Sworn to secrecy: anti-apartheid activists’ children speak out

June 16 is a public holiday that celebrates the young people who stood up against apartheid. However, for the children of anti-apartheid activists, life was filled with anxiety and infamous strangers they were forbidden from identifying.

Peta Wolpe says that despite being the daughter of apartheid activist Harold Wolpe, she was anything but politically astute back in 1976 when Soweto youth protested the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction.

“Youth Day shouldn’t just be about memory of that time, but a reminder of the importance of young people in the world and the role they can play,” she told the SA Jewish Report this week. “They were courageous, and it was good that they stood up and spoke up against what was happening.”

Wolpe wasn’t in South Africa in 1976, having gone into exile with her family in 1963 when she was only six years old. She grew up in exile in England, and though she and her family were so far away from their “birth home”, what was happening in South Africa was a backdrop to their lives.

“We knew that my parents were engaged in African National Congress [ANC] work,” she said, “And there was a time when I was quite young, maybe about 11, when I felt proud of what my father had done and spoke about it to friends. And quite soon after that, I was told that I shouldn’t, that it was unsafe.”

She said that because of not being able to talk about what her parents did in South Africa, she chose rather not to say she was from this country because she believed others would see white South Africans as shameful.

Similarly, Paul Goldreich and his older brother, Nick, were sworn to secrecy because they were living on Liliesleaf Farm, which served as the secret headquarters and nerve centre of the ANC; South African Communist Party (SACP); uMkhonto we Sizwe; and the Congress Alliance between 1961 and 1963.

“The farm was kind of idyllic because we had 24 acres, so we could enjoy ourselves on the farm and in the neighbourhood,” Paul said. “But, of course, you know it was a bizarre situation because we had Mandela living with us. We also had other members of the high command of the ANC living with us, and this was normal for us. One of the main issues for us as children was that we were essentially sworn to secrecy.”

Goldreich said that although Mandela and his family were living in their home in Rivonia for some time, he and his brother didn’t know that he was the infamous figurehead of that era who would become the first post-apartheid president of South Africa. They knew him only as David Motsamayi, a labourer on the farm.

“A lot of the time Mandela walked around in blue overalls, and he spent much time playing and chatting with us,” he said. The Goldreich children also spent a lot of time with the Mandela children on the farm.

However, it was while flipping through a Drum magazine after school one day that the two young boys discovered the truth about “David” when they saw a photograph of him. Once they let him know of their discovery, they were promptly told never to reveal this fact to anyone.

For the Wolpes, it was also common to have South African activists in exile come to their home. One of their most frequent house guests was Joe Slovo. And while it was completely normal to the Wolpes, it horrified one of their neighbours, who was also from South Africa, who couldn’t believe that they would entertain a Communist Party leader in their home.

Jerome Chaskalson, the son of Arthur Chaskalson, a member of the Rivonia Trial defence team and later South Africa’s chief justice, also recalls his family home being filled with activists. His father was part of the team which saved Mandela and the Rivonia trialists from the gallows in the mid-1960s.

“The people my dad was working with were at the top of the legal profession, but much of their interaction was on a first-name basis, and it was very collegiate,” he said. “Whereas there wasn’t a huge sense of ego, it was interesting to be in a house where George Bizos may be around, or Albie Sachs, or leaders involved in the struggle. They were almost like uncles, so to speak, or friends of the family.”

However, while having these people around may have seemed normal for them, for some, there were dire real-world implications for what their parents were doing. Some may not even have realised it.

Wolpe said that for a lot of her childhood, there was mindfulness that there could be danger lurking around the corner. She would look in her father’s car to make sure there was nothing dangerous, and after the murder of Ruth First by a letter bomb, they would cautiously check the letter box.

“It was more terrifying when my dad travelled and I worried about what would happen and if he would return,” she said.

Goldreich was only eight years old when Liliesleaf was raided by the police on 11 July 1963. The police arrested the core leadership of the underground liberation movement, including Goldreich’s parents, leaving the two boys on the farm alone.

“Our parents were gone,” he said. “They told us we’d never see our parents again, and then the next day, we were interrogated by the special branch all night. I told them that there were bombs buried in the garden, and so they brought bulldozers the next day, and bulldozed the whole garden looking for the bombs, and of course, there weren’t any bombs.”

He said that he and his brother stayed with his aunt for the 90 days that his mother was kept in solitary confinement until they were sent to live overseas.

For Chaskalson, there was never this fear of violence, as his father always worked within the law, but what stuck with him most was that the people that he was surrounded by were regular people. “They might have been good people, and they might have ended up on the right side of the fairy tale and got nice positions afterwards, but they were always very human in what they were doing,” he said.