Rivonia

The recent article by Kathy Munro on Liliesleaf farm and Rivonia (click here to read) had me digging out and reviewing some notes I made a while back.

This Robinson family, like many at that time, came to South Africa when then family head, Peter Robinson was sent out from England to take charge of the local branch of the large company he was employed by in London. Scaffolding Great Britain (SGB) promoted Peter Robinson to Managing Director of SGB South Africa and he arrived in the country in mid-1959, to be followed by the rest of his family and his own, by now widowed, mother. Eldest son Howard, then aged 14, convinced the family to let him fly out by BOAC Bristol Britannia while the rest of the family sailed from Southampton in December 1959 on the Union Castle Lines ship Stirling Castle. Those who enjoyed the sea trip were Grandma Robinson, Mary (wife of Peter), Mark (12 yearold second son), Angela (8)* and the family cat Midge! ** First landfall in South Africa was at Cape Town on New Year’s Day 1960 and the Coon Carnival was a colourful if slightly bewildering introduction to the country. We weren't sure if this was what we would see every day!

Old...

September is Heritage Month but it is a downer when the news comes through that the museum and heritage site Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia has closed its doors permanently. The news of closure announced by the CEO and founder of the Liliesleaf Trust, Nic Wolpe, son of Harold Wolpe, comes as a surprise. It is inconceivable that this unusual centre and museum should disappear off the well-trodden tourist route of Johannesburg. Liliesleaf, like the Apartheid Museum (also now closed but on a temporary basis), is a must visit site of history if you want to understand South Africa’s history of the last century. Liliesleaf was once a farm and was the centre piece in Liberation History.

One can argue that Liliesleaf is simply a casualty of Covid. Museums suffer when no one goes out and foreign tourists stop coming to South Africa. All we could hope was that the wondrous treasures that so many galleries and museums hold are protected and cared for during this long inactivity. Museums and galleries only live when people visit and are curious about the knowledge therein. There are over forty Museums in Johannesburg and all have suffered during the past 18 months when doors closed temporarily as the country went into lockdown.

In May 2021 museum stakeholders gathered at Constitutional Hill to launch the Johannesburg Museum Manifesto highlighting the plight of all museums. The Manifesto, drawing attention to the crisis facing so many museums, was posted on The Heritage Portal (click here to view).

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In the article below, journalist Lucille Davie looks at the painful yet triumphant journeys of the struggle personalities captured at Liliesleaf. The article was originally published on the City of Johannesburg's website on 6 June 2008. Click here to view more of Davie's work.

On hearing that they had got life sentences, Denis Goldberg shouted: "Life! Life is wonderful!"
 
And life was wonderful on that day, 12 July 1964, because the Rivonia trialists had expected the death penalty, but Judge Quartus de Wet handed down four life sentences to each of the men instead.
 
"All rationality aside, and for all our preparedness to die for freedom in South Africa, we started smiling in disbelief, at first, and complete relief as it sunk in that the judge said he would not impose the maximum penalty, even though it would be an appropriate sentence," says Goldberg now, 44 years later. "By the time he had finished speaking we were openly laughing. In the end most of us got four life sentences, but in the end you can only serve one of them!"

Denis Goldberg

It meant that they would live, but spend up to 27 years of their lives in jail, not seeing their children grow up, not seeing their wives struggling to hold things together without their husbands, or dealing with harassment by the...

The article below, written by journalist Lucille Davie, was originally published on the Brand South Africa website on 26 July 2013. It looks at details of Operation Mayibuye as well as an ingenious ANC arms smuggling operation that ran in the 1980s and early 1990s. Click here to view more of Davie's work.

In the early 1960s, the African National Congress (ANC) and its armed wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), planned to bring into South Africa 7 000 men and arms to fight the apartheid government, via air and sea. But instead, a much smaller operation took place: it brought in arms via a tourist truck, making 40 trips in all.

The Africa Hinterland Camping Safaris truck has been recovered and is now parked at its final destination: Liliesleaf in Rivonia, which had been the headquarters of MK for two years. This is where the security police swooped in and netted the top echelons of the ANC in July 1963. The result was the Rivonia Trial, in which eight men were sentenced to life imprisonment, including Nelson Mandela.

Liliesleaf outbuildings from above (Heritage Portal)

They also found Operation Mayibuye, the blueprint for armed resistance in the country. The eight-page document was lying on the table when the police drove up the driveway. Govan Mbeki gathered up the...

In 1979 Dorothy O'Kennedy, an old resident of Rivonia, commenced a tremendous journey of discovery to find Rivonia's First Shop. Her story was published in the annual journal of the Sandton Historical Association. We retraced her steps but were unable to confirm whether or not the old building is still there. If you have any information on the shop please contribute to the comments section at the bottom of the article. Rivonia has certainly changed since this piece was first published!

I did not realise that I was part of the history of Sandton, until I noticed an appeal in The Star for people who had lived here in the early days to come forward and tell what they could remember.

In 1912 my family moved from Johannesburg to Rivonia - known then as Edenburg. I was eight years old, and I lived there until my marriage in 1926. My parents owned the tea garden Sleepy Hollow which was visited by people en route between Johannesburg and Pretoria. In those days it was much smaller than the present well known hotel.

One of the things which I remembered about my childhood in Rivonia was that Mr and Mrs Shull had a shop which was the focus of the neighbourhood, but no one else seemed to have mentioned it when reminiscing about the 'old days' so I determined to look for it, and to discover whether the building still existed.

As I had not returned to Rivonia for many years, I...