Pod Insights ABC Rewind 01 | Boycott! | Spear of the Nation About this episode How South Africans won their freedom from the racist Apartheid regime and the Australians who helped them fight for it.
It’s 1990 and Sisonke Msimang is glued to the TV, watching Nelson Mandela, the world’s most famous political prisoner, walk free after 27 years. She’s weeping with joy for a country she knows and loves but has never seen.
Since 1948 South Africans have been divided along race lines, called Apartheid. Blacks, Indians and ‘coloured’ people are separated from white people, and cannot marry them, earn the same wage, or get the same education as whites. Blacks are simply cheap labour for the mines and for rich white families. Then in 1960 police open fire on a protest in Sharpeville, killing 69 blacks. This is a turning point: world leaders condemn the massacre, and inside South Africa, the resistance movement galvanises.
Sisonke’s dad Mavuso is a rebellious young man and dedicates his life to fighting for the freedom of his people. This commitment takes him all the way to Russia and an uncertain future.
Transcript 5,722 words · 23 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:13 Speaker 01 It's February 11, 1990, and I'm glued to the TV at my auntie's house in Nairobi, 3,000 kilometres from Johannesburg, watching the most famous political prisoner in history, Nelson Mandela, as he walks out of the prison gates, a free man.
0:33 Speaker 02 They're just catching a sight of this figure now. Yes, he's alongside Winnie Mandela, both of them raising their arms in the air.
0:40 Speaker 01 No one has seen his face for 27 years.
0:45 Speaker 01 When Nelson Mandela was locked up by South Africa's apartheid regime in 1962, I wasn't even born yet, and he was only 44, a tall, handsome lawyer with this booming voice. And now, he's an older man, 71.
1:02 Speaker 02 Now is the time to intensify this struggle.
1:07 Speaker 01 Mandela's image has been banned for almost 30 years, and so we drink him in, this hero of ours, this man who's kept us going. There were times, to be honest, when I wondered if Mandela really existed. He was this mythical hero who couldn't possibly be real. But here he is, free, standing in the sun, holding hands with his beloved wife Winnie, turning up his older, wiser face to let the world see him.
1:39 Speaker 02 To relax, our efforts now would be a mistake which generations to come.
1:48 Speaker 01 And I can't stop weeping. Mandela is free.
1:55 Speaker 01 And this means South Africa, the home I have never been allowed to visit, might soon be free as well.
2:02 Speaker 03 Mr. Mandela told the crowd there was now a much greater recognition that South African apartheid had no future and would be replaced by democracy.
2:10 Speaker 01 After decades of protest and boycott and activism, the movement to end apartheid in South Africa is finally on the verge of victory.
2:20 Speaker 04 It was a historical moment. You couldn't help but hold back tears. It was an amazing moment and it was victory.
2:31 Speaker 05 There was complete joy. I've never seen joy like that. I felt just an extreme sense of exhilaration, that huge luminescent smile.
2:40 Speaker 06 You just realised you were in the presence of a noble and rare human being.
2:48 Speaker 02 The roar of AMC goes up from the crowd.
2:52 Speaker 02 Mr. Mandela is to walk out of this place to freedom.
2:57 Speaker 01 I'm Sisongem Simang. On ABC Rewind, this is Boycott: The Fight to End Apartheid. It's a story for our times. In this bin fire of a world we're living in right now, we all need a story. One that reminds us that once upon a time, a bunch of regular folk stood up to a racist regime and insisted that what was happening on the other side of the world was absolutely, 100% their business. It's the story of how millions of people, black and white, South African and non-South African, fought a brutal white minority government and brought it to its knees.
3:40 Speaker 01 And it's the story of the role Australia played in that fight. The story of sports fans running onto rugby and cricket pitches in protest.
3:50 Speaker 07 Here's a fullback McGill coming in. A chance here, there's a demonstrator on the field. Demonstrator has run right through the play.
3:55 Speaker 01 The story of people refusing to buy and sell South African goods at supermarkets, of unions boycotting, refusing to handle apartheid cargo. The story of ordinary people standing strong against injustice in their own small ways.
4:19 Speaker 01 And why am I the person telling you this story? Well, I've been thinking and writing about South Africa for a long, long time. And that's because I grew up in the anti-apartheid movement.
4:32 Speaker 01 My dad was a freedom fighter. You'll hear a lot from him in this story. And because I'm the child of a freedom fighter, I was born and raised in exile, always dreaming of South Africa.
4:45 Speaker 01 When apartheid ended, I finally got to move home, and it was miraculous. Fast forward a few decades, and I'm married to an Aussie, have a couple of kids, and then a decade ago, I left my beloved Johannesburg to live in Australia. So here I am, unraveling a story that brings together both sides of my heart. Episode one, Spear of the Nation.
5:19 Speaker 01 This is my dad.
5:21 Speaker 04 I was born outside Pietermarisberg, Edendale, which was a special place, by the way. It was formed by missionaries.
5:30 Speaker 01 His name is Mavuso, Mavuso Msimang. But I call him Baba. Baba's only seven when South Africa's right-wing Afrikaner National Party shoots to power in 1948.
5:43 Speaker 08 The result of South Africa's general election is worldwide news.
5:51 Speaker 01 Although black people have been stripped of their land, can't vote, and are barred from certain professions, the Afrikaners campaign on the idea of white supremacy and that whites are in danger of being economically displaced by the majority, black people.
6:09 Speaker 01 The national party's election is worldwide news. Because in the shadows of World War II, it's campaigned and won on a platform of racial division: apartheid.
6:19 Speaker 09 1948, the Afrikaner nationalists got to power on the slogan of apartheid, which was Afrikaans for "apartness."
6:28 Speaker 01 Benjamin Poggrund was a white journalist during the apartheid years.
6:32 Speaker 09 And the world was at first astonished. Three years after World War II, the Holocaust, the mass murder of Jews, you suddenly had this funny little group of people at the bottom part of the African continent, who were not just preaching but practicing racial segregation and white supremacy based on the Bible.
6:56 Speaker 01 The incoming prime minister, Hendrik Vervoud, describes apartheid quite benevolently. Then again, he would. He designed it.
7:05 Speaker 10 I'm afraid that has been misunderstood so often. It could just as easily, and perhaps much better be described, as a policy of good neighborliness. Accepting that there are differences between people. Live together, aid one another, but that it can best be done when you act as good neighbors always do.
7:28 Speaker 01 A policy of good neighborliness. Hmm. When was the last time you told someone they couldn't be your neighbor because of the color of their skin?
7:38 Speaker 01 Apartheid's obsessed with racial classification. And apparently, there are four types of humans: white, the best; so-called colored or mixed race, they're second because at least you've got a bit of white in you; then Indian; and finally, African. Me, at the bottom of the pile. Baba, my dad, is African. A black child, living in a rural area, in a country with a very complicated history and a very uncertain future.
8:08 Speaker 09 So you felt racism? Because when you went to the train station, there was a coach for black people. It would be somewhere at the end of the train, and the rest for white people. When you went into a park, you'd find benches that were written "ne blankez," meaning "not for whites." And you did not sit on a bench that was written "blankez," which is white.
8:35 Speaker 04 We went to separate schools and it was clear that ours were much, much poorer than those of the white people. You were not allowed in cinemas which were reserved for whites.
8:47 Speaker 11 Africans were not allowed to live in the city. You needed a pass to come into the city to work. Every household and every factory depended on African labour. All menial work was left to them. That's your lot in life, God said so. This is what the Prime Minister of apartheid South Africa would say.
9:10 Speaker 01 Navi Pille is an absolute legend who was born into a poor Durban neighbourhood in 1941, the same year as Baba. She grew up classified as Indian and against all odds, she became the first non-white female judge of South Africa's High Court. Then the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. And now she's a judge at the International Court of Justice.
9:33 Speaker 11 Black and white can't marry. Certain jobs were only reserved for whites. Blacks can't do all the skilled jobs. You can never mix. So as children, the most heart sore thing for us is the exclusion. You cannot go on to beaches. Very many of the beaches in the city were for whites only. Parks really made us sad because you couldn't go on to the swings. You know, this is a country that even detained children who had done drawings and the authorities interpreted those drawings as critical of apartheid. And it's humiliating and hurtful.
10:15 Speaker 11 You're born in apartheid, everybody understands it and children do. At school, nobody, least of all the teachers, were allowed to talk about apartheid so that we remained brainwashed.
10:30 Speaker 01 South Africa has a really complicated history, like, really, really, really complicated. But here are the absolute basics you need to know. In the 1600s, the Dutch set up a shipping post for the Dutch East India Company, on country that's been home to the Koi Koi, San and Bantu people for thousands of years. The Dutch, also known as Boers or Afrikaans, they introduced slavery. And then in the 1800s, the British decided, hey, we want a piece of the action. In 1910, after a vicious war, the Boers and the British decided we're going to share power. They don't like each other, but they both agree that the white man is superior to the black man.
11:15 Speaker 01 Black people are subject to slavery and increasingly terrible racist policies, until it reaches its awful peak in 1948, the formal introduction of apartheid. In 1952, the government makes it compulsory for every black man in the country to carry an identity document. My dad, Baba, is only 11 years old.
11:38 Speaker 04 We used to call it a dome pass. Dome means stupid. It was a stupid pass defining where you could live and where we should be.
11:47 Speaker 01 If you're not white, you have to carry the stupid pass everywhere you go.
11:53 Speaker 04 This badge of slavery was a really detested document. A humiliation, but you just cannot take the risk of not having it because policemen would stop you in the street anytime, where's your dome pass? And if you failed to produce it, then you were locked up until you were able to get your dome pass.
12:14 Speaker 01 Then, a year after the past laws, another massive blow. The government introduces something called Bantu education. Basically, an education system just for black people that's nowhere near as good as the white system.
12:30 Speaker 01 Bantu education is white supremacy in action. Teach black people only in their own language, Zulu, Sutu, Tzana, and not in the language of power, English. Teach them how to be laborers, to cement their status as second-class citizens. Basically, limit their potential.
12:55 Speaker 12 The government's black education policy is inexplicably cruel. With average wages well below the poverty line, they're expected to pay $12 a quarter. Whites pay nothing. But as some apartheid supporters say, too many educated blacks would lead to frustration.
13:12 Speaker 01 Too many educated blacks would lead to frustration. Let that sink in.
13:19 Speaker 04 It was to divide and rule. You divide these people who are together as Africans, and they must start looking at themselves as Zulus and Sutu and Tzana. Typical divide-and-rule tactic to diminish, to reduce the strength and power of a United African nation.
13:41 Speaker 01 But it's not just a question of language. Bantu education also serves up a bunch of lies. It teaches black people an Afrikaner version of history. Now, Baba's a really smart guy, and he was a smart kid, too. But there was one subject he failed.
14:00 Speaker 04 And it was history, because I just hated the kinds of things they were saying about natives as a country that had spaces that were empty and everybody arrived in South Africa at the same time. I just couldn't internalize that.
14:16 Speaker 01 Spaces that were empty. When Baba says this, I think of Australia.
14:24 Speaker 01 It was the same tactics in my country, the very same playbook. Here, the lie of Terra Nullius took 200 years to expose. It was Eddie Mabo who forced Australians to face the truth. It took much longer in South Africa. As two young colonies in the 1800s, Australia and South Africa had a lot in common. Historian Roger Bell.
14:52 Speaker 13 The relationship between Australia and South Africa was surprisingly very intimate, very friendly. Indeed, it was often termed a special relationship. The two countries were widely referred to as Sisters of the South, largely because of their ideologies of race and racism, and their institutionalizing of segregation and discrimination and denial of rights to people who were non-white.
15:22 Speaker 01 Now, you might have picked up on some of the similarities between Australia and South Africa. Because, yes, there was segregation here too. Aboriginal people were also forced off their land onto missions and reserves. And they also weren't allowed to vote, weren't allowed to sit with the white fellows at the pub, or swim in white-only pools. So I guess it's not that surprising that when apartheid's legislated in 1948, Australia's Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, stays besties with his Sisters of the South.
15:54 Speaker 13 Indeed, he visited South Africa in 1953, and he was welcomed with banners pronouncing "Welcome Uncle Bob." Menzies epitomized the support for South Africa. No country did more to bolster white South Africa and to defend apartheid than did white Australia in the period of Menzies and Holt, and even through to Gordon and McMahon.
16:25 Speaker 01 So why? Why does Australia back South Africa so strongly? Well, it's partly about shared racist values, partly about keeping the communists out, but mainly, it's about money. South Africa is indispensable to the global economy. Its land is a treasure chest full of gold, diamonds, platinum, and shockingly cheap black labor. Apartheid is the engine room of mining. So many black bodies put on the line, generation after generation, shaping the lives of millions. Barbara Masakela, she's kind of like an auntie to me,
17:09 Speaker 01 and she'll go on to have an epic career as Nelson Mandela's chief of staff. But when she's a little girl, she's being raised by her grandmother.
17:16 Speaker 06 All of us did not have parents because this was a great era for mining in South Africa. So our parents were all working on the reef.
17:27 Speaker 01 The reef is the giant gold deposit in an area called the Vidwatschisrand that white people supposedly discovered and is the whole reason Johannesburg exists. More than half the gold ever mined comes from this reef, and thousands of African men have lost their lives in its deep tunnels.
17:49 Speaker 06 We did not have grandfathers. Most of them were dead. So our grandmothers were forever in mourning. And what I recall is as a child seeing women in black all the time. One of the first experiences I had living with my grandmother in a mining town is the death of my uncle, who is killed gratuitously.
18:18 Speaker 06 Killed because he was a cheeky native. He answered back. And that was not unusual. Neither was it unusual for men to leave home and not come back because they are arrested on their way home or wherever for passes. And this is a generation we don't speak about. These were people who were highly traumatized, who remembered living on lands that belonged to their clans, who remembered having kings. So we talk about the trauma of apartheid, but we don't talk about the trauma before apartheid.
19:01 Speaker 01 They have a memory of dispossession in a sense.
19:04 Speaker 06 They have a direct memory of dispossession, a direct memory of conquest. They've been moved, dislocated. Those women of my grandmother's generation were women who had been raped regularly by farm owners. Nobody talks about it. So you are then raised by somebody like that, you know.
19:34 Speaker 01 So many shared experiences of colonization and segregation and exclusion. So much hurt.
19:44 Speaker 01 My Auntie Barbara's story of dispossession and intergenerational trauma is as common in South Africa as it is here in Australia.
19:53 Speaker 01 But while not being able to go to the cinema or swim with white people is humiliating, I'm gonna be real. For black people everywhere, hanging out with white people is the least of our worries. We're opposed to apartheid because of its violence, because it forces us from our lands and condemns us to poverty, inequality, and injustice. So as we have since the beginning of colonization, we fight back.
20:24 Speaker 01 The British had promised black people the right to vote with the birth of the Union of South Africa. But, shock, horror, that doesn't happen. And so, in 1912, we form the African National Congress, the ANC. For decades, the ANC is a moderate lobby group. It's trying to convince white people that they can trust us to vote. But then, in 1948, when the government launches those dreaded pass laws that you heard about earlier, the ANC launches the defiance campaign. Now, the campaign is led by this young, charismatic lawyer who's rising up through the ranks. His name is Nelson Mandela.
21:05 Speaker 09 But he had a bit of a playboy image. Very good-looking man, married to Winnie, his beautiful woman, lawyer, owned a car, socialized a lot, and with all the seriousness, bit of a playboy.
21:20 Speaker 01 For years, Mandela urges people to peacefully protest the pass laws. And they do, they listen. But it's a pretty radical thing to be doing. Because, as journalist Benjamin Pogrand explains, "The punishment for not carrying your identity pass with you at all times is brutal."
21:38 Speaker 09 You could be standing at your front gate, and a policeman would come by and say, "Pass." And you say, "It's in my jacket inside. Arrest it." That's it.
21:49 Speaker 01 In 1959, a breakaway activist group called the Pan-Africanist Congress, the PAC, splits off from the ANC. In March 1960, its charismatic leader, Robert Subukwe, throws down the gauntlet. "Leave your dumpass at home. March to your closest police station and present yourself for arrest." A big crowd starts gathering outside the small police station that morning in the black township of Sharpville, 60 kilometers south of Johannesburg. Thousands announce themselves to the police. They're asking to be arrested for not carrying a pass. The police tell them a government official is going to come and talk to them, and so the crowd waits.
22:33 Speaker 01 Women are yodeling, singing in protest. It's passionate, but peaceful.
22:40 Speaker 01 Benjamin Pogruntz, a young journalist with Johannesburg's progressive newspaper, The Rand Daily Mail, and he gets word that something's going down. He grabs a staff photographer and drives to Sharpville.
22:53 Speaker 09 There were crowds of black people on the side of the street shouting and booing at the police.
22:58 Speaker 01 By the time Benjamin arrives, the protesters have worked out that the police are lying. There is no official coming to talk to them. Instead, the notorious security branch turns up, driving armed tanks into the crowd.
23:13 Speaker 09 We started driving slowly around the crowd, and my photographer, Jan Hook, started shouting, "They're shooting, they're shooting."
23:22 Speaker 14 We just heard a loud shot from the gunfire. From there, it was all hell.
23:29 Speaker 01 At 1:30 PM, with no warning, police fire 1,344 rounds into the crowd.
23:39 Speaker 09 And I turned left towards the shooting, and Jan was yelling, "There are bodies all over, there are bodies all over."
23:46 Speaker 14 Everybody was running for safety, taking all directions. But then I was already shot. The bullet came through and got stuck on my spinal cord. It's still there. It was all blood behind these shops here.
24:01 Speaker 01 69 people are killed by the cops that day. 180 are wounded. Almost everyone shot in the back as they run away in confusion.
24:13 Speaker 09 I saw bodies on the ground, just littered. It was an astonishing sight. I mean, how does one describe a field with bodies all over the place? It was a horrifying sight.
24:25 Speaker 04 Everybody in the country knew instantly that this has happened, this massacre had taken place, and the mood was really bitter. I mean, I just thought, no, this can't go on. We really have to do something. We were charged with emotion, we were angry.
24:47 Speaker 15 The massacre awakened the world to the horrors of apartheid and sparked mass protest action.
24:54 Speaker 09 Overnight, overnight, Sharpeville became the embodiment of evil, of racial oppression, and it galvanized the anti-apartheid movements throughout the world. South Africa became page one news throughout the world.
25:13 Speaker 01 March 21st becomes known as the International Day for the Elimination of Racism. In Australia, you might know it as Harmony Day, the memory of a shocking event watered down and sanitized, which makes me very, very sad. But back in 1960, a line has been crossed, one that the world simply cannot ignore. The Sharpeville massacre changes how it sees South Africa. It also changes South Africa.
25:48 Speaker 09 From then on, a new type of security came in, and they were vicious, and they stopped at nothing. Sharpeville was the dramatic turning point externally and internally. It had a profound effect on what happened in South Africa.
26:07 Speaker 01 The government immediately bans both the ANC and the PAC. The message is clear: black dissent will not be tolerated. The UN condemns apartheid, and it encourages nations to cut ties with South Africa. Australian unions follow suit. In fact, they're some of the first in the world to call for trade sanctions. But Australia's Prime Minister, Robert "Uncle Bob" Menzies, holds his line. He stands firm with his sister of the South. Historian Peter Limb.
26:42 Speaker 00 Prime Minister Menzies refused to condemn Sharpeville, and this was despite almost universal condemnation around the world, but... Menzies had been called by apartheid's architect, Hendrik Fervud, as their best friend for not condemning the atrocity and for backing Pretoria in the UN. So it was pretty grim, but Sydney in particular, there were spontaneous protests. Police used force and they arrested quite violently trade unionists and students who were protesting the massacre.
27:16 Speaker 01 The ANC has always firmly rejected the use of violence. But now, banned and backed into a corner, its young leaders push back against the ANC's older president, Chief Albert Lutuli. By this time, Nelson Mandela is the head of the ANC's youth league. And he steps up and boldly makes a stunning announcement.
27:38 Speaker 04 Mandela went underground and made an announcement that it comes a time in the life of an organisation when it must decide whether to live or die. The government wants to kill us. We have chosen to live, to fight. We no longer can continue politics in the old way of marches, protests, demonstrations and so on. They're not listening to that. They'll have to listen to the bullets, to power.
28:09 Speaker 01 The movement that's always disavowed violence changes course and goes underground. Um Konto Wesizwe, MK, the armed wing of the ANC is born, the spear of the nation. Mandela and the ANC's other leaders disappear.
28:29 Speaker 04 Mandela represented the struggle. They used to refer to him as the Black Pimpernel.
28:35 Speaker 01 Every now and then, Mandela pops his head up, always secretly, never announced. The year after Sharpville, my 20-year-old dad is at an ANC meeting in Pietermaritzburg, when a buzz starts in the room. The Black Pimpernel emerges.
28:52 Speaker 09 He addressed us and we were so inspired that the guy had decided that we're not going to allow the struggle to die. It was absolutely impressive. And an hour later, he had disappeared and we didn't know where he went. But I mean, you can imagine how invigorating, how we were just pumped up. I can tell you, I became really radical.
29:25 Speaker 01 In the early 1960s, Nelson Mandela travels across Africa, drumming up support for the new army. The ANC knows it can't fight the highly militarized apartheid regime without some serious financing. It looks to newly independent African states for money and also the Soviets. In between missions, Mandela slips in and out of view. He sneaks into the country to see his wife Winnie and to touch base with other ANC leaders. He wears disguises and every meeting is top secret. And Mandela stays in touch with journalist Benjamin Pogrand.
30:04 Speaker 09 We had a method of contacting each other and we met either at the home of a friend or more usually in a dark street corner in my car. We sat for an hour or so talking and a lot of trust developed between us because we were both putting our lives on the line. I would have been put in jail forever if I'd been caught with him. The whole police force were hunting him. He was known as a Black Pimpernel. It was almost a joke because he was this tall, imposing figure. His disguise was he was working at workers' overalls.
30:40 Speaker 01 While Mandela's on the run canvassing support, Baba started studying at the legendary Black university, Fort Hare. It's where Africa's intelligentsia have been educated for years and so naturally, campus is this hotbed of activism. But the students have to be very careful. The authorities have eyes everywhere.
31:03 Speaker 01 Baba's supposed to be studying pharmacy, but every day he's getting more and more deeply involved in the band ANC.
31:11 Speaker 04 You formed cells of five people, and each one of the five people would go and set up another cell of five. To minimize security, you could know only the people in your cell. I was immediately invited to join the high command structure there, but it was just exciting that we are going to fight for our freedom.
31:37 Speaker 01 Then one day...
31:38 Speaker 04 You know, it was so shocking.
31:41 Speaker 01 The worst news. Mandela has been captured.
31:49 Speaker 01 It's August 1962, and the Black Pimpernel's luck has finally run out. He's been on the run for more than a year, and he's just re-entered the country when he's ambushed by police in Natal. Mandela is detained and spends months in prison awaiting trial.
32:09 Speaker 01 A few months later, the ANC's secret hideout is raided, and its entire leadership is arrested. They're accused of plotting to overthrow the government. Mandela is named as accused number one, the mastermind.
32:24 Speaker 04 And it was so devastating. The documents that were seized there, one of them was Operation Mabuya, the blueprint for the struggle in South Africa, you know. Gosh, that crushed the revolution almost.
32:41 Speaker 01 Some of the ANC's most confidential documents, including its plan for an armed uprising to bring down the government, are now in the hands of the apartheid regime.
32:51 Speaker 04 At that point, I just thought, there is no way I can proceed to school. I've got to go and train.
32:58 Speaker 01 And when you say training, Baba, when you say training...
33:01 Speaker 04 Military training abroad.
33:07 Speaker 01 The ANC is in crisis. Its entire high command structure is now in prison, awaiting trial. Baba is just 22, but he has to act now. He starts planning his escape from South Africa to start training with Mukonto Wessizwe, MK, the armed wing of the ANC. He knows he's taking a huge risk. It's not just police he has to worry about. Under apartheid, any white man can stop him at any time and ask for his dompas. Still, he forges ahead, keeping his plan to himself. When everything's ready, he disappears without telling a soul.
33:52 Speaker 01 Not his parents and not a single friend. Baba makes his way to Johannesburg and then takes a train to the Botswana border. And when he gets there, he'll still have to cross it on foot. It's an incredibly dangerous journey.
34:09 Speaker 04 There were patrol vehicles at night. So we stood under the trees and when it passed, we crossed carrying branches to make sure that they don't see us crossing into Botswana. But we were under instructions to destroy our dompas as soon as we crossed, just to completely remove our identity and so on.
34:32 Speaker 01 Can you describe how it felt when you crossed the border and burned that dompas? Did you feel somehow more dignity? Did you feel that you were going to miss home? How did it feel to cross that border?
34:50 Speaker 04 Well, the first feeling was that of relief, that we'd been able to cross the border without being detected. But also the sense that you're going to accomplish, change your life. It was quite clear that if you were caught, that would have been a serious, serious problem.
35:10 Speaker 01 People who are caught are often shot on sight or returned to South Africa, tortured and imprisoned. The stakes are so high. But Baba makes it through the hardest part.
35:23 Speaker 04 In no time, two weeks, three weeks, I was on an aeroflot flight to Russia, to Moscow.
35:33 Speaker 01 Just a reminder that by now, 1963, we're right in the thick of the Cold War. And the ANC has close ties with the South African Communist Party. And therefore, it has the support of the Soviet Union.
35:48 Speaker 01 It's a time when many of the African liberation movements are choosing sides. You either back the US and you say you love capitalism and freedom, or you choose socialism and economic progress for your people, and you are embraced by the USSR. If you choose the Soviets, they'll train you, they'll feed you, and they'll clothe you. And they will definitely educate you. And Baba, just when you're leaving to go to Russia, what do you think you're training for? You think you're going to carry a gun and blast into South Africa?
36:21 Speaker 04 We're trained in urban guerrilla warfare. We were going to be taught how to make homemade explosives to prepare us to go and use sabotage, which is urban guerrilla warfare, and quietly recruit people in South Africa who would carry out these things. We were able to handle guns from a revolver, pistol, submachine gun, machine gun, heavy machine, all the way to anti-ACOM things. I mean, it's the kind of thing that I thought was just superb.
37:00 Speaker 01 Baba and his 22 ANC comrades are living out their boy's own adventure in an outlying suburb of Moscow. Their teachers in this top-secret, fast-track guerrilla training program are ex-Soviet Army officers, experts on explosives, topography, and communist theory. They can't tell anyone they meet why they're there, which isn't too hard, because lots of Africans are studying in the Soviet Union. Everything from medicine to teaching to armed guerrilla warfare. The Soviets are big on supporting the liberation movements fighting for independence from colonial powers.
37:39 Speaker 01 Meanwhile, back in South Africa, Nelson Mandela and his comrades face trial.
37:45 Speaker 16 I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination.
37:54 Speaker 01 Facing death, the Black Pimpernel delivers one of the most famous speeches in history.
38:00 Speaker 16 I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society. It is an idea for which I hope to live for. But my lord, if it needs be, it is an idea for which I am prepared to die.
38:22 Speaker 01 Mandela is spared the death sentence. The regime knows that killing him will only make him a martyr. Instead, in 1964, at the age of 44, Mandela is sentenced to life in prison on the notorious Robben Island. It seems he really might die in his fight against white domination. With dissent banned and the hope of black people imprisoned, the brutality of the apartheid regime seems to know no end.
38:55 Speaker 06 It just escalated. The laws changed. There are detention without trial and people dying.
39:04 Speaker 01 And then, just when it seems things can't get worse, they do. In 1966, the government starts forcibly removing black people from neighborhoods designated "white only." They call them "black spots." Those who remember still weep for their homes.
39:29 Speaker 01 Baba and his comrades spend an intense year doing their military training in the Soviet Union. When they first return to their transit camp in Tanzania, they naively think they'll be back in South Africa within a year.
39:43 Speaker 01 It's not long before they realize how hard it's going to be to fight their war. Tanzania is 3,000 kilometers north of Johannesburg. The logistical nightmare of crossing borders, avoiding authorities, feeding themselves, and staying on mission, that all begins to dawn on them.
40:03 Speaker 01 Baba has left his home to join a revolution that now seems stillborn. He has no idea how long it will be before he can get home, and no sense of how long it might take for South Africa to be free.
40:16 Speaker 04 I didn't think about anything except that I was going to study and possibly I was going to fight and that we were going to win.
40:28 Speaker 01 You just had no idea. You had no idea the win would be so long.
40:33 Speaker 04 I had decided to go into revolution and the cost was that of citizenship.
40:42 Speaker 01 In his quest for his people's freedom, my father has given up his home.
40:53 Speaker 01 This season on Boycott, come with us inside one of the greatest resistance movements of our time.
41:01 Speaker 06 It just escalated. The laws changed, the detention without trial and people dying.
41:09 Speaker 17 We were a generation prepared to die for freedom.
41:14 Speaker 01 Black South Africa rises up, and people around the world join us.
41:18 Speaker 18 The best way to do it is to starve that racist country of oil.
41:23 Speaker 19 "Free Nelson Mandela" is one of those kind of songs. It was so full of life. It was so invigorating. It was so powerful. I mean, protest music, you can dance to. That's always a good thing.
41:33 Speaker 20 We started reading about these demonstrations that were being held involving these Australian anti-racists.
41:40 Speaker 21 The demonstration is now getting quite violent. There are screams of pain and cries of pain coming up from the crowd from time to time.
41:47 Speaker 01 Politics turns nasty on the rugby pitch.
41:51 Speaker 07 It was such a clear case of terrible discrimination, whites-only teams. We thought that to the average Australian, that would be despicable.
42:05 Speaker 02 They're under the field and the police can't stop them.
42:09 Speaker 01 The world stands up and brings South Africa to its knees.
42:12 Speaker 18 All people were waiting for was for someone to kick-start a movement. And once it did, it got off the ground like a rocket.
42:23 Speaker 01 Boycott was produced on the lands of the Nalama, Gadigal, Darug, the Jarrawarung, and the lands of the Wajag people of the Ngunnaw nation. Our team of producers is Kirsty Melville, Sarah Alali, Cathy Peters, and Claudia Toranto. The sound engineer is Matthew Sigley. Our editor is Michelle Rayner, and original music is by Musa Diakate. I'm Sisankem Simong, and this has been a Rewind production for ABC Radio National.
43:01 Speaker 22 You've been listening to an ABC Podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio, and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.
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