Almost exactly a year ago I had gone to Johannesburg, South Africa, to deliver, for the year 2016, the Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture organized annually under the auspices of the University of the Witwatersrand. Harold Wolpe had been an outstanding figure in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, a leading member of the South African Communist Party and of the African National Congress. An attorney by profession in his youth, he had been the person who had organized the "safe house" at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, which was used as a hideout and a meeting place by the ANC. It is from this Liliesleaf Farm that several top leaders of the ANC, including Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Ahmed Kathrada, Denis Goldberg (described in government records of the time as "the most dangerous white man in the country"), Arthur Goldreich and Lionel Bernstein were arrested by the South African police during a fateful raid on July 11, 1963.
Nelson Mandela was already in jail when the raid took place but he had lived on the Farm for a while from October 1961 under the guise of a gardener and cook. After the end of apartheid when he was the president of the country, Mandela once visited the Liliesleaf Farm and reminisced that they had buried a cache of arms somewhere on the grounds of the Farm, although he could not recollect the exact spot. Those buried firearms still remain buried, since it was thought that digging up the entire garden to discover them would be too much of an extravagance.
Mandela's name, together with that of Andrew Mlangeni, was added to the list of the accused, along with those arrested in the raid, in the famous Rivonia trial which finally concluded in October 1964, and which sentenced him and seven other defendants to life imprisonment.
By a curious coincidence I became personally well-acquainted at a later date with one of those who had been arrested in the raid on the Liliesleaf Farm and been one of the accused along with Mandela and others at the Rivonia trial, Robert Hepple. He had escaped trial and fled from South Africa by pretending that he would turn approver. He was my colleague in the early 1970s at Clare College, Cambridge, England, where we were both fellows, he as a lawyer and I as an economist.
Harold Wolpe himself had also been arrested in that raid, but had escaped with two other comrades from jail, so that he never faced the Rivonia trial. The three of them had split up after escaping, one going in one direction and Wolpe and Arthur Goldreich, who legally possessed the Liliesleaf Farm, going in a different direction. The comrade who was on his own had been recaptured but Wolpe and Goldreich had managed to escape to Swaziland across the border, where the president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, alerted about the escape, had covertly sent a special plane to take the escapees to Dar-es-Salaam.
It was not easy for the plane to land and take away the escapees while evading the eyes of South African intelligence which had tumbled to what was going on; but it was somehow managed, and Wolpe escaped to Dar-es-Salaam and then made his way to England. He began an academic career there and went on to become a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex. At Essex he authored a number of seminal articles on the political economy of apartheid which remain to this day the most outstanding work on the subject.
After the end of apartheid, Wolpe returned to South Africa and directed the Education Policy Unit at the University of Western Cape, Cape Town, until his untimely death in 1996. He is survived by his wife, also a redoubtable figure of the anti-apartheid struggle, and his son and daughter, also active fighters against apartheid, both of whom came for my lecture.
My lecture was held at the Liliesleaf Farm itself which is now a museum under the directorship of Wolpe's son, and where a lecture hall and some amenities for visitors have been added to the original building that has been left intact. Before my lecture I looked around the museum and came across some interesting information which I wish to share with the readers of this column.
How exactly the South African intelligence agency came to know about the activities at the Liliesleaf Farm has naturally been a matter of intense speculation and discussion. The most widely held view now, based on documents available at the museum, is that the South African intelligence agency itself never tumbled to the reality of the Liliesleaf Farm, but was alerted to it by the United States of America's Central Intelligence Agency.
An individual CIA operative, it seems, had come to hear of a farm near Johannesburg where blacks and whites met freely and he decided to move into the neighbourhood to investigate. He developed what is believed to be a fake love affair with a woman neighbour of the Liliesleaf Farm whose children used to go to the same school as, and were friends with, the children of Arthur Goldreich, who lived in one section of the Farm itself with his family. By observing the goings-on at the Liliesleaf Farm from his 'lover's' house, and also by gathering bits of information from her children about their friends' household, he came to understand the significance of the Farm and alerted his own agency about it. The CIA in turn passed on the information to the South African intelligence agency which organized the raid on July 11.
Much later, after the end of apartheid, when the CIA operative, retired by then, was asked about the story, he neither confirmed nor denied it, but merely remarked: "Why dig up the past now?"
I now come to the punchline of the story. I came across a newspaper cutting at the museum that showed that the same CIA operative who had discovered the reality of the Liliesleaf Farm had been posted in New Delhi earlier in his career and had been present on the grounds of Birla Bhawan on January 30, 1948, standing in close proximity to Gandhi when he was shot by Nathuram Godse. In fact, it was he who had caught hold of Godse after he had fired his shots at Gandhi, and had helped in handing him to the police.
This was a startling bit of information, which also helped to clarify one point that had always intrigued me. When a person is actually shooting a gun, ordinary persons would, I suppose, generally tend to keep away from him. And I had always wondered how the people around Gandhi, when he was being shot, could muster enough presence of mind and courage to catch hold of a person wielding a gun. The puzzle, however, disappears if it is a trained intelligence officer who happened to be nearby and apprehended the assassin. Such a person is trained precisely to handle situations like this and can act with alacrity. Indeed, this very fact lends some credence to the story of the CIA operative being the person who caught hold of Godse when Gandhi was assassinated.
The author is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
