(Vol. 77, #2, Autumn-Winter 2022)
A Liliesleaf Boyhood
Editor’s Note: From December 1961 until July 1963, Paul and Nicholas Goldreich lived with their parents Arthur and Hazel Goldreich on Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, then a largely rural suburb 20km north of Johannesburg. During that period, Liliesleaf served as the underground headquarters of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the banned African National Congress, and also as a safe house for political fugitives. For a time, Nelson Mandela lived on the property under the alias David Motsamayi and under the guise of a caretaker-cum-houseboy. Arthur Goldreich, a highly successful architect, artist and designer and a veteran of the Israeli War of Independence, was a founder member of MK. For more on the life and times of this extraordinary individual, see this writer’s article that appeared in the Chanukah 2011 issue of Jewish Affairs: https://www.jewishaffairs.co.za/the-life-and-extraordinary-times-of-arthur-goldreich/
On 11 July 1963, the security police swooped on Liliesleaf, capturing all political activists present, Goldreich included, and following up with the arrest of a number of others in the course of the day. They also seized copious documentation, which the following year became the basis for the State’s case against Nelson Mandela and ten others in the famous ‘Rivonia Trial’. Goldreich was not among them, however. About a month after his arrest, he and three others had made a daring escape from policy custody and slipped over the border into Swaziland. After a short stay in the UK, he settled in Israel. There, he continued his successful career as an artist and designer, including establishing the world-renowned Department of Industrial and Environmental Design at Jerusalem’s Betzalel Academy.
On 24 May this year, the Israel launch of the book Mensches in The Trenches (see elsewhere in this issue) was held in Ra’anana under the joint auspices of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and Telfed. Participants, both via Zoom, included Paul and Nicholas Goldreich, who spoke to SAJBD National Chairperson Prof Karen Milner about their late father and shared their childhood memories of the 18 months they spent on Liliesleaf. Hereunder follows an edited transcript of what they said on that occasion, with the editor’s bridging comments and footnotes added where appropriate.
The discussion commenced with Prof Milner asking Paul Goldreich to speak about what it was like growing up in the Goldreich household at Liliesleaf.
Paul Goldreich (P G): The Goldreich household was a confusing place to grow up in. We moved from our home in Parktown to Liliesleaf which, as a farm 24 acres large, was of course a totally different ballgame. From a child’s point of view it was a miraculous place, with so much open space to explore and run around.
But equally there was this other aspect to it. There were a lot of people on the farm whom we didn’t know. Madiba [Nelson Mandela] was one of them – of course he wasn’t known to us as Nelson at all, but as David. He would often walk around the farm, in blue overalls. Apparently, the other farm workers didn’t know who he was either. At the same time, there was this massive contradiction going on, which was that at certain points there were meetings taking place both in his room and in the dining room of the main house, where the higher echelon of the ANC, particularly Umkhonto we Sizwe, sat in around a large table. For me as a six year-old it was all very intriguing, being in an environment with people discussing politics generally. I would spend quite a lot of time sitting under the table listening to the debates. There is a story my mother likes to tell, which is about me coming out from under the table after one of the meetings and saying to her, “Bloody Americans!”, in relation to the fact that the Americans wouldn’t fund the ANC. So there was quite a lot of this kind of incipient politicisation going on.
We lived this rather odd life. It included afternoon walks with Madiba around the farm, doing all sorts of things with him including basketball, football, archery, rifle shooting and knife throwing. These walks were lovely because it meant that we could have time with him. He knew an enormous amount about the flora and fauna of Southern Africa, taught us how to make fires, taught us about snakes and insects and all that sort of thing. He was an extremely knowledgeable man, and of course very kind and good.
But it was obviously all extremely complex. We would go to school in Saxonwold and then come back to the farm, and those two worlds were very divided and separate. Our parents were engaged in multiple lives. My mother was a nursery schoolteacher and my father was a designer, artist, architect and revolutionary – a very complex package! It all sort of melded together for us. I remember how my father was very absorbed in his work as artistic director of King Kong[1] in the early 1960s, apart from his work with the ANC. Essentially, his life was bound up with the complex question of how one can live multiple lives and still function. He was always working, always doing different things. At one time, he would be in the studio doing a painting, then he would be in a political meeting, then designing a building, then going downtown and working on the set of King Kong. In fact, he was always like that, then and after the escape and his life in Israel. He was a busy guy.
Karen Milner (KM): Being a child and recognising the complexity of a parent is a theme I picked up a lot in the book. The stories you tell, and those that come through in Mensches ingeneral, shows that these were complex people who lead complex lives, and it all impacted enormously on their families.
PG: Massively impacted. Also, one of the very important aspects to this whole drama is the role of women, because of course my mother was deeply involved in the process as were many other women, white, black and Indian. This was in a sense the underbelly of all of that resistance. The men tend to be positioned in a very particular way in the story. Actually the women – as an example, my mother would often drive the members of the high command around at night, putting her life at risk – played a crucial role as well.
KM: This is perhaps a difficult question to ask a child about his father, but what was it do you think allowed Arthur Goldreich, as a white Jewish man, to recognise in Mandela the capacity and leadership qualities we all acknowledge today when most whites at the time would have seen him as being no more than an agitator or terrorist?
PG: Looking back on that period, you’re talking about a group of black freedom fighters who connected themselves with staunch Jewish communists – seriously staunch Stalinists essentially. The South African Communist Party was the most vehement Communist Party in the world next to Russia. So you’ve got a lot of Jews, whose families mainly came from Lithuania just before and after the Russian Revolution, of whom some were deeply communist. Denis Goldberg’s family for example was seriously communist, as was Joe Slovo’s. I had conversations with my father about his connections to the SA Communist Party, and he wasn’t where they were, if I can put it that way. My mother’s family were a lot more connected, but not my father’s, who were merchants – and also English, which is another aspect.
My father’s position I think really came from the Holocaust. For him, that was the root of his hatred for the apartheid system, because in it he could see the reverberations of Nazism within South Africa. He really opposed that, was sickened by it. His experiences in Israel, where he arrived towards the end of the 1948 war was what connected him to Mandela, who knew that he had some military experience (although his association with the Palmach is debatable). But he was also under the radar in South Africa because he’d been first in Israel and then in England in the early 1950s. When he returned to South Africa, he was not politicised. So in a way it was the other way round, in that it was Mandela who saw something in my father that could be very useful for the cause. Through Mandela, my father’s link was concretised, because he’d already been having thoughts and views around the need to dismantle the apartheid state.
Nicholas Goldreich (NG): Regarding his service in Israel, he went there with his best friend, who was his mother’s cousin, a chap called David Fine. They went to a brand new kibbutz in the northern Galilee, called Mayan Baruch, where there were a number of South Africans. That was a Palmach stronghold. David Fine’s wife Ruti was in the Palmach when they arrived, so that was the connection.
Questions and comments from the floor followed, including on the relationship between the ANC and Israel and the attitude of Jewish activists towards Zionism:
NG: They still are anti-Zionist – friends of ours. It’s a bug-bear of mine to be honest, but not everyone agrees!
PG: There’s a YouTube clip of Mandela speaking to Ted Koppel in America, where Koppel asks what the ANC’s position was on Israel and Palestine and Mandela makes a very clear statement, saying that Israel is a racist state that is working against the interests of the Palestinians and that as a revolutionary movement the ANC would support the revolutionary movement of the PLO. This was the position the ANC took from very early on, and I think continues to take, and it affected my father’s relationship with the ANC until Mandela was released. It also affected Denis Goldberg’s relationship. He, of course, was released to Israel from prison.
NG: When he was released, the deal was that he renounce violence, and he got a lot of criticism from within the ANC for doing that. And a lot of that I think was that the deal that got him out was brokered through Israel.
PG: It was a deal brokered with the South African government through our cousin David Fine, with one of the Labour MKs and our father. The ANC’s response to it was very negative.
NG: It was a fairly typical breakdown between supporting Israel and supporting the Palestinians. Just to move away from South Africa, I have a daughter in Belfast, Northern Ireland. If you drive through the streets of Belfast, you’ll see pro-Palestinian posters and paintings in the Catholic areas, while in the Protestant areas, you’ll see pro-IDF posters. It’s a way of identifying who you are and where you stand.
PG: It’s the political affiliative opposition, basically. And in a way, this is the biggest problem and contradiction. Nicholas and I agree on this fundamental point. When Joe Slovo was asked before he died what he thought of his connection and relationship with the Stalinists in Russia and whether he had any recriminations or problem with it. He said very clearly, “I think there were some excesses”. Well, you’re talking about tens of millions of people murdered by the Stalin regime and another eighty million by the Mao tse Tung regime in Communist China. The Left have always denied their connection with that reality.
NG: And it’s continuing today. If anything happens between Israel and Gaza the social media’s flooded with it. There’s so little, from former South Africans I mean, about Ukraine. They will not criticise Russia.
PG: I understand if people are a bit confused over Nick’s and my response to this political position, but the point is this: We grew up in a situation where our parents were connected to a revolutionary movement that was linked to the Communist Party. Madiba was not a communist, but all the serious groundwork was being done by the Jewish communists. The reality of the situation is that when you grow up in an environment where you’re essentially indoctrinated to believe that Communism is right and Capitalism is wrong, which is exactly what Nick and I were brought up to believe, eventually you come to a point in your life when you’ve acquired a bit of knowledge and understanding about the world that this is a total ideological fabrication. Our father sat very uncomfortably in this whole political debate.
NG: We had an interesting childhood to say the least! As a child, you are very adaptable; when you become an adult, you forget how adaptable you in fact were. On the one hand, we lived on a farm, and had a huge area to play in (full of snakes, very poisonous). We lived the lives almost of country squires, in an area that was very affluent, and horse-orientated. The dads of a lot of kids in my class played polo, and our old man had a horse. On the other hand, we had people at our house who were trying to overthrow the government. I can remember, for example, walking past an open window watching my father coaching Nelson Mandela in delivering a speech for a radio broadcast. A guy I subsequently worked with in London was in fact radicalised by that very broadcast!
It was a very exciting time – there were things happening. On a Sunday, you would see them all out on the lawn (which was huge, about the size of a football pitch), blazing away with pistols at man-shaped targets. How they imagined they would remain unseen and unheard I just can’t think. They were unbelievably naïve.
PG: Unbelievably. There was a long drive up to the main road, and I clearly remember going up the road with my father in his Citroen, seeing two guys on top of a telegraph pole and asking him who they were. He said there was no need to worry about them. Those guys were Special Branch; this was about a month before the raid. So they were observing everything. The other thing was, there was a boy across the road, a “friend” of ours, who was coming down to the farm on a very regular basis and writing down the number plate details of all the cars that were coming in and out. These he would give to his old man, who would pass them on to the police. He also asked us, “Why are there so many Bantus coming in and out of the farm?” This was
NG: It was a very weird mixture between the most idyllic life and the revolutionary plotting going on all the time. For us kids, though, it was not really a difficult thing to square that circle. We went to school, we had a nice life, and this was just something that was happening in our house and the surrounding buildings.
PG: Until it ended.
NG: It ended rather suddenly, yes.
[1] A famous South African musical, sub-billed as “An African Jazz opera”, King Kong chronicled the rise and fall of heavyweight champion boxer Ezekiel ‘King Kong’ Dhlamini. It opened on 2 February 1959 and went on to become an international sensation.
