Denis Goldberg

Origins and early life

Denis Goldberg was born in Cape Town on 11 April 1933, the son of Sam Goldberg, a truck driver, and Annie Fineberg, a seamstress, two Communists whose home was open to people of every race. His parents were Jewish, both born in London to Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to England in the second half of the nineteenth century. He studied at the University of Cape Town, where he graduated in civil engineering in 1955, and with his wife Esme joined the Congress of Democrats, organising a poor settlement near Simon's Town for the Congress of the People.

Work and career

Held without trial for four months after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, he became a technical officer of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, and in December 1962 helped run its first training camp inside the country. Arrested at Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia on 11 July 1963, he was accused number three in the Rivonia Trial and on 12 June 1964 was sentenced to life imprisonment with Nelson Mandela and six others, the youngest of them and the only white man.

Because apartheid separated prisoners by race, he was held not on Robben Island but in Pretoria Central Prison, and he was released on 28 February 1985 after twenty-two years behind bars. His daughter Hilary, who lived on a kibbutz in Israel, had campaigned for his release, and he flew there straight from prison to join his family, then worked for the ANC from London until apartheid ended. In 1995 he founded Community HEART to help poor South Africans, came home in 2002, and in 2010 published his memoir, The Mission.

Later years

He received the Order of Luthuli in silver in 2009 and the Isitwalandwe, the highest award of the ANC, in 2019, and gave his last years to the House of Hope, an arts centre for the young people of Hout Bay. He died of lung cancer at his home in Hout Bay, near Cape Town, on 29 April 2020, at the age of eighty-seven.