When the best defence is no defence

This remarkable book is the account by their lawyer of the trial, imprisonment and sentencing to death in the late Eighties of a group of young men who came to be known as the Delmas Four. It is also a wonderfully vivid and at times alarming account of the inner workings both of ANC ‘operations units’ and of the police, who used torture, murder and intimidation without compunction in the fight to save South Africa from what they saw as a communist threat. As South Africans in general drew closer to some sort of détente between the ANC and the nationalist government, neither the ANC on the one hand nor the security police on the other were prepared to hold back. It was as if this was the last hurrah for their deepest fears and hopes for the country.

The young Peter Harris took the apparently hopeless case of these four men who had been seized after a number of murders and assassinations, and had absolutely no defence. He was a practised human rights lawyer and had made many trips to courts where highly prejudiced Afrikaner judges sat in judgment over people who regarded themselves as soldiers in a just war. Many of them had been forced by appalling torture to confess.

Harris recounts his conversations with the four; strangely, throughout the whole apartheid era there was some acknowledgment of judicial process, and lawyers (often funded by various international foundations) were able to meet with the clients, even though their clients had been beaten and tortured. Some never had the option of a lawyer because the security police killed them out of hand or tortured them to death before the legal process had begun. So Harris recounts not only the fate of his clients, but also tells us about the activities of the security police and the sinister covert operations like Vlakplaas that were set up to murder and torture opponents of the regime.