page 263 - Long Walk Original Manuscript [LWOM_263.jpg]

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NMPP-PC-NMPP-PC-2012/14-chapter 8-263

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Long Walk Original Manuscript [LWOM_263.jpg]

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  • 1976 - (Creation)

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1 page

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(18 July 1918-5 December 2013)

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Soon after we were committed for trial we heard that the Crown intended calling a new star witness, Father Boschensky, a Catholic priest who had been born in Poland and had later settled in Swaziland. He was reputed to be a leading "Sovietologist" and an expert on communism. Indeed Father Boschensky arrived in South Africa and even came to court, but the Crown never called him nor did they ever explain why he was never called. Naturally that gave rise to speculation, the most persistent of which was that, after studying the exhibits, he told the Crown that in his opinion there was no evidence of any conspiracy to replace the existing State with a communist State, that the Freedom Charter and other related documents upon which the Crown case rested were far from being a blueprint for a communist state, and that the exhibits generally embodied the views of nationalist fighting for democratic rights in their own country.

Oswald Pirow must have reported all this to the government but the Nationalist Party was at war with us and a man who wages a war is not interested in justice and fair play but in victory over the enemy. A special court is part of the machinery the government uses to immobilise its political opponents and we had to be put away at all costs. The case continued and the Crown had to fall back on the evidence of Professor Murray who had proved to be so uncertain on the subject during the preparatory examination as to describe his own statement and one by Malan as "communism straight from the shoulder". Now he was back and this time his evidence in chief was led by Advocate de Vos Q.C. and in my opinion he was even more incoherent on Marxism now than he was at the preparatory examination. Cross examined by Maisels he admitted that none of his theses for his seniour degrees covered the subject of Marxism, that he had never visited any of the

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