Faith Fighters: How Jews and Muslims Stood Together Against Apartheid
EVERYDAY COURAGE
Takeaway: When oppression hardens the rules, solidarity across faiths softens the ground where change can actually begin.
Courtrooms can be eerily quiet. In Pretoria in 1964, as the Rivonia Trial reached its end, that silence felt heavy enough to touch. The apartheid state had accused a multifaith circle of activists of sabotage and conspiracy after the 1963 police raid on Liliesleaf, the ANC’s underground base in Rivonia. The charge sheet listed 199 acts. On 12 June 1964, eight men received life sentences. Among them: Denis Goldberg, a South African Jew, and Ahmed Kathrada, a South African of Indian Muslim heritage. Different faiths. Same verdict. Same refusal to treat “order” as an excuse for injustice.
(Sources: South African History Online; Nelson Mandela Foundation)
Goldberg’s route there ran through the Congress of Democrats and then uMkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing. Arrested in the Rivonia sweep, he became Accused No. 3. Because he was white—the only white defendant ultimately convicted—he was sent not to Robben Island but to the white section of Pretoria Local Prison. He served 22 years before President P. W. Botha signed his release in 1985. The separation meant isolation from comrades, which is likely to have made the sentence feel longer, not shorter.
(Sources: South African History Online; Wikipedia)
Kathrada also passed through Liliesleaf. Convicted of conspiracy, he received life and spent 18 years on Robben Island before a transfer to Pollsmoor in 1982. He walked free on 15 October 1989, after 26 years and 3 months. If you read his interviews, what stands out isn’t melodrama but the grind: study circles, carefully shared news, small routines that, piece by piece, kept a movement alive.
(Sources: South African History Online)
The facts are stark; the meaning sits underneath. To the state, these men were joined by a plot. In public memory, they’re joined by conscience. Jews and Muslims, Christians and communists, trade unionists and students; Africans, Indians, Coloureds, whites. The regime tried to separate them—literally, by race, and figuratively, by branding them enemies of “order.” Yet the unity they forged across faith and identity appears to have outlasted distance, walls, and years. Goldberg kept working from Pretoria. Kathrada kept working from Robben Island and later Pollsmoor. Resistance, it turns out, often survives on routine and stubborn solidarity, not grand gestures.
(Sources: South African History Online)
Rivonia is sometimes told as a story with a single hero. The record reads more like a chorus. The accused included Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoaledi, Andrew Mlangeni—alongside Goldberg and Kathrada—while others were acquitted earlier. The court handed down life sentences in June with the clear expectation that the movement would fade. History, inconveniently for the state, recorded the opposite.
(Sources: Nelson Mandela Foundation; NMF Archive)
After release, the work didn’t stop. Goldberg left for exile, continued the struggle in London, and eventually returned to help build institutions at home, including a legacy trust. Kathrada stepped into a new democratic order, served in government, and helped found a namesake foundation devoted to non-racialism and human rights. If you visit those institutions today, you’ll likely find the same practical ethic that sustained them in prison: do the work, teach the next person, repeat.
(Sources: South African History Online; Kathrada Foundation)
There’s a quieter thread here, and it’s not hard to miss: indifference is the quiet partner of oppression. Faith didn’t sort these men into opposing camps; it gave them different languages for courage. A Jewish engineer and an Indian Muslim organizer sat under the same sentence because they answered a similar ethical call. That said, it would be naïve to suggest faith always aligned with justice. Some religious leaders defended the status quo, and not every coalition moment was easy. Still, the Rivonia generation shows how conscience can braid differences into something stronger than fear.
