STATEMENT BEFORE DURBAN MAGISTRATE’S COURT DURING DEFIANCE CAMPAIGN, SEPTEMBER 1952⁽¹⁾

Your Worship, I deem it my duty to place before you the reasons for the action I have taken. I stand before you not as a criminal who has to be punished for a crime he has committed against society. I am here with the full realisation of my responsibilities to our South African society, and it is this realisation which has dictated the decision I and thousands of others in South Africa have taken.

Your duty as a judicial officer is to enforce laws passed by the Legislature. But it is the basic concept of democracy that Parliament should represent all the peoples of the country so that when it passes laws it interprets the wishes of the majority in the country. My colleagues and I before you today represent the majority of the South African people, yet we have no say in the making or the administering of the laws of the country. Because we are denied a say in the government of the country it is our contention that more often than not we are legislated against in the Union with the result that our Statute Book abounds with laws which we consider to be unjust and against the dignity of man.

While you have a duty to perform in enforcing the laws of the country my people and I too have a duty to our conscience. The African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress, representing the African and the Indian people of the Union, have correctly decided that if we are true to our conscience we cannot tolerate unjust laws passed by a minority group in Parliament and therefore we have with all seriousness decided to defy unjust laws. This defiance on our part is the only concrete way we have of showing our opposition to these laws for we are not allowed to voice our protests in the law-making bodies of the country.

We have adopted a civilised weapon in our protest for we preach hatred towards none and we are bound by the noble ethics of nonviolence. Our struggle is not against the white people of South Africa as such but against oppression and injustice.

Today our beloved country cries out for justice. There is a growing attack on the liberties and rights of all sections of South African people, white and non-white. Even the high tradition of our Supreme Court in upholding basic rights of the people, in so far as that is possible for the Supreme Court to do, is also being challenged. It is at a time like this that the non-white people of the country have given a clear lead and pointed out that South Africa cannot have freedom for only a small section of its people and oppression for the rest. Freedom is indivisible.

Sir, my people have come to believe that when unjust laws prevail in the country the place for all just men and women is in the prisons of the country in defiance of these unjust laws. History will decide whether it was correct for us to have decided to defy unjust laws as we are doing today. In our minds we are satisfied that history is with us for in the struggle of every nation men and women have had to make sacrifices including courting imprisonment in order to usher in democracy.

That is all I have to say in explaining why we are before you. It is now for you to pronounce your sentence. In due course history will pronounce its sentence on South Africa.

1. The Leader, Durban, September 5, 1952