MANDELA, Nelson - TREASON TRIAL.

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Indictment. Regina Vs. Adams and Others. High Treason, Etc. First edition of the indictment for the "Treason Trial", in which Nelson Mandela and almost the entire anti-apartheid leadership were prosecuted. One defendant, Ahmed Kathrada, has signed beside his name; the signature was acquired by a collector in recent years."The core of the treason charge related to a momentous - and for the government, disconcerting - event at Kliptown, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, on 25-26 June 1955... The delegates were drawn from the ranks of the Congress Alliance, a coalition of race-based anti-apartheid groups - the ANC (still Africans only), the Indian Congresses, the Coloured People's Congress and the white mix of communists and non-communists. They had come together to draw up the country's first democratic constitution... Out of the deliberations came the endorsement of a Freedom Charter, which to western eyes was an unexceptionable statement of democratic principles and equal rights, owing something to the UN Charter but virtually nothing to the Communist Manifesto" (Herbstein, pp. 28-9).In response, 156 individuals who attended or were associated with the meeting were arrested under the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act. The trial helped unite the anti-apartheid movement and attracted worldwide support for the struggle and international condemnation of the South African government. The trial lasted over four years, after which all the accused were acquitted. However, soon after,

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