The Delmas Treason Trial Collection

The Delmas Treason Trial, which ran from October 1985 to December 1988, was the prosecution of 22 anti-apartheid activists. Included among the defendants were three senior UDF (United Democratic Front) leaders, Moses Chikane, Mosiuoa Lekota and Popo Molefe, who were known as the "Big Three". Eleven of the accused were found guilty in the same courtroom where Nelson Mandela was tried in 1964. Their sentences were overturned in 1989 after an appeal to the Supreme Court. The trial was the longest in South African history at the time - over 450 days.

The Delmas Treason Trial Collection was part of Judge Frans Lourens Herman Rumpff’s (1912-1992) personal collection, which was donated to the University of Pretoria’s Library Services by his son-in-law, Judge Louis Harms arround 1993. The collection consists of court transcriptions (comprising 88 boxes) of the Trial and is housed in the Special Collections Unit in the Merensky Library. In 2017 the Digitisation Unit embarked on a project to digitise these transcriptions and upload them onto the UPSpace Repository. The process comprised the scanning of the materials, OCR, and editing, uploading and adding of metadata to each record. The project was completed in December 2018 and the material is keyword searchable and available on the UPSpace Repository of the University at https://repository.up.ac.za/handle/2263/63470

From left to right:  Johann van Wyk, Tebogo Badimo; Mariette Mapheto; Reneilwe Pila; Nokwanda Mwase and Lidia Swart