Tony Yengeni is no stranger to the dock. On February 8, 1989, he and 13 other people, alleged to be members of the then banned African National Congress's "Western Cape machinery" made their first appearance in the Supreme Court.

They were alleged to have been responsible for bomb blasts at Castle Court - on the fringes of District Six - which housed South African Defence Force officials, a limpet mine explosion in a toilet at Cape Town International airport and a blast at the Athlone magistrate's court.

At the time of his arrest Yengeni was the Western Cape commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC.

They were under heavy police guard with as many as 10 police officers in the court room on any given day. Outside the court building, police officers armed with assault rifles blocked off the short road to traffic. This trial carried on for more than three years.

The trial judge, Justice Selwyn Selikowitz, had a police guard at his home.

Yengeni and some of his co-accused were brutally tortured by security police in a bid to make them point out arms and fellow guerrillas. Police denied that they had obtained confessions through torture.

The defence team, led by "Lang" Dawid de Villiers, put up a dogged fight and exposed not only the abuse of Yengeni and his wife Lumka, but also that of Jenny Schreiner, who was accused number two.

During the trial, evidence emerged for the first time that police used askaris - "rehabilitated" or "turned" ANC guerrillas - to hunt down and arrest ANC members inside the country. Despite the unbanning of the ANC following FW de Klerk's watershed address to parliament on February 2, 1990, the trial of the 14 continued.

The ANC and the then apartheid government concluded the Pretoria Minute which categorised people to be taken into account with regard to pardon or indemnity for various political offences.

On March 5, 1990, Yengeni and his co-accused joined a hunger strike started by 350 political prisoners on Robben Island. They demanded their release.

Thirteen days later eight of Yengeni's co-accused were acquitted and released after the state had formally ceased the prosecution against them.

By then the state had decided not to hand in the confessions allegedly made before magistrates. The judge had already ruled that the state bore the onus to prove the admissibility of the alleged confessions. By then some of these people had been detained and on trial for 17 months.

The prosecution of Yengeni, his wife, Schreiner and three others continued. On August 29, 1990, Lumka was released on bail of R5 000 and reunited with her six-year-old son.

Yengeni and Schreiner remained in custody. On September 17, the 215th day of the marathon trial, Yengeni completed three years in custody. He had by then married Lumka in prison. On November 10, Yengeni and Schreiner were released on bail of R40 000 each, with stringent conditions.

Unknown to the security police, Yengeni was a regular contributor to a newspaper's letters page. As one of the reporters covering the trial, I ensured that the letters, written under a pseudonym, reached the unsuspecting letters-page editor.

In this way Yengeni commented on a variety of issues, most of them of a socio-political nature.

With acknowledgements to Ronald Morris and the Cape Times.