HISTORY: MARY RUSSELLreviews Just Defiance: The Bombmakers, the Insurgents and a Legendary Treason TrialBy Peter Harris, Portobello Books, 315pp. £14.99

IT’S A LEGAL nightmare: a lawyer opposed to the use of violence is asked to defend four men who, charged with armed murder and treason, plead guilty and refuse to recognise the court.

The 33-year-old lawyer, Peter Harris, is South African; his clients are members of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, or MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress. The year is 1987, and the four men, known as the Delmas Four, are headed for death row. Thus we meet Jabu Masina, Neo Potsane, Joseph Makura and Ting Ting Masango, and hear about the circumstances that have brought them to this place.

One, as a child, has to watch as his much respected father is humiliated by a white boss. Another, offered food by a well-intentioned white family, sees the bowl of food put on the floor for him to eat from. Another has a dog set on him by a white boy of his own age, and is promptly charged with burglary when he seeks refuge inside a garden gate.

Apartheid South Africa has nothing to offer these young men, so they turn to the ANC, which sends them off to military camps in places such as East Germany, Swaziland and the MK headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, where they learn how to kill people with their AK-47s. Some are sent to support the resistance movement in Angola, though they are by now experienced fighters and want to take part in the struggle back home.

This book was first published in South Africa. While reading it then, I happened to be staying in Soweto, where I learned that one way the people tried to confuse the South African Defence Force was to remove the numbers from their doors – which is why Soweto still has numberless doors.

This kind of support is vital for the four men when they return to South Africa, needing safe houses from which to work.

Assisted on their case by a young Sowetan lawyer, Bheki Mlangeni, Harris offers a high-octane narrative that will have special appeal for anyone associated with the ANC or the MK. The story of how donations to the struggle are moved from account to account, by reputable law firms acting as fronts, will bring tears of envy to the eyes of anyone trying to shift money around today.

With his clients making a courageous stand that can lead only to the death sentence, Harris travels to meet exiles such as Chris Hani, Jacob Zuma, Oliver Tambo and Ronnie Kasrils, my favourite bad boy in South Africa’s story. Formerly an advertising executive, Kasrils became the MK’s director of information. We met again recently in London, where he was sitting on a human-rights committee related to Palestine.

The ANC leaders instruct the Delmas Four to allow Harris to ask for extenuating circumstances to be taken into account. The description of the four walking into the dock to hear the verdict, defiantly wearing their MK uniforms, is breathtaking.

But let’s not get carried away by the euphoria of that occasion. The torture and slow death of the fifth member of the group, Justice Mbizana, make horrific reading, as do the accounts of the numerous assassinations of Harris’s human-rights colleagues.

There is also the sad spectacle of the Askari – ANC activists turned informers – mirrored by the people in the defence force who approach the ANC leadership with stories of violence and intrigue. One such is the infamous Dirk Coetzee, intriguingly brought to life here by Harris, who is put up in a London flat funded by the ANC so that he might give evidence about the more brutal tactics used by his former army bosses.

This is a complex and fascinating book that operates on many levels and is all the better for it. It is a courtroom drama and a story of revolution and counter-revolution, some of whose characters display the highest form of bravery while others sink to the lowest level of obscene behaviour.

Harris deals with his own dislike of violence simply by describing how it is to be found on both sides in the apartheid struggle. He makes his choices and leaves readers to make theirs.

Because this is a cliffhanger it would be unfair to reveal the ending, except to quote what is the saddest paragraph of the whole story: "When his body was carried to the ambulance . . . the crowd that had gathered stood in the cold glare of the township arc lights, fists raised, and softly sang Hamba Kahle Mkhonto we Sizwe, the song that is sung at the funerals of MK soldiers."

MARY RUSSELLfirst travelled to South Africa in 1980, during the apartheid era. In 1994 she was an international observer for the country's first democratic elections