In June 1964 Denis Goldberg was sentenced to life imprisonment, to incarceration in a South African prison for the rest of his life. When he was sentenced, at the end of the Revonia Trial, he was 31.

Since 1971 his wife Esme was not allowed to visit him. His mother Annie, who died in 1975, was given permission to visit her son once (after she moved to England) in 1974. And in 1980 his father who had been his constant link with life outside, died in Johannesburg. Both Annie and Sam Goldberg were life long political activists, members of the Communist Party and participated in the national liberation struggle in South Africa since the 1930s when they first came into the country, Annie originally from England, Sam from Lithuania.

Denis grew up in Cape Town in atmosphere of heightened political consciousness. At Observatory Boys School his athletic abilities developed, as did his gift for the practical and scientific. He qualified as a civil engineer at the University of Cape Town and met and married Esme Bodenstein, a champion swimmer and his match in every way. They both joined the Modern Youth Society, which attracted young people of all national groups who wanted a change of government based on the ‘one person, one vote’. In 1955 Denis was among the founding members of the Congress of Democrats (COD) and was elected Treasurer. At the time COD worked for mass support for the Congress of the People and Denis attended the historic Kliptown Conference in 1955 as a delegate from the Western Cape, arriving despite police blockades, lorry breakdown and impediments all the way of the journey.

For those young years, Denis was practical and intrepid. He always believed and made others believe that obstacles were there to be overcome and his enthusiastic optimism infected those who worked with him. That optimism was always with him through all the horrors of South African prison existence. Denis Goldberg was finally released in the mid 80s and continues working for the re-construction of a new South Africa. In this regard, he donated his papers to the University of Fort Hare as part of records of resistance against apartheid donated already by the liberation movements, as well as other individual or family activists.