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211 pages

English

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Indexed in Clarivate Analytics Book Citation Index (Web of Science Core Collection)

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Personal Memoirs

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Publié par	WITS University Press
Date de parution	06 octobre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776141562
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Memory Against Forgetting
Memory Against Forgetting
Memoir of a Time in South African Politics
1938 – 1964
Second Edition
Rusty Bernstein
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Second edition first published in South Africa in 2017
Copyright © Bernstein Family 2017
Photographs © Individual copyright holders
Courtroom sketches by Hilda Bernstein, 1963/1964 © Bernstein Family 2017
First edition published by Viking/Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd 1999
ISBN 978-1-77614-154-8 Print
ISBN 978-1-77614-155-5 PDF
ISBN 978-1-77614-156-2 EPUB
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the Publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The Publisher gratefully acknowledges the institutions and individuals referenced in the captions. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the images reproduced. Please contact Wits University Press at the address above in case of any omissions or errors.
Project managed by Hazel Cuthbertson
Edited by Pat Tucker
Cover designed by Fire and Lion
Typeset by Newgen

For Hilda, without whose courage, persistence and love neither my children nor I would have come through. And for all those who resisted apartheid and finally laid it low, but whose courage and sacrifices are now in danger of being forgotten
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Milan Kundera
Contents
Biography of Rusty Bernstein
Foreword: Thabo Mbeki
The Rivonia Trial Attorney Remembers: Lord Joel Joffe
Prologue
Photographic plates follow
1 Starting Blocks
2 Time at the Crossroads
3 A Foot in Each Camp
4 Across the Divide
5 Spoils of War
6 Warning Winds
7 A Line in the Sand
8 Goodbye to All That
9 Overground– Underground
10 To Speak of Freedom
11 Power, Treason & Plot
12 Cracking the Fortress Wall
13 Exercise Behind Bars
14 To Put Up or Shut Up
15 Things Fall Apart
16 To Sit in Solemn Silence
17 In a Deep Dark Dock
18 Telling it as it Was
19 In a Closing Net
20 Over, and Out
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Biography
Rusty (Lionel) Bernstein 1920–2002
R usty Bernstein was born to a middle-class family of Jewish émigrés. He was orphaned at the age of eight and he and his three siblings were raised by relatives. He finished his education at Hilton College, where he excelled academically although he hated the ethos of the school. After studying architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand, Rusty worked as an architect in Johannesburg.
Rusty joined the South African Communist Party and the Labour League of Youth, where he met Hilda, an immigrant from Britain. They were married in 1941. During the Second World War, Rusty served as a gunner in the South African army in North Africa and Italy, returning to South Africa in 1946.
Rusty was a private and reticent person, and a sensitive and articulate writer who wrote extensively for a number of journals. After the banning of the Communist Party in 1950, Rusty was active in forming the underground party and the Congress of Democrats, an organisation for whites that cooperated with the African National Congress, which at that time was restricted to black membership only. Rusty played a crucial role in drafting the 1954 Freedom Charter, writing the document’s opening slogan, ‘Let us speak of freedom’, and giving its demands a sense of purpose with phrases like ‘the people shall govern’, and ‘all shall be equal before the law’.
In 1956, Rusty was arrested with 150 others and charged with treason, but acquitted after a trial lasting four years. In 1960 following the Sharpeville massacre both Rusty and Hilda were arrested and held for months without trial and were eventually released under banning orders.
Rusty was arrested again in 1963 at Liliesleaf Farm with leaders of the high command of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC. In what became known as the Rivonia Treason Trial, Nelson Mandela and seven of the other accused were sentenced to life imprisonment. Rusty was acquitted but immediately re-arrested. While out on bail, he and Hilda escaped into exile.
In London, Rusty practiced as an architect and continued to work for the ANC. He returned to South Africa in 1994 to run the ANC’s press office during the first democratic election. Rusty was awarded the Order of Luthuli (Gold) posthumously for his political activism.
Foreword
Thabo Mbeki
May 2017
H aving read Memory Against Forgetting , I realise that, quite in error, for many years I thought as a matter of fact that I knew everything I needed to know about many phases of the struggle for the liberation of our country.
This includes much of the period which Rusty Bernstein discusses in this important book.
Thanks to an accident of history I knew and know many of the people he mentions in his account.
I was fortunate that I interacted with some of them in the context of our struggle, as a young cadre involved in that struggle.
In that context it was easy for me casually to address as comrades all these who were, by age and politically, my seniors by a long distance, including Rusty.
When I grew older I came to understand that that political intimacy sometimes served to hide much knowledge about who these people were, who were indeed my comrades.
In these later years I have had direct experience of how some whom I knew attached themselves to the family of those called comrades because this helped them to hide the fact that they were other than comrades.
However, the stories which Rusty tells in this book about himself and his fellow freedom fighters, who, though older, were also my comrades, have greatly assisted me to retreat from my cynicism about the abuse of comrade, the honourable word indicating comradeship.
This is because he writes of himself and these within the context of challenging circumstances which tested their principled loyalty to the struggle as well as comradeship with their comrades.
I speak here of comrades, like Rusty, who stand out today and will, for all time, as legendary figures whose readiness to make all necessary sacrifices brought us the freedom the millions in our country, in Africa, and in the world, continue to celebrate.
Yet it is true that the portraits of these, which Rusty presents with great sensitivity, remain incomplete because they do not and cannot contain the personal details which would complete the composition of the individual as an ordinary human being.
It is in this regard that we are very fortunate that Rusty wrote this book in the way he did.
When I had the opportunity to read it I thought that it would be an account of the struggle, in which Rusty was intimately involved for many decades.
But as I read on I thought that it might be an autobiography.
In the end I discovered that it is both a fascinating story about our struggle, illustrated with telling detail, and an extraordinarily frank narrative about the passions, varied moods and vexations, triumphs and disappointments of an admirable human being and revolutionary.
Because he writes honestly about himself, including as an ordinary human being and a revolutionary, here, finally, I came to possess a true and complete portrait of those I was privileged to address as comrades, who, in terms of age and politically were, as I have said, my seniors by a long distance.
Side by side with that portrait Rusty draws a living picture which tells of his love for his wife, Hilda, and their children, created with the delicate strokes of a master painter.
That moving image helps to present in sharper focus the pains and frustrations and triumphs which accompanied those who dared to engage in the struggle to defeat apartheid tyranny.
The memory so eloquently contained in this book tells especially the younger generations of South Africans who live in freedom that they should never forget that, indeed, that freedom was not free.
The Rivonia Trial Attorney Remembers
Lord Joel Joffe
September 2016
T he Foreword to the first edition of Rusty’s book was written by the eminent author Anthony Sampson and ended:
‘It is the honesty and credibility of his narrative, without any posturing or self-advertisement, which makes it both a gripping story and a crucial historical document. He poignantly takes his title from Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of a memory against forgetting”. But his own memory is unusually reliable and important, in its insistence on truthfulness and uncomfortable facts. His story is not just the record of a heroic movement, told from the inside, important though that is: it is an account of a warm individual and his family, caught up in a challenge they could not ignore, who still retained an individual scepticism and humour as they looked back on the events which turned their lives upside down.’
I cannot match this masterful writing but am able to add to it as one of the lawyers who defended Rusty Bernstein, on trial for his life, accused of sabotage in the Rivonia Trial alongside Nelson Mandela, and eight other leaders of the liberation movement, as well as James Kantor, a non-political but brave and principled lawyer, framed by the police and discharged at the end of the state case because there was no credible evidence against him.
Rusty’s role in the liberation movement was mainly as its scribe – the articulator who put in writing the ideas and opinions of the other leaders and the movement – and also as a brilliant educator in political theory. It was Rusty who was tasked by the Working Committee of the South African Congress Alliance (comprising the African National Con