The London Observer, 27th Feb 2000
BARBARA TRAPIDO; Memory Against Forgetting by Rusty Bernstein
RUSTY BERNSTEIN was a talented member of that small,
heroic band of white South Africans who, for 30 years, fought alongside
black South Africans against a minority, racist regime. To do so took
enormous courage and self-sacrifice, but also intelligence and skill.
An indefatigable writer of pamphlets and policy
statements, Bernstein was delegated in 1956 to draft the Freedom Charter, a
key ANC policy document, by making a painstaking synthesis of the
submissions received from ordinary black South Africans. Written on scraps
torn from school exercise books and old envelopes, these offerings expressed
the aspirations of the country's disenfranchised majority, covering land
reform, education, employment, civil rights, family life and electoral
hopes.
Bernstein wrote the rousing preamble and conclusion
which commits the ANC firmly to non-racialism. Its assertion that 'South
Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white' ran counter to the
pan-Africanist slogan 'Africa for the Africans' and became unexpectedly
controversial.
He tells the story of his own political awakening,
through an accidental encounter with a group of door-to-door collectors from
Medical Aid for Spain during the war against Franco. He conjures the
atmosphere of Johannesburg, with its hole-in-the-corner, left-wing
bookshops, its first 'continental' cafe run by German refugees, its young,
pro-Nazi blackshirt Afrikaners and its radicalised returning soldiers.
He conveys vividly the sense of fulfilment derived
from first entering a 'native' beer-hall to sell two-penny weeklies to black
workers. He was close to the 1946 miners strike, in which miners were
literally bludgeoned to work, and to the squatters who spilled on to patches
of municipal wasteland, since no provision had been made for the huge
numbers of; newly urbanised black workers servicing the needs of white
industry.
Bernstein was one of the 156 accused in the 'Treason
Trial' which ran from 1956-1959 before all were finally acquitted. Though it
had the effect of eroding livelihoods - Bernstein, for example, was an
architect whose practice petered out - it was the high point for
anti-apartheid activists, since the state had unwittingly made possible what
was almost impossible outside - it gave opportunity, over three years, for
the political leadership, black, white and Asian, to confer and connect in
the same physical space.
Then came Sharpville and the State of Emergency.
Banning orders and house arrests began, along with 90-day detention and the
emergence of a new breed of Special Branch policeman trained in torture
techniques by the CIA. The loss to the liberation movement through gagging,
imprisonment, exile and intimidation was enormous.
Resources were meagre and the chain of command in what
were all by then illegal organisations developed cracks which resulted to
alarming security lapses, just at a point when the decision had been made to
begin acts of sabotage against strategic tar-gets. Some among the leadership
were airing the idea of guerrilla war, though many were against it when the
police closed in on the Rivonia House in 1963 and seized the smoking
document known as 'Operation Mayibuye'.
Bernstein was the only one of the Rivonia defendants
who was acquitted. He was immediately re-arrested, but bailed by default,
thanks to a prominent rugby fixture which guaranteed the absence of all
Special Branch persons from their desks that afternoon.
The book touched on his hair-raising nocturnal escape
into Botswana, complete with twisted ankles and kidnap attempts, but this is
not only a personal story. It's a valuable historical document which comes
at a time when the contribution of people such as Bernstein is in danger of
being written out of the liberation story.
Reprinted without the kind permission of The Guardian,
England |