15/08/2006
Wilhelm Snyman

Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary

A Book Review by Wilhelm Snyman

"A life begins long before it starts; it endures long after it ends." While it is true for anyone in the politically, ideologically fraught context of South Africa, those words acquire a very particular hue when Bram Fischer is the life referred to.

And so it is that at last, four years into the democratic South Africa that Fischer believed in, a biography has been published, and one that does justice to its subject.

Sincerity of purpose pervades this excellent biography of one of the most controversial figures in South Africa's recent history - an Afrikaner nationalist turned communist; a man who had the legacy of the Boer War and anti-imperialism deep in his veins.

Clingman's work reflects a deep awareness of the fact that Fischer, an anathema to many who called themselves Afrikaners and those who rightly or wrongly feared the communism Fisher espoused, was fighting a battle and a particularly lonely one, unbuttressed by the support of his community.

Thankfully the biography has been written by an accomplished individual who has approached his subject with subtlety and refinement, and who has not fallen into the ideological pitfalls that such a daunting task presents.

Clingman, who holds the Chair of English Literature at the University of Massachussets, Amherst, succeeds in drawing together the apparently conflicting strands of Fischer's tumultuous life, from his family's eminence in the legal and political spheres in the Orange Free State, to the days of the Rivonia trial and ultimately to Fischer's cremation in 1975 attended by Chief of Prisons who came in his private capacity to pay his respects.

While giving a thorough account of Fischer's trial and political activities which led to his incarceration on sabotage charges and charges relating to Suppression of Communism Act, Clingman provides a succinct commentary on Fischer's reaction to all that was happening to him, and what he did, up to the dramatic and fateful day in November 1965 when heavily disguised - using the alias of Douglas Black - Fischer was arrested in his Volkswagen Beetle in Johannesburg.

A tribute to the work is that throughout the book Clingman consistently provides a cogent link between Fischer's personal life - his love for Molly - for his family - and his intellectual and spiritual growth from the years in the Orange Free State, his UCT period and Oxford, Vienna, his visit to the Soviet Union through to what would call his martyrdom for the cause he believed in.

Besides serving to demystify the figure of Fischer, Clingman also provides a chilling account of history of the times, and the attitudes that made Fischer such an unpalatable figure to the government of the day and to those who had put that government in power. Clingman takes care to point out the patterns of history as they affected Fischer's life, including a reference to the bond that existed between the Fischer family of yore and the Mofutsanyana family in what was then Basutoland, during the Boer War.

Using court records and letters, study is also accompanied by ample notes and bibliographical references making it a suspenseful read as well as a useful aid for researches.

Bram Fisher, Afrikaner Revolutionary goes a long way to lifting the veil over the vast body of previously suppressed local history and gives back to South Africa a major figure who responds to the definition of hero, regardless of one's political persuasions.

AN INTERVIEW WITH WILHELM SNYMAN

In the week after Bram's death, each newspaper in South Africa was permitted to publish one photograph of him, with the proviso that the picture had been taken before his period underground. Die Burger, which missed the deadline, printed a whited-out silhouette, presenting a ghostly and vacant image, replete with hat. An editorial in the newspaper, regretting that Bram had been "a lost son who did not return", suggested that a nation that wished to retain the loyalties of its questing children would require wisdom and love to preserve the bond of affection. Only then would it be able to escape the terrible self reproach implicit in David's grief: "O Absolom, my son, my son, …would God I had died for thee."

Bram Fischer, honoured and reviled, hounded and eulogized, probably one of the more controversial figures in post-war South African history, is the subject of this extensive, superbly written and polished biography by Stephen Clingman.

In his work, Clingman grapples with the apparent contradiction in Fischer. I asked him how does an Afrikaner nationalist (not a gesuiwerde [purified] nationalist as the victors of the 1948 election were styled) - of the JBM Hertzog variety - turn to communism.

"Fischer's was a kind of Free State patriotism, an anti-imperialism, rather than a strict Afrikaner nationalism.

"My interest started with my work on Nadine Gordimer, and I was intrigued by people like Gordimer, their sense of history and how they responded to what was called the "burden of history". But my interest in Fischer originally was to see what he actually said. At that time he was as bad as anything, a complete anathema and you couldn't get hold of anything he'd done. I wanted to see his speech from the dock which I saw in about 1980 and it really intrigued me. On another level what really interested me were his letters, which the family had kept. At that point it became much more personal. He became real. His wife Molly became real."

Asked why a major portion of the book is such an intimate account of the man who until the publication Bram Fischer, Afrikaner Revolutionary was known more for his political role, Clingman explains that for that him it had to be a personal story.

"I felt that what Bram Fischer did he did as a whole person not just as a political person. Everybody has a private life as well as a public life. It's not the kind of biography where I go 'delving into the dirt' or anything like that. To me what is intriguing is the relationship between the public person and the private person. I'm not a political scientist. Nor am I interested in someone who was a hero, although I think he was heroic. Rather, I'm interested in someone who had a complicated life who was very brave during an important period of our history."

How would you assess Bram Fischer's contribution to the South Africa we have today?"

"To me it's very significant, not only because I've been working on him for a very long time. His importance centres around the issue of identity. He was an Afrikaner and identified himself very strongly as an Afrikaner. He began his life as a nationalist. And then not in spite of that, but because of that he became who he was. He took that work seriously 'Afrikaner' - 'African'. It became a lightning bolt to me when I realized that Bram became a communist because he'd been an Afrikaner nationalist. The roots of this lie in the anti-imperialism of the Boer republics, particularly in the Free State. He was someone who was born for leadership and he understood that very differently and took it to its logical conclusion.

"Fischer's life is about the transformation of identity, of the sense of the self. In that sense his a very South African story and a very important South African story and one which also reaches beyond South Africa. I think the question of identity is an issue that faces everybody - it doesn't matter where they are. The question all this centres on is 'how do you remain true to yourself and also enlarge your sense of self?'…

"When Bram went underground he said it was very important for an Afrikaner, in a very public way to identify with the majority of the people of the country."

In a different way to Beyers Naudé for example?

"Yes, in a different way, but he felt some affinity with Beyers. He wrote to Beyers while he was underground. Bram was not the sort of straight run-of-the-mill Stalinist. Bram believe in progress. For him Christianity and communism were on the same line of evolution. They believed as he put it in the 'brotherhood of man'. When he wrote to Beyers he said that they were both fighting for the same things.

"Bram also was not alone in developing this non-racial vision. When I spoke to Mandela and the others, Mandela said to me 'look when I started in the '40's, I really wasn't interested working with whites or with Indians'. But it was because of people like Fischer and Yusuf Dadoo that he came to realize that 'others felt as passionately as we did about these things' and were prepared to make the sacrifices. As Mandela said they came to understand that they could work across these colour lines. Non-racialism wasn't a given at the beginning. It was worked for. That vision came to fruition in 1994 and Fischer had set a precedent. That spirit of reconciliation ran very deeply in his life. Because his family had been through the Boer War he knew what it meant when nationalism clashed. He really wanted to avoid a civil war in South Africa, between white and black."

Couldn't he have done this as a liberal?

"He was a liberal for a while. But what is crucial here is the context of the '30's. In the 30's he had been a Rhodes Scholar and he'd been to Europe, attended student congresses and had seen the rise of nazism and had visited the Soviet Union."

Wasn't he conveniently oblivious to the excesses of Stalin's Soviet Union, as indeed were many wide-eyed idealists until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939?

"I don't think he understood what he was seeing when he saw it. But he was a believer. He believed in communism. Once he had given his allegiance he never lost it. He may have had his private doubts, but he wasn't going to show it in any public way. But in the '30's fascism and communism were the two forces. When Fischer came back to South Africa liberal organizations couldn't provide, in his view, any long-term solution or any real resistance."

Referring to the later years of Fischer's life, Clingman points out that Fischer didn't have the visibility of a Mandela or a Sisulu and that his legacy has been more indirect.

"Because Fischer had been in the fold, he was subsequently cast into utter darkness and yet was deeply rooted in this country. There was never any thought that he would go into exile for example.

"His political involvement was a very particular gesture of belonging and his legacy lies above all in his integrity.

"He was one of those people who did what he did because he believed it was right, regardless of the consequences."