Bram Fischer – Afrikaner Revolutionary
In many ways, Bram Fischer, the grandson of the prime minster of the
Orange River Colony, had made the greatest sacrifice of all. No matter what I suffered in my pursuit of freedom,
I always took strength from the fact that I was fighting with and for my own people. Bram was a free man who fought against his own
people to ensure the freedom of others.
Nelson Mandela [2]
When looking at prominent political trials, it is usual for the focus to be upon those who are being prosecuted. Sometimes, however, another story can be discovered in the background when attention is spared for other players involved in the proceedings. This is certainly the case with the Rivonia trial. The life of the lead advocate for the defence, Bram Fischer, was one of great commitment and sacrifice in his participation in the fight to end apartheid in South Africa. In 1966, two years after representing Nelson Mandela and others at the Rivonia trial, Bram Fischer was sentenced to life in prison himself for his anti-apartheid activism. His trial may not have caused the level of global criticism that resulted from the Rivonia trial, but the events that led up to his imprisonment, and his motivations for taking the actions he did, deserve recognition. In pursuit of this goal, this blog post will be a very short biography of Fischer.
Abram Fischer’s life took a course that no-one, least of all
himself, would have expected at the outset.
He was born on the 23rd April 1908 to a very prominent
Afrikaner family in Bloemfontein. His
grandfather, Abraham Fischer was the first, and last, Prime Minister of the
Orange River Colony between 1907-1910, before its absorption into the Orange
Free State. The legacy of his
grandfather, and of his father Percy, were formative in his early years in his
support of Afrikaner nationalism.
The key moment that Fischer recollected as being pivotal in
his opposition to the system of racial discrimination in South Africa, which
was to eventually crystallise into apartheid following the National Party election
victory in 1948, was an occasion when he was a university student in the 1930s. At a meeting he attended he was required to
shake hands with a Black man for the first time in his adult life. His deep-seated reluctance to do this shook
him to the core and led to a serious period of introspection about the
upbringing that had led to such a reaction.
It was such a pivotal moment in his life that it was an event he would
recall thirty years later when on trial:
’The result
of all this’, as he remembered it in his speech from the dock, ‘was that in the
succeeding years when some of us tried to run literacy classes in the old
Waaihoek location in Bloemfontein I came to understand that colour prejudice
was a wholly irrational phenomenon, and that true human friendship could extend
across the colour bar once the initial prejudice was overcome. And that I
think, my Lord, was lesson number one on my way to the Communist Party, a Party
which has always refused to accept any colour bar, which has always stood firm
on the belief – a belief itself two thousand years old – of the eventual
brotherhood of all men.’[3]
His road to a vastly different political outlook to that of this
youth took him deep into the community of anti-apartheid activists that existed
in South Africa. Fischer became a
leading member of the South African Communist Party and was deeply involved in
its work to end apartheid.[4] His wife, Molly, also was a communist and
similarly involved with anti-apartheid work.[5] Their home was a haven for all South Africans
regardless of their colour and they were known for entertaining parties with no
barriers between races. The Fischer’s
had three children – Ruth, Ilse and Paul.[6] Their family life and their life of political
activism involved tensions and their children had to deal with the occasional absence
of a parent during periods of detention.
Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer knew the family and the characters
in her novel Burger’s Daughter, a book that was banned in South Africa for
a few months after its publication, were loosely based on the Fischer family.[7]
Bram Fischer worked as a lawyer and, while he is best known
now for representing anti-apartheid activists, his background was in commercial
law and he had been involved in a number of significant cases on behalf of
mining companies, somewhat of an unusual choice for a man becoming increasingly
sympathetic to communism. Accounts suggest
that the complexity and arcane nature of the laws involved in gold mining appealed
to him. When the Rivonia trial began, in
October 1963, Fischer was asked by the relatives of several of the men detained
to take on the case. He was deeply
reluctant to do so due to his links with several of the defendants and to the
Liliesleaf Farmhouse where many of the arrests had taken place. He was also aware that some of the evidence
that had been collected at the farmhouse by the State was written in his own
hand. Despite his reservations, he
agreed to take on the case and for the next nine months he worked to defend
Nelson Mandela and his co-defendants from a possible sentence of death.
Tragedy struck the Fischer family shortly after the Rivonia
trial ended, when Molly Fischer died in an accident when a car that she was in
with Bram and a friend left the road and plunged in a river. Bram desperately tried to reach her to get
her out of the car but was unable to. Left
inconsolable, he still carried on working with the defendants on a possible
appeal, not letting them know what had happened. Mandela recalled later that when he was told
about Molly’s death, he wrote a letter of condolence to Fischer, but this
letter was never posted by the prison guards.[8]
In the aftermath of
the Rivonia trial, Fischer found the net around him tightening. He was detained on the 9th July 1964
but released a few days later and then arrested again on the 23rd
September. He was granted bail before his trial to go abroad to appear in court
in London to assist on a case that was being heard by the Privy Council. Some of his friends urged him to remain in
London and to continue his work in the fight against apartheid from abroad, but
he decided to return to South Africa.
I am an
Afrikaner. My home is in South Africa. I will not leave my country because my
political beliefs conflict with those of the Government.[9]
He did not meekly submit to the charges against him,
however. On the 25th January
1965, Fischer was expected in court but did not appear. Instead of waiting to be sentenced, he took
the decision to continue his resistance underground. Throughout his career Fischer had been well liked by his colleagues, despite his political views. Therefore when, two days after he went underground, the Johannesburg Bar Council started proceedings to get his name removed from the roll of advocates he viewed this as a betrayal. He left a letter to be read in the court house by his lawyer where he explained how difficult he had found it to make the decision to disrespect the court with his absence, but felt that morally he was obliged to continue on with his cause as long as possible. His disappearance was widely reported in the
papers but despite this fanfare, and despite his relatively well-known
appearance, Fischer succeeded in remaining on the run for most of the year. Despite rumours about what plastic surgery he was likely to get, his attempts at disguise were more modest. He lost weight, shaved some of his hair and dyed it auburn, and grew a goatee. He worked to change his mannerisms and his gait, something that was distinctive due to a youthful knee injury. His efforts were reasonably successful and it
was not until the 11th November that the Security Police finally
caught up with him and placed him under arrest.
Fischer's trial opened on the 23rd March 1966 and he sat in the same dock that had been built especially to seat the defendants in the Rivonia trial two years previously. Echoing the actions of Nelson Mandela at that earlier trial, Fischer too declined to be cross examined as a witness but instead made his own lengthy speech from the dock in which he laid out his reasons for pleading not guilty to the charges against him. Bram Fischer was sentenced to life in prison on the 9th May and he remained there for the rest of his life. He was never to see the end of apartheid. After experiencing a serious decline in health while in prison, he was eventually diagnosed with cancer and died on the 8th May 1975 still in custody but at his brother’s house rather than in a prison cell. He was 67 years old.
This very short biography of just some snapshots of the life
of Bram Fischer has been a bit of a cathartic exercise for me. He is a man whose legacy I think of often,
and is someone I refer to frequently when I am talking about my research. To sit down and write a short piece on his life
and legacy has been enjoyable and I hope that people reading this find it of
interest and maybe decide to read more about Bram Fischer himself and about
anti-apartheid activism more broadly, as of course it can be argued there are
many other Bram Fischer’s out there whose sacrifice is well worth recognising.
Bram Fischer has no official resting place, but a memorial plaque
was unveiled in Rhodes House, Oxford University, in 2019.[10]
[1] Much
of the material covered here can be found in Stephen Clingman’s biography of
Bram Fischer: Stephen Clingman, Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary, (Mayibuye
Books, University of the Western Cape, 1998),
[2] Nelson
Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, (Abacus, Great Britain, 1995), p562
[3]
Stephen Clingman (1998), p51-52
[4]
The communist party in South Africa was originally called the Communist Party
of South Africa. The party was made illegal
in 1950 with the Suppression of Communism Act.
Many former members continued to support the work of the ANC. A few years later some former members
reformed the party as an underground organisation called the South African
Communist Party.
[5]
Molly, née Krige, also came from a privileged Afrikaner background. She was the niece of Jan Smuts, globally renowned
statesman and Prime Minister of South Africa 1919-1924 and 1939-1948.
[6] Ilse
recalled this upbringing where apartheid was observed at her all-White school but
then she would come back at the end of the day to a home with no racial barriers:
Ilse
Wilson (wits.ac.za), p2-3
[7]
Nadine Gordimer herself was active in the anti-apartheid struggle and has her own
connection to the Rivonia trial as she wrote profiles of all the defendants in
the trial and also helped edit Mandela’s ‘I am Prepared to Die’ speech.
[8]
Nelson Mandela, (1995), p461-462
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