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Bram Fischer: an Afrikaner Against Apartheid in Jail for His Convictions

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Bram Fischer: an Afrikaner Against Apartheid in Jail for His Convictions Bram Fischer: An Afrikaner against Apartheid in jail for his convictions http://www.aluka.org/action/showMetadata?doi=10.5555/AL.SFF.DOCUMENT.nuun1970_18 Use of the Aluka digital library is subject to Aluka’s Terms and Conditions, available at http://www.aluka.org/page/about/termsConditions.jsp. By using Aluka, you agree that you have read and will abide by the Terms and Conditions. Among other things, the Terms and Conditions provide that the content in the Aluka digital library is only for personal, non-commercial use by authorized users of Aluka in connection with research, scholarship, and education. The content in the Aluka digital library is subject to copyright, with the exception of certain governmental works and very old materials that may be in the public domain under applicable law. Permission must be sought from Aluka and/or the applicable copyright holder in connection with any duplication or distribution of these materials where required by applicable law. Aluka is a not-for-profit initiative dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of materials about and from the developing world. For more information about Aluka, please see http://www.aluka.org Bram Fischer: An Afrikaner against Apartheid in jail for his convictions Alternative title Notes and Documents - United Nations Centre Against ApartheidSpecial Article Author/Creator United Nations Centre against Apartheid Publisher Department of Political and Security Council Affairs Date 1970-06-00 Resource type Reports Language English Subject Coverage (spatial) South Africa Coverage (temporal) 1970 Source Northwestern University Libraries Description Mr. Abram Fischer, Q.C., a prominent South African jurist, was sentenced to life imprisonment on May 9, 1966, and is now in Pretoria prison. Mr. Fischer, an outstanding opponent of apartheid, was defense counsel in the "Treason Trial" of 1956-61 and the "Rivonia Trial" of 1963-64 in which leaders of the African people and other opponents of apartheid were charged. He himself was charged subsequently with membership in the banned Communist Party, of conspiracy to commit sabotage and of estreating bail. The Special Committee on Apartheid and other United Nations organs have condemned the imprisonment of Mr, Fischer. This article on Mr. Fischer was contributed to the Unit on Apartheid by afriend of Mr. Abram Fischer. Format extent 5 page(s) (length/size) http://www.aluka.org/action/showMetadata?doi=10.5555/AL.SFF.DOCUMENT.nuun1970_18 http://www.aluka.org UNIT ON APARTHEID UNIT ON APARTHEID PAPERS Special Article June 1970 BRAM FISCHER An Afrikaner against Apartheid in jail for his convictions (Mr. Abram Fischer, Q.C., a prominent South African jurist, was sentenced to life imprisonment on May 9, 1966, and is now in Pretoria prison. Mr. Fischer, an outstanding opponent of apartheid, was defense counsel in the "Treason Trial" of 1956-61 and the "Rivonia Trial" of 1963-64 in which leaders of the African people and other opponents of apartheid were charged. He himself was charged subsequently with membership in the banned Communist Party, of conspiracy to commit sabotage and of estreating bail. The Special Committee on Apartheid and other United Nations organs have condemned the imprisonment of Mr. Fischer. This article on Mr. Fischer was contributed to the Unit on Apartheid by a friend of Mr. Abram Fischer.) BRAM FISCHER An Africaner against Aarth id Superficially he is a paradox. He is an Afrikaner whom Afrikaners call traitor and Africans revere. He might have been Minister of Justice in South Africa. He could easily have been a respectable and respected Judge-President. He is a brilliant lawyer - in prison for deliberately defying the law. His name is Abram ("Bram") Fischer and he dramatises - perhaps as no other man in South Africa dramatises - the price of conscience in a racist state. Six years ago when he was part of the legal team defending Nelson Mandela and other African leaders, and radical whites, accused of trying by violent means to overthrow Dr. Verwoerd's apartheid regime, Bram Fischer was a man at the top of his profession: a Queen's Counsel widely respected for his brilliant work in both civil and criminal trials. Two years later he was facing similar charges to those faced by Mandela and the other men of Rivonia, his trial following ten grim months underground while South Africa's secret police hunted the country for him. Jailed for life Today, a man of sixty-two, suffering from dangerously high blood-pressure, he serves a life sentence in Pretoria Prison with a few other courageous white men who dared to ally themselves with Africans struggling for their human rights. The trial and conviction of Bram Fischer shocked the South African nation. They posed the harsh question of what decent men were to do if a man like Fischer, whose integrity, respectability and service in the law were incontestable even among whites, was driven to say, as he said from the shadows of the underground: "I can no longer serve justice in the way I have attempted to do in the past thirty years - I can only do it in the way that I have now chosen." The implication was that, in South Africa, the law itself had become, through years of corruption, an oppressive part of the ruthless machinery of tyranny which pervades the country legitimizing detention without trial, interrogation without consent, and torture. -2- Fischer had seen the evolution of laws from the Prohibition of Plixed karriages Act and the Immorality Act - so like Hitler's Nuremberg Decrees at the beginning of the Nationalist rule to a "Sabotage Act" in the sixties which made even slogan painting an offence potentially punishable by death. He had fought as a lawyer to mitigate the effects of the inhuman Pass Laws, the Group Areas Act and other legislation designed to trap non-whites forever in a position of inferiority. And in the end, precisely because he valued justice, he was brought to disobey the law. He went underground in 1965 when he was charged with several others of trying to further communism: the accused who stood trial served sentences of between one and five years. By choosing to continue to fight rather than stand trial Fischer chose - and knew that he chose - to risk the gallows. Quiet and modest man Part of the significance of Bram Fischer's choice lies in his character and circumstances. He cannot be stereotyped as flamboyant or eccentric: he is a quiet and modest man, gentle in all his behaviour and conventional to the point of conservatism in his tastes and preferences. He is not a man driven by oddities of personality, or by poverty or lack of social recognition to a revolutionary stance. He was, by standards his fellow whites would accept, an outstanding example of success within the rules - well-to-do, popular among his colleagues, extremely happily married until his wife's death, devoted to his children. Cnly in the pattern of his political principles can he be said not to conform to the South African image of the ware Afrikaner, the true son of the soil. He is thus a clear case of conscience fortified by courage, a courage as heroic as any in South Africa's history. Di stingui shed Afrikaner What Bram Fischer turned his back on to fight the cause of the oppressed majority helps to explain the shock waves among white South Africans when he stood in the dock. His sacrifice is indicated not only by his glittering career - which includes a distinguished period at New College, Oxford, and some of the most important briefs in recent South African civil litigation - but by his impeccably Afrikaner origins. His grandfather was State Secretary in the old Afrikaner Free State and later Prime Minister of the Orange River Colony. His forebears fought in both the first and second Wars of Independence in 1881 and 1899-1901. He married an Afrikaner, his wife being related to the late Mrs. J.C. Smuts. Fischer was for many years a Nationalist - it is typical of his integrity that once he saw the horror of a1rtheid he bypassed intermediate positions of opposition and joined the radical Coimnunist Party of South Africa, bravely remaining a member when it was banned in 195C. It is a fact of some irony that Fischer's courageous fight for a nonracial society in South Africa is deeply rooted in his Afrikanerism. Facing trial for his life on March 28, 1966, he movingly recalled the Afrikaners' proud history: "In one sense we Afrikaners were the vanguard of the liberation movement in Africa. Cf all former colonies we displayed the greatest resistance to Imperial conquest, a resistance which a handful of freedom fighters carried on for three years against the greatest Empire of all time..." Irony of South African history But that, as Fischer recalled, was in the 19th century. The Afrikaner Republicans had since won their freedom only to deny its extension - the irony and the tragedy of South African history - to black South Africans. "Now, as we communists see it, those who rule South Africa are trying to do just those things which imperialism could achieve in the 19th century." Speaking as an Afrikaner, Fischer sorrowfully noted the estrangement of the Afrikaner and the African, an estrangement compelled by qpartheid policies. "That is why ... when I gave an African a lift during a bus boycott, he refused to believe that I am an Afrikaner." And to close his speech to the court, Fischer quoted the words of the famous Afrikaner, Paul Kruger, speaking in 1881 on the eve of the Transvaal Republic's rebellion against British overlordship, words inscribed on the base of Kruger's statue outside the court where Fischer was on trial: "With confidence we place our case before the whole world.
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