Bram Fischer: An Afrikaner against in jail for his convictions

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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 "" 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)

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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 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 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 .

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. Whether we are victorious or whether we die, freedom will arise in Africa like the sun from the morning clouds." Bram Fischer has shown himself prepared to die for freedom too, not for the freedom of a small band of white Republicans but for the deprived majority and for a democratic nonracial South Africa. No one who has ever shared any part of his life can doubt the utter sincerity and inclusiveness of his vision for South Africa, his hatred of strife and his readiness to co-operate with men of differing views and all races to achieve social justice. "We aim," he said, "in the first place only at democracy and the abolition of racial discrimination, and leave entirely open the manner in which and the time when socialism may eventually be achieved in this country." Tjespcted_p even in- Lrison2 Bram Fischer has been in Pretoria Prison for more than four years. For a time he lived under conditions very close to those of the dreaded 90-day detention - in a solitary cell with only thin felt matting for his bed, a sick man forced to live most of his time with the crude sanitation of a pot and a water bottle. There were harsh restrictions on his reading matter, visits and letters. When he was given work it was the kind of work given to the lowest grade of prisoner - sewing filthy mailbags, brushing cement floors on his hands and knees, and cleaning, without proper equipment, the communal latrines. Above all he was for some years under the eye of a warder notorious in the prison system for his hatred and contempt of prisoners, a man who could make every instruction a subtle attack on human dignity. Fischer emerged from that period with his dignity and integrity intact: his fellow prisoners and his captors alike recognize him as a man whose principles are not for sale and whose spirit is unbreakable. In prison he is loved and respected for his indifference to his own sufferings and his lively sympathy for the cares of others, for his uncomplaining resolution in the face of a sentence which may well mean that he must die in prison, for the sense of solidarity which makes him insist on sharing the most tedious and unpleasant prison chores, for his humour and tolerance and, above all, for his capacity for hope. An important challenge Bram Fischer's imprisonment emphasizes the continuing tragedy of South Africa. His presence behind bars is a living accusation of the system which put him there. Fischer represents, for white and non-white, for communist and non-communist, an important challenge. The challenge is an old and fundamental one: when the good man is in jail, what can be said of the men who remain free?