 Rivonia's Children
Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa
by Glenn Frankel
Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux; 0374250995; $25.00US; Aug. 99
Rivonia's Children is the
harrowing and inspiring account of a handful of white activists, many of
them Jewish, who risked their lives to combat apartheid when, in the 1960s,
South Africa plunged into an era of darkness from which it has only recently
emerged.
This is the story of Hilda and Rusty Bernstein, longtime
communists so deeply committed to the cause that even the threat of life
imprisonment did not stop them; of Ruth First, a fiery activist arrested
and held for months without charge; and of AnnMarie Wolpe, an innocent
bystander sucked into the maelstrom, who had to decide whether to risk
her own freedom and the life of her sick infant by helping her activist
husband escape from prison.
Their underground headquarters was in Rivonia, a Johannesburg
suburb, and it was there that their dream of revolution was shattered after
a police raid in 1963. Nelson Mandela, Rusty Bernstein, and eight of their
comrades were tried for sabotage and attempting to violently overthrow
the government. The Rivonia raid not only destroyed an old order of benign
radicalism but thrust radicals into a new, dangerous world of action, leading
to the Soweto uprising and the birth of another generation of black activists.
The regime turned a corner as well, becoming a full-scale police state
that waged a dirty war of brutality and oppression. In the end, freedom
triumphed, and the sacrifices of this small group of whites contributed
to the miracle of racial reconciliation that is the new South Africa.
The searing tale of soaring hopes and ideals betrayed,
Rivonia's Children is also the moving story of the impact of political
activism on the lives of three families.
Author
Glenn Frankel has been a
staff writer and editor for The Washington Post for twenty years.
He is the paper's former bureau chief in South Africa, London, and Jerusalem,
where he won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his
coverage of the Middle East. He is the author of Beyond the Promised
Land: Jews and Arabs on the Hard Road to a New Israel, winner of the
1995 National Jewish Book Award. Frankel is currently the editor of The
Washington Post Magazine and lives with his family in Arlington, Virginia.
Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book: Rivonia's
Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa
by Glenn Frankel
Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux; 0374250995;
$25.00US; Aug. 99
Copyright © 1999 Glenn Frankel
THE RAID
Communists are the last optimists.
Nadine Gordimer
Burger's Daughter
JOHANNESBURG, JULY 11, 1963
He was late.
Under normal circumstances, she would have considered
it a minor annoyance, a matter of a dinner grown cold, or a delay in helping
the children with their homework, or an errand that might not get run for
another day. Nothing to worry about. Under normal circumstances.
He had left the house just before noon in the black Chevrolet
sedan. "I'm going in to report, he told her. "Then I have to deliver some
drawings. And this afternoon I'll be busy."
She knew the routine. For nine months, ever since the
Justice Ministry's written order restricting his movements, it had been
a daily part of their lives. First he would drive downtown past the gleaming
office towers and unruly markets of bustling Johannesburg, past Greaterman's
department store, the Sanlam insurance building and the Chamber of Mines,
to the red-brick police station at Marshall Square, a squat, brooding fortress
that dated back to the turn of the century when Johannesburg was little
more than an overgrown mining camp. He would park on the street and march
briskly to the tall, studded doors that served like a gate to a forbidden
castle. Inside, he would enter the charge office, where the desk sergeant
would open the oversized ledger book to the current page, rotate its spine
so that it faced him, and produce a pen. Other than a terse "Good afternoon,"
no words would be spoken; both the sergeant and he knew why he was there.
He would sign his name on the first blank line, then return the book to
the desk man, who would record the date and time next to the signature.
Within minutes he would be back inside the safety of the Chevy and drive
off, having once again fulfilled the condition of his daily house arrest.
It was a bloodless, seemingly painless ritual, yet he
dreaded each trip to Marshall Square. Every time he walked into the station,
he feared he would not walk out again. Sooner or later, he believed, the
state would stop toying with him and relegate him to the ranks of the disappeared.
The thought of it made his knees buckle and left him in a cold sweat even
on the coolest winter day. Marshall Square would swallow him up and bury
him in a prison cell tomb deep within its bowels, a place from which he
might never return.
But not today. After the mandatory visit he attended to
the work he was responsible for as an architect, visiting an engineer,
helping him with a project. There had been a time when such tasks would
have taken most of the day. But in recent years, as the authorities graced
him with their very special attention and he spent more and more time in
court fending off their accusations, commissions had dried up, leaving
him with little professional work and a shrinking income to support a family
of six. Now, on most days, it only took him a few minutes to deal with
the work.
After that he headed somewhere else, somewhere secret,
to engage in the illegal political work that had led to his house arrest
and that, if he were caught, could land him in prison for a very long time.
Under the terms of his restriction, he was required to
be home by six-thirty each night and remain there until six-thirty the
next morning. If he missed the deadline, even by a minute, he risked a
fine and imprisonment. A few times he had cut it close, most recently a
few days earlier when a long and cantankerous political dispute had spilled
over into the early evening. But he was a cautious man by nature--serious,
quiet and responsible, and not inclined to give his wife and children more
to worry about than they already had. Usually it was safely before six
when she would hear the familiar rumble of the Chevy as he eased into the
driveway, and she would start to breathe again. But not tonight.
"I'll be busy," he had said that morning, and she had
not asked to be told more. She knew by his very terseness that he would
be doing something for the movement. He never told her exactly what or
where. This deliberate vagueness was designed to protect them both--she
could not divulge what she did not know. Still, she suspected that he was
going to Lilliesleaf, a farm north of the city in the suburb of Rivonia.
The movement had purchased the twenty-eight-acre estate clandestinely two
years earlier, set up one of its members as owner and used it as a secret
headquarters for men who were plotting sabotage attacks against the state.
All of this she knew and much, much more, all of it guilty and very dangerous
knowledge, and it made her uneasy. They both knew Rivonia was not a secure
location, that too many people who were under suspicion came and went from
there, traveling mostly in their own cars with license plate numbers that
the Special Branch men seemed to know by heart. He had complained often
about the lack of security, and he had promised her that he would stop
going there, but there always seemed to be one last matter that had to
be discussed, one last meeting that had to be attended. So far they had
been lucky. But they both knew it would not last forever.
They had been married for nearly twenty-two years and
they had worked together as comrades in the Communist Party for even longer.
Still, there were things they never said to each other, feelings they did
not share. That morning she had wanted to plead with him not to go, to
tell him it was too dangerous to keep taking such risks at a time when
the police were looking for any excuse to strike. But she did not do so,
partly because her own years of political discipline had conditioned her
to endure stoically, and partly because she knew he would not heed her
plea. He understood the dangers as keenly as she did, felt the same turbulent
anxiety in the pit of his stomach. Yet he had decided to take the risk.
It was a decision she knew she must honor even as she dreaded its potential
consequences. "Take care of yourself... Be careful." That was all she said.
She knew the risks so intimately because she was taking
many of them herself. Despite the security crackdown, she still attended
secret meetings, working to keep alive banned organizations and helping
arrange illegal activities such as protest demonstrations and boycotts.
Increasingly she could see something many of her comrades refused to admit:
that what they were doing was futile. The government was slowly transforming
itself into a police state. There were new laws restricting their movements
and further contracting their already limited freedoms, and the police
were coming down on them with a weight they had never felt before. The
few whites like themselves who stood with Nelson Mandela and the black
liberation movement were reeling from the pressure and the blows. They
had long grown used to the sense that someone was always watching or listening.
But now it had gone far beyond that. People were disappearing, swept away
in mass raids or sucked into the bottomless pit of recurring ninety-day
detentions. Like Germany before World War II, South Africa seemed gripped
by a mass fever of desperation and fatalism. Each night they listened for
the sound of cars pulling up the drive, footsteps on the pavement and a
knock on the door. Their personal lives were not immune to these fears;
their own children had become hostages to their cause. Even the house that
they had cherished and raised their family in for fifteen years seemed
to turn against them.
It was a modest four-bedroom cottage in a leafy, backwoods
neighborhood just a ten-minute drive from downtown--154 Regent Street in
the eastern suburb of Observatory. There was no thatched roof or split-level
flourishes, just a rust-colored, triangular roof of corrugated tin atop
a plain, whitewashed, one-story building whose walls always seemed in need
of paint. There was a small swimming pool out back where the children seemed
to live day and night in summer. But the trees were the real prize. They
graced both the front and back, ranging from the six great jacarandas that
lined the driveway to the clusters of lemon, fig, apricot, quince, wattle,
apple, peach and plum trees scattered throughout the grounds, to the vine
that yielded black grapes in summer. Their daughter Frances, who had just
turned twelve, thought of it as her own little Garden of Eden, a perfect
African paradise. The back yard was not large, but it sloped downward to
merge with several others in a long, continuous field with only a low wire
fence separating them. The ground was hard and dry and brittle as bone
in winter, but the powerful summer rains softened and massaged it and coaxed
dark sweet smells from the rich red earth.
When they first lived there, doors and windows had seldom
been closed even in winter. Children paraded through both day and night
on their way to someone or somewhere. Visitors, whether white, black or
Indian--an unusually free mix in a society where race was the ironclad
organizing principle of human existence--came and went without ringing
the bell. They swam, sat, talked, stayed for tea. And like most white South
Africans, they had African servants, Bessie and Claude, to help with domestic
chores and child care.
Later she would write that she felt as if the house was
itself a living organism; it breathed and murmured and rattled and groaned,
and it embraced them in its gentle warmth. But the very openness of the
house became a weapon in the hands of the police. Inside, no one could
hide from view; onlookers from without could see easily through the glazed
windows. Secrets could not be told, nor kept. The phone, too, be- came
an enemy. They assumed it was wired to record not only their phone calls
but other conversations as well. Over and over they drilled the rules into
their children like a catechism of fear: Never tell callers that we're
out, never ever say where we've gone or when we'll be back. It got so bad
that the children dreaded hearing the phone ring.
Her husband was an amateur carpenter--he designed a false
bottom for her desk, a secret panel for the drying rack in the kitchen
and special slots at the top of the kitchen door and the linen cupboard.
In these ordinary icons of domestic life, the two of them concealed notes
of meetings, forbidden magazines and other documents whose possession could
land them a year or more behind bars. They stashed a list of names and
numbers as well, far from the prying eyes of police who longed to discover
it and whose invasions of their house and their privacy had become more
and more frequent. Nothing was off-limits to these officers of the law--the
master bedroom, the children's rooms, even the bathroom were all considered
open territory to be scrutinized, pawed through and ransacked with contemptuous
familiarity.
There were times when she longed for a normal middle-class
life, times when she wanted to chuck it all and flee for the nearest border,
as many of their closest friends were doing. The Hodgsons had fled, the
Bermans too. Joe Slovo, Yusuf Dadoo, J.B. Marks, Moses Kotane and countless
others had left on secret missions and never come back. She could feel
their pull. But she was too committed, not just to the movement but to
her comrades, the handful of people who were as deeply involved as she
and her husband. They were like a second family to her; she could no more
abandon them than she could her own children. To cut off contact now, to
give up in the face of the state's terrible power, would be an act of betrayal
not only of her closest friends but of herself. Besides, as
strong as she was, he was even stronger and more determined not to cut
and run.
July was the first full month of winter south of the equator,
and the African sun set abruptly each night with a brilliant display of
crimson defiance. Most nights this glorious ritual gave her strength, but
tonight, she would recall later, it only compounded her sense of dread
as the time passed and still he did not return. There was nowhere to call,
no one to ask, no way to reach him. She could only sit and wonder and wait.
As she started preparing dinner, she tried not to look at the kitchen wall
clock, but she knew that the sun went down just before six. By six- fifteen
the darkness was complete, the night like a lid sealing in her fear. There
was no way to see from the window if a police car was hovering up the block.
She could send one of the children to sneak a look, but that might alert
the security men that something was wrong. It might also alarm the children,
whose keen antennae were already sensing her anxiety. Toni, at nineteen
the eldest, sat quietly with a friend in the living room before a roaring
fire. "Daddy's late" she said matter-of-factly. Patrick, fifteen, sullen
and withdrawn, was away at a holiday camp where he tried to escape from
the relentless claustrophobia of his parents and their politics. Frances,
who was scholarly, dutiful and sincere, was spending the night at a friend's
house, while Keith, six, coughed and sniffled, the first signs of a new
bout of the septic throat that often kept him awake through the night.
She looked up again. It was six twenty-nine, and she watched
the second hand sink to the bottom of the clock and then begin to climb.
If something had happened at Rivonia, she knew that their world would come
crashing down. All the troubles they had faced in the past would be nothing
compared to what was to come. Then six-thirty came and went, and Hilda
Bernstein knew. Her husband Rusty would not be coming home. Not that night.
Not for many nights to come..
Purchase a copy of Rivonia's Children
Copyright © 1999 Glenn Frankel and The Multiracial Activist
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