When it came to choosing a lead defence lawyer, Nelson Mandela and his co-accused in the Rivonia Trial wanted only one man. But Bram Fischer QC was reluctant to accept.
Fischer wasn’t just close friends with the accused — as the leader of the South African Communist Party he was an important political comrade and a frequent visitor to Liliesleaf farm. He was supposed to be there for the meeting of the Umkhonto we Sizwe high command during which many of the triallists were arrested.
As his biographer, Stephen Clingman, writes: “Bram’s involvement at Rivonia meant that he had been observed by … the black workers at the farmhouse who were now to be called as prosecution witnesses. Any one of them, asked to identify any individual in the courtroom they had seen at Liliesleaf, could have turned to Bram and pointed him out.”
To make matters worse, some of the documents seized in the raid, and used as evidence during the trial, were in his handwriting. Even more audacious was the fact that, while the trial was in progress, Fischer was actively involved in resuscitating MK.
When Rusty Bernstein was told that Fischer had agreed to lead the defence, he turned to his co-accused and said: “He deserves the Victoria Cross.”
What made Fischer’s moral courage more remarkable was his impeccable Afrikaner pedigree. As Mandela put it, Fischer “showed a level of courage and sacrifice that was in a class by itself. I fought only against injustice, not my own people.”
Fischer was born in Bloemfontein in 1908, the scion of a sixth-generation Afrikaner dynasty. His father, Percy, was judge president of the Orange Free State and his grandfather Abraham was prime minister of the Orange River Colony. Young Bram excelled in the classroom and on the sports field — when the All Blacks toured in 1928, he played scrumhalf for Free State. After graduating with a law degree from Unisa, he spent three years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.
In his early years, Fischer was a proud Afrikaner nationalist and a believer that segregation was the answer to South Africa’s problems. That began to change at university when he joined the Bloemfontein Joint Council of Europeans and Africans. As he remembered: “I found myself being introduced to leading members of the African community. I found I had to shake hands with them. This, I found, required an enormous effort of will on my part. Could I really, as a white adult, touch the hand of a black man in friendship?”
What made his “strange revulsion” even stranger was that as a young boy growing up on a farm his “daily companions were two young Africans of my own age … When I was not at school we were always in each other’s company. We roamed the farm together, we hunted and played together, we modelled clay oxen and swam. And never can I remember that the colour of our skins affected our fun or our quarrels or our close friendship in any way.”
This gulf between childhood race relations and adult ones was by no means unusual for Afrikaners of the day. But Fischer’s response to it was. “What became abundantly clear was that it was I and not the black man who had changed … I had developed an antagonism for which I could find no rational basis whatsoever.”
Fischer scratched the itch, teaching literacy classes in the Waaihoek location and attending meetings of the Communist Party, the only political party in South Africa that stood for equal voting rights for all races. A visit to the Soviet Union in 1932 seemed to offer a blueprint for dealing with South Africa’s problems (he did not spend long enough in the country to see what was really going on under Stalin), and Fischer would remain a proud communist until the day he died.
But back to 1963 there was never any doubt that the main Rivonia triallists would be found guilty, but Fischer and the rest of the legal team scored a major victory in ensuring that none of them was sentenced to death.
His elation was short-lived. The day after the trial, he and his wife, Molly, set off for Cape Town together with Elizabeth Lewin, a friend and fellow activist. Driving through the Free State in the dark, Fischer swerved to avoid a cow in the road and the car ended up in a pool of water. While he and Lewin got out easily, Molly appears to have been knocked unconscious and drowned before Fischer could reach her.
Fischer was devastated by the loss. Molly had not just been a wife and mother, she had also turned her back on her proud Afrikaner pedigree (she was a grandniece of prime minister Jan Smuts) to become a communist and political activist.
After Molly’s death, Fischer buried himself in his political work. As Martha Evans notes in Speeches That Shaped South Africa, “when he went to discuss the possibility of an appeal with the Rivonia triallists on Robben Island a few days after Molly’s funeral service, a stoic Fischer didn’t mention her death, and since the prisoners were denied news material, they had no way of knowing about the tragedy.”
Later that year Fischer was arrested and charged under the Suppression of Communism Act. Incredibly the judge allowed him to go to London to act in a patent case. Even more incredibly, Fischer did not take the opportunity to go into exile, dutifully returning to South Africa as stipulated in his bail conditions.
Back home, he made the seemingly curious decision to go into hiding and become an underground activist. Fischer knew that this would result in much harsher charges, but he did it anyway. On the first day of his trial, his lawyer read out a letter from Fischer explaining “that it is the duty of every true opponent of this government to remain in this country and to oppose its monstrous policy of apartheid with every means in his power”. The judge was not amused and Fischer was swiftly struck from the roll of advocates.
Wearing a goatee for disguise and using the name Douglas Black, Fischer lived underground for 290 days. In November 1965 he was recognised by a senior policeman and arrested.
This time the apartheid state was taking no chances. Instead of four charges, he now faced 15 — and the prospect of a life sentence. Like Mandela before him, he chose to open his defence with a speech from the dock, rather than as a witness. This format would allow him to speak uninterrupted, but it carried far less legal weight. Unlike Mandela, he pleaded guilty to all charges.
In his speech, Fischer freely admitted belonging to the SACP. “I believe what I did was right,” he said. “I must therefore explain to this court what my motives were: why I hold the beliefs that I do and why I was compelled to act in accordance with them.”
Like Mandela, Walter Sisulu and many others, Fischer spoke of “the glaring injustice which exists and has existed for a long time in South African society”. But he also spoke as an Afrikaner, who was proud of his people’s “century-long struggle for freedom and equal rights”. Fischer acknowledged that apartheid had existed for “many decades” under different names — but Afrikaners, he argued, had taken it to absurd extremes.
Speaking calmly, with “no obvious drama or passion”, according to Clingman, Fischer launched an incredible attack against his own people: “What is not appreciated by my fellow Afrikaner, because he has cut himself off from all contact with the nonwhites (other than that between master and servant) is that the extreme intensification of that policy over the past 15 years is laid entirely at his door. He is now blamed as an Afrikaner for all the evils and the humiliation of apartheid.”
Because of this, he felt “an additional duty cast on me — that at least one Afrikaner should make this protest actively and positively”.
He finished by quoting one of the great Afrikaner figures, Paul Kruger: “With confidence we place our case before the entire world. Whether we are victorious or whether we die, freedom will arise in Africa like sun from the morning clouds.”
Fischer was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life in prison. When his son, Paul, died of cystic fibrosis at the age of 23, he was not allowed to attend the funeral.
And when Fischer was diagnosed with cancer in 1974, the apartheid government denied him proper care (Rivonia triallist Denis Goldberg, also serving a life sentence, became his nurse). Under pressure from Helen Suzman, Fischer was eventually placed under house arrest at his brother’s home, where he died two months later.
The government’s control of Fischer continued beyond the grave — his funeral was a heavily regulated affair, and the family were forced to return his ashes to the prison department.
Forty years later, however, he would be permitted one last giggle. Under a piece of legislation known as the Bram Fischer Act, he became the first South African to be posthumously readmitted to the bar.
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