Anthony Egan
MEMORY AGAINST FORGETTING by Rusty Bernstein (Viking )
Struggle autobiographies are becoming increasingly common – so common that one wonders if there is anything new to be said. The first chapter of this new book, however, dispels such fears.
Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein’s autobiography is well-written and it contains a load of new and often fascinnating information about what it was like to be a white person, a communist and an activist in the struggle against apartheid from the 1930s to the 1960s. Bernstein’s tale is at once familiar and different.
It is familiar, particularly to those who know the history of the South African Communist Party (or the Communist Party of South Africa, as it was called until the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act). Trade union activism and left journalism combined with proselytism for socialism at places as unlikely as the steps of Johannesburg City Hall during the 1930s. During World War II, the party gained support even in some sections of the white working class, but it was implicated in the 1946 African mine workers’ strike and its leadership (including Bernstein) put on trial. It was not his last trial. Bernstein was also detained during the 1960 state of emergency. After acquittal at Rivonia in 1964, he was rearrested, but was released on bail, allowing him to escape into exile.
Were this all the book contained, it would be pedestrian. Luckily it is not. For Bernstein has the rare ability to combine the very personal – often extremely funny – with the broader picture. He fills his account with anecdotes, not for their own sake but to illustrate the human side of the struggle. He describes the slow and unglamorous process of producing party newsletters on rather simple copying machines, stapling them together and then trying to sell them to sometimes less than ardent potential comrades. He also fills his narrative with often poignant profiles of long-forgotten comrades.
A number of very useful accounts of little- recorded events in South African history are also presented. Bernstein served in the South African Defence Force during World War II – as did many fellow communists (and future party members). While on active service, leftwing discussion groups were set up, culminating in the formation of the Springbok Legion. Though very small, it later played a role in Congress alliance politics after the war and in the formation of the South African Congress of Democrats.
Bernstein was also one of the longest- serving white detainees during the 1960 state of emergency. He was one of a group – combining party members, ex-communists, independent leftists and some members of the Liberal Party – who were held in Pretoria Local Prison. He records how attempts were made, mostly unsuccessfully, to form a temporary “united front”. In some matters – morale-boosting, mainly through the production of plays and concerts by fellow detainee Cecil Williams and through cultural talks – a sort of unity was maintained. Yet political tensions were considerable.
The eventual escape after the Rivonia trial is also recounted: the uncertain reception in Botswana, the touch-and-go move from Botswana to Zambia, then to Tanzania and finally to a Britain that was perhaps not wholly pleased to have Bernstein and his wife Hilda, who has written a stirring account of the journey in The World That Was Ours.
As a memoir of what it was like to be part of the white left during the period, Memory Against Forgetting is a very successful piece of writing with many new insights into its subject. Bernstein is a very engaging writer, with a good turn of phrase and a novelist’s skill at telling a fast- moving tale. One hopes that he will write a second volume, covering the experience of exile.