Pat Schwartz
RIVONIA’S CHILDREN: THREE FAMILIES AND THE PRICE OF FREEDOM IN SOUTH AFRICA by Glenn Frankel (Jonathan Ball)
The 10 years since the unbanning of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party (SACP) have brought with them a plethora of biography, autobiography and memoir evoking the hidden history of “the struggle”.
Glenn Frankel’s contribution weaves the threads of some of these stories into a seamless, graphic and elegant tapestry which, by focusing on the experience of a handful of people, starkly reflects the human cost of the fight for a democratic South Africa. It is a story which highlights the debt owed by those who now enjoy the benefits of the victory in that fight to those who fought it, many of whom did not live to see the rewards of their sacrifice.
“In the end,” writes Frankel in his introduction, “I see two purposes for Rivonia’s Children: to tell an important but little-known story about moral choice; and to try to rescue from obscurity a group of people and a body of work that deserve our critical attention, admiration and respect.”
This is a book which Frankel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who was bureau chief in South Africa for The Washington Post in 1983, “had to write”. We are fortunate that he did so, for this outsider’s view, sympathetic as it is, is no hagiography. The central characters are portrayed complete with their faults, their personality problems and their weaknesses. It is not a portrait that will necessarily win approval from all sides, but it is one which adds another important dimension to the picture of the past that is gradually coming into focus as hitherto forbidden knowledge is made available.
Nor is the book without flaws – it is sometimes repetitious and, especially towards the end, some of the anecdotes seem oddly inappropriate, but these are mere quibbles.
He begins his story on July 11 1963 as Hilda Bernstein waits anxiously for her husband, Rusty, to return home at the mandated hour of 6pm to begin his daily 12 hours of house arrest. He will not return that night or for a long time to come – on that day the security police raided Lilliesleaf Farm, Rivonia, netting members of the high command of Umkhonto We Sizwe and members of the SACP, Rusty Bernstein among them.
Hilda and Rusty Bernstein are central to Frankel’s story, which focuses largely on three couples and their families – Bernsteins, Wolpes and Slovos – all Jews, all middle-class whites. Why, Frankel asks, should they have chosen the route they took instead of settling like most of their white compatriots and coreligionists for a comfortable and privileged life as beneficiaries of an unjust system?
In seeking his answer, he unfolds a tale of dedication and courage and human frailty; of disillusion and dissent; of duplicity among comrades and of naked brutality on the part of those in power. It is also the tale of a prosecutor called Percy Yutar, whose personal ambition overrode all moral considerations and who, 30 years later and in his 80s, could still maintain, despite all the recorded evidence to the contrary, that he had “saved the lives” of the accused in the Rivonia trial.
Those who have read much of Frankel’s source material might feel at times a sense of dj vu – details of the treason trial, the Rivonia trial, Ruth Slovo’s detention, Harold Wolpe’s escape, Nelson Mandela’s speech from the dock, are all familiar – but these well- documented events are a necessary background, the fabric into which he weaves his narrative.
His research has been both extensive and deep – books and newspapers and journals, transcripts of oral histories and court records – all the sources one would expect. But what distinguishes Rivonia’s Children is the way Frankel has drawn on interviews (more than 60 of them) with his selected protagonists and with those who knew them. It is these stories, and the manner in which he retells them, that make the book dramatic, human, and utterly compelling.