Barry Streek OBITUARY
Mary Benson, the passionate and committed South African author who died on Sunday June 18 of a heart attack at the London Free hospital, went out, as she did in her own life, in some style.
Three months ago, a party was held at South Africa House in London for her 80th birthday. Her close friend, Athol Fugard, said: “It was a wonderful party.”
Then three weeks ago, former president Nelson Mandela and his wife, Graca Machel, visited her in her small flat in St John’s Wood.
She had met Walter Sisulu and Mandela during the early 1950s. In 1956 she became secretary of the Treason Trials Defence Fund in Johannesburg, until illness forced her to return to England.
She later returned to South Africa and, according to Fugard, drove Mandela around Pretoria when he was underground before the police captured him in 1962. Biographies about Mandela are common these days, but Benson wrote the first, South Africa: The Struggle for a Birthright and Nelson Mandela: The Man and the Movement.
Her hours with Mandela and his wife three weeks ago must have been very special for her. Fugard said from San Diego in California that “they spent some glorious hours together”.
He also said: “Mary Benson was my oldest friend, particularly when I look over my life. We were close friends for 40 years. We stayed constantly in touch, also with my wife, Sheila, and my daughter, Lisa. She was at the very first performance of my first play, The Blood Knot, in Johannesburg.”
Fugard disclosed that whenever he wrote a new work he would first send it to Benson for her “criticisms … A few days ago she got hold of me about my latest play about South Africa, about a returning exile, Sorrows and the Journey. Mary phoned me to say that she had read it and gave it her seal of approval.”
Despite acute arthritis, which disabled her, particularly in the hands, she was active until last Monday when she herself called the emergency services to take her to hospital.
Fugard said she was determined to live life as fully as possible “as when she was a young person”.
Benson was born and educated in Pretoria. The reading of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country had a profound effect on her attitude to black South Africans. Between 1950 and 1956 she assisted the Reverend Michael Scott in founding the African Bureau in London and lobbying the United Nations.
She became the first South African to testify before the United Nations committee on apartheid in 1963.
Benson returned to South Africa in 1965 to report on political trials in the Eastern Cape but was banned and placed under house arrest. She did, however, find it possible to develop a close friendship with a leader of the South African Communist Party, Bram Fischer, when he was underground.
She then left South Africa, where her prolific writing career, almost exclusively about the struggle against apartheid, took off.
She wrote a novel, At the Still Point; an autobiography, A Far Cry: The Making of a South African; the first history of the African National Congress, African Patriots; and The Sun Will Rise: Statements from the Dock by Southern African Political Prisoners.
Her dramatised plays, Robben Island and Red Clay: Journey to the Interior of the Eastern Cape, have been broadcast by the SABC.
Fugard said Benson was one of those remarkable white women, like Helen Joseph and Helen Suzman, “who absorbed themselves in the line of struggle against apartheid”. Many others also fought against apartheid but “the role played by these white women should not be marginalised. This should not be allowed.”