There are individuals in every political movement who tend to take a back seat and yet are major drivers. Such was Rusty Bernstein, the Rivonia trialist who died this week. He was a powerful intellect, analytically perhaps without equal, and a writer of great talent.
Rusty was one of the architects of the Congress Alliance of the 1950s, consisting of the African National Congress, South African Indian Congress, South African Coloured People’s Organisation, South African Congress of Democrats and South African Congress of Trade Unions. He was also a leading force in the Communist Party, which had gone underground.
My association with Rusty began in 1955 at a secret conference of the Communist Party held in a Johannesburg factory owned by Ruth First’s father, where about 20 delegates met to discuss our future. Rusty presented a report and I was immediately impressed by his calm lucidity and objectivity. As we moved towards the Congress of the People, which adopted the Freedom Charter, I learned that he had drafted the Call to the Congress, an inspired poetical document.
Rusty was also the editor of the Freedom Charter, collating thousands of demands from grassroots meetings across the country and turning them into a document that remains the principal statement of African National Congress policy to this day. No one has ever challenged it.
Rusty was best known for his articles in the radical journals Fighting Talk, Liberation and New Age, which influenced many cadres throughout the country. These policy pieces were reinforced at many small secret meetings where the real work of the movement was conducted and where Rusty was invariably given the task of strategist.
I was privileged to stay with Rusty for nine months during the Treason Trial where I became one of the family with Hilda, his famous wife, and the four children. I found him to be a taciturn person, not given to small talk, who kept his obvious political passions under control. Hilda was the one to burst out in the indignation that subsequently found expression in a series of widely read books.
Rusty was an accused in the 1956 Treason Trial and subsequently in the Rivonia Trial, where he was the only trialist not convicted. His acquittal followed a long period awaiting trial in Pretoria Local Prison.
That the state failed to nail him was a surprise, as Rusty was a foundation member of Umkhonto weSizwe. I recall a rendezvous with him in a cafe in central Johannesburg where he and Jack Hodgson handed me four cannisters that we used to set fire to Rissik Street Post Office, later leading to my arrest and imprisonment.
After the Rivonia arrests the movement was decimated. Rusty tried to earn a living as an architect but special branch harassment drove him to escape into exile in the United Kingdom.
There, his inspiration withered and his writing ceased. Even his enormous political talent seemed to dry up and he became an observer of the movement to which he had dedicated his life. He was asked to go to Tanzania to assist with various underground duties, but the conditions were not propitious and he returned to the UK.
This is perhaps the appropriate place to record that Rusty was one of a small contingent of white progressives who threw in their lot with the ANC without reservations, even when membership was open only to Africans. They did so out of an overwhelming sense of social justice and, in many cases, from a powerful belief that socialism would come to South Africa through the agency of the black working class.
It is a belief that history has not treated kindly, but which survives nevertheless.
I have always felt that Rusty should have been recalled to Johannesburg by the ANC in 1990, so that he could have played the kind of crucial role he was capable of in building the new South Africa.
The least we can do now is recall the life of this brilliant man who withstood the battering of the apartheid state for so long.
Ben Turok
Ben Turok, the former National Secretary of the South African Congress of Democrats, is an African National Congress MP