Bram Fischer, because of … not despite

The decision of the University of Stellenbosch to award an honorary doctorate to Bram Fischer has stirred up the autodestruct instincts of some commentators in the Afrikaans media. I am not really surprised, but I am puzzled that intelligent thinkers can be so out of step with our country and their own heritage.

I never met Bram. He was released, terminally ill, from Pretoria Central prison in 1975, the year before I arrived. But Bram's aura was all about us, especially in the recollections of my fellow political prisoners. "Bram would have taken this approach." "No, he would have done the exact opposite!" we argued - confirming his persisting presence as a moral reference point.

But Bram was also remembered with respect by a generation of young white warders, caged themselves inside a militarised, bullying hierarchy. Not that they had assimilated all of Bram's values. A young warder who often spoke warmly of Bram commiserated with me one day after I had been verbally abused by an aggressive prison officer. "I don't care if you're a prisoner, a communist, a terrorist or what," he said consolingly, "you just don't talk to a white man like that."

In the early 1930s, when he was a student at Oxford, Bram frequently wrote home to his parents in Bloemfontein. One memorable letter describes a visit to Westminster Cathedral. "Not so bad," he wrote, "for the funeral crypt of a backward feudality".

When I first read this throw-away comment (in Stephen Clingman's wonderful biography), I suddenly understood something I had only dimly grasped before, owing, no doubt, to the incipient chauvinism of my own upbringing. Far from feeling himself to be a provincial bumpkin in a grand metropolis, Bram saw himself as the bearer of a modern, enlightenment tradition. And remember, he is sharing the comment with his family, knowing, I imagine, it would evoke a chuckle back home in that staunchly republican household.

Transported to the colonies, whether in the Americas, Asia or Africa, republicanism has had progressive anti-feudal, anti-colonial, democratic credentials, but also a tendency to develop localised variants of oppression. It is a contradiction captured in my Pretoria warder's egalitarian "I don't care if you're a prisoner … etc" on the one hand, and his colonialist, racialised qualifier on the other.

Bram Fischer embraced communism, not despite but, in part, because of the republican milieu of his Bloemfontein upbringing. Like many others he saw communism as the logical development in the twentieth century of an enlightenment tradition (Eric Hobsbawm has written extensively on this).

Those who have led the posthumous witch-hunt against Fischer, like the deputy editor of Die Burger, Leopold Scholtz, will roll their eyes in disbelief. They want to reduce communism to the gulag. Rooi gevaar is lovingly preserved in the mausoleum of their newspaper columns. They goose-step up and down guarding it with care. It is a pretext, after all, not to have to think self-critically.

But communism in the 20th century was many things. It was the ideology that inspired the defeat of the most formidable war machine of the century in the hands of an entirely anti-enlightenment project, Nazism. It inspired brave peasant fighters throughout the third world to resist and defeat colonialism and US imperialism. The communist legacy of the 20th century is the anti-fascist resistance movements of Greece and Italy. It is Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. It is the intellectual work of Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci and Amilcar Cabral, or the poetry of Neruda, Brecht, Hikmet, Eluard and Mayakovsky. There is also an enduring local legacy. Communists in South Africa pioneered non-racialism, progressive trade unionism and alternative journalism.

But yes, alas, this is only one side of the story. You cannot deal honestly with communism without pondering long and seriously upon the unspeakable horror of Stalinism and its attenuated prolongation in the grey bureaucracies of Eastern Europe in the Brezhnev era.

Many of the eulogies and some of the criticism directed at Bram evoke the word despite: "He became a communist despite his privileged background / his being a white Afrikaner / the advantages of an elite education / his legal professionalism / his obvious integrity", etc. In a way, this is segregationist thinking. What is much more interesting and relevant are the linking, the hybridising, the creolising questions - the because of issues: Bolshevism because of Bloemfontein; communism because of (not despite) Oxford. If we pursue this line of questioning we will understand better the new modalities of being white, for instance, in South Africa that Bram Fischer has made imaginable - for whites, but also for millions of blacks.

If I insist that Bram was a prisoner, never a jailer, Leopold Scholtz, it is not to deny the horror of Stalin's gulag. Had he been a Bolshevik in the late 1920s in the Soviet Union, I am sure Bram would have been among the first victims of the terror. But in saying this I am not seeking to avoid the awkward question: What in communism gave birth to Stalinism?

However, I am also highlighting the complementary question: What in communism did Stalinism have to exterminate in order to become Stalinism? (We should never forget that among the very first victims of the terror were tens of thousands of communists.) Let's name the answer to this question Repressed One.

We need, as South Africans, to answer many similar questions. For instance, what in Afrikaner political and cultural tradition did Afrikaner nationalism of the 20th century have to deny in order to become the catalysing force for the apartheid project? Let's call this Repressed Two.

The life that Bram Fischer actually lived (not the hypothetical one he might have lived had communism been in power in South Africa 50 years ago) is at the very confluence of these two Represseds. Stellenbosch University's welcome decision to award him an honorary doctorate provides us all with the opportunity to recover, to debate and - for those who are not irretrievably mean-spirited - to celebrate the legacy Bram Fischer has bestowed on a new South Africa.



LitNet: 5 November 2004

boontoe / to the top

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