Mandela, Bernstein, and me by ROB TURRELL

[Nat Quinn]

“Are you still a communist?” I asked Hilda Bernstein. It was March 1989, and we were sitting in my South

Hampstead basement flat in London. I was publishing a new edition of her 1967 book The World that was Ours. The book was about the landmark Rivonia trial in South Africa in 1963 and 1964, in which Nelson Mandela and his co-accused, with the single exception of her husband Rusty, were convicted of sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island.

“I was a South African Communist Party stalwart,” Bernstein replied to my question, “but I haven’t been a communist for a very long time.”

Bernstein was 75, her face softly lined, her hair grey-white in a bob. She was wearing stockings and a woollen skirt and a white blouse. It was the beginning of spring and the hollyhocks in the allotments behind my flat had begun to bloom. I found her warm and unassuming. I could not see her as Rosa Luxembourg, although some of her fellow communists regarded her as their passionara. This was because she was a rare beauty and the only communist ever elected, between 1941 and 1944, to a municipal government by white voters in South Africa.

Why am I thinking about Hilda Bernstein and communism now? Last year I came across Bernstein’s papers in the Wits University archive. She died in 2006, her papers were placed there in 2010, and they were digitised in 2015. To my surprise, I found an extensive correspondence between Bernstein and me over the publication of The World that was Ours. I have few written records of my life from the pre-internet era. But here was letter after letter. Bernstein kept a copy of every written and type-written letter she wrote, and she wrote a lot.

Intriguingly the only collection she or her children embargoed were her travel diaries

***

Bernstein’s father Simeon Schwartz came from Odessa. He emigrated to London in 1900 and set up a painting and decorating business. He spoke Russian, German, Yiddish and English. He was a burly man of average height with red hair and a red moustache.

Bernstein’s mother Dora came from the border regions between Poland, Germany, and Russia and was sent to London to join her brother when she was seven and became, in effect, her brother’s household maid. She took her brother’s children to school each day, and remembered her childhood as an intensely unhappy time. She never went to school, and only learned to read and write as an adult when she worked in a garment factory. She had curly black hair and a beautiful complexion.

Even though Bernstein’s father was Jewish, he did not practise Jewish religious customs or traditions at home. He believed that immigrants should assimilate. He accepted that his home was England, and he anglicised his first name from Simeon to Samuel. He changed his last name from Schwartz to Watts but these were not legally notated.

Bernstein called her family “upper working class”. She lived in Hampstead Garden Suburb, not then or now a working-class London suburb. She was the youngest of three sisters and all three sisters took music lessons. There was even an upright Bechstein piano in their living room. Her father wanted each of his three daughters to play an instrument, Vera the piano, Olga the violin, and Hilda the cello.

Russia was central to her father’s life. To him the Russian revolution promised an end to poverty and exploitation. He had an active social life in London emigré circles with regular meetings in Charlotte Street. They were mainly Russians who were refugees from Tsarism. When a new soviet government was formed, Litvinov was appointed as an envoy and her father became his secretary. He opened an office for emigrées. When Litvinov was expelled, her father became the Russian consul in London. He also worked for a new Russian trading organisation called Argos. He waited six years to be recalled to Russia.

Then he went. “I was ten years old,” Bernstein wrote, “and would never see him again.”

Her father remitted money to his family and wrote long letters. When it was clear that her father was not going to return to his family, her mother decided to move to South Africa with Bernstein. It was 1932 and she was eighteen. She never went to university but she regarded herself as an intellectual without an education. She learned to write and speak through her involvement in the labour movement and in women’s organisations. She joined the Communist Party of South Africa in 1940 and that was where a year later she met her husband, Rusty, who was five years younger than she was. They shared the same idealism about the Russian revolution.

Bernstein turned to communism in the face of the threat of fascism in Germany. She saw the future as a struggle between fascism and communism. She was an idealist. “To me” she wrote, “communism represented not just a bulwark against fascism, but something bigger. I thought of it as opening up the possibility of a world without poverty, without exploitation, without racialism, as a shining and ideal form of society.” She was one of a generation who believed in the great hope of a better future that the October Revolution of 1917 offered the world.

I never thought to ask Bernstein when she left the Party. It was, I discovered later, unclear if it was in 1956 (the Soviet invasion of Hungary) or in 1968 (Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia), that is, either before the Rivonia Trial or after. In one interview she said she left the party after Khrushchev denounced Stalin for the “cult of personality” in 1956. “I then knew absolutely whatever was in my mind, in my heart,” she said, “that all those things we in the Communist Party had been denying and saying were lies and capitalist propaganda, that they were true.”

But in the epilogue to the third edition of World (2009), she says it was after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. And she had nearly left her husband then as well, because he refused to give up his belief or his faith in Soviet communism.

***

Bernstein wrote The World that was Ours in 1967, three years after the Rivonia trial ended and she and her husband had escaped from South Africa to settle in England. Her book is about the personal costs of public courage, about how her family life was put under impossible strain by her political beliefs. Under house arrest, held without charge in prison, and unable to make a living – Rusty was no longer able to work as an architect – Bernstein paid a steep price for her belief in democracy.

“I wrote this book about the last two years of our life in South Africa,” she wrote, “because I thought it would be easier for people outside our country to understand the total situation through the impact of events on one family. It is, therefore, a personal and subjective story.”

Most first-hand accounts by anti-apartheid activists tend to be detailed and boring. Not Bernstein’s. Her book is a very personal, emotional and gripping account of her life lived in the fear of betrayal. “There came a time when it seemed as though the ground was no longer firm beneath our feet,” she wrote, “as though the world had tilted and we were uncertain about each step.”

Bernstein’s The World that was Ours established a narrative about the Rivonia trial that has lasted for fifty years and more. That narrative is that the trial provided a platform on which to show the world that there was a struggle for freedom and democracy under way in South Africa in the face of an intransigent racist government that denied black people the vote. “The Rivonia Trial became the platform from which, for the first time,” she wrote, “the black-out of state censorship and of press self-censorship was broken; and for the first time since the State of Emergency of 1960 and the banning of the ANC, the whole story of black oppression and black struggle and aspirations was told through the testimony of Mandela and his fellow accused.”

The trial was not about establishing the guilt or innocence of the accused: those in the dock admitted that they had turned to sabotage after 48 years of peaceful black protest for the right to vote, in the face of an authoritarian state cracking down on all opposition. “It was the first important political trial in which the primary purpose was not to prove the guilt or innocence of the defendants,” she wrote, “but in which the trial itself became a forum for expounding their beliefs, the justification of actions considered treasonable by the State but which they were not prepared to deny.”

And indeed, the trial revealed the human degradation of racial discrimination and exploitation in apartheid South Africa. “In the contemporary history of South Africa Rivonia is a giant episode”, Bernstein wrote, “not just for South Africa, but for people worldwide. It is an essential part of our comprehension of the nature of racial discrimination that poisons our country and exists in various forms almost everywhere.”

And, despite the subsequent banning and suppression of opposition forces, the trial was an axis around which political change turned. “Our world had tilted; we walked uneasily in those days,” she wrote. “But not for long. We had gained a new balance. How fortunate we were to have been part of that great catalyst of change, the trial of those arrested at Rivonia.”

How could the trial be a ‘catalyst of change’ rather than a brutal defeat after Mandela and his co-accused were sent to prison for life, I wondered? The answer lies in the title Bernstein chose for her book. She took the title of her book from a line in a poem, ‘The burning of the Leaves’, by Laurence Binyon, a famous English war poet. The full line is: “The world that was ours is a world that is no more.” The poem was written in London during the blitz in the Second World War. It’s a long and personal poem about a frenzy of destruction, but written in the belief that the war will pass and there will be a new beginning.

***

Heinemann published the first edition of The World that was Ours in 1967. Bernstein complained about missed deadlines, sacked editors, and a failure to market her book. Heinemann engaged a lawyer for the paltry sum of £63 to vet her text for libel and was told that Percy Yutar, the Rivonia Trial prosecutor, was likely to sue if Bernstein called him ‘cowardly’ or worse.

Even stranger, the special branch operatives were likely to sue as well if she called them ‘thugs’.

So Bernstein fretted and complained. “I’m afraid that your explanation does not make sense to me,” she wrote to Roland Gant, the Heinemann editorial director, “and as far as I can see the only hard and inescapable fact that has delayed publication is the extreme dilatoriness with which your firm has acted.”

With further publication delays, Bernstein became even more frustrated. “It seems I am destined to quarrel with Heinemanns and everyone I come into contact with there,” she wrote to editor Alwyn Birch. “I continue to nurse a tremendous resentment and every time I have contact with one of your staff it flares up again.”

Heinemann did publish her book but it didn’t sell well in England, only 1,500 copies, compared to a German edition that sold 5,000 copies in the east European market. There was greater success with the Russian, Hungarian, German, Italian and Japanese editions.

****

When I undertook to publish a new edition of The World that was Ours in 1989, I had just started a new imprint called SA Writers modelled on Heinemann’s African Writers Series; between 1967 and 1984 Heinemann published 270 titles in this series. In fact Bernstein had asked James Currey, the publisher in charge of the series, to publish a second edition in 1983, but he had turned her down. “It is proving quite difficult with the lack of foreign exchange in Africa,” Currey wrote, “to keep publishing at quite the rate we were a few years ago and we are giving first priority to novels.”

In June 1989 it would be the 25th anniversary of Mandela and his co-accused’s imprisonment on Robben Island. The publication of a new edition of World would mark the anniversary and would be part of the publicity around the Anti-Apartheid Movement’s campaign to ‘free Nelson Mandela’.

I was a 35-year-old South African living in London. I had studied history at SOAS in the 1970s and written a PhD on the social and economic history of diamond mining in early Kimberley. I followed this up with a post-doctoral study of global mining finance seen through the records of the private bankers NM Rothschild. Soon after, in 1987, I founded the Southern African Review of Books, a tabloid review modelled on the London Review of Books. My review focussed on quality literature and research produced in southern African universities. It provided me with a subscription list that I hoped would be useful in the launch of SA Writers, a book imprint of South African biography and autobiography.

I knew a bit about Lenin’s theory of imperialism, but I knew next to nothing about the Rivonia trial or the role of the South African Communist Party and the ANC in the struggle for liberation in South Africa. Bernstein’s husband, Rusty, was one of the Rivonia Trialists. Most of the accused were underground members of the SA Communist Party.

The accused were not charged with treason or plotting a popular revolution. The prosecution had learned from its failure to secure a conviction for high treason in a trial that dragged on over four years between 1956 and 1960. It was easier for the state to convict the accused on a charge of sabotage. Besides, a sabotage charge also carried the death penalty.

Yet attempting to overthrow the state is exactly what the accused had been planning to do at the farm in Rivonia north of Johannesburg when they were arrested. There the police discovered a plan for guerilla war and evidence of the involvement of Umkhonto we Sizwe (spear of the nation), the paramilitary wing of the ANC and the SACP. The government believed the police had foiled a communist-inspired revolution by arresting the leadership of Umkhonto.

***

I couldn’t believe my luck in being offered such a book to publish as one of the first in a series that would give me a new life as a London publisher.

My baptism of fire lay in my first encounter with Bernstein’s literary agent, Mic Cheetham. She was part of Anthony Shiel Associates, a literary agency founded in 1962, that represented big-name novelists such as John Fowles and John Banville, and popular bestselling writers Catherine Cookson and Josephine Cox. Quite how Bernstein was taken on was a mystery to me.

Agents read manuscripts, recommend them to publishers, negotiate publishing contracts – and take 10%.

In my case Bernstein had already found a publisher. Me. All that remained was the contract. One winter day in 1988 I met Bernstein, her husband, and Mic Cheetham at the Doughty Street offices of Anthony Shiel Associates. It was well furnished with gilt framed Constable prints on the walls. I felt as if I was going to an appointment with my dentist.

Cheetham was mannish in looks and condescending in manner.

“So, you want to publish Hilda’s book?” Cheetham began. “Yes, well Hilda has decided to publish with me,” I replied. “Well that will be up to me to decide,” Cheetham said.

Hilda said nothing. Her husband looked out of the window onto a grey day in central London.

I feigned surprise, but I was terrified.

“What do you have to offer?” Cheetham asked me, mixing a condescending tone with a bemused expression.

“Well, I’ll publish a hard-back edition …” I started.

“That’s all well and good but how will you get the book into bookshops … do you have any staff … or are you a one man band?”

She was going to give me a course in publishing for beginners.

“It should be easy to promote in quality newspapers because it’ll mark 25 years on the Island for Nelson Mandela and his co-accused. It’ll be part of the free Mandela global campaign,” I said.

***

Bernstein knew Mandela long before he was famous, long before the Rivonia Trial. She was impressed by his resolve, authority, and charisma. She wrote about the commanding impact he made during his 1962 trial at which he was convicted for inciting a strike and for leaving the country illegally and sentenced to 5 years in prison.

In 1967 Bernstein wrote in World:

“Years before when Nelson Mandela had first come to our house, one of the children ran into the kitchen shouting excitedly: “There’s a giant in the front room! After that, in our family, he was known as the giant”. But it was not only his splendid physique and attractive personality that made him an outstanding popular leader. He responded to challenge. And when confronted with the difficulties, his political strength and understanding grew.”

In 1970 she wrote a letter to a friend:

“When I first met him he was a self-conscious and resentful young African nationalist, with a chip on his shoulder and a dislike of all whites (part of his own feelings of inferiority). As the political situation developed, so he did as well, changing under the impact of activity and events. His growth was like a visible thing, a flower unfolding. He met difficulties and crises with a kind of gaiety and strength, until he became the giant figure that he is, a true hero of our times.”

This sort of observation would make Bernstein an engaging guest on the talk-show circuit. None of us knew what Mandela then looked like, but here was Bernstein who knew him as a young man, and was not afraid to express herself about him.

***

Cheetham continued to interrogate me.

“I take it you have the funds to pay for editing and printing,” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. In fact, my funds came from 4 gold card bank accounts that carried automatic and unsecured £10,000 overdrafts. These were easy money days at the back end of PM Thatcher’s property-owning democracy and Chancellor Lawson’s mortgage boom.

More importantly I would edit, design, and typeset the book myself. Publishing was then going through something of a technological revolution driven by computers, and specifically the personal computer. I bought a Macintosh, launched in 1984, and felt I was able to run a small publishing company on a shoestring. I remember how I agonised over the purchase of the font Garamond.

I had enough working capital but I failed to see where the conversation was going.

“What about a paper-back edition?” She asked. “We’ll publish in hardback first,” I said.

“It’s a trade book,” she replied.

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

Publishing was also going through a massive expansion in sales through the selling of popular books in malls and supermarkets. Books are a high-risk, low-margin business; the more books you sell, the more publishers make in profit.

I didn’t know this. I was feeling tense. There was little light relief in the meeting: no smiling, no personal stories exchanged around which to bond.

“I’ll give Hilda a contract,” I said, hoping for an end to the meeting.

“No, you won’t,” said Cheetham, “I’ll give you a contract.” I didn’t know what to say. I was overwhelmed.

“And what advance will you be offering”? Cheetham said.

It was a new edition. It wasn’t a new book. I was honest about it: “I wasn’t planning on paying an advance,” I said.

“Well, if you can’t pay an advance, I can’t give you a contract,” Cheetham said.

Bernstein said nothing. Her husband looked out the window.

I fled. And Cheetham made me wait for a contract. Months. This was a time before email. Negotiations took place on the phone. She was seldom available to take my calls. I was frantic and inexperienced, but I was desperate for the book. So I took one suicidal step after another. I offered Bernstein a £2,000 advance, I agreed to fly Bernstein back from Tanzania (where she and Rusty had gone to teach ANC exiles), for a launch of the book in June 1989, and I asked Pandora Press, an established publisher, to bring out a paperback edition of the book.

I had met Candida Lacey, publisher at Pandora, through a friend. She was a bubbly, enthusiastic, glass-overflowing woman who jumped at the opportunity to publish a paperback version of World. She and Bernstein bonded and soon they were talking about an idea for another book, a new book, a book about South African exiles.

Mic Cheetham gave me a contract in January 1989. “I’m extremely happy that the contract has been signed – life has become good again,” Bernstein wrote to me. “There was never any doubt that I would sign up with you …”

For my part I soon realised that publishing a hardback and a paperback edition by two different publishers in the same market was a stupidity. So I chose to publish both paper and hardback editions myself.

“As you will understand by now I am extremely upset about your action in dropping Pandora and deciding to do the paperback yourself,” Bernstein wrote to me. “To me it was clearly part of the whole contract that Pandora would do the paperback.”

I had interested Pandora in her book and it was a mistake to think that both hard and paperback editions could be published at the same time. “I find it hurtful that you are so distrustful of me and my infant project,” I wrote to Bernstein. “I know that the latter is a small thing. I have great admiration for your book and for you as a writer.”

Of course, it was a trade book and should only have been published in paperback. I lost money on the hardback edition and cobbled together deals with publishers in other markets to make the paperback work.

For Bernstein the whole business was altogether more enriching and enlightening. Lacey gave her a contract to write a book about South African exiles subsequently called The Rift, a big book, a thick book, a door stopper that took years to research. Lacey offered Bernstein an advance of £10,000 but it was a sign of the corporate times and the negotiating skills of Cheetham that the advance was boosted to £30,000. In turn, the book was published in hardback and because it didn’t do so well, there was an acrimonious conflict over whether the publisher was bound to publish a paperback edition. The publisher reneged.

Bernstein only ever earned £3,000 of her £30,000 advance.

****

I have been working as a ‘ghostwriter’ for a senior cabinet minister over the last twenty years.

Bernstein’s papers have made me reconsider my small role in her life and whether in turn that role shaped my entry into government a decade or more later.

At the time I was beguiled by Bernstein’s courage and the beauty of her prose. Her book convinced me that publishing it in 1989 was part of a process in establishing democracy. I didn’t think further than that. I didn’t think beyond a belief in democratic politics to the complicated ideas about a state-driven economy and the prospects of reparation or redistribution.

Back then I was totally uninterested in the relationship between the ANC and the SA Communist Party.

Now, of course, given the way the ANC has turned out in government, communist policy has become more and more visible.

The narrative of the Rivonia Trial that Bernstein created now appears to me dated and even disingenuous.

Take the following points.

Was the South African Communist Party a Trojan horse in the ANC? It seems obvious now that it was. The political scientist RW Johnson was right a long time ago when he reviewed Anthony Sampson’s authorised biography of Mandela and disputed the ANC-in-charge story Sampson presented to western readers.

Does it matter that Mandela joined the Party? It seems to me unimportant that he did. The ideology and planning and resources all came from the South African Communist Party.

Why weren’t the Rivonia men sentenced to death? It seems fairly obvious now that the judge could have sentenced them to death but chose not to do so. The support of some western governments for South Africa in international fora was critical in preventing further sanctions that would break apartheid rule. An execution would be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Why did the ANC turn to guerilla war rather than a working-class urban struggle? The historian Simon Stevens is clearly right to see the armed struggle as a rushed response to a township situation about to explode out of ANC control.

Why is Mandela’s ‘I’m prepared to die’ speech/statement regarded as one of the greatest of all time? This is the question that interests me the most of all. Because it seems to me that this is the most disingenuous part of Bernstein’s narrative. As the political scientist and a PoliticsWeb editor, James Myburgh, writes Mandela’s speech/ statement was a remarkable piece of ‘political misdirection’:

“… the Statement was clearly .. … designed to, on the one hand, appeal to and win over liberal Western public opinion to the ANC/SACP’s cause and, on the other, draw attention away from the actual declared intentions of the accused.

“It did this extraordinarily successfully. To this day it remains the framework through which Western opinion (mis)understands the ideology and beliefs of both Mandela and the ANC. The Statement thus arguably represents one of the greatest feats of political misdirection of the Twentieth Century.”

And the declared intention of the communist party was to overthrow the institutions, principles and rights fundamental to liberal democracy.

 

Extracted from Rob Turrell’s forthcoming political memoir My Life in the Slow Lane. He is the author of Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871–1890 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), and White Mercy: A Study of the Death Penalty in South Africa (Heinemann, 2004).

[Author]

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