- S Clingman Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary (1998) 175 (quoting South African attorney Charlie Johnson).
- Ibid 117, 163, 230.
- Ibid 117, 195, 217, 289.
- Justice Albie Sachs is a member of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and a man who, like Bram Fischer, endured a great deal in the struggle against apartheid. After detention without trial and exile, he lost an arm when South African agents bombed his car on 7 April 1988. A Sachs The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter 2 ed (2000) 51.
- Clingman (note 1 above).
- N Mandela Long Walk to Freedom (1995) 151.
- Ibid 132.
- KS Broun Black Lawyers, White Courts: The Soul of South African Law (2000).
- Ibid 224.
- Ibid 162–64. Mahomed's situation was not unique. George Bizos has pointed out, in a personal communication to me, that ‘[t]he Johannesburg Bar Council itself defied the law by arranging with [Bizos] to share Chambers with Duma Nokwe between 1956 and 1962.’ See I Maiseis AA Life at Law (1998) 72–74.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 98.
- Mandela (note 6 above) 145.
- See ibid 126–40, 162–63; see Incorporated Law Society, Transvaal v Mandela 1954 (3) SA 102 (T).
- Mandela (note 6 above) 282.
- Ibid 270–74. ‘UMkhonto we Sizwe’ means ‘The Spear of the Nation’. Ibid 274.
- Broun (note 8 above) 162–63; Clingman (note 1 above) 348.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 160, 167.
- See ibid 167.
- Ibid 182.
- It is not clear exactly when Fischer and his wife, Molly, became part of the underground organisation. Clingman reports, however, that the Party had re-established itself by 1953 (ibid 193), and specifically mentions that, ‘[g]iven the South African Communist Party's recent reconstitution, it is hard to believe that Molly's trip [to China in 1954] did not have any clandestine purposes' (ibid 203). Lionel ‘Rusty’ Bernstein recalls Fischer playing an integral role in the resuscitation of the Communist Party, apparently beginning in 1951. See R Bernstein Memory Against Forgetting: Memoirs from a Life in South African Politics 1938–1964 (1999) 114–30.
- Ibid 194, 209–10, 267.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 265.
- The possibility that lawyers are specially obliged to obey the rules of their own profession stems from at least three sources: the oath of admission lawyers take, the daily interactions lawyers have with each other, and the lawyers' continued participation in the legal system. I will not explore these moral arguments in detail, but it is important to sketch them briefly.
- The oath of admission, whatever its exact language, surely implies to others that the oath-taker will obey the rules that directly govern the lawyer's professional activity. A lawyer might maintain that an oath calling, say, for fidelity to the Republic of South Africa bound him or her only to the laws of the just nation that was waiting to be born. (For an example of a somewhat similar understanding of the oath, see D Dyzenhaus Judging the Judges, Judging Ourselves: Truth, Reconciliation and the Apartheid Legal Order (1998) 114 (quoting a comment by a speaker from the National Association of Democratic Lawyers, at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's hearings on the legal profession).) But unless the lawyer announced this interpretation, it would no doubt come as a surprise to many other members of the profession. A lawyer might also maintain that a promise or oath offered to an evil antagonist had no moral force, but this position seems hard to sustain as a general proposition. Finally, lawyers might contend that their decision to take the oath of admission was coerced because they could not otherwise challenge the injustice of apartheid through the courts. This point has force, but not every lawyer who came to oppose apartheid could really have said that he or she was ‘coerced’ into becoming a lawyer.
- The daily interactions that lawyers have with each other also may generate moral obligations. If lawyers and judges tend to trust each other, perhaps warily but still meaningfully, because of their shared membership in the legal profession and their presumed adherence to its norms, then each lawyer who receives that professional trust from others while in fact not living by those norms is engaged in a form of deception. The deception, moreover, is not abstract, but personal — directed at the particular men and women with whom the lawyer interacts and whose trust he or she seeks to manipulate.
- Finally, lawyers' participation in the legal system may also generate moral claims. Participation may imply some measure of consent, confirming the apparent meaning of the oath of admission. In addition, participation may sometimes lead to victories, and then the lawyer who rejects the obligations of the profession is in the position of seeking and obtaining benefits while refusing to acknowledge reciprocal duties.
- I do not mean to suggest that any of these sources of professional obligation generate claims that always trump the other ethical duties resulting from the right and obligation to oppose injustice. Moreover, these grounds of professional obligation may have less force in some contexts than in others; the norms of the courtroom may have more claim on lawyers than those of the prison, for example, where shared trust and decent treatment may be in scant supply. My point is only that even in an unjust society where, in general, law does not deserve obedience, the obligations of the legal profession itself will often still have special, moral weight.
- Broun (note 8 above) 228.
- Ibid.
- Mandela (note 6 above) 421.
- Broun (note 8 above) 21.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 319–22. Walter Sisulu, perhaps Mandela's closest comrade, said of this verdict: Our Movement should have been broken, without leaders and without hope. But instead it was alive, singing, marching in procession right there around the court, with ANC colours flying. It was not just our celebration, but had become a world celebration with ANC colours waving. We were expecting death and now we were all alive preparing for the next phase of the struggle…. Now we were a central part of a worldwide movement.’ W Sisulu I Will Go Singing (2001) 150–51 (an interview/biography of Sisulu, ‘[i]n conversation with George M. Houser and Herbert Shore’) (punctuation modified).
- Clingman (note 1 above) 337, 348.
- Ibid 338–39.
- Ibid 339–40.
- Ibid 339 (quoting Peter Ulrich Rissik).
- Ibid 340.
- Ibid 337.
- See notes 2–3 above and accompanying text.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 334.
- Ibid 108.
- Ibid 337–38.
- Ibid 370. He later maintained that this statement bore on the grant of his passport, but not his getting bail. Ibid.
- Ibid 342–46.
- Ibid 358.
- At his bail hearing, Fischer testified: I have no intention of avoiding a political prosecution. I fully believe I can establish my innocence. I am an Afrikaner. My home is South Africa. I will not leave South Africa because my political beliefs conflict with those of the Government ruling the country’ (ibid 338). Even if this declaration falls short of a promise to stand trial to the end, as distinguished from a promise only to return to South Africa (as Clingman suggests, ibid 370), it is obvious that a criminal defendant seeking bail implicitly represents that he will continue to attend his trial.
- Ibid 355. Hanson was not telling the truth. He had gone to Fischer's house the previous day to pick up the letter, and Clingman writes that ‘[i]n fact when Bram told Hanson what he planned to do, Hanson had said he would do anything to help him’ (ibid 364). Hanson's acts surely put him too in breach of ordinary legal ethics.
- Ibid 355.
- Ibid 356.
- Ibid.
- Ibid 368–72, 389–91.
- Ibid 389–90, 454.
- See ibid 390.
- Ibid 401.
- Ibid 375–76.
- Ibid 379.
- Ibid 365–68, 379.
- Ibid 379.
- Ibid 323–28.
- Ibid 357.
- Ibid 382, 388, 392, 398–99.
- Ibid 406.
- Ibid 392, 418, 427.
- Ibid 432–41.
- Ibid 217–18, 427–28.
- Ibid 428.
- Ibid 301. For more information on Fischer's role in the Treason Trial of the 1950s, see ibid 228–64.
- Ibid 304–05.
- Ibid 287.
- Ibid 293. The car needed to be disposed of to prevent its being discovered at a cottage being used as a ‘safe haven’ (ibid).
- Ibid 295.
- Ibid 304, 312.
- Ibid 305.
- Ibid 304.
- Ibid 310–11. This and all other excerpts from S Clingman Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary (copyright ©1998 by Stephen Clingman) are reprinted by permission of the publisher, the University of Massachusetts Press.
- Ibid. Clingman mentions that another lawyer and Communist ‘had given evidence (under instruction from Bram) when subpoenaed in the Rivonia Trial’ (ibid 366). It is not clear from this brief reference whether Fischer influenced this lawyer's testimony in ways that would have been unlawful. When Fischer himself was tried, however, he smuggled messages to a jailed former Communist Party colleague, Piet Beyleveld, who was preparing to testify against him. Fischer wrote to ‘Beyleveld that the threat of ten years [imprisonment] meant nothing, and that he must not give evidence under any circumstances' (ibid 349). Bernstein appears to assume that Fischer urged a potential witness against the Rivonia accused, Bob Hepple, to flee the country after Hepple's release from detention. Hepple did escape. Bernstein (note 20 above) 293, 296.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 356.
- In ‘the first stage of armed struggle, uMkhonto took care to avoid any loss of life’ (ibid 280). Even in 1963, at the time of the Rivonia arrests, uMkhonto apparently had not yet embraced ‘guerrilla warfare’ (ibid 300, 312–13), although Umkhonto's leadership may have been pressing the ANC and the Communist Party to approve this step. Bernstein (note 20 above) 249–52.
- See note 23 above and accompanying text.
- S Ellmann In a Time of Trouble: Law and Liberty in South Africa's State of Emergency (1992) 248–74.
- In 1987, the Appellate Division (then South Africa's highest court) upheld a state of emergency regulation barring emergency detainees from access to their lawyers (except with government permission). The court rejected an argument that the possibility of adopting case-by-case measures to avoid the ‘security risks arising from contact between a detainee and his legal adviser’ made the regulations' broad-brush approach so unreasonable as to be beyond the state's authority (Omar v Minister of Law and Order; Fani v Minister of Law and Order: State President v Bill 1987 (3) SA 857 (A) 859). See Ellmann (note 76 above) 94–97.
- Broun (note 8 above) 255–56; Ellmann (note 76 above) 266–67. Dikgang Moseneke makes a similar point in Broun (note 8 above) 108–09.
- South Africa has struggled to identify and respond to the stunning violence of apartheid (and sometimes of its opponents) through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For a wrenching and moving account of this Commission's efforts, see A Krog Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (1999).
- See Clingman (note 1 above) 6–28.
- Ibid 334.
- Ibid 40, 67–68 (detailing Fischer's athleticism); 101 (noting his success as a Rhodes Scholar); 48–49, 78–79, 105, 109 (chronicling his early promise).
- Ibid 39, 58, 97, 109.
- Ibid 38, 40–41, 107–09, 224, 291.
- Ibid 29–31.
- I Mahomed ‘The Bram Fischer Memorial Lecture’ (1998) 14 SAJHR 209, 209–10.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 353.
- Ibid 98–99, 165, 247, 292, 429. In a letter to her husband, Molly Fischer told him, ‘Someone else said that from the time you took over [to argue for the accused in the Treason Trial], kindliness descended over the whole court!’ (ibid 262). After being sentenced to life imprisonment, ‘[e]ven across the borderlines of prison enmity Bram managed to make the kinds of connections that defined him’ (ibid 425). Similarly, Hugh Lewin, a fellow prisoner (and opponent of apartheid), describes Fischer's suffering at the hands of one abusive jailer, but says that, even with this man, Fischer was ‘irrevocably polite and courteous’ (H Lewin Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison 213 (1974)).
- Ibid 171, 220–21, 224, 252.
- Ibid 282–83; see ibid 452 (quoting Joe Slovo — lawyer, Communist, leader of uMkhonto, and later, Minister of Housing in the first post-apartheid government): ‘[Fischer] wasn't a communist in the sense that we used to understand the way a communist operated. And in that sense he laid the basis for the future… In his personal relationships with people he had a sort of humanistic approach to the way people should operate in a political party’ (ibid)).
- Ibid 351.
- A Chaskalson ‘The Third Bram Fischer Lecture: Human Dignity as a Foundational Value of Our Constitutional Order’ (2000) 16 SAJHR 193, 195.
- See generally C Gilligan In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982).
- For references to the debate on this question, see S Ellmann ‘The Ethic of Care as an Ethic for Lawyers’ (1993) 81 Geo LJ 2665, 2665–66 n3.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 40, 47.
- Ibid 116, 247–49.
- Ibid 248.
- Ibid 249; see ibid 46–47, 423.
- Ibid 50.
- Ibid 51.
- Ibid.
- See ibid.
- Ibid 224.
- Ibid 226. Moreover, he shared his political convictions, and to some extent the peril to which his politics had brought him, with his family members. Molly Fischer was a longtime member of the party and was detained without trial during the 1960 state of emergency (ibid 265–75). Their daughter Ilse was also a Communist, and apparently (Clingman does not quite specify the chronology) her father ‘brought her on to the central committee’ while he was a fugitive (ibid 397). Ilse also drove the car while her father hid on the floor, when he fled from their family home to begin his months underground (ibid 362–65). Other members of the Fischer family, without necessarily sharing all of Bram Fischer's beliefs, assisted him in hiding information or delivering clandestine messages. See ibid 326–27, 329, 357. To share peril with one's family may seem startling, but, as Clingman observes, Fischer was always pragmatic (ibid 357). It seems right to say that his loyalty to his family was one that encompassed them in his world, rather than trying to shield them from it. In somewhat the same way, Bram and Molly Fischer regarded their ill son Paul's ‘sense of independence as having as absolute a value as his health’, and ‘they had long decided that part of Paul's normality had to be the moral and political engagement of his parents' (ibid 272).
- Ibid 211–13. Even in prison ‘Bram would brook little criticism of the Soviet Union’ (ibid 424).
- Ibid 60.
- Ibid 94.
- Ibid 103, 112.
- Ibid 103.
- Ibid 431.
- Ibid 341. In any event, he knew that the government planned to ban Communists from practicing law, so ‘he had little prospect of anything, by way of a legal career, to protect’ (ibid 342).
- Ibid 382.
- Ibid 27.
- Ibid 228–29.
- Ibid 59, 92.
- Ibid 81.
- Ibid 150.
- Ibid 190, 291.
- See ibid 212.
- Ibid 423. On Fischer's leadership role in prison, see note 137 below.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 423.
- Fischer's father and grandfather both were part of Afrikaner struggles against the British. See notes 80–85 above and accompanying text. But Fischer's grandfather, Abraham, married a woman whose native language was English, named Bram's father Percy, and advised Percy to stay in college in Cambridge, England during the Boer War (ibid 9, 15). Percy in turn married a woman who spoke no Afrikaans (ibid 33). In their home, the children spoke English with their mother and Afrikaans with their father (ibid).
- Ibid 87–93.
- Ibid 92. See also D Harrison The White Tribe of Africa (1985) 117–30 (examining the proGerman and pro-Nazi sympathies of many Afrikaner nationalists during World War II). Clingman emphasises Fischer's dismay that an Afrikaner ‘had caved in’ quickly and become a witness against him at his trial; ‘[s]urely,’ Clingman writes, ‘it was now up to at least one Afrikaner to prove his good faith.’ Fischer did that by going underground (Clingman (note 1 above) 353).
- Clingman (note 1 above) 253–54, 264, 278–79.
- Ibid 185.
- Ibid 185–88, 253. See also J Dugard Human Rights and the South African Legal Order (1978) 163–64.
- See Mandela (note 6 above) 372–378.
- Ibid 265–318; Sisulu (note 28 above) 81, 235.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 401. Geoff Budlender has emphasised that Fischer's response is an expression of his solidarity with African victims of apartheid. G Budlender ‘Book Review’ (1999) 15 SAJHR 413, 415. Yet it is also, interestingly, not an answer to Bizos's question. Did Fischer, on that terrible day, feel more certain of his commitment than of the value of his sacrifice?
- Clingman (note 1 above) 166–67, 283.
- When he returned to Europe for a Communist-linked ‘Congress of the Peoples for Peace’, he disdained London's West End plays as ‘bourgeois and neurotic’, and ‘it was evident that his political and aesthetic tastes had hardened from twenty years before’ (ibid 198–99).
- Clingman comments that ‘[t]here is no doubt that [taking in the little girl, Nora Mlambo,] was in many respects a remarkable gesture for those times, especially for an Afrikaner’, but notes that this act was later seen by some as ‘Bram Fischer's unholy communist “experiment”’ (ibid 171). Clingman suggests, however, that the Fischers acted at least as much out of their ‘clear sense of human reciprocity’ as out of any political principle (ibid 171–72).
- Ibid 226.
- See ibid 59–60, 286–87, 375, 413, 456.
- Ibid 424.
- Ibid. One fellow political prisoner viewed him as rigid and Stalinist, but this man may have been almost alone in his harsh reaction. ‘[B]y common consent [Fischer] was the presiding and guiding figure in prison. Everyone came to him with their needs and their troubles, and no decision of any import was ever taken without hearing his views' (ibid 424–25). Baruch Hirson, a fellow prisoner and sharp critic of Fischer's Communist political thinking, wrote that Fischer ‘towered over [the prison authorities] (despite his size!) as he towered over the political prisoners' and recalled that Fischer's ‘lack of personal rancour, his even-handed treatment of everyone, and his compassion’ ‘endeared Bram to everyone in the prison yard’. B Hirson Revolutions in My Life (1995) 247. For other instances of Fischer's role in prison, see Lewin (note 88 above) 184, 187, 215–16.
- Bernstein describes the frame of mind of the activists connected to Rivonia as arrest approached: ‘There was, I suppose, a measure of recklessness in us all, which kept us going even while things were patently falling apart. We were living dangerously in the constant shadow of disaster… We had come too far and given too much to pull back now even if we wanted to. There was only one way to go — onward.’ Bernstein (note 20 above) 249.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 369–70. This statement is not unlike a comment by Gandhi, who wrote that a Satyagrahi, a person challenging injustice through nonviolent ‘truth force’, ‘obeys the laws of society intelligently and of his own free will, because he considers it to be his sacred duty to do so. It is only when a person has thus obeyed the laws of society scrupulously that he is in a position to judge as to which particular rules are good and just and which unjust and iniquitous. Only then does the right accrue to him of the civil disobedience of certain laws in well-defined circumstances' (MK Gandhi An Autobiography; or the Story of My Experiment with Truth (1957) trans M Desai (1993) 575–76, quoted in J Leubsdorf ‘Gandhi's Legal Ethics’ (1999) 51 Rutgers LR 923, 939).
- See notes 75–79 above and accompanying text.
- See text at note 107 above.
- Action promotes, or at least provides a cover for, reaction. Fischer himself worried about the ANC's entry into armed struggle; Joe Slovo recalled that Fischer was ‘anxious to avoid a step from which there could be little turning back for South Africa’. Clingman (note 1 above) 285. Cf Dyzenhaus (note 23 above) 133 (arguing that the ANC's move, however fully justified, provided a pretext for the state's ferocious repression). It is, of course, ultimately a truism that human encounters are interactive, and to recognise this is not at all to excuse the horrors of the apartheid state's response to the liberation struggle.
- Clingman (note 1 above) 414. He denied various other connections to uMkhonto, including ‘any knowledge of its financial sources’ (ibid), although Clingman reports that Fischer ‘brought Kitson [a member of uMkhonto] money in large amounts, smuggled in from overseas' (ibid 311).
- David Dyzenhaus, in his thoughtful and admiring discussion of Fischer, emphasises the challenge he posed to his colleagues (Dyzenhaus (note 23 above) 99).
- See notes 6–27 above and accompanying text.
- Sisulu (note 28 above) 118.
- As David Dyzenhaus observes, ‘right can never be entirely on the side of one who decides to overthrow an order which still contains vestiges of the rule of law’ (Dyzenhaus (note 23 above) 134). John Leubsdorf comments that ‘Gandhi never treated the existing system as a mere power structure that lacked any legitimacy, so that revolutionaries should manipulate or disregard it at will. He would have regarded such an attitude as fatal to the moral growth of both the manipulators and the manipulated, and he believed that growth was essential to any real or lasting improvement’ (Leubsdorf (note 139 above) 937).
- On Fischer's style, see Clingman (note 1 above) 116, 247, 255, 299–300. For an instance of ‘unusual emotion,’ see ibid 308. On Fischer's impact on other lawyers, see ibid 454–55. For an account of the comparable style of advocacy that seems to have been characteristic at least of many anti-apartheid South African lawyers, see Ellmann (note 76 above) 238–41.
- Lawyers who chose not to violate the law might nevertheless have also chosen to stretch it. A lawyer who would not knowingly lie in court, for example, might have structured his or her inquiries of the client so as not to come to know intolerably damaging facts. I have argued that such conduct can be justified, in limited circumstances, even in the United States, a society whose legal system is obviously far less flawed than that of apartheid South Africa. See S Ellmann ‘Truth and Consequences’ (2000) 69 Fordham LR 895, 905–09 (2000). Conduct of this sort does stay within the bounds of the law, albeit uncomfortably within them. As such, it may be less disrespectful and less threatening to the values of the rule of law than blunt (and covert) disobedience.
- Sachs (note 4 above) 208. The Johannesburg bar has come to recognise that ‘”a grave injustice” was done to Fischer’ when his name was taken off the roll of advocates (Dyzenhaus (note 23 above) 99 (quoting the General Council of the Bar's submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings on the legal profession)). His name has not been restored to the roll. Clingman writes that the reason is that ‘[o]nly practising advocates may appear on the roll; someone who is no longer alive can no longer practise; therefore Bram could not be reinstated’ (Clingman (note 1 above) 454). Surely this is a requirement that could be made waivable, and should now be waived. Happily, Fischer's reinstatement now appears imminent, under the Restoration of Enrolment of Certain Legal Practitioners Bill, which has been approved by South Africa's cabinet and will be before Parliament early in 2002. W Hartley ‘Bill Seeks to Reinstate the Lawyers Who Fell Victim to Apartheid’ Business Day (29 November 2001).
- Candour compels the acknowledgment that Fischer had by 1965, overtly and covertly, gone far beyond the bounds of normal legal ethics. (His actions as a lawyer in the Rivonia trial were not then known, however, and the sole basis for his disbarment appears to have been his breach of his bail.) See notes 63–72 above and accompanying text. A lawyer who systematically acts on the principle that the rules of legal ethics are not binding can hardly continue to act as a lawyer. Even so, it was not necessary to remove Fischer from the roll, for he was already on a trajectory that would send him to prison or at the very least keep him far from the work of legal advocacy. Moreover, the government had already announced its intention to bar all communists, in or out of prison, from practising. See Clingman (note 1 above) 342, 369. (Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for life, was never struck from the roll of attorneys. See Mandela (note 6 above) 426–27.) Nor, ultimately, was it just to strike Fischer from the roll. Fischer, the moralist who turned to illegality in an immoral society, did not deserve to be cast out as dishonourable. As his lawyer Sydney Kentridge urged in court at the time, ‘It was doubtful… if there were any member of the Bar that had known Bram who would be prepared to stand up and say, “He is a less honourable man than I am'” (Clingman (note 1 above) 389).
- Ironically, South Africa, with its history of internal division, also had a history of distinguishing to some extent between crimes committed out of political conviction and crimes that made a lawyer unfit to practise law. See Incorporated Law Society, Transvaal v Mandela 1954 (3) SA 102 (T) 107–09; Ex parte Krause 1905 TS 221. Fischer himself invoked this distinction in his response to the Johannesburg bar's proceeding against him. See Society of Advocates of South Africa (Witwatersrand Division) v Fischer 1966 (1) SA 133 (O) 135H. The precedents may not have encompassed all that we now know Fischer had done; indeed, in one further irony, Fischer's own father was apparently the lawyer in an unsuccessful attempt to forestall the disbarment of an Afrikaner rebel convicted of high treason (Incorporated Law Society v De Villiers 1915 OPD 98). It is still sad that Fischer was not treated with the generosity South Africa sometimes accorded its erstwhile adversaries.
- Dyzenhaus (note 23 above) 134.
- See Clingman (note 1 above) 456.
- Fischer wrote to his future wife from Europe in 1932 to express, or confess, his thoughts about sexuality: ‘For me the only thing that is wrong is that which impedes the development of intellectual life on this planet’ (ibid 93). As Clingman writes, Fischer ‘told Molly he had not actually put his sexual philosophy into practice — “just why is difficult to say”’ (ibid). Molly disagreed in principle, but also pointed out in her letter back that ‘You have such ‘frightfully loose moral standards’ and then you never do a thing to be ashamed of’ (ibid 94). Her insight reflected not only Fischer's own rectitude, but also his tendency to work for others' well-being while almost never being able to ask for help for himself (ibid 425, 428–29). (People often value in others what they hope to find in themselves, and Gillian Slovo observes that Bram Fischer, mourning for his wife Molly, praised her for having ‘the rare quality, supposed to belong to judges, of being able to exclude entirely from her mind what the consequences of a decision might be to her and — what was perhaps even more remarkable — what such consequences might be to her family.’ She is struck by ‘that almost biblical conviction that what matters is not the person but the cause. And yet Bram was the least impersonal of men… He was one of the most heroic of men and the kindest and here is his accolade for the dead wife he had adored: that she thought not of herself, or of her family, but of others, less well off than them.’ G Slovo Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country (1997) 99.) Both aspects of his personality helped bring him to the radical, even desperate, steps of his last years of freedom.
- R Ellmann Oscar Wilde (1987) xiv.
- O Wilde ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ in O Wilde The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde ed R Ellmann (1969) 255, 265.
South African Journal on Human Rights
Volume 17, 2001 - Issue 4