(Reviewer: David Saks, Vol. 65 #1, Pesach 2010)
The young Lorna Borkum, only child of a middle class, liberal-leaning Johannesburg Jewish couple, grew up with a keen sense of the injustices that were being inflicted on black South Africans. As a university student in the late 1950s and afterwards, she gravitated naturally into left-wing anti-apartheid activities. While never arrested or banned, her close association with other, more high profile activists – most obviously her husband, the trade unionist and Treason Trialist Leon Levy – resulted in her having to leave the land of her birth for a prolonged period of exile in the UK. Towards the end of this period, she resumed her anti-apartheid activities, and had the satisfaction of taking part in the dramatic final years of “The Struggle” culminating in the transition to non-racial democracy. A few years later, she and her husband returned permanently to South Africa, settling in Cape Town.
This, in summary, is the story Lorna Levy recounts in her autobiography, Radical Engagements. Its themes have much in common with other autobiographical accounts by South African political exiles (of whom so high a proportion were Jewish), but is by no means typical. Levy was certainly involved with some of the main personalities and activities of early 1960s resistance, but remained to an extent an outsider. Here, her resistance to accepting the rigid Marxist orthodoxies of her colleagues undoubtedly played a major role.
One early experience that left a deep impression on Levy was how a classmate, Rhona Kiel, boldly challenged their Afrikaans teacher’s depiction of the Soviet Union as a place of misery and oppression. She countered that her mother had visited the Soviet Union and seen something very different.
Levy subsequently found out that Rhona’s mother was a named Communist. Later, she would have learned that her verkrampte teacher was essentially right and her boldly-spoken classmate wrong. Western leftists could be notoriously in denial about the realities of post-revolution Russia (or China or Cuba), and the Soviet system was able to make such good use of such ‘useful idiots’ to bolster its international image.
Levy herself would not disagree with this. Her commitment to fighting apartheid, which did not balk at support for the armed struggle once methods of peaceful protest had proved futile, did not mean that she bought unquestioningly into the Utopian Communist vision of so many of her fellow activists. Once in exile, she had first-hand experience of the true nature of life behind the Iron Curtain whilst working or attending conferences in Moscow and Prague, and this confirmed her growing scepticism about Communism’s supposed Brave New World. The environment she describes is every bit as drab, repressive, paranoid and stifling as the Soviet system was generally depicted in the Free World.
For all that, Levy never became explicitly anti-Communist; to have done so, as she freely acknowledges, would have meant being side-lined by her fellow activists and, at best, relegated to the fringes of the anti-apartheid struggle. As it was, as she herself, acknowledges, her role within “The Struggle” was a fairly marginal one, although terming herself a mere ‘fellow traveller’ seems to overstate the case (her activities, for example, had included safeguarding and passing on potentially incriminating documents, a decidedly risky venture in the increasingly totalitarian environment of early 1960s South Africa).
Levy’s visit to Moscow in 1963 to participate in a Women’s Peace Conference proved to be a turning point in her life. Apart from being alienated by the blatantly propagandist nature of the event, she was hurt and deeply offended by being excluded from the ANC delegation, apparently because she was white. As a consequence, she took little part in anti-apartheid activities for the next two decades. In any case, the imperatives of forging a new life in a new country would have necessitated a degree of withdrawal. Her husband, who joined her in London immediately following her return from Moscow, was involved for a short period in anti-apartheid work, but eventually he, too, moved away from this, forging a successful new career within the British trade union environment.
Levy herself eventually found her niche for a time in local politics. She was twice elected as a Labour Party councillor, first in London and thereafter in Birmingham after the family relocated there. The work was invigorating, although the frequently vicious infighting and, as she learned to her dismay, clear evidence of persistent racism within the party, generated a fair amount of disillusionment. Shortly after losing her seat to the Tory candidate, a loss that she was by then able to take in her stride, she returned to London. Returning briefly to South Africa to be with her father in his final illness then rekindled her commitment to her birthplace. Thereafter, she embarked with mounting enthusiasm on a new career of anti-apartheid activism, working closely with the ANC and forging anew many important friendships. Characteristically, though, Levy does not romanticize this period, candidly recording the infighting, jealousies and suspicion that were the negative flipside of activist politics in exile.
Following the unbanning of the ANC in 1990, Levy became part of the ANC mission in London to prepare the way for the first democratic elections. The following year, she was selected by the ANC for diplomatic training in the Netherlands in preparation for the now imminent transition to non-racial democracy. This later saw her spending four months ‘on attachment’ at the Foreign Ministry in Oslo. Her high hopes of one day promoting the new South Africa in a political role were destined to be cruelly disappointed, however. Diplomatic posts in post-apartheid South Africa were hotly contested, and when the appointments were made in 1995 she was passed over.
A consistent strand throughout Radical Engagements is how the author wrestles with the question of identity, hers and, by implication, that of all political exiles. Was she a South African who happened to be living in the UK, or was she a Britisher of South African origin? Most of her activist colleagues, she found, took the former view. She, on the other hand, strove to put the past behind her and become as British as she could. It came as an unpleasant shock when, some years after her return to South Africa following 34 years of being resident in the UK, she asked a gentile friend whether she thought of her as being South African or British, and was told instead that she identified her as Jewish. Levy, while also regarding being Jewish as one of her identities, had never described herself as Jewish first.
In the mid-1990s, the Levys returned permanently to South Africa, settling in Cape Town. So different was this environment from the one in which she had grown up, however, that the experience has been one of once again having to forge an identity in an essentially new society. In this case, it least, there has been comfort to be drawn from living in a country that had triumphed over its racist, divisive past and successfully forged a vibrant new democracy.
Radical Engagements is a welcome addition to the growing body of autobiographical literature by anti-apartheid veterans. Particularly engrossing is the section dealing with the tension-filled early 1960s period that culminated in the ruthless crushing of the resistance movements through the banning, detention, imprisonment and exiling of their leadership. Also of considerable interest are the finely observed descriptions of life behind the Iron Curtain, where the author’s abhorrence of apartheid never blinded her to the manifold shortcomings of those regimes which the South African liberation movements came to revere so uncritically.
Radical Engagements: A Life in Exile by Lorna Levy, Jacana Media, 2009, 213pp EAN: 9781770097094
David Saks is Associate Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and Editor of Jewish Affairs.
