(Reviewer: David Saks, Vol. 67, No. 1, Pesach 2012)
Do we really need yet another ‘Struggle’ autobiography, some might ask? After all, since the demise of apartheid, and indeed before that, a host of memoirs by former activists in the anti-apartheid sphere have appeared, not only by such acknowledged giants as Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, Walter Sisulu, Joe Slovo and Lionel Bernstein, but also by those who might be described as ‘foot soldiers’ (or perhaps NCOs) in the broader struggle for democracy in South Africa. Have we not by now reached a stage where new autobiographical accounts do little more than rehash the same historical material, albeit from a slightly different perspective?
In the view of this reviewer, one cannot have too many first-hand testimonies to this crucial period in South Africa’s history from those who played an active part in it. Each activist’s role and background was unique, and each therefore brings singular new insights into the events in which he or she was in some way involved. It is this kind of multi-perspective record, and the rich archive of first-hand testimony it provides, that prevents our understanding of history from becoming static and one-dimensional.
The Final Prize: My Life in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle by Norman Levy is one of the most recent of these memoirs to appear in print. What makes it distinctive, adding considerably to its overall value, is that in addition to the material directly relating to the author, it is also an extremely well-written, in-depth and intelligent general history of the rise and fall of apartheid. Levy himself was a school history teacher, later obtaining his doctorate and lecturing on the philosophy of history at Middlesex University. His book is also the product of a life-time of study and research into the making of modern South Africa.
While Levy weaves his own specific experiences into the narrative where appropriate, in much of the book, he does not appear at all. One is struck here by the author’s evident modesty. Some former activists have come across as overly anxious to get on record what they personally did in “The Struggle”, but Levy, despite his admirable record in this regard and the high personal price he was made to pay for it, is remarkably self-effacing.
The son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Levy was born in Johannesburg in 1929 (his twin brother, Leon, likewise, became prominently involved in the anti-apartheid resistance, primarily in the labour field). It was a public speech by Hilda Watts that first attracted him to left-wing resistance politics. Born Hilda Schwartz in the United Kingdom and later the wife of the famed activist Lionel Bernstein, Watts was at the time a Municipal candidate for the Communist Party of South Africa in Johannesburg. Levy, still in his early teens, in due course became involved as a volunteer for the Party, selling its literature on the street before graduating to more responsible roles on the various regional committees. Like so many other Jewish activists of the time, he lived in the Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville.
The Final Prize naturally contains much detailed discussion of resistance politics, with its complex and often tortuous internal debates, strategies and programmes of action. In addition, however, it also devotes a great deal of space to discussing developments within the white political establishment, and in particular to how this came to be taken over by a far right-wing, ethnically supremacist and racially exclusive form of Afrikaner nationalism from the mid-1940s onwards.
Levy writes that he became especially interested in this last phenomenon, which occupied much of his thoughts during the long periods he spent behind bars for political offences. His insightful account of how – in great part through the relentless, behind-the-scenes dominance of the Broederbond – it imposed a stranglehold not just over the country’s political structures, but throughout South African society at every conceivable level, provides a necessary reminder of just what it was the liberation movements were up against.
As was typical with Jews who became committed communists, Levy was not an identifying Jew, although he was by no means hostile to that heritage. In the early chapters, he provides some interesting insights into the South African Jewish experience, observing, for example, that a great many Jewish immigrants, although officially part of the privileged white minority, had more in common with migrant black labourers than they realised during the difficult early years of their struggle to establish themselves. Of the latter, he writes, “”They were probably unaware of the affinity they shared with the migrant streams of African labourers who travelled back and forth to their families over a regular cycle of time, sending monetary remittances and replenishing the family and labour force” (p16).
Levy writes frankly of the often blinkered loyalty to the Communist ideology and its champion, the Soviet Union, that he and his fellow Communist Party members displayed. This continued long after the revelations over the true nature of the Stalin regime had emerged in the mid-1950s. He also recounts the difficulty he would experience, as a disciplined Party cadre, in having to justify the movement’s frequently tortuous and morally contradictory standpoints on the issues of the day. On the Left’s initial opposition to supporting the war against Nazism, for example, he writes, “It was intriguing to note the ways in which some of the ways most profound political analysts on the Left got themselves entangled in inextricable knots” (p22)”. What resolved the Left’s dilemma in the end was the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941.
In addition to enduring lengthy spells in detention as one of the original accused in the Treason Trial (1956-1961), Levy ultimately served three years in gaol for offences under the Suppression of Communism Act. He was one of the fourteen accused in the so-called ‘Braam Fischer Trial’ of 1964-5, one of the key political trials of the decade through which the State broke the back of the underground anti-apartheid resistance movements. All but one of the accused was found guilty and sentenced to terms varying from a couple of years to life. Levy himself received a three-year sentence, which was served at various times in the Local or Central Prison in Pretoria.
The chapter dealing with his incarceration makes a valuable contribution to the prison memoirs that have since emerged concerning this period, including those of other Jewish political detainees like Baruch Hirson, Hugh Lewin, Ben Turok and Paul Trewhela.
Prior to his trial and sentencing, Levy spent 54 days in solitary confinement, during which he was subjected to lengthy periods of interrogation. His account of this harrowing experience, and particularly the psychological tools he devised to withstand what was specifically designed to break down his will to resist, makes compelling reading and bears interesting comparisons with how such fellow detainees like Ruth First and Lionel Bernstein reacted under the same circumstances.
After his release, Levy joined many other fellow activists in exile in the United Kingdom in 1968. In the course of the next 23 years, he obtained his doctorate and served as Head of School of History at Middlesex University. He continued to be involved in anti-apartheid activities, inter alia conducting research for the International Labor Organisation on the South African labor system. As he acknowledges, for the majority of exiles like himself, the primary goal was simple survival, with continued political activism having to take a back seat before the pressing need to establish oneself in a new country.
On his return to South Africa in the early 1990s, he was much involved in the post-apartheid transition process, playing an important role in restructuring the public service and in creating a framework for Affirmative Action for government. He also served as Professor in the School of Government at the University of the Western Cape and as a member of the committee of the Classification and Declassification Review Committee for the placing of apartheid documents in the public domain. Now retired, he lives in Cape Town.
Characteristically, Levy’s assessment of what South Africa has achieved, and still needs to achieve if the ideals of the movement he was part of for so long need to be realised, is dispassionate and realistic. Never one for sweeping rhetorical flourishes, he sees the country as a work in progress, where the struggle for democracy has been supplanted by a new set of challenges. It is with this thought that Levy concludes this admirably detailed, judicious and wide-ranging memoir-cum-historical analysis of the apartheid phenomenon and the successful fight to overthrow it, writing:
After sixteen years of democracy the euphoria of liberation remains, but it is marred by contradictions that in our innocence we did not contemplate. For all our imaginings of a new society and a harmonious rainbow nation, these are ideals still in the making. There is no promised land, no earthly paradise, only the imperfect place we ourselves create and the vision we have to change it for the better.
The Final Prize: My Life in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle by Norman Levy, South African History Online, 2011, 478pp, with index, bibliography, endnotes and photographs.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
David Saks is Associate Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and Editor of Jewish Affairs. His recent book, Jewish Memories of Mandela was published last year by the SAJBD-Umoja Foundation.
