fact Bizos and Isie Maisels QC had planned to head off potential opposition from some members of the Bar by having Bizos make his offer to share his chambers with Nokwe when he was actually already doing so. Bizos remained distressed that Nokwe did not also gain access to the Bar’s common room (nor did Ismail Mahomed, when he joined the Bar in 1957).10 But Bizos, who had formed ties with black law students while at Wits, was by now already launched on a career focused on opposing the government. Arthur, it seems, had not yet reached this point.
It would be a mistake, however, to see Arthur as unaffected by the political struggles of this time. We have already encountered Arthur’s participation in Torch Commando events that entailed physical battle against right-wing stone-throwers. It was also in the 1950s, evidently, that Arthur joined a political party for the only time in his life, the Liberal Party. (Though Arthur was also pursued later by rumours that he had at some point become a member of the South African Communist Party, I believe these were unfounded, as I will discuss later.) Since Arthur was a university student in the early and mid-1950s, he would have been a member of the Liberal Party then. Founded in 1953, the Liberal Party was not initially a voice for unqualified racial equality, though in the context of the times Arthur’s joining was certainly an expression of his anti-apartheid views. Over time, the party came to stand for a universal, non-racial franchise, and attempted to build membership among blacks as well as whites, a major step in those days, when no blacks had the right to vote for Parliament, their (qualified) franchise having been taken from them in 1936.
Arthur’s formal membership must have lapsed quite soon after he joined, and long before the Liberal Party disbanded in 1968 – after the National Party government made multiracial political parties unlawful, in a statute egregiously titled the Prohibition of Improper Interference Act 51 of 1968. But his affiliation with the sentiments of the Liberal Party was longer lasting. Arthur’s friend Benjamin Pogrund remembered seeing Arthur and Lorraine at parties of the white liberal social set; Pogrund placed these in the late 1950s, but Arthur and Lorraine did not meet until a little later than that, and so these parties presumably took place in the early 1960s. It seems that, as with tennis – where there was a Marxist tennis group and another, less radical, of which Arthur was a part – so with parties, both social and political: there were, Pogrund recalls, two distinct groups of white leftists, those linked to the Liberal Party and those linked to the Communists.11 Apparently there was ‘fierce antipathy’ between some of these people, despite (or because of) their shared opposition to apartheid.12 Beryl Unterhalter, who was a member of the Liberal Party at the time (and whose husband Jack was vice chairman), similarly remembered Arthur and Lorraine in the 1960s as supporters, but not as active members who would have, for instance, served on committees.13
One other political act of Arthur’s stands out from this period. In the early 1960s, after the Sharpeville massacre – a defining moment in South Africa’s history – Nelson Mandela went underground. To get from place to place, he often relied on whites who could lend him their car. Mandela would drive the vehicle, masquerading as a chauffeur ‘driving my master’s car’ to achieve invisibility,14 sometimes or always with the white ‘master’ along. On one occasion, Joe Slovo – who ‘often arranged for drivers and safe places to stay’ for Mandela15 – asked Denis Kuny if he would drive Mandela to a meeting in Ladysmith in Natal. Kuny unhesitatingly agreed. But there was one problem: Kuny’s car wasn’t very reliable. So Kuny went to Arthur and asked if he could borrow his car (a reliable Humber) to transport Nelson Mandela. Arthur unhesitatingly agreed too. Kuny drove Mandela through the night to Ladysmith, dropped him off there, and drove back.
This decision was seriously risky. It was not long after this, in August 1962, that Mandela was apprehended by security forces while engaged in just this sort of drive.16 Denis Kuny told me that if they’d been caught he wouldn’t have disclosed that it was Arthur’s car, but even if he had successfully resisted the ferocious pressures the police could bring to bear, they surely could have identified the car’s owner more prosaically, by tracing its licence plates. Perhaps Arthur could then have persuaded the police that he lent the car without knowing that Mandela was to be driving it, but to do so would have required Arthur to give a false account of events to the police – and he might not have succeeded anyway.
The impression these events give is that Arthur had not yet fully thought through the implications of his commitment against apartheid. He could have joined the Congress of Democrats, a white group aligned with the ‘Congress Alliance’ which the African National Congress led, but he did not. Yet Arthur was willing to fight, in the Torch Commando events, and was willing to risk arrest, in lending his car to Nelson Mandela. His opposition to apartheid and his courage stand out; but he does not yet seem to have evolved a strategy for living a life opposed to apartheid within South Africa. It may also be fair to say that he is still acting in good measure on the basis of personal ties – to his longtime friend Denis Kuny (who for a time shared Arthur’s chambers), or to his brother Sydney, who invited him to the Torch Commando events – rather than on strategic judgement. Perhaps he was even excited by the drama both of participating in the Torch Commando confrontations and of assisting Mandela, the ‘Black Pimpernel’, as he slipped from place to place underground.
But to say that Arthur was still acting out of youth rather than maturity may be quite wrong, because there are additional such moments of which we need to take account. One is an instance in which Arthur and his wife Lorraine sheltered a fugitive in their home. Lorraine told me about this, but she was not sure of the name of the person they had sheltered, and on reflection she pointed out that she may never have known who he was.17 It’s worth emphasising, as well, that this act of sheltering, though clearly covert, may not have been criminal; it is not clear that the fugitive was at the time the subject of any arrest warrant. But it was surely risky. Lorraine acknowledged the risk, but told me that she wasn’t nervous about it; the man needed us, she felt, and so we should help him.
Though Lorraine could not identify the person the Chaskalsons sheltered, it now seems possible to say who this fugitive likely was. As it happens, Roman Eisenstein, a friend of the Chaskalsons from early on (he had got to know Lorraine in her first year at university), recalled visiting the Chaskalsons and met there a man who was never introduced to him. Some months later, Eisenstein encountered the same man in London. He turned out to be Vivian Ezra.18 Lorraine’s tentative recollection that the Chaskalsons might have been asked to shelter this person by Bram Fischer thus seems likely to be correct. Stephen Clingman, Fischer’s biographer, records that after the arrests that led to the Rivonia trial took place in 1963, Fischer realised that Ezra held crucial information that would be jeopardised if he was arrested, and that ‘they had to get Ezra out of the country with all possible speed’.19 It appears that Fischer first asked the Chaskalsons to hide Ezra. Lorraine did not recall where he went next, or how, but Clingman indicates that he made his way secretly out of South Africa.
The second episode of which we need to take account is another story told by Eisenstein, who became a member of the African Resistance Movement (ARM), a group of young white radicals who embarked on a sabotage campaign in the early 1960s. Ultimately he would be sent to prison after a trial in which Arthur appeared on behalf of one or two of Eisenstein’s fellow accused, in 1965. In 1962, another member of ARM, the journalist Yusuf Omar, was caught with a suitcase of explosives. The case against him looked open-andshut. But Omar was out on bail, and Eisenstein arranged for Arthur to come and talk with them. Arthur questioned Omar in what Eisenstein considered the English style – that is, he asked Omar a number of questions but notably did not ask him, ‘Did you do it?’ Then Arthur and the two of them invented a defence for Omar, and Omar told this story to his advocate, George Lowen, who defended the case on this basis. Omar was sentenced to only a year and a half in prison. Subsequently, Eisenstein says, other advocates ‘ragged’ Lowen about Omar’s defence in the advocates’ common room, and Lowen got mad and insisted that the defence was absolutely true.20 As with the harbouring of a fugitive, so in this instance Arthur may not have violated any law; he seems to have carefully avoided knowing, unambiguously and unqualifiedly, that the story
