Joel told me in 2016, he and Arthur were very close friends, even after Joel left the country, and even though they probably exchanged only six letters in all the years they were apart. Joel’s estimation was surely correct, however scanty their correspondence. When the Chaskalsons visited England in 1970, 1973 and 1976, they each time spent a few days at the Joffes’ home; Matthew largely based himself at their home when he came to England on his own in 1980.15 Arthur said that if Christ returned to earth, he would probably resemble Joel Joffe. Joel helped to found the fund-raising arm of the Legal Resources Centre in Britain, the Legal Assistance Trust, and remained a trustee in 2016.16 Joel and Arthur also went together in 1988 to the apartment of Stephen Clingman, to encourage him to write the biography of Bram Fischer – a hero to both Joel and Arthur. Clingman writes that ‘Both [Joel] and Arthur Chaskalson were in at the birth of this project, and I dare say without their encouragement I would never have begun it, let alone completed it.’17 Joel provided crucial financial support for that biography, as he has, more recently, for this biography of Arthur.
*
Finally, Bram Fischer. Arthur and Bram had become even closer during the trial. Bram’s daughter Ilse said that Bram loved Arthur, though Bram wouldn’t have used that word, while his daughter Ruth said that the relationship between Bram, Arthur and Joel was especially close, perhaps a kind of love.18 The days and years that followed the Rivonia trial were anything but kind to Bram – but nothing that happened undercut the intense bond between Arthur and Bram, and indeed between Arthur and Bram’s family. Bram’s story is eloquently told by Stephen Clingman, whose account I rely on here; it’s important to tell Bram’s story, because it was a story that all those who cared for Bram, such as Arthur, lived as well.
With the Rivonia trial coming to an end on 12 June 1964, the Fischers left the following day on a vacation. Bram and his wife Molly and a family friend, Elizabeth Lewin, planned to drive from Johannesburg to Cape Town. As they travelled at twilight, Bram was forced to swerve to avoid a motorcyclist and a cow on the road. He lost control of the car and it left the road and fell into a ‘deep pool of water’ in the notoriously dry Free State. Fischer and Lewin got out; Molly, in the back seat, never emerged. Fischer’s desperate dives into the pond were unsuccessful. She was dead, one day after the end of the Rivonia trial.19
Back in Johannesburg the next day, family and friends gathered at the Fischers’ home. Bram somehow maintained self-control – until, as his biographer records, Lorraine Chaskalson arrived. Lorraine and Molly had become very close during the trial too; Lorraine, not on good terms with her own mother, had responded to Molly’s great warmth as a person.20 When Bram saw Lorraine that day, ‘he just wept on her shoulders’.21
Seven days after the Rivonia trial ended, Molly Fischer was buried. Nevertheless, Bram and Joel were the ones who went, shortly after the funeral, to Robben Island, and then to Pretoria Central, to discuss with their convicted clients whether or not they wished to appeal. (They didn’t; several of them had no ground for an appeal, and even those who did might not have gained much in the end.) Fischer didn’t acknowledge his own loss as he met with his clients. Nelson Mandela, reflecting on those moments, would write of Fischer that ‘as an Afrikaner whose conscience forced him to reject his own heritage and be ostracized by his own people, he showed a level of courage and sacrifice that was in a class by itself’.22
On 9 July Fischer was detained by the security police – but oddly he was released less than three days later. Perhaps the police were trying to scare him into leaving the country, but he didn’t. Instead, on 23 September, he was arrested again, and now he was charged under the Suppression of Communism Act. He faced ‘an inevitable jail sentence’, which – to judge from the sentences his co-accused subsequently received – quite likely would not have exceeded five years.23
Bizarrely, however, the government had issued Bram with a passport two days before his 23 September arrest, after having previously refused to do so. Bram explained to the American scholar Tom Karis that it was ‘practically unknown to get bail’ in Suppression of Communism Act cases. But the passport, issued to enable Bram to argue a commercial case in London before the Privy Council, changed the calculus. ‘It was therefore on this rather extraordinary ground,’ he wrote, ‘namely that a passport had been issued to enable me to go to the Privy Council, that I was given bail in order to leave the country.’ In court, Bram declared, ‘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.’ Perhaps the magistrate who granted bail was also impressed by the testimony of the attorney Rissik, who would ultimately post Bram’s bail money. He said of Bram that ‘I have absolute faith in his integrity. I would accept his word unhesitatingly, confident that he would carry it out’.24
Bram made the trip to London. He argued his appeal and won it. Then, despite being urged not to return to South Africa, where he faced the likelihood of conviction and imprisonment, he chose to return. Perhaps he did so out of political calculation, or perhaps out of moral obligation. Joe Slovo, a leading Communist who tried to get Bram not to return, spoke ‘of Bram’s “rather touching fidelity” as a revolutionary prepared on one level to sacrifice his life, but on another committed to personal honour and the importance of carrying out a political undertaking’. And then, having returned, he faced trial, which began on 16 November 1964. The evidence accumulated, though it included a prosecution witness, a longtime Communist comrade of Bram’s, agreeing with Bram’s lawyer that he was ‘a man who carries something of an aura of a saint-like quality’.25
Then, on Monday, 25 January 1965, Bram estreated his bail. Harold Hanson read out a letter to the court from Fischer, a letter Hanson claimed to have received that morning, but that in fact he had picked up from the Fischers’ home over the weekend. George Bizos also had a sense of Bram’s plans:
One Friday we walked back and forth in the long passage outside his office while he told me that he had come to say goodbye. For my own protection he would give no further details. He was worried that his actions might place his children in danger and asked me to help them if they were detained. We embraced. And he hurried off.26
Citing the accumulation of oppressive laws and the necessity for radical change to avoid a future of ‘appalling bloodshed and civil war’, Fischer wrote:
To try to avoid this becomes a supreme duty, particularly for an Afrikaner, because it is largely the representatives of my fellow Afrikaners who have been responsible for the worst of these discriminatory laws.
These are my reasons for absenting myself from Court. If by my fight I can encourage even some people to think about, to understand and to abandon the policies they now so blindly follow, I shall not regret any punishment I may incur.
I can no longer serve justice in the way I have attempted to do during the past thirty years. I can do it only in the way I have now chosen.27
He remained underground for 294 days. Along the way Rissik, who had posted Bram’s bail, was reimbursed. In one sense, Bram accomplished little politically – he made little progress in reconstructing the underground Communist Party, in particular. It also seems fair to say that he was a man in personal distress during these months, and understandably so. At the same time, what he did had symbolic significance: ‘On Robben Island Nelson Mandela and his colleagues came to hear that Bram was underground: though it reflected the kind of commitment they expected from him, they were elated, and it lifted their spirits … [His daughter] Ilse Fischer, meeting Africans of all descriptions, was told time and again how much her father was revered.’28
Almost as soon as Bram went underground, the Johannesburg Bar moved quickly to have Fischer struck from the roll. ‘Justice Minister Vorster publicly challenged the legal profession to
