for Arthur’s standing as an advocate.46 But apparently Arthur was in touch with Bram about this matter only through Ilse. While George Bizos, as Bram’s counsel, was able to visit him regularly in prison, Arthur, for these purposes evidently treated as just a friend, could not visit because only family members could have social visits with prisoners.47
While Bram was in prison, Ilse and her future husband Tim Wilson decided to get married. They wanted to marry in the prison, with Bram, but prison rules prevented him from meeting with more than two people at once, and the minister would have been one person too many. So they were married in a small chapel, with only a few guests, who included the Chaskalsons and the Bizoses. Lorraine Chaskalson was much involved with the planning of the ceremony and may have cooked for it.
Fischer, in prison, developed prostate cancer. Prison authorities grossly neglected his care, though perhaps with no ‘malicious’ intent; at one point, Denis Goldberg, one of the Rivonia accused now serving his life sentence, nursed Bram through painful nights. The family pressed for Fischer’s compassionate release, and consulted with Arthur about how to accomplish this.48 Ultimately Fischer was transferred to his brother’s house, suitably far from Johannesburg and any conceivable political impact this dying man could have had. His brother’s house was re-designated as a prison and there he died. The Prisons Department claimed his ashes.
Arthur spoke at the funeral, held on 12 May 1975. It hadn’t been planned that he would speak. The leading Afrikaans writer André Brink had become deeply attached to Bram and asked to speak – but then the day before the funeral he backed out, citing pressure from his own father. Thirty years later, when Brink encountered Fischer’s daughter Ilse at a party, he was still embarrassed by this. Arthur agreed to read Brink’s statement, thus taking on whatever risk there was of attracting the security police’s attention. He also read messages from five other people – messages from three more people ‘could not be read because the senders were banned’. He was the only speaker. (A few other Johannesburg lawyers, including George Bizos, attended.49) For Brink, Arthur reportedly said, ‘Fischer had proved that “Afrikaner” meant infinitely more than someone identified with a narrow ideology. “If Afrikanerdom is to survive,” [Brink] went on, “it may well be as a result of the broadening and liberating influence of men like Bram Fischer.”’50
Arthur also spoke for himself, but because that hadn’t been planned, he didn’t write his remarks down.51 However, according to one newspaper report, he pulled no punches in what he said: ‘Mr Chaskalson said Bram engaged in a struggle for equality, for freedom from domination, freedom from control by imperial powers, for an end to racialism and for the building of socialism.’ Arthur went on to say: ‘His decision to remain was made in the full knowledge that few of his comrades remained, who were not in prison, and there was little hope of any immediate success. His arrest, trial and the many years of imprisonment that followed, he saw as a continuation of the struggle to which he had committed himself.’52
The link between the Chaskalsons and the Fischers continued. Years later, in the 1980s, Ilse Fischer Wilson, Bram’s older daughter, would work as a librarian and then a paralegal at the Legal Resources Centre. When Ilse and her husband Tim finally received passports in the mid-1980s, after decades of trying, Arthur happened to be in her office and she told him the news. He was carrying a pile of papers of some sort, and he was so happy that he threw everything in his arms to the ceiling. Ilse and Tim remained friends of Arthur and Lorraine’s for life, and were among the guests at Lorraine’s 70th birthday party, which Arthur and his daughter-in-law Susie organised just months before he died.53 Ruth Fischer Rice and her husband were part of the Cape Town branch of this multi-stage party.54
*
Arthur, Joel and George continued to honour Bram Fischer’s memory through the years. In the 1980s Arthur and Joel would persuade Stephen Clingman to write Fischer’s biography. In the 1990s, after the end of apartheid, the Legal Resources Centre would establish a Bram Fischer Memorial Lecture. In 1995 Nelson Mandela gave the first of these lectures; Arthur Chaskalson gave the third, in 2000. Other Fischer lectures have been established as well, including a series now hosted by Rhodes House and another at the University of the Free State. Much earlier – probably when criminal charges were filed against him, since at this point he would have known his office would have to be closed55 – Bram had given Arthur his lawyer’s silk robe (though it was too small for Arthur, who was much taller than Fischer), his law library and his desk. The law library would find a lasting home at the LRC, and Arthur would take Fischer’s desk with him to his chambers as the first President of South Africa’s new, post-apartheid Constitutional Court. (The undersize robe was stored by the Chaskalsons in a playroom with a leaky roof, and after Arthur’s death Matthew found that it had been ‘completely destroyed’ as a result of storm damage.56)
In the 1990s efforts were also made to have Fischer restored to the roll of advocates. Initially those efforts were blocked on the ground that ‘only practising advocates may appear on the roll; someone who is no longer alive can no longer practise; therefore Bram could not be reinstated’.57 But the last were now first in South Africa, and Parliament was prevailed on to pass legislation to remove this barrier, the Reinstatement of Enrolment of Certain Deceased Legal Practitioners Act 32 of 2002. George Bizos would rely on this Act in successfully petitioning the High Court, on behalf of Fischer’s daughters, to reinstate him, in the 2004 case of The Application for the Reinstatement of Abram Fischer on the Roll of Advocates.
The High Court was fully sensitive to the historical implications of its decision. In 1965, as he approved the striking of Fischer’s name from the roll, Judge De Wet had quoted from a 1905 decision growing out of the Anglo-Boer War, Ex parte Krause, in which a leading judge of that day had spoken in favour of ‘as much as possible drawing a veil over the acts which were committed during the course of the war’. De Wet went on: ‘If the respondent were to apply for readmission at some future time, similar considerations may apply. It is impossible for this Court to foresee what will happen in the future. We are concerned with the laws in force at the present time and with the structure of the society as it exists in this country at the present time.’58 Now the High Court, sitting as a racially diverse three-judge panel, wrote:
It was, in our view, therefore appropriate that the application for his reinstatement also served before a Full Bench; but even more appropriately, before a court as representative of the diversity of our society as possible. This is the kind of society that Fischer fought for. The future time to which reference is made in the judgment for his striking off has now arrived.59
As all of these interconnections reflect, the bond between Bram and Arthur was strong and deep. It is tempting to think that perhaps Bram, close as he was to Arthur, might have offered Arthur advice about how he could best negotiate the years to come. He might have suggested to Arthur that he too should join the Communist Party, in which Bram had lived his life – or rather that Arthur should avoid joining any political party and instead should pursue a career that was emphatically lawyerly, as R.W. Johnson has suggested.60 But those who knew Bram respond that it simply was not Bram’s way to offer advice like this. George Bizos himself told me that Bram had not advised him and Arthur to be non-political.61 Joel Joffe emphasised Bram’s disposition not to offer such advice, and added that if Bram had advised people to join the Communist Party, half the Johannesburg Bar would have done so because Bram was so persuasive.62 Ilse Fischer Wilson also doubted that Bram had advised Arthur about how to handle the years ahead.63 Bram’s biographer, Stephen Clingman, wrote to me that he
never got the impression in talking with [Bram’s] colleagues – Chaskalson, Bizos, Joffe – that Bram ever expected them to follow him into illegality of any kind. He had a profound respect for individual choice, refusing to influence them in this respect – and in this respect (another paradox) he influenced them profoundly: a different kind of politics.64
