(and of Arthur); she also describes Lorraine as one of the kindest people she’s known, immensely generous, and very, very smart.8 Another friend, Orenna Krut, remembers that when she wrote her thesis for her MA at Wits, she did not have the money for a computer, and Arthur and Lorraine offered her the use of their study and their computers.9 Lorraine rose in her profession, being appointed as a full-time lecturer in English in 1974 and promoted to senior lecturer in 1980; she also was elected to the university Senate and the university Council, and sat on the Academic Staff Association Executive.10 But she found many of her colleagues at Wits difficult and inflexible.
She found more sustenance in working with African students to open up learning opportunities for them. She reached out to black students not only pedagogically but more politically as well; her decidedly personal CV says: ‘During the late 1980s and early 1990s, when there were police on campus (unthinkable before then), firing tear gas and rubber bullets at students protesting against apartheid, I was one of three Academic Staff Executive members who met regularly with the various black student organization leaders on campus.’ But her most sustained efforts were as a teacher. Early on she taught honours students from Soweto at the Chaskalson home in the afternoons and evenings.11 From 1963 to 1989 she taught black students seeking degrees from the University of London (later from the University of South Africa) under the auspices of the South African Council on Higher Education (SACHED); one of her first students was Njabulo Ndebele, who would go on to prominence as a novelist and educator. For some years she chaired SACHED’s Tertiary Education Committee. Her involvement with SACHED had its grimly educational side for her too: Lorraine remembered that at some point there was a celebration of SACHED’s progress, and three Africans from the townships came to it; at the end, she said, she naively didn’t invite them to stay the night – and they went back to the townships where one of them was murdered that night. She also taught learning skills to black students joining the Johannesburg Bar.12 Over the years, she increasingly focused on academic support teaching at Wits itself. As we will see, even these moves would not shield her from conflict and disappointment, which grew over the years, and she would retire from Wits in 1996.
Lorraine seems to have managed much of the day-to-day life of the household. She certainly did most of the cooking – and made the kitchen her preserve in part to have one area of their lives where she rather than Arthur was certainly the expert.13 She was a talented cook, who made meals that were (as I had the pleasure of experiencing) both tasty and beautiful to look at, and did so with kitchen equipment, including knives and cookware and crockery, that she had carefully selected. In 1990, Julia Child praised Lorraine’s recipe for lamb pilaf in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin.14 It may be that Arthur and Lorraine arranged a division of labour, and that Arthur handled other household matters, but if that was so, it was not completely so, because in their earlier years together Lorraine looked after the household’s domestic finances too, perhaps even including dealing with the Receiver of Revenue on Arthur’s behalf.15 Matthew recalls the ‘very conventional gender division of labour in the house when we were growing up. Until the mid-’70s, Arthur did almost no cooking or cleaning up’, but he took on more of these duties in the 1980s, and became ‘particularly proud of being able to cook a good leg of lamb’.16 In later years Arthur took over a much wider range of tasks, but that was the result of the growing physical and emotional difficulties that Lorraine encountered.
It is impossible to discuss Arthur and Lorraine without emphasising the bond between the two of them. Many people commented to me on how strong their love was, and that in itself is important, but it is also important to understand what their love entailed. Their friend Richard Rosenthal felt that Lorraine kept Arthur balanced in dealing with the workaday world, though she herself felt that each helped the other with different aspects of this balance.17 She also filled their house with beauty. They raised their two sons together, with a commitment to the boys’ freedom.
But there was much more even than this to their partnership. Joel Joffe felt that Lorraine helped Arthur to open up emotionally, and that this was crucial to his later achievements as a leader of the Legal Resources Centre and the Constitutional Court.18 Arthur had begun his career as a barrister. Lorraine recalled that Arthur didn’t talk much about his feelings; she talked about hers.19 Yet Arthur would wind up focusing on the building of institutions, such as the Legal Resources Centre and the Constitutional Court, which relied on the cooperation and fellowship of many individuals to become successful. Lorraine also contributed to Arthur’s moral thinking. As we have seen, Ilse Wilson, one of Bram Fischer’s daughters, saw Lorraine as Arthur’s moral compass, even though he himself was a very moral person.20 Arthur himself told Lorraine that she had taught him what justice is. Lorraine felt that she was more emotional about justice and injustice than Arthur was.21
It may be that Lorraine’s outspokenness on matters of justice and injustice was the precise counterpart that Arthur needed to his own circumspection. He was well known for his reluctance to speak ill of anyone; Lorraine, while outstandingly kind to those for whom she cared and to those she saw as victims of the unjust society around them, could be very blunt with others. As a political statement, this may have been an expression of candour and commitment, though it hardly built bridges; at a lunch in the early 2000s she abruptly told Tony Leon, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, that ‘I agree that we need an opposition but I certainly do not approve of the kind you run’.22 But she could also be hard on others, such as Arthur’s mother Mary, who were not necessarily subject to any real political critique. One can imagine Arthur finding much to admire in Lorraine’s candour, while also working to maintain the connections with others to whom she gave short shrift. Their son Jerome, for his part, does not recall Arthur ever telling Lorraine that something she had said went too far.23
At the same time, they did not always agree. Lorraine, for example, was extremely generous to the street people and the marginally employed so visible in South Africa, while Arthur maintained that giving money individual by individual was pointless.24 Jerome recalls that Lorraine used to drive around with a small bag containing R200 in coins to be used in giving money away in this manner.25 I remember that sometime after Arthur’s death, when my wife and I were in the car driving home one night from a restaurant with Lorraine, we passed someone she felt was in need, and at her request I walked back up the street to give this person some money. She told us, too, that she had provided a steady if modest income to a parking lot attendant she had got to know.
Lorraine’s efforts, however, were not just monetary. Years later, when she would pick her granddaughter Julia up after school, ‘she would speak to any old person with kindness and genuine interest: the ice cream man, a waiter, the garage petrol attendant’. And Julia herself ‘was always assured of her absolute undivided attention’.26 Lorraine also tried ‘to solve the shortcomings of the apartheid urban transport system on her own. Often when she fetched us from school,’ her son Matthew said in his eulogy of her, ‘our drive would be diverted because she saw a domestic worker walking and needing a lift to the nearest bus stop’ or even further if it was raining.27 She and Arthur each took their own course on such matters; they were not identical people by any means, and they were not controlling. (Zak Yacoob, however, tells a story of Arthur insisting, very early on in his relationship with Lorraine, that ‘unless she stops smoking, he is never going to see her,’ and recalls that Lorraine confirmed that he did ‘put his foot down on this issue’.28 This moment seems quite out of character for both Arthur and Lorraine and for their marriage, but perhaps at this very early point some fundamental issues had not yet been worked out between them.) In any event, they agreed, always, on the fundamental point that apartheid had to end and its after-effects had to be combated.
Perhaps the most telling account of Lorraine’s impact came from Arthur himself, in a letter he wrote to her while she was away in Israel visiting her sick father. Adrian Friedman, in his biographical notes on Arthur, emphasised this letter, in which Arthur says that when he and the boys are back in Johannesburg, he will probably ‘stay home, ignore the people and do the work’ and then, in Friedman’s
