HAROLD WOLPE: SOUTH AFRICA TODAY IS A BETRAYAL OF MY FATHER'S FIGHT FOR RIGHTS AND JUSTICE - BY PETA WOLPE

TRIBUTE

Harold Wolpe: South Africa today is a betrayal of my father’s fight for rights and justice

By Peta Wolpe• 18 January 2021
Fom the Daily Maverick

Harold Wolpe photographed in 1995. (Photo: Sue Kramer)

Harold Wolpe led his life from a moral code not just in rhetoric, but in his work and actions. This code was not borne out of greed and power, but from honesty, integrity and a deep-seated belief in equality – traits that seem largely forgotten in today’s South Africa.

Today, 19 January 2021, marks 25 years since the death of my father, activist, lawyer and acclaimed academic Harold Wolpe. It’s perhaps a fitting anniversary to reflect on the kind of person he was, his life’s work, the sacrifices he made and where we are today.

In recent years I have often wondered what his analysis would be, how he would have made sense of the corruption that has beset our country, the disappointments and the failure of government to right the wrongs of the apartheid era.

Certainly, he would recognise that there have been certain changes for the better since 1994. But it is likely that he would have the same deep concerns he raised in 1995 when he criticised the RDP policy – that the changes are not systemic or sustainable, do not go far enough and have fundamentally supported a pre-existing economic order which ultimately served only a few.

At the heart of what drove people like Harold was the determination to create a better life for all citizens without lining their own pockets and without the need for power.

“One-thousand Africans are imprisoned and convicted every day because of the pass laws and this causes untold suffering to the individual and their families and it enrages one.” He made this statement after his escape from prison in August 1963.

This rage and striving for equal rights and justice for all underpinned his very being. He led his life from a moral code not just in rhetoric, but evidenced by his work and his actions. This code was not born out of greed and power, but from honesty, integrity and a deep-seated belief in equality – traits that seem largely forgotten in today’s South Africa. As James Blignaut said in a recent Daily Maverick article, we are living in an institutionalised neo-fascist world where “statesmanship based on leadership, justice, kindness and respect is now an ancient artefact”.

Harold Wolpe was born on 14 January 1926 in Johannesburg, the youngest of four children. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. His interest in human rights and politics were evident from an early age and cemented while attending Wits University where he obtained a BA in social studies and then completed an LLB. He joined the Young Communist League and the Progressive Youth Council, was president of the Student Representative Council and a leading activist in the National Union of South African Students (Nusas).

Harold Wolpe in the late 1950s. (Photo courtesy of Peta Wolpe)

After obtaining his law degree, he practised as a lawyer and most of his work was to support political cases and protect the rights of African people. He became increasingly active in the Struggle and was instrumental in securing the purchase of the Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia, which was the headquarters of the ANC. He attended numerous political meetings and engaged in drafting and handing out political leaflets. He was active in uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC, and contributed to drawing up plans for Operation Mayibuye, the sabotage and military plan that underpinned MK. In short, he was an activist.

In 1960 he was detained under the State of Emergency after Sharpeville and again in July 1963 after the Rivonia arrests, when he was held under the 90-Day Act without charge. He and the other 90-day prisoners were kept in solitary confinement with no access to books. It was only during short exercise breaks that they were able to communicate illicitly with other prisoners.

The Rivonia arrests resulted in the top members of the ANC being detained and led to the well-documented Rivonia Trial in which Nelson Mandela and nine others were charged with sabotage, with eight sentenced to life imprisonment. Wolpe would have been part of that trial except that he and three others managed a dramatic escape from prison.

Rand Daily Mail front page, 13 August 1963. (Photo: Supplied)

In recounting the escape later, his elation at escaping from prison was not primarily from personal relief at his freedom. Rather it was caused by the change of mood engendered by the escape in the townships. “Subversion has been crushed and the underground has been broken, it was claimed. Then came our escape magnificently carried out by very brave men in the face of the biggest manhunt ever organised in South Africa,” he said. In place of a sense of defeat following the Rivonia arrests, the people were overjoyed and saw the escape as proof that the movement was far from dead.

Many activists talk about their imprisonment and solitary confinement almost in a matter-of-fact manner, minimising the personal trauma they experienced. Their accounts are about the Struggle and why they did what they did. Almost none speak of the personal sacrifice, of the impact of their activism on themselves or their families. This was not about them as individuals, but about a cause they felt compelled to be involved in.

Following his arrival in the UK and in response to a letter criticising his actions, my father wrote:

“I was amazed by your suggestion that I did whatever I did without due consideration to the possible consequences to other people. That this suggestion should be made to one who has striven for the past 20 years for the elimination of racialism and for the amelioration of the plight of the non-white people in South Africa is little short of insulting. Whether or not you agree with my approach to the solutions of South Africa’s problems, I think you must concede that it is obvious that I have worked in the interests, according to the way I saw things, of other people at great personal cost.

“Before you condemn so easily perhaps you should give some consideration to this and to the alternatives which face those who are prepared to risk all for what they believe to be a just cause, that is the liberation of all the people of South Africa.”

This just cause and this moral code have not been lived out in democratic South Africa. The story of South Africa from 1948 until its democracy in 1994 is remarkable in many ways and in historical terms fairly peaceful. Yet, since 1994 the hopes, intentions and promises of the ANC have not been delivered upon. The South Africa of today is built on corruption, greed and personal gain. This is a betrayal of all citizens and is not what my father and the other Struggle veterans fought for.

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi reminds us that “the unimaginable can happen again” and that those who chose not to see what was in front of them can do so again and again. He writes that most countries will come up against those who crave power, where economic success, racism and political and religious dominance reign. The racism that Trump incentivised as president of the US is testament to that.

“It is necessary for us to distrust the prophets, the enchanters, those who speak and write ‘beautiful words’ unsupported by intelligent reasons,” Levi wrote.

Is this not the case in South Africa since democracy? Is this what has happened to many people and our leaders of today? Is the inherent notion of a politics of humanity something of the past?

The recent documentary on the South African Rugby World Cup win of 2019, Chasing the Sun, gave some hope that something has shifted, however fragile. A commentator said the try in the final by Makazole Mapimpi was “scored by possibly the player that has come from the most hopeless situation in the history of Springbok rugby”. The coach said he was not only playing for South Africa, but that his score and our win represented a human story – a story of where we as a country have reached and where we can and need to get to. This glimmer of hope is what Harold Wolpe and many others fought for during the Struggle. This is the story they hoped to achieve and hoped would be played out in the new democratic South Africa.

DM

January 12, 2021

Defending Apartheid

by Lawrence Davidson
12 January 2021

In 2017 the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) issued a report on the conditions of Palestinians under Israeli rule. The report covered the situations of both Palestinian citizens of Israel and the subject population in the Occupied Territories. The report concluded “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”

Though U.S. and Israeli pressure managed to suppress the report, evidence for this charge of apartheid is clear-cut. More recently, the facts have been brought together in a succinct presentation by the noted journalist Jonathan Cook. In a 2018 issue of The Link, a publication of Americans for Middle East Understanding, he wrote an expose` entitled “Apartheid Israel.” Some of the particulars Cook looks at are citizenship inequality, nationality inequality, marriage inequality, legal inequality, and residential inequality. The predictable Palestinian struggle seeking equality and the end of apartheid is seen as a subversive movement by both Israel’s Jewish majority and its increasingly rightwing governments.

Of course, some Israeli Jews do understand that the country has a serious problem with racism. For instance, this comes through in the June 2020 Haaretz report that indicates that as “world sensitivity to racism and oppression” increases “historical injustice in Israel is … only getting worse.”

The “Nation-State” Law

One of the ways things are getting worse in Israel is through the enshrining of Zionist-inspired apartheid in law. On 18 July 2018 the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) enacted a “Nation-State” Law. It defines the State of Israel as the nation-state “of the Jewish people only.” In other words, only Jews can hold “nationality rights” in Israel.

MK (member of the Knesset) Yariv Levin dubbed the law “Zionism’s flagship bill … that will put Israel back on the right path. A country that is different from all others in one way, that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people.” MK Amir Ohana, who chaired the special committee that shaped the bill, stated: “This is the law of all laws. It is the most important law in the history of the State of Israel, which says that everyone has human rights, but national rights in Israel belong only to the Jewish people.” The absurdity of this proposition is exposed by the fact that the Palestinian minority has been denied significant aspects of its human rights for over 70 years. As it turns out, the two categories of rights, national and human, have been interdependent ever since the development of the sovereign state.

Hannah Arendt’s Insight

Acting on the claim that one can separate out human rights, much less civil rights, from “national rights” has proven disastrous in the modern political era. Significantly, it was a brilliant Jewish intellectual, Hannah Arendt, who pointed this out following the horror of the Holocaust and on the occasion of the U.N. pronouncement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Arendt pointed out that, in the era of the nation-state, rights are defined and enforced within state entities claiming sovereignty over both territory and population. If a state decides that for racial, ethnic, religious, or any other reason, that only one portion of its population is worthy of first-class citizenship, it can proceed to deny to all those who do not qualify any and all rights. This is, of course, what the Nazis did to the Jews, and more recently is reflected in how Myanmar treats its ethnic minorities, how China treats its Uyghur population, and Saudi Arabia discriminates against its Shia religious minority, and so.

The United Nations has proven unable to effectively challenge this perversion of sovereignty. Keep in mind that the United Nations is itself made up of nation-states which reserve the power to discriminate as a consequence of sovereignty. This has made it difficult for the U.N., as an organization, to enforce a “universal” and “inalienable” conception of rights. In truth, the only way to achieve universal rights is to replace the nation-state’s claim that its sovereignty allows it alone to grant rights—replace it with enforceable international law that assures equitable application of rights.

Israel’s High Court of Justice Defends Apartheid

Israel is now acting out the scenario Arendt identified. There were many complaints against the nation-state bill, coming not only from the Palestinian Arabs, but also from the Druze community and even elements of the Mizrachi Jewish population. Thus, on 22 December 2020, fully two and a half years after the passage of the bill, the High Court of Justice held a public review of the law.

Two sections of the law drew particular objection from those appearing before the court. First was the objection to the bill’s official designation of “Jewish settlement as a value that the state is obligated to promote.” Considering the fact that such settlements most often lead to eviction of Palestinians from their land and homes, and the steady segregation of populations based on ethnicity and religion, it can’t help but be seen as an important historical factor in Zionist apartheid. The second was the law’s purposeful demotion of Arabic—it will no longer be an official language of Israel. The implication here is that loss of recognition of the language spoken by the Palestinians, Druze, and at least the first generation of Mizrachi Jews is equivalent to their loss of equal social and political status with those who speak Hebrew.

Throughout the ensuing debate the eleven High Court judges could not, or would not, recognize that giving elite legal and social status in law to one group of religiously identified citizens must have detrimental legal consequences for other non-elite citizens and subjects. That it would was a point made by Attorney Hassan Jabareen, the director of Adalah—the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights.

The rejoinder of the judges made in reference to the emphasis on “Jewish settlement” was that “the fact that Jewish settlement is perceived as a national value does not mean that there should be no equal allocation and legitimate civil rights for others.” As observers noted, this reply is ahistorical. It simply ignores Israel’s history of “over 70 years of discrimination, in which hundreds of towns, cities, and villages were established for Jews while not a single new locale was built for Palestinian citizens. As if Palestinian land was not expropriated for constructing Jewish communities.”

The same obtuseness was displayed when it came to the demotion of the Arabic language. The judges just could not see why losing its status as an official language was so painful for Arabic speakers. They were not moved when one of the plaintiffs pointed out, “there is a violation of convention here. The rules of the game have changed. My language, at least formally, has maintained its status from the time of the Ottomans until the 20th Knesset. Language was the only collective right [afforded to] the indigenous minority in its homeland.”

The cultural divide between Jews and non-Jews in Israel/Palestine that has been evolving into apartheid since before 1948 reached a tragic legal climax in the decision-making of these eleven judges. They confirmed in law a process that condemns non-Jews to a legal no-man’s-land. As the Druze lawyer told the court, “There is not a word on minority rights; it is a badge of shame for the State of Israel. … It is doubtful whether Jewish students who are educated on this law will be willing to accept Arab citizens at all in the future.”

“The Desired Reality”

Why were the eleven Israeli High Court judges so obtuse? Perhaps it is because they have been acculturated to see Zionist Israel as an exceptional place—a justification unto itself. As Yariv Levin described it above, Israel is “a country that is different from all others in one way, that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people.” This exclusiveness is the raison d’être of the Zionist project—it is its ultimate “noble” goal. For those within the exclusive Zionist tent, assigning the term apartheid to their accomplishment is to judge a special case by supposedly non-applicable generic rules. To persist in doing so is regarded as a sign of anti-Semitism rather than facing the facts.

This situation has been addressed by the Haaretz journalist Amira Haas. Haas is “the daughter of Holocaust survivors and resides in Ramallah, where she is the only Jewish Israeli journalist living in the West Bank.” She was in the United States in June 2019 and gave an interview to Mari Cohen for the publication Jewish Currents.

Haas explains the current situation this way: “The current reality is actually one state, which is an apartheid state. This means there are two separate laws: one for Palestinians and one for Israeli Jews. The Palestinian population is subdivided into groups and subgroups like the nonwhite population of [former apartheid] South Africa. They’re disconnected from each other. They are treated differently by Israel, while Israeli Jews live in the entire country, like one people, with full rights.”

The apartheid nature of Israel is a developmental plan of the state. Haas explains that Israel’s main goal is “to get more land, and to manipulate the Palestinian demography. … You see that this is really a plan. [Israeli leaders] sit and they think about how to implement it, and what regulations will achieve this goal. … One by one, step by step.” And, one has to conclude after seventy years that Israeli apartheid is sustainable because most of the world’s governments accept it. That, of course, could change, but there is no sign that it will in the near future.

It is also sustainable because it is what Israeli Jews want. “For Israel, this is the desired reality: that Palestinians live in their enclaves, deprived of any ability to develop their economy, and that the world gives them donations so that they can sustain themselves. And that’s it. There is no desire on the part of Israel to reach a different reality. There has been a kind of an illusion among Jews [in the diaspora] that Israel wants a solution. But [Israeli Jews] don’t see that this is a problem.”

Can it get worse? Yes, it can. Religious fanaticism can make it worse. Haas goes on to explain, “The question is, will the Israeli messianic religious right-wing segment of the population that has gained a lot of power in Israeli politics—will it succeed in accomplishing its aims: the mass expulsion of Palestinians and annexation of the great majority of the West Bank? It’s not enough for them to have Palestinians living in enclaves. They want more.”

It is this overall attitude that explains the ability of Israeli Jews to feel little or no obligation to help Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to maintain their health care systems or provide Covid-19 vaccinations. The act of official segregation has not diminished Israeli control, only any acceptance of Israeli responsibility.

Conclusion

History is full of tragic irony. At the end of the 19th century Germany was considered one of the most civilized nations on the planet. One world war and a Great Depression later, many Germans were electing Nazis and gearing up for the Holocaust. Up until the mid-20th century, the Jewish people were considered peace-loving and a reservoir of brilliant minds. One Holocaust later, many of them, both survivors and those in the diaspora, had joined a Zionist movement determined to create a racist warrior state.

Over time we become products of our local environment. That environment narrows our range of thought and choice. When the environment changes, those who endure change with it, not always for the best. The Holocaust traumatized its survivors, and some of them went on to produce “a nation-state for the Jewish people.” They might have pulled this off benignly if they had done so on some unpopulated planet. However, they chose Palestine in an allusion to biblical Israel—a disingenuous choice given that most Zionists were atheists. Palestine was not an unpopulated place, and thus, today, over 20 percent of Israel’s population is not Jewish.

The fact that Palestinians have no nationality rights means, historically, that their possession of any other sort of rights is precarious. They are like the Jews in any number of anti-Semitic historical circumstances—a fact that seems to have escaped our modern-day Hebrews.

It didn’t have to be this way. As a species we have a very wide range of experience, and with the proper historical awareness we can broaden out our current decision-making beyond the dictates of our local environment. In fact, after World War II some Jews tried to do just this. Even through the trauma of the Holocaust, they could see that the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine meant war with the indigenous population. Their own sense of the Jewish past told them that there were alternatives. These people were known as “cultural Zionists,” and they sought a democratic, equalitarian Palestine as a shared, multicultural home that guaranteed the protection and continuing development of Jewish cultural heritage, alongside those of Muslims and Christians. Palestine could have become a “spiritual” home for the Jews, with generous though controlled immigration opportunities. It was a possible peaceful route to Jewish recovery after the Holocaust.

Whatever one might think of this alternative, it was never seriously considered by those “political” Zionists convinced by persistent anti-Semitism that the survival of the Jews could only come through having their own nation-state. This path combined an evolving Jewish nationalism with a racist exclusiveness (the “chosen people” claim) that also ran through Jewish history. Zionists ignored that part of their historical reality, and today’s Apartheid Israel, along with its insistence that Judaism and Zionism are synonymous, is the result. As you sow, so shall you reap.

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.

SOUTH AFRICA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; AUSTRALIA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; ISRAEL - APARTHEID POLICE STATE

HOTEL HELL FOR REFUGEES

Headline on front page of Preston Leader on Tuesday 10 March 2020 (This is a Murdoch paper!!! )

Whatever happened to our so-called democracies?

Starting with South Africa, the world waited with bated breath for dramatic changes when Nelson Mandela became the first black president of a united South Africa and possibly the end of apartheid - and the police state.

Mandela retired after his first and only 5-year term as president - he was, of course, quite elderly by then and after the criminally hard life he had had in South Africa's infamously dreadful prison on Robben Island, he rightly thought a younger generation should govern for South Africa.

He  wrongly favoured Thabo Mbeki who was disastrous during his periods as president because he was an AIDS denier to the extent that even today, a few presidents later, HIV/AIDS still presents a major health challenge for the South African people.

A little later Jacob Zuma became president and corruption set in, with disastrous results for the economy and all other facets of South African life.

One of the disasters of this period was the Marikana massacre of many miners who had gone on strike because of the murderous mismanagement of the company owning certain mines.

The person who is now the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was apparently the person who ordered the police and the army to open fire on the miners. In an earlier incarnation he had been the president of the organisation Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Then he became a business man and also very rich.

Disaster all the way, and the rich got richer and the poor poorer - if possble -  and South Africa still remains a mess - in 2020.

I arrived in Australia from South Africa in 1978, hoping apartheid and police state would not be as bad as in South Africa.

Idle hope! After all, apartheid started in Australia on 26 January 1788 and the nature of the British colonisation of Australia was that it was already a police state. Instead of improving over the years, the police state has intensified to the extent that asylum seekers managing to get to Australia - escaping mostly from brutal regimes around the world and arriving here to ask for asylum, hoping to have peace in their lives, are locked up in concentration camps from which escape is virtually impossible.

Some slightly more humanitarian politicians - and they are few and far between in Australia - managed to pass legislation to bring refugees to Australia from the concentration camps on Manus and Nauru for medical treatment.   This legislation was overturned by the government as soon as it was possible, and 55 asylum seekers have been locked up in a Mantra Hotel in Preston in Melbourne for the last 8 months with no chance of any relief in sight and no hope of change from a government and opposition determined to follow a police state mentality of locking people in concentration camps and throwing away the keys.

What is mostly ignored by most white Australians and many migrants in the last 200 years or so is that the indigenous inhabitants of this ancient country are still treated like savages in their own land and they are imprisoned at alarming rates where they are also suffering deaths in custody by a brutal police regime determinedly maintained by the police state governments of the country.

Some of those of us who have experienced the "joys" of living in a police state despair of any changes in Australia because so many people behave like sheep and also can - or won't be bothered with making any sorts of protests and leaving the rest of us with that hopeless feeling that there is never going to be any changes - ever!

At the age of 93 I thought I had seen and experienced most of the worst aspects of human nature but the longer I live the worse it gets - and I haven't spoken about Israel yet.

Israel is not only a police state, but one with fascist tendencies. Israelis resent being compared to the Nazis but most of what they are doing to keep the Palestinians under control is to keep them incarcerated in their concentration camps in Gaza and the West Bank on land stolen from them by the zionist settlers. Even those Palestinians who were and are in Israel as citizens of their own land are treated like second or third class citizens without full citizens' rights because the zionist project is to occupy the rest of Palestine which has some old Jewish names - Judea and Samaria - for them called after some of the old tribal groups of a few thousand years ago.

Israel wants a Jewish state and if that is what they want, Israel under no circumstances can be called a democracy - it hasn't been that for most of its existence - but a theocracy similar to Iran and other  similar religious states.

.........and Israel is the propagator of much of the anti-semitism in the world in the 21st century.

MALCOLM TURNBULL AND ALL HIS POLITICAL ALLIES ARE EXTREMIST WHITE RACISTS WHO SHOULD BY NOW HAVE HEARD OF APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, THE POLICE STATE

The longer I live in Australia, already 40 years, after living in the South African apartheid police state for 50 years, the longer I have to despair at the racism so inherent in the country I am confined to living in to the end of my days.

At 91 those days can't be far off but the longer I live the more I despair of any sign of democracy and increasing signs of authoritarian racist police state behaviour.

Most Australian politicians seem to have inherited the British racism which has existed for so long and is still in evidence in the UK of today, 2018.

The expression of racism to help win elections at all costs is an ugliness which seems to get worse as the years roll by.

Malcolm Turnbull and his cronies are determined to make race an issue in the 2018 Victorian state election by attacking "black gangs who make the streets of Melbourne unsafe and a danger to its citizens."

The trouble is that people remain gullible and believe the crap that pours out of the mouths of so many of Australia's politicians.

It is an agony for those of us who can see through the nonsense and can do nothing about it except write protest blogs to get it off our chests and know we are powerless to be able to effect change.

Racism has always been inherent in Australian society, but with Abbott and Turnbull and Dutton and several others in parliament in Canberra as well as in most of the states, the white Australian male diktat is rearing its ugly head more and more.

Poor Malcolm, my partner is 95 and I am 91 and we would be happy to go out for dinner anywhere if we were still able to, and the fact that the federal government is doing its best to support the racist opposition in Victoria to help it get elected in November 2018 is probably going to have the opposite effect.

CECIL WILLIAMS - FREEDOM FIGHTER

CECIL WILLIAMS – FREEDOM FIGHTER

6 February 2017

Mark Gevisser is a South African writer and journalist. In about 1997 Gevisser made a film called “The Man Who Drove With Mandela which was issued originally on a VCR and in 1998 it was issued in DVD format.

I went to school in Johannesburg, South Africa from 1933 to 1943. The school had a primary school and a secondary school, each with their own premises on separate but related pieces of land next to each other. In those days they were called prep. (preparatory) school and high school, and I went to High school in 1939, the year the second world war started.

The school was called King Edward VII School because it was founded in the new mining town of Johannesburg in 1905 and King Edward VII was on the throne in Great Britain and South Africa was a colony of Great Britain after Great Britain had won the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902.

In 1910 the four colonies in South Africa were combined and South Africa became a dominion of Great Britain and joined other dominions like Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Our school was very “English” in its education and teachers, and some of our teachers in High School actually came from Britain.

When I got to high school in 1939 we were divided up into different classes from what we had had in primary school, so we had different teachers for different subjects.

One of the teachers of English was, in fact, an Englishman called Cecil Williams, and it was only as time went on during the war and after the war ended in 1945 that Cecil Williams’ name became very well known in South Africa.

I was not fortunate enough to be put in a class taught English by Williams, but somehow – as happens with schoolboys – the boys knew he was homosexual and they also knew where he lived in the City. In those days homosexuals were called queer and many other names, most of which I have now forgotten, and because there are so many different words used in the late 20^th and early 21 centuries.

Williams went from school as a teacher into the Royal Navy during the war, and when he came back to South Africa after 1945 he did not go back to teaching but became a broadcaster for the South African Broadcasting Corporation and also an actor and theatre producer and he was very well known and acclaimed for his productions and acting.

In the mean time there was another side to Williams which most of us didn’t know about and even when we went to university in the mid to late 1940s, he was mostly known for his acting and broadcasting, and basically that is all we know.

Field Marshal Jan Smuts had been one of the generals during the 1899-1902 war and when that war ended he had remained close to the British in his affiliations and politics. When Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, Smuts was in opposition in the South African parliament and when a vote was taken by the South African parliament as to whether South Africa should join the war with Britain or should remain outside the war as many South Africans wanted the government to do, the government lost its majority and Smuts won enough to take over the government and thus joined the British war effort.

After the war ended in 1945, Smuts was still the prime minister, but at the election in 1948 Smuts lost power and the Nationalist party came to power, and that was more or less the beginning of official apartheid although of course it had existed since white settlement started in South Africa in 1652 when the Dutch established a colony in the Cape as a half way house to the Dutch East Indies, now called Indonesia.

At that stage in South Africa, in about 1948, the South African population consisted of about 8 million people of whom six million were black and two million were white.

The whites had the power and ruled the country and the blacks were the labourers without any political rights and were treated as third class citizens of their own country.

The next part of the story is recorded in South African History online:

Cecil Williams was born in Cornwall, England in 1906. He left for Johannesburg in 1928 and worked as an English teacher.

During World War II he switched to journalism and then became a theatre director using black and white actors.

Being gay he often got assaulted.

After the war when South African soldiers returned from Italy and other war zones, the ex-servicemen formed an organisation called the Springbok Legion  and War Veterans Action Committee – formed in 1951 - and Williams became an active member and became chairman of the Springbok Legion.

Williams worked closely with Bram Fischer ( a leading barrister at the time) in bringing the Springbok Legion and the Congress of Democrats (COD) together.

In 1953 The Springbok Legion’s offices were raided by the security police, and the Minister of Police ordered Williams and his colleague Alan Lipman to resign from any organisation they belonged to. They were banned from any gathering or meeting for two years.

In 1954, after the formation of the Congress of Democrats (COD) and the newly revived South African Communist Party (SACP), because these organisations were banned by the Nationalist Party government, they operated underground with freedom fighters which included Rusty Bernstein, Ruth First (later murdered in Mozambique by the South African government) Cecil Williams and Rica Hodgson.

Williams served in the first executive committee later serving as vice-chairman and he later became part of the underground unit.

In 1959 Williams was tried for treason but later acquitted.

Involvement in the activities of the banned SACP and opposition to racism led to contact with Nelson Mandela.

After the banning of the African National Congress (ANC) and the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC, Williams became involved in underground work of MK. For instance, when Mandela returned from military training in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia, formerly Abyssinia), he was met by Williams in Bechuanaland (now Botswana) They continued to work together intil 1962 when Mandela was arrested posing as David Motsemayi – a chauffeur for Williams.

The story of how Mandela was caught got much publicity, but there was not much ever about the man he was driving that day.

Though involved in the struggle, Williams kept that part of his life separate from his personal life. Consequently few knew about his political activities and his lifestyle as a gay person.

After Mandela’s arrest, Williams left South Africa for Britain, where he lived until his death in 1979.

Mandela tells of his friendship with, and assistance from Cecil Williams in his biography LONG WALK TO FREEDOM (published by Abacus in 1995) but once Mandela was imprisoned in 1964 he possibly didn’t have the contacts or ability to find out what had happened to Cecil, as he called him in the book.

The film about the Mandela arrest with Cecil Williams is the first paragraph of this story, but what happened to Williams after he left South Africa? Did he get involved in the UK with the anti-apartheid movement in the UK?  I believe research in the UK will be richly rewarded into the later years of Cecil Williams’ life.

There are probably many facets of Williams’ life and political activities in the latter years of his life, but many of us remember some of his life in South Africa which, as far as we knew, was not political.

Cecil Williams was well known as a broadcaster on the airwaves in South Africa with the South African Broadcasting Corporation, but became more widely known as an actor, producer, director and theatre manager which must have made this a very fulfilling life.

I firmly believe Cecil Williams to have been a freedom fighter of our times and someone for whom recognition of his activities and his bravery in the context of the brutal South African apartheid and police state regime need to be recorded and acknowledged for all to know about.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1951 and have been receiving alumni journals and magazines over the years.

The alumni journal is called WITSReview and an article in a recent issue was about a sculpture erected at the place Mandela was arrested by apartheid police in 1962.

Here is the article, followed by my letter to the journal a few months later:

WITSReview

March 2015 Volume 31

In 2012, an artist and anarchitect collaborated to create Release,

a sculpture honouring Nelson Mandela at the site where he was

captured in KwaZulu-Natal in 1962. Marco Cianfanelli

and Jeremy Rose regrouped in 2014 to craft falcons and

forests in a mall in Abu Dhabi.

Falcons &

Freedom

Fighters

BY DEBORAH MINORS

ARTIST: MARCO CIANFANELLI. ARCHITECT/ARTISTIC COLLABORATOR: JEREMY ROSE OF MASHABANE ROSE ARCHITECTS. 

RELEASE 2012. PAINTED LASER-CUT MILD STEEL AND STEEL TUBE CONSTRUCTION/TO BE RUSTED: WIDTH: 5.19-METRES |

HEIGHT: 9.48-METRES | LENGTH: 20.8-METRES

March 2015

Joburg-born Cianfanelli graduated with a distinction in Fine Arts from Wits in 1993.

He is an artist “constantly looking to realise art where one doesn’t expect to find it”.

A rambling road in KwaZulu-Natal’s Midlands is one such space. It was on such a road

that Nelson Mandela, operating “underground”, was driving on 5 August 1962, posing as a

chauffeur. Just outside Howick, he was flagged down by apartheid police. They’d been tipped

off about the driver’s real identity. Mandela was exposed, arrested and eventually imprisoned for 27

years. 

Cianfanelli’s sculpture Release, of Mandela at this capture site, was unveiled 50 years later on

4 August 2012.

The sculpture is made from 50 steel columns, each about 8-metres tall and planted on a concrete

base. The sculpture comes into focus from 35-metres and the image of Mandela emerges.

 

Viewed from the side, however, the design and arrangement of the columns create a sense of

fracture – or release. The sculpture is affected by the changing light around it, and visually shifts

throughout the day. It both exerts influence on and is part of its surroundings.

 

Silhouettes of human figures, like Release, are characteristic of Cianfanelli’s art – colossal works

in steel. He creates monumental silhouettes that juxtapose with other shapes and enable

unexpected connections in social forces to emerge.

Locating Release in the rolling Midlands landscape was thus not only accurate, but deliberate – and

required an architect.

Jeremy Rose (BArch 1988) is Principal Architect at Mashabane Rose Architects in Johannesburg. His consultancy work focuses on museums and cultural heritage site projects, and has included designing the Apartheid Museum and the Robben Island heritage site.

Cianfanelli and Rose regrouped in May 2014.

A property firm commissioned them to install a

sculpture in Yas Mall, which opened on Yas Island

in the United Arab Emirates in November 2014.

The artwork, currently untitled but referred to as

the

Swooping Falcons, is made of 140 tonnes of

steel. The

Swooping Falcons, like

Release, fluctuate

with the viewer’s perspective.

The mall doors open to a massive sculpture of

six falcons aloft 132 columns, each 18-metres

tall. “The idea is that, as you move around the

sculpture, you see different falcons from different

angles,” explains Cianfanelli. “From any position,

you will see one falcon and the others will

break apart, becoming an expression of rhythm,

movement or flight.”

Whichever way you look at it, this artistic alumni

collaboration continues to soar.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 2015

WITSReview Volume 33

LETTERS

The Man who drove with Mandela

Dear Editor,

Deborah Minors’ article (WR March 2015) about the sculpture Release honouring Nelson Mandela at the

site where he was captured in 1962, in what was then either Zululand or Natal, is part of the story of that

eventful trip which needs to be told in full, and probably needs a sculpture supplemented to honour the man who was with Mandela when the capture took place.

Cecil Williams had gone to fetch Mandela from a meeting in Natal and they were returning to Johannesburg.

Quoting from the DVD called The Man who Drove with Mandela, the story unfolds as follows:

“Driving a gleaming Austin Westminster, Mandela was able to travel around the country by

disguising himself as a chauffeur for an elegant, impeccably dressed white man. That man, Cecil Williams, was a leading Johannesburg theatre director and a committed anti-apartheid freedom fighter.”

In fact, Cecil Williams was so very much more than that. When WWII started on 3 September 1939, he

was teaching English at King Edward VII High School in Johannesburg.

 

He had a flat in Anstey’s Building in Joubert Street and, apart from his gay activities which some of us

at the school had heard about, he was involved with the South African Communist Party. He also broadcast

on SABC and acted in theatre. When the war started he joined the navy (he was an Englishman) and after the war his political activities increased untithe fateful day when he was in the car with Mandela, the whereabouts of whom had been revealed to the South African authorities by those in the USA who didn’t want apartheid to end.

Cecil Williams needs to be recorded historically in the South African anti-apartheid struggle, and the DVD

of this episode is well worth seeing.

Actor Corin Redgrave plays Cecil Williams in the 1998 film directed by Greta Schiller.

Mannie De Saxe (BSc Eng Mech 1951 Wits.), now living in Australia

 

THE GUARDIAN, ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN AND "THE ONLY DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST, ISRAEL"

I personally don't think I can add much to what Tony Greenstein has laid out below, but let's go back to the old days when this "august" newspaper was known as the Manchester Guardian. Back then I believe the newspaper was known for its generally left-wing views on the political issues of the day - after WWII from 1950 onwards.

In its later manifestation it had gained so much readership from elsewhere in the UK south of Manchester that it changed its name to "The Guardian.

When one of South Africa's remaining anti-apartheid newspapers was busy collapsing due to the ramifications of the apartheid government - the South African one, not the Israeli one -  the Guardian  more or stepped in and provided an alternative newspaper voice and the paper in South Africa to this day is called the Mail and Guardian.

The Guardian along the way has spread its wings until these days, in the 2000s, it is as right wing as they come. 

What a shame and what a disgrace is their behaviour towards Antony Loewenstein and others who have other political views to the developing right-wing approach being pushed by the Guardian.

What a let-down to everybody in this reactionary political climate around the world to have what was one of the remaining newspapers with a little proper journalism still left, losing the plot altogether and supporting apartheid Israel at a time when Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions are beginning to show their effect on apartheid Israel.

---------------------------------------------------------

 

Saturday, 24 December 2016 - from Tony Greenstein blog

Guardian Cowardice as it abandons Antony Loewenstein to Israel's Ministry of Information

Antony Loewenstein's profile on Guardian website which lists over a 100 articles he has written

The article below by Jonathan Cook, a freelance journalist who used to work for The Guardian is self-explanatory.  A journalist, Antony Loewenstein, who has contributed 90 articles to the Guardian over the past 3 years as a freelance journalist, had the temerity to ask a difficult question of Israel’s uber-racist politician Yair Lapid, the head of Yesh Atid.  Lapid masquerades as a Zionist centrist but he is virtually indistinguishable from Netanyahu. 

Antony Loewenstein - his crime was asking an uncomfortable question of Israeli MK and leader of Yesh Atid, Yair Lapid, a notorious racist opposed to 'mixed-race' i.e. Jewish-Arab liaisons

Loewenstein dared ask whether Israel’s treatment of the millions of Palestinians under military rule merited the accolade of it being an Apartheid state.   Nothing makes the defenders of ‘Israeli democracy’ bristle more than the word ‘Apartheid’ though quite how you describe a situation where 4 million Palestinians are held under military rule for nigh on 50 years at the very same time as Jewish settlers are subject to normal civil law, defies me.  Jimmy Carter, the former US President, was given similar treatment when he made this obvious comparison too.

HonestReporting is one of the many Israeli funded groups which dedicated themselves to combating unsympathetic coverage of Israeli and Zionist repression and racism

Either way a nasty little campaign has arisen, during which it has been falsely claimed that Loewenstein claimed to work for the Guardian as a permanent correspondent.  Loewenstein has been made the target of the so-called HonestReporting group, one of these Israeli funded groups whose main purpose in life is to intimidate journalists who are not singing from Israel’s hymn sheet.  When they contacted the Guardian to ask whether in fact Loewenstein works for them, rather than being told he is a freelance journalist who contributes copy, the Guardian distanced themselves from him. 

A cursory visit to Lowenstein’s profile on the Guardian website shows just how many articles he’s contributed in the past few.  The total is about 105. For the Guardian to now distance himself from the Israeli government and its Zionist chorus who wish to expel inconvenient journalists is despicable.

Tony Greenstein

Guardian newspaper fails to support colleague facing deportation threat from Israeli government

23 December 2016

Mondoweiss – 23 December 2016

Harriet Sherwood, former Guardian Israel correspondent, now their religious affairs correspondent.  Perhaps appropriate since her behaviour towards Loewenstein resembleds that of Judas towards Jesus

Israel is reported to be ready to expel an award-winning Australian journalist and writer, Antony Loewenstein, after he asked a too-probing question of an Israeli politician at a media event last week. Government officials have said they are investigating how they can deny him his work visa when it comes up for renewal in March.

It is unsurprising to learn that Israel has no serious regard for press freedom. But more depressing has been the lack of solidarity shown by journalistic colleagues, most especially the Guardian newspaper, for which he has regularly worked as a freelancer since 2013. Not only has the paper failed to offer him any support, but its management and staff reporters have hurried to distance themselves from him.

Sherwood on Twitter demonstrating that when it comes to solidarity with journalists under attack, the Guardian's journalists retreat by example

A deferential foreign press

Loewenstein has been under fire since he attended the event in Jerusalem, hosted by the Foreign Press Association (FPA), on December 12. According to the Israeli media, he asked former government minister Yair Lapid: “Is there not a deluded idea here that many Israeli politicians, including yourself, continue to believe that one can talk to the world about democracy, freedom and human rights while denying that to millions of Palestinians, and will there not come a time soon, in a year, five years, 10 years, when you and other politicians will be treated like South African politicians during Apartheid?”

Peter Beaumont - Guardian's Jerusalem correspondent in the normal act of solidarity one expects of Guardian journalists denied all knowledge of Loewenstein 

Israeli politicians are not used to hearing such difficult questions from members of the FPA, a professional association for journalists working in Israel. The reason for their deference to Israeli officials was explained to me a few years ago by an FPA insider. He revealed that not only are most of these correspondents Jewish – as Loewenstein himself is – but, unlike Loewenstein, they deeply identify with Israel. They live in Israel, not the occupied territories, they speak Hebrew, send their children to Israeli schools and expect them to serve in the Israeli army. Some of the reporters have served in the army themselves.

Perhaps most famously, former New York Times bureau chief Ethan Bronner was embarrassed in 2010 by the disclosure that he and the NYT had not divulged that his son was serving in the Israeli army while Bronner reported from the region. There was nothing exceptional about Bronner’s professional conflict of interest. My confidant told me: “I can think of a dozen foreign bureau chiefs, responsible for covering both Israel and the Palestinians, who have served in the Israeli army, and another dozen who like Bronner have kids in the Israeli army.”

He added: “The degree to which Bronner’s personal life, like that of most lead journalists here, is integrated into Israeli society, makes him an excellent candidate to cover Israeli political life, cultural shifts and intellectual life. The problem is that Bronner is also expected to be his paper’s lead voice on Palestinian political life, cultural shifts and intellectual life, all in a society he has almost no connection to, deep knowledge of or even the ability to directly communicate with.”

Most publications appear to believe that the benefits of employing openly partisan reporters – and all of them partisan towards the same party in the conflict – outweighs any potential damage to claims that they are neutral and impartial. The outlets hope their partisanship will offer them an advantage: gaining unfettered access to the corridors of power, whether in the Israeli government or army.

With this background in mind, it is possible to understand why Loewenstein described the tenor of the FPA event in the following terms: “With a few notable exceptions, the vast majority of journalists in attendance were deferential to Lapid and asked him bland questions.”

No support from the FPA

Loewenstein’s failure to follow the standard FPA rules of politesse when addressing an Israeli politician triggered a campaign against him by Honest Reporting. The group is one of several US-based media lobby organizations whose job is to intimidate foreign media organizations on behalf of the Israeli government. In this way, they have been successful in limiting critical coverage of Israel even further. Staff reporters tend to self-censor, while freelance journalists are pressured to leave the region.

In a transparent maneuver, Honest Reporting sought to paint Loewenstein as politically extreme for his past support for BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions), and as an activist rather than a journalist. That is no easy task. In addition to the Guardian, he has written for many leading publications in Europe, Australia and the US, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, the Nation, Le Monde diplomatique, the Huffington Post, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, and many more.

He has also written several books covering a diverse range of topics, including his best-seller My Israel Question, in which he considers his own Jewish identity and relates it to issues of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. (Full disclosure: I contributed a chapter to a 2012 volume, After Zionism, he edited with Ahmed Moor.) He is currently working on a documentary based on his book Disaster Capitalism.

In other words, Loewenstein is not only a journalist; he is the gold-standard for serious independent, critical-thinking journalists. Which, of course, is precisely the reason Israel would want him gone.

Ignoring the deep, but entirely acceptable partisanship of the vast majority of reporters in Jerusalem, Honest Reporting has accused Loewenstein of partiality: “Loewenstein is clearly incapable of reporting on Israel in a fair and objective manner. Yet Honest Reporting has learned that he happens to be a paid up associate member of Israel’s Foreign Press Association.”

It is the traditional and self-defined responsibility of journalists to hold power to account, yet, sadly, the FPA has failed to come to Loewenstein’s defense. In response to Honest Reporting, it said it had accepted him as a non-voting associate member “based on his career as a freelance journalist”. But then added only: “While we do not endorse his views, we also do not screen our members for their opinions.”

So no words of support from the FPA for Loewenstein as he faces being stripped of the right to report from the region (and not just from Israel, as Honest Reporting dishonestly claims, but also from the occupied territories, since Israel controls all access to Palestinian areas). Not a word of condemnation of Israel from the FPA for crushing press freedom. Just a shrug of the shoulders.

Loewenstein should not be surprised. The FPA has barely bothered to raise its voice in solidarity with journalistic colleagues in the region whose rights are being trampled on a systematic basis. 

Palestinian journalists have been regularly killed, wounded, beaten up or jailed, earning Israel a ranking of 101 out of 180 countries this year in the Reporters without Borders index. That places it below Liberia, Bhutan, East Timor and Gabon, and a nudge ahead of Uganda, Kuwait, and Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Honest Reporting saw its chance to set a trap for Loewenstein to get him out of the region. More than a decade ago, Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO) introduced new rules that tightly controlled coverage in its favor. In a non-transparent procedure, independent journalists have to persuade the GPO that they deserve to be issued with a work visa.

In February, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ executive director, Robert Mahoney, criticised Israel for this patronage system. “It is virtually impossible to work as a reporter in Israel and the occupied territories without a press card,” he said. “The threat of withdrawing accreditation is a heavy handed approach at stifling unwelcome coverage.”

The Guardian distances itself

Honest Reporting has created a phony controversy about how Loewenstein received his work visa in a bid to discredit him. In fact, Loewenstein should easily meet the formal requirements for a freelance visa, as he has written far more than seven articles for major publications in the last year. But Honest Reporting is seeking to confect a row to justify the GPO refusing to renew his visa in March.

It did so by questioning the Guardian about his connection to the paper, hoping that it could get the paper to dissociate itself from him. Without a shred of evidence, it suggested that Loewenstein might have lied to the GPO, claiming he was a Guardian accredited journalist, to get his visa.

How did the Guardian respond? According to Honest Reporting, its head of international news, Jamie Wilson, told them that “Loewenstein was contracted to write comment pieces for Guardian Australia and remains an occasional comment contributor but he ‘is not a news correspondent for the Guardian in Israel’. It was also relayed to us that Loewenstein has now been told to in future make sure he does not reference The Guardian at press conferences unless he is working on a direct commission."

Further, their Jerusalem correspondent Peter Beaumont emailed the group to deny any knowledge of Loewenstein. And its former Jerusalem correspondent and now religious affairs reporter Harriet Sherwood entered the fray on Facebook: “Why is this guy claiming to be a Guardian writer when all I can find in our archive is occasional opinion pieces and nothing since August?” For the record, Loewenstein has written more than 90 articles for the Guardian since 2013.

One might wonder how it is that neither Beaumont nor Sherwood appear to have heard of Loewenstein when he has written several books on Israel and Palestine, and writes for their own paper and other leading publications on a range of issues, including Israel and Palestine. But then I suspect they may have a rather narrow range of reference points for their coverage – most of them doubtless FPA regulars.

But what is more significant is that none of the relevant actors at the Guardian has shown an ounce of solidarity with Loewenstein, as the Israeli lobby seeks to get him kicked out of the country for doing proper journalism. They have also inadvertently conspired with Honesty Reporting in misrepresenting him.

Despite Honest Reporting’s accusations, Loewenstein says he stated clearly in his GPO application that he was a freelance journalist. And it is simply inconceivable that he could have professed to be a Guardian reporter to the GPO without being found out. The GPO knows precisely who represents all the big media outlets in Jerusalem.

Further, according to a source at the FPA event, Loewenstein was clear about his status when he addressed Lapid. He said he was freelance journalist who had contributed to various publications including the Guardian.

Predictably, Honest Reporting’s managing editor, Simon Plosker, was delighted by the Guardian’s response: “The Guardian’s distancing itself from Loewenstein is a welcome development.”

So far the Guardian appears to have issued no criticism of Honest Reporting for its deceptions in this matter, or retracted its own misguided comments.

The Guardian — far from the fearless watchdog

Loewenstein may have hoped that the Guardian would stand by him. But my own early experiences in Israel with the paper suggest this is part of a pattern of cowardly behavior when it is under attack from Israeli officials or the Israel lobby.

I had an established relationship with the Guardian when I arrived in Israel as a freelancer early in the second intifada, in September 2001. I had previously worked on staff in its foreign department in London for several years. I used those contacts to begin pitching stories, and a few of the less controversial ones were commissioned by the paper.

It is standard journalistic practice when writing articles to give parties that come in for criticism a chance to respond. Therefore, in a piece on the Israeli army, I called the army spokesperson’s office for a comment. As is also standard practice, I introduced myself and cited where the piece would be published.

Less than an hour after the conversation, I was surprised to receive a furious phone call from the Guardian foreign desk in London. The Israeli army spokesperson had called the paper’s then-correspondent, Suzanne Goldenberg, to ask who I was and why I was writing for the paper. Goldenberg called the desk and threw a tantrum about my referring to the Guardian.

Then I had the most bizarre exchange in my journalistic career – and I have had a few. The foreign desk banned me from mentioning the Guardian in calls to any Israeli officials.

“But if I am commissioned by the Guardian to write a piece, like this one, and an official asks me who I am writing for, what am I supposed to say?” I asked incredulous.

I was told: “We don’t care – just don’t mention the Guardian. Things are difficult for us and Suzanne right now, and we don’t need you making more trouble for us.”

It was a revealing moment. Far from the fearless watchdog of popular imagination, the Guardian showed its true colors. It was petrified of actually doing its self-professed job of monitoring the centers of power. And the Guardian is one of the most critical publications on Israel. Imagine how much more feeble the rest are, if Guardian staff are so fearful of incurring the wrath of Israeli officials.

Time for the Guardian to step up

The Guardian now needs to make amends to Loewenstein, rather than allowing itself to be implicated in Israel’s ugly McCarthyism. It could stand in journalistic solidarity with him. It would not take much, just a simple act of journalistic courage and refusal to allow Israel to control who gets to report on the region.

The Guardian could do it by giving Loewenstein official accreditation. That would remove the GPO’s pretext for expelling him. It would not mean he was the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent. It would simply be a declaration by the paper that it believes in a free press and does not wants to see him silenced. Or is that too much to expect from the Guardian? 

Posted by Tony Greenstein at 03:48 5 Comments