A MESSAGE FROM UNDERGROUND
Bram Fischer
[Advocate Abram Fischer, Q.C. was detained in 1964 and was the
main accused in a trial of 13 men and women in Johannesburg on charges of being members or
supporters of the Communist Party. On January 22, 1965, he announced that he had chosen to
forfeit his bail and leave his home in order to continue the liberation struggle from
underground. The following message was sent by him from "somewhere in South
Africa."]
In 1965 South Africa presents a surface of ebullient confidence:
the ebullience of a white electorate basking in phenomenal prosperity; and the confidence
of a Government which, during sixteen years, has with increasing violence attempted to
crush every effort by the majority of the people to win human rights until today it
appears supremely stable.
To the outside world, then, South Africa may seem to be another
Spain: irrevocably set for long years of rule so tyrannical that all militant opposition
can be continually and readily suppressed. A powerful body of conservative opinion
including the many British and American investors with a large stake in this prosperity
particularly appreciates the present Governments maintenance of "law and
order" (regardless of the cost in human suffering below the surface) and argues that
economic forces are breaking down apartheid.
These impressions and arguments need to be corrected.
South Africa may resemble Spain, but it is not another Spain.
Apartheid, in a manner unique in history, arouses the abhorrence of all the United Nations
except Portugal; not only the abhorrence, but the growing determination to bring to an end
such racial domination. The view may be true that many investors in South Africa favour a
strong Government, and hence resist any interference with the policies of such a
Government which attempts to maintain law and order at all costs. This view may be true at
present. It ceases to be true as soon as the Governments policy produces
unrest and external threats. At that stage it must become increasingly apparent that it is
in the interests
of the investor to support rapid change and the transfer of
political power to a truly representative government which would establish racial peace
and proper relations with the African States and the United Nations. In any event, can any
government be truly stable where, in a multi-racial society, all non-whites,
three-quarters of the population, are deprived of the vote and detest the racialist laws?
Can any economy long be stable where its prosperity is reserved for a politically dominant
white minority? Can any policy produce racial harmony where it imposes economic and social
degradation and a denial of human rights on the vast majority of people?
As for the argument that economic forces are breaking down
apartheid, this is true only to a strictly limited extent. The law reserving jobs for
whites and Coloured people is daily infringed as more and more non-whites are absorbed
into skilled and semi-skilled work, while during the Nationalist Governments rule
the number of Africans living and working in so-called white areas has more or less
doubled. But though their wages and living conditions improve in face of the
ever-rising cost of living, need, poverty and malnutrition remain the lot of the vast
majority of non-whites in this prosperous country. Furthermore, the absorption illegally
of Africans into semi-skilled or even skilled work is in fact leading to even greater
exploitation of labour, as white employers hire them for so-called white jobs at cheap
wages, safe in the knowledge that Africans have no right to organise and strike. But above
all the argument that economics are defeating the politics of apartheid becomes fallacious
in face of the mounting human and political repression that has accompanied the growing
influx of Africans, now more than 7,000,000 in the so-called White 87 per cent
of South Africa. In short, the more educated and "industrialised" the Africans
become, the more they are repressed.
It is not necessary to look far below South Africas surface
in time or depth to discover the reality. Protests against shocking social conditions,
against the hated pass laws, against political and industrial oppression whether
peaceful or whether exploding into riots or sabotage have equally been put down
with violence.
Yet for fifty years, the senior African organisation, the A.N.C.,
followed a policy of non-violence. Even after the Sharpeville massacre, it still persisted
in such methods. Not until the 1961 protest stay-at-home had been crushed by all the force
of a modern well-armed State, did the leaders turn away with bitter regret from their
policy of non-violence, and allow some members to join the Spear of the Nation.
Even then the campaign of sabotage that followed was directed strictly at symbolic
targets. Once again the reply of the exclusively White Parliament was not to repeal
discriminatory laws. Instead, surely a unique occurrence in history, an elected body whose
members must have known full well what the consequences would be, passed a law which
legalised torture. Under the so-called ninety-day law, which soon earned
world-wide notoriety, a thousand of our best citizens were detained for indefinite periods
of ninety days in solitary confinement, for purposes of interrogation. As was to be
expected, this has been used (and, though suspended, can at any time be used again), not
merely to inflict solitary confinement in itself one of the cruellest forms of
punishment, as I know from personal experience but for actual physical torture;
long hours of enforced continuous standing forty hours, fifty, sixty or even more
during incessant interrogation; electric shock treatment and other forms of violent
physical assault.
Our police State, now arming itself to the teeth, has used this
law with barbarous intensity to try to break the forces striving for basic human rights.
Today there are over 2,500 political prisoners in our jails, including most of our
non-white leaders. The State thinks it has crushed the liberation movement, but it has
not. As we know from history including the history of South Africa if the
struggle for freedom is smothered in one place or for the time being, it flares up again
before long. In 1960, with the mass arrests during the Emergency, it seemed as if the
struggle had been crushed. But this was not so. There was a resurgence in the movement for
liberation. Now of course the set-back has been more profound and widespread. But
set-back it is, and the struggle will surge forward again. It is in this that
the real danger lies. If South Africans have to perform the task by themselves, they will
inevitably be driven by the terrorist methods of the State into a violent and chaotic form
of struggle. And the more prolonged the daily, incessant humiliation meted out by the
majority of whites, to the millions of non-whites, the fiercer the bitterness being
created in millions of souls. This bitterness is understood, indeed overtly shared, by
people of colour everywhere. The fury recently vented in the United Nations over the Congo
will seem trivial by comparison to what lies ahead in relation to South Africa. Though it
is at the moment beyond the powers of the African States to launch any direct attack they
cannot indefinitely tolerate our gross insult to man solely because of his colour and
their existing influence in the United Nations can but grow and, in its turn, influence
the countries with heavy investment in South Africa.
Immediately, world opinion has positive and constructive tasks to
perform. It must prevent torture from being used again in a country which counts itself
civilised. World opinion has already helped to bring about the suspension of the
ninety-day law, now it must work for its repeal. The law still exists and the Minister of
Justice has already threatened to reimpose it at a moments notice.
World opinion should work for the release of our thousands of
political prisoners and, until this is achieved, must insist that they are not, as at
present, treated as ordinary criminals of the lowest category. The wives and dependants of
these prisoners must be cared for; their children educated. We in South Africa are quite
incapable of looking after 15,000-20,000 dependants.
But, most important, is the extension of human rights to all
citizens. Democracy will eventually be won, of that there can be no doubt. The question is
whether it can be achieved peacefully or only by violence.
A peaceful transition can be brought about if the Government
agrees to negotiation with all sections of the people and, in particular, with the
non-white leaders at present jailed on Robben Island or in exile. Prospects of such
negotiation seem desperately remote. The Government presents a "granite"
attitude. Not one of the three Prime Ministers produced by the Nationalist Party since
1948 ever met or talked with a single non-white leader.
Yet this is no static situation. This is no Spain. It is 1965
not 1935. If the combination of predictable and unpredictable forces leads to
large-scale violence or war, the consequences would be so disastrous in loss of life, in
suffering, in economic disruption, in a legacy of bitter hatred and in the threat to world
peace, that I believe that white South Africans must at some stage be brought to realise
that their own long-term interests lie not in maintaining race supremacy but in extending
human rights to all.
Although the Nationalist Party appears supremely confident, its
spokesmen show some awareness of the hopelessness of their struggle in their warnings that
if apartheid fails, multi-racial democracy must follow.
The United Nations can bring home to white South Africans the
recognition that the maintenance of white supremacy is doomed. I doubt even whether it
would be necessary to apply sanctions, boycotts, embargoes. I have no doubt that if white
South Africans really believed that certain fundamental sanctions would be imposed after
the lapse of some specified time, they could well rid themselves of apartheid, and thus
avoid bloodshed more fearful than ever occurred in Algeria.
And knowing them as I have grown to know them from twenty-five
years work with the A.N.C., I have no doubt that our African people will gladly bear any
hardships that would be caused by sanctions, rather than achieve their freedom by
violence.
With all South Africa free, at long last our country will
fulfil its great potential economic, political, cultural and educational
internally and in African and world affairs.
