10 November 2004
The South African Communist Party (SACP) reaffirms its support for the decision of the University of Stellenbosch to award the late Bram Fischer an honorary doctorate. This decision has stirred up the auto-destruct instincts of some commentators in the Afrikaans media.
Those who have led the posthumous witch-hunt against Fischer, like the deputy editor of Die Burger, Leopold Scholtz, and so-called academics (Herman Gilliomee and Jannic Gagiano), will roll their eyes in disbelief that the majority of South Africans recognise the contribution Fischer made, as a communist and Afrikaner, to a democratic South Africa. These elements seek to reduce communism to the gulag. Rooi-gevaar is lovingly preserved in the mausoleum of their newspaper columns denying their Afrikaans readers once the knowledge and information of what communism has meant for this country.
Communism was the ideology that inspired the defeat of the most formidable war machine of the last century in the hands of an entirely anti-enlightenment project, Nazism. It inspired brave peasant fighters throughout the third world to resist and defeat colonialism and US imperialism. Communists in South Africa pioneered non-racialism, progressive trade unionism and alternative journalism.
Stellenbosch University?s welcome decision to award Fischer an honorary doctorate provides us all with the opportunity to debate and ? for those who are not irretrievably mean-spirited ? to celebrate the legacy Bram Fischer has helped bestow on a new South Africa.
Fischer was born in Bloemfontein in 1908, the son of an eminent Afrikaans family. His grandfather, Abraham was the prime minister of the Orange River Colony, and his father, Percy, was a Free State Judge.
Fischer was always deeply proud of his Afrikaner roots and heritage. He saw no contradiction between his Afrikaner identity, the republican and anti-imperialist traditions of his Free State family on the one hand, and his own espousal of communism on the other hand. In fact, he recognised, as these elements clearly do not, that to be a true Afrikaner, one has to be a South African patriot. To be an enlightened Afrikaner requires being a supporter of non-racialism, unity and democracy.
CONTACT: Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara (surname Jara)
Head of the Office of the General Secretary
South African Communist Party
Tel - 011 339 3621, Fax - 011 339 4244/6880
Email - mazibuko@sacp.org.za, sacpho@wn.apc.org (alternate)