THE DARING LIFE OF A RADICALLY DIFFERENT AFRIKANER

Author: By T. Kai Norris Easton

Date: SUNDAY, July 12, 1998

Page: C3

Section: Books

A South African and professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Clingman is the author of ``The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside,'' and that 1986 book may well have been the spark for this biographical project. As Clingman says, Bram Fischer's life ``migrated into fiction,'' and Lionel Burger in Gordimer's novel ``Burger's Daughter'' is clearly borrowed from his character and circumstances.

Clingman's real-life story sets Fischer in a multigenerational history of wars and trials and into some of the darkest days of apartheid.

Born into a prominent family of Afrikaner Nationalists, Fischer -- like his father and grandfather before him -- grew up to become a distinguished and widely respected lawyer; unlike them, he became a leading member of the South African Communist Party. To the eternal credit of his parents, a great ``intellectual openness'' had marked his upbringing. While Percy and Ella Fischer did not agree with their son's later communist views, they respected and encouraged intellectual and political debate.

Clingman's portrayal takes these seemingly opposing factors as the focus of his book, showing how Fischer's Afrikaner-Nationalist background and his ultimate swing toward communism were not at such odds with each other. He loved the South African landscape and held his Afrikaner heritage dearly. He was in awe of the courage of the Afrikaners who fought in the Boer War against British imperialism; his paternal grandfather had fought in that war, and his father had defended the Afrikaner rebellion of 1914. He saw himself as a successor in this tradition of ``rebels,'' working to enlarge and redefine Afrikanerness against the segregationist policies of the Nationalists.

Fischer's mentor, Leo Marquard, taught him and then brought him into the Joint Council and the Institute of Race Relations -- and these were defining experiences. Fischer's ultimate commitment to racial equality in South Africa was uncompromising and shared completely by his wife, Molly. Like many political families, they were surrounded by secrecies, disappearances, bannings, police raids, and personal tragedy. In 1960, Molly Fischer was one of more than 1,000 people detained without trial in the state of emergency declared after the Sharpeville Massacre. In 1963, she died in a car accident, just after her husband and the Rivonia trial verdict made international headlines.

Written with the full cooperation and assistance of Fischer's family (primarily his daughters and his brothers), the biography is the result of a decade of research and, above all, interviews, correspondence, and a large collection of family letters. Clingman introduces the book by stating, ``This is a biography and must rely on the facts; impression must be based on observation, interpretation on evidence. Yet it must also delve into those deeper currents.''

Clingman delves deeply indeed, spanning decades of Fischer family history. The breadth and thoroughness of his research is evident. One cannot imagine a more detailed account, nor one as meticulously put together from such a trove of sources, most of them primary. But this strength is at times a weakness of the book. Clingman's approach to the story of Fischer's legacy is one of fullness: from Bram's long and intense courtship with Molly, which lasted through his years as a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, to their marriage in 1937, the birth of their three children, their activities in the Communist Party, and the increasingly repressive legislation of the Nationalist government, which resulted in the banning of opposition movements, forcing them to operate underground.

Clingman's most compelling chapters are those in which Bram Fischer's history was caught up with that of Nelson Mandela. In fact, they were to appear together in two of South Africa's biggest courtroom dramas: The four-year treason trial at which Mandela and others were acquitted, and the Rivonia trial, at which Mandela (among others) was sentenced to life imprisonment.

On the day of the police raid at Rivonia, in July 1963, Mandela was not actually present, since he was already serving a five-year prison sentence. In the trial that followed, he was brought out of prison to stand as ``Accused Number One,'' and Fischer was leading his defense. What even his colleagues in the courtroom did not know at the time was that Fischer did so at great risk to himself: A number of documents seized at Rivonia were in fact in Fischer's own handwriting. While not a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe (the military wing of the African National Congress), Fischer was acting chairman of the South African Communist Party's central committee, and heavily involved with policy making and meetings at their headquarters at Rivonia.

Considering the charges of sabotage, the verdict of life imprisonment was a victory for the Rivonia accused -- the defense team's strategy had certainly saved Mandela and his comrades from the death sentence. But their leading lawyer soon faced his own trial.

Fischer could have chosen a life of exile. Instead, while released on bail to handle a case in London, he made the deliberate and dangerous decision to return to South Africa to continue his political activities underground, in disguise. His daughter Ilse helped him escape. She was now his ``collaborator . . . Bram's world was also hers.'' Arrested after nine months underground and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966, Bram Fischer died of cancer in 1975.

Clingman offers a wealth of new information on Fischer's life and a close perspective on some turbulent years in South Africa's political history. If his biography has a fault, it is the unevenness of tone -- the prose is sometimes hard-edged, sometimes obscure, sometimes even flowery. But this does not lessen his real accomplishment, which is to chart the journey of a remarkable Afrikaner, whose greatness shone even behind bars.