Soup and kneidlach with activists

GEOFF SIFRIN

TAKING ISSUE

Like a bolt of sanity in a country gone mad, exactly 25 years ago – on February 2, 1990 – SA President FW de Klerk announced the immediate unbanning of the ANC liberation movement, and the release of Nelson Mandela, clearing the way for the complete dismantling of apartheid, which had been government policy since 1948.

From one day to the next, SA newspapers which had operated under severe censorship, forbidden to publish even a picture of Mandela or quote from the ANC, became free to publish anything. Most South Africans who were adults at the time remember exactly where they were when they heard his speech. Things would never be the same again.

It did not come completely out of the blue. There had been signs in preceding years that apartheid was crumbling, and meetings were going on with ANC leaders towards a different future.

The involvement of SA Jews on various sides evoked some curious encounters. Six months before De Klerk’s speech, a group of Jews under the umbrella of Jews for Social Justice went to Lusaka with the Five Freedoms Forum of academics, mayors and businessmen, to meet ANC leaders about the role of whites in a changing society. The late, then Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris was invited but could not go because of prior commitments; his wife, Rebbetzen Ann Harris went as an observer.

The regime of fear South Africans lived in then was so perverse, that official Jewish community organisations actually rejected such meetings. In hindsight today we can hardly fathom why anyone would oppose them.

Yet they did. Harris was reprimanded. He wrote later in a book that his management committee said to him: “But they’re communists… and the ANC is a banned organisation. How can the Chief Rabbi’s wife even think of mixing with such people?”  

Harris answered: “I don’t know why you’re getting so excited. At the moment the State President is having tea with Nelson Mandela… They looked at me as if I were meshuggah but one of the committee members slipped out to contact the South African Press Association and check my facts. After an embarrassing hiatus which lasted about 10 minutes, he returned and nodded confirmation to the chairman. They changed the subject.”

Ann Harris described the atmosphere in Lusaka in an interview: “When we got there, the people from the ANC who met us, included the late Joe Slovo, Ronnie Kasrils and others in exile. They immediately sought me out and said: ‘We know who you are, and welcome, and it’s so nice,’ and all the rest of it. And we had this joke that when they came back to South Africa, we’d have soup and kneidlach together.” Which they did.

When Slovo – who had been a commander of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe during the Struggle – died, the ANC asked Cyril Harris to make a speech at the memorial at Orlando Stadium in January, 1995.

Harris said: “I have never experienced such difficulty in preparing a speech. On the one hand, Joe was a humanist socialist, the last person a conscientious rabbi could be expected to eulogise. On the other, he deserved great adulation for his championship of the oppressed. So I decided quite simply to quote the two motivations – one religious, the other humanitarian – towards helping fellow human beings.”

Harris was lauded by many, but also criticised by many others, for praising the “atheist and communist” Joe Slovo so effusively.

Twenty five years after De Klerk’s speech, there are almost no Jewish political activists left to have soup and kneidlach with. SA Jews have almost completely withdrawn from South African politics. Yet the need for involvement is as urgent as ever, given the appalling state of our leadership today and the debacles like Nkandla, Eskom and so on.

The freedoms that were bought at great personal cost by the Joe Slovos of this world, seem to have also brought a great apathy. What will it take to become passionate again about making our country great?

Geoff Sifrin is former editor of the SAJR. He writes this column in his personal capacity.