‘We need to honour our anti-apartheid activists’

DAVID SAKS

Krengel was speaking at last Friday’s memorial ceremony for the late AnnMarie Wolpe, who died in Cape Town last month at the age of 86. The event took place at Liliesleaf Farm, once the secret headquarters of the banned ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK).

Wolpe’s husband, Harold, was a member of MK and was among those arrested in the infamous raid by security police on the premises in July 1963. With his wife’s help, he and several others were able to escape from gaol and flee the country.

Ronnie Kasrils, a former senior member of the MK high command who went on to hold various ministerial positions under the Mandela and Mbeki administrations, was the keynote speaker at the gathering. Other speakers included Robbie van Niekerk, Adrienne van den Heever and Nicholas Wolpe, son of the late AnnMarie and Harold Wolpe and chief executive of the Liliesleaf Trust.

Krengel recalled how he and AnnMarie had been part of a panel discussing the Jewish community’s responses under apartheid, held at the same venue in mid-2013. On that occasion, he recounted, he had identified the main fault of the Jewish leadership during those times as having failed to look after members of the Jewish community who were being targeted by the apartheid regime for their political activities.

He stressed that whites who joined the Struggle were regarded as criminals by the apartheid state, which hunted them down relentlessly. Whereas non-whites were the victims of the country’s unjust race laws and therefore had no real choice but to resist them, whites had various options available to them. They could support the system, limit their opposition to it by supporting the liberal opposition at election times, emigrate or commit themselves wholeheartedly to opposing the system, even if it meant doing so outside the confines of the law.

Only a handful of whites had chosen the fourth option, for which not only they – but their families as well – paid a high price, said Krengel. In the face of huge pressure, AnnMarie stood loyally and courageously by her husband while also raising her three children.

Krengel urged that every effort be made to properly record the personal testimonies of anti-apartheid veterans before it was too late. He referred to the project by US filmmaker Steven Spielberg through which the stories of thousands of Holocaust survivors had been recorded, and how, as SAJBD chairman, he had proposed to then president Mbeki that a similar project be implemented in South Africa but to date nothing had been done to take it further.

Krengel noted that many children of political activists felt that they had lost their parents to the Struggle, and hence showed little inclination to identify with the anti-apartheid legacy.

Nicholas Wolpe was an outstanding exception, however, having returned to his South African roots after living most of his life abroad and gone on to further the work of his parents by turning Liliesleaf into one of the country’s premier national heritage sites.