FISCHER, BRAM (ABRAM)

Bram (Abram) Fischer (April 23, 1908-May 8, 1975) was a prominent Afrikaner member of the South African Communist Party and a distinguished lawyer who led the defense in the Rivonia Trial of 1963-64. Had he remained an orthodox Nationalist he could well have become prime minister; instead he was to die a prisoner.

PHOTO CAPTION: Fischer Bram (Abram). SOURCE: EA Library

His grandfather was prime minister of the Orange River Colony after the South African War of 1899-1902, and his father was judge president of the Orange Free State’s Supreme Court. Bram grew up and was educated in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State.

In the late 1920s he was elected Nationalist prime minister in the National Student Parliament and played rugby for the Orange Free State, yet it was then that he ran evening classes for Africans. Indeed, he saw Afrikaner Nationalism, with its support from white workers, as a potentially progressive force until, with the attainment of power, decadence set in.

From 1931-34 Fischer was a Rhodes scholar at New College, Oxford, England. In these years he travelled through Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Fascist Italy. Returning to Johannesburg, he became an advocate, specializing in mining and water law cases.

Influenced by events of the 1930s, both he and his wife, née Molly Krige, a relative of the wife of Jan Christiaan Smuts, joined the Communist Party and became close allies of black activists. In 1943 he drafted a new constitution for the African National Congress. In 1946 he was among Communists arrested and fined for helping to organize the African mine strike.

The Nationalist government’s outlawing of Communism in 1950 drove the Party underground; Fischer, among those “listed’ as having been a member, was thus barred from various organizations and political meetings.

Appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1952, he was repeatedly elected to the Johannesburg Bar Council and for a period was chairman. But as the liberation movement, after half a century of non-violent protest, turned to sabotage in 1961, arrests and political trials proliferated.

Fischer, who had been on the defense team in the Treason Trial of 1957-61, devoted increasing time and energy to political trials, the most famous being his defense of Mandela, Sisulu and others in the Rivonia Trial in 1963-64. Shortly after the success of saving these men from a death penalty, his wife was killed in an accident.

In September 1964 he himself was in the dock, on trial for Communism. In an effort to reorganize resistance at a time when police repression had stifled all militant protest, Fischer went underground in January 1965. The police finally captured him in November and, in 1966, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to commit sabotage and to further the aims of Communism. In 1967 he heard that he had been awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. Then, in prison in Pretoria in 1974, he fell ill with cancer. Despite international appeals, the government refused to release him until shortly before his death and, after the cremation, his family had to return his ashes to the prison.

MARY BENSON