The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

“vintage pedigree”, and a potential for privilege, which he turned his back on. In spite of
these seeming contradictions across generations, Clingman argued that Fischer’s
communist political choices and activism were indeed grounded in a family politics of
“conviction and principle”. Fischer had inherited “a tempered resolve” and “a deep
impulse to reconciliation, negotiation and peace” from his grandfather. His support for
violence in the early 1960s had “historic precedents” in the struggle of Boer republics
against British colonialism, as well as in his father Percy’s support for the 1914 rebels. As
an Afrikaner, Fischer wanted Afrikaners in general to “find fulfilment and self‐
identification within the larger context of South African belonging”. Fischer’s life
trajectory and patterns of biographic causation accorded to it were narrated in terms of
lines of descent and family genealogies of principle and commitment, and in the
“examples, gestures, styles [and] ways of being in the world” that he had inherited. 209
In this emplotment, Clingman also sought to examine key moments of transition and
catharsis in the unfolding of Fischer’s life and beliefs. Fischer’s decision to support the
turn to violence in the early 1960s had been one which “went to the core of his being”,
and which “initially he had not wholly believed”. Indeed, it seemed to mark “a
boundary”, away from his “vision of reconciliation … reciprocity and mutuality”, and,
while Fischer sought to avoid “disintegration into futile violence”, “in the end he paid
the absolute price”. 210 In October 1964, after he had been charged under the Suppression
of Communism Act along with 11 of his comrades, Fischer was released on bail in order
to make it possible for him to travel to London for a Privy Council appeal. After having
given an undertaking that he would return to face trial, in spite of escalating repression
and the “increasingly thin line between accused and defence”, Fischer returned to face
trial, notwithstanding the protestations of his SACP comrades in London. Fischer had
convinced his comrades of his argument that “the time had come when leaders ought
not to leave but be prepared to stake everything”. While it was necessary to reconstitute
the SACP inside South Africa, it was also important “to find a way of playing a
209 Stephen Clingman, Bram Fischer, pp 27, 109, 286.
210 Stephen Clingman, Bram Fischer, pp 287, 335.
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