The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

In exploring these issues of image, symbol and identity in relation to Bram Fischer’s life
history, and in suggesting that Fischer, as a “prototype” of the Afrikaner as South
African and African, had taken on “a story of identity, its retention and extension, into
the marrow of his own life”, 217 Clingman had actualised his own arguments from eleven
years previously about lives being laboratories of identity. 218 As useful as these issues
may be for thinking about political biography in South Africa, it may have been possible
for Clingman to go to the next level, to think about issues of biographic production and
contestation in relation to Bram Fischer’s life. Indeed the possible building blocks of
such an examination were present in Clingman’s research. He noted, for example, how
Fischer’s life had “migrated into fiction” in novels by Mary Benson, André Brink and
Nadine Gordimer. 219 Clingman also briefly noted how Fischer’s life had been
memorialised through the creation of the Bram Fischer Memorial Library at the Legal
Resources Centre (where Fischer’s daughter, Ilse, worked as a librarian) and the
inauguration of the Bram Fischer Memorial Lecture in Johannesburg.
There were other possibilities for exploring questions of biographic production. During
his trial, Fischer presented a five‐hour address (like Mandela) from the dock, “separating
fact from fiction” as he dealt with the supposed evidence against him, and “weaving his
own story against the backdrop of a broader political history”. In this auto/ biographical
presentation, given under the coercive conditions, Fischer traversed a range of issues,
including his childhood, his membership of the Communist Party, its relationship with
the ANC and uMkhonto we Sizwe, his belief in the rationality of Marxist
understandings of the history of societies, his belief in the necessity for racial co‐
operation, and how necessary it was for Afrikaners to protest against discrimination.
While this autonarration of Fischer’s life became unavailable due to his banning, two
repressive biographies had been published soon after Fischer’s conviction and
217 Stephen Clingman, Bram Fischer, p 456.
218 Stephen Clingman, ‘Biography and Representation’.
219 Mary Benson, At the Still Point (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, first published in 1969); André
Brink, Rumours of Rain (London: W.H. Allen, 1978); Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter (London:
Cape, 1979). Benson had worked with Fischer during the Treason Trial in the 1950s, and had spent
time with him while he was underground (Mary Benson, A Far Cry: The Making of a South African,
Randburg: Ravan Writers Series, 1996).
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