Burger's Daughter Page 10

  Cathy Burger née Jansen was not charged in this case, although she and not her husband was a trade union organizer; she was only twenty-six years old and perhaps not prominent enough to have been a member of the Central Executive. The prosecutor accused the Party of having engineered the strike as part of a wider plot to overthrow the government; the accused were cross-examined about Party policy, the role of Communists in trade unions and their attitude to strikes. The biographer had been studying old court records and what had been said by the accused was fresh to him as if it had been spoken in his hearing, and yesterday. Lionel Burger told the court the Communist Party stood for the unity of workers regardless of colour. Communists were required by the Party’s policy to be active in unions for which they were eligible. A good Communist must win workers’ confidence by proving himself a good unionist. Communists had served the workers’ cause by organizing unskilled and semi-skilled Africans, coloureds and Indians, the largest and most neglected sector of the labour force, and through this achievement the Communist Party had made a unique contribution to racial harmony in a country constantly threatened by racial unrest. The strike was 76,000 black miners’ genuine and justifiable protest against exploitation and contemptuous disregard of the needs, as workers and human beings, of the 400,000 black men in the industry.

  Etc., etc. This rhetoric delivered by her father produced no reaction from his daughter outside the degree of attention that she apparently had decided to apportion the whole interview. It had been spoken in a courtroom in January 1947 before she was born; no doubt her mother was there to hear it. She herself could add nothing about that time, except that as her mother’s work was in the unions—a passionate interest, even when banned from labour movement activity and with a child old enough to be aware of evidence of her parents’ preoccupations—the double involvement, personal and professional, in that trial must have been intense.

  At one point the prosecutor had to withdraw charges because of some irregularity in the prosecution—the biographer didn’t want to waste the opportunity to talk to Burger’s daughter by going into factual details he could verify elsewhere. Anyway, the accused, including Burger, were re-arrested once again, committed on sedition, and stood trial. The African Mineworkers’ Union, led by the black man who was her parents’ close friend and first choice as best man for their wedding, was accused of being a concealed wing of the Communist Party of South Africa. The strike of 1946 was alleged to have been engineered by the Johannesburg District Committee of the Communist Party, on which Lionel Burger sat. The Central Executive of the Party, of which he was a member, was accused of having conspired to initiate a strike that resulted in the use of violence against state authority.

  Documentation available put beyond doubt of anyone studying it in retrospect that the Communist Party had been and was at the time of the strike closely involved with the miners’ union. Since the inception of the Party and its affiliation to the Third Communist International in 1921 (Lionel Burger 16, a schoolboy in Johannesburg), acceptance of Lenin’s thesis on the national and colonial question and the consequent task of ‘educating and organizing the peasantry and broad mass of the exploited’ in addition to ‘raising the class consciousness of the proletariat’ had been compulsory for the Party. The fact that the organized proletariat of the mines—the basic industry in the country—was white and remained participant in the privileges of the oppressing class, while the black miners, at once peasants and proletariat, were rejected by the white miners’ unions, was an adverse reflection on the Party’s effectiveness. From time to time there was criticism from the Communist International. The Party had succeeded neither in educating the white proletariat to identify with the black proletariat, nor in organizing the indentured black peasants in their industrialized role as proletarians. For example, the Praesidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International advised the South African Communist Party to organize revolutionary trade unions of workers. But the Party had no members in the mines, in spite of attempts dating from July 1930 to form a black mineworkers’ union, a League of African Rights, and its successor with an African name, Ikaka Labasebenzi —The Workers’ Shield. This pioneering was the initiative of Thebedi and Bunting (the latter one of the founders of the Party and stated once by Lionel Burger to have been his early mentor, although records showed that Burger voted for Bunting’s expulsion in 1931). Then in 1940 the Party’s national conference deputed to the Johannesburg district the specific duty of organizing black miners, whose overwhelming numbers would then benefit the trade union movement and ultimately national liberation, the first phase (bourgeois-democratic/national-revolutionary, varying according to the dissenting views within the Party) of the two-stage revolution to terminate in the attainment of socialism—again in accordance with Lenin’s thesis of 1920. (Burger, probably taking along the girl who was to be his first wife, attended the Sixth International in Moscow in 1928, at which the aim of an ‘independent Native Republic’ had officially replaced the classic Marxist bourgeois-democratic revolution as a first stage for South Africa.) In the trial arising out of the’46 strike, the prosecution’s case for a causal link between the Communist Party and the strike relied heavily on the fact that J. B. Marks, chairman of the African Mineworkers’ Union, was both a member of the Communist Party and a member of the national council created in 1941 by the black political movement, the African National Congress, for the purpose of organizing black miners.

  But the prosecution failed to establish that causal link between the Central Executive of the Communist Party and the strike. Neither could it prove, as evidence of an element of unlawful violence constituting the crime of sedition, the use of knobbed sticks with which (Rosa Burger did remember being told, years after) the black miners danced defiance in the compound yards, or the lashing-shovels with which they defended themselves against the clubs and rifles of the police.

  Her father’s biographer was eager to expatiate upon his theory, somewhat second-hand, that this trial was a watershed in the relations between liberation movements and the State, and the liberation movements and each other. The documents unearthed and seized during the raids on organization offices and people’s homes, then examined as evidence in the trial, provided the secret police with names not only of Communists but of their supporters and any organization or individual who had been associated with them, even during the period when public indignation against Fascism in Europe and among groups of white people at home brought anticommunists onto common platforms with Communists. As a result of the trial, it was possible for the government to pass the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950 and bring about the dissolution of the Party as a legal one. As a result of the information gleaned at the trial, persecution through bannings, spying and harassment of the black political movements brought about an identity of cause that finally erased ideological differences between the African National Congress, the Indian Congress and the Communist Party, and culminated in the Congress Alliance of these movements in the early 1960s; the High Command which directed their underground operations; the new series of sensational political trials in which those taking supreme responsibility were discovered, betrayed, imprisoned, and with which a whole political era, in which and for which Lionel Burger lived, came to an end.

  All this, hindsight told the biographer, began when the indictment against her father and his associates in the miners’ strike case was quashed, May 1948. It was the month when the first Afrikaner nationalist government took office; that would round off a chapter with a perfect touch of foreboding.

  It was the month and year that Rosemarie Burger, hearing him out, was born.

  A part from Flora Donaldson, her father’s old associates did not pursue her during this time when she kept away from them. Flora had no doubt; the girl needed to live a new life. With managerial kindness and the tact of a well-off woman who fellow-travels beside suffering as a sports enthusiast in a car keeps pace alongside a marathon runner, she championed thi
s course with the gift of a red velvet skirt and a pair of pinchbeck earrings from her own jewel-box.—I’ll pierce your ears myself; my grandmother used to do it, I’m an expert.—She returned, for Rosa’s own good, to the attractions of Tanzania. She had friends living there, they found the whole place inspiring, it would be a tremendous release to work in a black socialist country. And even London—she no longer thought the idea inconceivable, apparently—all the marvellous people in London! The exiles, Noel de Witt and his young wife, Pauline’s daughters, Bridget Sulzer, Rashid’s sons—everyone doing interesting, fulfilling work and preparing themselves positively for the day when they’d be able to come back. The Donaldsons had a flat in Holland Park, the key was there for the asking. Flora talked about these things with an air of decisions already halfway taken, when she invited Rosa to dinner and provided as table partners an eclectic assortment of visiting British and Scandinavian left-wing journalists (the latter brought regards from the Swede who briefly had been her lover) and liberal white American congressmen or black sociologists come to visit Soweto from their base in expensive white hotels where only foreign blacks could stay.

  The others—her father’s closest associates, who ought to have known her best, standing among them outside the prison when she was a child, left her to come to them. Those that there were: who were not in prison or gone into exile. Many were under restrictions which forbade their meeting one another, including her. But this was an ordinary circumstance for them all; there were ways and means. They studied the pattern of police surveillance as surveillance studied them; hiatus will occur, out of habit, in vigilance become routine.

  The faithful were there. They did not have to give her any sign. They had always been there. Mark and Rhoda Liebowitz’s mother, Leah Gordon, and Ivy Terblanche, danced with her father to the gramophone in the Jewish Workers’ Club in the Thirties. Aletta Gous went with Rosa’s mother when she was young and Lionel Burger married to someone else, to one of those vast assemblies of their time with names like Youth for Peace, and they were photographed together holding flowers on a Russian railway station. The biographer had borrowed the photograph for reproduction in his book. Gifford Williams, the lawyer with the briefcase for whom the fourteen-year-old had seen the prison portal open, acted for her father for years before he himself was banned, and it was he who had briefed Theo Santorini in the Burger trial.

  They were not many. They had been to prison and come out again, lived through two, three, five years of their sentences—just before Lionel Burger died in prison, Ivy Terblanche completed her two years for refusing to testify against him. They lived through years-long bans on their movements and association with other people and often were banned again the week restrictions expired. Except for Dick Terblanche, who was a sheet-metal worker, they had had to find substitutes for work they were debarred from doing. Gifford sold office equipment in place of practising law, Leah Gordon, forbidden to teach, was an orthodontist’s receptionist, Ivy Terblanche ran her own little take-away lunch business in the factory area where she had once been a shop steward. Aletta Gous, banned from entry into premises where printing or publishing was done, had lost her job as a proof-reader of Afrikaans textbooks and was working, when last Rosa was in touch with her, with some organization that tried to make popular among blacks a cheap, high protein food.

  Lionel’s daughter came in through the backyard gate from a lane as she had always done. When she was a child, in homely ease, now because it was not overlooked by neighbouring houses as the front entrance from the street was. As a named person she was forbidden by law to visit Ivy and Dick Terblanche, both restricted people under bans, but their daughter Clare was neither named nor banned and she happened to live with her parents and could receive her friends—some sort of an alibi. Dick Terblanche, cleaning the carburettor of Ivy’s same old car, lifted a red, yellow-eyebrowed face in whose expression Rosa was long out of mind; but at once came to kiss her. Holding his dirty hands away had the effect of outlining a space round her. Whoever watched the Terblanche house was least likely to be alert on a Sunday morning; the only witness to be seen was a neighbour’s child with a kicking rabbit in its arms, watching the car repair. It turned its attention undiscriminatingly to the embrace and then to Ivy, carolling out from the house. Rosa went quickly indoors. A thin old black woman ironing in the converted porch covering the length of the house behind whose louvres the Terblanches followed most of their pursuits, rested the iron end-up.—How’s Lily ?—

  —Fine. She writes sometimes. One of her granddaughters has taken up nursing. Lily’s taking care of the little boy she had. He’s called Tony, after my brother, you remember ?—

  —Oh shame, that’s very nice... And the other daughter, that one the last-born, same age like you ?—The black woman frowned shrewdly, laying a claim for old, reciprocal responsibility where it was due.—She’s got children ?—

  —No, no children. She’s married to a waiter in a big hotel in Pretoria. He’s got a good job, Lily’s pleased.—

  —Only you’s not getting married, Rosa.—

  Ivy hitched her Yorkshirewoman’s wide rump past the black woman to reach up and disconnect the iron.—Get away with you, Regina, stop giving her hell and give her a cup of tea.—

  Dick was scrubbing his hands at the outside sink. His face came up divided by the open louvres of the windows.—Tell Clare who’s here.—

  There was neither surprise at Rosa’s sudden appearance nor reproach at her neglect of them, from the Terblanches. And they were ready to vanish from her company into another part of their tiny house if a knock or the bark of the old Labrador that had once been a Burger family pet should announce the arrival of another guest—perhaps the plain-clothes man whose charge they were. He would find the first guest alone with their daughter.

  —Clare’s washing her hair, she’ll be along.—

  Ivy shuffled together papers and newspaper cuttings and dumped them on a chair under a typewriter to weigh them down. Ironed shirts, knitting and cats lay on other chairs, two huge wet pullovers of the kind Ivy had supplied her husband with for many winters were shaped to dry on thicknesses of newspaper. Dick clapped and cats sprang sourly down. Ivy put her hand on her guest’s—He wouldn’t dare if Clare saw him. She’s daft as ever over animals. In her bed every night. Ay...you look well, Rosa. Dick, don’t you think she’s looking better ?—

  —Since when did she look worse ?—

  —Flora wants me to throw away all my clothes and buy new ones.—

  Ivy cocked her big, wild-haired head.—Oh Flora. Does she, now.—

  —You living at her place ?—Dick was slightly deaf from working forty years in industrial noise and spoke in a voice pitched to be heard in a machine shop.

  —No, no. I see them sometimes.—

  —Perhaps William Donaldson will give you a job.—Ivy addressed her husband, taking the opportunity of bringing up tongue-in-cheek, before a third person, something neither would have suggested in private.—He’s going to be retired next year in July, is Dick.—

  —I’m four years younger than Lionel. He was twentieth November nineteen-o-five, mmh ?—

  Regina, with the glance from face to face of one who has lost the room’s attention, brought in and set out the tea-tray.

  Rosa’s profile was very like her father’s as she looked down with light eyes hidden, sugaring her cup from the bowl Ivy held in a hand from which a cigarette rippled smoke.—When did you get to know Lionel, then—I thought you were together in Moscow that first time ?—

  —She means 1928.—

  Dick and Ivy’s response to other people was close as if there existed between them a mutual system of cerebral impulses.—I wasn’t interested in the C.P. Soccer mad. And girls. When I was a youngster.—

  —We didn’t meet until 1930.—Ivy sugared and stirred his tea and gave it to him.

  Rosa had her jaw thrust, jaunty, smiling, the young flattering in unconscious patronage of the past:—Girls.—


  He nodded, feeling for a spoon with a thick hand pied with scaly pink patches of skin cancer.—It’s stirred.—Ivy’s words issued in smoke as those of comic book characters are carried by a bubble. —He was too young. I was meant to go but Lionel was already in Edinburgh, it was cheaper to send him from there... I’m the one as old as Lionel.—

  —Did he take someone along—a girl ?—

  —Girl! We all had girls.—

  But the wife required more female precision in these matters. —What girl ?—

  —Katya, wasn’t it ? David’s mother.—

  —Oh Colette. Could have been. I suppose they must have been together by then. The future star of Sadler’s Wells. I don’t know when that affair started up—Dick ?—

  —Were they married when we met ?—

  But neither was sure.

  —She wrote me a letter.—They knew Rosa meant when her father died. Ivy’s broad alert face, powdered to the strict limit of jowls, relaxed into a coaxing expression of scepticism and expectancy. The woman Rosa had never seen had been materialized by her.—She did ? Where has she landed up by now?—

  —She heard via Tanzania. From David. She lives in France. The South of France.—

  —D’you hear that, Dick? What’d she say in the letter ?—Ivy’s lips shaped to lend themselves to the offensive or absurd.

  Rosa was odd-man-out in the company of three, one absent, who had known each other too well. She spoke with the flat hesitancy of one who cannot guess what indications her hearers will read in what she is relating.—The usual things.—There had been many letters of sympathy, following one formula or another. But the Terblanches were waiting. Rosa stroked under the hard feral jaw of the cat that treaded her lap and smiled, placing words exactly.—She wrote about here. Well, she said something... ‘It’s strange to live in a country where there are still heroes.’—