At a Glance
From London to Johannesburg: The Formation of a Communist
Hilda Watts was born in London in 1915, in the east of the city, into a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe. The milieu of Jewish immigrant London in the early twentieth century was saturated with the political traditions of the European left — socialism, anarchism, communism, trade unionism — and Hilda grew up in an environment in which politics was not a distant abstraction but an immediate daily reality. The question of how to organise society so that people were treated fairly, paid decently, and given the conditions to live full human lives was not an academic question. It was the question her community lived with.
She came to South Africa as a young woman and found a country that posed the questions of justice and inequality in terms more stark and more brutal than anything she had encountered in London. The racial architecture of South African society — a system that assigned every person to a racial category and determined from that category what work they could do, where they could live, what they could own, whom they could marry, and whether they had any voice in the political arrangements that governed their lives — was not merely unjust in the abstract. It was a daily experience of humiliation and deprivation for the majority of the country's population, and it was enforced by law and by violence.
She joined the Communist Party of South Africa, which in the 1930s and 1940s was one of the few political organisations in the country that operated on a non-racial basis and that organised across the colour line. This was not a comfortable or a safe position. The CPSA's non-racialism was radical in a society built on race, and its members faced official harassment, surveillance, and the hostility of the white community whose political consensus the party challenged. But it was also intellectually and morally coherent in a way that the racially circumscribed politics of the mainstream parties was not, and Hilda Bernstein committed herself to it with the consistency and the seriousness that would characterise her political engagement for the rest of her life.
The Councillor: Politics in Public Office
In 1943, Hilda Bernstein was elected to the Johannesburg City Council as a Communist Party candidate — one of the first communists to win elected office in South Africa. The significance of this achievement should not be understated. The Johannesburg City Council was the governing body of South Africa's largest city, a city built on gold mining and on the migrant labour system that the mining industry had created and that the apartheid state's predecessors had organised, legislated, and enforced. Its politics were the politics of white supremacy, of racial capitalism, of a system that needed Black labour and denied Black humanity in the same motion.
Into this environment Hilda Bernstein brought the politics of the communist left: demands for better wages for African workers, challenges to the racial restrictions on residence and movement, questions about the conditions in which African families lived in the townships that surrounded Johannesburg, and a consistent insistence that the people whose labour built the city had rights in that city that the council was obliged to recognise. She used her council seat as a platform for the kind of politics that the mainstream parties refused to engage with, and she did so with the combination of intellectual rigour and personal courage that distinguished the best of the South African communist tradition.
The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 changed her political situation fundamentally. The Act banned the Communist Party and defined communism so broadly that virtually any advocacy for racial equality or workers' rights could fall within its scope. It gave the government the power to "list" individuals as communists — with severe restrictions on their activities as a consequence — and it was used systematically to remove the most effective left-wing voices from public political life. Hilda Bernstein, as a prominent communist, was subject to banning orders that restricted her ability to attend meetings, to be quoted in publications, and to continue the kind of public political work she had been doing since her election to the council.
Liliesleaf Farm and the Rivonia Arrests
Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, north of Johannesburg, was the nerve centre of MK's high command and the ANC underground's operational headquarters in the early 1960s. Nelson Mandela had lived there under cover while he was operating as the Black Pimpernel — the fugitive leader of MK who evaded the security police for months. The farm was owned and managed by Arthur Goldreich and was, to outward appearances, a working smallholding; in reality it was the place where the ANC's most senior underground operatives met, planned, and kept the documents and materials of the armed struggle.
On 11 July 1963, the security police raided Liliesleaf Farm and arrested seventeen people, including Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Raymond Mhlaba, Dennis Goldberg, Elias Motsoaledi, Andrew Mlangeni, and Lionel Bernstein. Nelson Mandela, who was already imprisoned following his arrest in 1962, was brought from Robben Island to stand trial with the others. The documents found at the farm gave the state what it believed was sufficient evidence for charges of sabotage and conspiracy to commit violent revolution — charges that carried the death penalty.
Hilda Bernstein attended the trial throughout its months-long proceedings. She was there in the Palace of Justice in Pretoria when the accused made their statements, when the advocates argued the law, when the state presented its case. She was there on the day of the verdict — 12 June 1964 — when all but one of the accused were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. The exception was Lionel Bernstein, who was acquitted. And she was there to witness what happened next: as Lionel walked from the dock, freed by the court's verdict, the security police arrested him again under the ninety-day detention law, which allowed them to hold anyone without charge for ninety days, and then for another ninety days, indefinitely.
This moment — the acquittal and the immediate re-arrest, the law giving with one hand and the state taking with the other — is one of the defining images of the apartheid legal system at its most nakedly contemptuous of the rule of law it claimed to embody. Hilda Bernstein's account of it in The World That Was Ours is one of the most vivid and devastating passages in the literature of the anti-apartheid struggle.
The World That Was Ours: Writing the Struggle
After the Bernsteins fled South Africa in 1964 — escaping via Botswana in a pattern that many activists from the Rivonia era followed — Hilda began writing the memoir that would become her most celebrated work. The World That Was Ours, published in 1967, is an account of the years leading up to the Rivonia arrests, of the trial itself, of the world of the Congress Alliance and the SACP and the underground movement as it had existed before the state destroyed it. It is a book about politics, but more fundamentally it is a book about people: about what it felt like to live in that world, to commit oneself to those politics, to watch the thing one had built being taken apart by state violence, and to carry the knowledge of what had been lost and what had been preserved.
The book was immediately recognised as an important document. It combined the intimacy of personal memoir with the analytical clarity of a political mind that had thought seriously about the movement it was describing, and it provided international readers with a ground-level account of the South African liberation struggle that had not previously been available in this form. It was not a propaganda document — Hilda Bernstein was too honest a writer for that — but it was a committed one, a book written from inside the struggle by someone who believed in what the struggle was for and who wanted the world to understand what it had cost.
She continued writing prolifically in exile. South Africa: The Terrorism of Torture documented the systematic use of torture by the South African security police. No. 46 — Steve Biko, published in 1978 in the aftermath of Biko's murder in detention, brought his story to a wider audience. Death Is Part of the Process was a novel. For Their Triumphs and for Their Tears documented the lives of women under apartheid. The Rift: The Exile Experience of South Africans, published in 1994, examined the experience of exile itself — the dislocations and losses and unexpected transformations that came with living far from the country one had committed one's life to.
The Artist's Eye
Throughout her political and literary life, Hilda Bernstein was also a practising artist — a painter whose work engaged with the same subjects that animated her writing. Her paintings documented the faces of the people she had known in the movement: the activists, the organisers, the ordinary people whose lives the struggle was fought to transform. They documented the landscapes of South Africa — the Highveld, the townships, the urban environments that the apartheid system had created and that the liberation movement sought to change.
Her art was not a hobby or a sideline. It was continuous with her political and literary work, a different register in which the same commitments expressed themselves. The ability to see people clearly — to see them as fully human, as individuals with faces and histories and particular presences in the world — was both an artistic and a political capacity, and in Hilda Bernstein the two were inseparable. Her paintings are records of a world, and they are also arguments about the value of the people they depict.
Exile, Return, and the Long Arc of the Struggle
The experience of exile is one of the recurring themes of Hilda Bernstein's later work, and it was a defining condition of the last four decades of her life. She was in London while South Africa continued under apartheid, while the generation of activists who had been imprisoned at Rivonia served their sentences, while the struggle continued under the conditions of illegality and repression that the state maintained through the 1970s, the Soweto uprising of 1976, and the state of emergency periods of the 1980s. She was watching from a distance, writing and painting and contributing to the international anti-apartheid movement, but she was not there.
The democratic transition of 1994, and Nelson Mandela's election as South Africa's first democratic president, marked the end of the system she had fought against for the whole of her adult life. She was seventy-nine years old. Many of the people she had known and worked with in the movement were dead — some killed by the state, some by the hazards of exile and age, some by the ordinary attrition of long lives. Lionel Bernstein had died in 2002. She herself lived for another twelve years after the democratic transition, long enough to see the new South Africa in its early decades, with its achievements and its complications and its unfinished business.
Legacy: The Chronicler of a Cause
Hilda Bernstein died in London in 2006. She was ninety years old. In the volume and quality of her literary output, in the breadth of her political commitments, and in the consistency with which she maintained those commitments through decades of official harassment, exile, and the ordinary difficulties of a long political life, she stands as one of the most significant figures of the South African liberation movement's literary and cultural history.
Her books remain the best available accounts of certain aspects of the anti-apartheid struggle — particularly of the Rivonia Trial period, of the experience of exile, and of the lives of women under apartheid. They are written with a clarity and a humanity that make them accessible to readers who know nothing of the historical background and illuminating to readers who know it well. They are not nostalgic documents. They are honest ones: books that face what happened, including the failures and the losses, without flinching and without sentimentality.
She was also a woman who lived by her political convictions at a time when living by those convictions was genuinely dangerous. She joined a communist party in a country that would eventually ban communism. She stood for election on a platform of racial equality in a society built on racial inequality. She attended the Rivonia Trial and watched her husband acquitted and immediately re-arrested. She went into exile rather than abandon her politics. She spent forty years writing books that told the truth about apartheid to a world that the apartheid government spent considerable resources trying to mislead. That record, taken as a whole, is not a minor one.