Lionel Bernstein
Lionel Rusty Bernstein ( born March 5, 1920 in Durban, † June 23, 2002 in Kidlington, Oxfordshire ) was a South African politician and opponent of apartheid. He was a leading member of the South African Communist Party ( SACP ).
Life
Origin and background
Amber was born as the fourth child of European Jewish immigrants in Durban. At eight, he was an orphan. He received at the elite school Hilton College his schooling. After leaving school he worked in a Johannesburg architect's office and took the same time at Witwatersrand University part-time studies in architecture. After graduating in 1936 he worked as an architect.
Political Activities in South Africa
In 1937, Bernstein member of the Labour League of Youth. In 1939, he joined the former CPSA (later SACP ) and was a leading member there soon. He became secretary of the Johannesburg district of CASP. In 1941 he married Hilda Watts, an emigrant from the UK, which he had met in the Labour League of Youth. Nicknamed "Rusty " ( Rusty ) he received because of his red hair and his political views. During World War II he served in the South African army and fought in North Africa and Italy. In 1946 he worked with the great miners strike for strike newspaper. He and his wife were arrested and sentenced to probation for rebellion. As a result, Bernstein worked as a journalist for various left-wing South African newspapers such as Liberation and The Guardian. After he was banned, he wrote under pseudonyms.
In 1950, the CPSA was banned. Bernstein founded in 1953 with other party members, the SACP as an underground movement. He was instrumental in the formation of the Congress of Democrats who cooperated with the African National Congress ( ANC), which at that time had only blacks as members. Lionel Bernstein 1955 took part in the Peoples 's Congress, which adopted the Freedom Charter. His task was the final wording of the Freedom Charter. 1956 Bernstein was accused with 155 other anti -apartheid activists in the Treason Trial of treason, but acquitted all the defendants as. From 1959 to 1990 he was a board member of the journal The African Communist. After the Sharpeville massacre he and his wife were arrested. Bernstein was released only five months later and was placed under house arrest in 1962. However, he continued to be active in the underground.
On 11 July 1963 he was arrested in a raid in Johannesburg Rivonia district along with other senior ANC and SACP officials. Bernstein was placed in solitary confinement and was from 1964 to 1965 defendant in the Rivonia Trial, in which high-ranking ANC and SACP members such as Nelson Mandela received some life sentences. Only Bernstein and another accused were acquitted. After his release, he was immediately arrested again, but then released on bail. His wife should be arrested, but escaped in time.
Time in exile and temporary return to South Africa
The Bernstein decided in 1964 mainly because of their children, to go into exile. They fled on foot across the border to Botswana and on to Zambia. From there they traveled to Tanzania and finally in the United Kingdom, where their children arrived and Amber was able to work in London as an architect. There, too, he campaigned for the abolition of apartheid. In 1987, he was in Moscow a series of seminars for ANC members. He helped in the establishment of a Department of Political Science at the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania's Morogoro, where he was a year young ANC members lectures on the struggle for freedom.
Bernstein returned in 1994 for four months back to South Africa. For the ANC, he worked in preparation for the first free elections in South Africa's press office. His job was to convince white voters from the ANC. He wrote in 1999 the book Memory against Forgetting about the resistance against Apartheid 1938-1964. In 2002, Bernstein died at his home in Kidlington near Oxford. At his funeral in the United Kingdom also Zanele Mbeki took part, the wife of former South African President Thabo Mbeki. Nelson Mandela and Graça Machel visited his wife Hilda Bernstein in the week after the funeral.
Works
- Memory Against Forgetting. Memoirs from a Life in South African Politics. Viking, London 1999, ISBN 0-670-88792-7