1960

All the male detainees at the Fort have some sort of a political record, most as current political activists but some as activists in times long past or ‘fellow travellers’ or members of obscure sects.

There are people who are quite unexpected, like Hymie Basner, who I have scarcely seen since he stormed out of the party ‘aggregate’ meeting back in 1938. Since then he has ploughed a lonely furrow, been elected as the lone senator to represent all Africans in the Transvaal and Orange Free State; founded a new African Democratic Party to rival the ANC, with small success; undertaken the legal burden of a number of important political cases and been an expert witness for the defence in the 1946 Mine Strike trial.

He seemed to have dropped out of politics altogether. Less surprising to find Jock Isacowitz, who, with me, had been introduced to Marxism by Kurt Jonas. In about 1940 Jock had joined the party, served in the army with the rank of sergeant major and helped found the Springbok Legion. After the war he had dropped out of the party and later helped found the new Liberal Party.

There are two other members of the Liberal Party, Ernest Wentzel and John Laing, both lawyers who I do not know, and the Reverend Douglas Thompson from the East Rand, who I know from occasional encounters at the Left Club and COD affairs. And Louis Joffe, brother of Max, who had steered me towards the party. An old and frail veteran of the 1917 campaign against the Germans in South West Africa (now Namibia), one of Smuts's internees at the start of the Second World War and a party member until he was expelled in about 1940 for ‘factional activity’. I had been on the conference sub-committee which heard his appeal, upheld the verdict and advised him to apply de novo for readmission. He was a stubborn old man who refused to do so and remained ineffectual and on the political fringe instead.

There is one of my contemporaries from university who I cannot now recognise. Vincent Swart had been one of Wits University's golden boys, a highly regarded poet with the romantic looks of a young Chopin, who moved in a radical circle of glamorous girl students.