Hilda Bernstein

n activist, organiser, writer and artist, Hilda Bernstein was a unique and unrelenting voice in the struggle to end apartheid.

Hilda Bernstein, née Schwarz, was born in 1915 Russian-Jewish parents in London, England. After her father’s death, she quit school and left for South Africa as a young woman in search of work. At only 18 years old, she was profoundly moved by the inhumane social and economic treatment the majority of people, particularly women, suffered in South Africa.

Bernstein became involved in politics, and committed herself to the struggle for liberation. She was an executive member of the National Union of Distributive Workers. She was first a member

of the South African Labour Party League Youth, but their inaction on apartheid led her to join the nonracial South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1940. It was there she met and married her partner, fellow SACP member Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, in 1941.

Bernstein served as a councillor for the City of Johannesburg from 1943 to 1946, which was remarkable in a time where anticommunist paranoia among white South Africans was high. She used her position as Hillbrow’s representative to advocate against the squatter slums demarcated for thousands of black South Africans, d e ma n d i n g mo r e a n d d e c e n t housing.

In 1946, however, Bernstein was charged with sedition for her work in aiding the 1946 African mineworkers’ strike. Her anti-apartheid

writing was also appearing regularly in South Africa, Africa and Europe. In 1953, she was “listed” as a communist and banned by ministerial decree from 26 different organisations, meetings, organising activities, writing or being published.

Bernstein’s dynamisn was undeterred, and together with Ray Alexander Simons, a fellow SACP member, she began working on the idea of the Federation of South African Women (Fedsaw). Their aim was the first non-racial women’s organisation in the country.

In 1954, Fedsaw was born. Bernstein’s vision and writing skills were key in drafting the Women’s Charter, Fedsaw’s manifesto.

Together with this like-minded group of women, Bernstein was key in organising the historic Women’s March to the Union Buildings on

August 9 1956.

Bernstein was also in the Congress of Democrats after the banning of the SACP, and involved in forming the South African Peace Council in 1956, where she was elected secretary, until it too was banned by the apartheid government. Like many others instrumental in the liberation struggle, she was arrested in the 1960 State of Emergency and detained without charge.

After her husband Lionel Bernstein was released on bail during the Rivonia Trial, they decided to escape, evading imminent arrest and capture by state police. They crossed the border into Botswana on foot, from where they could travel to London.

From exile in London, Bernstein was feverishly involved in the political work of the ANC, focusing on

the Women’s Section activities. A brilliant public speaker, she spoke on behalf of the ANC and antiapartheid movement across Europe and the USA. Hilda and Lionel Bernstein returned to South Africa to participate in the first democratic elections in 1994.

She supported herself and her four children by working as a freelance journalist, artist and print maker. A prolific writer and artist, she authored many publications and biographies on the struggle against apartheid and its heroes, including Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko and Lilian Ngoyi.

She was awarded the Order of Luthuli in Silver in 2004 for her “contribution to the attainment of gender equality and a free and democratic society” in South Africa. Bernstein died in 2006 at the age of 91 in Cape Town. — Romi Reinecke