Rica Hodgson, firebrand who dedicated her life to the freedom struggle 1920-2018
Tough member of SACP did everything, from raising funds to making bombs in Hillbrow flat
● Rica Hodgson, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 97, played a key behind-the-scenes role in the anti-apartheid struggle.
A small, tough, formidable member of the SACP, her activities ranged from fundraising to making bombs with her husband Jack in their small Hillbrow flat.
She was jailed, banned, spent years under house arrest, had her passport confiscated and eventually, with the police hot on her heels, fled to Botswana.
The then minister of justice John Vorster warned her never to come back. She was in exile for 27 years.
Hodgson (née Gampel) was born in Johannesburg on July 1 1920. Her father was from Warsaw and became rich selling grain to Tsarist Russia. He left Poland for South Africa in 1880 to escape anti-Jewish pogroms.
He owned several buildings in the centre of Johannesburg and frequented the Rand Club, which barred entry to all but the wealthiest Jews.
He died of a heart attack in 1939 after losing most of his money on the horses. Those members of Hodgson’s family who stayed in Poland were wiped out by the Nazis in the war.
Her mother was from a poor family in
Lithuania.
One of 11 children, Hodgson matriculated at Athlone High. She was influenced by schoolmates whose Russian fathers were Bolsheviks. Her father belittled her as a woman and hated communists and banned them from the house.
Hodgson trained as a nurse and got married at around 20.
When the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1941 she volunteered for the South African armed services and did administrative work in the air force.
She became involved with the Springbok
Legion which was started by South African soldiers during the war to preserve the values they thought they were fighting for — anti-fascism and anti-racism.
Her husband strongly opposed her activities. She decided he was a racist and ended the marriage.
Love at first sight
One day she was asked to book a hotel room for the national secretary of the Springbok Legion who was coming to Cape Town to address a meeting.
This was Jack Hodgson, and when they saw each other it was love at first sight. They married in 1945.
He was a hardcore, militant member of the local communist party who had had combat experience in World War 2.
He taught her about communism and in 1946 recruited her into the party.
She became a formidable fundraiser for the legion. Her first donors were anti-apartheid advocates Issie Maisels, Bram Fischer and Vernon Berrange.
She didn’t just want money from donors, she wanted their allegiance to communism. She honed her rhetorical skills politicising them.
This alienated noncommunist members of the legion. Disenchanted with its increasingly militant leftist rhetoric they left and the legion petered out.
She joined the International Peace Council, which was a communist front, and formed lasting friendships with Fischer, Hilda Bernstein, Ruth First and Joe Slovo who were the driving forces behind it.
In 1950, when communism was banned, she was listed and went underground.
She was a founding member of the Congress of Democrats in 1953 and its national secretary until she was banned in 1954.
She served on the secretariat of the National Action Council with Walter Sisulu, Slovo, Ahmed Kathrada and others who organised the 1955 Congress of the People in Kliptown.
She couldn’t attend because she was banned, but watched from on top of a pile of coal in someone’s back yard.
She came home from work one day in 1956 to find that Jack had been arrested along with 155 others and charged with treason.
She became fundraiser and secretary of the Treason Trial Defence Fund. When the state’s case collapsed and the trial finally ended she transferred her formidable fundraising skills to the SA Defence and Aid Fund, which covered the legal costs of political detainees.
While all this was happening she was also secretary of the King Kong committee that organised the famous musical which became a hit overseas.
She was detained at 2am during the state of emergency after the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960.
She was held at Marshall Square police station, the Fort prison in Johannesburg, Pretoria Prison and in Nylstroom with other activists including Helen Joseph and Hilda Bernstein.
After 100 days in detention and an eight-day hunger strike she was released without being charged.
Under house arrest
She overcame her doubts about armed struggle and helped Jack turn their Hillbrow flat into a small bomb factory where they manufactured explosives and timing devices.
In 1962 she was put under 12-hour and Jack under 24-hour house arrest.
Their 15-year-old son, Spencer, was the only member of the family allowed to leave the flat on nights and weekends.
Jack had to quit his job and Rica’s small salary had to support the family. At the time she worked as a reporter at New Age, an influential leftist newspaper in Johannesburg operating from 1953 to 1962.
In mid-1963 they were driven across the border to Botswana (then Bechuanaland) by Andrew Mlangeni, who soon afterwards became a Rivonia triallist and was sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island.
They set up a transit centre outside Lobatse for South Africans fleeing apartheid. They were declared prohibited immigrants a couple of months later and deported to London. There she worked for the British Defence and Aid Fund.
She encountered security police spies Gordon Winter and Craig Williamson and warned the trusting head of the fund, Canon John Collins, to have nothing to do with them.
Her small flat in London was a workshop and meeting place for Jack and other comrades producing underground material for the struggle at home.
When she returned to South Africa in 1990 she became Sisulu’s secretary. Small, tough and efficient, she ran his office with an iron hand.
The contrast between them was stark. Sisulu was soft-spoken and used temperate language. She called a spade a spade and swore like a trooper. She protected him from the hordes of people demanding his attention.
“Walter would have attended to all of them and worked himself to the point of absolute exhaustion,” she said.
Her job was “to keep him alive”.
She retired in 1996.
She is survived by her son. Jack died in 1977.