Hugh Lewin
Anti-apartheid activist who was betrayed by his best friend
HUGH LEWIN, who has died aged 79, was an anti-apartheid activist and writer who spent seven years in a South African jail after being betrayed by his “dearest friend” and “twin brother”, Adrian Leftwich.
The two belonged to a militant anti-apartheid group, and in 1964 Leftwich was arrested; under interrogation he named Lewin as one of his comrades. Leftwich turned state’s evidence at his trial for sabotage, and while he walked free, Lewin was jailed for seven years.
Lewin, who became an acclaimed author and poet, remained angry for decades. “Bitterness,” he wrote, “clung to me like an armour.” Then, in 2002, he read an article by Leftwich in Granta magazine. “I Gave the Names” recounted his act of betrayal: he had named names, he said, out of “terminal terror”.
Moved by his former friend and comrade’s admission, Lewin, by then back in South Africa after 21 years’ exile, emailed Leftwich, and on his next visit to Britain they were reunited after 40 years. In his award-winning memoir, Stones Against the Mirror, he wrote: “We sit at the river’s edge. We have met again and found that we are what we were before. Friends. It is better that way.”
Hugh Lewin was born in the small agricultural and mining town of Lydenburg, in the north of South Africa, on December 3 1939. His father was an Anglican priest, his mother a missionary – although her mother was Jewish – who suffered mental health problems and eventually had a lobotomy.
Because of his mother’s health issues he was sent to St John’s College, a private school in Houghton, near Johannesburg, on a scholarship thanks to his father’s calling. It was, he recalled in his memoir, “a good introduction to prison”.
He went to Rhodes University in Grahamstown, and had his passport confiscated when he joined a campaign to prevent Fort Hare, South Africa’s only black university, being turned into a segregated college for Xhosa students. He had a short first marriage to Tina, a fellow activist.
Following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 Lewin worked as a sub-editor on publications including the black magazine, Drum, then in 1962 he joined the African Resistance Movement, which carried out minor acts of sabotage on railway lines, pylons and the like. “It was the only way we could escape our whiteness,” he wrote. “Apartheid had crippled us.”
Following his arrest he was tortured and threatened with the death penalty. His jail time was spent in Pretoria Central Prison, where white political prisoners were held. It was a time, he wrote, of “isolation, few visits, few letters, our days measured by the piles of stinking mailbags we mended, day in, day out, bag after filthy bag”.
On his release in 1971 he was handed a “permanent departure permit”; he left South Africa and lived for 10 years in London. There, he married Pat Davidson, who had been his lawyer in prison. They had two daughters, but divorced.
Lewin worked for The Guardian and for the International Defence and Aid Fund, and he was active in the Anti-apartheid Movement. He also began writing a series of children’s books about a boy growing up in an African village.
When Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, Lewin and his family moved to Harare, where he trained journalists and founded Baobab Books to publish up-and-coming Zimbabwean writers. In 1993 he returned to South Africa, becoming head of the newly founded Institute for the Advancement of Journalism and serving on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
His book about his prison experiences, Bandiet Out of Jail, won the 2003 Olive Schreiner Prize, while his memoir, Stones Against the Mirror, won the 2011 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.
Hugh Lewin is survived by his partner of 30 years, the journalist Fiona Lloyd, and by his two daughters.
Hugh Lewin, born December 3 1939, died January 16 2019