The heroes who fought against apartheid
THE ROLE of South African Jews in consigning apartheid to history is examined in An Act of Defiance, the gala opener for the UK International Jewish Film Festival next week. This was not the initial intention of Dutch director Jean van de Velde. “I didn’t realise in the beginning that so many Jews were involved in the uprising against apartheid,” he tells me.
“Neither did I know that the prosecutor, Dr Percy Yutar, was also a Jew. He wanted to prove that the Jewish community weren’t all terrorists, that they were law-abiding citizens.”
All the white people accused in the 1963-1964 Rivonia Trial were Jewish. The trial saw Nelson Mandela sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government.
The movie is based on the life story of Bram Fischer, a white Afrikaner advocate who was lead counsel for Mandela and his comrades. The screenplay is adapted from The State vs Nelson Mandela, by Joel Joffe, the instructing attorney in the trial.
What amazed Van de Velde was that when Mandela became president of South Africa, he invited Yutar, the man who had fought for him to be sentenced to death, to a kosher lunch.
Van de Velde was born and raised in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, spending the first 13 years of his life there. It is this, he says, that piques his interest in stories about racial issues.
Though everyone knows about Mandela being sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island, “hardly anybody” knows about the mixed group of Coloureds, Indians, white Jews and black people who were convicted with him.
“That motivated me to tell the story,” he says, “because I really found it interesting that they believed in a non-racial society and they lived it and dared to risk their lives for this ideal.”
While the Jewish angle was not specifically targeted, it happens to be important, he says. “All the white characters are Jewish.
“The white Jewish trialists found the lawyers and the moral strength to fight the apartheid system.”
It struck Van de Velde forcibly that these individuals were willing to give up everything for their ideals. “They had good jobs, they had wonderful houses, they had swimming pools, they had families and they were willing to put it in jeopardy and they did, for their beliefs.
“They had a moral compass which a lot of people and especially world leaders these days, totally lack. They were willing to sacrifice their lives not for their own benefit, but for the future of others.”
As Mandela remarked after his release from prison, Fischer and the other Jews were more courageous than he was because they were fighting against their own people for his people, Van de Velde notes.
He adds that the notorious security police “brutally attacked” them continuously, including almost daily house searches, sometimes at midnight. “It’s amazing. They were so strong and the wives too.
“Something in Jewish people makes them very strong when they have a goal to fight for,” he reflects.
Shot on location in South Africa, the court room and the prison cells are the original ones. The cast and crew were motivated to tell the story as Bram Fischer is an unsung hero as are some of the Jewish trialists, he says. The Dutch-South African co-production had input from the Fischer family as well as some of those accused at Rivonia.
Over 20 years since South Africa’s transition to democracy, the story still resonates with audiences, as evidenced by the awards the film has garnered. “I think everybody feels that we are living in a very narcissistic age and they are looking for inspiration.”
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