Norman Levy
Freedom fighter who helped shape the new South Africa
HE WAS just a riding his bike in a Johannesburg when he came across a white woman addressing a group of black domestic workers about people’s rights. The woman was a Communist Party candidate to the city’s council and the boy, Norman Levy, who has died aged 91, was intrigued enough to accept an invitation to attend a forthcoming meeting of the Youth Communist League.
The people he met there would become legends of the anti-apartheid struggle; Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Ahmed Kathrada. Their aim was to change the South African political landscape; young Norman decided that was what he wanted too.
Together with his identical twin Leon, Norman would become part of a group of first-generation Jewish South Africans who would play a leading role in the fight against racial discrimination in the country. As members of a race that was still so discriminated against, they felt dutybound to oppose a regime that was itself race-based.
Norman and Leon were the youngest of the four children of fishmonger Mark Levy and Mary Witten, both from Jewish families who had emigrated from Lithuania. Mary used to tell her kids about the discrimination she had experienced there and the children were raised in accordance with the principles of Bundism – a secular Jewish socialist movement.
Life for the Levys became more difficult after Mark’s death when the twins were just six, and to make ends meet Mary was forced to take in lodgers. Norman attended Athlone High School in Johannesburg but kept up his activism and in 1946 joined the Communist Party of South Africa.
Even after the party was disbanded he remained active in underground cells. Firmly opposed to the introduction of the Bantu Education Act — which stipulated separate education for the different races — Levy took part in the 1952/3 defiance campaign. One of the leaders of the African Education Movement, he led a double life combining his daytime job as a teacher in white schools with his clandestine work helping devise and run “cultural clubs”, which aimed to help black students fill the gaps left by the much inferior education they received.
His prominent role in anti-apartheid activities made it almost inevitable that in 1956 he and Leon – by then a well-known trade unionist – would be among the 156 people detained in what would go down in South African history as the Treason Trial. In the end, all the accused, among them Nelson Mandela, were acquitted. But that didn’t put a stop to police harassment. Levy, who in 1958 had married fellow activist Philippa Murrell, left teaching in 1960, ostensibly to study for a degree at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg but also to dedicate more time to his underground work. This intensified after the declaration of the state of emergency following the Sharpeville massacre that same year.
It all came to a head in July 1964 when Levy was arrested and held in solitary confinement for 54 days. In spite of being repeatedly tortured — with one particularly brutal session lasting for 102 hours — he refused to give away any of his comrades. He was sentenced to three years in the Pretoria local prison, together with other notable white political prisoners, among them Dennis Goldberg and, later, Bram Fischer, Mandela’s lawyer.
According to a fellow inmate, while in jail Levy had at times despaired of the movement’s leadership, but he never lost faith in its principles.
On his release, with newly issued banning orders prohibiting him from working, taking part in meetings and social gatherings, Levy and his family, armed with an exit permit to the UK, went into exile. But starting from scratch abroad proved difficult; at one point Levy held three concurrent teaching jobs.
Awarded a United Nations Fellowship to study at the London School of Economics, he gained a PhD in Economic History on the mining industry and worked as a lecturer at Middlesex University. Even in the UK he continued to be active in the movement, mainly by helping other exiles to secure scholarships.
His belief in communism, though, didn’t mean that he accepted everything unquestionably; his open admiration of Czech leader Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face” during the 1968 Prague Spring for a while left him sidelined within the party. That, however, didn’t diminish his admiration for the Soviet Union and what it represented. He finally managed to visit it in 1972, travelling on a refurbished London bus with a group of students, staying in campsites and meeting ordinary people rather than party cadres, an experience he thoroughly enjoyed.
But he wasn’t left out in the cold for long. In 1987 Levy visited the USSR as part of an ANC delegation to meet Soviet social scientists and he was a South African Communist Party delegate at the party’s 7th congress in Cuba in 1989.
In 1991 with South Africa on the cusp of radical change, he did not hesitate to leave behind the life he had built in almost three decades abroad and return to the home country. Here he started the massive enterprise of transforming the public service, designing affirmative action frameworks for the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA).
In 1996 Mandela appointed him deputy chair of the Presidential Review Commission for the Transformation of Public Service with Dr Vincent Maphai as chair. According to Maphai, “Levy understood things politically”. He knew that politicians come and go but that public service is at the core of government.
Levy was always aware that creating a new South Africa was a complex undertaking and although his support for the ANC never wavered, he wasn’t blind to the failings of some of Mandela’s successors — Jacob Zuma’s actions reportedly infuriated him.
After moving to Cape Town he became Professor Extraordinary at the University of the Western Cape’s School of Government. Soon after he served on an inter-ministerial committee in charge of putting apartheid documents in the public domain. Later he was asked to head a ministerial task team on Balancing Secrecy and Transparency in a Democracy.
Even after he retired he continued to write. His 2011 autobiography, The Final Prize, has been highly praised. He also spoke at conferences and remained intellectually engaged and full of curiosity. A man of the people to the end.
Levy’s marriage to Murrell ended in divorce in 1974. He married American academic Carole Silver in 1991. She died in 2015.
He is survived by his twin brother Leon, his daughters Deborah and Jessica, his son Simon and stepson Tim.
Norman Levy, born 7 August, 1929. Died 4 July, 2021.
In our obituary of Captain Israel Shalome Dalton (8 October) we inadvertently omitted the name of his daughter Laurel Farrington in the list of his survivors. We apologise to the family for any upset caused.