Business Day was the first to publish Rehana Rossouw’s review of Hugh Lewin’s new book, Stones against the mirror. It brought back vivid memories of my student days at the University of Stellenbosch where I met both Hugh Lewin and Adrian Leftwich, one of the main characters in the new book. In fact together with a fellow student at Maties we persuaded Adrian Leftwich and Jonty Driver to start a branch of NUSAS at Stellenbosch University in about 1963.
I remember being on the outer fringes of the ARM student group and attending meetings in Cape Town without fully appreciating what it was they had in mind. I really look forward to reading the book to find out much more about that movement and those early days of the “struggle”.
Rehana Rossouw’s review in Business Day of Hugh Lewin’s book – Throwing stones at the past can help heal it: Friendship in the Time of the South African Struggle (Random House Struik) can be viewed or down-loaded and makes fascinating reading. Here are some extracts from that book review article.
Friendship betrayed
“HUGH Lewin carried bitterness in his heart for 40 years, sharp as a shard from a mirror, for his best friend who had betrayed him. When he finally rid himself of his sour burden, he sat down to write a book that enriches South African literature. His mined memories are shared in a voice chiselled down to the essentials in Stones Against the Mirror: Friendship in the Time of the South African Struggle (Random House Struik). It is essentially a story of friendship, forged and shattered in the struggle against apartheid”.
Book launch
“His book launch last month was attended by several grey- and white-haired former bombers and survivors of torture in detention. Hopefully, more of their stories will be shared. Despite a plethora of struggle biographers, South Africans know little about the sacrifices and pain experienced by intrepid adventurers, implacable in their resistance”.
Meeting Adrian Leftwich
“Lewin met Adrian Leftwich at university, when both were student activists. ‘We lived, slept, ate and drank politics. It consumed us, every moment of every day’. Their comradeship was enriched by a huge dollop of friendship. Soon after he accepted the invitation to join the underground dynamiters, Lewin discovered that his best friend was also in the group. He thought it inevitable; to build a circle of trusted collaborators, people chose those to whom they were closest. Lewin worked as a journalist on the Golden City Post by day and learned to build and plant bombs at night”.
John Harris and the station bomb
“In July 1964, ARM’s attacks in Johannesburg and Cape Town attracted the attention of the security police. Like a line of dominoes, the saboteurs were caught, one after the other. Lewin was detained under the 90-day detention law five days after his best friend — who had given his name to the police”.
“John Harris, one of the few ARM members who escaped attention, planted a bomb at Park Station, timed to go off at peak hour. He phoned a warning to the police, who took no action. Four weeks after the blast, a grandmother died from her injuries; 22 others were injured. The security police stepped up their torture”.
Evidence in court
“Some of the ARM comrades tried to provide minimal information in the statements they eventually signed. Others cracked. Leftwich and another ARM member, John Lloyd, testified against Lewin and his three co-accused. Lloyd also testified against Harris, who was executed eight months after the Park Station bomb, at 27”.
Public admission by Adrian Leftwich and meeting
“In June 2002, Leftwich published an article in Granta magazine titled I Gave the Names. It gave Lewin what he had been waiting decades for: an explanation that didn’t duck responsibility. Leftwich wrote:
‘Not why I had done it, or the circumstances of my doing it, but that I had done it. That I had betrayed my colleagues… I had chosen, I had acted…. Unlike many betrayals, mine was public and known’.”
“Curious about himself, and his friend whose voice rose up from the Granta article, Lewin contacted him and the men met for the first time in decades. The struggle provides Lewin with a dramatic backdrop to an incredible true story of a friendship tortured by politics. His description of their reunion is pared down to the essentials, and filled with love”.
Reading the book really did bring back many memories of my student days at Stellenbosch University. I also realised that Hugh Lewin was not based in the Cape and that I probably did not meet him. His description of Adrian Leftwich is very accurate and I also remember him as being very friendly and someone who inspired young people to do things. It is amazing that Hugh was able to meet Adrian again and resume a friendship after all those years and after what Adrian did to his friends. Very admirable of Hugh.
Hugh mentions that he met Adrian at the NUSAS conference in 1959. That was when I met Allard K Lowenstein (16 Jan 1929 – 14 March 1980) and his two friends from the USA who attended that conference and stayed at my parents home in Johannesburg for a few days. They told me about John Kennedy and how he would be the next president of the USA in 1960. Al wrote a book “A Brutal Mandate” in 1962 about their clandestine visit to South Africa and Namibia (then South West Africa). Al actually gave evidence at the United Nations about the treatment of the inhabitants in Namibia.
I met Al again with his children when he visited South Africa in about 1975. He had an extremely soft spot for South Africa and this is apparent in the book he wrote. It is worth reading about him in Wikipedia. Al was murdered in his office in Manhattan in March 1980 by a deranged gunman, David Sweeney, who was known to him.
He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery because he was a veteran of the United States Army. I have read that the inscription on his headstone is from a note Robert F Kennedy once sent him, quoting Emerson: “If a single man plants himself on his convictions and there abide, the huge world will come around to him”.
As a further aside Hugh Lewin mentions Baruch Hirson on page 113. Before going to Stellenbosch University in 1961 I studied mining engineering at Wits University and Baruch Hirson was my lecturer in Physics. I remember him as being very intense and not very popular with the students, but then first-year students were extremely badly behaved in class and showed very little respect for the lecturers. Baruch Hirson has also written books and I found them interesting. Although Hugh does not mention Jonty Driver I do remember meeting him in Cape Town and he addressed one of our NUSAS meetings in Stellenbosch. Jonty has also written books which I have read.
Being a student in Helderberg residence at Stellenbosch I wrote to my parents regularly and came across one of the letters in which I referred to NUSAS and thought it might be worth quoting part of the letter, written when I was 21 years old.
Extract from my letter dated 27 August 1962 whilst at Stellenbosch University to my parents in Johannesburg.
“I think I did tell you that we have a local branch (of NUSAS) not recognised by the SR (Students’ Representative Council) but operating very successfully. I am the Director of Studies and on Wednesday 5th Sept we’re having a lecture on the “Hungarian Revolution, 1956”. The lecturer is Mr Truu an economics lecturer and (he) actually fought in the Revolution. So it should be very interesting. Our membership is increasing steadily and we have almost 120 members now. We have told everyone that we intend staying out of politics and being conservative. All we want is co-operation with the ASB (Afrikaanse Studente Bond) as far as possible”.