SAHO Links
Organisations: South African Communist Party
Politics & Governance: The Congress of Democrats and the Freedom Charter
Outside Links
Treason trial to Rivonia - Rusty (Lionel) Bernstein, website: rusty-bernstein.com
-
Lionel Bernstein, website: wikipedia.org
Sources
From Protest To Challenge, Political Profiles Volume 4, p6
Names: Bernstein, Lionel (Rusty).
Date of Birth: 5 March 1920.
Place of Birth: Durban, South Africa.
Date of Death: 23 June 2002.
Gender: Male
In Summary: Activist, Architect and prominent member of the SACP.
An architect, he was a leader of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) and a founder member and leader of the Congress of the Democrats. Bernstein was a defendant in both the Treason Trial and the Rivonia Trial. He was born in 1920 into a middle-class family and attended a private school in Natal. In the late 1930s he was secretary of the Labour Party League of Youth and an ex officio member of the Labour Party's national executive committee. He joined the Communist Party in 1939, while a part-time student at the University of the Witwatersrand.
A skilful writer, from 1940 he was in charge of propaganda in the CPSA's Johannesburg office and a member of the Johannesburg committee. He served in World War II with the Sixth South African Division in Europe. Lionel met Hilda Watts through shared political involvement, and they were married in 1941.
He was involved in the African mineworkers' strike of 1946 and in the trial that followed, and was fined for assisting an illegal strike. During the War he had become a member of the Springbok Legion and later served on the editorial board of its journal, Fighting Talk. He continued to be associated with the journal when it became independent until it ceased publication in 1963. Although banned from all political activity by the mid-1950s, he played an important role in drafting the Freedom Charter in 1955. He was detained in 1960 and placed under house arrest in 1962. He was arrested in the Rivonia raid in July 1963.
He was alleged to have been a member of the central committee of the underground Communist Party at the time. With little evidence against him, however - he had been present at Rivonia at the time of raid, apparently to erect a radio mast - he denied being a member of Umkhonto We Sizwe and was acquitted. He was re-arrested and re-charged at the end of the trial but escaped while on bail and left South Africa. He died in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, on June 23, 2002, aged 82.