Special Hearings — Prison Hearings — 1997-07-21

DR BORAINE: I now call Mrs Ilse Wilson to the witness stand please.  I welcome you very warmly to the hearings on prison and prison reform, you have very close and intimate knowledge which we would like to share with you and for you to share with us.  Can I take it that both of you will be speaking or just the one?  You both are?  Will you take the oath or the affirmation?

UNKNOWN: Affirmation.

DR BORAINE: Will you please stand and I think you can take it together.

UNKNOWN: (sworn states)

MRS RUTH RICE: (sworn states)

DR BORAINE: Thank you very much, please be seated.  Mrs Seroke will assist in facilitating your evidence today and I'm going to hand over to her now, thank you.

MRS SEROKE: Ruth and Ilse welcome, we're grateful that you've come to share with everybody here and us, the experiences your father Braam Fischer went through.  Braam was accused number one as I remember, in the trial which was known as the Braam Fischer Trial and fourteen others.  He was detained on the 9th of July 1964 under the 90 day clause but was released after three days, then he was again arrested on the 23rd of September.  He had however just been granted a temporary passport to enable him to appear before the Privy Council in London in a case involving patent rights.  In view of this, the Judge granted his application for bail which was fixed at ten thousand rand.  Mr Fischer won his case in London and returned to stand trial.
 On the 15th of November 1963 he was again detained but suddenly he decided that he was going to go into hiding and I would like to quote his reasons for that.  He said that he was absenting himself from the remainder of the trial and was going into hiding in South Africa in order to continue opposing the policy of Apartheid for as long as he could.  He had not taken this step lightly but feared that unless the whole oppressive system was changed radically and rapidly, disaster must fall.  Could you tell us, after this trial what happened to him that necessitated him being incarcerated in this prison?

UNKNOWN: I'd just like to give a little more background.  Braam was an Afrikaner from a prominent Free State family with a strong history of civic responsibility and there was always a presumption that he would go far even when he was a child.  He did well at school, he did well at University and in fact won a Rhodes Scholarship to go to Oxford.  He came back, he had studied law and started practising as an advocate in Johannesburg but because he was aware of the wrongs in the society around him, he in fact joined the Communist Party because he felt that this was the one party, first of all, which was not divided racially and where he really felt that perhaps he could, some change could come through working in the party.
 He continued to practice as an advocate and became a senior advocate of Queens Counsel and did both his political work and his legal work.  He was one of the lawyers in the treason trial which went on for four years when the people were acquitted, the accused were acquitted.  He was also the lawyer in the Rivonia Trial which I think was very difficult for him because he was defending his comrades, they were not just clients.  A lot of people would say that through the defence which he led, the lives of those people were saved as death sentences were being asked for.  
 Soon after the end of that trial he was arrested, he knew that he would be arrested and was put on trial as you reported.  He felt, again as you reported that he could more useful if he went underground, he in fact went underground in January 1965 and remained underground for the best part of that year and was arrested in November again after which he was accused under the Sabotage Act.  They threw the book at him that time.

MRS SEROKE: Thank you, going through your statement, you give very painful experiences that you went through when he was in prison, would you care to share those with us?

UNKNOWN: Braam was sent straight away to Pretoria local where he was kept on his own longer that most convicted political prisoners were at that time.  He was then joined by his two comrades Izzi Heyman and Harold Strachan who helped him but there seemed to be a very determined effort to humiliate and undermine Braam.  The man who was in charge of his section, a man called Du Preez, seemed to take particular delight in trying to humiliate him.  He cut Braam's hair short, he made Braam wear clothes that were far too big for him, he made Braam wash the toilets on his knees with a rag endlessly.
 These two comrades really did support Braam in that and for which we were very grateful but they too were humiliated with Braam.  They were made for instance to keep sweeping the courtyard in silence, the three of them.  It had a rough floor and there was a coal burning boiler nearby that spewed instant ashes onto this floor and these three men had to in total silence, sweep continuously.  These were the kinds of ways in which people were just deliberately and maliciously humiliated.  I think that there was a general sense that Braam particularly was targeted because he as the Afrikaner was the real traitor to the people.  
 Then of course there were the general prison conditions of those days in terms of the fact that people were, Braam was allowed as other political prisoners one visit from one visitor once every six months for half an hour.  He was allowed one letter once every six months and limited to five hundred words.  All the news and all the visits were very, very carefully censored so that anything that the warders considered to be news was excluded.  This meant that no relationship really was possible and that was really hard for us.  I think as we all know these were very petty and vindictive as they didn't really help with state security.

MRS SEROKE: When you got  married to Tim, as the daughter I'm sure you would have wanted your father to come to your wedding and give you away, was Braam ever given this permission?

UNKNOWN: We didn't even ask for him to come, we asked if we could have an extra visitor, that's all we asked for so that we could take a marriage officer with us and get married in front of him but they refused.

MRS SEROKE: When you brother Paul died, was he able to come to his funeral?

UNKNOWN: The most difficult part of Paul's death was that his brother Gustav came from Bloemfontein to tell Braam that Paul had died and Braam was called late one afternoon for this unexpected visit and he was told about it.  We went to the visit but of course he wasn't allowed into a private room to talk to his brother.  They still had to talk to each other through the partitions with the warders on either side of them so Braam was told of the death of Paul in this way.  By the time the visit was over it was lock-up time and Braam went back on his own to his cell and locked up on his own so for fourteen hours after the news of his son's death, he was left on his own.  When we asked whether, he obviously wasn't allowed to go to the funeral and when we went to see him afterwards to share our grief with him, we also had to see him through this partition.

MRS SEROKE: We learnt from your statement that Braam got ill and progressively ill and I'm sure listening to Professor van Heerden now when she was highlighting the lack of medical care in the prisons and the in Braam's instance, the deliberate way that the prison authorities prevented him from seeing that he got that medical care, I wonder if you could share with us what you just discovered long after which were snippets that were written by Dennis Goldberg from day one when he got ill and what happened until ...