I was born in South Africa. Africa is not a cause I adopted or a vocabulary I picked up in a seminar. It is the ground I come from, and the place where my family chose a side.

My aunt, Esther Barsel, was born in Raguva, Lithuania, in 1924 and brought to South Africa at the age of three. She joined the Communist Party of South Africa at fourteen and became a courier between the banned liberation movements and the activists still working in the open. In 1964 she was tried alongside Bram Fischer, and she served three years of hard labor at Barberton Women’s Prison. For part of that time her cell stood beside the one holding Nelson Mandela before he was moved to Robben Island, and a short distance away my uncle, Hymie Barsel, was held in solitary confinement.[1] Long afterward, when Chris Hani returned from exile, she became his private secretary. She gave the whole of her life to the freedom of other people.

Between the prison and that later service came some twenty years under a banning order. A banning order was not a sentence passed by a court. It was an administrative decree, signed by the Minister of Justice without trial and renewed at will, built to erase a person from public life. A banned person could be confined to a single magisterial district, forbidden to attend any gathering, barred from being quoted or published, and required to report to the police. It was civil death by signature. When Esther’s own daughter married, she needed police permission simply to attend, and when that permission was granted she was forbidden to speak to the guests. The state would let her watch her child marry and would not let her say a word at the wedding.

My uncle Hymie was a Litvak in speech and tradition. He had stood trial for treason alongside Mandela, and the security police tortured him. The damage to his body never healed, and in the end it killed him. A doctor had once taught him that antisemitism could not be defeated while any other racial hatred was tolerated, that the prejudices are one fabric and must be cut together. Hymie believed it. He gave his health, and finally his life, for the civil rights of black South Africans he had been told were no concern of his. He refused that lie. So do I.

My aunt and uncle were not exceptions. They were part of a flood. The Jews of South Africa came overwhelmingly from Lithuania, out of the Pale of Settlement where pogrom and, in living memory, the Holocaust had taught them exactly what a state becomes when it ranks human beings by blood. They looked at apartheid and knew the machine on sight, so they fought it far past their numbers. Jews were two in every hundred white South Africans. They were more than half of the whites put on trial for treason in 1956,[2] and every one of the whites seized with the high command at Lilliesleaf farm was a Jew. Joe Slovo came out of Lithuania to help found the armed wing of the movement. Ruth First was killed by a parcel bomb for the same cause. By some reckonings the Jewish presence in the resistance ran to twenty-five times their share of the........

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