I spent much of my youth in the royal bed. To be more precise, I slept on a mattress that was made for the royals and embroidered with an elaborate crown.
My father’s first job after emigrating to South Africa from Britain in early 1946 was as the accountant of the Airflex company. When there was to be a royal visit, the factory was commissioned to make luxurious mattresses for the King, the Queen and two princesses. It was in Cape Town that Princess Elizabeth, on her 21st birthday, made her famous broadcast pledging that “my whole life, whether it be long or short, will be devoted to your service, and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong”.
After their sojourn in Cape Town, one of those mattresses became my bed throughout my school years — and very comfortable it was too. I look back on my childhood’s royal resting place as a harbinger of my refuge from the apartheid regime in the Queen’s country, Britain, to which I had to flee as a 23-year-old anti-apartheid activist.
By the 1960s, most African Jews were English-speaking, even though the majority had come from Lithuania. They eked out a living largely in the countryside and small towns occupied by white Afrikaners.
Across the decades, increasingly urbanised African Jews looked to Britain as a protector, not only of black civil rights but also their own. Since 1948, less than two years after the royal visit, the country had been ruled by hardline nationalist white Afrikaners. Though declared “white” to boost non-black numbers, Jews were not allowed to join the ruling political party, even if they had wanted to.
When South Africa was pressured out of the Commonwealth in 1960 and declared itself a white-ruled republic, Jews became more worried. But with the country’s largely British structure of courts and legal precedent, judges bravely mustered English civil liberty guarantees to minimise the impact of the draconian laws against dissent that Parliament imposed. “Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are part of the democratic rights of every citizen,” a high court judge ruled in 1972 when finding my protesting fellow-students and myself not guilty of “riotous assembly”.
Jews were immensely proud that in 1970 the cricket team had a Jewish captain, Ali Bacher, with a 4-0 winning record over Australia. Then our racially-segregated national summer sport was rightly banned worldwide. In the apartheid years, nine Jews had proudly worn green-and-gold Springbok jerseys. Then came the tenth, labelled in a community magazine “Minyan Man”.
In Johannesburg in 1995 (a year after the end of the apartheid white regime) Joel Stransky scored the drop goal that brought victory in the World Cup. I was at the press conference after when an ecstatic Springbok captain declared: “Our Jew-boy won us the Cup”.
South Afican Jews continued to experience discrimination, specifically from English-speakers. We were not welcome at some posh sports clubs. In the late 1980s, I was invited to play at the Royal Johannesburg Golf Club because I was reporting for The Times on the South African Open at a nearby course. As I sipped a glass of beer in the clubhouse, a member, unaware of my ethnicity, told me: “We’ll probably have blacks here before we have Jews.” Though South African Jews played a disproportionally heroic role in battling apartheid, there were many who acquiesced in the system. At my university, we left-wing Jewish students handed out leaflets to our congregations on Yom Kippur, quoting Isaiah, that the fast and repentance God wants is to break the chains of bondage for all people. This message had not been universally welcomed in shuls.
Many Jewish students emigrated. Almost all my law class of 1976, including me, now live outside the country. Partly there had been a worry about civil war (which never happened), but usually it was because we simply could not accept the immorality of apartheid and, much later, in some cases because of black majority misrule after the Mandela era ended.
Jews continue to be worried about the virulently anti-Israel sentiment that soured relations between the Jewish community and the post-apartheid, black-ruled South Africa. As Zev Krengel, vice president of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, said in April: “The single most pressing issue we have is the government’s obscenely anti-Israel stance and the incessant Israel-bashing, where the Jewish state is the pariah and the Palestinians can do no wrong.”
Nelson Mandela was a good friend of the Jews but his party was not. Jewish South Africans were delighted when our country’s great leader forged a close relationship with the Queen. Against protocol, they called each other by their first names.
South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth and we hoped the example of Britain, a democratic state with supportive relations with the Jewish state, would have some impact on its attitude to Israel. Sadly, though, in that regard, not even the Queen could make a difference.
