Customer Reviews

Rivonia's Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa

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Pulitzer prize winning Washington Post report Frankel has another prize winner in this book that sheds light on Mandela's little known supporters. The book welcomes the reader to Rivonia, a northern suburb of Johannesburg. Haven't heard of it? After reading this thrilling book you won't forget it. The Rivonia trial in South Africa in 1963 sentenced Nelson Mandela and Govan Mbeki (President Thabo Mbeki's father) and other anti-apartheid leaders to jail for life and shattered the underground resistance movement. In newspaper dispatches of the time we learned about Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, the ANC, and the nation's apartheid leaders, but little was known about Mandela's white lieutenants. Frankel fills in the gaps with this intimate book. In Rivonia's Children, we learn about the white, radical men and women who chose to fight in the harrowing trenches with the ANC, plan the Soweto uprising, make tactical mistakes, and suffer. We learn about how the Eastern European background of many of these white associates made their parents fear the Afrikaner National Party and render their left of center community speechless to the institution of the apartheid laws. These white associates, many of them Communist and openly hostile to the Jewish religion of their parents, fought the regime. Among the people we meet are Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Sachs, Harry and Alan Paton, AnnMarie Wolpe, Arenstein, Hilda Bernstein, Rusty Bernstein, Barney Simon, Lazar Sidelsky (who gave Mandela his first law firm job), James Kantor, Feistenstein, Arthur Goldreich, Kodesh, Harold Goldreich, Helen Suzman, and Mollie Fischer (hmmm... there seems to be a pattern here, hehe)

If you've read Mandela's 'Long Walk to Freedom,' and want to learn more about some of the people you met in that book, such as Helen Suzman, Ruth First, or Bram Fishcer, this book will take you day by day through their lives in the anti-apartheid struggle. Frankel weaves together the intricate threads of their stories to create a solid tapestry of experience.

For a human face on Apartheid. Read it if you want to explore idealism. Reading this book makes one think of the wellsprings of commitment to a cause. It is sufficiently engrossing that it is possible to imagine why one would join in to try and change an unjust society.