Politics & Power Quote by Bram Fischer

Memory is doing double duty here: as confession and as legal brief. Bram Fischer isn’t offering a romantic origin story of radical awakening; he’s staging an evidentiary hearing inside his own head. The sentence advances cautiously, clause by clause, as if he knows that any clean, triumphant rationale would be suspect - and, in apartheid South Africa, potentially lethal. “When I consider” and “I have to cast my mind back” signal not certainty but the disciplined restraint of a lawyer trained to distrust convenient narratives, especially his own.

The real force sits in the delays. “More than a quarter of a century” widens the gap between act and explanation, implying that motives aren’t fixed objects you can retrieve intact. They rot, they get repainted by later loyalties, by public mythmaking, by the need to justify sacrifice. Fischer’s syntax performs that unease: he keeps circling toward clarity (“ascertain,” “precisely,” “motives”) while acknowledging how slippery those terms are. It’s less “here’s why I did it” than “I’m not sure a single why exists.”

Context sharpens the stakes. Fischer, an Afrikaner advocate who defended anti-apartheid activists and ultimately went underground, is speaking from within a world where joining the Communist Party was both a moral choice and a prosecutable fact. The line reads like preemptive cross-examination: he’s anticipating the accusation that communism is mere ideology or opportunism, and answering with something harder to dismiss - the long, uncertain, deeply human process by which conscience forms.