EVERYDAY COMMUNISTS IN SOUTH AFRICA'S LIBERATION STRUGGLE, the lives of Ivan and Lesley Schermbrucker

386pp., illus., hardback, Cham, 2022

Ivan Schermbrucker was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). Detained under the 90 day legislation, he was tortured, subsequently tried, and imprisoned under the Suppression of Communism Act. After Ivan was jailed Lesley moved onto the Central Committee and was also jailed for refusing to testify against Bram Fischer and for having assisted in hiding him.

“Kirkaldy’s moving biography is about ‘everyday’ lives in a different sense from the ordinary … Kirkaldy illuminates Lesley’s and Ivan’s everyday experience: their residences; their bill paying … and of course their love and confidence in each other, for it is very much a book about a marriage. His heroes may be ordinary enough people, but in the way they lived their lives, they achieved ‘a triumph of the everyday’” Professor Tom Lodge

Alan Kirkaldy is Professor Emeritus and retired Head of the History Department at Rhodes University. He is the author of Capturing the Soul: The Vhavenda and the missionaries, 1870-1900.