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The article was entitled \"The Corridors to Corruption\" and its warnings about the pitfalls ahead for the struggle generation, and the dangers of falling into them, are prescient and uncanny. The article was accompanied by a cartoon of a limousine with motor-cycle outriders and a pedestrian remarking: \"There goes a 'Man of the People'.\" [Rusty Bernstein] considered how a process that had corroded the moral integrity of good honest revolutionaries once power had been achieved could well be repeated in South Africa. He considered the metamorphosis from Comrade to Minister of the typical respected People's Leader whose life had formerly been devoted to serving the poor and oppressed in an exemplary way. He imagined, sensitively and not without sympathy, how the new lifestyle - limousine with chauffeur and bodyguards, ministerial residence with retinue of servants, Champagne and smoked salmon, the demands of \"protocol\" and \"security\" - could come to take charge. Bernstein did not hold the view that power must inevitably corrupt. But he argued that we must understand that the \"trappings of power\", passed on from generation to generation, system to system - if unchanged - kept the policy makers separate from the people, underpinned existing power relations and insulated them from the forces of change. In reference to the Freedom Charter, he reminded us that \"the ending of white supremacy... requires the total overturn of the status quo\" of which the existing apparatus of state was an essential part. \"Since the trappings of state power serve to uphold the status quo,\" he argued, \"the trappings of protocol and privilege which surround apartheid power must be essentially hostile to our cause.\"

RUSTY BERNSTEIN was a talented member of that small, heroic band of white South Africans who, for 30 years, fought alongside black South Africans against a minority, racist regime. To do so took enormous courage and self-sacrifice, but also intelligence and skill. An indefatigable writer of pamphlets and policy statements, Bernstein was delegated in 1956 to draft the Freedom Charter, a key ANC policy document, by making a painstaking synthesis of the submissions received from ordinary black South Africans. Written on scraps torn from school exercise books and old envelopes, these offerings expressed the aspirations of the country's disenfranchised majority, covering land reform, education, employment, civil rights, family life and electoral hopes. Bernstein wrote the rousing preamble and conclusion which commits the ANC firmly to non-racialism. Its assertion that `South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white' ran counter to the pan-Africanist slogan `Africa for the Africans' and became unexpectedly controversial.

At the Rivonia trial, Rusty Bernstein was the only one found not guilty and was discharged. But police harassment made life so untenable the couple were forced into exile, leaving their children behind. In exile, Bernstein was an active member of the External Mission of the ANC, and a regular speaker on behalf of ANC and anti- apartheid movements around the world. The Bernsteins ended up in England and returned to South Africa after the 1994 democratic elections. Rusty died in 2002.

VETERAN anti-apartheid activist and author [HILDA BERNSTEIN] was the wife of the late Rusty Bernstein, who was tried for treason alongside Nelson Mandela in the famous Rivonia trial in 1964. In exile, Ms Bernstein was an active member of the External Mission of the ANC, and a regular speaker on behalf of ANC and the Anti-Apartheid Movement, both in Britain and abroad. She toured extensively in many countries of Europe, Canada and since 1994, South Africa, on behalf of the ANC and the Women's League. Readers' contributions are invited for consideration: obituary@thecouriermail.com.au; or Obituary Editor, The Courier- Mail, GPO Box 130, Brisbane 4001. Material is accepted for publication on the condition that Queensland Newspapers Pty Ltd, as publisher of The Courier-Mail, may edit and has the right to, and license third parties to, reproduce in electronic form and communicate this material.

\"The liberation movement mourns a tireless political activist whose life-long commitment to the cause of the South African people will continue as an inspiration for generations to come, \" the ruling African National Congress said. \"Bernstein will be remembered for her work in chronicling the lives and struggles of the South African people, and in documenting the struggle of South Africa's women.\" Bernstein was a founding member of the Federation of South African Women, the first non-racial women's organisation in South Africa. Born in London in 1915, she emigrated to South Africain 1932 to work in advertising.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Hilda Bernstein, an anti-apartheid activist and author whose husband was tried for treason alongside Nelson Mandela, has died. She was 91. Bernstein's husband, Rusty, and Mandela were tried along with other anti-apartheid activists in the infamous Rivonia Trial in 1964. Mandela received a sentence of life imprisonment, while Rusty Bernstein was the only defendant acquitted and freed. Hilda Bernstein was a founding member of the Federation of South African Women, the first nonracial women's organization in South Africa. She also was a writer and artist whose work has been used as book jackets and illustrations, posters and cards for the AAM.

It was the anti-apartheid activist [HILDA BERNSTEIN] who introduced me to the term \"wives-of\". Married to Rusty Bernstein, she was never his \"wife-of\". There was a famous moment when, as Rusty was re- arrested after being acquitted in the Rivonia trial in Johannesburg in 1964, she yelled out in court, with wifely distress, \"Oh no, they are taking him again\". Her cry captured headlines. Her book more than holds its own as a highly literate remembrance of a world that was, but is no longer, ours. Hilda and Rusty were among the greats of the [Nelson Mandela] generation of South African freedom fighters. Almost 40 years ago, she wrote this story of Rusty's arrest, trial, acquittal and escape. She wanted it to be a personalised weapon of struggle, and to focus attention on Mandela and the others in prison. Rusty died recently, honoured for his role in the struggle and author of an acclaimed, elegantly written autobiography. Hilda lives alone in Cape Town, resisting the infirmities of age with characteristic spirit.

In the 1940s, political activism had been something of an adventure, a chance to break out of the suffocating confines of white society. People such as [Nelson Mandela] and [Walter Sisulu] were regular visitors to the Bernsteins' home. The Bernsteins were first charged with sedition in 1946 for supporting a strike by black miners, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. After that they were rounded up periodically and their house raided for banned literature. The government outlawed the Communist Party in 1948, but [Hilda Bernstein] and [Rusty] maintained their participation clandestinely and tightened their ties with the African National Congress, the leading black organization fighting apartheid. Rusty was one of the 156 defendants in the marathon Treason Trial of 1956. The case against them collapsed after three years. In 1960, the government banned the ANC and began tightening restrictions on activists of all kinds. Rusty was \"banned\" -- put under house arrest and regular surveillance. In response to the crackdown, Mandela and his allies formed an underground movement and launched a sabotage campaign. Their stated purpose was to \"bring the regime to its senses,\" but the turn to violence had the opposite effect. Armed with new anti-terrorism laws, the government cracked down harder. Mandela was tracked down and imprisoned in 1962. The following year, Rusty and 17 others were arrested at the Communist Party's secret headquarters in Rivonia, a suburb of Johannesburg. After Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and South Africa became a multiracial democracy, Rusty and Hilda received honorary university degrees and a small government pension. After Rusty died of a heart attack in 2002, Mandela came to Oxford to visit Hilda. She decided to move back to South Africa, and spent her last days in an assisted-living facility in Cape Town.

Hilda Bernstein, 91, was one of the last surviving leaders of apartheid resistance in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. As the newly elected Afrikaner nationalist government formalised racial segregation and flexed its muscles, opposition leaders were either jailed or, like Bernstein and her husband, forced into exile. Bernstein was born Hilda Schwarz in London in 1915 to Russian immigrants. Her father, a Bolshevik, left the family to return to his homeland when she was 10 and when she was 18, she emigrated to South Africa and worked in advertising, publishing and journalism. Shocked by the rise of fascism in Europe, she joined the South African Labour Party. However, its attitude to the oppression of blacks was, at best, ambiguous and by 1940, she had joined the non- racial Communist Party. In 1941 she married a party colleague, Lionel \"Rusty\" Bernstein, a quietly spoken architect five years her junior. Two years later, she was elected to the Johannesburg City Council, its only communist member. During the 1950s, the Communist Party was banned but its members, including Bernstein's husband, reorganised underground. The government banned her from being a member of 26 organisations and from attending meetings but she found enough ways around the restrictions to help to set up the Federation of South African Women and was an organiser of the massed Women's March to Pretoria in 1956. Meanwhile, Rusty spent four years from 1956 in and out of court as one of the 150 accused in the mammoth Treason Trial, at the end of which all were acquitted. In 1961, Hilda was arrested and held for five months without trial during the state of emergency after the Sharpeville killings. In 1963, it put on trial 10 of the most senior activists, including Rusty Bernstein. This was known as the Rivonia trial.