Harry Schwarz

Harry Schwarz was born in Germany in 1924 and escaped Nazi rule, reaching South Africa as a child. During the Second World War he served as a navigator in the South African Air Force. He then became a lawyer and joined the defence team in the Rivonia Trial of 1963–1964, when Nelson Mandela and other opponents of apartheid faced prosecution. ²

As an opposition member of Parliament from 1974 to 1989, Schwarz challenged the government’s racial policies and spoke against antisemitism. He also participated in Jewish communal leadership, serving on the national executive and other bodies of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies between 1983 and 2000. ²

Schwarz presented his credentials in Washington on 11 April 1991 and served through the transition from F. W. de Klerk’s government to Nelson Mandela’s presidency, leaving in 1995. On 5 May 1994, he and African National Congress representative Kingsley Makhubela presented the new South African flag to President Bill Clinton on the White House South Lawn. Clinton was announcing American aid and investment measures and the delegation that would attend Mandela’s inauguration. ^{1, 3, 4}

Schwarz died in 2010. In his State of the Nation address that February, President Jacob Zuma paid tribute to him alongside the surviving members of the Rivonia defence team. ⁵