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Chapter 1

Whites and the ANC, 1945–1950

The 1940s saw the rise of nationalist and anti-colonial movements across what we now know as the developing world, including South Africa. In the same decade the African National Congress (ANC) was transformed from a small elite body using courteous and constitutional forms of protest into an extra-parliamentary organisation attempting mass-based mobilisation of all unenfranchised groups in South Africa, and working alongside whites and others committed to non-racialism. In 1947 the ANC entered into an alliance with the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), which was joined in September 1953 by the South African Coloured People’s Organisation (SACPO), followed a month later by the white South African Congress of Democrats (SACOD).

In 1956 the Congress Alliance endorsed the Freedom Charter (drawn up the year before), a statement of principle that envisaged a future South Africa based on full equality for all people of all races. The principle that came to guide the ANC – remarkably, given the exigencies of white rule in the guises of both segregation and (after 1948) apartheid – was its commitment to a non-racial future. How did this come about? Why, in the midst of a race-based society, did the ANC espouse a racially inclusive vision rather than an exclusive African nationalism?

The integration of all races in a struggle against the race-based ideology of apartheid, and behind a national liberation struggle led by the ANC, was difficult. The incorporation of whites in the struggle against white supremacy was particularly difficult. This chapter analyses the roots of non-racialism in the post-war years by reviewing the rise of the Congress movement after the Second World War and the responses of whites who supported a non-racial future but differed over its exact form and how (and when) it could be achieved.

The impact of the war years

The years of the Second World War were a remarkable period in twentieth-century South African history, marked by the partial relaxation of discriminatory legislation, a 50% increase in real average earnings for black industrial workers, and rising hopes for a more liberal government policy.¹ During the war, industrial manufacturing became the largest single sector of the economy, since uninterrupted industrial production was essential for the war effort, and the labour requirements of heavy and manufacturing industry began to compete with those of the formerly unchallenged mining and agricultural sectors. Representatives of organised industry opposed the migrant labour system and called for a permanent urban black labour force to meet their demand for semi-skilled and skilled labour. The privately owned commercial and manufacturing sectors joined the call for an urbanised labour force and saw a potential black consumer market ‘going to waste’.

Black workers, restricted by law to tribal reserves in rural areas, poured into the urban areas, driven by economic necessity and attracted by the growing demand for labour. Deneys Reitz, Minister of Native Affairs, relaxed influx control in the industrial centres of the Transvaal and Natal in 1942, increasing the number of urban Africans, while the 1943 Landsdown Mine Wages Commission reported that the reproductive capacity of the reserves, on which the migrant labour system was premised, was ‘a myth’.² By 1948 the Native Laws (Fagan) Commission noted that women comprised a third of urban Africans and concluded that black urbanisation was permanent.³

Black urbanisation led to an acute housing shortage and informal settlements increased as thousands of homeless Africans built shacks on deserted land and provided their own services and infrastructure.⁴ Their direct action was matched in other urban struggles such as bus boycotts,⁵ while black unionisation and industrial action also increased. Although the fact was officially unrecognised, by 1945 more than 40% of commerce and privately owned industry was unionised. According to O’Meara, 145 522 African workers went on strike between 1940 and 1948, accounting for a loss of 409 299 workdays, and prompting organised manufacturing industry to call for the recognition of black trade unions. The Transvaal Chamber of Industries argued that ‘… if Natives are to enter industry in ever-increasing numbers, it is clear that their being organised and disciplined in proper unions is an indispensable prerequisite to their development as stable and productive workers.’⁶

During the war years liberal discourse moved beyond its former domain in educational or research bodies and was taken up by a series of government commissions whose reports supported the central demands of organised industry. For example, in 1942 the Smit Report called for the recognition of black trade unions and the Van Eck Commission proposed the abolition of pass laws, while the following year the Landsdown Commission called for the payment of a full living wage to urban African workers.⁷

Liberal values were popularised by the war itself, fought as it was against fascism and in defence of individualism, the rule of law and self-determination. These ideals were set out in Churchill and Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter and it was necessary to promote them in South Africa in order to ensure support for the war effort. No wonder the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) – more a slow-burner than a hotbed of liberalism – in its 1948 Handbook on Race Relations in South Africa, offered its own brand of (entirely misplaced) optimism, concluding that ‘in South Africa more ill is wrought through lack of understanding than through ill will.’⁸

The United Party (UP) government of Jan Smuts faced a number of problems in the early 1940s – the Allied powers were suffering setbacks in the war, the threat of an invasion grew as the Japanese fleet entered the Indian Ocean and government had to fight a general election in 1943. In a tactical response, government sought to accommodate rather than alienate. In an attempt to win black working-class loyalty and avoid fighting challenges on too many fronts simultaneously, as the Axis powers were doing, the pass laws were partially relaxed and a pragmatic approach adopted to labour unrest. African unions were allowed to develop unofficially and, in 1942, Walter Madeley, then Minister of Labour, promised black union recognition in return for worker loyalty.⁹

Black strikes in areas of industry important to the war appear to have been settled in a manner favourable to workers. Smuts talked of replacing segregation with undefined (but nicer-sounding) ‘trusteeship’.¹⁰

Government also flirted with organisations sympathetic to the Allied cause and which had the potential to cause political or economic disruption. Following the entry of the USSR into the war in 1941, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) threw itself into supporting the war effort – having previously opposed the war and supported the Hitler–Stalin pact – with a ‘Defend South Africa!’ campaign and soon gained a degree of political respectability. The Smuts government permitted the existence of the CPSA, the Friends of the Soviet Union (FSU), non-racial trade unions and other organisations. Not until 1994 would South Africa again see Cabinet ministers join communists on public platforms.

Smuts opened a 1943 ‘Soviet Friendship’ conference in Johannesburg, while his wife was a patron of the FSU. After 1941 the CPSA placed support for the war above purely domestic issues and discouraged strikes, a remarkable position for a party committed to working-class rights, and another in a lengthy and tortuous history of juggling domestic demands with the ‘party line’ coming out of Moscow. The Communist Party programme was vague about black political rights while supporting the principle that the government should provide food, shelter and medical services as required.¹¹

The particular conditions of the war years allowed organisations such as the CPSA and the FSU to penetrate the white community in a way that was unknown before or after the war. In 1942 more than 6 000 people gathered to welcome the first Soviet consul to Johannesburg, and Medical Aid for Russia received more than £80 000 in the first two months of its existence.¹² The Red Army offensive led the Minister of Justice, Colin Steyn, to conclude that a ‘… Russian victory will mean a victory for democracy’.¹³ The CPSA won seats in city council elections in Johannesburg, East London and Cape Town. The party also fielded nine candidates in the 1943 general election and, although all lost, they polled an average 11% of the vote.¹⁴

The war boosted industrialisation, which challenged the migrant labour system. Government commissions argued that African urbanisation and ‘economic integration’ – of blacks into the ‘white’ economy – were irreversible processes. A degree of consensus emerged about the direction of future government policy. The ANC and CPSA, as well as liberals in the UP, the SAIRR and among the Native Representatives (who were indirectly elected to Parliament by African voters) claimed that ‘nothing could be the same after the war’ – that government policy would have to acknowledge that segregation had failed to maintain racial separatism. In 1942 Julius Lewin, a liberal academic involved in the Army Education Service (AES) run by one of the most impressive South Africans of the twentieth century, Leo Marquard, stated:

We have a definite sense of taking a new direction. The van Eck Report … expresses this and the war itself means that no new disabilities will descend. On the contrary, old ones are being shaken – the hated pass laws have been relaxed and Native trade unions are to be recognised … We [can] get along faster now that the principle of this and that is conceded …¹⁵

High hopes for a change in direction by government were boosted by a speech made by Smuts in the ‘dark days’ of the war, even though the words seem more a lamentation than excitement about a possible new future:

The whole trend both in this country and throughout Africa has been in the opposite direction [to segregation]. The whole movement of development here on this continent has been for closer contacts to be established between the various races and the various sectors of this community … Isolation has gone and segregation has fallen on evil days too … A revolutionary change is taking place among the Native peoples of Africa through the movement from the country to the towns – the movement from old Reserves in the Native areas to the big European centres of population. Segregation tried to stop it. It has, however, not stopped it in the least. The process has been accelerated. You might as well try to sweep the ocean back with a broom.¹⁶

Smuts’s commitment to the Atlantic Charter, combined with the relaxation of discriminatory legislation and the findings of various government commissions, seemed to suggest that progressive (if incremental) change was in the air. But what was happening outside the coterie of liberals in and near Smuts, and among the newly respectable (mainly white) communists? How would black organisations respond to the times and to the signals of possible change?

Africans’ Claims

The main response of the ANC – still a small, elitist body yet to undergo its own radicalising transformation brought about by wartime conditions – was the 1943 publication of Africans’ Claims in South Africa, drawn up by a committee dominated by doctors, lawyers, teachers and ministers of religion, and intended to attract ‘distinguished University graduates’ to the ANC.¹⁷

The organisation sought to capitalise on the liberal ethos of the period by placing squarely before government the vision of non-racial citizenship. Africans’ Claims articulated Western liberal-democratic demands in a non-racial South African context and attempted to formulate an ideological path that government, apparently backing away from segregation, should follow. But segregation and trusteeship, tragically, were aeons away from equality.

Africans’ Claims was divided into two main parts following a preface written by Dr Alfred Bitini Xuma, President-General of the ANC. The first placed the Atlantic Charter in a South African context and analysed the nature of oppression in the country; the second comprised a Bill of Rights. It tried to achieve two goals simultaneously: to generate black support for the ANC while appealing for wider acceptance of the principle of non-racial equality. Addressing the white audience, Xuma appealed for the anti-fascist values of the war and the Atlantic Charter to ‘apply to the whole of the British Empire, the United States of America and to all the nations of the world and their subject peoples’; talking to the domestic black audience he noted that ‘we are not so foolish as to believe that because we have made these declarations our government will grant us our claims for the mere asking’ and warned that ‘this is only the beginning of a long struggle …’.¹⁸

The Bill of Rights called for equal political participation and universal suffrage, breaking with previous ANC demands for a qualified franchise. One decade’s radicalism was the next decade’s old hat: when the overwhelmingly white Liberal Party was launched in 1953 its call for a qualified franchise would be scorned by the ANC as garishly out-of-date, rejected by UP members, and savaged by Afrikaner nationalists as a fundamental threat to ‘preserving South Africa as a White man’s country and a bastion of Western Christian civilisation’.¹⁹

The Bill of Rights also demanded ‘a fair redistribution of the land as a prerequisite for a just settlement of the land problem’, ‘freedom of movement, residence and equality before the law, as well as equal pay for equal work, employment insurance and unemployment benefits’.²⁰ The economic sections of the Bill demanded equality with whites and the removal of laws that hampered African economic mobility.

Africans’ Claims was ‘radical’ to the extent that it signalled a shift to the left by the ANC. It was ‘radical’ in demanding non-racial equality; its other demands were little more than the contemporary liberal canon. It was a moderate restatement of democratic goals and aspirations in a South African context and in tune with international opinion as set out in the Atlantic Charter, flowing from and trying to nudge ahead the apparent liberalisation of government thinking.

In 1943 the ANC also adopted a new constitution which abolished the ‘House of Chiefs’ set out in its original 1912 constitution, centralised authority with a working committee of members living within a fifty-mile radius of the President-General and attempted to create an effective branch structure. The ANC in 1943 was a small organisation dominated by professionals but, under the influence of the pragmatic Dr Xuma, it began to show signs of ‘a more vigorous reaction to the new pressures and challenges created by a rapidly industrialising society’.²¹ The initiation of a branch structure was an important (if tentative) first step along a long road towards the mass mobilisation that would be an ANC hallmark by the end of the twentieth century. But it was a long journey. In Xuma’s prophetic words, Africans’ Claims and restructuring the ANC were ‘… only the beginning of a long struggle entailing great sacrifices of time, means and even life itself ’.²²

But the door was slammed shut. The UP won a landslide victory in the 1943 general election at home while the balance of forces in the war changed overseas, and with the changed circumstances came a changed Smuts government.

Through his secretary, Smuts rejected Africans’ Claims as ‘propagandist’ and stated that he was ‘not prepared to discuss proposals which are wildly impracticable’.²³ Influx control measures had been relaxed in 1942 but were restored in 1943. Madeley reneged on his promise to recognise African trade unions, and went further and enacted War Measure 145, which made strikes illegal.

In 1946, Acting Prime Minister J H Hofmeyr, a prodigy accepted by Oxford when barely into his teens, able to manage four or five wartime ministries simultaneously, still the doyen of many older (white) South African liberals (and never without his mother),²⁴ presided over the violent suppression of a strike by some 70 000 African miners, following which the CPSA executive committee was tried for sedition. For the United Party government liberalism was a matter of global justice but had little to do with the ‘native question’ at home, where it was a tactic not a principle.

Despite this, the Atlantic Charter, to which the South African government was a signatory, continued to inspire black political activity. The 1945 United Nations Charter, of which Smuts was an author, increased black demands for the domestic application of liberal principles. Smuts himself noted:

The fully publicised discussions at UNO are having a great effect in all directions. We even hear about them from our domestic farm Natives who really have nothing to complain of, but are deeply stirred by all this talk of equality and non-discrimination.²⁵

Africans’ Claims did not fill the growing ideological vacuum created by an increasingly strident nationalist movement on the one hand and a government unable to please the competing sectors of a rapidly industrialising economy on the other. Nor did it generate a legitimating ideology to replace segregation (which it had assisted in undermining). But it did commit the ANC to a more radical programme than it had previously endorsed, and pressure continued to grow within the organisation for the use of more militant extra-parliamentary methods of protest.

Black unity

During the war, ideological changes, economic necessity and governmental pragmatism combined to generate widespread black militancy. African urbanisation and unionisation increased dramatically. In 1945 the Council of Non-European Trade Unions claimed an affiliation of 119 unions, representing more than 40% of Africans in industry.²⁶

In August 1946, 70 000 African miners went on strike; within three days, eighteen had been killed and the strike bloodily broken. As migrant miners fled police brutality in the compounds, they crossed paths – on Germiston Station – with their indirectly elected representative councillors, who were on their way to a meeting in Pretoria.

The Native Representative Council (NRC), an indirectly elected African body set up in 1936 to assess legislation affecting ‘native affairs’, and presided over by Hofmeyr while Smuts attended the United Nations, adjourned indefinitely after requests to discuss the miners’ strike were turned down and in protest over government’s handling of the strike. NRC member James Moroka, a wealthy doctor and later ANC President-General, accused the government of a ‘… post-war continuation of a policy of Fascism which is the antithesis and negation of the letter and the spirit of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Charter’.²⁷

Meanwhile, Smuts was joined at the UN by a delegation from the ANC and SAIC, as well as by former CPSA member and native representative Hymie Basner. The vexed ‘native question’ ensured that world attention focused on racial oppression in South Africa, robbing Smuts (some believe) of his moment of international acclaim at the UN, but signalling the shape of the future.

The war years saw the radicalisation of Indian politics and, with the formation of the SAIC, a growing unity between the Transvaal and Natal Indian congresses. The tabling of the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Bill, which offered partial political representation for Indians in Parliament in return for accepting restrictions on Indian ownership and occupation of land in Natal, helped foster Indian unity – and militancy. Under the new leadership of medical doctors Yusuf Dadoo and ‘Monty’ Naicker the SAIC organised a passive resistance campaign against what it described as a ‘diabolical attempt to strangulate Indians economically and degrade them socially’.²⁸

The campaign, as its organisers stressed, was multiracial; organisations were beginning to work together for common goals while remaining racially discrete. More than 2 000 volunteers of all races, but predominantly Indian, were imprisoned, and the Joint Passive Resistance Council stated:

The non-white population of South Africa is on the march, in tune with the forward surge of peoples of Asia and Africa and the democratic forces throughout the world … we feel confident that the decision of the N.R.C. will hasten the day when the alignment and unification of all Non-European forces against racial oppression will become a reality … We believe that the struggle of the non-whites in South Africa against colour oppression is one and indivisible.²⁹

The need for a common front to oppose black oppression was a recurring theme of postwar Congress and CPSA propaganda. Informal co-operation between the ANC, the SAIC and the coloured African People’s Organisation (APO) began in 1946, and a year later they jointly organised what Xuma described as a ‘historic unity rally’.³⁰ But as we shall see, a ‘common front’ was a lot easier to attain than a common organisational form that would give expression to all races but retain African leadership, the essence of the multi racial Congress Alliance structure that lasted while the congresses remained legal.

In 1947 Dadoo, Naicker and Xuma signed the ‘Doctors’ Pact’, which formally united the African and Indian congresses, not merging them but joining them in an alliance, each remaining distinctly race-based. Though equality was a shared goal, racial separatism was the organisational form for attaining that equality. Race was accepted, along with race-based organisations, in pursuit of racial equality. Unity moves among the black congresses were supported by the CPSA. The pro-Congress newspaper The Guardian, edited by CPSA members Betty Radford and Brian Bunting, gave prominence to speeches and articles calling for a black united front. CPSA conference resolutions called for the creation of a ‘broad fighting alliance’ to struggle for equal rights for all – though, as we see later, the Communist Party was less convinced of the need for racial separateness than for the need for unity among all forces opposed to segregation.³¹

Attaining unity at the grassroots level, however, was not a smooth process. In early 1949 violence flared between the African and Indian populations in Durban, leaving 123 dead, 1 300 injured and some 40 000 homeless. Not only were the Durban riots the most violent demonstration of the difficulties of achieving racial unity, they also provided the context for a reaffirmation of the 1947 Pact; the ANC and SAIC issued a statement which traced the roots of racial oppression and strife not to ‘racism’ but to ‘the political, economic and social structure of this country, based on differential and discriminatory treatment of the various groups’.³²

Both the ANC and the SAIC had a series of internal issues to contend with, which had an impact on their approach to how to give organisational expression to racial cooperation in the fight for equality. That race was accepted as a given is clear, however awkward it may seem seen through a twenty-first-century lens. Various factors worked against the emergence of a single congress for all races, particularly within the ANC.

The ANC Youth League (ANCYL), formed in 1944, led moves to radicalise Congress. The League comprised outstanding young men of their generation, including law students Anton Lembede, Ashby Mda, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo. If the universal franchise had raised the bar for whites sympathetic to black demands for equality, the increasingly radical ANC, contemplating extra-parliamentary protest and pushed by a Youth League committed to ‘rousing popular political consciousness and fighting oppression and reaction’,³³ would raise it yet further.

During the late 1940s, while many ANCYL members were drawn into mainstream ANC politics, some continued to espouse a racially exclusive form of African nationalism, as well as opposition to the CPSA, which was seen as white-dominated and an avenue for undue white (and communist) influence on Congress. This was a continuum in ANC thinking and was in tune with African nationalism on the rest of the continent at the time. It would bedevil the Congress Alliance throughout the 1950s and result in the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) splitting from the ANC in 1959, claiming (in the words of one-time PAC Secretary General Potlako Leballo) that the ANC:

… has made a catastrophic blunder by accepting foreign leadership by the whites. How can we have leaders who are also led? If this white leadership is denied, why was one Joe Slovo of the Congress of Democrats allowed to become Chairman of the ANC Commission of Enquiry in 1954, into disputes involving ANC policies?³⁴

At the same time, both the ANC and the SAIC were concerned with internal struggles, particularly over more radical policies and strategies. The transformation of the ANC from a small petit bourgeois organisation using petition and constitutional action into a mass-based extra-parliamentary organisation demanding full and immediate equality was a long process.

White responses to African nationalism

The growth of African nationalism, the emergence of the ANC as the leading domestic African political organisation with an increasingly radical programme, and its alliance with the SAIC, confronted whites who supported a democratic future with a set of ideo logical and strategic questions.

Prime among these was African nationalism. Both white liberals and socialists warned of its dangers; liberals believed that it threatened to submerge individualism within the fervour of mass action, while the Communist Party maintained that it would obscure class alignments which cut across racial barriers. Both warned that nationalism could degenerate into racial exclusivity and race war. Both (initially, in the case of the Communist Party) supported a single, non-racial organisation.

There is no doubt that in the late 1940s and the 1950s progressive whites exerted undue influence (in relation to their numeric base and certainly in the context of segregation and apartheid) over the nature and course of African nationalism in South Africa.

This is not automatically ‘a bad thing’.³⁵ There was considerable symbolic value to whites joining other progressives in developing the vision of a future where all races would live in complete equality – a non-racial future, where race was not the starting point of analysis or organisation and where they rejected exclusive African nationalism in the face of exclusive Afrikaner nationalism and broader white supremacy. The foundations laid by this small band of progressives shored up the ‘miracle’ of negotiating the end of apartheid and introducing democracy despite the blood-letting of the 1980s and 1990s.

According to the 1946 census, whites comprised 21% of the population (this halved to 11% by 1996), though barely a couple of thousand, at most, participated in non-racial politics, whether via the Liberal Party (1 500 at its peak), the congress movement (COD had a couple of hundred members at most), the CPSA–SACP (which was even smaller), or the trade union movement. Much of this book details the sacrifice, commitment and sheer bloody-mindedness of white liberals, radicals and communists in their struggle to ensure that non-racial principles shaped nationalism.

An argument can and has been made that more whites opposed apartheid than this book credits, evidenced by the dramatic marches of the Torch Commando, UP voters, early Black Sash members, later Progressive Party members and the like. The point is not to question the motives of the individuals involved but to accept that a very large gap existed between opposing apartheid and supporting full equality for all citizens.

The Torch Commando and Black Sash, for example, had their roots in opposing National Party moves to remove coloured voters from the common voters’ roll – a far cry from supporting universal suffrage. Their activities were acknowledged by the Congress movement and other black anti-apartheid groups but they made little or no substantive impact (whether ideological, organisational or intellectual) on those groups, other than, possibly, an emotional one. The focus is on the points of interaction between whites and blacks opposing apartheid together, where practice and ideology mixed and clashed and changed. And this narrows down the field considerably.

The small band of whites who actively supported the dismantling of segregation and then apartheid and wanted to replace it with equality was a motley collection. It included liberals, who, themselves, covered a remarkably wide canvas. They were more or less radical and more or less wedded to parliamentary/constitutional forms of protest or direct action; some were committed to free-market economics, others to varying degrees of socialism. Many of the latter had started out believing in a qualified franchise but were radicalised by their involvement in black political and organisational work either through collaboration or competition with the Congress movement and the SACP.

There were other non-communist radicals, many of them graduates or teachers from the Army Education Service, who felt constrained in the Liberal Party, while sharing its wariness of communists (Helen Joseph is perhaps the best-known example). There were also white socialists, communists and Trotskyists, who reserved their most vituperative language for each other, and who fought out venomous ideological-cum-personal battles decade after decade.³⁶

There were activist and beneficent Christians, Jews and atheists; pacifists and militants; and other variations in world view. They had two common values: they hated apartheid, and they hated each other – though not always in that order. They differed over relations with the ANC and the SAIC, the parliamentary or extra-parliamentary nature of their struggle for equal rights, the social and economic goals for which they struggled and the prominence of communists within the congresses and supporting organisations. Definitions of radical and liberal, and even of communist, centred not so much on ideological or economic questions but on participation in, and attitudes towards, the liberation struggle.

Liberals based their vision of future equality on the development of an African middle class through the extension of educational and social welfare services, and gradual incorporation into state structures, which the government was called on to create, in tandem with equally gradual incorporation into the body politic for ‘civilised’ and later ‘suitably qualified natives’. While, initially, no liberal party-political organisation existed, liberals were found in welfare organisations, churches, universities, the SAIRR, among the Native Representatives, and elsewhere.

Radical whites called for the immediate application of universal suffrage and supported mass-based extra-parliamentary campaigns, strikes and similar forms of protest. Some were to join the Liberal Party after 1953, more because of shared anti-communism than shared ideology (at least initially); others joined the Congress of Democrats, formed at about the same time. Radical whites, who included communists, Trotskyists, socialists, social democrats and others, were found in the CPSA, the trade union movement and the Springbok Legion, an organisation which operated as a soldiers’ trade union.

Before 1950 (when it was banned), the main political home for radical whites was the non-racial Communist Party, which supported equal rights for all. According to Hymie Basner, who left the CPSA in 1943:

There was no possible party to which a progressive young South African, whether Marxist or … of moderately liberal views, if he wanted to work in an organised group … against racialism, if he wanted to work even for common social decency, never mind about world revolution or South African revolution … there was no room for him to work in any organisation at that time except the communist movement. And during that period hundreds of middle-class youth who normally, in other countries would be joining the Labour Party or the Liberal Party, say in England or in France … would join the Communist Party.³⁷

The support of socialists for the ANC, in contrast with that of liberals, was premised precisely on the absence of a significant African bourgeoisie and the resultant belief that the movement would not, therefore, become a home for black capitalists. As will become evident below, this view changed over time, and had to change as the ANC grew to become a powerful force in apartheid South Africa. Liberals called on the congresses to restrict themselves to constitutional methods of protest as the only means of ‘rational’ and ‘evolutionary’ societal development; radical whites, on the other hand, joined the ANCYL in criticising the ANC for failing to develop a branch structure and to deploy mass-based extra-parliamentary pressure.

White opposition to apartheid in the 1950s – where it mattered: in the cauldron of African nationalism, not sitting in the anterooms of white racist politics hoping to be invited into the main chamber – was divided between the South African Congress of Democrats and the Liberal Party; between radicals (including communists) and liberals.

Both Marxist and liberal theoreticians argued that segregation and apartheid restricted economic development. Government, they believed, would have to adopt a ‘commonsense’ policy and acknowledge the fact of black urbanisation and economic integration by awarding concomitant political representation. Rather than being overtly economic or ideological, as might have been expected, differences between the two were dominated by approaches to the methods and aims of the ANC-led struggle.

In 1947 Edgar Brookes, a Native Representative and leading liberal, stated: ‘If Liberalism be interpreted as an economic doctrine in opposition to socialism, not all of us would be very enthusiastic to defend it.’³⁸ This was not merely the last blush of wartime pro-socialist sympathies: by the late 1950s the Liberal Party programme was considerably more radical in many respects than the Freedom Charter of the Congress Alliance. And both Marxists and liberals shared a viewpoint – later codified by the Communist Party as internal colonialism or ‘colonialism of a special type’ – from which oppression and resistance were understood in relation to the existence of colonists who lived cheek by jowl with their subject colony and had no metropole to which they could or would flee after decolonisation. For communists this was a theoretical construct to explain and accommodate the contradictions of national and class struggle; for liberals it emphasised the ‘logic’ of accepting a meritocratic, colour-blind future for South Africa.

Ideologically, liberals and radicals operated within a remarkably similar framework, dominated by the shared demand for the abolition of racial discrimination and the introduction of a policy based on individual merit rather than race. Communists and radicals may have agreed from the outset that this meant equality under African leadership; by the end of the 1950s (though not before) most Liberal Party members would probably have agreed.

The influence of African nationalism is pervasive. Where white opponents of apartheid differed was over the speed at which a non-racial solution could be reached and the best means of reaching it. Liberals sought the separation of middle-class groups from the mass of the African population and their incorporation in state and economy – the classic black buffer class, as it later came to be known. The liberal vision was evolutionary, steady and gradualist. It relied on a quiescent working class; extra-parliamentary action was seen as both potentially revolutionary and anathema to managed societal evolution.

Liberals called for the extension of social services as a necessary precondition for black advancement to a ‘civilised’ status and incorporation in a modern Western state. In contrast, radical whites supported and worked for the organisation of the working class through mass-based extra-parliamentary campaigns, and called for immediate universal suffrage. White radicals assisted with the formation of black trade unions and offered support for strikes, bus boycotts and other campaigns.

Although relations between liberals and radicals were marked by hostile rhetoric the white liberal/left comprised a relatively cohesive social grouping. Largely drawn from the professional, English-speaking upper middle class, dominated by academics, lawyers and journalists, the liberal/ left was interwoven with friendships and professional and personal relationships that criss-crossed ideological and organisational divisions.³⁹ Through the 1940s the ANC slowly radicalised its programme, adopted extra-parliamentary methods and demanded unqualified white identification with both, a demand that was to sharpen divisions among white liberals and radicals.

The Communist Party 1945–1950

The Communist Party of South Africa, formed in 1921, was, for decades, the only non-racial political party in South Africa. It was a predominantly African organisation with a small white membership. Communists were the only organised body of opinion among whites to offer full support for the goals of the ANC and were also among those few whites who were aware of the deeper political changes afoot in South Africa. As Lionel ‘Rusty’ Bernstein noted:

The growth of radicalism in the African National Congress, and especially its Youth League, seemed to be passing unnoticed. There was no attention to its new Charter of African Rights [Africans’ Claims] … And no recognition of the calibre of a new black generation with leaders like Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu. Only the stock-market speculators seemed aware of the rash of wild-cat strikes spreading across the Rand amongst the black mine-workers.⁴⁰

But, as we see below, communists (black and white) were themselves lulled by wartime pro-Soviet sentiments into seriously underestimating both the strength of anti-communism within the nationalist movement it worked with and within South African society more broadly, and the forces of reaction and the lengths to which they would go in seeking to stop communists, real and imagined.

During the war years the CPSA had scored some minor successes in municipal elections in Johannesburg and Cape Town, but the onset of the Cold War marked the end of white voter support. Black membership increased significantly during the war, as party organisers such as David Bopape and J B Marks concentrated on African mobilisation over civic and trade union issues.⁴¹ The combination of increased African urbanisation and militancy created conditions conducive to the organisational work of CPSA members and, in 1944, the CPSA Central Committee noted both the growth of African industrial and economic action and the lack of political organisation: ‘Our members working in the various national organisations have done much in an individual way. A central and active leadership in this direction has been lacking for a time.’⁴²

The CPSA was a heterogenous organisation, with both black and white party members playing important, though different, roles. White members had a high profile in supporting the war and fighting (white) elections. Black party members were involved in the 1944 Anti-Pass Campaign and in trade union and civic work. Their combined successes led some sections of the CPSA ‘to think in terms of mass membership’.⁴³ A significant portion of the CPSA regarded legal parliamentary activity as the main field of party work, suffering what would later be termed ‘legalistic illusions’:

… the Party revealed certain weaknesses which had developed in its ranks, as well as its indestructible virtues. A certain tendency towards legalistic illusions had penetrated the Party and sections of its leadership. Despite the open threats of the Nationalist party to ban the C.P., no effective steps had been taken to prepare for underground existence and illegal work.⁴⁴

In 1928 the CPSA had accepted a Comintern thesis that placed South Africa in the ambit of ‘colonial and semi-colonial countries’ and endorsed ‘an independent native South African republic as a stage towards a workers’ and peasants’ republic, with full equal rights for all races, black, coloured and white’.⁴⁵

In what became popularly known (outside of the Communist Party, at any rate) as the ‘two-stage revolution’, the CPSA developed a national democratic programme that called for the immediate transfer of power to the majority population and effectively left socialist reconstruction to a later, secondary stage. In the late 1940s, as the ANC grew (in part through the active role played by black communists) and seemed to be taking up a position where it could provide the leadership necessary for the first stage of the revolution, CPSA–ANC co-operation evolved, despite opposition from the ANCYL and some older ANC members.

The post-war CPSA programme was explained in a 1945 pamphlet entitled What Next? A Policy for South Africa, which called for democratic rights for all, the nationalisation of the land and banks, a national health service and free and compulsory education, and supported increased industrialisation.⁴⁶ Given the heterogenous nature of the party, the call for a national democratic programme met with some internal opposition. Academic Jack Simons, a leading Central Committee member and CPSA theoretician, defending What Next? at the party’s 1945 Conference, noted (in language that continues to echo in the Communist Party today): ‘Some of our comrades describe this pamphlet as “wishy-washy” … they do not consider it revolutionary in content.’ He continued:

Comrades, there are times when to be extreme ultra-revolutionary is to betray the cause for which we are working. Which is the more revolutionary today – to say you want the vote and equality of rights for the non-Europeans? Isn’t it more revolutionary to take up the struggle for housing for the people, for fair distribution of supplies and a Ministry of Food? We must find a policy which gives expression to the innermost needs of people of our country. What we lack too much is the spirit of sacrifice, the determination to get among the people and to take up the issues which most nearly affect them.⁴⁷

The CPSA programme was clearly more radical than Africans’ Claims in its talk of nationalisation, which found increasing sympathy within the ANC and later expression in the 1955 Freedom Charter. The relationship between communists and African nationalists was never straightforward; according to leading CPSA–SACP member Michael Harmel, ANCYL leaders denounced communism as a ‘foreign ideology’ but ‘… found common ground with Communists in demanding a more positive and revolutionary ANC leadership and a turn from stereotyped and ineffective methods of struggle to radical mass action’.⁴⁸

Harmel’s description is factually accurate, but smoothes over long-standing and deeply felt anti-communism. While many ANCYL and ANC members remained hostile to the CPSA and the high profile of white communists, the role of those white communists in visibly providing unqualified support for the black liberation struggle, including trade union and political work, was of substantial importance.⁴⁹ By fully endorsing (the newly radicalised) Congress’s aims and activities, whites in the CPSA adopted a position that set the standard for radical whites in the 1950s and against which white anti-apartheid activists of all political hues would be judged.

The Communist Party’s decision to participate in alliances with non-socialist, nationalist organisations in pursuit of the ‘first stage’ of the revolution, rather than going it alone as a class-based party, had considerable effects on opposition politics, positive and negative. The CPSA encouraged the creation of a ‘broad fighting alliance’ against racial discrimination. Of particular significance for our story was its role in working with the Congress movement to develop grassroots mobilisation in producing statements of principle, starting with Africans’ Claims and finding its fullest expression in the Congress of the People campaign of 1954/55, which produced the Freedom Charter.⁵⁰

In 1944 the CPSA proposed that ‘[t]he idea of a People’s Charter of Rights should be taken up jointly by three sections [the three national groups]’.⁵¹ This should emphasise a point that will become evident in this book: race was a given in the period under study. Parties and individuals fought for a future based on equality regardless of race, but it was not based on a denial of what they saw as the ‘fact’ of race. ‘National groups’ is, of course, a euphemism for race; the ANC’s talk of ‘the national question’ – which lasted beyond apartheid and into democracy – has exactly the same connotation.

Both the CPSA and the ANC expressed the desire to ‘get among the people’ and reunite formal organisations with the widespread black militancy of the period. With this in mind, in 1945 the CPSA called for the summoning of ‘a People’s Convention’, with the aim of producing a coherent, popular statement of national democratic goals, and to symbolise and give concrete form to the emerging black organisational unity.⁵² This became a common goal of the CPSA and the Congress movement in the post-war period.

The production of such a charter could not and did not precede the emergence of a unified alliance of forces opposed to racial discrimination, which took place a decade later. However, the method of drafting what became the Freedom Charter (in 1955) was envisaged in the late 1940s. In 1947 Yusuf Dadoo, president of the SAIC and a leading CPSA member, began implementing a joint resolution of the Transvaal ANC, the SAIC and the APO to convene a countrywide conference of all progressive organisations and to draw up a charter for democracy for all in South Africa.⁵³

In early 1948 delegates were invited ‘from factories and workshops, townships, hostels, advisory boards and vigilance committees, farm settlements and country towns in all corners of the provinces’ to assist in the drawing up and endorsement of a charter for ‘Votes For All’. The goal was ‘to launch a campaign for the democratic principles of the United Nations Charter’, concentrating on universal suffrage and equal political participation for all.⁵⁴

In the end, the conference, which became known as the People’s Assembly for Votes for All, was considerably less ambitious in scope, affected by the disputes that marked ANC–ANCYL as well as ANC–CPSA relations, and was restricted to the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The ANCYL and ‘old guard’ ANC leadership jointly attacked what was seen as Communist Party dominance of the Transvaal ANC and its activities. In particular, organisers of the Assembly were accused of attempting to bypass the existing multiracial alliance of congresses and create a new, non-racial competitor – a single organisation of all races, rather than an alliance of organisations representing different races, led by Africans in the ANC.⁵⁵ The organisers attempted to clarify relations with the congresses:

It is not our aim to compete in any way with, or take over the functions of the great national organisations of the African, Coloured or Indian people. It is our aim to secure friendly co-operation and mutual assistance of South African people in championing the great democratic cause of the franchise.⁵⁶

These tensions, and their impact on organisational form, recur throughout the period under study. Despite opposition from the Youth League, the Assembly met in Johannesburg and was opened by Michael Scott, a radical churchman and a leading figure in the 1946 passive resistance campaign. The 322 delegates present endorsed the ‘People’s Charter for Votes for All’ and the Assembly was significant for the interracial rank and file co-operation it produced, compounding that of the 1946 passive resistance campaign. The Assembly ended by calling for a further Assembly where delegates from the whole country could endorse a ‘People’s Charter’. Popular mobilisation around and participation in drawing up the People’s Charter and the penetration of rural as well as urban areas set precedents that informed leading ANC member Z K Matthews’s call five years later for a ‘Congress of the People’.

The People’s Assembly marked a shift away from the cautious style of earlier ANC activity and a step on the way from deputation to confrontation. Propaganda issued by the organisers stressed the illegitimacy of the 1948 general election and called for the election of delegates ‘who will represent more citizens than those voting in the General Elections’.⁵⁷Where Africans’ Claims had tentatively proposed an alternative legitimating ideology for the state based on equal citizenship, the Assembly directly challenged ‘the election of the new Parliament by a minority of the people’.⁵⁸ The People’s Charter, anticipating the Freedom Charter, concluded:

Where there is no freedom the people perish. Raising high the banner of freedom, the banner of the liberation of our people,

WE PLEDGE that we shall not rest until all adult men and women have the right to stand for, vote for and be elected to all the representative bodies which rule over our people;

WE CHALLENGE the existence of a Parliament from whose election the majority of its citizens are excluded, in a country which upholds in words the principles and practices of democracy.⁵⁹

The People’s Assembly has been criticised for not producing a programme of action by which to achieve the aims it set out.⁶⁰ This may have been a result of the conflicts which surrounded it. Moreover, the ANC at the time was debating what emerged in 1949 as the Programme of Action, largely inspired by the ANCYL. The programme endorsed the 1943 Bill of Rights, repeating demands for universal suffrage and equal political participation, but it was more concerned with methods than aims. The changing nature of the struggle, suggested by the People’s Assembly, was made clear in the programme, which resolved to work for ‘the abolition of all differential political institutions the boycotting of which we accept and to undertake a campaign to educate our people on this issue and, in addition, to employ the following weapons: immediate and active boycott, strike, civil disobedience, non-co-operation and such other means as may bring about the accomplishments and realisation of our aspirations’.⁶¹

Liberals and liberalism 1946–1949

During the war ‘[l]iberalism acquired its greatest influence, both in describing and in shaping South Africa …’.⁶²

Lewsen saw the Cape liberals as ‘the cultural and intellectual elite of the Cape, its leading parliamentarians and … its most brilliant men’,⁶³ which, of course, would extend in the 1950s to include a woman, leading Native Representative and Liberal Party member Margaret Ballinger. Lewsen’s description obtained more generally in the war years and the immediate post-war period.

During those years liberals were well thought of by the then ANC leadership, with whom they shared a class position and broader socio-political views, and were generally regarded as important in South African society. They were well known, enjoyed a high media profile, and were (sometimes self-consciously) part of the white South African elite.

The fact that they were roundly attacked for decades after the war by white radicals, many in the Congress movement, communists, black consciousness movement supporters and others should not allow an ahistorical view. The war years were a period of enormous promise for liberals. Government commissions reported that segregation, under pressure from industrialisation, was breaking down and Smuts acknowledged the irreversibility of black urbanisation. Liberals in the SAIRR and among the native representatives, who emerged at the forefront of liberal public thinking in the late 1940s, adopted a pragmatic stance in response to these apparent shifts in government thinking, believing that capitalist development would inevitably favour their approach to ‘race relations’.

Industrialisation was seen to challenge the economic and political stranglehold of agricultural and mining capital and, as such, was regarded as an inherently progressive modernising process. Its apparently objective economic inevitability appealed to liberals (seeking a ‘rational’ – and apolitical – solution) and socialists alike. Native Representative Donald Molteno argued that the struggle in South Africa lay between vested economic interests that benefited from the status quo and industry, which challenged it (and strengthened liberals in the political arena).

Putting forward a view that would be repeated for the next four decades by businesspeople and others in South Africa (though in language more commonly associated with the left), Molteno argued that industry speeded up both economic and political change; from the 1940s it seemed that ‘the objective forces that make for progress are on [our] side’.⁶⁴ Liberals felt themselves to be on the side of ‘common sense’ (the title of one of their journals⁶⁵), both economically and politically.

The liberal position, insofar as a single set of views can be ascribed to an informal group, was set out by Leo Marquard as early as 1943. Marquard, head of AES, Afrikaner ‘royalty’, mentor of Bram Fischer, author of Black Man’s Burden (which radicalised a generation of young white conscripts), and probably the most thoughtful of a clutch of highly intellectual wartime and post-war white liberals, remained open to new ideas and directions throughout the life of the Liberal Party, with his own position changing quite radically. He noted that ‘[t]here is ample evidence that a Bantu bourgeoisie has come into being in the urban areas … their economic position, as they see it, is associated with the European rather than with the depressed Bantu worker’.⁶⁶

Marquard argued that white liberals and the emergent black middle class were natural class and political allies, participating in the joint councils set up by the SAIRR to generate consensus over municipal affairs. Such co-operation, he maintained, together with the ‘relatively good economic position’ of the black bourgeoisie, ‘makes them feel that they have more to lose than their chains’.⁶⁷ For liberals, a black middle or buffer class was the best safeguard against revolution; communists had decided to ally themselves with the ANC, home of the emergent black bourgeoisie, and feared precisely what the liberals embraced. Both argued that post-war economic development would drive political change, but differed over the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of that change. Liberals argued that the emergence of an urban African bourgeoisie would flow inevitably from industrialisation, and called for representative structures with greater powers than the NRC. As Edgar Brookes noted: ‘The liberal-minded South African who takes the line of going all out for a policy which will conform immediately to world liberal opinion has virtually made his decision for rebellion and direct action.’⁶⁸

He went on to note, in words that exemplified the strengths and weaknesses of South African liberalism at the time, ‘Our cause is logically so strong that we are tempted to put our whole faith in logic.’⁶⁹

Espousing, as they did, a gradualist reformist vision and opposed to extra-parliamentary strategies that jeopardised the slow evolution of a race-blind meritocracy, the natural course for liberals in their support of incremental change and black socio-economic advancement was to put pressure on the United Party to adopt a more liberal ‘native policy’. They opposed demands for significant political reform as premature until ‘the basic social and material conditions for an advance towards them have been achieved’.⁷⁰ With economic developments appearing to nudge government towards a policy change, liberals called for restraint on the part of the Congresses.

Encouraged by the apparent congruity between the process of industrialisation and political goals, the Native Representatives saw the main task of liberals as being ‘to assist, at every point, the forces making for the evolution of the Bantu people into a modern community’.⁷¹

As Martin Legassick put it, ‘… their argument that progress could only come by the evolutionary acceptance of “civilised” Africans into the community, became transformed into the belief that because progress had come (as measured in terms of economic indices), acceptance of “civilised” Africans would follow’.⁷²

In 1943 the UP was supported by industrial, mining and agricultural capital but by 1946, unity in support of the war had given way before the competition for black labour. As a result, according to O’Meara, ‘the UP government fell between at least three stools’ in attempting to appease the competing demands of these three main sectors of the economy.⁷³ Politically, the UP faced an attack on its ‘liberal’ policies from the right by the Nationalist Party (NP) and for its illiberal policies from the left by the organised black opposition, which expressed itself by means such as industrial action and passive resistance.

The UP’s response was mixed as it tried to hold together its own internal factions while appeasing those outside it. Smuts made some cynical moves in the direction of the gradual black inclusion in state structures called for by liberals, among them his offer of white parliamentary representation to Indians. In response to the adjournment of the NRC Smuts offered to enlarge the council to fifty elected members.

Hofmeyr shared the liberal desire to separate perceived black moderates from radicalising influences and warned Smuts of ‘the disturbing fact that the moderate intellectuals of the Professor Matthews type have committed themselves to a policy of non-cooperation’.⁷⁴ This was confirmed when both Smuts’s proposals were rejected by the African and Indian congresses. Liberals outside the UP appealed for black restraint, arguing that South Africa was less like colonial India (where mass-based passive resistance campaigns were effective) and more like nineteenth-century Britain, where gradual extension of the qualified franchise had brought parliamentary democracy into being.

Edgar Brookes argued: ‘Most of us believe that given time and opportunity we can do in South Africa in the twentieth century what was done with signal success in England in the nineteenth century; namely, step by step obtain majorities in the privileged groups for the extension of rights to the unprivileged’.⁷⁵

Facing opposition from both white and black the UP lurched to the right in an attempt to appease current (white) rather than possible (and distant) future (black) voters. In 1946 the miners’ strike was crushed, the NRC adjourned, and the offices of the CPSA, The Guardian, the Springbok Legion, various trade unions, and the homes of prominent left-wing individuals were raided by the police.

Gone were the days of shared platforms; communists (real and imagined) were again the enemy. Finally, in attempting to rationalise its ‘native policy’ and provide labour, as demanded by the different sectors of the economy, the UP convened the Fagan Commission to investigate influx control with regard to the growth of urban industry and its effects on migrant labour.

The Fagan Commission had an obvious ideological function, namely to repair the growing crisis of legitimacy faced by the Smuts government as segregation was undermined by industrialisation, urbanisation, and the liberal discourse that attended them. Of course the commission could not fulfil this task. Its 1948 report was internally contradictory, favouring both a permanent black urban presence and continued migrant labour.⁷⁶ Rather than provide a legitimating discourse the report operated within a framework of economic necessity and expediency. As Ashforth argued, the racist assumptions of the report were in common with the ‘grand tradition’ of South African ‘Native commissions’, but the Fagan Report was unique in that it:

… does not provide a scheme for the legitimate division of rights and obligations within the state on racial grounds. Fagan accepts the racial division of the state as it stands and rationalises it in purely ‘racist’ terms ... For Fagan the divided State can be accepted as legitimate merely on the basis of administrative expedience; there is no need for any of the rhetorical paraphernalia of ‘civilising mission’ or ‘development’.⁷⁷

By 1946 liberals were caught between a radicalising Congress movement and a United Party government that resorted to repression rather than concession. Leo Marquard warned Hofmeyr that ‘the United Party is frightening off its possible friends by vainly trying to attract its known enemies’, noting that liberals were ‘profoundly disturbed and bewildered by what we feel to be a drift away from liberalism and an appeasing of reaction’.⁷⁸

Liberals sought to keep in place a moderate ANC leadership with whom dialogue was possible, which forced them (assuming force were required) to oppose an election boycott called for by the ANCYL. They also proposed political reforms that they regarded as pragmatic, implementable responses to the Fagan Report. Both tactics would fail, leaving liberals isolated, ostracised and facing the twin extremes of white racism and black militancy.

Liberals in a corner

Liberals aimed to establish in South Africa what Margaret Ballinger later described as ‘a Western state, maintaining Western standards and based on Western values’.⁷⁹ The evolutionary attainment of such a society was premised on parliamentary gradualism; this, in turn, required governmental concessions to ‘reasonable’ black demands. The alternative, as they saw it, was anarchy:

[Black] resistance, whether by armed rebellion or by general strike or by non-cooperation movement on a national scale would arouse fierce passions and produce results which none could foresee. The whole structure of parliamentary government through ordered democratic channels would be destroyed, and that before the non-European himself is ready to accept the responsibilities which would be thrust upon him.⁸⁰

No liberal organisation operating in the political arena was established and no liberal programme of action was developed; rather, the Native Representatives and leading SAIRR members attempted to influence the policies and programmes of the UP and the ANC and play a mediating role between the two. The events of 1946 confronted liberals with their inability to influence either side.

The NRC adjournment, argued Margaret Ballinger, amounted to a ‘repudiation of the whole representation embodied in the 1936 Act under which we hold our seats’.⁸¹ While the UP seemed intent on kicking away one leg of the stool on which Ballinger and fellow liberals perched awkwardly, another was being kicked out from under them by the ANCYL call for a boycott of all native representation elections.

Apparently lacking an alternative strategy, Margaret Ballinger and her husband, William, jointly advised Z K Matthews in September 1946 that ‘the African people are not yet ready for a complete repudiation of the Council’ and that ‘… probably the best next move would be for the Councillors simply to accept the next summons to meet, to turn up at Pretoria as if nothing had happened, and then to begin to argue about the future of the Council when you reassemble’.⁸²

But liberals didn’t just wring their hands in consternation, they took the battle to the ANC. The ANCYL’s proposed boycott in response to the NRC adjournment was supported by ANC–CPSA members such as Moses Kotane and by councillors such as James Moroka. Other councillors, however, opposed the boycott, and these the Native Representatives regarded as their allies.

The Ballingers and Communist Party member Hymie Basner attended an emergency conference of the Transvaal ANC in June 1947, called to discuss implementation of the boycott.⁸³ Supported by councillors Paul Mosaka and Selope Thema, the Ballingers called on the conference to reject the boycott and to encourage the ANC nationally to do the same.

Indicating the growing gulf between themselves and the ANC, the Representatives described the boycott as a ‘silly’ idea and warned the conference that ‘before you carry it out you will have the fight of your lives’.⁸⁴

While some Representatives took on the ANC, others were trying to squeeze a semblance of liberalism from the post-war UP. Edgar Brookes pleaded with Hofmeyr to grant concessions to the NRC, claiming that ‘the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that there is a real case to meet from the Native point of view’.⁸⁵ By making concessions, Brookes argued, the government would assist liberals in ‘strengthening … the moderate section in the Representative Council so that they might find it possible to carry out the policy of co-operation which in their heart of hearts they would prefer’.⁸⁶ Brookes argued that ‘the most important thing’ was the development of personal friendship between Hofmeyr and ‘a handful of key men among the non-Europeans’.

If a few men … could be encouraged to visit you from time to time, to open their hearts to you, to feel your friendship, to know your difficulties, political and otherwise, to feel free to write confidentially to you, their influence, spread far and wide among other people, would counteract all the negative propaganda, and help the people, through having confidence in your intentions, to wait for the right moment for drastic reforms.⁸⁷

Hofmeyr warned Smuts that NRC moderates supported the adjournment.⁸⁸ But, according to Marks, ‘… far from responding to their [the NRC’s] justifiable anger in conciliatory mode, Smuts … instructed Hofmeyr to stiffen what he saw as the apologetic tone of the statement the latter intended making to the adjourned NRC’.⁸⁹

In January 1948 the electoral boycott, a strategy that had never been popular with the cautious ANC leadership of the time, was openly rejected by Xuma and others.⁹⁰ Sustaining the boycott became impossible in the confused situation and the ANC and CPSA (somewhat tortuously) proposed the election of ‘boycott candidates’, who would call for the 1936 legislation to be repealed.⁹¹

In justifying the change of tactics the ANC argued that there had been insufficient organisation to sustain a boycott and that NRC candidates should use their positions to undertake such organisation.⁹² But by then liberals were seen to be actively opposed to the boycott. A year later, faced with a choice between Margaret Ballinger and a National Party candidate, the secretary of the Port Elizabeth African Organisations advised his members: ‘DO NOT VOTE FOR EITHER OF THEM!’⁹³

By the late 1940s the Congress movement evinced widespread hostility towards white liberals. Black liberals were, of course, to be found at all levels of the ANC itself, and liberals were not criticised on ideological grounds but rather for their failure to support the methods of the ANC and SAIC. This would be a recurrent theme of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Leading Transvaal Indian Congress member Ahmed ‘Kathy’ Kathrada, later imprisoned with Nelson Mandela and others, defined liberals precisely as those who refused to support the strategies and campaigns of the congresses. Accusing ‘the men and women of the liberal creed’ of cowardice, Kathrada stated: ‘Our experiences have been that these individuals, who are usually vociferous in their claims for justice and fair play for the black man, have on every occasion when their assistance was required, sadly failed us.’⁹⁴

At a meeting in Durban, liberals were characterised by their use of ‘humble petitions and respectable deputations’ which failed to ‘deliver the goods’.⁹⁵ Criticism was also evident among black liberals. Jordan Ngubane, a founder member of the ANCYL and later prominent in the Liberal Party, stressed that white liberals had failed to intervene constructively in black political life:⁹⁶ ‘… the collapse of African Moderation has been largely occasioned by the failure of European Liberals as a group to take an unequivocal and unfaltering stand on the vital colour question’.⁹⁷

By 1948 liberal attempts to mediate between the UP and the ANC had failed. The ANC increasingly favoured extra-parliamentary protest (formally endorsed a year later) in pursuit of unqualified equality, and youth leaguers became increasingly hostile to the perceived cautious obstructionism of liberals. In May 1948 the National Party won power and the UP went into opposition. Seven months later Hofmeyr died. Edgar Brookes, surveying the landscape, saw little but gloom: ‘The lot of the European who claims to be, in any sense of that much abused word, a “liberal” is hard. He stands, as it were, on a shrinking isthmus, with the oceans of European passion and non-European passion encroaching on it from day to day.’⁹⁸

By the late 1940s white (and black) communists felt themselves to be on the side of a rising, increasingly radical nationalist movement that was replacing its older bourgeois leadership with a younger – but still essentially bourgeois – leadership (young lawyers, teachers, chiefs and the like replacing old lawyers, teachers, chiefs and the like) willing to utilise fully extra-parliamentary and direct methods of protest.

The Congress movement now demanded full equality rather than politely requesting partial inclusion. But all was not plain sailing: the Youth League leadership was more radical than that of the ANC but it was also strongly anti-communist, though only feebly so compared with the newly elected National Party and those who subscribed to the growing global Cold War hysteria.

White (and black) liberals found themselves opposing ANCYL radicals and their use of extra-parliamentary methods, trying to stop the influence of communists, while seeking to nudge Hofmeyr and shove Smuts into replacing their reactionary platform with some elements of liberalism. They suffered a failure of the colonial (and, arguably, post-colonial) imagination: the notion of full equality for all remained beyond their grasp, and their focus was on securing the franchise for ‘suitably qualified’ or ‘civilised’ natives – in essence, trying to keep alive their own version of the Cape liberal tradition, and export it northwards.

But while they were doing so the socio-economic changes triggered by the Second World War led to a significant increase in black, particularly African, political activity and a steadily more radical ANC platform. It also led to African–Indian political unity (not necessarily characterised by easy socio-economic relations, as later events would show), as seen in the People’s Assembly for Votes for All. This unity was reflected in the ANC and SAIC’s pursuit of ideological and racial accord and popular support through the mobilisation of people around the production and endorsement of a statement of principle, while remaining in a multiracial alliance of separate congresses for different races, as they would do with greater success in the 1950s.