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Chapter 3

Multiracialism: Communist plot or anti-Communist ploy?

Resistance politics in the 1950s was dominated by the Congress Alliance, which sought to mobilise people of all races against apartheid. However, attempts to foster racial co-ope ration – especially including whites – in an increasingly racist state came with costs. The internal politics of the resistance movement – including both the Congress movement and the South African Communist Party (SACP)(in its pre-1950 and post-1953 incarnations)¹ – was dominated by wide-ranging and bitter disputes over the form racial co-operation should take. The dispute centred on the multiracial nature of the Congress Alliance – that is, an alliance of separate congresses comprising members of a single race,² co-ordinated at regional and national levels. This multiracialism stood in marked contrast to the non-racialism of organisations such as the disbanded Communist Party of South Africa, the reconstituted SACP and the Liberal Party.

It is important to recall what was said in the introduction: that sensitivity about the language of race was not evident in the 1950s – multiracial, non-racial, interracial and similar terms were, initially, used interchangeably. Over time, as the race-based structure of the Congress Alliance became a politicised issue – with liberals and Africanists seeing it as a vehicle for overweening white communist influence over the African National Congress (ANC) – people became more sensitive to the true meaning of the terms they used.³

The issue of racial co-operation was being debated as the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) came to exert greater influence over Congress, bringing to the ANC a new militancy; a strident and at times exclusive African nationalism; and marked anti-communism. As senior ANC official Dan Tloome put it, the ANCYL’s attitude:

was that our fight is against the white people. ‘We are nationalist here, and these white people took away our land’ – that was the type of approach … They were very, very hostile against the CP[SA]. Their cardinal point was that communism is a foreign ideology and that we shouldn’t follow it because it’s not applicable to South Africa.⁴

The ANCYL strongly resisted what it saw as an attempt by the CPSA to bypass existing national organisations and create a permanent ‘unity movement’⁵ – an organisation of all races that emphasised class above national consciousness via a Marxist rather than a nationalist approach.⁶ The Youth League, by contrast, insisted on racially separate or multiracial structures, viewing non-racialism not as an organisational expression of anti-racism that allowed whites to participate (as liberals saw it) but rather as a stalking horse for communist dominance.

Debates over multiracialism and non-racialism first centred on the CPSA and, after it disbanded in 1950, on the South African Congress of Democrats (SACOD), which had become the organisational home for many white former Communist Party members. The fact that multiracialism afforded each congress equal representation on all coordinating structures meant that SACOD, with an average membership of 250, had equal representation with the ANC, which had an average paid-up membership of between 30 000 and 50 000.⁷ Since liberals, Trotskyists and African nationalists viewed SACOD as a communist front, multiracialism generated hostility and suspicion, with SACOD – ‘the white wing of the Congress Alliance’⁸ – at its epicentre.

SACOD was a small white organisation that supported extra-parliamentary campaigns in pursuit of equal rights. It did include a number of former CPSA members, many with a high profile, but it also provided a home for the tiny number of whites wanting to work in support of and as part of the Congress movement. SACOD’s place in the Congress Alliance provided a hostile focus for a wide range of organisations that regarded it as a communist front and multiracialism as the means by which communist influence was being entrenched in the Alliance.

Africanists saw the alliance of congresses as a ‘somersault on principles’ set out in the 1949 Programme of Action.⁹ The Liberal Party (LP) attacked SACOD as a communist front and criticised the ANC for co-operating with it, while some LP members attacked the ANC for being dominated by white communists.¹⁰ Anti-communism made for strange ménages. For example, in a pamphlet issued in Cape Town in 1956, liberals and Trotskyists on the Bus Apartheid Resistance Committee stated: ‘COD is a boss organisation in an alliance of racial organisations and is a great believer in the big stick. The organisations allied to it are boy organisations. COD dictates its instructions to them. They never meet as equals: theirs is simply to obey …’.¹¹

In an ironic twist the multiracial structure of the Congress Alliance, which was created largely at the insistence of ANCYL nationalists, came to be seen as the product of white communists who engineered it so as to control the ANC they were unable to join.

Explanations for the emergence of multiracialism tend to follow the conventional ANC argument, emphasising that it was a strategy which acknowledged the differing material conditions affecting races politically and geographically divided under both segregation and apartheid. But such explanations ignore the ideological content of multiracialism, whose roots lie in large part in the hostility that characterised relations between the Communist Party and the ANCYL. Both organisations called for the radicalisation of the ANC and the development of a mass base as the only means to achieve successful national liberation. But after that they differed: where the ANCYL pursued a nationalist path the CPSA warned that nationalism could serve to obscure class oppression and called for the transformation of existing organisations ‘into a revolutionary party of workers, peasants, intellectuals and petty bourgeois’.¹² Non-racialism in organisational form was clearly allied to a particular argument set forth by one strand of thinking within the Communist Party. Its ideological content made it anathema to African nationalists, despite its obvious symbolic value.

Brian Bunting, a CPSA Central Committee member, discussing the distinction between the CPSA’s non-racialism and the ANCYL’s multiracialism, attempted to downplay the differences, pleading: ‘let us not be confused by semantics’.¹³ The distinction was more than semantic; the hostility between the Youth League and the CPSA resulted in the strategic debate over non-racialism or multiracialism being influenced by heavily ideological overtones which fed into the emerging Communist Party theory of ‘colonialism of a special type’ (discussed further in Chapter 4). This chapter analyses the disputes between the CPSA and the ANCYL in order to locate the ideological roots of multiracialism and, in doing so, it highlights the tensions within the CPSA over the relationship between class struggle and national struggle, which increased in the late 1940s as a result (in part) of CPSA–ANCYL hostility.

The post-war Communist Party: ‘a tendency towards legalistic illusions’ ¹⁴

In the 1940s and early 1950s the ANC was transformed from a small organisation wishing to enrol ‘distinguished university graduates’¹⁵ into a mass-based nationalist organisation pursuing national liberation by extra-parliamentary means, including stayaways and passive resistance campaigns. Those changes were largely brought about by the ANCYL, which dominated Congress politics in the late 1940s. The league set itself the twin tasks of ‘impart[ing] to Congress a truly national character’ and opposing those who sought to provide ‘foreign leadership of Africa’.¹⁶ Youth leaguers stressed ‘the need for vigilance against Communists and other groups which foster non-African interests’.¹⁷ In practice the ANCYL’s programme entailed gaining control of the direction of Congress, while isolating organisations and individuals who either exerted influence over the ANC or sought to develop their own African support base.

The transformation of the ANC took place largely in the post-war years. During the war the organisation had concentrated on drawing up and popularising Africans’ Claims in South Africa and in the immediate post-war period it left grassroots organisation around civic issues to other organisations. Black trade unions grew, while squatter movements and bus boycotts represented a spontaneous popular response to the hardships faced by the black population.

In contrast, the Communist Party was directly involved in grassroots organisation in some townships, notably on the East Rand. Sapire describes the case of Brakpan location, where the CPSA mobilised residents around immediate local concerns such as wages, employment practices, the extension of passes to women, the shortage of housing, and pass law raids – precisely the kind of civic organising that would be so effective a few decades later.

The CPSA contested advisory board elections, winning all six seats in East London in 1942. It also won local council seats in Cape Town, East London and Johannesburg.¹⁸ It used the boards and vigilance associations as a means of establishing ‘footholds in location communities’.¹⁹ According to Sapire, CPSA members such as David Bopape and Gideon Ngake used their elected positions as platforms from which to defend local interests and instituted the CPSA as ‘the undisputed political force in the region’.²⁰ The CPSA also ran night schools in the major centres, which, according to the Johannesburg District CPSA secretary, were ‘a very big factor in the development of the membership of the party’.²¹

The CPSA believed the national organisations would spearhead a national revolution aimed at abolishing racial discrimination and attaining equal rights for all. Thereafter, the struggle for socialism could follow, with the obfuscations of race removed. In 1940, however, the ANC was a small, weak organisation of the black elite, and, as the CPSA complained,

[t]he year 1940 has arrived with hardship and misery for the oppressed and poor peoples of the Union of South Africa … Unfortunately the year finds the forces of freedom as scattered as sheep in the presence of wolves. When talking of the forces of freedom, one cannot lose sight of the fact that the African people are potentially the most important of these forces. Therefore, if the Africans do not pull themselves together to face the enemies of freedom vigorously, not only will they let themselves down, but they will let their allies down also.²²

Together with organisations such as the Springbok Legion and Friends of the Soviet Union, the CPSA successfully mobilised large sectors of the white population – Hilda Watts, for instance, won a seat on the Johannesburg City Council in the whites-only Hillbrow ward. CPSA members were also active in the black trade union movement. As a result of its high political profile and success in various spheres of operation, some in the party began to think of it as a potential mass movement in its own right, ignoring the unique conditions of the war; such thoughts came to a juddering halt when hostilities ended.²³

In 1929 the party had accepted a Comintern directive which stressed the need to work within ‘the embryonic organisations among the natives, such as the African National Congress’ in order to transform the latter into a ‘fighting nationalist revolutionary organisation against the white bourgeoisie and British imperialists …’.²⁴ By the end of the war the Communist Party had emerged as a significant force, but it remained party policy to work with the ANC and build it up.

Black CPSA members, however, were reluctant to join the ANC. Elias Motsoaledi, a leading ANC–SACP member jailed for life in 1964, explained:

[the] Party taught me the struggle. I attended ANC meetings but was not happy with it at the time [the late 1940s]. To me, the ANC did not interpret the aspirations of the masses. But the Party taught me that it was my responsibility to tell the ANC about our aspirations … at the time, the ANC was dominated by sophisticated intellectuals who only spoke in English.²⁵

Rusty Bernstein, CPSA Johannesburg District Secretary at the time, also noted that black members resisted joining the ANC: ‘They thought the ANC was rather reformist bourgeois nonsense – “that’s not for us, we’re revolutionaries!’’ ’²⁶

The CPSA extended its township work during the war years, but remained concerned with the state of the ANC. CPSA members such as David Bopape, J B Marks, Edwin Mofutsanyana and Moses Kotane were also senior ANC members, in part because the party insisted that national liberation struggles ‘fought in the colonial and semi-colonial territories’ were ‘no mere side issue’ but an integral part of the global anti-imperialist struggle.²⁷

But, as stated above, the ANC (unlike the Communist Party) failed to capitalise on the changed conditions resulting from the war, and rival organisations aimed at mobilising black support were either established or revitalised. The African Democratic Party (ADP) was formed, while the All-African Convention (AAC) agitated for a ‘non-collaborationist’ strategy. Within the ANC the restless young urban intellectuals of the ANCYL, who favoured direct, extra-parliamentary action, began to criticise the ANC’s moderation and its failure to establish a branch structure and win a mass following.

The CPSA accepted that the ANC remained ‘the premier political organisation’, both because of historical ties and presumably because both the ADP and the AAC were influenced, to differing degrees, by Trotskyist thinking. CPSA statements between 1942 and 1948 stressed that it was ‘… the duty of all Communists belonging to oppressed nationalities to join their respective national movements, so as to work for the strengthening of such movements …’.²⁸

CPSA literature and internal reports during the war shared three related themes with regard to the ANC and national liberation. In the first place the party acknowledged the progress made by Xuma in reorganising the ANC, but criticised Congress for failing to provide political leadership in a period of considerable black industrial and civic action. In a 1943 report on ‘National Movements of the Non-Europeans’ the CPSA Executive Committee noted that ‘the lack of a strong and influential organisation among the Non-Europeans has been felt time and time again’ and criticised the ANC for failing ‘in its main task – that of uniting its membership and carrying out the formation of branches in a systematic manner’.²⁹

In 1945 the CPSA Johannesburg District stressed the ‘unity and solidarity … militancy and readiness for action’ evident in the Alexandra bus boycotts, protests over train fare increases and the squatter movements, but criticised both itself and the ANC for failing to provide leadership.³⁰ Given its own failure to appreciate what was going on, the party took a gratuitous swipe at Mpanza, the squatter leader, who ‘may seem a figure hardly worth taking seriously’, as well as at the ADP, which ‘suffers from all the faults of sectarianism, political inexperience and stupidity’.³¹ But it also acknowledged that they ‘… gave the people what they demanded … they were advocating something positive …’.³² The analysis concluded that ‘the people demand leadership’ and called for a ‘practical plan of campaign and action’ to channel popular militancy.³³

Flowing from this was a second theme of CPSA commentary on national movements – a repeated call for the elaboration of a minimum shared programme between national organisations, the CPSA and the trade union movement. Such a programme, it was argued, would allow both ideological and organisational unity.

The third theme comprised repeated calls for the development of a united front of organisations opposing racial discrimination. The CPSA argued that ‘[a]ll genuine movements towards national liberation are progressive’, but warned against the tendency to racial exclusiveness, which would obscure the underlying reality of the class-based oppression of all workers.³⁴ The party supported the emergence of a ‘broad fighting Alliance’³⁵ or ‘wide democratic front’³⁶ which would oppose segregation while underplaying exclusive nationalism.

The CPSA’s post-war programme was internally contested, with some members calling on the party to capitalise on its wartime successes and concentrate on furthering class struggle in place of the ‘two-stage’ revolution, which saw national liberation as a necessary precondition for socialist revolution. This also flowed in part from the changing nature of the ANC, as the ANCYL became more prominent and focused its hostility on the CPSA and its ‘foreign’ ideology. The CPSA expressed concern that ‘[t]he realities of the class divisions are being obscured … Nationalism need not be synonymous with racialism, but it can avoid being so only if it recognises the class alignments that cut across the racial divisions.’³⁷

The criticisms levelled by the Youth League against the ANC echoed those of the CPSA, calling for the development of a branch structure and mass membership, and the utilisation of extra-parliamentary means of opposition. The two organisations seemed to be competing over who would direct the future of the ANC, fuelling the Youth League’s twin hostilities – to the CPSA, and to anything other than ‘occasional co-operation’³⁸ with other racial groups.

The ANC Youth League

The ANCYL’s ‘Manifesto’, issued in March 1944, noted criticism of the ANC as an organisation ‘of gentlemen with clean hands’ which had failed to organise the mass of the African population.³⁹ The League, it stated, was formed as ‘a protest against the lack of discipline and the absence of a clearly-defined goal in the movement as a whole’ and was committed to ‘rousing popular political consciousness and fighting oppression and reaction’.⁴⁰More significantly, it stressed that ‘the national liberation of the Africans will be achieved by Africans themselves. We reject foreign leadership of Africa.’⁴¹

The programme was based on an African nationalism that rejected non-African leadership and ‘the wholesale importation of foreign ideologies’⁴² while emphasising African pride and self-sufficiency. The League was influenced, in part, by the growth of anti-colonial movements in the post-war period. Anton Lembede, a lawyer and the League’s first president and leading ideologue, stated:

The history of modern times is the history of nationalism … All over the world nationalism is rising in revolt against foreign domination, conquest and oppression in India, in Indonesia, in Egypt, in Persia and several other countries. Among Africans also clear signs of national awakening, national renaissance, or rebirth are noticeable …⁴³

The League saw as its ‘immediate task’ the need ‘to overhaul the machinery of the ANC from within’, moulding it into a mass-based organisation pursuing national liberation and mobilising support by means of a militant African nationalism.⁴⁴ It stressed ‘the divine destiny of the African people’⁴⁵ and the need for ‘high ethical standards’ to ‘combat moral disintegration among Africans’.⁴⁶

Both the ANCYL and the CPSA wanted a more radical ANC, but they also wanted an ANC in their own image. While the CPSA tried to work with Congress, the Youth League saw as part of its task the need to stop non-African nationalists from influencing Congress. Lembede argued:

No foreigner can ever be a true and genuine leader of the African people because no foreigner can ever truly and genuinely interpret the African spirit which is unique and peculiar to Africans only. Some foreigners Asiatic or European who pose as African leaders must be categorically denounced and rejected.⁴⁷

The first task that faced Ashby Mda when he was elected ANCYL president in 1948 was to clarify the League’s position with regard to both communism and liberalism.⁴⁸ In calling for the development of African nationalism as a mobilising force sufficient to challenge the status quo, the League came to see both liberalism and communism as competing ideologies.

The ANCYL and the CPSA

The conflict between the ANCYL and the CPSA in the late 1940s, and its resolution in the early 1950s, has been widely discussed.⁴⁹ But that discussion has remained within the parameters set by youth leaguers themselves, who are seen to have started out as ardent nationalists opposing ‘Vendors of Foreign Method’ who ‘seek to impose on our struggle cut-and-dried formulae, which so far from clarifying the issues of our struggle, only serve to obscure the fact that we are oppressed not as a class, but as a people, as a Nation’.⁵⁰

These fervent young nationalists, the literature tells us, later mellowed into inclusive non-racialists and learned that non-racialism ‘was not very easy to accept at the beginning, because of immaturity, because of youthfulness’, according to ANCYL (and later ANC NEC) member Stanley Mabizela. ⁵¹While this seems true at the level of individuals, it is an inadequate analysis of the processes that took place. It also skips over the fact that it took youth leaguers nearly four decades to embrace the ANC’s non-racialism, in the sense that it is used here – a rather lengthy maturation.

The conflict operated on two main levels. Firstly, the Youth League reacted strongly to the CPSA’s repeated calls for a broad – non-racial – front of organisations opposed to segregation and apartheid. The broad front envisaged by the CPSA would ‘conduct mass struggles against race discrimination’ while underplaying exclusive nationalism by ‘develop[ing] class consciousness in the people’ and ‘forg[ing] unity in action between the oppressed peoples and between them and the European working class’.⁵²

Non-racialism and class struggle became almost synonymous, which did the former few favours, since it took on the ideological, racial and other baggage of class analysis, guaranteed to raise nationalist hackles. The Youth League rejected the class content of non-racialism as proposed by the CPSA, insisting that in its place ‘the national liberation of Africans will be achieved by Africans themselves’;⁵³ co-operation between the oppressed groups was acceptable only when the racial groups were organised multiracially – in ‘separate units’.⁵⁴

Secondly, as we have seen, the two organisations were competing for first prize – managing the changing ANC at a time of growing black political mobilisation. And as such, they had very similar programmes in key areas. The Youth League argued that black South Africans ‘suffer national oppression in common with thousands and millions of oppressed Colonial peoples in other parts of the world’.⁵⁵ But nationalism did not exclude socialism: it was a matter of priorities, according to Lembede, who argued ‘After national freedom, then socialism’.⁵⁶ In this he was joined by Ashby Mda, who argued that the interests of the mass of Africans could be protected only by ‘the establishment of a true democracy and a just social order’.⁵⁷

Mda defined ‘a just social order’ to include ‘full political control by the workers, peasants and intellectuals’ combined with ‘the liquidation of capitalism’ and ‘equal distribution of wealth’.⁵⁸ The Youth League did not officially endorse socialism, but Lembede argued that ‘Africans are naturally socialistic as illustrated in their social practices and customs’ and concluded that ‘the achievement of national freedom will therefore herald or usher in a new era, the era of African socialism’.⁵⁹

Nothing in this programme conflicted substantially with the CPSA analysis of the South African situation. Strategically, both organisations called for the radicalisation of the ANC leadership and a branch structure and mass base. Ideologically, the CPSA had accepted the primacy of the national question, following its adoption of the 1928 Comintern thesis, which 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’.⁶⁰

The concept of a socialist revolution happening in phases meant that the CPSA programme tallied with Lembede’s vision of national revolution followed by (African) socialism. Needless to say, in the heat of the battle neither side acknowledged (or even saw) these similarities.

The ANCYL, with a belief ‘in the unity of all Africans from the Mediterranean Sea in the North to the Indian and Atlantic Oceans in the South’, saw the struggle for equal rights as part of a pan-African anti-colonial movement.⁶¹ For the CPSA, the notion that black South Africans were colonially oppressed was at least implicit in the 1928 thesis. The idea of internal colonialism – to be the cornerstone of post-1953 SACP ideology – had been hinted at but not developed by the then CPSA member Eddie Roux in 1928:

[In South Africa] we have a white bourgeoisie and a white aristocracy of labour living in the same country together with an exploited colonial peasantry. Here the participation of the workers of the ruling class in the exploitation of the colonial workers is very apparent … the exploitation occurs within the confines of a single country.⁶²

Caught up as it was in the factionalism of the period between 1928 and 1935, and thereafter in the Popular Front politics of the anti-fascist period, the CPSA did not assess internal colonialism and its implications until the late 1940s and early 1950s. At that point it became intimately commingled with debates over non-racial/multiracial organisational forms.

This should not be taken to imply that there were no differences between the ANCYL and the CPSA; the point is to try to focus on the precise location and nature of their conflict, which appears to have been a mixture of ideological disputes and a power struggle. That conflict came to work itself out over a particular issue – the form that racial co-operation should take.

The politics of non-racialism

The CPSA’s switch from initial opposition to active participation in the Second World War, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, generated widespread suspicion (while confirming the suspicions of many) of the extent to which it was Moscow’s lapdog. The party expended much energy during the war popularising the Soviet Union, and was seen by the Youth League as having an agenda which stretched beyond national liberation, was informed by a ‘foreign ideology’ and used ‘methods and tactics which might have succeeded in other countries, like Europe’.⁶³

The issue on which the Youth League’s suspicion of the CPSA came to focus most directly was the form racial co-operation should take in organisational terms. The CPSA was concerned to avoid the emergence of a racially exclusive African nationalism of the type espoused by leading youth leaguers, which would obscure and retard the class struggle. In the 1940s the party stressed the need for the liberation struggle to be waged by a broad front of organisations led, not by the black bourgeoisie (which included most ANC and ANCYL leaders), but by ‘the class-conscious workers and peasants of the national group concerned’ so as to foster class-conscious racial unity.⁶⁴

While both organisations called for the development of the ANC, the CPSA supported the emergence of a broad front of organisations (including the ANC) representing Africans, Indians, coloureds and trade unions⁶⁵ in co-operation with which it could ‘… carry out its task exploring the class purposes of race oppression, creating a working class consciousness, breaking down national prejudices and providing leadership in the struggle for socialism’.⁶⁶

Ironically, those who were members of both the CPSA and the ANC enjoyed the support of more conservative and established members of the ANC national executive.⁶⁷ Both rejected the Youth League’s call for a complete boycott of elections, while more pragmatic ANC leaders supported CPSA calls for broad unity in opposition to racial discrimination. In 1947 this took shape as doctors Xuma, Naicker and Dadoo, representing the ANC, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) and the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC) respectively, signed the ‘Doctors’ Pact’, which accepted ‘… the urgency of cooperation between the non-European peoples and other democratic forces for the attainment of basic human rights …’.⁶⁸

In 1946 the NIC began to mobilise support for a passive resistance campaign against the ‘Ghetto Act’. The campaign lasted for two years and resulted in the imprisonment of more than 2 000 resisters of all races (though predominantly Indian). Rallies and public meetings began to be held under the joint auspices of the African and Indian congresses, as well as the (coloured) African People’s Organisation (APO).

The Youth League’s position on racial co-operation was complicated by the presence of both an exclusive approach, which rejected any such co-operation, and a more inclusive approach.⁶⁹ The leadership of the League was drawn increasingly from the latter category, comprising men who accepted greater racial co-operation while stressing the centrality of a strong African nationalist organisation.

In 1946 Lembede stated that co-operation among Africans, Indians and coloureds ‘can only take place between Africans as a single unit and other Non-European groups as separate units’⁷⁰ – multiracialism, in other words. The League endorsed the 1947 Pact, stating in its ‘Basic Policy’ that ‘… the National Organisations of the Africans, Indians and Coloureds may co-operate on common issues’.⁷¹

The Communist Party had endorsed a similar position in 1943, calling for separate organisations representing Africans, Indians and coloureds, co-ordinated at regional and national levels.⁷² With the rise of the Youth League and the growing influence of its nationalist programme, however, the CPSA came to support the idea of one mass organisation with which it would co-operate and, at the end of the decade, in its 1950 Central Committee Report, it called for the transformation of the existing separate national organisations:

… into a revolutionary party of workers, peasants, intellectuals and petty bourgeoisie, linked together in a firm organisation … guided by a definite programme of struggle against all forms of racial discrimination in alliance with the class-conscious European workers and intellectuals.⁷³

Organisational non-racialism, in other words; and with special room for white left-wing intellectuals.

The language of the report was imprecise and unclear. For the Youth League, however, it implied the creation of a non-racial organisation, pursuing class struggle, with, in effect, strong influence exerted by white communists – and this immediately cemented the League’s rejection of the CPSA approach to the integration of structures. This mix of issues meant that the question of racial co-operation – that is, the form racial co-operation should take – was a key issue of contention between the two organisations.

The conflict spilled into the open in relation to participation in the 1948 People’s Assembly for Votes for All, when the Transvaal branches of the ANC, CPSA, APO and TIC proposed calling a non-racial assembly to highlight the franchise issue on the eve of the (white) general election. The assembly soon became caught up in the ANCYL–CPSA conflict, with youth leaguers on the ANC’s Transvaal Executive declaring themselves willing to participate in the assembly only if the organising committee was restricted to representatives of the ANC, TIC and APO – in other words, accepting cooperation between national organisations, but not with the CPSA.

Youth League agitation ensured that the ANC refused to participate officially in the assembly. Transvaal ANC President C S Ramohanoe later faced a motion of no confidence for issuing a statement in support of the assembly.⁷⁴ The point at issue was not mere anti-communism, argued law student Nelson Mandela of the Transvaal ANC Executive (and a leading Youth League member) in The Guardian, but that

… the working committee of the People’s Assembly had invited the African National Congress to send delegates to the Assembly. The A. N. C. Executive was not in opposition to the general aims of the People’s Assembly, but felt that it was being summoned in an incorrect manner, in that the established national organisations were being by-passed … The organisers of the People’s Assembly had departed from … agreed methods and there were suspicions that a permanent ‘unity movement’ was being formed.⁷⁵

The clash in 1948 between the ANCYL and the CPSA is illustrative in two respects. The dispute over the assembly highlighted the way in which ideological differences were being fought out over the issue of non-racialism – not simply on the basis of Youth League racism or exclusivity, as conventional wisdom has it, but because moves towards non-racialism were seen to be part of an ideology which stressed class above race, and would retard the emergence of a strong African National(ist) Congress. (It is not disputed that the League included anti-white and anti-communist elements.)

Secondly, the dispute reflected the growing influence of the ANCYL within the ANC. The League had initially set itself a three- to five-year programme to change Congress,⁷⁶ but in the next four years it made few moves towards developing a mass base or radicalising its methods of opposition. The political space was occupied by others – the squatter movement was being organised by Mpanza into the Sofasonke Party, which contested Advisory Board elections; the ADP gained representation on the Native Representative Council with the election of Paul Mosaka; and the CPSA extended its township base. Sensing the need for action and the competition it faced, the League adopted a more assertive tone in 1948:

From the very outset, the Congress Youth League set itself, inter alia, the historic task of imparting dynamic substance and matter to the organisational form of the A.N.C. This took the form of a forthright exposition of the National Liberatory outlook – African Nationalism – which the Youth League seeks to impose on the Mother Body.⁷⁷

In a private letter written in 1948 Mda acknowledged that a clash between the ANC and the Youth League was ‘inevitable’ because ‘… the Congress Senior leadership reflects the dying order of pseudo-liberalism and conservatism, of appeasement and compromises’.⁷⁸

The rise of the Youth League

In order to implement its programme successfully the League had to transform the ANC, and to do so it had to be in a position from which it could determine Congress policy. It also had to squeeze out any other organisation or group seeking to do the same thing. In the first instance this entailed building up its own ranks, and branches were established in Durban, Cape Town and at Fort Hare, although the majority of youth leaguers remained in the Transvaal. League members also began to move into ANC provincial structures.

It was also necessary to counter competing ideologies that sought to influence the development of the ANC – including those of (white) liberals and (white) communists. As stated above the League turned on white liberals such as the Ballingers, Edgar Brookes and members of the Institute of Race Relations who had influence over some leading Congress personalities. Hostility towards the liberals was exacerbated by disputes in 1946 over the adjournment of the Native Representative Council (NRC) and the League’s call for the boycott of all ‘Native Representation’ elections. The process of weaning Congress from the influence of white liberals was largely completed by 1947.

Finally, if the Youth League were to direct a militant movement for national liberation under the aegis of the ANC, competing organisations (as well as ideologies) had to be isolated. The AAC remained a small organisation, primarily based in the Eastern Cape and increasingly dominated by the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) to which it had affiliated, while the ADP had begun to collapse by 1947. Both were accused of causing ‘rift[s] in the national unity front at this critical moment’ with the effect of ‘invit[ing] more oppression for Africans’.⁷⁹ Put simply, anyone who sought to mobilise Africans was attacked, including the CPSA, which had largely set the pace in township organisation in the 1940s, and which proposed to ‘draw in thousands of members of each racial and national group, provide them with a Socialist education, and organise them for work among their own people …’.⁸⁰

Paradoxically, however, as the power and influence of the ANCYL grew within the ANC in the late 1940s, older ANC leaders revealed a willingness to work with communists. The League failed in its attempts in 1945 and 1947 to have all CPSA members removed from Congress, with communists and the older ANC leaders jointly outvoting its call for a boycott of all elections.⁸¹ Nonetheless, youth leaguers occupied increasingly important positions within the provincial structures of the ANC and, by 1948, were sufficiently entrenched to prevent the organisation from participating in the People’s Assembly.

By 1949 the League was powerful enough to insist that any candidate for the post of President-General of the ANC must endorse the Programme of Action. At the annual conference of the ANC in 1949 the League succeeded in ousting Xuma from the post and securing the election of Dr James Moroka, while ANCYL members including Ashby Mda, V V T Mbobo, Dr J L Z Njongwe, Godfrey Pitje, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu were elected to the National Executive Committee (with Sisulu in the important post of Secretary-General). Two years later youth leaguers were able to remove A W G Champion as President of the ANC in Natal, securing in his place the election of Albert Luthuli, later to be elected ANC President-General and to become Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

While the influence of the Youth League within the ANC grew, the fortunes of the CPSA were in decline. After the 1946 African miners’ strike the CPSA Executive Committee was tried for sedition by the once liberal-seeming Smuts government, in a process that dragged on from 1946 to 1948. White wartime support for the CPSA disappeared as the Cold War gathered force, and organisations such as the Springbok Legion, Friends of the Soviet Union and the Left Book Club either withered or closed, along with their wartime ability to reach a large white audience.

The Trades and Labour Council was divided as the Nationalist Party (NP) made a serious bid for white working-class support. Attacks on the CPSA by both the United Party and NP governments culminated in the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, which outlawed the CPSA and also any doctrine ‘which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union’.⁸²

The Communist Party and national liberation

The CPSA in the late 1940s revealed differing approaches to the ‘national question’ and the national liberation movements in South Africa. Reduced to their simplest form these differences revolved around the emphasis given to class struggle in relation to the national struggle waged by the ANC and SAIC. To a perhaps surprising degree the differences took a regional form, with the party’s Cape region differing from those in Natal and the Transvaal.⁸³ Finally, race complicated all these differences. As Ben Turok has noted, the Communist Party in Cape Town was ‘probably the only fully non-racial organisation in the country at the time’ – but ‘it was apparent that, in Cape Town, whites played a disproportionately dominant role in the movement, to a degree not seen elsewhere, causing some resentment …’.⁸⁴