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COLIN BUNDY

GOVAN MBEKI: INTELLECTUAL ACTIVIST

The diningroom table in Govan’s parents’ home was beautifully carpentered: fully extended, with all its leaves in, it could seat sixteen. Even in its more compact form for everyday use, the table would have been surrounded by a good number of chairs. Govan was the youngest of eight children: he had three half-sisters by his father’s first marriage, while his own mother bore three daughters and two sons. He was born on 8 July 1910, in Mpukane, a ]straggling village in Nqamakwe district in that portion of the southern Transkei known as Fingoland. His parents named him Govan Archibald Mvunyelwe (“he for whom people sing”) Mbeki.

The furniture – like the handsome stone-built house which it occupied – was probably built by students from Blythswood mission school in nearby Nqamakwe, the seat of the magistracy. Pigs and poultry were in pens around the house; at a little distance was his father’s farmland, about sixteen morgen, held under Glen Grey title and all fenced. Govan’s father, Fkelewu Mbeki, owned a quantity of livestock: cattle, horses, sheep and goats. Before East London and Umtata were linked by rail, Fkelewu Mbeki had run a wagon transport services between Kingwilliamstown and the Transkei. He had also earned a modest salary from the government of the Cape Colony when he served as a headman.

Furniture, home, farm and livelihood: in every respect, Govan was born into a typically “progressive” or modernising peasant family characteristic of the region at the turn of the century. Like most other members of this modest elite, his parents were Christians. His mother was the daughter of a Methodist evangelist; Govan is not sure when his father was converted, “but the missionaries evidently had great influence on him”.1 Govan himself was named after one of the most famous missionary educators of the Eastern Cape, William Govan, a Presbyterian minister and principal of Lovedale College from its inception in 1841 until 1870. (An indication of William Govan’s standing amongst African Christians in the Eastern Cape and Transkei is that Govan – named 35 years after the Scot had died – had among his acquaintances two other similarly baptised.)

Fkelewu was a devout Methodist, a teetotaller who would say grace even before drinking a glass of water. Did anything of the family ambience rub off on Govan, who left the church when still a student? Certainly, those who worked with him politically between the 1940s and early 1960s speak about his self-discipline, his dedication to the task in hand, and a certain austerity in his lifestyle. A further defining characteristic of the stratum into which he was born was the premium placed upon education. Govan’s own family exemplified this. Most of his sisters became teachers; his brother also trained initially as a teacher before becoming a demonstrator at the Tsolo school of agriculture.

Govan himself was not only encouraged in his schooling, but also excelled in it, rapidly ascending the rungs of the best education available to a bright young Transkeian of his generation. He began at the local Methodist primary school, a church hall given over on weekdays to this use. In a single large room, six classes were conducted simultaneously: the Sub A pupils chanting out their alphabet while older children scratched their sums on slates – and looking back, Govan wonders with amusement how he learnt anything. He also remembers how he enjoyed school and “never played truant”. In his teens, he left Nqamakwe for boarding school at Healdtown, near Fort Beaufort, a leading Methodist institution. At Healdtown he was introduced to Latin – which he loved, later studying it for two years at university – and also studied history, physical science, biology, and English.

From Healdtown, Govan was awarded a Bunga (United Transkeian Territories General Council) scholarship to Fort Hare,2 where he first completed his Senior Certificate and then enrolled as an undergraduate. He was at Fort Hare from 1932 to 1937 – and these years constituted a formative period of his life, intellectually and politically. (His student life was not all politics. Govan was an accomplished footballer and an enthusiastic ballroom dancer. Years later, held in solitary confinement in Port Elizabeth’s North End Prison, Govan exercised and amused himself by twirling through the remembered steps on the impromptu dance-floor of his tiny cell.)

There had been glimpses of organised politics before 1933 – Govan remembers attending an ANC meeting in the Transkei when he was in his teens, held by an African minister. He also acted at some point in the late 1920s as an interpreter for a cousin, Robert Mbeki, who was a member of the ICU (Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union). The ICU, which grew mightily in rural areas between 1926 and 1928 to become the first mass organisation of black South Africans, was briefly active in the southern Transkei. (Thomas Mbeki, a prominent Transvaal ICU leader, was not related to Govan’s family.) But Fort Hare, when he arrived, was not yet the political hothouse that it became in the 1940s: he cannot recall “any real political work” there in 1932.

In the winter of 1933 there took place an encounter which was a decisive political turning-point in his life. Eddie Roux, a member of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), and his bride Win embarked on “a sort of busman’s honeymoon”. They had recently begun producing a monthly magazine, Indlela Yenkululeko – The Road to Freedom – which they sent to various educational centres “and especially to students at Fort Hare”. Now, with camping gear and a donkey, they tramped through the Ciskei. When they reached Alice they camped by the Tyhume River – and from this base they went to hold outdoor meetings at Fort Hare. The students (recounted the Rouxs) “told us of their life in college and of how they were disciplined and treated at schoolboys. We told them of the movement and of Indlela Yenkululeko.3 Among those students was a rapt Govan Mbeki, immediately attracted by the clarity and radicalism of what he heard. He was most impressed by Roux, and began an association that was to last until the 1950s, long after the older man had broken with Marxism and the Party.

There were other influences, too, at Fort Hare that shaped Govan’s politics. He majored in political science and psychology; and his political science lecturer invited Max Yergan to lecture on fascism and communism. Yergan was a black American who served as a representative of the American Young Men’s Christian Association between 1921 and 1936. Politically, he moved from evangelicism to left-wing activism and then (during the Cold War) to a right-wing anti-communism. In 1934, after an absence during which he had visited the USSR, Yergan returned to Fort Hare. He drew on this experience to preach a riveting sermon (after which he was debarred from the pulpit at Fort Hare!) on the text “I have come that ye may have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). Govan became “very close” to him, visited his home, and was introduced by Yergan to Marxist literature in the shape of the Little Lenin Library.

In 1935 and 1936, student politics at Fort Hare was galvanised by the fascist invasion of Ethiopia, by the Hertzog Bills and the 1936 Native Land and Trust Act, and by the calling of the All-African Convention in December 1935. Govan spent each holiday during these years in Johannesburg, where he lodged with one of his half-sisters. There he was drawn further into political discussions and reading, and encountered for the first time the realities of poverty and police repression in a black township. In 1935 he joined the ANC. He was also influenced by socialist ideas, and became personally close to Edwin Mofutsanyana, a leading African member of the CPSA (Communist Party of South Africa). (Thabo, Govan’s oldest son, was named after Mofutsanyana.) Govan did not, however, join the Party: in fact, he did not become a member until much later, when the banned CPSA regrouped underground in 1953 as the SACP. Govan explains that, while sympathetic to the aims of the Party and friendly with individual members, he differed with them as to where the primary focus of their organisational efforts should be:

My view was, look, if we want to make an impact on the government let us organise around labour. And we cannot organise on the mines. We must go and organise in the rural areas . . . That was my approach. Let’s go and organise in the Transkei, let’s go and organise in Zululand so that when they come to Joburg they are already reached – we are able to guide them to take certain actions.

During his vacations in the Fort Hare years, Govan Mbeki worked in a branch of the Central News Agency, in Johannesburg. He set about trying to organise his co-workers there into a trade union – and was promptly fired by the Irish manager of the branch. This was his first dismissal on political grounds. A series of such sackings, mainly from teaching posts, peppered his employment history.

He graduated from Fort Hare in 1937. Almost immediately the three main strands from which his working life was woven became visible. These were teaching, journalism, and political organisations. The first teaching appointment was at Taylor Street Secondary School in Durban, and from there Govan moved to teach at Adams College, near Amanzimtoti, under Edgar Brookes. While at Adams, in 1938, he received a telegram from Clarkebury Institution – a teachers’ training college in the Transkei – and he jumped at the chance to live and work there. In addition to teaching educational psychology and economics at Clarkebury, Govan also became increasingly politically active – especially in meetings of the Transkeian African Voters’ Association. Towards the end of 1939, he was dismissed from Clarkebury.

By then, he had just published Transkei in the Making, a book he had drafted as a series of articles in 1937. Dedicated “To the youth of my race”, it was written partly as a rebuttal of a 1933 booklet, Transkei Enquiry, written by the Quaker and liberal, Howard Pim. Mbeki criticised the form of local government – indirect rule – operating in the Transkei, and examined economic conditions in the reserve. Introducing themes which his later writings would revisit and amplify, he identified the way in which migrant labour and peasant farming on tiny plots generated rural poverty so that the majority of the territory’s population were “wallowing in a permanent slough of debt”. Although the argument is couched for the most part in measured tones, there is a decidedly radical edge to a passage warning against cattle culling imposed from above:

It should really be an unfortunate state of affairs if the rigours and vices of a capitalist society will be deliberately imported into the African territories – any attempt to destroy the people’s cattle is no less than a declaration of that most iniquitous system which enables a chosen few to be possessors of all the means of production in the Transkei to the entire exclusion of the masses . . .4

He was now approached by the African printers of Transkei in the Making, who invited him to edit a newspaper that they were launching in the Transkei, the Territorial Magazine. While he was still editor, the publication was renamed Inkundla ya Bantu, a more overtly political newspaper. In 1943 or 1944, Inkundla fell into financial difficulties, and a new board decided that Govan’s opinions were too radical, and replaced him as editor. Another important journalistic connection was his appointment in 1940 as one of the directors of the Guardian, a left-wing weekly close to the Communist Party.

Another major event in Govan’s life during these years was his marriage. He first met Epainette Moerane in Durban when they both taught at the Taylor Street School. She came from an essentially similar background to his own. Her parents, Sotho-speakers, lived in Mount Fletcher district near the border between Lesotho and the Transkei. Her father was a lay preacher and a prosperous peasant farmer. Her parents saw to it that Epainette and her six siblings received the best available education. All three of her brothers were university graduates; she had obtained the Cape Senior Certificate. She remembers Govan as an unostentatious, rather lonely young man: “particular about how he dresses, particular about how he speaks”.5

When they spoke together, it was frequently about politics. Together, they moved in circles close to the Communist Party in Durban: Epainette had been impressed initially by Betty du Toit, an Afrikaner woman and Party member, who came to Natal to organise workers in the sugar industry. She became a member of the Party in the late 1930s – and must have been one of only a handful of African women in its entire membership. When Govan departed Natal for Clarkebury, she spent a year in the Orange Free State, and the pair saw each other during school holidays. They married in January 1940 – and had four children (Linda, Thabo, Moeletsi and Jama) between 1941 and 1948.

They lived in Idutywa district, a few kilometres south of the town of the same name. Govan’s journalism did not bring much money into the home, and they supplemented this income in various ways: they ran some livestock; Epainette baked scones and cakes for a coffee shop; and, especially after Govan left Inkundla, they relied upon the small shop run from their home. This venture sprang initially from a political enthusiasm of Govan’s: an interest in cooperatives. He had read about them while studying privately for his B.Comm., and also read Father Bernard Huss’s pamphlets urging cooperative self-help. In 1946 Govan published a booklet, Let’s Do It Together, in a series edited by Eddie Roux. He identified existing collective practices amongst African peasants, in ploughing land or building huts, and argued that greater cooperation could lessen dependence on white traders for credit. The cooperative aspect of the store dwindled as the other partners fell away, and it became a Mbeki family concern.

The 1940s have won considerable scholarly attention for their watershed quality in the history of organised black resistance in South Africa: Tom Lodge, in particular, has chronicled the reorganisation of the ANC under Dr Xuma and the radicalising influence of the Youth League; the growth of war-time trade unionism amongst black workers; the volcanic underclass pressures exerted by township residents and squatters; the exemplary effect of campaigns against the pass laws and against the Pegging Act; the emergence of new left-wing political groupings like the Non-European Unity Movement – and so on. In all these elements, this phenomenon is almost an urban one. There is another, parallel history that has not yet been adequately researched or written: an account of how politics in rural areas – the reserves in particular – was also radicalised.

The process was patchy and uneven. Peasant politics, in South Africa as elsewhere, tends to be parochial, atomised and defensive: rural producers are conscious of their weakness relative to other classes and to the state. But during the 1940s, in a number of areas, the scale and intensity of rural resistance broadened significantly. The Transkei was one such area; and Govan Mbeki was not only caught up in the process, but also helped shape it.

He became increasingly active in Transkeian politics, on a number of fronts. He was elected secretary of the Transkeian African Voters’ Association in 1941; served for a session in the Bunga as councillor for Idutywa; and in 1943 was a founder member of the Transkeian Organised Bodies. The TOB linked a number of disparate organisations: Vigiliance Association, the Chiefs’ and People’s Association, welfare societies, women’s groupings, and so on. It also exemplified the changing tone and content of politics in the Transkei. It shifted from an emphasis upon specific reforms in favour of educated Transkeians to distinctly tougher and more radical public utterances. At its 1946 conference, the TOB called for “full citizenship rights for all the people”; supported a cash collection for victims of the miners’ strike on the Witwatersrand; and pledged its support for a boycott of the Natives Representative Council.

Govan corresponded with the ANC head office in Johannesburg a number of times during this decade: requesting Xuma’s help in launching Congress in the Transkei; suggesting that the ANC take over Inkundla as an official publication; urging that the national movement should provide a clear lead to its potential followers in the reserves. In 1941 he described the Transkei as “to be frank, politically in midnight slumber”; but due in no small measure to his own efforts, an awakening of sorts occurred. A letter from Mbeki to Xuma in September 1946 is vibrant with optimism. He described fund-raising efforts for the Anti-Pass Campaign and added, “what a joy it is to be alive in these days when history is being made all around us.” A few months later he wrote again, enquiring what plans were being developed by the ANC “to clamp down on Advisory Boards, Councils, and individual chiefs?” His concern went beyond the details:

Writing a letter like this I feel I must be frank. Our fears here are that we may work up the people only to find that the rest of the country does not attach much significance to its resolutions. Country people have a way of being honest. We have already lost face in the Anti-Pass Campaign which was just dropped when we were working up the people, and that was immediately seized on by the gradualists as one of these “paper fires” which do not last . . .6

It must have been a source of frustration that, for all his clear-headed urgings, there was negligible response on the part of the urban leadership of the ANC.

In 1953, Govan took up another teaching post – in Ladysmith, Natal. Once again, he was dismissed for political activities, including his opposition to the Bantu Education Act and his efforts at organisation amongst local coal-miners. While he was still in Ladysmith, he was approached by Fred Carneson and Ivan Schermbrucker in 1954 with the suggestion that he move to Port Elizabeth as local editor and office manager of the newspaper New Age.7 He did so – and thus commenced a decade of intensive, unremitting political activism.

Time and again, when interviewing Govan Mbeki about his years in Port Elizabeth, one is struck by how hard he drove himself. In the first place he was a full-time journalist, running the New Age office, attending meetings and fund-raising events and then filing news stories through to the head office in Cape Town. He also wrote more analytical and theoretical pieces for the left-wing periodicals Liberation and Fighting Talk. In particular, he wrote a major series on the Transkei (which was subsequently incorporated into his best-known book, The Peasants’ Revolt) for Liberation, then edited by Michael Harmel. As these articles had not been commissioned, Govan worked on them in what spare time he had: “On Sundays I would come and write what I could – in the afternoon. Sunday after Sunday. Sunday after Sunday.”

Secondly, he was deeply involved in organisational politics in Port Elizabeth. The M-Plan, proposed by Nelson Mandela in response to the state’s crackdown after the 1952 Defiance Campaign, sought to equip the ANC to run at least some of its activities beyond surveillance, to establish certain underground structures and practices. The only urban area in which real progress was made towards underground politics before the ANC was banned was Port Elizabeth. From 1953 to 1956, meetings of more than ten Africans were banned in New Brighton (the municipal “location”) – and so the ANC held its meetings in Korsten and elsewhere. But in 1956, the ban was extended to the entire magisterial district of Port Elizabeth: “Now it was during this time, 1956 to 1960,” recalls Govan, “that we perfected methods of working underground.” Almost all organisation work was done at night. A task dear to Govan’s own heart was political education: with ANC membership in Port Elizabeth growing rapidly, he set up scores and scores of study groups. He also wrote, cyclostyled and distributed a booklet of about fifty pages, in Xhosa, outlining the aims and politics of the movement.

Thirdly, his urban base did not deflect Govan from his long-standing involvement in rural politics. The Port Elizabeth ANC established links with smaller branches in Ciskei villages like Peddie and Middledrift, particularly through organising in migrant hostels. Govan also maintained an active interest in the Transkei, hammering away in New Age against the Bantu Authorities system – precursor to Bantustan “independence”. In 1960 (after he had been detained during the State of Emergency) Govan received an invitation to visit Pondoland. A militant popular protest movement had developed there against chiefs who supported the Bantu Authorities, and the young ANC activist Anderson Ganyile now sought Govan’s assistance. To reach Bizana meant slipping through a heavy police presence in Pondoland; and Govan achieved this disguised as a chauffeur, driving the car of a white Communist Party member from Uitenhage. Contact between the ANC and the Mpondo resisters was maintained through subsequent meetings in Durban.

Fourthly, the organisational abilities and intellectual energies displayed by Mbeki during this period won recognition, and he became increasingly involved in ANC and Communist Party leadership at national level. Much of this had to be behind the scenes, as his movements were restricted by banning orders. By the time of Sharpeville, the banning of the ANC and the State of Emergency, the balance of his activities had already swung from journalism towards organisation. From April 1960 to June 1963, this pattern of political activism in the face of state harassment intensified. He was detained for five months during the Emergency; arrested in 1961 on charges of furthering the aims of a banned organisation; arrested again in 1962 under the Explosives Act; and served on his acquittal with an order of house arrest.

During this same period he was on the National Executive Committee of the ANC (before the banning) and on the National Action Committee (its underground leadership structure after the banning); he was directly involved in the decision to turn to armed struggle and a founder member of High Command of Umkhonto we Sizwe. He recruited and ran a sabotage group in Port Elizabeth, travelled to Durban for meetings with the Mpondo rebels, and – after being served with a house arrest order – he went fully underground. Underground, but still working prodigiously. He prepared scripts, with Ruth First, for broadcasting on Radio Freedom; worked on the manuscript of The Peasants’ Revolt; served as treasurer and secretary for the underground organs; maintained contact with MK units inside and outside the Transvaal; and attended meeting after meeting. Talking about three months, Govan chuckled and said emphatically, “I was very fully occupied.” Underground, active – and living on the farm Lilliesleaf, in Rivonia.

Govan spent some months on the farm, before moving early in July 1963 with the rest of the political leadership to another property that had been acquired. A meeting was called, and it was decided “all right, let this be the very, very last meeting that takes place at Rivonia”. So, on Thursday, 11 July 1963, Govan and the others had actually returned to Lilliesleaf only shortly before a dry-cleaner’s van entered the driveway. It was full of armed Special Branch policemen. Govan, followed by Sisulu and Kathrada, jumped out of a back window but had not moved far when the command rang out: “Stop – or we shoot.” Govan was in the clothes he had used while living on the farm: old overalls and a woollen balaclava, so as to resemble a labourer. A photograph of him with the balaclava rolled up as a cap – reproduced many times since then – was taken by the police.

The arrest at gunpoint brought an abrupt end to one phase of a remarkable political career. As a Fort Hare student, he had become a member of the ANC and a student of Marxism. Thirty years later, he was one of the most influential leaders of the underground structures of the ANC and the Communist Party. Throughout that period, Govan Mbeki’s political theory and practice were inseparably fused. The dedicated organiser and activist was also a versatile intellectual – commentator, analyst, reporter and historian. More, perhaps, than any other African politician of his generation he experienced and reflected the tensions and complexities of both rural and urban life. He worked in Johannesburg, Durban and Port Elizabeth but also devoted enormous energies to the Transkei and rural Eastern Cape. As a theorist, he occupied a distinctive place on the South African left for his insistence on the potential importance of rural mobilisation and struggle. As a practising politician, he contributed mightily to the urban organisation that made Port Elizabeth a rock-solid centre of ANC support.

Hilda Bernstein provides this pen portrait of Govan during the Rivonia trial:

Govan Mbeki admits to being a member of the National High Command of Umkhonto; to membership of the African National Congress and the Communist Party. Perhaps “admits” is not the word; rather he declares proudly that he has played a substantial role in these organisations.

“As you have answered in the affirmative to questions or actions concerning all four counts against you, why did you not plead guilty to the four counts?”

“Firstly, I felt I should come and explain under oath some of the reasons that led me to join these organisations. There was a sense of moral duty attached to it. Secondly, for the simple reason that to plead guilty would to my mind indicate a sense of moral guilt. I do not accept there is moral guilt attached to my actions.”

. . . Something in Govan’s quiet and courteous way of speaking arouses in Yutar [the state prosecutor] a greater antagonism than he has yet displayed to the accused . . . He returns again and again to questions of identities, places, names, which Govan refuses to answer.

Although Govan’s admissions make it unnecessary for Yutar to press his cross-examination of Govan – there is no question of the verdict in this case – he continues to question him for three more days, interspersing questions about documents with the questions that seek information. He is like an angry fly hitting himself again and again against a pane of glass; because the glass is transparent he believes he only has to hit hard enough and he will reach the other side. Govan steadfastly refuses to answer any question which might implicate anyone else.8

Life sentences for eight of the nine accused were handed down in the Pretoria Supreme Court on 12 June 1964. As a huge crowd filled Church Square with the strains of “Nkosi Sikelele”, the police van left the court behind its convoy of cars and motorcycles. That night, apart from Denis Goldberg (held in the whites-only Pretoria Central Prison), the men of Rivonia were flown to Cape Town. The next morning the Dakota aeroplane crossed the wintry waters of Table Bay to the flat, windswept island that was to house them for so many years. It was also to become their “university”, the site of an extraordinary programme of political education. It is a portion of that programme which makes up the body of this book.

POLITICAL EDUCATION ON THE ISLAND

Michael Dingake (an ANC operative jailed from 1966 to 1981) published an account in 1987 of his years on the Island. The prison was – he suggested – “a laboratory of a major political experiment”: here, “the political fibre of the oppressed” was to be tested. And, despite the controls available to the experimenters (over diet, mail, study rights, and punishment) the attempts to destroy that fibre failed.9 Instead, the ANC re-established itself as a political organisation with identifiable leadership, underground structures, ingenious communication channels, and committees with a wide range of responsibilities. Committee structures existed for day-to-day administration amongst the political prisoners on the Island, for organisational discipline, for developing a programme of study, for devising leisure activities – and more. The full story of how this “complete underground organisational machinery” (as Mbeki refers to it) was set up on Robben Island awaits its own history.

Two educational initiatives were mounted on the Island: academic education and political education. Govan Mbeki speaks proudly of the attention given to academic study on the Island:

We took people from the lowest level, who came to the Island illiterate, and they had to be taught. I remember one group I had – I started with them when they were illiterate – started them up. And by the time they left Robben Island they were able to write letters home – they didn’t require anybody to write letters for them, and to address their envelopes. And they spoke English. And, so we did that. Most people when they came to Robben Island were at about the JC [Standard 8] level, and by the time they left they were doing degrees and things like that. Take one case, you had a special case like Eddie Daniels. Now Eddie Daniels when he came to Robben Island was starved of education. But when he left Robben Island he had a B.A. and a B.Comm.

On another occasion he spoke again about the academic educational programme.

We encouraged people to study. It is good for them. It is good for our discipline too. It is good for them to improve their qualifications. It is also good for their parents. Like before I was released, there was a young chap from UWC [the University of the Western Cape], Leonard. We asked for a report from the section: “Who are studying of the new chaps? Who are studying and what are they doing?” So we are given the report and it shows that Leonard is not studying. So we make an enquiry why is Leonard not studying. Leonard replies, saying, “Look, here’s Comrade Mteto in this section” (it was section B), “here’s Comrade Mteto, he has no degree and yet he is up and up his politics and he has given us guidance here. Why should I bother? I want to concentrate on political studies.” So we replied, “Leonard, when your parents took you to the UWC they expected you to come out of there with a degree for your good and for their own good, and their satisfaction as parents – and now that you are here, the organisation stands in loco parentis! You’ve got to study!”10

But as well as encouraging educational activities from literacy skills to postgraduate degrees, the ANC leadership on the Island also devised a programme of political education. A good deal of less formalised political education took place in earlier years, but it was mainly after 1979 and especially in the early 1980s that a full-blown course of studies was devised, material prepared and circulated, and study groups set up. The project was both more necessary and more feasible at this time.

The necessity arose from the influx of political prisoners in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the beginning of the eighties, explains Mbeki,

a new crop of very young comrades started streaming into the Island. Most of them were MK cadres, but also among them were BCM [Black Consciousness Movement] members whose leadership stated that they did no time “for the dusty manuscript of Marx and Engels”.

It did not take long to establish the fact that as enthusiastic as the young ANC cadres were about the national democratic revolution, they were not well informed about the history of ANC, nor were they clear about its politics and how they differed from those of the Communist Party.11

These circumstances had two implications for the senior ANC prisoners. Firstly, they wanted to equip their own members with an adequate knowledge of their own history and struggle; secondly, in doing so they would also be able to counter the claims of rival groups on the Island, particularly the Pan-Africanist Congress.

Several factors made it possible to implement political education on the desired scale by the end of the seventies. A major barrier to a successful programme was the difficulty of developing communication channels between the various sections. (When the Rivonia trialists arrived on Robben Island in 1964, they were housed in an antique building originally used as a prison by Cape colonial government, and segregated from other political prisoners in the “zinc tronk” – a cluster of buildings constructed of wood and corrugated iron. Prisoners worked on the Island to quarry the stone which went into the construction of the new maximum security wings, divided into seven sections, named “A” to “G”. High walls were erected between the sections, so that inmates of one could not even see those of another.) Gradually, the prisoners devised ways of breaching their isolation and making effective contact between the sections.

One man is credited, in particular, with defeating the system of isolation between the sections. “The transfer of the late Joe Gqabi from the main section to the B section where the Rivonia group was isolated” (Govan Mbeki narrates) “was one of those inadvertent mistakes the jail authorities committed.”12 Gqabi belonged to the first group of Umkhonto we Sizwe cadres sent out of the country for training as military commanders, and his instruction had included covert communication methods. “He was absolutely good, very good, at it!” recalls Mbeki. Joe Gqabi immediately set about devising all sorts of communication channels – and with this breakthrough, it became possible to prepare material and to smuggle it from one section to another.

Moreover, if we laid our hands on any book, however thick, it was copied out and distributed to our membership throughout the various sections. On occasion, newspapers and even small portable transistor radios fell into our hands, and the information derived therefrom was immediately written out and despatched to all the sections. Sometimes during searches that took us by surprise, “banks” of the material were confiscated from the prisoners, and sometimes the authorities acting on information dug it up from the yard. But whatever losses we incurred in one section were made up for by the materials that were kept in “banks” in other sections.13

The political prisoners fought year after year to improve conditions on the Island; and as the years passed these struggles helped to win small privileges. An important policy change that directly benefited the political education programme took place in 1980, when access to newspapers became regular (although they were still often subject to censorship and arrived mutilated by the warders’ scissors). The study programme through the University of South Africa also provided both content and cover for political education. Govan Mbeki drew directly for several of the essays in this book upon material gathered towards his courses in business economics, economics Honours and a Master’s degree in economics. The UNISA assignment pads also housed those portions of the political education programme that Govan brought with him when he left the Island in 1987.

The perceived need for an enhanced programme of political education thus intersected with factors making it possible. Govan and others set about drawing up a two-part syllabus. The first part, called Syllabus A, was a history of the ANC. It was far from perfunctory. It commenced in the mid-nineteenth century, with the Wars of Dispossession, and provided an analysis of the social context from which the educated proto-nationalists emerged, who in 1912 were to become the founders of the organisation. It dealt with the subsequent history of the ANC, decade by decade, with particular attention devoted to a study of the Freedom Charter. It also examined closely the “reasons which decided the organisation to embark on the armed struggle” and “showed the relationship between the ANC and the SACP, devoting considerable attention to the distinction between the two organisations – the character of the alliance between the two”.14 Mbeki estimates that it took about three years of study to work thoroughly through Syllabus A.

Syllabus B was essentially a materialist history of the development of human society. It outlined the writings of Marx and Engels, especially with reference to the rise of capitalism, and introduced concepts of class struggle and socialism. In addition to these two syllabuses, other documents were also prepared for the political education programme: essays were commissioned from individuals or groups of prisoners on specific topics and topical issues.

Political education material was circulated and discussed in two main ways: through the clandestine structures that had been set up in all the sections, and during work in the quarries and elsewhere. Small groups of three to five people conducted classes: “As the prisoners would say, they had a greater number of eyes and ears than the jail authorities.”15 In producing the material, it was essential that it could be hidden, copied and passed on. (In one of the essays Govan notes the need to keep it “within a tolerable length and transportable proportions”!) These essays were written on the thinnest paper that could be found, in the smallest possible script. Govan’s eyesight did not permit him to compress his own handwriting, so many of his essays were dictated to “scribes”. Terror Lekota, he recalls approvingly, “could write so small the chaps would want magnifying glasses!” As material circulated from one section to another, it would be copied and stored.

The writings in this book are only a sampling of the material written by ANC historians and theorists. They are not even a complete collection of Govan’s own contributions, but are the ones he was able to preserve. They are discussed briefly in the final section of this Introduction.

THE ROBBEN ISLAND WRITINGS

South Africa has jailed so many gifted men and women that there already exists a sizeable body of prison writing. Bosman’s sardonic Cold Stone Jug begins the genre – and alongside it one might shelve Breytenbach’s True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. Ruth First’s 117 Days and Albie Sachs’s Jail Diary both describe detention without trial – and they are also linked by the terrible bombings which took life and limb from these opponents of injustice. Prison memories by Indres Naidoo, Moses Dlamini and Michael Dingake recreated the cell blocks and rocks quarries of Robben Island. Hugh Lewin and Tim Jenkins took readers into (and in the latter case out of!) Pretoria Central. So did the taut verse of Jeremy Cronin’s Inside. Helen Joseph (treason trial and house arrest) and Frances Baard (prison and banishment) described their lives in other parts of the apartheid gulag. Drum magazine’s photo-essay on life in the Johannesburg Fort and the Rand Daily Mail’s publication of Harold Strachan’s revelations (for which he was promptly re-imprisoned) are journalistic classics.

The essays of Govan Mbeki which comprise this book add to this distinguished list. Yet they differ in important respects from all the others: they were written, circulated and preserved in prison. They were never intended for publication but to be read by other prisoners; their aim is not to share an experience but to educate politically. They are remarkable documents. The circumstances of their production and nature of their initial audience are intriguing enough; but their content and scope mean that they possess far more than mere curiosity value. Ranging over history, politics and economics they draw upon their author’s learning and his life as an activist.

Govan Mbeki agreed that these documents should be reprinted as they stand, and not reworked with hindsight and at leisure. He points out that they will contain gaps and silences. The essays represent only a small portion of the total material produced. Some of the essays were not based on research; in other cases, sources could not be identified lest they fell into the hands of the authorities. Over the years, the Robben Islanders had built up a collection of Marxist texts – and the authors of the political education material were unwilling to draw attention to these.

A couple of the shorter pieces (“A Note on the Comment on the Paper on Apartheid” and “The ANC and Student Organisation”) are written in the first person, responses by Mbeki to written communications from other inmates. Many of the others appear at first glance completely impersonal. Yet even in these, there are constant glimpses of Govan, echoes of his experience. There is the highly educated man: quoting Wordsworth, Kipling, Mqhayi, Cicero and Vegetius (although in this last instance, half a century after his Latin courses, Govan ascribes “Let him who desires peace, prepare for a war” to Caesar). There is the teacher: present in almost every essay, in the deft use of the Socratic question and in the measured emphases “we stress the following significant points” (“The Rise of Afrikaner Capital”, III). At one point Govan suggest that political leaders need “the patience of a conscientious class teacher”, and in the same document he reflects, with characteristically gentle humour, upon his schoolmasterly approach:

You complain that my Note was full of “provocative assertions, hints and undeveloped points” which have set your mind athinking. Blame my training as a teacher, which was entrenched in my mind by having to teach others to be teachers. One of the most important lessons in Psychology of Education and in School Method was the injunction to draw the answers from the pupils. They should work out answers from hints thrown out. When I write I so often forget that my position is no longer that of a teacher. (“A Note on the Comment”)

First cousin to the teacher, there is the scholar. This is most evident, perhaps, in those essays dealing with formal economic issues (“Notes on the Business Cycle, Unemployment, Inflation and Gold”, “Movements in African Real Wages” and, the longest essay in the book, “Monopoly Capitalism in South Africa”). Govan completed an Honours degree in economics on Robben Island, took other courses in business economics, and planned to embark (in his seventies) on a Master’s degree. He effectively recycles data and arguments from his UNISA coursework in these essays. Even where he is dealing with a topical issue – explains Govan in “The Rise of Afrikaner Capital, III” – he is not reporting as a newspaper does: he is “on the contrary, seeking to get to the bottom of the underlying forces and factors that have been building up over a period of time”.

Not writing a newspaper – but present too is the journalist. A moving “In memoriam” to Ruth First contains a valuable assessment of the historical contribution to the liberation movement of the Guardian and its successors, with “the story behind the story” of major exposés, and an acute comment on the importance of photographs. It is a journalist’s eye that remembers and describes a picture thus: “the then Minister of Justice towering above a group of giggling Nationalist parliamentarians as he fondled a cat-o’-nine-tails”. And it is a most effective pen that produces passages like this:

“Operation Apartheid!” thus went out the order. Apartheid, Apartheid, was the war cry. Hardboiled officials steeped in racist ideology leapt to work with crowbars and bulldozers, while close behind them were menacing Saracens, police armed with submachine guns, police holding in leash fierce Alsatian dogs no less bloodthirsty than their masters . . . (“Rise of Afrikaner Capital” II)

In these writings, as in Mbeki’s life, there are also the unmistakable tones and temperament of a political tactician.

Go to the masses of the oppressed and exploited peoples of our land. Work among them; work with them to prepare the way for a take-over of power. Expressed briefly, this is to say: Go – organise.

From this point of departure, the two-part essay on “Good Organisation: The Key to Success” proceeds in the accents of the Port Elizabeth veteran. It is worth looking more closely at how the argument develops. Mbeki begins by posing the problem in the most general terms. If oppression and exploitation are man-made by minority interests, what must the majority do to turn things in their favour? The collective organisation of a beehive or ants’ nest is driven by instinct, but in human society consciousness can be sharpened and harnessed by a political movement. The process focusing on political consciousness involves “two closely related pillars”, building an organisational machinery and rallying mass support.

From these general precepts, the essay shifts to concrete, practical illustrations. In South African conditions, operating underground, “it is a hard and exacting exercise” to recruit a strong, closely knit membership into an organisational machinery. Mbeki spells out the value of working to a schedule, meeting tasks and targets. He stipulates different approaches to various sectors – labour, educational institutions, sports organisations, professional bodies, and churches.

The second half of “Good Organisation: The Key to Success” shifts the focus from urban to rural areas, and concentrates on the challenge of creating an organisational machinery in the Bantustans. Suggestions are made about organising in migrant workers’ hostels and about establishing a presence in rural areas (both to create supportive structures and to recruit and train military cadres). The essay concludes with detailed practical advice. Cadres must produce a news sheet in the vernacular; compile a mailing list by obtaining names and addresses from migrant workers; and despatch small parcels of the publication wrapped in “as many calendars, catalogues, sales promotion bills as they can lay their hands on”. The essay closes with these words: “Difficult? Yes. But if the job has to be done, it must be done.”

Another striking essay is the three-part study on “The Rise and Growth of Afrikaner Capital”. Part I is a tour de force: a historical analysis of “the process of capital accumulation by the Afrikaner operating consciously as a group within the overall framework of the development of capitalism in this country”. Summarised thus, it will remind many readers of one of the most influential “revisionist” monographs by a Marxist scholar – Dan O’Meara’s Volkskapitalisme. This book was published in 1983; but Mbeki produced his study, on Robben Island, in October-November 1981.

He begins by identifying the proletarianisation of significant numbers of Afrikaners in the early years of this century, and links to this the role played within Afrikaner nationalism by an emergent intelligentsia. Then, in a passage which adumbrates O’Meara, Mbeki traces the emergence of “business enterprises which were to be the main pillars around which in the future large concentrations of Afrikaner capital were to take shape”. He details the particular benefits extended by Hertzog to unskilled Afrikaner workers, to manufacturing enterprise, and to farmers. This provided a launch-pad from which, after 1940, “the phenomenal growth of Afrikaner capital and its widely spreading tentacles” took place.

Part II deals with the “socio-political-economic effects” of the rise of Afrikaner capitalism, and specifically with the responses by the oppressed peoples. Mbeki looks sternly at “petit bourgeois misconceptions”: the attempts by an emergent black middle class to cushion themselves against the blows of apartheid. Their basic error is to assume that they can replicate the success story of the Afrikaner petit bourgeoisie and clamber up the ladder of capitalist success. They fail to recognise that the objective conditions favouring the growth of Afrikaner capitalism are absent for the black middle class. The alternative response advocated it to mobilise “all available forces to engage actively in a struggle to rid the country of the cancer of apartheid”. The paper concludes with a survey of the various forces that might be knitted together in a broad front.

Part III (written in February or March 1982) is in effect an analysis of the Botha administration’s reformist initiatives and its attempted co-option of black middle class groupings via the new constitution. (“A new dispensation! Power-sharing! Words. Words.”) He concludes that the new constitutional proposals are “like a diseased foetus” that must be rejected. What did this mean in practical terms? Mbeki distinguishes between short-term and longer-term aims. In the short term, if tricameral elections were to take place, “the task of the progressive forces” would be to mount a mass boycott so as to render hollow any claims to representivity by those elected. Long-term objectives are summed up in the slogans, “Overthrow the fascist dictatorship. Set up a democratic people’s republic.” In a telling sentence, the essential dynamics of the mid-1980s are identified – in advance. “Inevitably, the new phase of the birth of the UDF will fuse with the ongoing politico-military struggle conducted under the ANC-SACP alliance.”

Finally, there are the writings concerned with theoretical issues and generated by theoretical disputes. In various places, there recurs an explication of the relationship between the ANC – usually referred to as Inqindi (“the first”) – and the Communist Party. In “Economic History: South Africa” Mbeki is mediating between positions taken in two other documents circulating on the Island. He argues that while the basic contradiction in capitalist societies is that between opposing classes, the imperialist epoch introduced a “complementary contradiction”, that of national oppression. The immediate project of the liberation movement led by the ANC, he argues, is to concentrate upon the complementary contradiction.

“A Discussion Document” and its companion, “3/B: A Supplement”, were also written in response to formulations by others. At the heart of the exchange was the issue of what kind of society would be ushered in by an implementation of the Freedom Charter. Govan’s adjudication works at several levels. It identifies practical political problems raised by a theoretical clash: he urged that the existence of conflicting views must not allow them to become rallying points for factionalism, and stressed the need to follow agreed procedures. He then sets out the two positions – which he summarises as envisaging “Bourgeois Democracy” or “People’s Democracy”, and then comes down firmly in support of the latter. He marshals a number of arguments against the proposition that the Freedom Charter would permit a flowering of African capitalists. “Can anyone realistically expect”, he asks at one point, “the bourgeoisie to man the scaffold to hang themselves by nationalising banks, monopoly industries and finance houses?” And he spells out a vision of People’s Democracy as a “national democratic republic”, and a transitional phase towards a socialist society.

Many, today, might disagree with Govan’s radicalism. He would respond, one suspects, much as he did on Robben Island. Here are my positions, and here are my arguments in support of them. You may not accept them; there may be differences of view, but let them be discussed. “If anything, there should emerge at the end a clearer understanding . . . In that way the discussion will have borne fruit” (“Discussion Document”). What is certain is that the issues under debate, and their outcome, are not less important today than when the exchanges took place on Robben Island.

Govan Mbeki’s prison writings – the lessons from Robben Island gathered in this publication – offer to historians and political scientists valuable raw material for any study of the ideas and ideology of the ANC-SACP alliance. They provide activists with a distillation of practical lessons about political organisation, learned in the most testing conditions. They include extended historical, political and economic analyses that must be read alongside Mbeki’s other writings in any assessment of the intellectual history of the South African left. And they are pages in a truly international literature – a record throughout the ages of the creativity and indomitability of people imprisoned for their beliefs. These prison essays mark a victory in the continuing contest between the pen and the sword.

ENDNOTES

1Govan Mbeki, interviewed by Colin Bundy, in Port Elizabeth, 1988. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations by Govan Mbeki in this Introduction are taken from a series of interviews conducted in 1988 and 1989.

2Fort Hare, founded in 1916 as the South African Native College, and until the 1960s the only university expressly intended for Africans. Up to 1938, Fort Hare admitted students who were completing high school in addition to those registered for undergraduate studies.

3E. and W. Roux, Rebel Pity: The Life of Eddie Roux (London, 1970), 147, 150.

4G. Mbeki, Transkei in the Making (Verulam, 1939), 13, 23.

5Mrs Epainette Mbeki, interviewed by Colin Bundy, in Idutywa, December 1988.

6Xuma Papers (microfilm, University of Cape Town library): G. Mbeki to Dr A. Xuma, 7 May 1941; Mbeki to Xuma, 11 September 1946; Mbeki to Xuma, 27 June 1947.

7Carneson and Schermbrucker were members of the SACP. New Age was a weekly newspaper printed in Cape Town. After the Guardian was banned in 1952, it was followed by the Clarion, the People’s World, Advance, New Age and Spark – each publication eventually banned. (See “In Memoriam: Ruth First”, infra.)

8H. Bernstein, The World That Was Ours (London, 1989, originally 1967, 218-220.

9M. Dingake, My Fight against Apartheid (London, 1987), 203.

10Names have been altered in this quotation.

11From “How They Came to Be”, typescript by G. Mbeki. (This was written in 1990 to give brief details about the origins and context of the prison writings: the typescript has been a major source for this section of the Introduction.)

12Ibid.

13Ibid.

14Ibid.

15Ibid.