Читать книгу Memory Against Forgetting - Rusty Bernstein - Страница 13
Оглавление1 | Starting Blocks
to 1939
The white rabbit put on his spectacles. ‘Where shall I begin, please your majesty?’ he asked. ‘Begin at the beginning,’ the king said very gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’
from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Begin at the beginning! Excellent advice, provided you know where it is. I do not. Could it have been the 1928 elections – a big event in the life of Durban’s small white community?
I was eight years old. For a short while before and after school games took on an election colouring. We gave up games of cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians in favour of the gang warfare of the South African Party (SAP)4 versus Labour. English-speaking Durban was overwhelmingly SAP. Labour Party support was small and Afrikaner Nationalist support even smaller. For reasons unknown I declared myself for Labour. I knew nothing about Labour or anything else at issue in the elections. My parents, as far as I recall, had no Labour leanings.
I must have been seeking attention for myself. If so, it certainly worked. I was chased about the playground by a rowdy nine-year-old SAP mob and was duly scragged in the grass. No one got hurt; when the bell sounded we dusted ourselves off and went in to class together, without any animosity.
Near the school there lived a family with four or five sons in different classes. I grew friendly enough with the one in my class to go to his home one day after school. His mother gave us tea and jam sandwiches.
Why should I remember this out of all my childhood? Perhaps I remember – or was I told? – that there was something special about the Hennessys. They were fully accepted at school, but seemed to hold themselves aloof, as though they were a clan of their own. The boys were all dark skinned, their mother even darker. I remember suggestions – I do not know from whom – that I should not get too friendly with them and should avoid visiting their home.
Much later it began to dawn on me that perhaps they were not ‘white’. There were rumours in the air that the mother was Mauritian. Or perhaps even coloured? ‘Coloured’ was a new concept for me – interesting but meaningless. The times were not as racially obsessed as they would become later. No one did anything to bar the Hennessys from the school, but as we grew older my friends and I became less and less comfortable in their presence, until they were almost totally isolated. Now I realise that they were clinging precariously to the fringe of white society, always in danger of being swept off by the rising tide of racism. But I did not realise it then. I left the school at the age of eleven and never saw or heard of them again.
Was this, even so, the beginning? I cannot remember when I first realised that ‘black’ and ‘white’ were not simply colours but separate categories of people. I knew black people – two of them worked in our family home – a cook named Dick and a gardener, John. I don’t think I ever knew their surnames. John was my companion. He played games with me and made me bows and arrows. He could run and jump like a champion and throw a ball further and higher than anyone. He was a hero figure. I do not think I ever thought of him or Dick as ‘black’.
That childhood colour blindness could not last. Something new and disturbing happened to our comfortable white world. Rumours of it spread through gossip at home and at school. Trouble, it was said, was ‘brewing among the “natives” ’. Its nature was unknown to me, but it seemed to be confined to the downtown commercial and industrial areas which were remote from our home on the Berea.
There was talk of a character called Champion, who was believed to be the source of the trouble. My favourite weekly comic book was called The Champion. It was strong on war heroics and the adventures of ‘Fighting Mac at Arras’, as well as triumphs in the boxing ring, on the motor cycle dirt track and the FA Cup. And it had a fair share of horror stories and drawings of ogres dripping blood and venom. In my childish imagination, Champion the troublemaker appeared as one of those.
The brewing trouble came to a head in a mass meeting of blacks near the racecourse. A mob was said to have marched on the town; police had barred their way; shots had been fired and men had been killed and wounded, Champion not among them.5 I either heard or imagined I heard the distant rattle of rifle fire. A momentary frisson of fear and uncertainty upset my parents and our white neighbours, but it soon passed. The ‘trouble among the natives’ subsided and life returned to normal.
Politics proper began much later. In 1936 I was in my matriculation year at boarding school near Pietermaritzburg. Our debating society was to contest with our ‘sister school’ a few miles away the proposition: ‘The future of mankind depends on a civilisation based on science’. I was asked to second the motion. I searched the school library for inspiration and in that collection of miscellaneous discards from family bookshelves I turned up a slim red volume called The Results of the Soviet 5-Year Plan. How it came to be there I cannot imagine. It was little more than a catalogue of statistics about Soviet industry, agriculture, transportation and so on. It was crashingly boring, but it gave me just what I needed. It presented a picture of all-round Soviet triumphs, which it attributed neither to luck nor nature but to ‘scientific socialism’.
I based my speech on the little red book – the term had not yet acquired its Maoist connotations. I made the bold claim – based on my profound ignorance – that the Soviet 5-Year Plan vindicated scientific planning.
The opposition had come prepared for a more genteel case based on morality and learning. I unsettled them and we won the debate hands down. Overnight I acquired a totally unmerited reputation as the school Bolshevik. In truth, I knew no more about communism, politics or the USSR than anyone else in the school. But I had read the little red book and they had not.
I was struggling with Latin and the Gallic Wars. My teacher, known as ‘Caesar Jenks’, was in his mid-twenties. He was a cadaverous immigrant from Britain, one of an Oxbridge generation who had awoken early to the Nazi threat and the clangers of the policy of appeasement. Jenks interpolated caustic comments on current affairs into his explanations of the Gallic Wars. His diction, filled with crashing consonants, excoriated Hitler and Mussolini as caricatures of the Roman greats. His aphorisms about the mad dictators and even madder appeasers appealed to me. I recorded many of the best in the back of my Latin book, and left it behind by mistake when I left the school at the end of 1936. Some of his hatred of fascism must have come away with me.
In Johannesburg I found a job as the most junior junior in an architect’s office and enrolled for a part-time course in architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). I had come from a white school into two exclusively white establishments, where the only exception was an elderly black man employed as the office delivery ‘boy’. His status was even lower than mine.
There were no black students in the architectural faculty, and almost none in the whole university. I lived among whites in a wholly white suburb, and at weekends played hockey in an exclusively white team. Racial separateness was so ubiquitous, so deeply bound by both custom and law, that it never seemed in the least peculiar. What little social consciousness I had was concerned with the ‘mad dictators’.
Their rise and rise filled the press and radio. In Germany, Hitler was rearming massively in preparation for war, and his opponents – communist, socialist, trade union or religious – were dying in concentration camps. Japanese armies had overrun Manchuria and were battering China. In Spain, German and Italian forces were in action with General Franco; the democratic republic was drowning in blood and Madrid was under siege. Austria, undermined by subversion, had been annexed to the German Reich, with scarcely a hand raised in the outside world to prevent it. Czechoslovakia was in imminent danger of the same fate. And in Africa, Italian armies had occupied Ethiopia.
Fascism was everywhere. In Britain there was Oswald Mosley’s Union of Fascists, in France the Croix de Feu, in the USA the Ku Klux Klan and German-American Bund. In South Africa, Afrikaner Nationalism had sprouted an undergrowth of Blackshirts and Greyshirts with quasi-military uniforms, swastikas and the Nazi ideology of race mixed with lingering bitterness carried over from the South African War. They were close to the centre of state power and tolerated or encouraged by pro-Nazi Cabinet ministers like Oswald Pirow at Defence and Eric Louw at Trade. Police and army would stand by while fascist thugs disrupted political meetings. Blackshirts and Greyshirts seemed to be immune from prosecution under the new Riotous Assemblies Act.
I knew of all this; so did my contemporaries. But it was as though it was happening somewhere else, somewhere outside that narrow ring of suburb, office and university in which I lived. It was like a bad smell in the background – something to worry and complain about, but not bad enough to compel me to do anything about it.
One Sunday morning some young people came to my door collecting money for Medical Aid for Spain. I can no longer recall how they persuaded me, but the following Sunday I was with them, carrying a collecting tin and arguing on doorsteps in Berea.
Suburban Johannesburg did not feel itself to be involved in the fate of Spain, nor was it convinced that the war in Spain could be the curtain raiser for a new world war. A few householders gave us money for the cause, others gave just to get rid of us. We found a few supporters and several opponents who still held the Spanish people responsible for the Inquisition and the terrible things done to the Jews. In the arguments I was out of my depth. I needed to find out much more about what was actually happening in Spain and what it might mean for the rest of the world.
That was the end of my Sundays at leisure at the swimming baths and the hockey fields. The more I found out the clearer it all became. Spain was the front line against fascism and war. All our fates were being fought out there. If the Republic fell, there would be no restraining the mad dictators. Peace and democracy everywhere would be in peril and my generation would become the cannon fodder of a new war. Campaigning to uphold the Spanish Republic began to take over my life. I even toyed fleetingly with the idea of joining the International Brigade fighting on the Republican side.
Among the young people in the campaign for Medical Aid for Spain were members of the Labour League of Youth (LLY), the youth section of the South African Labour Party. When I joined them some time in 1937 or 1938, they numbered about twenty in all, all around my own age and all white.
They were a lively and dedicated group, almost the only lively and growing part of the Labour Party. Hilda Watts, as she then was, was probably the liveliest of them all, and the most politically experienced. She had been a member of the Young Communist League in Britain before emigrating to South Africa. She was an outstanding public speaker, a dynamo who put her formidable energy into the LLY and Medical Aid, carrying the rest of us along in her trail.
The LLY kept us all busy, but, as with so many small sects, much of our time went into defining precisely what we stood for, and why our politics was uniquely right.
Hilda was sharing a flat with three young men, which was very daring, almost Bohemian for those times. Rowley Arenstein, also a member of the LLY, was a serious, rather humourless legal clerk, a didact who tended to monopolise every theoretical political discussion. Archie Lewitton was already a member of the Communist Party, a natural iconoclast who enjoyed sarcastic sallies against political pomposity, usually at Rowley’s expense. Hilda claims they both had designs on her. But she and I worked well together and developed a friendship beyond our shared politics. She introduced me to Italian opera in the Johannesburg City Hall, where a very large lady named Betsy Delaporte played the starving and consumptive Mimi in La Bohème.
I don’t doubt she sang beautifully, but all my attention was on the leading man, bracing himself like a rugby forward to take the shock as a dying Mimi fell into his arms; and on the tops of the City Hall organ pipes, which stuck up above a ten-foot (3m)-high painted backdrop.
Our friendship survived that, and a lot more. We worked together for political causes and married in 1941.
Spain and the LLY set me on a search for political understanding, which led me to the Left Book Club, founded in Britain by the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz. The club provided its members with uniformly bound, cheap, red-covered books with an anti-fascist, radical or socialist content. It encouraged members to discuss the books as well as read them and had sponsored the formation of a Left Book Discussion Group in Johannesburg. Members of various left and radical sects met monthly to discuss the club’s current book choice, or a related topic.
The mainstream bookshops ignored, or perhaps boycotted, Left Book Club publications, whose distribution was confined to a few specialist left-wing and generally obscure outlets. I was introduced to one of the smallest and most obscure of them.
Salmon’s bookshop occupied one room on an upper floor in Eloff Street, above Cuthbert’s shoe store and the Corner Lounge Café. Mr Salmon was a middle-aged, rather corpulent, Dickensian bookshop proprietor. He had thick spectacles perched on the end of his nose and muttered to himself in a strong Eastern European accent as he searched the shelves for what he wanted.
The shelves were cluttered with dun-, blue-or grey-bound volumes, many of them in foreign languages or from Soviet publishing houses. Left Book Club ‘choices’ with fading red covers gathered dust among the back numbers of Moscow News, Pravda and the Comintern’s press digest, known as Inprecorr (International Press Correspondence).
There was no space for browsing, but there was a cluttered lobby where one would rub shoulders with customers from other left-wing circles, waiting while Mr Salmon puttered and muttered around the shelves. Books and papers in some disorder piled up on an old roll-top desk where regular customers would wait, chatting and sifting through the latest titles.
Salmon’s and the discussion group opened up a small world of books which I could have found nowhere else. I had always been a voracious reader. I worked my way through years of Left Book Club publications, most of them now outdated and forgotten.6 Together, the good, the not so good and the pretty bad opened my mind to the political theory, history and philosophy which shaped my political development.
Through meetings of the Left Book Discussion Group I was gradually introduced to an intersecting, almost incestuous, network of organisations and committees which constituted the Johannesburg Left. Or rather, Johannesburg’s white Left. If there was a black Left – as I think there must have been – there was no more sign of it in the Left Book groups than in the LLY or at Wits University.
In the Faculty of Architecture at Wits there was a lively group of left-wing students a year or two ahead of me. They were developing ideas of socially responsible architecture, especially in relation to housing and town planning, encouraged by one of the senior tutors, Rex Martienssen.
Their political inspiration, however, came from an extraordinary third-year student, Kurt Jonas. Jonas was small, soft-spoken and self-effacing. He bore an uncanny resemblance to that popular Hollywood actor of oppressed little-man roles, Peter Lorre. He was a few years older than his colleagues and had been born in South Africa but educated in Germany, where he had qualified as an advocate. The rise of Hitlerism led his family to return to South Africa, where he exchanged the study of law for the study of architecture. He was an avowed Marxist.
Soon Jonas was elected president of the Architectural Students’ Society, and re-elected year after year. From that power base he was transforming the faculty from a training centre for businessmen-architects into a place of advanced architectural, political and social thinking. He was intellectually brilliant in both his architecture and his politics. In public debate he dominated by intellect alone, despite his apologetic, almost diffident manner. I came to regard him as closer to genius than anyone I ever knew.
Our paths seldom crossed at university but we met by chance at Salmon’s roll-top desk when I was still rather in awe of him. Some months later he asked if I would join a political study group he was starting. I jumped at the opportunity. Anything headed by Jonas had to be stimulating and exciting. There were about ten students in the group. Jonas proposed to start – start! – with Karl Marx’s Capital, an enormous advance on anything I had read before.
My political reading was not far beyond beginner’s level. I had no idea what I was letting myself into, but I bought a copy of Capital: Volume 1 from Mr Salmon and dipped into Chapter 1, as instructed. I found it dense and incomprehensible.
In weekly sessions Jonas expounded brilliantly on the mysteries of use value, exchange value, surplus value, commodity production, accumulation and exploitation. But it was small help. I was not ready for the intricacies of mind of either Marx or Jonas. I persevered, as we all did, until the class collapsed by mutual consent with only a part of Volume 1 poorly digested.
I did not dare open Capital again until years later, when I had enough of a foundation to be able to read it for myself and to appreciate the monumental scale of Marx’s ideas, which were still able to shake the world almost a century after he had written them.
Capital blew my mind. It transformed my interpretation of the world and transformed my way of living in it. Jonas had tried to explain it to me when I was not yet literate enough. He failed. But he pointed me in the right direction, for which I have been in his debt ever since.
At that time Johannesburg’s first Continental-style coffee house had been opened by some German Jewish refugees. The Florian café served real coffee on a corner balcony in Hillbrow – none of the then standard South African chicory-based brew which had been stewing on the stove for hours. For the price of a cup of coffee we could move from Jonas’s class to the balcony and sit talking politics for hours. It was at Florian via Kurt Jonas that I first learnt of the invisible world of black workers and their trade unions, which existed on my own doorstep.
There, too, I was introduced to the great debate about the interaction of socialism and nationalism. Jonas was an active member of the Zionist Socialist Party, whose Zionism came under regular attack over coffee from Jock Isacowitz, as Jewish as Jonas but different from him in almost every other respect. Jock was a prototypical English-speaking South African. He was articulate, argumentative and radical, uninhibited in his hostility to Zionism, which he described as Jewish fundamentalism. Even in its Zionist-Socialist colours, for him it was a doctrine of racial apartheid and a contradiction of socialist internationalism.
Jonas made no doctrinal defence of Zionism. His position was purely pragmatic. As a Jew he had experienced anti-Semitism at first hand in Germany. It had made him feel more at ease in a Jewish milieu than outside it. He claimed that in the Zionist Socialist party he was best able to serve the socialist cause without conceding any of his Marxist principles. I took no part in the fierce disputes between him and Isacowitz over the truth of that claim – I am a better listener than a talker. But I learnt a great deal from it at just the time when I was learning about practical organisation and agitation from my membership of the LLY. Between those schools I was learning to understand something of the central issues of all South African politics – the issues of class and race.
In Spain, Germany tested its latest weapons and blitzkrieg tactics; the Western powers looked the other way, pursuing what they called ‘non-intervention’. The Spanish Republic was being battered to death. As its fall became a matter of weeks, then days, a sense of doom seemed to set in among the anti-fascists who had held high hope of Spain as the last bastion against the mad dictators.
Volunteers from around the world had fought and died in the International Brigade under the slogans ‘No pasaran! They shall not pass!’ and ‘Better die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees’. Despite their sacrifices the war was being lost. The Spanish Republic had been left to fall by ‘non-intervention’, leaving a sense of mourning and of defeat and hopelessness such as I never felt at any other time – not even during Chamberlain’s betrayal at Munich. In our bones we could feel the clock ticking down for the Second World War.
The first battles of that war had already swept across China, Ethiopia, Austria. Now they were coming close in Czechoslovakia as once again the Western powers looked away. While the Left campaigned for the world to stand by the Czechs, Europe’s old order prepared once again to open the pass to fascism and encourage it to move eastward against communism. Hitler’s armies were loose and poised for action. Neville Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden to trade away Czechoslovakian independence and democracy.
In Johannesburg an Emergency Committee was cobbled together to call for the West to ‘Stand by the Czechs!’ At the university a parallel Students’ Emergency Committee was formed, sponsored by Jonas, Isacowitz, and Guy Routh, at that time a sociology student and campus bard of folk and protest song. They convened a students’ mass protest meeting at the university on the night of Chamberlain’s flight to Munich – twenty-four hours ahead of a citizens’ mass rally outside the City Hall. We turned the architectural faculty’s studios into a painters’ workshop and spent the night preparing banners and placards for the city rally. We still had paint on our hands when we made our way to the chemistry lecture theatre for the students’ protest.
In those days student meetings were rare and usually concerned with things like inter-varsity fixtures or the annual Rag days. Most of them went almost unnoticed by the main student body. This time things were different. The hall was packed to capacity, with all the aisles filled. A phalanx of students from the university hostel had taken up position on one side. That was not a good omen. Hostel-dwellers came mainly from the Rand mining towns and tended to be very right-wing, rowdy and macho – the scourge of the Left and of radicalism.
The chairman attempted to start the meeting. He got a rough ride and could scarcely be heard above the booing and catcalling. After several false starts he gave way to the first speaker, the University Registrar, Ivor Glyn Thomas. It must have been expected that his official status would earn him some respect and a decent hearing. From his occasional appearances at the Left Club I knew he was a committed socialist and – either then or later – a member of the Communist Party. He was slightly built, pale and bespectacled, an intellectual and reasoner with precise language but not much oratory. He did his best. But the heckling grew steadily more raucous as the rowdies realised he could not strike back.
After a miserable attempt to make himself heard he retired in defeat. The chairman called the next speaker. The small, shy figure of Kurt Jonas pushed its way through to the platform. Pale, and with a lick of black hair hanging apologetically over his forehead, he seemed comically misplaced before the oversized and sun-tanned rugby-playing audience. He was almost unknown outside the architectural faculty and was greeted with catcalls and mocking laughter. He stood silent at the lectern for a few moments, letting the noise wash over him, almost as though he could not hear it.
Then he started to speak in a conversational tone, making no attempt to raise his voice. The noise died away as people strained to hear what this comic might be saying. He talked fluently about Germany and fascism, without any histrionics. The audience began to strain to catch his words, spoken softly into the developing quiet.
‘Germany,’ he was saying reasonably, ‘has made an offer to the world.’ Murmurs of surprise and dissent. ‘It offers peace to its neighbours and peace to the world.’ Consternation and murmuring. He raised his voice marginally: ‘The peace of the graveyard.’ He had taken charge.
He was heard out to the end in mesmerised silence. He delivered a withering and brilliant critique of fascism, and of Chamberlain and the policy of appeasement. It was a tour de force, not of oratory but of intellect and of psychology. He ended as quietly as he had begun. The applause almost brought the house down. The chairman called for student attendance at the next day’s citizens’ protest meeting and we left in triumph at what felt like a great success.
But it was already scarcely relevant. Chamberlain was in Munich signing the piece of paper on which Hitler guaranteed ‘Peace in Our Time’, as he told a cheering Parliament in London on his return. That same night a vast crowd gathered on the steps of the Johannesburg City Hall. Czechoslovakia had been sold out, though we did not yet know it, and the protest went ahead as planned.
It was my first experience of a street demonstration. We marched off through the city centre, filling the street from kerb to kerb under a sea of banners and placards, most of them from our university workshop. I was carrying a pole at one end of a red banner which stretched across the road. Then the rain came down. We kept marching, but our inexperience as banner painters was exposed. Red rainwater trickled down on us from the banners – no one had warned us against using water-soluble paint – and turned mysteriously indelible as it washed over faces and clothes. My shirt and jacket, stained indelibly pink, became my first real sacrifice for the cause, at a time when I was earning £2.10 a month.
In pouring rain we marched down Von Brandis Street chanting slogans, past a high-rise building which housed the local German Club. The upper floors of flats were occupied by Germans, possibly supporters or even functionaries of the Nazi regime. Out of the darkness cups, saucers and plates started to rain down, smashing to pieces around us on the street. Our ranks broke for the cover of overhanging verandas. Alone in the centre of the street Johanna Cornelius of the Garment Workers, young, athletic, over six feet tall, strode back and forth with her head protected only by a scarf, shouting ‘Come on, boys! Don’t be afraid!’, waving us on while crockery crashed down out of the dark and shattered around her. She was statuesque, magnificent.
The ranks re-formed behind her, out of range of the bombardment, and marched on to the Union Grounds, where there were to be speeches. The grounds were surrounded by iron railings with only a single gateway barred by a line of dripping and fidgety soldiers with rifles at the ready, trying to look fierce. They were one-night-a-week civilian trainees from the Active Citizen Force (ACF), whose headquarters was in the Drill Hall across the road.
We stood about in the rain while their officers parleyed with the leaders of the march. In the end we all turned around and marched back disconsolately to the City Hall. On the way we discarded washed-out banners and soggy placards in the gutters. It was a dispiriting and damp end to the night, and to all hope of a last-minute stand against barbarism. The lights, as someone said, were going out all over Europe. And we were being dragged protesting into the darkness.
I no longer remember how I came to the Anti-Fascist League. Its original purpose seemed to have been to organise physically fit young men to act as bodyguards and protectors at anti-fascist meetings. Its secretary and only visible public presence was a recent immigrant from Britain, Ephraim Burford, always known as E J. Short and bespectacled, he looked like a subaltern from the British army in India – thinning sandy hair, sandy military moustache, ruddy complexion, clipped British accent, and a military stomach-in-shoulders-back bearing. He was then, I suppose, in his mid-thirties.
Burford’s fierce anti-fascism was born in Spain, where he had been on holiday with his wife. Madrid had been peaceful enough until the morning they woke to the sound of rifle fire in the street outside. The hotel staff advised them to keep the shutters closed against snipers. Burford thought they were being rather windy and un-British. When the firing stopped, he stepped out into the street to see for himself and a sniper shot him through the thumb. The Civil War had started. He had been an early minor casualty in it, but now had a major sense of outrage against the fascists.
Republican soldiers came to his hotel to commandeer cars in which to transport their men to the battlefront. Burford stood on his rights. He would not hand over his car, but would agree – under duress – to drive it himself. The holiday was over, turned into a short stint of ferrying government troops to the front. He returned to Britain a staunch supporter of the Spanish Republic and a lifelong enemy of fascism.
In South Africa he became a member of the Labour Party and the secretary, possibly the founder, of the Anti-Fascist League. He was an efficient manager with great bustling energy. Early in 1939 he involved me in the Anti-Fascist League’s most ambitious propaganda venture. He had obtained from somewhere a mock ‘Wanted for Kidnapping’ notice for the arrest of Adolf Hitler, much like the notices posted up outside police stations. He had found a printer willing to reproduce it without the identifying imprint required by law. It would have to be printed and distributed secretly – defamation of a foreign head of state was a serious criminal offence and was bound to be dealt with severely by a government that included pro-Nazi ministers. It would have to be distributed on a grand scale to have a worthwhile impact.
Burford raised the money and masterminded the work. I worked secretly with him and others to compile a massive mailing list of names collected from organisations far and wide, augmented with names taken at random from post and telephone directories for every town and district in the country. We farmed out the work of addressing thousands of envelopes in assorted shapes and sizes, using many different hands and typefaces. When all had been stuffed, stamped and sealed, the entire posting was carried out on a single night. Volunteers posted small batches in every postbox we could find on the Rand, to give no indication of an extraordinary bulk posting, which might be intercepted before delivery.
The operation went like clockwork. The handbill itself failed to shake either the German Reich or the South African government. It aroused some comment inside the country, but did little to change public attitudes. The police had neither the numbers, the ruthlessness nor the special powers they would get in later years. They enquired about it in a desultory way, found out nothing and gave up. I had served my first apprenticeship in clandestine political work.
Burford and I got on well together. We were members of the same branch of the Labour Party. The Labour Party, which was loosely associated with the British Labour Party, had once had a considerable number of members and working-class supporters, all exclusively white. It maintained a colour bar in its ranks without specifically stating so, simply on the basis that that was how things had always been. The much more recent Labour League of Youth, also all white, had no such tradition and a youthful radicalism. It made regular demands that the party ‘open its ranks’ to blacks. That suggestion created constant friction between the party and its youth section, and contributed to divisions inside the party itself.
There was a yawning contradiction at the very centre of Labour ideology, between its acceptance of the colour bar and its long-term aspiration of a socialist future. Socialism and democracy can only be understandable if they apply to everyone. But in the Labour Party they were seen as the aspirations of whites only, an incomprehensible anomaly in a country where the majority of the people and the working class is black. Law and custom could be cited to explain away the exclusion of blacks from party membership, but not their exclusion from the socialist future which was the explicit aim set out in the party constitution. The aim – I quote from memory – was: ‘To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruit of their labours, due regard being had to the presence of an overwhelming native population’ (my italics).
At the end of the First World War the Labour Party had been a serious contender for parliamentary power. By my time it had lost everything except a last precarious toehold on the ladder to power consisting of four MPs, one senator and a handful of provincial councillors. From a position which gave it no real state responsibility it could almost disregard what it called ‘the Native Problem’. All aspects of the colour bar could be relegated to the same league as problems like soil erosion, tariff barriers, cattle culling and deforestation – not fundamental to the social order but simply matters of administration and order which had no bearing on the socialist goal. Socialism would be a change of social order for us, the citizens, not for them, the black outsiders.
What it would provide for them could be settled by our administration when the time came. Implicitly it would not be much different from what they already had, though its administration would be more efficient and humane. Labour Party socialism was, in essence, a special variant of white domination and black inferiority.
At its conferences in the late nineteen thirties the party Left was a loose grouping united by a desire for democratic change and ‘fairness and justice for all’, which could extend from a simple relaxation of the pass laws to full democratic rights and an end to the colour bar. ‘Native Policy’ formed the backdrop to most of the policy confrontations between Left and Right. The Left was a constant irritant to the party establishment, but not strong enough to carry the conference vote against it. Demands for the party to rethink its ‘Native Policy’ were fiercely resisted by the hierarchy. As the Left grew, debates became steadily more heated and also more personal. They gave rise to the belief that agendas were being manipulated against us and that defunct branches and dead members were being resurrected to vote in emergencies.
We could never prove any of that. In fact, the party establishment was probably more representative of the party’s real and ageing membership than we were, even though the whole machine was running down. Former Labour supporters among the skilled white workers were retiring, and the new generations coming in from the countryside were turning instead to Afrikaner nationalism. The party leaders clung doggedly to a labourist class consciousness untampered by political theory. Opportunism was the order of the day, but their aspirations and ideology were out of tune with the times. Except for a shrinking role in Parliament and local councils, the party seemed to come alive only at election times and even then to depend on a corps of temporary paid ‘agents’ to deliver its message.
As Labour’s political arteries hardened only the Left minority still had the purpose and vigour to recruit a new generation of members. Together with Burford and others I helped resuscitate the Labour Party branch in Hillbrow-Berea, where we were both living. It was an area inhabited mainly by white-collar workers and middle-class householders, often with an Eastern European background. It was a good area for us. We attracted members more readily by raising such issues as fascism, the danger of war and race relations than by reliance on Labour’s past political record. We broke away from the tired tradition of branch meetings concerned almost entirely with electioneering and fundraising, and held regular ‘open’ meetings on current political topics. We published a monthly bulletin for members, titled Advance, which was the only official Labour Party publication in the country.7 We were putting Labour back on the Johannesburg map and also revitalising its inner politics. By the end of 1939 we had built what was almost certainly the party’s biggest branch, and its most active.
By 1939 I had been persuaded to act as secretary of the LLY. It was not very onerous – the whole LLY was little more than a sect, with perhaps fifty members organised in only two or three Witwatersrand branches. Among other things, I kept in touch with the British LLY and its secretary, Ted Willis, over mundane matters of printed propaganda material and supplies of their handsome enamelled badges.8 Labour Party rules entitled the LLY to one representative at all meetings of the party’s national executive committee (NEC). I was delegated the task and was able to observe all the party great and good in action, including all its MPs, who attended ex officio when in Johannesburg. I do not recall that I ever spoke at these meetings – perhaps I was not entitled to – but I learnt a lot about career politicians and how opportunism and careerism subvert political principles.
Left-wing Johannesburg was a very small pool, in which almost everyone knew everyone else, or knew of them. I had heard of Dr Max Joffe as a reputed communist and the eminence grise of the party’s almost invisible Youth League. I received a message that he was anxious to talk to me. It had to be about politics, we had nothing else to talk about. His (CP) Youth League was, I believe, even smaller than the LLY and had even less of a public presence, but it was said to be more radical, and avowedly Marxist. For reasons of his own, Joffe made our appointment for 10 p.m. in his city consulting rooms – suitably conspiratorial.
At that time of night central Johannesburg was almost dead. The last trams were still running. Occasional cars came by, but there were virtually no pedestrians as a night curfew kept all blacks off the streets except the municipal labourers who were hosing down the streets and clearing the day’s litter. Outside the City Hall my footsteps echoed off the walls in a way suitable for a Raymond Chandler novel.
Joffe’s rooms overlooked the City Hall steps from the first floor of a tall building with a pompous Corinthian pilastered facade. He was perhaps ten years older than I, wearing then and always a tight wasp-waisted dark suit and waistcoat. A lock of straight black hair hung down over one eye, giving him the romantic air of a wilting poet. He tried to persuade me of the merits of the Communist Party and Marxism, and to get me to join his Youth League. I was only mildly interested, and not totally convinced that the Youth League actually existed. But he did manage to persuade me, perhaps unintentionally, that lurking somewhere in the wings of most local left-wing activity there was a Communist Party. To which he had the key.
I came to know Joffe and his waiting-room better in subsequent daytime visits when the place was like a railway station, alive with arrivals, interchanges and departures. Everyone hurried. People dashed in from the street looking haunted, exchanged hurried whispers with the receptionist and were whisked into an inner sanctum with no suggestion that first come was first served.
Moments later they would reappear, often through another door, and hurry out without another word. From time to time a harassed looking Joffe would pop out of one of the doors, stethoscope dangling from his neck, touching his temple with an elegant sigh of exhaustion and suffering, then scuttle back out of sight.
I always thought of the place as the White Rabbit’s warren. Its atmosphere was furtive and conspiratorial. People spoke in whispers; doors never opened wide enough for others to see in. The waiting-room had no bowls of flowers or back copies of Punch or Tatler, but, as in every good conspiracy story, there was a glamorous blonde receptionist (whom Max later married) and, from time to time, her equally glamorous blonde sister, whose function was not apparent. Whatever else was going on, it was none the less the waiting-room to a surgery. The comings and goings, I guessed, were about one-third medical and two-thirds political.
