Читать книгу Memory Against Forgetting - Rusty Bernstein - Страница 15
Оглавление3 | A Foot in Each Camp
1939–1940
Though the country was at war, nothing much seemed to change – no blackouts, no air raid sirens, no conscription. Young white males were signing on for full-time service and, in the countryside, young black men too, but only for non-combatant duty as cooks, stretcher-bearers and drivers.
There were no calls for full-time service of the Citizen Force part-timers, no gas masks, no food rationing. In Johannesburg a white hooligan mob set out on an alcohol-assisted round of ‘patriotic’ mayhem, setting German cars alight in the streets, beating up German civilians and trashing the German Club. Outside the city a retaliatory spate of random assaults on lone soldiers started. A mob of soldiers from the Potchefstroom camp replied in kind by smashing National Party premises. For a short while it seemed that Lenin’s idea of turning imperialist into civil war was coming into its own. But the frenzy passed.
Unthinking mob violence gave way to organised violence by secretive armed pro-Nazi groups, one of them led by an ex-prizefighter, Robey Leibbrandt, who had been trained in Nazi Germany and been returned to South Africa by German submarine.
In parallel with the clandestine groups, a quasi-military organisation was organising and drilling militant white republicans. Calling itself the Ossewa Brandwag (OB) and playing on nostalgia for the Boer Republic commandos, it was rejecting parliamentary politics and preparing for a quasi-military confrontation. The Smuts government showed little sign of concern. It appeared to accept that the OB, for all its militarist bluster, was nevertheless part of a fundamental consensus that political power was to remain a white preserve.
Only the Communist Party stood outside that consensus. The black majority, still mainly rural, lacked an organised voice strong enough to influence the course of politics. That too was changing. War was bringing rapid industrial expansion, drawing armies of rural men and women to work in the cities, especially to the Vaal Triangle. In Johannesburg the black population was growing inexorably into a majority. Once impotent and barely visible organisations were growing in confidence. Trade unionism was spreading, as was a new sense of national identity. Urban blacks were starting to flex their muscles and to make their demands with a new-found militancy.
Most Communist Party members were involved either in the trade union movement or in the party’s most important activity, the running of night-schools for adult black workers. A growing network of these schools was providing basic tuition in reading, writing and arithmetic from unlikely places like domestic garages and outbuildings in the white suburbs, or unused storerooms and offices in the central city.
Black adults would arrive after work to be taught by party members who generally had no teaching qualifications but a good deal of dedication. The schools were neither philanthropic nor charitable ventures. They had a serious political purpose. Through them, the party was making contact with serious and responsible men and women and introducing them to social and political ideas through the teaching of the three Rs. It was proving to be a fruitful field. Many of the students were taking on active roles in the community and in trade unions and providing a steady flow of recruits to the party.
In its attitude towards the Left the Smuts government was proving little different from its predecessors. We did not share the reverential view which had given Smuts a near-saintly status in pro-war circles at home and abroad. His dismal record included responsibility for the massacre of 190 men and women at Bulhoek in 1921 over non-payment of taxes and the crushing by martial law of the 1922 Witwatersrand miners’ strike, with the loss of some two hundred lives. He had collaborated with avowed pro-Nazis like Oswald Pirow and Eric Louw in the coalition government right up to the eve of war. There was little in his choice of Cabinet to suggest that he had changed. His government, as we had expected, was proving itself white supremacist and anti-democratic at home even while it portrayed itself as anti-fascist and democratic.
Not long after his government took office ‘detention camps’ were set up for the first time since the South African War, ostensibly for enemy agents. Internment without trial of ethnic Germans and Italians began, and before long the distinction between enemy agents and local anti-fascists faded. Internment widened, and extended to some anti-fascists and members of the party, like Dr Max Joffe and his brother Louis, a veteran of the South African army in the First World War campaign in South West Africa, and Issy Wolfson of the Tailoring Workers’ union.
Non-party trade unionists like Max Gordon, a Trotskyist and organiser of black workers’ unions on the Witwatersrand, fell victim, and then Arnold Latti, an elderly Italian communist and veteran of the struggle against Mussolini and Fritz Fellner, an anti-Nazi refugee from Germany, trade unionist and husband of Johanna Cornelius of the Garment Workers’ union. And also E J Burford, secretary of the Anti-Fascist League and a member of my own branch of the Labour Party.
There was no obvious reason why they had been picked out. Their internment passed almost unnoticed by press and public, though Burford’s case drew the loudest protest because of his high profile in anti-fascist campaigns. His only other political activity had been in the Labour Party, which was a part of the Smuts government coalition, but it drew scant protest from the Labour Party hierarchy or its Cabinet member, Walter Madeley. Other internments of anti-fascists might be attributed to excesses on the part of the security services. But in Burford’s case, people inside and outside the Labour Party suspected connivance of the party leadership in whose side he had been a radical thorn.
I had that suspicion myself, though now I am not so sure it was fully justified. Anger over the Labour leadership’s failure to protest certainly was. Whether they were complicit in Burford’s internment must remain in doubt. Madeley appeared to me to be an honest man as career politicians go, but he was no radical. His politics was limited and parochial. To him the term ‘working class’ appeared to mean the class of skilled white artisans – black workers were not part of it, though he probably understood their disabilities and deplored them. I doubt if he had a hand in Burford’s internment but I felt far less charitable towards those of his colleagues in the party leadership who constituted what we called the ‘Headquarters Clique’.
The Headquarters Clique was a cabal of party cronies. Almost all of them held public or party office. They hung out in the seedy, beery, smoke-laden Labour Party Club on the floor below the party head office. It was exclusively male. It had no amenities except a bar, where they hobnobbed with a similar group of cronies and bureaucrats from the Trades and Labour Council next door. The financing and administration of the club was a closely guarded secret. The radical Left, which never used the place, believed that profits that should have gone into party funds were being secretly siphoned off to pay the election expenses of the insiders. We had no proof. At annual national conferences the left would ask to be shown the club’s balance sheet, and annually the procedures would be manipulated or filibustered to frustrate the demand.
The club’s finances were not important in themselves, but the refusal to disclose them exacerbated political animosities. The annual national conferences became more confrontational year by year. A Left-Right division overshadowed almost every debate on policy, whether on such matters as strikes and civil liberties or on social and economic policy. By tacit agreement both Left and Right avoided debate on the basics of the war effort for fear of an irreversible split. On other, less fatal issues Burford had been a regular combatant. For a short time his internment and the role of the party leadership in it became one of the divisive issues.14 But the fundamental and lasting confrontations were over so-called ‘Native Policy’. That lay hidden at the heart of almost every matter in dispute.
The Labour Party’s socialism was explicitly for whites only. It did not extend to voting rights or equal citizenship for the black majority, or necessarily include the abolition of pass laws, segregation laws and the rest of the props of white supremacy. All such matters were lumped together under the rubric of ‘Native Policy’. The loose Left grouping was agreed on the need for radical revision of the party’s ‘Native Policy’ but could never muster enough conference votes to obtain it.
Headquarters, that is to say the party establishment, was better managed and not averse to reviving dead branches and members to ensure a majority vote for the status quo. We believed that we won all the arguments, but still we lost all the significant votes. The annual Labour Party Conference after Burford’s release from internment was an especially ill-tempered and hostile affair.
When it ended Left and Right joined in the customary chorus of: ‘We’ll keep the red flag flying here!’ and went off to face another year of temporary inner-party peace. What we got was something like a firing squad. Curt letters arrived to inform our branch that it had been dissolved by the National Executive Committee, no reasons given; members who wished to do so could apply for admission to other branches. Burford and I both received personal letters informing us that the NEC had expelled us from the party. There had been no hearing, we were given no explanation.
By that time we had built the Hillbrow-Berea branch of the party into the liveliest and largest branch in the country and the only one with a regular organ of its own. The NEC’s blow against us could only be motivated by fear of a possible incipient challenge to its reign. It was a leadership whose democratic arteries had hardened. It was clinging to its power by means which could only weaken and dispirit the party.
Labour was sinking ever deeper into decline at just the time when the Communist Party was succeeding in hauling itself out of its own. The Communist Party central committee had been successfully reconstructed in Cape Town and had sponsored the revival of vigorous district committees in all four provinces. Archaic practices like the use of pseudonyms and of ‘concealed’ membership were being phased out and dual CP-LP membership was being reconsidered.
At about the time of my excommunication from Labour all CP ‘dual members’ were required to end that long-standing party practice by choosing one party and opting out of the other. With two exceptions all the members of my group chose to opt out of the Labour Party. The exceptions were Alex Hepple, who was a Labour provincial councillor and prospective parliamentary candidate, and his wife, Girlie. Alex was slightly older than the rest of us in the group. He had inherited a small factory, which made him a small-time ‘employer’ and ‘industrialist’, an anomaly in the Communist Party.
The Hepples’ loyalty to the party was unquestionable, but in the circumstances they were unlikely ever to be considered for any public leadership role. They felt that they could probably do more for the cause of socialism from the front ranks of the Labour Party than from the back benches of the CP. We agreed. The decision was a difficult one for them both, but in the end they decided to end their membership of the Communist Party. We had been in the same CP group for some time. I liked them both and had a high regard for their honesty and commitment. We remained friends. Alex went on to become the Labour MP for Rosettenville and a principled member of the shrinking Labour group in public office.15
By that time Labour’s decline was near terminal. The white-supremacist cancer had eaten away its core; its supporters had dribbled off towards the National and United parties. It had been displaced from its niche by narrow nationalist and chauvinist factions. Its final knell sounded in the 1948 General Election, when the Smuts government was turned out of office, taking the Labour remnants with it.
Labour had been born out of a white artisan class which had, by now, lost all socialist orientation. It had outlived its time and, for all practical purposes, died in tandem with the Smuts government.16 Whether it was ever formally wound up I do not know.
To me, expulsion from the Labour Party had come as something of a merciful liberation. I had repeatedly petitioned the CP district committee for permission to resign from it and had been repeatedly turned down. Now the decision had been made by Labour. I could concentrate my political activity in the CP as I wanted to do.
It was a good time for it. The CP was coming out into the public light from its reclusive and semi-clandestine past. It had moved from its hole-in-corner premises to new offices in Progress Buildings, close to the heart of the city, where the Carlton Centre now stands. It had replaced the press, sequestrated in the times of decline, with a new electric duplicator. It was starting publication of a new monthly, Inkululeko (Freedom), to replace the former, now defunct Umsebenzi: the change of title indicated some shift of orientation.
Inkululeko had pages in the main African languages as well as in English. It was typed on wax stencils and duplicated in the party offices. Hilda drew me into the production team in which she did skilled things like drawing the illustrations and hand-lettering the headlines, while Archie Lewitton typed the stencils with two fingers and Mofutsanyana edited. I was only a gofer.
We met at the office once a month, early on Sunday morning, and spent the day wrestling with the Gestetner machine and collating and stapling the pages as they rolled off the press. By the time we came up for air in late afternoon, coated in printers’ ink, a stack of some 1 200 copies would be ready for distribution and sale. For me it was the start of an unplanned career as a propagandist.
Inkululeko helped bring the party out of the shadows and into the streets. Members were expected to hawk it at factory gates, railway stations and municipal compounds. Once such street-vending became a regular practice it was logical to make it a weekly affair by adding the Guardian to our vending stock.
The Guardian was not a party organ but an independent and radical weekly, produced in Cape Town under the editorship of Betty Radford. It was the only regular publication to give space to the news and views of the trade unions, the national liberation movements and the party. It was already being sold by paid street vendors and commission agents. We joined them, in part to help boost sales, but chiefly in an attempt to turn the party outwards, away from its concentration on internal doctrinal minutiae towards public activity in the real world.
For months, perhaps for years, I did my stint of vending at midday on Saturdays at the entrance to the Mai-Mai municipal beer hall at the south end of Von Wielligh Street. At the time, the sale or supply of any form of alcohol to blacks was totally prohibited, the only exception being sorghum beer, so-called ‘kaffir beer’, for consumption at municipal beer halls. Municipalities with total monopolies saw no reason to make their beer halls anything more than comfortless drinking sheds. Mai-Mai was a bleak corrugated iron shed baking in the sun in a bleak wasteland of swirling red dust. My sales were quite brisk. The men – the customers were almost all men – would insist on seeing a page in their own tongue before they would spend a penny on a copy of Inkululeko.
It was always strangely easier to sell a twopenny Guardian, all in English. But whichever I was selling, it was an ordeal which I forced upon myself as a matter of party duty. Although I hated everything about selling, I came to enjoy the noise and liveliness of the Mai-Mai crowds and the exchange of banter with sober men coming in from work and with rolling drunks coming out. My pitch was shared with a bustle of women street traders roasting mealies and chicken legs on pavement braziers. Alongside us there were pavement barbers giving alfresco trims and razorcuts to customers sitting on soap boxes.
Everywhere else in Johannesburg paper selling was done only by blacks, usually teenage blacks, and the buyers were almost all white. Here the standard order was reversed – an adult white man was selling to black buyers. Just being white in such an all-black environment made me a curiosity. Men would stop and stare in disbelief. Occasionally some inebriated fellow might jeer, but I was never threatened or even felt threatened.
There at Mai-Mai I first learnt to feel at ease in the midst of black people and to move among them without self-consciousness. The psychological baggage of a life lived in exclusively white surroundings rubbed away as blacks ceased to be ‘others’ – menials, servants or victims of underdevelopment – and became simply people, individuals.
After some years of Mai-Mai I moved to a different party branch, handed over the Mai-Mai pitch to others and transferred my paper-selling to the branch area of Braamfontein. In those days, before it was ‘redeveloped’, with an unlovely mix of shops, high rise offices and university overspill, it was a working-class area of small semi-detached brick cottages occupied by white railwaymen, some with student lodgers.
Branch members trudged from door to door with the Guardian every Sunday morning. We learnt to know where there might possibly be a buyer, where we would get a political argument on the doorstep but no sale, and where it was best to pass rapidly in silence before being spotted by hostile residents or even more hostile guard dogs.
To me it was a cheerless activity, with none of Mai-Mai’s compensations. Only missionary zeal kept me at it, and a belief that sooner or later one of my regular buyers would develop democratic, radical or even Left views, and become ‘educated’, as our jargon had it.
That belief was constantly undermined by experience. My most regular customer was an Afrikaans-speaking railwayman who had an adult son. Every Sunday one or other of them duly handed over twopence and chatted on the doorstep about the state of the nation. The chat was costing me my Sunday morning leisure, but in the good cause of their ‘education’. Eventually the question of crime came up on the doorstep. All whites claim to be experts on what they portray as a specifically black phenomenon, and to have an instant solution for the crime wave. My favourite Braamfontein customer gave me his: ‘Follow Paul Kruger!’ he said. Tie the kaffir to a wagon wheel and give him a thrashing he will never forget!’ The educational payoff for my Sundays with the Guardian!
Did all that expenditure of time and energy really achieve anything at all? Did we really effect even a subliminal change in our buyers’ thinking, or were we mortifying our flesh for the good of our own souls? I am not sure of the answer, or of what our Braamfontein customers were thinking when they handed over their twopence. Were they looking for alternative news? Getting rid of us cheaply? Or were they perhaps being charitable and helping out an apparently poor white boy in need?
I like to think that perhaps we did help to change some of their ideas and counter some of their prejudices. Perhaps when the time came for white South Africa to choose between civil war and majority government our Guardian Sundays might have influenced some of their decisions for the better. Perhaps. Whatever the reality, those hours of paper-selling were not totally wasted. We had spread information and ideas which might possibly have helped Braamfontein railwaymen and Mai-Mai beer drinkers to look at their country in a new way, perhaps to start adapting their minds to a new South Africa which was still fifty years away.
It was not just a one-way process. While trying to ‘educate’ others we were educating ourselves. We were learning to work collectively, to listen to what ‘the man in the street’ was saying and thinking, and to present our political ideas to them in non-dogmatic ways. Through paper vending we were also rebuilding the party as an open organisation in the public light, just like any other political party.
Opposing the war effort had its price. Early in 1941 Yusuf Dadoo in Johannesburg and Dawood Seedat in Durban, both prominent members of the party, were arrested and charged with subversion and anti-war incitement. Their arrests triggered the biggest protest campaign of meetings, handbills and posters that the party had managed for years. My group was assigned to help campaign in the Sophiatown area, where our local organisation was under strength, Sophiatown now exists only in memories. It was bulldozed in one of Verwoerd’s worst racial excesses, to make space for an exclusively white suburb, provocatively named Triomf (Triumph).
At that time it was a multiracial residential area where black people could own their own homes and live unencumbered by the red tape and round-the-clock controls of the municipal townships. It was a tight huddle of small, run-down cottages which had once been single-family homes. As the war-time population grew, houses had been divided and re-divided until almost all housed multiple families, often with one family per room. Backyards had been built over with unauthorised annexes that occupied every remaining inch of open space. It was a lively, bustling place where people of all races and colours shared minimal facilities and deprivation. By night householders locked themselves in, leaving the yards to jazz clubs and illegal shebeens and the streets to petty gangsters, drunks and packs of mangy dogs.
Night after night our group trudged the streets at around midnight with our stacks of protest leaflets. The people were asleep but the dogs were loose. We worked in pairs, up and down the streets, slipping leaflets under every door. Dead of night may have been chosen as the best time to avoid police patrols and roving gangsters, or perhaps out of revolutionary romanticism. It was very scary.
The streets were badly lit and potholed and crossed by foul-smelling open ditches and overloaded drains. We crept guardedly to the front doors on dark front porches where lean, mean guard dogs lurked in the shadows. That too was a part of our learning and party-building – by ordeal. We gained a first-hand knowledge of the living conditions of a sector of the black working class. We learnt to rely on one another for support and morale and developed a party bond which cannot be created by rules alone. In that activity the party developed the exceptional levels of unity and voluntary discipline which became its most distinct characteristic. Whether we affected the fate of Dadoo and Seedat is hard to say. Both were found guilty and sentenced to short terms of imprisonment, making them the first martyrs of the years of the Communist Party revival.
Open-air political meetings had been held intermittently on the steps of the City Hall since the time of World War One and throughout the white workers’ strikes of 1913 and 1922, but the practice had withered. Meetings there had become irregular and infrequent until the party district committee decided to revive the tradition.
We started to hold public meetings there every Sunday evening. The steps provided a natural podium, with speakers at the top and the audience spread along the pavement at the foot.
We took our pitch in the centre of the podium, facing the clock on the old Rissik Street Post Office across the road, and simply held forth to anyone who happened to be passing – and often initially to no one at all – on Sunday evenings there were precious few passing pedestrians.
Almost no blacks lived in the city proper and those who did were kept off the streets by a night curfew unless they had a ‘special pass’. The meetings were thus an all-white affair which all our city members were expected to attend to form the nucleus of a crowd. That gave us an advantage over our lone-wolf competitors. The occasional black straggler would pause momentarily to listen from the outer fringes. But not for long – the white audience would soon make him feel alien and uncomfortable. The party, which was waging a consistent and resolute fight against the colour bar everywhere never managed to banish it from its own meetings on the steps.
We had only a few experienced public speakers. Novices like me were simply thrown in at the deep end, without tuition and without any public address equipment. Our veteran speaker was Issy Wolfson of the Tailoring Workers’ Union, endowed with a voice like a foghorn, which drowned out the noise of hecklers and passing traffic and echoed back from the Post Office across the road. He seemed never to use notes, but the words flowed effortlessly, conjuring up instant slogans and drawing intermittent applause.
Hilda was our most eloquent speaker. She too could conjure up the applause and rousing perorations, but always from a base of meticulously prepared notes.
Most of our speakers had learnt the art in the trade union movement. Betty du Toit of the Food and Canning union, equally at home in English and Afrikaans; Willie Kalk, pacing furiously like a caged lion; Danie du Plessis of the Building Workers’ Union. The rest of us, including the district secretary, Michael Harmel, Archie Lewitton and several others, learnt as we went along. I was probably the most reluctant of them all.
Attendances fluctuated between fifty and several hundred. Occasionally someone from the crowd would apply to join the party, but recruiting was not the main aim. The purpose was to build ourselves a regular public forum in the centre of the city as a step towards establishing the party in the mainstream of political life.
In time, the Steps on Sunday Nights came to be known as the party’s platform. Other speakers, some of whom had been there from time to time before us, would also exercise their rights and take advantage of what we considered to be our audience. These irregulars were a strange mixture. There was an elderly, vituperative, tub-thumping socialist radical named Dunbar, who thundered out minor variations of a sermon he had been delivering since the 1920s and the days of the International Socialist League. An altogether more tolerant old socialist and veteran of the 1922 General Strike, Jimmy Brown, preached the social panacea of ‘One Big Union’.
Most vituperative and hostile of all our rival orators was a lone Trotskyist named Saperstein, a white-coated pharmacist during the week and a proto-proletarian with greasy leather lumber-jacket, patched jeans, checkered sweatshirt and day-old stubble on his chin on Sundays. He arrived with no discernible message of his own, only to deliver a fiery ‘revolutionist’s’ condemnation of all things communist.
No doubt they all believed in their messages as much as we did in ours, but only sheer cussedness can account for their persistence in the face of cruel heckling and howls of rejection from the audience. Our meetings would start strictly on time, regardless of who else might be speaking a few yards away. We could rely on Wolfson’s foghorn to persuade the others to shut down for the night.
As the Steps became known as the party’s platform, audiences of hundreds would appear from nowhere whenever there was an event of importance to give the gathering immediacy. Examples were Rommel’s capture of South African soldiers at Tobruk, the fall of Paris to the Nazis and the German invasion of the USSR.
Johannesburg still carried some birthmarks of its mining camp beginnings. Political meetings were rowdy and often rough. The Steps meetings became both, and a focus for hooligans looking for a punch-up with communists. Gangs of young fascists began mingling with the crowd, bringing a vicious tone to the jeering and heckling, shouting fascist slogans and trying to provoke a fight. As their confidence grew, they took to assaulting any of our members whom they found in the street alone on the way to or from the Steps. They randomly assaulted any passing blacks and staged violent forays against the speakers on our platform. Sunday evenings on the Steps became a regular battleground.
We either had to abandon the meetings or defend them physically. We chose defence and organised a corps of our fittest and toughest members to protect the speakers and to guard members coming to or from the meeting. That helped us feel safer, but made our meetings more fraught. While the speakers balanced precariously at the top of the steps, fists flew and bodies clashed and the police, who were regularly there in force, stood idly by.
We were seeing the beginning of new-style policing, based either on surreptitious encouragement of the Right-wing thugs or on positive protection of them. Sunday nights for us became ordeals of stomach-knotting anticipation of minor brawls and running street fights. They regularly ended either at our casualty clearing station in Max Joffe’s surgery overlooking the Steps, or in a march to police headquarters at Marshall Square to bail out comrades arrested for ‘assault’ or ‘public disorder’.
The City Hall Steps meetings tested our nerves to the limit, but gave the party a real presence in the city’s politics. But growth was not confined to the white arena. In the black areas of the city a parallel growth in party confidence and activity was taking place with the recruitment of new members proceeding faster than among whites. Black party members were advancing into leading positions in the trade unions, in the liberation movements and in township community organisations. The whole party was growing up and changing from a predominantly white sect into a predominantly black mass party. For the first time in its history its membership began to mirror the real racial and class composition of the population as a whole.
