Читать книгу Memory Against Forgetting - Rusty Bernstein - Страница 16
Оглавление4 | Across the Divide
1940–1943
The Communist Party was functioning in a non-racial enclave of its own. Inside the party there was a total black-white equality which could be found nowhere else. But we were not Utopians seeking to create a perfect place of our own, shut off from the world. We were trying to engage with that world, challenge its fundamental mores and customs and ultimately change them.
There was, however, a paradox. The more we involved ourselves in that wider world, the greater became its pressure on us to conform to its practices. Inside the party and its committees, conferences and members’ meetings there was no colour differentiation. But the more we moved out of our own closed circles into the social and political mainstream the more we were driven to divide into black and white streams – fraternal, nominally equal, but separate.
There was no way for us to grow outwards and avoid the great racial divide. Society imposed its racial division on our organisational forms and on our political activities. Our residentially based branches were inevitably either predominantly black or predominantly white, according to the race pattern of the area. Trade unions we belonged to were either ‘white’ or ‘black’ to accord with industrial laws. Election campaigns were restricted by law to white candidates and voters only, or to black. The languages used at meetings had to be either English or Afrikaans in a white area, or Zulu or Sotho in a black. Society locked us into its established racial net. We had either to conform or cease to function at all.
I was seconded to assist the party branch in Vrededorp, a racially-mixed slum area with close-packed cottages where single rooms were rented out by absentee landlords. The branch members were all new recruits, black, mainly middle-aged men, with no prior party experience. The only member with a place big enough to hold ten or twelve people was a very large and forceful woman who had two back rooms and a kitchen. She was known as a ‘shebeen queen’, that is to say, she kept an unlicensed drinking place with a stock of hard liquor and sold home-brewed beer stored in old petrol drums buried in the yard. Illegal activities, including brewing of beer and the sale of alcohol to blacks, went on in her kitchen.
Our branch met in her parlour each week, always in fear of a police liquor raid. Occasional drunks would lose their bearings and blunder in and out. It was all very new to me, both socially and politically. I was only to guide, advise and facilitate. In theory at least, I was an ordinary member, equal with all others. In practice, there was no disguising my separate status. I was the only one who knew and understood the party ropes. I was the only white and the only one who did not live in the area. I felt like an outsider, an intruder in the community and not really part of it. But the others showed no signs of resentment or distrust. They accepted me fully, a rare experience for a white in such a black circle, and for the few hours I spent each week in Vrededorp it was as though there was no racial divide.
But that was an illusion. Outside there was white supremacy everywhere. And inside the group, a deeply ingrained habit of black subservience which holding a party card did not cure. When any difference of opinion arose, the members would invariably defer to my opinion, not because of my party rank but because of my racial status. I knew it and tried to combat it. But there was a fatal contradiction. Our black members were being encouraged to act as full equal citizens inside the party at the same time as they were being compelled to live in racial subservience and inequality outside it. I began to understand that though I was trying to help them develop self-reliance and a sense of equality, my very presence among them inhibited both.
It was a paradox. My mission in Vrededorp was to assist, but to do that I needed to diminish my own role and allow them to discover how to stand on their own feet. I am not sure that I was successful, but the Vrededorp branch was eventually up and running and I was transferred to another struggling branch, in Alexandra Township. It was my Vrededorp experience revisited, but in rather different circumstances. In Alexandra our meetings were held in a quiet detached cottage occupied by a comrade named Tommy Peters. There were no blundering drunks or threats of police liquor raids, but outside there was tension and real danger.
Alexandra was a sprawling slum, much smaller than it is today, with dusty, rutted roads and little sign of drainage or garbage removal services. Dilapidated cottages and shacks stood amid vacant plots of weeds and litter. There was no street lighting. By night the streets were dangerous and intimidating, peopled with roving bands of gangsters wielding lethal weapons made from sharpened bicycle spokes. After dark it was perilous and foolhardy to walk alone, and not quite safe in a car.
Meetings were never held on Friday nights – the bicycle-spoke gangs would be out waiting for men coming home with a week’s pay in their pockets. Members would never leave meetings singly; always in groups. On Sundays, when the sun dispelled some of the menace in the air, we held open-air public meetings at a dusty, litter-strewn bus terminal known as Number 1 Square. It had none of the vibrant liveliness of Mai-Mai or even of the streets of Vrededorp.
From time to time I would be one of the speakers. I was ill at ease. Even in the sunshine the place felt hostile. Those passers-by who stopped to listen for a few minutes would walk off, often shouting something derisory or dismissive. Whether the hostility was caused by my white presence or by the meeting’s message was not clear. It was always a relief when the meeting was over and I could get away – by car – to my side of the racial divide, leaving my comrades uneasily on theirs.
Here again, during the branch meeting I was among equals, outside I was an intruder. Inside there was comradeship and trust without regard to colour, outside, distrust and hostility. Inside we were working together to change the old order, outside we were trapped in its racial coils on separate sides of the divide. Yet the party was expanding. At the Johannesburg centre it was outgrowing its resources and I was asked to take up full-time work as a ‘party functionary’, engaged mainly in publicity and propaganda activities. I agreed. I could carry on with my part-time course at university, with lectures before and after work.
I soon learnt that there was little difference between full-time party work and any other office work, except that the hours were unlimited and the pay about that of an unskilled labourer.
Party work produced a special variant of Parkinson’s law: meetings proliferate to fill the time available for them, including mealtimes and all hours of the day and night. And an addendum, which gives meetings precedence over everything else. My home life became erratic. I kept irregular hours and ate irregular meals, but I learnt something about the art of propaganda and became a competent committee clerk, copywriter, reporter and occasional sub-editor.
Inkululeko had outgrown the wax stencil and Gestetner machine and was about to change to a regularly printed fortnightly. It was edited in the party office by Edwin Mofutsanyana, who could read most of the African languages, with Michael Harmel writing most of the English language articles and the editorials. Edwin, best described as an egghead and cautious and slow of speech, was a veteran of the leadership of both party and ANC. He was quiet, shy to the point of diffidence, an intellectual and a thinker – his critics might say a slow thinker. He was neither an inspirer nor an administrator.
He edited Inkululeko systematically and with careful attention to political correctness, but without much verve or originality. For flair Inkululeko depended on Harmel, who wrote easily and well but was even less of an administrator than Mofutsanyana. Between them they planned and edited, but gradually left almost everything else to me.
I knew just enough about newspaper production to be the office boy – if the editor knew more than I did he did not show it. He gave me no instructions, merely explained the procedures, suggested what I might do and left me to it. I found myself gradually saddled with layout, headlining and seeing the paper through the press.
And when Edwin was away on party or ANC business, as he often was, I was left to do the proofreading of articles in languages of which I was wholly ignorant. I learnt to do it by making a tedious letter-by-letter comparison with the manuscript. In time I could manage a syllable-by-syllable check, and finally a word-by-word. It is not the way to learn a language, but in the end I could recognise most commonly used words by phonetics without reference to the script, and without understanding them.
Over the years I picked up a smattering, but no more, of several languages. By the time I completed my university course and received my diploma I had little practical experience of actual building, but considerable experience of newspaper production and printing and of dashing off a piece of journalese at short order.
Harmel, Mofutsanyana and I worked out of two small offices. The corridor access was locked by a steel grille at night. The party’s confrontation with fascists at the City Hall steps and elsewhere was intensifying. One night petrol, or something similar, was poured through the grille and set alight. Before the building’s night watchman realised it flames had burnt through the door and into the offices, where what was not incinerated was reduced to pulp by his fire hose.
We salvaged what we could and moved into the only other space available in the building. It was a much larger suite of four offices and a boardroom large enough for meetings or small conferences and much more expensive. The party treasurer bit the bullet and the party operated from there until its demise in 1950.
The party and Inkululeko were both growing and needed more hands. A young comrade, John Nkadimeng, joined us, taking charge of Inkululeko’s distribution and sales, and John Kepobetsoe came in as filing clerk, messenger and general factotum. By 1941 Inkululeko had grown sufficiently to move from fortnightly to weekly publication, putting severe strain both on the party finances and on the capacity of part-time volunteer writers and reporters.
It also strained the capacity of our printers, who had only one linotype machine operator. He was a morose but cooperative Afrikaner who had learnt to set type in the African languages by the same letter-by-letter process without understanding that I had used. He was a high-speed, high-quality operator, but our weekly issue proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. After a few months he issued a démarche: no more weekly Inkululeko! Either our weekly went or he did.
Our printers gave way to force majeure. Inkululeko was more dispensable than their linotype operator. We reverted to fortnightly production, and all heaved secret sighs of relief.
Party propaganda services were expanding in several directions. On the trade union front discontent was growing among the black workers. Prices were rising fast, but wages were not, and the unions were struggling to cope with a rash of industrial disputes and spontaneous strikes. The party, in concert with the unions, launched a campaign for a national minimum wage of ten shillings (R1) a day. By today’s standards it is a risible amount. At that time it was way beyond what any part of the establishment would even contemplate. It was said to be unrealistic and revolutionary, more than the country could afford and a recipe for bankruptcy. But the ten-shilling claim brought an instant response from the black workers. It was adopted by all the black trade unions and by the national liberation organisations.
As part of the campaign for that minimum wage I wrote my first pamphlet for the party, titled, slightly misleadingly, ‘How To Get More Money’. It sold in thousands for a penny a copy and was translated into several languages. Its message, more precise than its title, was: If you want better wages, join and build your trade union! The slogan of ‘Ten Shillings a Day’ caught on fast, the trade union message rather more slowly.
But the campaign and the pamphlet gave a tremendous spurt to trade union growth and a focus for rising militancy among black workers at a time when white trade unions were slowly declining, with defectors gravitating to Right-wing Afrikaner nationalism. Even so, the white trade unions’ Trades and Labour Council (TLC) barred all affiliation by black unions.
On the Rand the black unions had come together to form their own independent Council of Non-European Trade unions (CNETU), under whose aegis new and fast-growing black unions were being built. An unprecedented influx of black workers was coming into the party, recruited from the factories and townships, and also at public meetings. We held periodic mass meetings on what was then the Newtown Market Square. Meetings would end with a call for recruits and the handing out of membership application forms.
After one such meeting at the height of the ‘ten shilling’ campaign, we received a mass of completed application forms which appeared to represent almost the whole black labour force at the Castle Breweries compound not far from our office. The applicants were all called to the customary interview before being accepted. That was almost a mass meeting in its own right. The applicants were almost all Shangaan speakers. Our best Shangaan interpreter was appropriately named – English Tschauke.
It was soon apparent that the brewery workers made no distinction between joining the party and joining the claim for ten shillings a day. Perhaps our public speakers were, themselves, allowing the edges to blur. Tschauke spelt out the difference to them and persuaded them that what they really needed was a way to deal with grievances at work. That meant a trade union, not the party.
There was no union in the brewing industry, but if they would support one Tschauke and the party would organise one. They agreed and went off happy. Tschauke underwent a short course of intensive training and became a founder and full-time organiser of the new Brewery Workers’ Union. The incident was typical of the times.
Trade union growth was being paralleled, perhaps exceeded, by simultaneous growth of the national liberation movements. In theory, the party had always supported a liberation movement, but in the locust years of inner party doctrinal strife the relationship of nationalism to socialism had become a matter of fierce dispute.
Now, when the party was deliberately seeking to integrate itself into mainstream politics, the debate had to be resolved. Practical political work had to be carried on wherever there were politically aware people.
Accordingly, almost all eligible party members were active members of the Indian Congtress or the African National Congress, though there remained a small minority who would not join. Some argued a dogmatic, allegedly ‘Marxist’ view that nationalism was simply ‘bourgeois’ and the national movements a ‘reformist’ distraction from class struggle and revolution but the main source of opposition to joining the ANC, however, was its sorry organisational state. It had proved itself to be the most durable and representative African national body. But despite wide popular support organisationally it was a broken reed.
Its active membership had declined to the level of a sect and feeble public appearances had reduced it to not much more than a current of opinion rather than a serious contender for political power.
The ANC’s Transvaal secretary at that time, CS Ramohanoe, would call at the party office from time to time to borrow ink, paper and a duplicator with which to produce notices of his committee meetings. We both knew that none of the loans was ever likely to be returned. If he had an office of his own, it must have been about the ANC’s only asset.
It is easy to understand why so many party members regarded the ANC either as irrelevant or as a potential handicap in the struggle. It required real political insight to see in this enfeebled organisation the once and future representative of the nation. The party, to its credit, had that insight. It had to fight a consistent campaign inside its own ranks to convince the sceptics. In the end, aided by the spectacular renaissance of the ANC membership in the late 1940s, the objections were laid to rest once and for all.
Although the party and the mass movements were moving boldly out into the public arena – or perhaps because they were – harassment by police and fascist irregulars carried on. The right to speak and organise was always under threat, and the prospect of a state clampdown seemed real enough to move the district committee to defensive preparations. It decided to establish a clandestine printing press, just in case.
Someone in the upper echelons discreetly bought a machine known as a ‘Multilith’ and a small group, which included Hilda and me, was given responsibility for it. The apparatus looked simple enough. It turned out to be fiendishly difficult. Hand-set type had to be composed letter by letter and locked into a drum. Sheets of paper had to be fed in individually by hand, strictly synchronised with the hand-rotated drum – a trick calling for the same knack as rubbing one’s stomach in a circular pattern with one hand while patting the top of one’s head with the other. Its action was heavy. We never managed to get the thing moving at much more than a crawl, and even at that speed it made enough noise to wake the dead.
We found a secluded house to let in an acre of overgrown garden in Orchards, far enough away from neighbours to muffle the noise. Hilda and I hired the place and moved in with the Multilith. Our group practised on the machine each evening and mastered it well enough to produce some small party handbills.
Success with what it called ‘the party press’ went to the district committee’s head. We were ordered to print multiple copies of a speech by Soviet foreign minister Molotov which explained the USSR’s armed incursion into Finland. It was, I suppose, an important speech. It had passed almost unreported in the press. It would run to twelve of our pages, though we had only enough type to set two pages. So two pages had to be printed and the type recovered before we could do any more. We were into a long job, and stuck at it determinedly, while the war rolled on faster than our Multilith. At last we had the whole thing printed except the cover page and its title in bold: THE SOVIET UNION MAINTAINS NEUTRALITY! We spent nights churning away at the handle and watching the words flash past interminably: ‘The Soviet union maintains neutrality … maintains neutrality … maintains neutrality.’ Only it did not. Just as we reached the end of our print run Hitler’s armies blasted their way across the Soviet border and the Soviet Union was fighting for its life. June 22, 1941, and neutrality was dead. So was the first and only pamphlet from our secret press, which was mothballed and disappeared from sight. Hilda and I abandoned the cottage retreat and returned to ordinary living.
By this time party membership in Johannesburg had grown to around three hundred, rooted in the trade unions and the national liberation movements. The Pretoria branch had grown into a separate district and new branches had been established in several Rand mining towns. Fraternal relations had been established with Lekgotla la Bafo, a radical peasant movement in Basutoland led by the remarkable brothers Maphutseng and Josiel Lefela and with small communist sects in Mozambique and Southern Rhodesia.
The internecine schisms of the 1930s and the strife which had dictated the removal of party headquarters to Cape Town were things of the past. Johannesburg was the industrial and commercial heart of the country. The resurgence of national liberation movements and trade unions made it also the political heart. The siting of party headquarters in Cape Town had always been an anomaly, dictated solely by the need to restore party stability and unity. The geographical and political distance between the Cape Peninsula and the rest of the country remained. The Peninsula was uniquely different. It was the only part of the country where Africans were a minority, and thus where the CC would be insulated from the gale of political growth and change which was blowing up among the black majority everywhere else.
When the move to Cape Town had taken place it had not been intended to be permanent. By 1941 there was general agreement that the time had come to prepare to move our headquarters back to the political centre of the country. Two members of the Johannesburg district committee – Harmel and Lewitton – were seconded to Cape Town to learn the CC ropes and provide for continuity when the move back to Johannesburg came about. That left Johannesburg without a district secretary. I was elected to the post at the next district conference. It made little difference to my work except to load me down with ex officio attendances at innumerable additional sub-committee meetings and with extra secretarial duties.
From time to time Moses Kotane would arrive in Johannesburg on a political mission. During one of his visits my work at the office was interrupted by a middle-aged white man I did not know. He was small, wrinkled, and wore an ice-cream coloured suit and pince-nez. He wanted to see his ‘old friend Moses Kotane’. Kotane was not in. I told the visitor he would be back shortly and suggested he wait. After a time I took pity on the poor fellow and phoned Kotane to tell him a friend was waiting for him. Kotane was just leaving Dadoo’s home less than half a mile away. A few minutes later he stepped into the office, and stopped as though pole-axed. His little ‘friend’ stood up and said: ‘Hello, Mr Kotane. I have a warrant for your arrest!’ He was from the Special Branch, Cape Town, and marched Kotane off in a state of shock.
I was as shocked as he was – by my own naivety. We started an immediate campaign of protest, but Kotane remained locked up for some weeks on allegations of incitement, before being released without charge. Afterwards he made black jokes about it, but never held any grudge against me. I had earned myself a niche of sorts in history as the only party official who ever shopped his own general secretary … and got away with it.
Kotane and I got on quite well. He was a man who spoke his mind bluntly and many people found his manner abrasive, intimidating, or sometimes just downright rude. For that reason he was not always popular, but he was our best-known public figure and much respected in the party and beyond. He was also a member of the ANC National Executive and one of the founders of the Council of Non-European Trade Unions. His status in the movement was built on a solid base of incorruptibility and personal integrity, combined with an independent mind, plain speaking and remarkable political acumen. There was no sensible reason for his sudden arrest, it was a clumsy blunder.
At the time there was growing pro-Japanese sentiment in the black community, based on Japan’s sweeping victories in the Far East. The country’s military triumphs were being widely interpreted in black political circles as the ascendancy of the non-white people over white imperial power, and thus a harbinger of South Africa’s coming liberation.
The party was the only organisation challenging this simplistic thesis head on. Kotane had been in the forefront of that challenge. He had attacked the myth from many public platforms and had written a party critique of Japanese fascism, published under the title ‘Japan: Friend or Foe?’ His arrest created widespread protest, not just from the party, but from other pro-war and establishment circles. The charge was dropped within weeks by order of the Minister of Justice, Dr Colin Steyn, and he was released – a sign of how the political climate had changed since the campaign only two years before for the release of Dadoo and Seedat.
As we saw it, the character of the war was also changing, which accounts in some measure for our open campaigning against the pro-Japanese camp around us. To some, that stance, coupled with our persistent critique of the anti-democratic and racist actions of the Smuts government, appeared to have us facing both ways at once. It was a tricky balancing act. But it was indicative of a policy in transition. A changing world was calling into question our overall characterisation of the war. It might once have been correct, but was it ever adequate? I think now that it had always been too simplistic. It dealt only with the predominant and overall character of the war and skated over the contradictory and complex aspects.
From the beginning there had been genuinely anti-fascist struggles and localised struggles for democracy or national independence mixed up in the imperial struggle. As the war went on, these struggles were gathering importance in the overall equation. Genuinely popular struggles were taking centre stage in almost every Nazi-occupied country, moving the centre of gravity from imperialist war towards people’s war. We were responding to that shift, instinctively, and almost certainly too slowly, because we were so far from the scene. But refugees, partisans and resistance fighters from some of the people’s struggles were beginning to arrive among us, along with soldiers bringing new ideas and attitudes from the war fronts in East and North Africa. We were being made to appreciate that the character of the war – like everything else – was subject to change. And that our policies needed to change to keep in touch.
Servicemen were returning to South Africa on leave or to regroup after the battles in the Western Desert. Men in army uniform would drop in to the party office for an argument or a discussion, among them Jack Hodgson, in blue army hospital fatigues. He was about my age, but gaunt and hollow cheeked, as though all flesh had melted off his bones. He had a slight stutter as his thoughts raced ahead of his tongue. He had served in the Western Desert with an irregular armoured car unit known as the Desert Rats, roving behind the enemy lines, hitting and running wherever opportunity offered. It had left him with seemingly incurable stomach ulcers. Army medics had tried every cure they could think of – surgery, psychiatry, drip feeds, drugs. Nothing had worked. He was waiting for an army medical board to decide about his future.
Jack lacked the temperament for waiting. Convalescence in hospital was driving him mad. He was looking for some useful activity in the party. He had learnt something about communism when he had worked on the Northern Rhodesian copper mines during the great depression of the 1930s. An expatriate British miner, Frank Maybank, had introduced him to socialist ideas and Marxism. They were both militant members of the Mine Workers’ Union.
Soon after the outbreak of war, and together with another South African, Chris Meyer, they had been prominent in a strike of the white miners. Northern Rhodesia’s Prime Minister, a Labour man and former railway worker, Sir Roy Welensky, who Jack referred to as ‘that fucking Labour baron’, had imposed martial law. Maybank, Hodgson and Meyer were all declared to be personae non gratae and deported back to their home countries. Jack had joined the army.
I took an instant liking to him. His family was sharing a small Bellevue house with the Meyers and an army of children. We struck up a close friendship which lasted, in South Africa and in exile in Britain, until the end of his life. He was an unassuming man with no personal ambitions, utterly unshakeable in his political convictions and incurably optimistic about the future despite the ill health which dogged him to the end of his life.
At that time not much was known in South Africa about an organisation which had started among the soldiers ‘up North’, calling itself the Springbok Legion. Jack provided the facts. It had started as a type of soldiers’ trade union concerned with conditions of army service, the welfare of dependants and the provisions for ex-servicemen after the war and had been at pains to avoid possible accusations of ‘conduct prejudicial to good military order and discipline’.
The South African army was not a likely breeding ground for such a body. Most of the ordinary soldiers had joined the army too young to have been trade unionists before. They were all volunteers. Their service conditions were neither as harsh nor as repressive as those of many conscript forces, and their family backgrounds were generally conservative or thoroughly reactionary. Army service abroad had changed their ideas and radicalised them.
In Egypt they had had some contact with the radicalism which was spreading in the ranks of the British and other armies and, with a regular political forum functioning in Cairo and known as the Soldiers’ Parliament. Among the ‘Parliament’s’ founders were British serviceman Leo Abse, later to become a distinguished Labour MP; James Klugman, one of the British CP’s leading Marxist theoreticians and Basil Davidson, the British ‘Special Operations Executive’ liaison man with Tito’s partisans and later populariser of Africa’s lost history.
The Soldiers’ Parliament’s debates on the shape of a possible brave new post-war world had helped broaden the South African minds and revive faded folk memories of a classless (white) South African frontier democratism.
The Springbok Legion was an idea whose time had come. Among its founders was Jock Isacowitz, who had received an introduction to Marxism with me from Kurt Jonas at Wits University. He had returned from ‘up North’ with the rank of sergeant major and the Springbok Legion as his inspiration.
He was a powerful public speaker who travelled in uniform from one public meeting to another, introducing the Springbok Legion to South Africa. A packed meeting with a white audience in the Johannesburg City Hall started funds and pledges of support rolling in; the legion began recruiting black servicemen from segregated black camps and units inside the country and started building a ‘Home Front League’ for soldiers’ dependants and ex-servicemen of earlier wars. It also started a lively newspaper called Fighting Talk, which circulated quite widely in the army camps at home and abroad.
Jack Hodgson was discharged from the army on medical grounds and pensioned. He became the national secretary of the legion, with an office in Johannesburg. The legion’s foremost fundraiser was a former army nurse, Rica Gampel, whom he later married.17 The legion was fast becoming a force to be reckoned with. Most of its members in uniform were cutting their political teeth in the organisation and developing their first flush of political consciousness, which brought a number of them into the ranks of the Communist Party.
The war was also casting up on South African shores many refugees fresh from political struggles in Europe, particularly Holland, Yugoslavia and Greece. Between them, these diverse groups were loosing a fresh wind in the ranks of the party. Those who came our way were generally very left-wing, very militant and fired with the partisan spirit. Among them were twenty or more veterans of the anti-Nazi resistance in Greece, members of the Greek Seaman’s Union and partisan fighters who had escaped when their country fell to the Germans. At least one of them had been sentenced to death in Greece in absentia. Most of them spoke poor English, so when they joined the party en bloc it was decided to form them into a special branch of their own. Shepherding them became one of my tasks as secretary.
They were lovely people, wonderfully untamed spirits with an irrepressible partisan enthusiasm, but temperamentally different from most of our party members. Right from the start I sensed that they found us disappointingly mild and legalistic, not at all what they thought communists ought to be.
Our Greek comrades all found jobs at the Van der Bijl steelworks in Vereeniging – just how, I never discovered. Not long afterwards a dispute erupted between the white workers and the company, in which they were all deeply involved, possibly even having created it. The company fired them all. They claimed they had been victimised simply for exercising their union rights, which was probably true.
Through a leak of information from the company office they learned that they had been blacklisted and their names sent out in a ‘do-not-employ’ warning to other employers in the area. They brought their troubles to the party office. I could not see that the party could do much about it, so suggested that they take it up with the steelworkers’ trade union. They agreed, but without visible enthusiasm, and decided instead to lay hands on the blacklisting letter and make it public. One of them arranged to get himself locked into the plant office for the night. He searched the files until he found the letter and removed it. When they reported in triumph on their coup, I tried to explain that, proud as we were of their initiative, it was not quite our style. We were still battling to prove that we were a legitimate political organisation and not a criminal conspiracy. The last thing we needed was to be accused of the theft of company documents. Once again I urged them to try and involve the union and the Trades and Labour Council. Again they went away unenthusiastic.
I do not remember how things went after that, except that they never got their jobs back at Van der Bijl and found work elsewhere.
We suggested that they give some thought to ways of drawing the sizeable local Greek community into progressive politics. For this they showed some enthusiasm, and went at it Greek style. Within weeks they had either founded or resurrected a body called the Pan-Hellenic Progressive Union. It gave them a forum from which to vent their contempt for their Queen Frederica, who was in South Africa as the special refugee guest of General Smuts. To them, she was the deeply hated, unacceptable face of the Greek ruling class which had betrayed its people to the Nazis.
The next time they came to my office they brought the first issue of a new Pan-Hellenic Progressive Union newspaper. They were triumphant and we shook hands in congratulation. It was printed in Greek. I had no idea of the contents, I could only read the subheading below the masthead, which used the Latin alphabet: ‘Organ of the Communist Fraction of the Pan-Hellenic Progressive Union’. Once again I had to explain that this was not quite our style. We had abandoned the Bolshevik practice of forming ‘fractions’ in other organisations and were working to win support through open debate and persuasion, not secret caucuses or ‘fractions’. Total disbelief and incomprehension. That had never been the way of the party in Greece.
I admired their spirit. While we were fighting for a legitimate foothold in the political arena they were, in spirit, fighting a war for patria and freedom. Our ideals were in tune but our tactics were out of sync Nevertheless, they stayed loyally with us, despite their disappointments. They were revolutionary revolutionaries in a way we were not. I do not think they learnt anything much from us; we certainly had a lot to learn from them.
When they did go home when the tide of war had turned and Greek partisans were once again armed and fighting for the liberation of their homeland, our Greek comrades left as suddenly and as secretly as they had arrived, to rejoin their revolution, no doubt in their own exuberant style.
They were the liveliest of our immigrant groups. There were also Hollanders, equally bitter about their royals, who had abandoned the people when the Nazis came. And Yugoslavs, fiercely critical of the aid reaching General Mihailovich and his fascists from the West. Together their presence helped us to reappraise our characterisation of the war and to give proper weight to the spreading popular anti-fascist struggles encompassed in it.
The German attack on the USSR in June 1941 finally tilted the balance and changed our political landscape. The ‘Soviet menace’ turned instantly to our Soviet ally, creating a new climate in which communism could come in from the cold, even in South Africa. It was as though the bars of a cage had fallen away. For the first time we could throw off the mantle of outcasts and operate in every political field with the same freedom as any other party.
We were forced to confront questions which had seemed scarcely relevant before. Should we be entering racially-based and discriminatory election contests? Why stay away from white elections and yet take part in black elections for the Natives’ Representative Council and township advisory boards? What purpose, if any, was served by such token institutions which had no meaningful power but still gave an illusion of self-rule?
Many new possibilities were opening up for us. We could enter elections we had never ventured to enter before, even those we knew we were unlikely to win. In ‘white’ elections our non-racial policies would still tell against us and in black elections our opposition to tribalism and outworn custom would have a similar effect. We decided to campaign – and usually lost, but we were making a new mark.
In Hillbrow-Berea in Johannesburg Hilda won election to the city council. In the Cape Peninsula, where there were still some coloured voters on the electoral rolls, party candidates won council seats, and a lone seat as ‘native representative’ on the provincial council.
We were breaking new ground everywhere and, for the first time, were challenging the nationalist monopoly of Afrikaner support and starting to recruit white artisans from the building and mining industries. At meetings in white areas we were drawing large audiences – on one memorable occasion two thousand people filled the Johannesburg City Hall and donated some two thousand pounds to the party coffers in response to Hilda’s appeal.
All other sectors of the radical movement were also racing ahead. An organising drive among black miners, initiated by the ANC and headed by J B Marks, brought into being a new African Mine Workers’ Union, which cracked the country’s hardest anti-union barrier and penetrated the compounds housing 340 000 black workers. Black miners’ wages set the baseline for all other industrial wages. The new union was positioning itself for a direct challenge to that base and to the whole structure of indentured labour and below-subsistence wages.
The ANC was also forging ahead under the modernising presidency of Dr A B Xuma and a new constitution. Branches were growing everywhere, many in previously untapped rural areas. A formal pact between Dr Xuma and Dr Dadoo had raised co-operation between the African and Indian congresses into a standing alliance.
Moves at the annual ANC National Conferences to debar communists from membership died away and communists like Kotane and Mofutsanyana on the NEC were joined by many others at provincial levels, including J B Marks, David Bopape, Dan Tloome and Duma Nokwe on the Transvaal Provincial Committee.
These were times of exciting all-round growth for the whole movement but I was growing ever more restless in the role of a party official. The longer I held that office the more frustrating I found the great black-white divide which we could not bridge. As district secretary I was supposedly as much the representative of the black members as the whites. But the ingrained separation forced upon us by the apartheid of life and of language outside belied that position.
When I visited branches in the black townships, I still came as an outside visitor or an official. Only within the apparatus of party administration, in its committees and sub-committees, did I truly feel that I was accepted as an equal among equals. Elsewhere, at the general membership and branch levels, apartheid society imposed its divides and inequalities.
As our attitudes to the war shifted I became ever more convinced that I should be in the army rather than the party office. The party’s slow response to the changing international situation strengthened that conviction. The Springbok Legion experience had proved that military service did not exclude overt radical political activity, and left me feeling that I was losing touch with and becoming alienated from my connections with the white middle class even though, in exchange, I was enjoying an acceptance and rapport in the black community which I could not have earned anywhere else.
I knew that in many ways I was an unsuitable choice for the post of district secretary. My personality was not right for it. I was capable enough for the purely administrative tasks, the paper work and the committees. I could ‘make the trains run on time’. But those were not the essentials. The post called above all else for someone to inspire, galvanise and organise people. That is not in my nature; I lack the easy rapport with people, the outgoing personality and the oratory.
For some time I saw myself as eminently replaceable and applied several times to be released in order to join the army. All my applications had been turned down by the district committee. The party, it had been said, was desperately short of safe and experienced hands, while the army could obviously manage without me.
All of which was true. But even here the balance was shifting. Our membership had grown much larger and more stable and united. More hands were becoming available. Harmel, who had been secretary before me, had returned from secondment to the CC in Cape Town and could easily take up the post again. The committee could no longer claim that I was an irreplaceable cog in the machine.
I applied once again to be released and some time in 1942 the committee finally agreed. I resigned as district secretary and became a gunner in the South African artillery.
