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3
Incarceration, Exile and Homecoming, c.1960–c.1991
In 1961, the ANC was declared a banned organisation. Many of its leaders were arrested; others had to go underground or flee the country for Lusaka, London and other parts of the world sympathetic to their cause. The years that followed required a whosesale reorganistion of the movement in a difficult global context dominated by Cold War considerations. The West provided little support for the ANC, while offering considerable financial and political support to the apartheid regime. The role of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in tipping off the South African authorites about Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts, which led to his arrest near Howick, Natal, in August 1962, has been well documented. The US Consul in Durban, Donald Rickard, was the CIA operative who provided the information. The arrest had the effect of seriously setting back the struggle against the apartheid regime (Garcia 2016: n.d.). In London, Oliver Tambo secured a base for the ANC, from which it could begin the massive task of raising funds, developing new political strategies and growing international support under Cold War conditions. And in Lusaka, the ANC began, with limited resources, to establish a rudimentary living and working base, as well as the elaborate machinery and structures, to wage the military and propaganda campaign against the apartheid state (Macmillan 2013). In all this, the role of its (acting) president, Tambo, loomed large. But we begin this chapter on an island within view of Cape Town’s Table Mountain, which used to be a leper colony and is today one of the wonders of the new world.
ROBBEN ISLAND
The winter of 1964 on Robben Island, when Mandela and six other Rivonia prisoners arrived there, was the coldest that anyone could remember. So fierce were the Atlantic winds sweeping across the island that prisoners working in the quarries were numbed to the bone, hardly able to raise their picks … [The cell of the man who would forever be remembered as the world’s most famous prisoner] was so cold he slept fully dressed in prison garb. Outside the cell was fixed a white card giving his name and identification number: 466/64 (Meredith 1997: 281).
While robust, organised discussions occurred on matters of political economy and strategies of political liberation, very little of what we could describe as economic and social policy debates occurred within ANC or other circles on Robben Island. Here, as compared to the more policy-oriented, evidential and analytical chapters that follow, we can only offer some anecdotal and personalised glimpses into issues that are tangentially linked to economics and social policy. This is partly because, as Pallo Jordan has noted (see chapter 1), little such policy debate took place on the Island for understandable reasons, but also because so few reliable or consistent sources exist about those aspects of life on Robben Island. Ahmed Kathrada and Andrew Mlangeni (among the most senior ANC leaders who were imprisoned on the island from the mid-1960s), whom we interviewed for this study, confirm these impressions obtained from the secondary literature.
Education and economics on the Island
Robben Island lies off the coast of Cape Town and is the site where political prisoners were incarcerated by the National Party government. It was often referred to as ‘the university’ because a lot of learning took place there. Less well-educated prisoners took high school courses through Rapid Results College, and more formally educated comrades registered for degrees and diplomas at the University of South Africa (Unisa) – both were correspondence-based institutions. Mandela and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) leader Robert Smangiliso Sobukwe both studied at the University of London by correspondence, the latter for a degree in economics (Pogrund 1990: 195). One of the biggest problems faced by prisoners in relation to their studies was the restriction and censorship of books and other study material. All books bearing in the title the words Marx, Marxism, Lenin, Leninism, Russia, China, Cuba, socialism, communism, revolution, civil war, violence, Africa, anti-apartheid and all books of any kind written by black authors were routinely banned. Although most academic journals were also subject to draconian censorship, the South African Journal of Economics and African Studies were not proscribed. Most issues of the Financial Mail were stopped; the few let through were extensively redacted, apart from the advertisements. The British Economist somehow got through but only in a mutilated state until it, too, was banned in 1968. Farmer’s Weekly, Huisgenoot, Readers Digest, South African Panorama and Lantern were allowed in, although often heavily censored (Alexander 1994: 60–65).
Around 1966, Sobukwe was allowed to read the British economics magazine Economica, which had suddenly and without explanation been made available to him (Pogrund 1990: 241). Later, when formal studying was allowed, Sobukwe read, among other ‘heavyweight titles’ (as Benjamin Pogrund puts it), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (presumably by Joseph Schumpeter). Sobukwe comments, ‘I never dreamt I would come to enjoy Economics like this … [though] some articles, while interesting, contain so much maths that they leave huge gaps in my understanding’ (Pogrund 1990: 250).
Few would contest the view that Govan Mbeki was the most educated and well-read of the Robben Island prisoners in matters related to the study of economics. We rely mainly here on Colin Bundy’s (2012) excellent biography of Mbeki. Mbeki took formal courses in business economics through correspondence study at Unisa and other tertiary institutions; he successfully read for an Honours degree in economics and began coursework towards a Master’s in economics. His essays, some for formal study, were many and varied and showed a highly sophisticated grasp of both economic theory and economic history. His three-part essay on ‘The Rise and Growth of Afrikaner Capital’ demonstrates his skills as an analyst of the economics and politics of the growth of this racially defined fraction of South African capital; significantly, it predates Dan O’Meara’s (1983) classic study of the same subject (Volkskapitalisme) by two years. Mbeki also wrote a theoretical essay entitled ‘Notes on the Business Cycle, Unemployment, Inflation and Gold’, making the point that Afrikaner economists favoured a certain amount of inflation for economic growth, as rising prices would lead to rising profits and business development. He wrote an insightful essay entitled ‘Economic History: South Africa’ as well as one on a subject once again very topical in South Africa today, entitled ‘Monopoly Capitalism in South Africa: Its Role and Extent’. One final example of the essays he wrote was entitled ‘Movements in African Real Wages: 1939–1969’ (Mbeki 2015).
Given the time, context and prevailing restrictions, it is not surprising that Mbeki did not turn his undoubted intellect to matters of economic policy. Nevertheless, his work suggests that he understood the Freedom Charter as a policy document of the National Liberation Movement, and not just as a political programme. Among other arguments Mbeki made was one against the proposition that the Freedom Charter would permit a flowering of African capitalists, making a case instead of the Freedom Charter as a vision of a ‘national democratic republic’ and as a ‘transitional phase towards a socialist society’ (Mbeki 2015: 37). We learn from Bundy’s afterword to the book that Mbeki settled for the ‘modest revolution’ of 1994 and voiced no public criticism of the neo-liberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution programme, championed by his son, Thabo (Mbeki 2015: afterword).
Despite restrictions on reading, there were often robust and sometimes tense debates and clashes among ANC comrades over a range of political and social issues, some of which have only come to light after 1990. Mandela and Govan Mbeki clashed over the latter’s attempts to get the ANC to mobilise and organise to link worker and peasant struggle, as well as over Mandela’s apparent willingness to open talks with Bantustan leaders.
Although both men have denied it, Govan Mbeki’s relationship with Mandela was particularly complicated. They disagreed strongly over Operation Mayibuye – the swashbuckling programme for armed insurrection which Mbeki wrote with Joe Slovo in the early 1960s – and then, in prison, over Mandela’s willingness to entertain alliances with Bantustan collaborators. So serious was the conflict between the two men at one point that, in 1975, a group of nine ANC leaders on Robben Island convened to try to find a solution; a report smuggled out to ANC leadership in Lusaka contended that ‘the two who represented polar opposites in attitudes and opinions were Madiba and Govan’ (ANC 2001: n.p.).
In the midst of such titanic clashes over political tactics and strategy, some further evidence of matters related to economic and social issues could be found. Thus, for example, in Long Walk to Freedom Mandela remarks:
For a number of years, I taught a course in political economy. In it, I attempted to trace the evolution of economic man from the earliest times up to the present, sketching out the path from ancient communal societies to feudalism to capitalism and socialism. I am by no means a scholar and not much of a teacher, and I would generally prefer to be asked questions than to lecture. My approach was not ideological, but it was biased in favour of socialism, which I saw as the most advanced stage of economic life then evolved by man (Mandela 1994d: 455).
This sense that socialism was the end goal of the struggle, as expressed here by Mandela, was shared by most of the leadership of the anti-colonial struggle in Africa and Asia in the post-war era. Largely based on a broad allegiance to the communist ideology of the Second International and Third International, this approach was rarely debated. The nature of the economic transformation was mostly taken as obvious, flowing from the expected collapse of capitalism under its inherent contradictions and a more or less seamless transition to socialism. ANC comrades on Robben Island, in South Africa generally and in exile benefited from reading Maurice Cornforth, Maurice Dobb, George Padmore and Eric Williams, among others, writers whose works revolved around anti-colonial and anti-segregationist struggles in various parts of the world (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).1 As Mac Maharaj observes:
I can only speak from my recollection of what the kinds of issues were that we were living in the 50s when I became active, and the 60s. And I think that the mood in the 1950s, not only in the left movement but in the broad anti-colonial movement, was that the question of the transformation of society, particularly the economic transformation, had certain easy answers. And those easy answers were largely based on the experience of the Second and Third Internationals. Even the debate from the Fourth International assumed that that transformation is an easy thing to achieve (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).
According to Mlangeni, discussions on the Island among ANC prisoners were ‘based purely on the Freedom Charter’. They seemed largely to be restatements of the intentions of the Freedom Charter and the non-racial society based on equality it sought to create with little attention to the policies, programmes or mechanisms by which this was to be achieved:
We said, if we achieve what is said in the Freedom Charter, we’ll have achieved the kind of South Africa, a society in South Africa that we’d like to see emerge, a society where people are equal … We want the land which was largely owned by white people, to be owned by all the people of South Africa, there must be equal distribution of the land among all the people of South Africa, for example. People must be equal before the law, something which did not happen before, the judiciary, the judges, the magistrates must treat black people the same way they treat white people in court, you must be treated as a human being (Mlangeni interview, 6 October 2015).
Mlangeni revealingly indicates that when the Freedom Charter clause on nationalisation was debated on Robben Island, his original view that it represented a socialist proposal was disavowed during the discussion.
At first I also had the same view that nationalisation of the mineral resources, etc., is socialism but further discussions, more discussions on the Island proved to us that no, it doesn’t mean that we are introducing socialism in South Africa. It simply means that banks and mineral resources must be shared among those who work it; it doesn’t mean introducing socialism … I also had that interpretation that it meant that the resources must be shared among the people of South Africa (Mlangeni interview, 6 October 2015).
It is a moot point whether discussions of the Freedom Charter on the Island, in which Mandela was a key figure, opened up or closed down the powerful social democratic impetus in the thinking of Albert Luthuli over the period of the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, as discussed in chapter 2. It would seem from the available evidence (including from Long Walk to Freedom) that Mandela was politically cautious and privileged the multi-class alliance politics of the ANC in the context of the imperatives of national liberation. Luthuli went much further to engage with the implications of the social democratic path he advocated, unequivocally locating a central role for labour in such a social democratic agenda of social compacting.
Of course, the conditions for any such open debate among comrades on Robben Island were very constrained for many obvious reasons. Among other factors were that the ANC leadership (the High Organ) was physically separated from other political prisoners and because of the limitations of prison life in South Africa under grand apartheid (Kathrada interview, 9 October 2015). This is how Maharaj describes the conditions:
Look at it from the point of view of the prisoners in those circumstances. I left in 1976; by 1978 they had stopped taking them to the quarry to work. You’re now roaming around in the single cells fairly freely, you can play sports, you’ve got a dining room, you can sit down and discuss and slowly more newspapers are becoming available, but that’s only what you’re getting. So, your information is extremely patchy. It is not sufficient to make any solid study of any problem. There is no in-depth debate, there is no continuity in your reading (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).
‘Inqindi and Marxism’
Kathrada, who admitted to knowing little about economics, pointed out that little or no economic or social policy debates occurred on Robben Island in the first ten to twelve years after 1964. The Freedom Charter, including its economic clauses as approved by the ANC in 1956, was accepted without question. However, in the later 1970s, after the Soweto student protests, many young ANC cadres arrived on the Island. After they fled South Africa, they had been trained in countries such as the German Democratic Republic. These young comrades contributed to a revival in discussions about both political strategy and (to some extent and indirectly) economic policy. The meaning and value of the Freedom Charter in changing circumstances became a subject of intense debate (Kathrada interview, 9 October 2015).
It seems that the coming to power of ‘Marxist’ parties in both Angola and Mozambique in the mid-1970s was also a powerful lever to reopen these debates. While the two-stage theory of revolution and internal colonialism was not directly raised, the question that arose was: if the Angolans and Mozambicans could take the great leap from essentially peasant societies to Marxism-Leninism, why not South Africa? Could South Africa, too, not take one big step to socialism? (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).
It was in that context that the document that came to be called ‘Inqindi and Marxism’ was drafted. Inqindi is an isiZulu and isiXhosa word meaning ‘fist’. Little has been written about this milestone document that was produced and circulated on Robben Island after 1978. It is not even certain who wrote the first draft, or who edited it. Kathrada tells us that he acted as something of a go-between among prisoners in the drafting of the document (Kathrada interview, 9 October 2015).
According to Kathrada, Mandela and his comrades in B section had a first stab at it, and later, after comments were received from comrades in other sections, he was tasked with liaising with as many comrades as he could and writing the final version, incorporating all comments. There were two main aims of producing the document. The first was to encourage all comrades, whether from the ANC or the South African Communist Party (SACP), to study Marxism. The second aim was to remind comrades of the difference between a national struggle and class struggle (Gerhart and Glaser 2010: 492–497). The core of the arguments in ‘Inqindi’ relate to the role of the working class in the struggle, and from there about whether the struggle was for a nationalist or a socialist future. There was a debate about the use and meaning of the phrases such as a ‘national bourgeoisie’, ‘national democracy’ and ‘bourgeois democratic republic’, which were used in drafts.
For us here it is important to realise that one element of the debate was to understand the economic basis of class conflict through ‘scientific knowledge’. However, there was no elaboration on this point and we are no wiser from studying the document about how far forward it took the understanding about the nature and character of the struggle. On one point, however, it is clearer and more interesting: ‘Unlike Marxism which guides a CP [communist party] before and after the taking of power, the role of African nationalism is limited to the pre-liberation phase of the struggle. It cannot be used to reshape society after liberation, nor for the purpose of developing a new mode of production different from capitalism or socialism, as some political organisations claim’ (Gerhart and Glaser 2010: 497).
In the end, it could only be claimed that the document asserts the dynamic nature and flexibility of the Freedom Charter and its value to the struggle over two decades after Kliptown – in short, a ‘progressive nationalism’ (Gerhart and Glaser 2010: 497).2
Maharaj, who was no longer in prison when ‘Inqindi’ was being drafted, recalls the mood and thinking around 1978:
But I know a number of comrades, who were the leading voices in our internal discussions on the Island, raised the question on whether the time had not arrived for the ANC and the Congress movement to proclaim its objective of socialism. Because we were looking at what was happening in Angola and Mozambique with a sense of excitement … So, whatever was happening was in a very strange way being taken and put into a theoretical box that you created … You were not looking (sic) that the reality was changing your theoretical outlook … So, when I got out of prison [1976] and I got to Mozambique, I was there for just a few days, but I remember my shock when I learned that the barber shops had become nationalised. And I said, my God, is this what I was saying is a great development, right, what is this about? (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).
In summary, within the limits of the strict censorship of literature, some reading around questions of the economy took place but these readings and discussion did not lead to any direct consideration of economic or social policy. Some debates over the Freedom Charter’s clauses did occur but there appears to have been consensus about the correctness of the Freedom Charter’s broad-church approach. The question of whether a direct (one-stage) struggle for a socialist goal should be waged only comes up after the arrival on Robben Island of the young post-Soweto generation of prisoners. ‘Inqindi’ represents an attempt to come to grips with their concerns, but in the end it does not resolve the matter one way or the other.
IN EXILE: LUSAKA, THE ECONOMICS UNIT AND THE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC PLANNING
The nature of life in exile
Physically, it’s like being in South Africa again. I feel at home and elated. The climate is mild, unlike the enervating humidity of Dar es Salaam and Luanda … jacarandas are in bloom. Then there are the images: Asian shops with Coca-Cola and Vaseline adverts in so-called ‘second class’ business districts; the crowded townships abuzz with hawkers selling everything from boot polish to bananas and single cigarettes; the suburban houses with ‘Beware of the Dogs’ signs; walls with jagged glass along the tops to deter ‘kabalalas’ (burglars); South African railway wagons with the SAR–SAS logo in English and Afrikaans; school kids in neat European-style uniforms … (Kasrils in Macmillan 2013: 6–7).
Hugh Macmillan also reminds us, however, that ‘any study of the ANC in exile has to begin by stressing the homesickness, loneliness, pain, alienation, sense of loss and the waste of energy and time that were essential features of life for most exiles and for much of the time’ (2013: 1). There can be no doubting this sense of pain and loss.
The ‘semi-detached member of the ANC’, Ez’kia Mphahlele, observed in an interview:
When I was abroad I felt that the ANC in exile was quite something else. The leaders were there all right, but the things that they were doing just didn’t seem to me to be important at all. Trivialities like attending conferences of one kind or another, tearing across the world, you know, and getting international money. Also, tribalism was pretty rampant in the exile movement. Xhosa against Zulu against Sotho. I kept saying to myself: back home there had been so much cohesion among us. I mean nobody ever bothered about these ethnic groupings at all. But in exile, man, the thing just emerged in bold relief (in Macmillan 2013: 3–4).
A second contextual point to note concerns the well-documented narratives of corruption, greed and personal wealth accumulation that pervaded the ANC in Lusaka, at the expense of the movement’s foot soldiers. There are accounts of smuggling donated goods across borders for private gain, of foreign funds being diverted to buy luxurious cars for top ANC officials and more. Terry Bell reminds us: ‘Hani and six of his comrades penned a memorandum complaining of the nepotism, rot and corruption in the ANC after the shambles of the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns of 1967/8. For Hani’s pains a hearing was held, and he was sentenced to death, a sentence later overturned by then acting ANC president OR Tambo. Hani left the ANC for a time before being persuaded to return’ (Bell 2016: n.p.).
One final point on the Lusaka context was made by Jeremy Cronin, and that relates to the splits and divisions among the ANC membership based there:
I was now in the underground structures in Cape Town, in the UDF [United Democratic Front], and from the underground structure we sent out a request to Lusaka through complicated couriers and all kinds of dangerous things for ourselves and the couriers, what to do about one of the trade unions. I think it was in the clothing sector. We were looking for advice. And eventually we did not get a response … So eventually we just did what we, through our native intelligence, we could see needed to be done. And then about a year later, through again a complicated channel a thing came back telling us to do something which completely misunderstood the reality … Remember, in our time, how people would say, Lusaka says,
…
And when I got to Lusaka I realised, okay, this particular grouping, the so-called cabal, they are not aligning to Lusaka’s Mac Maharaj … This particular grouping, they are not aligning to Lusaka’s Chris Hani. But we got a warning a bit from Jack and Ray Simons when they came home, at their famous 1990 UWC [University of the Western Cape] welcoming home, and they said, you guys are kind of getting it wrong here, you know. It is we guys who must kind of learn from you guys (Cronin interview, 14 March 2016).
In summary, the general conditions of exile life in Lusaka do not appear to have been conducive to serious attention to and debate about matters of economic and social policy. Instead, much attention appears to have been directed at other, sometimes more basic, struggles, tensions and divisions within the movement. Yet, evidence does exist that the ANC began more seriously than ever before to consider the establishment of structures to analyse economic conditions and the nature of South African capitalism, and it is to these matters that we now turn our attention.
The Morogoro Conference of 1969
Arguably the most interesting and important statement of the ANC’s stance on ‘economic policy’ before the 1980s, alongside that of the 1962 statement by Luthuli (see chapter 2), is to be found in the 1969 ‘Strategy and Tactics’ document (ANC 1997). The national consultative conference in Morogoro came at a time when the ANC was at a crossroads over several major issues: addressing the memorandum of grievances prepared by Hani and some of his colleagues following the Wankie campaign; palpable tensions between communists and nationalists within the movement; and the debate over the question of admitting Indians, coloureds and whites as full members of the ANC itself. All this was happening at a time when Tambo, who had assumed the ANC leadership in 1967 after Luthuli had died under mysterious circumstances outside Groutville in Natal, was grappling with a number of major strategic matters. For instance, he was trying to establish the ANC’s political footprint and credibility as the leading component of the liberation movement both internationally and within South Africa, while at the same time securing its financial sustainability and its global diplomatic stature.
These issues and the way they were addressed are mainly outside the scope of this book. The 1969 ‘Strategy and Tactics’ document, however, is important for the vision that it developed for the movement going forward, a vision that touched on matters social and economic. In a clear reference to the programme of nationalising the commanding heights of the economy, it stated:
In our country – more than in any other part of the oppressed world – it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not represent even the shadow of liberation.3 Our drive towards national emancipation is therefore in a very real way bound up with economic emancipation (ANC 1997: 17, emphasis added).
While not going all the way to endorse an advance to a communist or socialist future, as does ‘The Road to South African Freedom’, the SACP’s 1962 programme, this is nevertheless very close to that without using those exact words. Thomas Karis and Gail Gerhart make the following comment on this point: ‘Strategy and Tactics essentially reiterated the analysis of the SACP’s program of 1962, that the South African system was a “colonialism of a special type”. These words did not appear in the ANC document, but in virtually identical language, Strategy and Tactics declared that the “main content of the present stage of the South African revolution is the national liberation of … the African people”’ (1997: 36).
While recognising various tendencies within the broad church of the ANC, a more progressive (arguably, left social democratic) policy agenda emerges out of Morogoro’s ‘Strategy and Tactics’ document, and not a narrow African nationalist agenda. Even Stephen Ellis, a fierce critic of the ANC and SACP, has argued that the document ‘clearly reflected the influence of the Communist Party’s manifesto published in 1962 … It marked the ascendancy of the SACP’s theoretical and practical vision of struggle within the ANC’ (2015: 77). Ellis may have meant this in a pejorative and cynical sense, but there is every reason to believe that he was right. ‘Strategy and Tactics’ clearly lays down a strong marker about where the ANC stood at that moment in its history as far as economic emancipation was concerned.
The Economics Unit
In 1980, the ANC in Lusaka approached the Regional Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) for assistance in conducting a socio-economic survey of South Africa. In order not to lose control of the project, the ANC decided to mobilise and organise its own in-house capacity to contribute to and shape the outcomes of the ECA-led survey. In that way, the Economics Unit of the ANC, headquartered in Lusaka, came into being in February 1982. It brought together ‘politicised economists’ from different existing departments, since one of its aims was to support other departments, such as the Treasury, Information and Publicity, Research and the International Department, in their work. More generally, its work was to be focused on ‘interpreting economic issues for the movement and preparing briefings and fact papers for the National Executive Committee of the ANC’ (ANC Lusaka Mission Archives, Box 84, Folder 9).
Pallo Jordan, who was head of ANC Research in Lusaka, informs us that the Unit did not do economic policy work in any direct sense. It was set up to analyse selected aspects of the South African economy, including issues around monopoly capital and South African conglomerates. It commissioned or co-ordinated a variety of projects. Norman Levy, then based in Amsterdam, conducted a skills audit of the African labour force in South Africa. Jordan himself wrote a paper on the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Nafcoc) as part of a project on the African bourgeoisie. Victor Matlou wrote a paper entitled ‘South African Monopoly Capitalism, Social Deprivation and Social Emancipation’ for a Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) conference. Laurence Harris – a leading member of the Economic Research on South Africa (EROSA) group of progressive academic economists in London and a member of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) (see chapter 4) – prepared a paper for the unit on the mixed economy model, but Jordan does not remember Harris presenting the paper in Lusaka (Jordan interview, 4 August 2017).
About 50 such political economists were brought together in the Economics Unit; they were based in both Zambia and Tanzania. Various fields of responsibility were identified and individuals were assigned to these. Thus, for example, Thabo Mbeki (then recently back from his postgraduate studies at the University of Sussex) was responsible for development strategy; Selebano Matlape was delegated to mining; Conny Dlinges and Tony Seedat to industry; Barney Pitso and Jacob Chiloane to agriculture (policy and practice); and Sizakele Sigxashe and [M] Medupe to the financial and monetary system.
Others involved in the work of the Unit from early on, some since its establishment, included Max Sisulu (later its head), former student leader Jeff Marishane and Patrick Magapatona (its long-standing secretary). Thabo Mbeki, Jaya Josie and Neva Makgetla also served in the Unit at various times in the early 1980s.
The academic qualifications of those economists based in Tanzania are provided, while those of economists based in Lusaka are not given. Of the eight based in Tanzania, six are listed as having a Master of Arts in Economics, one a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and one a Bachelor of Arts in Accountancy. It is not stated where they obtained these qualifications.
Neither the Economics Unit nor the later Department of Economic Planning (DEP, discussed below) was really an economic policy unit; rather, they were more study groups on the economy (Sisulu interview, 25 August 2016). Like-minded comrades were invited from the Soviet Union, Cuba and neighbouring African countries to give seminars on their experiences in economic transformation, and the Lusaka comrades travelled to these countries for seminars on a regular basis.
Although Lusaka organised and raised funds for many comrades to study abroad, much of this was in medicine and engineering and not economics. Bheki Langa, who did his PhD in economics in Moscow, was a rare exception. One thing Sisulu recalls was the eagerness of many younger comrades to join MK and fight rather than study. Thandika Mkandawire supports this contention when he makes the point that many of the post-1976 generation who reached Lusaka ‘were relatively ignorant of the struggle and its objectives and had a militarist inclination’ (2005: 134). And they were eager, too, to pursue a leap into socialism without any consideration of the realities of the South African situation. ‘We had to work very hard to try to convince them otherwise,’ Sisulu argues (Interview, 25 August 2016).
When Josie arrived in Lusaka in 1983, the Economics Unit was not very strong at all. Its members included Sindiso Mfenyana, Joe Nhlanhla and Max Sisulu. According to Josie: ‘Thabo was ostensibly the head as the Unit fell into the Department of Information and Publicity. Pallo Jordan was head of Research and as such was an integral part of the Unit. I was deployed as an economic researcher under Pallo in a place called Makeni [a suburb of Lusaka] – that’s where the whole library was – and so on and we had to do research’ (Josie interview, 30 January 2015).
Josie argues that London-based economists and members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Laurence Harris and Ben Fine, were influential figures in the Lusaka debates (such as they were) on economic issues.
Josie also recalls that a meeting on the economy took place in 1985 in Lusaka, where the notion of the mixed economy came to the fore. But he remembers the conference for one other reason as well:
The most significant thing that happened at that 1985 meeting which stands out for me quite clearly was that while we were sitting in that plenary, Pallo or Max who was chairing said, Thabo is coming, and he is bringing some South African from Stellenbosch, a guy called Van der Merwe [likely to be Hendrik van der Merwe]. He came there and talked to all, sitting and looking there and discussing issues, very cynical, very kind of patronising – we got this all covered, guys – you know that kind of attitude, and I sat there. It only later dawned on me, in fact these guys were the forerunners of the negotiations that were taking place, because later on Wimpie [de Klerk] and all these guys came over. In fact, he [Van der Merwe] was part of the delegation with Wimpie that came and he was the economic person (Josie interview, 30 January 2015).
For Josie, it was Hani who had the vision to raise more practical economic policy issues linked to the struggles of ordinary South Africans in the townships as opposed to mouthing this or that theoretical line:
Chris was very seldom in Lusaka, but when he did come he played a very key role, because he was more on the frontline, he was inside the country, he was training people, he was in MK, he was the real revolutionary, and I worked closely with Chris and even with [Joe] Slovo. When Slovo was in London, he would talk to Laurence [Harris] and people like that, but in Zambia I would be the one they would discuss with. You could see Chris’s view. He was not verbose, he was very reflective but he would raise some clear issues, and he was the only one in my view that came across very strongly on the issue of redistribution. Chris Hani was very clear; even Slovo did not raise it as sharply as Chris Hani raised the issue of redistribution and inequality as opposed to just poverty. And for Chris Hani this was one of the key areas that needed to be addressed, because none of the others raised the issue. And I think for many of us who came from the townships, that was a key issue, because we could see what was driving the problems in the townships on the ground, and all indicators that came through were showing that levels of inequality, levels of poverty, education, all those strikes and things, were about inequality (Josie interview, 30 January 2015).
Gail Gerhart and Clive Glaser sum up the Freedom Charter debate and the broad economic stance in the 1980s, on the eve of the many ‘meet the ANC’ gatherings across Africa and Europe, as follows: ‘Had numbers and high position counted, the communists in the NEC [National Executive Committee], who made up at least three-quarters of its members after Kabwe, might have been expected to swing their weight to ensure that the ANC’s vision of a future South Africa conformed to socialist principles. But this did not occur; instead, the ANC’s blueprints emerged with a clear social democratic stamp’ (2010: 150).
In January 1986, a report appeared in the Star newspaper that the South African Nafcoc had held informal discussions with the ANC after it had drafted a business charter of social, economic and political rights and an accompanying action programme. While reluctant to disclose which members of the ANC they met, the Star report notes that Nafcoc had held prior discussions with various members of the Cabinet, including the minister of constitutional planning, Chris Heunis (Star, 22 January 1986). We know that David Willers, the London director of the South Africa Foundation, sent the Federated Chamber of Industries charter to the ANC’s Solly Smith. The ANC in Lusaka received the charter on 6 February 1986. Key aspects of the charter included the following: ‘South Africa must publicly remain committed to market-related policies in an essentially open economy’, and there is a need to ‘implement an integrated programme for growth-oriented adjustment based on supply-side economic considerations’ (ANC Lusaka Mission Archives, Box 126, Folder 60).
It is interesting to note that a major purpose of the Economics Unit was to ensure that the movement had trained economists thinking about the future economic emancipation of a democratic South Africa. ‘Our drive towards national emancipation is therefore in a real way bound up with economic emancipation. Preparations for the attainment of genuine economic independence cannot be postponed until freedom day’ (ANC Lusaka Mission Archives, Box 24, Folder 5).
Sadly, there is no evidence that this noble objective was met, and after 1990 the ANC scrambled to develop such a policy-making capacity.
The Department of Economic Planning
Following its second National Consultative Conference in Kabwe in 1985, the ANC decided to upgrade the Economics Unit by establishing the Department of Economic Planning (DEP). This was done in June 1987. Among those joining the DEP at this time were Bheki Langa, who had just completed his PhD in the Soviet Union. Max Sisulu was appointed the head.
The objectives of the DEP were to develop economic strategy and policy options for an ‘independent South Africa’ based on the ‘aspirations of our people as expressed in the Freedom Charter’ (ANC Lusaka Mission Archives, Box 24, Folder 4). Research on policy and strategy is added for the first time to the rather less ambitious goals set for the Economics Unit. Areas added at this stage were the macroeconomy, energy and power, public finance, the role of women in development, wildlife and tourism, as well as income distribution – all policy areas absent from the list of responsibilities developed for the Economic Unit (ANC Lusaka Mission Archives, Box 24, Folder 4).
The Research Unit of the Department of Information and the DEP had extensive contacts and formal relations with a number of organisations in both the non-governmental organisation and academic sectors in many parts of the world. These included the Economic Commission for Africa (members attended the 14th session in Niamey, Niger, in April 1988), the United Nations Environment Programme (members attended the 1st session of its Governing Council in Nairobi in March 1988) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (two delegates attended the 35th session on debt and development in Geneva in September 1988). Soon it developed a productive relationship with the Department of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, through its contacts with Laurence Harris, who had long been involved in intelligence work for the movement along the Botswana border (Keable 2012). Harris, with later support from Ben Fine and Peter Robbins, established EROSA, which worked closely with the movement in London and Lusaka (see chapter 4). It also worked closely with the Transnational Institute in Holland (ANC Lusaka Mission Archives, Box 24, Folder 4).
From early on in its existence, the DEP was tasked with gathering relevant material from and contacting (sympathetic) progressive economists working within South Africa. The proposal for the DEP’s establishment makes the point that ‘it is important to note that information written inside South Africa will be obtained as much research and economic analysis is going on there which is extremely useful’ (ANC Lusaka Mission Archives, Box 84, Folder 9).
Another of the DEP’s tasks was to build up its internal library in Lusaka, with newspapers ‘from home’ and journals. Among the 20 journals identified for purchase were the South African Journal of Economics, Zimbabwe Journal of Economics, Journal of Southern African Studies, Third World Quarterly, Review of African Political Economy, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Development Economics, Farmer’s Weekly and the Financial Mail. The South African Labour Bulletin (the Economist Intelligence Unit’s journal), Monthly Review (New York), Work in Progress, Codesria’s African Development and the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics were also ordered. All in all, if these were received and subscriptions maintained, a reasonable balance of progressive and mainstream journals were available to the ANC’s researchers in Lusaka (ANC Lusaka Mission Archives, Box 84, Folder 9).
Though our archival research reveals little about the day-to-day work of the DEP in Lusaka, we do learn that the department organised some seminars on the economy in Lusaka and other parts of the world.
In Amsterdam in December 1986, a conference entitled ‘Research Priorities for Socio-Economic Planning in Post-Apartheid South Africa’ was held. At that conference a paper on ‘Income Distribution and Poverty’ was presented by Francis Wilson and Mamphela Ramphele, both senior researchers from the University of Cape Town (UCT). Another paper on South African industrialisation was presented by UCT’s Anthony Black. It is of interest to note that the distinguished proponent of dependency theory, Andre Gunder Frank, was in the audience. In responding to these papers, Frank argued that the ‘South African economic crisis was a direct result of the world economic crisis with internal factors playing a very minor role’. He also argued that ‘redistributive pressures would make a future South Africa less able to compete in the capitalist world market’ (Oliver Tambo Papers, Box 040, Folder 357).
At another one of these workshops, between 14–17 August 1989, at the First In-House Seminar of ANC Economists in Lusaka, a paper by Laurence Harris (1989) entitled ‘The Mixed Economy of a Democratic South Africa’, read by Helena Dolny in his absence, appears to have been much discussed. Harris set out alternative visions of the mix of the private and public sector and suggested that one that leans towards socialism would be most appropriate in South African conditions. He favoured some degree of nationalisation, especially in certain sectors, such as those that are fundamental inputs for industrial development. But he also warned that nationalisation comes with costs. In the end, he argued that the ‘roles of the market, regulation and planning are much more important than the degree of state ownership’ (Harris 1989).
A paper in response to Harris by Vella Pillay, dated 9 October 1989 and penned in London, also addresses these issues. Pillay’s paper distinguishes between the long-term goals of the Freedom Charter and short-term interventions that appear to be left social democratic in nature. The latter include ‘enough food, shelter, social security, medical facilities, unemployment benefits, free and equal education and an improvement in the working conditions and power of workers’. He favoured anti-monopoly and anti-trust policies in respect of the powerful local conglomerates, being fully cognisant of the power of the conglomerates to undermine a democratic state. At the Lusaka in-house seminar, Rob Davies’ paper set out an economic vision of a mixed economy in which there will be a ‘considerable role for private capital’; he also set out a list of immediate goals, such as meeting basic needs and improvements in the conditions of working people (Oliver Tambo Papers, Box 039, Folder 0354). Though these are not policies but ideas put forwarded by qualified and trusted comrades, they do represent core aspects of a left social democratic programme rather than either African nationalism or Soviet-type socialism.
Phineas Malinga informs us that despite some scepticism the ‘question of economic policy had [indeed] received the attention of the broad liberation movement’ (1990: 21). He reminds us that the ANC’s Constitutional Guidelines commissioned by Tambo and approved by the NEC in August 1988 contained a section on the economy. It argued for a state that would ensure ‘that the entire economy serves the interests and well-being of all sections of the population … the economy shall be a mixed one … co-operative forms of economic enterprise, village industries and small-scale family activities shall be supported by the state …’ (Malinga 1990: 22). Yet, Malinga concedes that the Guidelines are ‘more cautious than the Charter about the role of the state in the economy’ (1990: 22), given the very changed economic circumstances all over the world, including in the management of the Soviet economy.
Gerhart and Glaser express this same position, as follows: ‘Without repudiating anything in the 1955 Freedom Charter, the [Constitutional] Guidelines positioned the ANC as a social democratic party strongly protective of individual rights while also committed to “corrective action which guarantees a rapid and irreversible redistribution of wealth and opening up of facilities to all”’ (2010: 181).
It is worth remembering this in the context of the discussion that we have had in chapter 2 over AB Xuma and Albert Luthuli, both ANC presidents, and in what follows in chapter 4, especially the position articulated by Alan Hirsch to explain shifts and changes in the 1990s. Clearly, there were many positions in the spectrum between Soviet-style socialism and petty bourgeois African nationalism that were held by leadership figures in the Congress Alliance over the period of our study. To focus on any one view as representative of that of the ANC as a whole would be a serious mistake, in our judgement.
In July 1989, 115 representatives of the Five Freedoms Forum4 travelled to Lusaka to meet and hold talks with senior ANC leaders. A conference was held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Lusaka from 29 June to 2 July 1989, where a number of important exchanges about the post-apartheid economy took place. The issue of nationalisation and the meaning of a ‘mixed economy’ were among the matters under discussion. There was agreement across the floor about the need for a mixed economy with private-sector and public-sector ownership and control (see chapter 5 on the role of business for more on this). While holding the Freedom Charter line on nationalisation, ANC delegates accepted that under some conditions ‘a premature nationalisation can result in impeding social control by the destruction or downgrading of industry’. The case of Mozambique was cited by the ANC as an example of such ‘premature nationalisation’. Towards the end of the conference, a South African business person, Ronnie Bethlehem, asked if the ANC had a policy position on the floating of the rand and whether the rand would be linked to gold or any specific international currency. It is hard to say if he was being serious or just trying to embarrass the ANC. The ANC responded that it was not able to answer this question because it had to be recognised that ‘a struggle for liberation did not necessarily guarantee experience in issues such as economics’ (Louw 1989: 86). This speaks to the issue of experience, which we raise at various times in this book.
The leadership of the Economics Unit and the DEP in Lusaka may have been involved in many important events and exchanges over policy and strategy during the 1980s, but they were also drawn into some totally mundane and bureaucratic issues that may well have detracted from their core work. Some of the things that senior ANC and DEP members had to deal with were nothing short of mind-boggling. Jordan speaks of these matters as ‘absurd bureaucratic controls’ (Jordan interview, 4 August 2017). Here is one of many examples we unearthed at the University of Fort Hare archives. Late in 1989, a DEP staffer wrote to Henry Makgothi, assistant secretary general of the ANC, requesting leave and support to travel to Harare to marry his fiancée. He was asked by Makgothi to get a written recommendation from his head, Max Sisulu. Sisulu then wrote (somewhat tongue in cheek) to Makgothi as follows:
Since Cde Mandla Tshabalala is an adult he does not need the permission of the Department to get married, but our department, however, wishes to vouch for his good character and honourable intentions. And request the movement to give him and his fiancée every possible support and assistance. The DEP for its part will give Cde Mandla a leave of one month in December, to give him time to prepare for and enjoy his marriage and new status.
In the year of Mass Action for People’s Power!!!
Amandla! Maatla!
(ANC Lusaka Mission Archives, Box 84, Folder 9)
IN EXILE: VELLA PILLAY, ECONOMIC RESEARCH AND THE LONDON COMRADES
Yes, the empire was collapsing: Ghana had become free; Malaysia and [Tanzania] were getting independence. In London there were people from all over the world, little groupings supporting the liberation struggles in their different countries: Nigerians, Kenyans, Tanganyikans, Burmese, Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Indians, South Americans, West Indians, Irish. It was a very cosmopolitan environment, and we were bound by a unity we felt when we met one another. There was a commonality in our struggles, so I didn’t feel lonely, in spite of the insularity of the British (Maharaj in O’Malley 2007: 82–83).5
In a recently published paper, Vishnu Padayachee and John Sender (2018) deal at length with the role that radical economist Vella Pillay played for over half a century in economic policy analysis, both in exile and on his temporary return to South Africa in the early 1990s. While we draw significantly from that paper, we try here to provide a glimpse of policy debates in the years of exile by focusing on developments in London, building the story around the key figure of Pillay. Even his detractors – of which there were many, including in the SACP in the 1960s and some of the ‘neo-liberals’ in the ANC and in academia in the 1990s – would not be able to contest the claim that Pillay was the foremost ANC economist in London from the late 1940s until his return to South Africa in 1991. There were very few, if any, in the movement more qualified and experienced in economic analysis and policy than Pillay. His story is inextricably bound into the narrative of ANC exile politics and economics in the British capital for all those long and difficult decades. In fact, we would contend that to the extent that any significant discussion of economic matters and economic policy for South Africa occurred over this period within exiled ANC circles, Pillay likely would have been central to it.
Pillay was without any doubt a figure of very significant influence in the ANC–SACP in exile. When Oliver Tambo left South Africa in March 1960, he found a house in Muswell Hill, North London, close to the home of Vella and Patsy Pillay, and they struck up a political and family connection that lasted until Tambo’s passing in South Africa in 1993. By that time, Vella had returned to Johannesburg with Patsy to head up the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG) project (see chapter 4). As Ellis notes, ‘Vella Pillay, although rarely mentioned in ANC histories, was one of the main intermediaries between the SACP and Moscow …’ (2015: 40, emphasis added). In the 1950s and early 1960s, Vella and Max Joffe were the leading SACP figures in exile. There may have been a reason for this ‘omission’ as we will see soon. This may, however, be a necessary moment to draw attention to and make a small contribution to correcting this egregious Stalinist-style side-lining from history of such a significant intellectual and senior policy thinker of the South African liberation movement.
The front cover of Ellis’s book on the ANC in exile features a photograph of three key figures sitting around a low table covered in documents and deep in discussion. The occasion is the first visit by South African communists to an official meeting of communist and workers’ parties in Moscow on 3 November 1960. They were Yusuf Dadoo, the chairperson of the SACP since 1972, Mao Zedong, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, and Vella Pillay, the SACP representative in London at that time (Ellis 2015: 12–13, fn. 43). In 1962, Pillay accompanied Arthur Goldreich to a four-hour meeting with Deng Xiaoping in Peking (Frankel 2016: 77). But his story begins long before these early 1960s experiences.
Pillay was born in Johannesburg on 8 October 1923. After matriculation, he attended the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) where he studied part-time and graduated with a BCom degree. Like many others of his generation, he became politicised at university. He joined the Federation of Progressive Students at Wits and became deeply involved in the activities of the Transvaal Indian Congress. He soon joined the Communist Party of South Africa. In the mid-1940s, he became involved in resistance to the Pegging Act – a forerunner to later apartheid legislation, such as the Group Areas Act, which attempted to segregate and discriminate against Indians on matters of land, property, trade and residence. In June 1948, he married Patsy, another activist, in the Cape where racially mixed marriages were then still legal. But the looming National Party plans for stricter policing of racial boundaries and his acceptance by the London School of Economics (LSE) to study there for an Honours degree in international economics led the couple to move to the UK in January 1949. While studying at the LSE, again part-time, he relied on Patsy to keep them going financially; she had found a job as the secretary to Krishna Menon, the world-renowned first Indian high commissioner in London after independence.
Vella found a job as a research officer at the State Bank of China in London. There he remained a loyal member of staff for the rest of his working life, rising to the position of assistant general manager (the second in charge) by retirement. He remained an active member of the ANC in exile, writing for, distributing and smuggling copies of the African Communist and International Bulletin (which he helped to produce) into South Africa, ably supported by Patsy.
Soon after Mac Maharaj arrived in London in 1957, Pillay set about the task of building a cell of the SACP. Maharaj found this strange as he had thought that the Party had long ceased to function or even exist (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016). The unit consisted of Vella, Patsy and Mac. A few years later, Vella became the SACP Central Committee representative in the UK (O’Malley 2007: 82). He became the key link between the SACP in South Africa and the rest of Europe. When he visited London in May 1962, Mandela visited Pillay and Dadoo as the leaders of the SACP there, and laid out the view that the ANC had to be given greater pre-eminence on the international stage: ‘Mandela later met Yusuf Dadoo and Vella Pillay and informed them that the ANC had to project itself as an independent force, represented by Africans at international conferences. Firmly, he told Dadoo, this was not a departure from ANC policy, rather, an unbundling of being stuck in a nebulous image that appeared to represent everyone, in effect a break with recent ANC policy – and cross-Congress cooperation’ (Benneyworth 2011: 90).
Aside from such ethnic politics at play in exile, Pillay soon became a victim of both personal infighting and rivalries within the Party, which had little to do with ideology and was to some extent a result of the growing Sino–Soviet tensions in the early 1960s. It is not easy to untangle these. The SACP, arguably the Communist Party most steeped internationally in the repressive political practices historically associated with Stalinism, regarded Pillay’s employment at the State Bank of China with some suspicion. He had to be a Maoist, they believed, to work there. There was no small irony in their conclusion, given that the Chinese Communist Party, in fact, broke with the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 in a Sino–Soviet split. This came after the public revelations of Nikita Khrushchev condemning Stalinism, to the practices of which the SACP (and the Chinese Communist Party) remained slavishly committed throughout, and notwithstanding the formal distancing of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party from such political practices. But this was not all, far from it. For all of the 1950s, Pillay, as the SACP representative in Europe, was the key that unlocked ANC–SACP access to both Moscow and Beijing. However, when the generation of Dadoo’s communists (including Michael Harmel) arrived in London in around 1960, they resented this influence and apparently set about undermining Pillay. Maharaj recalls that in 1960 or 1961, on a boat on a Moscow river, Harmel or someone of that seniority in the Party presented Vella with a choice: either remain with the State Bank of China or face expulsion from the SACP. We know from Irina Filatova (2012: 528) that Pillay, Dadoo, Harmel and Joe Matthews were all in Moscow in late 1960, the second visit by Pillay and Dadoo in that year.
Vella refused to quit the Bank of China even when he was offered a ‘sweetener’ in the form of a job at an equivalent proposed Russian state bank in London. These key developments are captured by Maharaj as follows:
… the party had been dominated by white members and there was a need for many white members to stand down. But within that context all sorts of personal issues arose and I think that therefore what I am saying about Vella is that the conflict that opened up, and according to him … he described to me the occasion where on a boat in Moscow, while they were having a meeting in Moscow, on the boat trip he was approached. He didn’t tell me who; I don’t know if it was Michael Harmel, who put the issue to him that he had to choose between working at the Bank of China and his representing the party. He thought this was an unreasonable proposition and he thought it was a cruel proposition but already there was enough unhappiness in his relationship with many of them. It was one thing for comrades that had gone to London fleeing from post-Rivonia … it was another thing for [people like] Vella who had family and everything settled in London to start to say I will give up my job. Where do you go? I know that before that the Soviets were courting Vella to come to help set up a Russian Bank, the equivalent of the State Bank of China, and therefore approached Vella and offered him a higher formal position than what he occupied at the Bank of China. And his response was to say to the Soviets, after he thought it through, to say, no, look chaps, I will stay with the Bank of China … I know my position, I know they will not take a Chinese and replace me. So my future is more secure with the Bank of China. That had little to do at that stage with any ideological issue (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).
Pillay’s widow, Patsy, also a former Party member and friend of Ruth First, now in her early nineties, recalls that Joe Slovo visited Vella and her at their London flat. It was there (after asking Patsy to leave the room) that he informed Vella that he could not continue to serve as the party representative in Europe or on the Central Committee as long as he continued to work at the State Bank of China (Patsy Pillay to John Sender, email correspondence with Padayachee, 29 June 2017).
As Vella observed to his friend and comrade Ronald Segal: ‘The SACP then decided to side-line me, and since then I ceased to have any connection with them. But my relations with Oliver Tambo and the ANC remained close and undisturbed’ (Segal’s biographical notes on Vella, in Vella Pillay private archives).6
With growing calls for sanctions against South Africa at the United Nations after Sharpeville and in the wake of the UN arms embargo in 1962, Pillay became deeply involved in the campaign to boycott South African exports to the UK. He spoke on the same platform as Julius Nyerere (then president of the Tanganyika African National Union), Trevor Huddlestone and others on 26 June 1959 when the campaign to launch the Boycott South African Goods campaign was launched in Holborn Hall in London. This was a campaign that led to the formation to the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, a key branch of the global Anti-Apartheid Movement (Gurney 2000: 123). Pillay would serve with great distinction as its treasurer and then vice chairperson for many years. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 2003, then President Thabo Mbeki sent Pillay a message, which read in part: ‘Your outstanding contribution to the liberation of our people will always be remembered with fondness, particularly your role in establishing one of the greatest solidarity movements of our times – the British Anti-Apartheid Movement.’ In his tribute to Pillay on that occasion, Ahmed Kathrada observed, ‘Many of us knew you as a brilliant economist and a dedicated freedom fighter.’ Kader Asmal, whom Pillay had taken under his wing and mentored, noted that ‘the only honour that Vella would want is a commitment from all of us to ensure that we consolidate and deepen the democratic gains which so many freedom-loving South Africans fought and died for’ (Letters in Vella Pillay private archives). While involved in all this South African struggle work, Pillay was invited by Ken Livingstone to join the Greater London Enterprise Board, with the special task of assisting the Greater London Council to promote the local economy and enhance opportunities for blacks in London. All this while he remained an employee of the State Bank of China.
After he arrived in London, Maharaj quickly joined up with Pillay in the boycott campaign, including via the Africa Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Gurney 2000: 133). Maharaj recalls that Pillay was the SACP contact person in London, a representative of the Central Committee, and the underground conduit for New Age, the banned ANC-supporting South African newspaper. ‘Exiled students from South Africa – Kader Asmal, Steve Naidoo, Manna Chetty, Essop and Aziz Pahad, Thabo Mbeki – found the Pillay household [in Muswell Hill] a home away from home’ (O’Malley 2007: 80). Maharaj recalls a meeting of the Africa Committee at the Marx Memorial Library, at which the agrarian question in Africa was debated. Jack Woddiss, one of the participants, questioned the view that the transfer of land to the state (on behalf of the people) under socialism would automatically raise productivity, a view that Maharaj had until that time taken for granted. It was one of the few real debates over economic and development policy that Maharaj had witnessed at that time.
By 1978, Pillay had completed his MSc in economics at Birkbeck College, University of London, obtaining First Class marks for his quantitative and econometric work and a Merit pass overall. There were very few South African Congress Movement activists who received comparably rigorous training in economics, although a few were trained in the rigidly orthodox economics of the former Soviet bloc (Padayachee and Sender 2018).
Pillay researched and published widely on the South African economy and related subjects throughout the 40 or so years he lived and worked in London. He often used the pseudonym ‘P. Tlale’, especially when he wrote for the African Communist. In the January–March 1964 edition, he wrote ‘Sanctions against Apartheid’ under that pseudonym; in the July–September issue of that same year he wrote ‘The Apartheid Economy Today’, and in the September–December 1965 edition he wrote ‘The Imperialist State in Apartheid’. ‘The Apartheid Economy Today’ was written well before the revisionists Harold Wolpe and Martin Legassick published their seminal work in around 1972; it placed a Marxist imprint on South African economic historiography, and demonstrated a sharp appreciation of the complex interrelationships between race, class and the apartheid state in South African capitalist accumulation. He understood clearly that the much-celebrated ‘economic boom’ that South Africa was experiencing at the time was based on class exploitation and racial oppression and that it would not be sustained because of that fact alone. In fact, he predicted that the repressive state controls needed to keep it going would prove to be its ultimate undoing:
Subjected to intense exchange controls and attracted by the demands created through the growing volume of overseas investment as well as of the war economy, South Africa’s ruling capitalists have again joined with the Verwoerd regime to intensify the rate of African exploitation with all its explosive political and other consequences. But not even the employment of Hitler’s techniques of economic control and organization can stop the explosion of the South African crisis. On the contrary, it will hasten it (Pillay 1964: 59).
Pillay wrote many monographs for the Anti-Apartheid Movement, for the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid (where he was good friends with Enuga S Reddy, the renowned head of the Centre). For the latter organisation and in his capacity as vice chairman of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, he wrote ‘The Role of Transnational Corporations in Apartheid South Africa’ (August 1981) and ‘The Role of Gold in the Economy of Apartheid South Africa’ (March 1981). Demonstrating his close familiarity with European economic affairs, he published articles in Africa South, including ‘The Belgian Treasury’ (1960) and ‘The European Economic Community and Africa’ (1958).
In the early 1980s, Pillay joined with sympathetic Marxist economist and activist Laurence Harris and later with Ben Fine in establishing an economic research capacity for the ANC in London. Harris had a long-standing and active engagement with the ANC, which is respected in South Africa to this day, and he had been closely associated with the ANC–SACP’s armed wing, MK. He is reported as assisting in running guns and other weapons for MK along the Botswana border (Keable 2012), and as being involved in an attempt to travel by boat down the eastern coast of Africa from Mombasa to the Transkei coast on an MK assignment (Jordan interview, 4 August 2017). Together with members of the Research Unit of the ANC’s Department of Information (and from the late 1980s with the DEP), Harris formed a research consortium called Economic Research on South Africa. EROSA was set up on the model already established by the Research on Education for South Africa (RESA) project, organised by another South African exile academic and activist, Harold Wolpe, famous for his work on the articulation of modes of production and colonialism of a special type (Fine 2010: 26). An unswerving commitment to the struggle against the heinous system of apartheid primarily drove these British economists. Working with the ANC they made it their task to study and better understand the complexities of the racialised South African economy and how it could be transformed equitably and democratically. Fine recalls that his first task for the ANC through EROSA was to assess the prospects of South African mining, based principally on his knowledge of coal mining in Britain rather than of South Africa (2010: 26). EROSA produced a number of papers on the South African economy, which (according to Ngoasheng 1992: 121) went beyond a critique into areas of policy recommendations. This included work on the minerals-energy complex, the savings-investment constraint and the nature of the South African financial system. The group related to the ANC in exile through Pillay, Sisulu and Jordan (IDRC 1991: 7).
At the ANC economic policy conference in Harare in April–May 1990, Pillay presented a detailed paper on the essential steps in economic policy immediately upon the seizure of state power. He recommended a day-to-day agenda of the key steps that needed to be taken upon assumption of power. He was a strong opponent of the idea of granting the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) independence from the new government, arguing that this would seriously compromise the democratic state’s power to influence and shape a co-ordinated policy response to the economic legacy of apartheid.
In a letter to his friend and comrade Lionel (Rusty) Bernstein, Pillay expressed grave concerns about the way the debate over economic policy was proceeding (we develop this point in chapter 4). He predicted that if the movement allowed itself to be seduced by South African and international capital to compromise on its economic policies, it would pay a high price one day. This long quote from that letter is worth setting out in full:
What I find outrageous is the invidious position in which poor Nelson [Mandela] has been placed (by some of his colleagues) in having to frequently shift the movement’s economic goal posts. I know who is responsible for this: it found its most telling expression in Nelson’s unfortunate speech to businessmen on May 23 [1990]. I also feel that our friend JS [Joe Slovo] is perhaps showing a willingness to skate on very thin ice on these matters. I fear that the people in the townships, the rural areas and the unemployed – all of them may at some point react pretty strongly to what appear as deliberate ambiguities in the movement’s economic policies and programme. This is a serious worry for me. I had a long chat with Jay Naidoo of Cosatu [Congress of South African Trade Unions) last month: he expressed fears even more grave than I have had: he declared that the trade union movement will not allow any foot dragging on any of the key issues of economic policy (Letter from Vella Pillay to Rusty Bernstein, 14 June 1990, in Vella Pillay private archives).
In the early 1990s, Vella was appointed director of the ANC’s Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG). Although he was the director and not an author or editor, he played a powerful role in shaping the ideas and policy framework behind the 1993 MERG report. Fine insists that the ANC could not have done better at that time than appoint him to that post:
Well, for me, it seemed a very natural choice and I was very pleased. First of all, Vella had been in London in exile for many years and was a very accomplished and experienced economist. He was head of Foreign Exchange Reserves for the Bank of China and so there was probably no one better in the progressive movement who knew about how to manage foreign exchange reserves and issues involved in that. Laurence [Harris] and I also knew him very well because he’d done the MSc (Economics) of Birkbeck where we both taught, which was a university or a college of the University of London, specialising in teaching people at work, and so he did that part-time. He was also treasurer of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. He’d also been on the board of the Industrial Wing of the Greater London Council … so his credentials for leading MERG were very strong. It probably also coincided with his ability to come back to South Africa, where of course he had very strong connections with the ANC leadership and he was a respected figure. I know he had a very close relationship with Mac Maharaj, but he seemed to have good connections with Mandela as well (Fine interview, 30 June 2015).
Pillay continued to write and publish well into his eighties, including an important piece on monetary and exchange rate policy in the volume edited by Jonathan Michie and Vishnu Padayachee (1997: 101–124).
Other developments in exile
But Vella Pillay and his comrades at SOAS were not the only active members of the ANC in exile in London, when it came to matters of policy. Harold Wolpe and Norman Levy were deeply engaged in thinking about education policy through their work in London for the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania, though differences and tensions between London and Tanzania over educational policy were evident. Levy (2011) recalls that in the late 1980s the ANC held internal discussions in London on the ‘economy, health, the constitution and the agrarian situation’ and began to draw up ‘concrete policy documents’ on these topics. He himself undertook a profile of population, education, manpower distribution and skills training in South Africa, at the request of the ANC Research Unit headed by Pallo Jordan. ‘The report was intended to provide an overview of the labour market and an accurate picture of the racially skewed economy. This it did. But I am not sure that the study ever received the attention we expected once Mandela took office or whether a similar survey has since been undertaken’ (Levy 2011: 401).
