In the end, the conference, which became known as the People’s Assembly for Votes for All, was considerably less ambitious in scope, affected by the disputes that marked ANC–ANCYL as well as ANC–CPSA relations, and was restricted to the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The ANCYL and ‘old guard’ ANC leadership jointly attacked what was seen as Communist Party dominance of the Transvaal ANC and its activities. In particular, organisers of the Assembly were accused of attempting to bypass the existing multiracial alliance of congresses and create a new, non-racial competitor – a single organisation of all races, rather than an alliance of organisations representing different races, led by Africans in the ANC.55 The organisers attempted to clarify relations with the congresses:
It is not our aim to compete in any way with, or take over the functions of the great national organisations of the African, Coloured or Indian people. It is our aim to secure friendly co-operation and mutual assistance of South African people in championing the great democratic cause of the franchise.56
These tensions, and their impact on organisational form, recur throughout the period under study. Despite opposition from the Youth League, the Assembly met in Johannesburg and was opened by Michael Scott, a radical churchman and a leading figure in the 1946 passive resistance campaign. The 322 delegates present endorsed the ‘People’s Charter for Votes for All’ and the Assembly was significant for the interracial rank and file co-operation it produced, compounding that of the 1946 passive resistance campaign. The Assembly ended by calling for a further Assembly where delegates from the whole country could endorse a ‘People’s Charter’. Popular mobilisation around and participation in drawing up the People’s Charter and the penetration of rural as well as urban areas set precedents that informed leading ANC member Z K Matthews’s call five years later for a ‘Congress of the People’.
The People’s Assembly marked a shift away from the cautious style of earlier ANC activity and a step on the way from deputation to confrontation. Propaganda issued by the organisers stressed the illegitimacy of the 1948 general election and called for the election of delegates ‘who will represent more citizens than those voting in the General Elections’.57Where Africans’ Claims had tentatively proposed an alternative legitimating ideology for the state based on equal citizenship, the Assembly directly challenged ‘the election of the new Parliament by a minority of the people’.58 The People’s Charter, anticipating the Freedom Charter, concluded:
Where there is no freedom the people perish. Raising high the banner of freedom, the banner of the liberation of our people,
WE PLEDGE that we shall not rest until all adult men and women have the right to stand for, vote for and be elected to all the representative bodies which rule over our people;
WE CHALLENGE the existence of a Parliament from whose election the majority of its citizens are excluded, in a country which upholds in words the principles and practices of democracy.59
The People’s Assembly has been criticised for not producing a programme of action by which to achieve the aims it set out.60 This may have been a result of the conflicts which surrounded it. Moreover, the ANC at the time was debating what emerged in 1949 as the Programme of Action, largely inspired by the ANCYL. The programme endorsed the 1943 Bill of Rights, repeating demands for universal suffrage and equal political participation, but it was more concerned with methods than aims. The changing nature of the struggle, suggested by the People’s Assembly, was made clear in the programme, which resolved to work for ‘the abolition of all differential political institutions the boycotting of which we accept and to undertake a campaign to educate our people on this issue and, in addition, to employ the following weapons: immediate and active boycott, strike, civil disobedience, non-co-operation and such other means as may bring about the accomplishments and realisation of our aspirations’.61
Liberals and liberalism 1946–1949
During the war ‘[l]iberalism acquired its greatest influence, both in describing and in shaping South Africa …’.62
Lewsen saw the Cape liberals as ‘the cultural and intellectual elite of the Cape, its leading parliamentarians and … its most brilliant men’,63 which, of course, would extend in the 1950s to include a woman, leading Native Representative and Liberal Party member Margaret Ballinger. Lewsen’s description obtained more generally in the war years and the immediate post-war period.
During those years liberals were well thought of by the then ANC leadership, with whom they shared a class position and broader socio-political views, and were generally regarded as important in South African society. They were well known, enjoyed a high media profile, and were (sometimes self-consciously) part of the white South African elite.
The fact that they were roundly attacked for decades after the war by white radicals, many in the Congress movement, communists, black consciousness movement supporters and others should not allow an ahistorical view. The war years were a period of enormous promise for liberals. Government commissions reported that segregation, under pressure from industrialisation, was breaking down and Smuts acknowledged the irreversibility of black urbanisation. Liberals in the SAIRR and among the native representatives, who emerged at the forefront of liberal public thinking in the late 1940s, adopted a pragmatic stance in response to these apparent shifts in government thinking, believing that capitalist development would inevitably favour their approach to ‘race relations’.
Industrialisation was seen to challenge the economic and political stranglehold of agricultural and mining capital and, as such, was regarded as an inherently progressive modernising process. Its apparently objective economic inevitability appealed to liberals (seeking a ‘rational’ – and apolitical – solution) and socialists alike. Native Representative Donald Molteno argued that the struggle in South Africa lay between vested economic interests that benefited from the status quo and industry, which challenged it (and strengthened liberals in the political arena).
Putting forward a view that would be repeated for the next four decades by businesspeople and others in South Africa (though in language more commonly associated with the left), Molteno argued that industry speeded up both economic and political change; from the 1940s it seemed that ‘the objective forces that make for progress are on [our] side’.64 Liberals felt themselves to be on the side of ‘common sense’ (the title of one of their journals65), both economically and politically.
The liberal position, insofar as a single set of views can be ascribed to an informal group, was set out by Leo Marquard as early as 1943. Marquard, head of AES, Afrikaner ‘royalty’, mentor of Bram Fischer, author of Black Man’s Burden (which radicalised a generation of young white conscripts), and probably the most thoughtful of a clutch of highly intellectual wartime and post-war white liberals, remained open to new ideas and directions throughout the life of the Liberal Party, with his own position changing quite radically. He noted that ‘[t]here is ample evidence that a Bantu bourgeoisie has come into being in the urban areas … their economic position, as they see it, is associated with the European rather than with the depressed Bantu worker’.66
Marquard argued that white liberals and the emergent black middle class were natural class and political allies, participating in the joint councils set up by the SAIRR to generate consensus over municipal affairs. Such co-operation, he maintained, together with the ‘relatively good economic position’ of the black bourgeoisie, ‘makes them feel that they have more to lose than their chains’.67 For liberals, a black middle or buffer class was the best safeguard against revolution; communists had decided to ally themselves with the ANC, home of the emergent black bourgeoisie, and feared precisely what the liberals embraced. Both argued that post-war economic development would drive political change, but differed over the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of that change. Liberals argued that the emergence of an urban African bourgeoisie would flow inevitably