The Ballingers and Communist Party member Hymie Basner attended an emergency conference of the Transvaal ANC in June 1947, called to discuss implementation of the boycott.83 Supported by councillors Paul Mosaka and Selope Thema, the Ballingers called on the conference to reject the boycott and to encourage the ANC nationally to do the same.
Indicating the growing gulf between themselves and the ANC, the Representatives described the boycott as a ‘silly’ idea and warned the conference that ‘before you carry it out you will have the fight of your lives’.84
While some Representatives took on the ANC, others were trying to squeeze a semblance of liberalism from the post-war UP. Edgar Brookes pleaded with Hofmeyr to grant concessions to the NRC, claiming that ‘the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that there is a real case to meet from the Native point of view’.85 By making concessions, Brookes argued, the government would assist liberals in ‘strengthening … the moderate section in the Representative Council so that they might find it possible to carry out the policy of co-operation which in their heart of hearts they would prefer’.86 Brookes argued that ‘the most important thing’ was the development of personal friendship between Hofmeyr and ‘a handful of key men among the non-Europeans’.
If a few men … could be encouraged to visit you from time to time, to open their hearts to you, to feel your friendship, to know your difficulties, political and otherwise, to feel free to write confidentially to you, their influence, spread far and wide among other people, would counteract all the negative propaganda, and help the people, through having confidence in your intentions, to wait for the right moment for drastic reforms.87
Hofmeyr warned Smuts that NRC moderates supported the adjournment.88 But, according to Marks, ‘… far from responding to their [the NRC’s] justifiable anger in conciliatory mode, Smuts … instructed Hofmeyr to stiffen what he saw as the apologetic tone of the statement the latter intended making to the adjourned NRC’.89
In January 1948 the electoral boycott, a strategy that had never been popular with the cautious ANC leadership of the time, was openly rejected by Xuma and others.90 Sustaining the boycott became impossible in the confused situation and the ANC and CPSA (somewhat tortuously) proposed the election of ‘boycott candidates’, who would call for the 1936 legislation to be repealed.91
In justifying the change of tactics the ANC argued that there had been insufficient organisation to sustain a boycott and that NRC candidates should use their positions to undertake such organisation.92 But by then liberals were seen to be actively opposed to the boycott. A year later, faced with a choice between Margaret Ballinger and a National Party candidate, the secretary of the Port Elizabeth African Organisations advised his members: ‘DO NOT VOTE FOR EITHER OF THEM!’93
By the late 1940s the Congress movement evinced widespread hostility towards white liberals. Black liberals were, of course, to be found at all levels of the ANC itself, and liberals were not criticised on ideological grounds but rather for their failure to support the methods of the ANC and SAIC. This would be a recurrent theme of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Leading Transvaal Indian Congress member Ahmed ‘Kathy’ Kathrada, later imprisoned with Nelson Mandela and others, defined liberals precisely as those who refused to support the strategies and campaigns of the congresses. Accusing ‘the men and women of the liberal creed’ of cowardice, Kathrada stated: ‘Our experiences have been that these individuals, who are usually vociferous in their claims for justice and fair play for the black man, have on every occasion when their assistance was required, sadly failed us.’94
At a meeting in Durban, liberals were characterised by their use of ‘humble petitions and respectable deputations’ which failed to ‘deliver the goods’.95 Criticism was also evident among black liberals. Jordan Ngubane, a founder member of the ANCYL and later prominent in the Liberal Party, stressed that white liberals had failed to intervene constructively in black political life:96 ‘… the collapse of African Moderation has been largely occasioned by the failure of European Liberals as a group to take an unequivocal and unfaltering stand on the vital colour question’.97
By 1948 liberal attempts to mediate between the UP and the ANC had failed. The ANC increasingly favoured extra-parliamentary protest (formally endorsed a year later) in pursuit of unqualified equality, and youth leaguers became increasingly hostile to the perceived cautious obstructionism of liberals. In May 1948 the National Party won power and the UP went into opposition. Seven months later Hofmeyr died. Edgar Brookes, surveying the landscape, saw little but gloom: ‘The lot of the European who claims to be, in any sense of that much abused word, a “liberal” is hard. He stands, as it were, on a shrinking isthmus, with the oceans of European passion and non-European passion encroaching on it from day to day.’98
By the late 1940s white (and black) communists felt themselves to be on the side of a rising, increasingly radical nationalist movement that was replacing its older bourgeois leadership with a younger – but still essentially bourgeois – leadership (young lawyers, teachers, chiefs and the like replacing old lawyers, teachers, chiefs and the like) willing to utilise fully extra-parliamentary and direct methods of protest.
The Congress movement now demanded full equality rather than politely requesting partial inclusion. But all was not plain sailing: the Youth League leadership was more radical than that of the ANC but it was also strongly anti-communist, though only feebly so compared with the newly elected National Party and those who subscribed to the growing global Cold War hysteria.
White (and black) liberals found themselves opposing ANCYL radicals and their use of extra-parliamentary methods, trying to stop the influence of communists, while seeking to nudge Hofmeyr and shove Smuts into replacing their reactionary platform with some elements of liberalism. They suffered a failure of the colonial (and, arguably, post-colonial) imagination: the notion of full equality for all remained beyond their grasp, and their focus was on securing the franchise for ‘suitably qualified’ or ‘civilised’ natives – in essence, trying to keep alive their own version of the Cape liberal tradition, and export it northwards.
But while they were doing so the socio-economic changes triggered by the Second World War led to a significant increase in black, particularly African, political activity and a steadily more radical ANC platform. It also led to African–Indian political unity (not necessarily characterised by easy socio-economic relations, as later events would show), as seen in the People’s Assembly for Votes for All. This unity was reflected in the ANC and SAIC’s pursuit of ideological and racial accord and popular support through the mobilisation of people around the production and endorsement of a statement of principle, while remaining in a multiracial alliance of separate congresses for different races, as they would do with greater success in the 1950s.
Chapter 2
The emergence of white opposition to apartheid, 1950–1953
In the years between 1950 and 1953 the differences between liberal and radical whites took organisational shape. White opposition to the Nationalist Party (NP) rose to a level that would never be seen again, with tens of thousands of whites joining night-time marches organised by the Torch Commando. Bearing torches and symbolic coffins and using anti-fascist/anti-Nazi slogans they opposed the removal of coloured (and some Indian) voters from the electoral roll. A scattering of whites also joined the Defiance Campaign, a passive resistance campaign organised by the Congress Alliance to highlight the increasingly repressive apartheid laws and bolster the profile and membership of Congress.
In November 1952 the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) attempted to capitalise on white anti-NP sentiment and called for the creation of a ‘parallel white organisation’ to work with them.1 But divisions among whites opposing the NP ran deep – deeper, certainly, than ANC leaders expected. Liberal and radical whites differed over universal suffrage,