Both the CRL and the Commando also had to confront the issue of extra-parliamentary action, which emerged as a dividing line between radical and liberal opponents of the government. Following the Cape Town violence, according to Hepple, the UP exerted ‘political influence and intrigue’ to bring the Commando within its ambit.36 The removal of Legion members from the Commando was a key element in this process; following their departure, the Commando confined itself to purely electoral work. In doing so, of course, the essence of its appeal – its massive extra-parliamentary presence, the drama of its protests, the robust rhetoric – was destroyed.
The UP successfully defused any possible challenge from the Commando and swallowed it whole, pausing only to spit out those few whites who would later populate the Liberal Party, the Union Federal Party and the Congress of Democrats. By mid-1952 radical whites had declared the Torch Commando dead, with liberals not too far behind.37
The Defiance Campaign
As the Torch Commando faded from the political scene its place was taken by the Defiance Campaign, a direct intrusion by the Congress movement into the political calculations of white South Africans, including those who opposed apartheid. The campaign generated a flurry of ideological and strategic debate among radical and liberal whites and served to crystallise divisions between the two as support for the campaign deepened, numbers of resisters increased, and Congress leaders called for full white identification with their aims and their methods.
Full equality and extra-parliamentary methods became the overt dividing line between the South African Congress of Democrats, the white wing of the Congress Alliance, and the non-racial Liberal Party. Under the surface anti-communism remained an important factor dividing the two.
The Defiance Campaign was launched on 6 April 1952, the tercentenary of Van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape. Rather than demanding the immediate destruction of the entire racist/ apartheid state, the organisers highlighted six specific laws – the Group Areas Act, the Bantu Authorities Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, the Stock Limitation Act, the pass laws and the Separate Representation of Voters Act – in order to facilitate their easier repeal.
Initial responses from white liberals – still hoping to influence the UP – were not encouraging. The SAIRR reacted by ‘deploring’ the ‘insensitivity’ of the date chosen by the organisers, and criticised the ANC for ‘unrealistically demand[ing] the immediate abolition’ of the six statutes, concluding that it ‘… shares with the Prime Minister his concern that public order must be maintained and appreciates the reasons that prompt him to declare that any outbreak of violence must be firmly met’,38 a statement that is unlikely to have done much for hopes for full white identification with the struggle.
Others, however, were less reactionary. Some liberals saw the gradualist approach as evidence of common ground with the ANC. Leading liberal theoretician Leo Kuper sought to persuade his more conservative colleagues that supporting incremental change was preferable to confronting the reality of full, immediate equality for all:
No immediate claim is made for direct political representation and for full democratic rights, which are held out as goals for the future. The time element is thus conceived in the spirit of liberalism. It is evolutionary.39
The Defiance Campaign unfolded in tandem with legal setbacks suffered by the NP government in its disenfranchisement battle as well as with a new optimism on the part of the UP after it had ingested the Torch Commando. After a slow start the campaign grew in size and popular appeal (among blacks) until, by the end of 1952, more than 8 000 volunteers had been imprisoned. The government responded with increased repression, including the introduction of whipping for defiers.
As the campaign continued anti-white sentiment grew. The sentences passed on resisters became harsher, and campaign organiser Joe Matthews, then president of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), warned of the dangers of black racism, noting, in October 1952, that ‘the attitude of those who have been to jail is uncompromisingly opposed to any talks with the whites unless all our demands are going to be met’.40 At the same time, whites supportive of the Defiance Campaign began agitating for a greater role than fund-raising or writing letters of support to the press.
This pressure increased markedly when Patrick Duncan, son of a former Governor-General, offered his services to the campaign organisers.41Duncan’s offer guaranteed massive publicity for the campaign but, probably more importantly, it promised to help counter its increasingly racial nature. As Planning Council member Yusuf Cachalia put it, ‘Pat’s offer to defy came as a gift from heaven: it stopped the campaign becoming racial’.42
Duncan’s offer was replicated by other (less high-profile) whites in Cape Town, where Lucas Phillips, chairperson of the ANC in the Western Cape, stated: ‘Our reason for accepting Europeans into the movement is to dispel the idea among many Africans that all Whites are oppressors.’43
In early December a large crowd, which included Duncan and six other whites, entered Germiston location without a permit and, after making speeches and singing freedom songs, were duly arrested.44 At the same time, four young white resisters – Albie Sachs, Mary Butcher, Arnold Harrison and Hymie Rochman – broke post office apartheid laws in Cape Town by using the counter set aside for blacks. A week later Arnold Selby of the Textile Workers’ Union did the same.
The effects of the Defiance Campaign
The Defiance Campaign triggered important political developments among anti-apartheid whites, among whom its influence grew in proportion to the campaign itself. In response to ANC–SAIC calls for white support, the white liberal/ left began to reveal ideological fractures in its commitment to the Congress-led struggle. Leading FRAC members participated in planning the campaign while the Springbok Legion endorsed it and called on the Torch Commando to join the ANC and SAIC in organising a national strike.45 The hostility evinced by the SAIRR is noted above.
Meanwhile, liberals were trying to plot their own path between the contending forces. In a statement written by Margaret Ballinger and published in October 1952, twenty-two leading liberals – including author Alan Paton, Bishop Trevor Huddleston and others – called for a positive white response to the Defiance Campaign, which they described as ‘clearly no sudden impulse … [led] by men who are acknowledged leaders among Africans and Indians’.46
The statement, around which the initial organisation of the Liberal Party took place in 1952/3, continued:
We believe that it is imperative that South Africa should now adopt a policy that will attract the support of educated, politically conscious non-Europeans by offering them a reasonable status in our society. This can be done by a revival of the liberal tradition which prevailed for so many years with such successful results in the Cape Colony.47
The statement called for a policy of ‘equal rights for all civilised men, and equal opportunity for all to become civilised’. At the same time, it called on Congress leaders ‘to recognise that it will take time and patience substantially to improve the present position’. Finally, with an eye on the UP, the twenty-two offered their proposal ‘in the hope that it will make negotiations possible and their success probable’.48
Go slow, make modest demands, be realistic, don’t rock the boat – the Ballinger statement was a perfect distillation of the somewhat effete liberalism of the early 1950s, itself ‘the fag end of nineteenth-century’ Cape liberalism. E M Forster (from whom the phrase is borrowed), writing at the same time (1951), had said:
[I am] an individualist and a liberal who has found liberalism crumbling beneath him and at first felt ashamed. Then, looking around, he decided there was no reason for shame, since other people, whatever they felt, were equally insecure… I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me – a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution…49
South