But if liberals were wary of being duped by communists, a lot of former CPSA members had no desire to work with liberals, whom they scorned for being unable to embrace equality and freedom for all. Former communists such as Rusty Bernstein came to the meeting determined to respond to the ANC call for whites to ‘take up their share of the burden’ and poured scorn on liberal suggestions from the floor for bridge-building afternoons in ‘a park where black nannies and domestic servants could get together in their afternoons off ’.65 But they too had come to the meeting determined to do the opposite to the liberals – to respond positively to the Congress call for white support. Both entered the room with an idée fixe about the other, and both left with it confirmed.
ANCYL Africanists such as Tambo and Sisulu finally saw the divisions between liberal and radical whites in a very immediate fashion. Callinicos quotes Walter Sisulu on Tambo’s speech at the meeting:
This speech of OR [Tambo] created a terrific impression on me. I have no way of describing it. You take a thing by the tail. And you expose it. OR, in his artistic way of speaking, created a tremendous impression. Not only to me, but to the people who were there. Because he has a way – you take a snake by the tail and you are exposing its head.66
The meeting was also addressed by Yusuf Cachalia, who called for a progressive white grouping ‘to co-operate with us, to be supportive … to assist us in bringing justice to this country’.67 The precise form of the organisation was left to the meeting, the only condition being that it should be fully committed to the Congress ideal of equal rights for all. By implication, it would also have to support the methods used by the Congress movement. It seems clear that Sisulu and Tambo felt they had seen the head of the liberal snake: but liberals saw a communist one. At the meeting, divisions and hostilities between white liberals and radicals became clear, and the gap between them was organisationally fixed; it would remain so for decades.
White responses to the Defiance Campaign had revealed differences previously obscured by common anti-fascist and later anti-Nationalist sentiment. Anti-apartheid whites faced a hostile NP government and an ANC and SAIC increasingly determined to use widespread extra-parliamentary mobilisation to achieve full and immediate equality.
The ANC–SAIC demand for universal suffrage, previously only endorsed by the CPSA, proved an immediate and intractable stumbling block. Margaret Ballinger, acting as liberal spokesperson, rejected the universal franchise out of hand.68 As a secondary issue, liberals rejected the idea of a white congress working in a multiracial Alliance, calling rather for an ‘all-in’ congress. This was the first time non-racial/multiracial organisational forms were cited as an issue; as the decade unfolded the issue would reflect deep ideological differences. Finally, with considerable liberal support, Margaret Ballinger refused to co-operate with the large number of former CPSA members present. This was later explained by liberal claims that white communists ‘packed’ the Darragh Hall meeting and controlled proceedings.69 Equal rights and extra-parliamentary methods divided radical from liberal whites; anti-communism supplied the fixative that cemented the distance between them.
The Darragh Hall meeting was followed by three further meetings at which attempts were made to find a compromise solution which would allow the creation of a combined liberal/ left organisation.70 The failure of these discussions was followed by the formation of SACOD, which was committed to standing ‘for equal political rights and economic opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of race, colour or sex: and win for all South Africans the freedom of speech, assembly, movement and organisation’.71
By the end of 1952 radical and liberal whites had irrevocably split. The SAIC’s Yusuf Dadoo had called for an alliance between the ANC and the SAIC on the one hand and the UP–Torch Commando–Labour Party election partners on the other, stating: ‘Intra-parliamentary struggle is played out. It is now for the masses of the people to act.’72
For many liberals, however, this was unthinkable; the closeness of extra-parliamentary to revolutionary strategies, coupled with the prominent role of former communists, closed the matter. Liberals who attended the Darragh Hall meeting rejected the call to operate outside Parliament as an ally of the ANC and SAIC and returned to the UP fold in time for the 1953 general election – and another routing at the polls.
Radical whites in Johannesburg joined SACOD, where a Founding Committee was elected to draw up a constitution and programme of action.73 In 1953 SACOD became a full and equal partner of the Congress Alliance. As Bernstein noted more than forty years later: ‘Personalities contributed to the COD-Liberal split, but its essence was political and thus unavoidable.’
In 1953 the Liberal Party was launched, initially committed to a qualified franchise and insisting on the use of parliamentary and/ or constitutional methods – though, by the time of its demise in 1968, its policies would be indistinguishable from those of the white ‘radicals’ of 1953. From its inception, white opposition to apartheid was fragmented and internally riven by suspicion, hostility and contestation; personality differences added spice to this already potent brew.
The split divided the already small white opposition to apartheid and diminished its impact on the course of political events, then and also into the post-apartheid era.74
Chapter 3
Multiracialism: Communist plot or anti-Communist ploy?
Resistance politics in the 1950s was dominated by the Congress Alliance, which sought to mobilise people of all races against apartheid. However, attempts to foster racial co-ope ration – especially including whites – in an increasingly racist state came with costs. The internal politics of the resistance movement – including both the Congress movement and the South African Communist Party (SACP)(in its pre-1950 and post-1953 incarnations)1 – was dominated by wide-ranging and bitter disputes over the form racial co-operation should take. The dispute centred on the multiracial nature of the Congress Alliance – that is, an alliance of separate congresses comprising members of a single race,2 co-ordinated at regional and national levels. This multiracialism stood in marked contrast to the non-racialism of organisations such as the disbanded Communist Party of South Africa, the reconstituted SACP and the Liberal Party.
It is important to recall what was said in the introduction: that sensitivity about the language of race was not evident in the 1950s – multiracial, non-racial, interracial and similar terms were, initially, used interchangeably. Over time, as the race-based structure of the Congress Alliance became a politicised issue – with liberals and Africanists seeing it as a vehicle for overweening white communist influence over the African National Congress (ANC) – people became more sensitive to the true meaning of the terms they used.3
The issue of racial co-operation was being debated as the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) came to exert greater influence over Congress, bringing to the ANC a new militancy; a strident and at times exclusive African nationalism; and marked anti-communism. As senior ANC official Dan Tloome put it, the ANCYL’s attitude:
was that our fight is against the white people. ‘We are nationalist here, and these white people took away our land’ – that was the type of approach … They were very, very hostile against the CP[SA]. Their cardinal point was that communism is a foreign ideology and that we shouldn’t follow it because it’s not applicable to South Africa.4
The ANCYL strongly resisted what it saw as an attempt by the CPSA to bypass existing national organisations and create a permanent ‘unity movement’5 – an organisation of all races that emphasised class above national consciousness via a Marxist rather than a nationalist approach.6 The Youth League, by contrast, insisted on racially separate or multiracial structures, viewing non-racialism not as an organisational expression of anti-racism that allowed whites to participate (as liberals saw it) but rather as a stalking horse for communist dominance.
Debates