SACOD was a small white organisation that supported extra-parliamentary campaigns in pursuit of equal rights. It did include a number of former CPSA members, many with a high profile, but it also provided a home for the tiny number of whites wanting to work in support of and as part of the Congress movement. SACOD’s place in the Congress Alliance provided a hostile focus for a wide range of organisations that regarded it as a communist front and multiracialism as the means by which communist influence was being entrenched in the Alliance.
Africanists saw the alliance of congresses as a ‘somersault on principles’ set out in the 1949 Programme of Action.9 The Liberal Party (LP) attacked SACOD as a communist front and criticised the ANC for co-operating with it, while some LP members attacked the ANC for being dominated by white communists.10 Anti-communism made for strange ménages. For example, in a pamphlet issued in Cape Town in 1956, liberals and Trotskyists on the Bus Apartheid Resistance Committee stated: ‘COD is a boss organisation in an alliance of racial organisations and is a great believer in the big stick. The organisations allied to it are boy organisations. COD dictates its instructions to them. They never meet as equals: theirs is simply to obey …’.11
In an ironic twist the multiracial structure of the Congress Alliance, which was created largely at the insistence of ANCYL nationalists, came to be seen as the product of white communists who engineered it so as to control the ANC they were unable to join.
Explanations for the emergence of multiracialism tend to follow the conventional ANC argument, emphasising that it was a strategy which acknowledged the differing material conditions affecting races politically and geographically divided under both segregation and apartheid. But such explanations ignore the ideological content of multiracialism, whose roots lie in large part in the hostility that characterised relations between the Communist Party and the ANCYL. Both organisations called for the radicalisation of the ANC and the development of a mass base as the only means to achieve successful national liberation. But after that they differed: where the ANCYL pursued a nationalist path the CPSA warned that nationalism could serve to obscure class oppression and called for the transformation of existing organisations ‘into a revolutionary party of workers, peasants, intellectuals and petty bourgeois’.12 Non-racialism in organisational form was clearly allied to a particular argument set forth by one strand of thinking within the Communist Party. Its ideological content made it anathema to African nationalists, despite its obvious symbolic value.
Brian Bunting, a CPSA Central Committee member, discussing the distinction between the CPSA’s non-racialism and the ANCYL’s multiracialism, attempted to downplay the differences, pleading: ‘let us not be confused by semantics’.13 The distinction was more than semantic; the hostility between the Youth League and the CPSA resulted in the strategic debate over non-racialism or multiracialism being influenced by heavily ideological overtones which fed into the emerging Communist Party theory of ‘colonialism of a special type’ (discussed further in Chapter 4). This chapter analyses the disputes between the CPSA and the ANCYL in order to locate the ideological roots of multiracialism and, in doing so, it highlights the tensions within the CPSA over the relationship between class struggle and national struggle, which increased in the late 1940s as a result (in part) of CPSA–ANCYL hostility.
The post-war Communist Party: ‘a tendency towards legalistic illusions’ 14
In the 1940s and early 1950s the ANC was transformed from a small organisation wishing to enrol ‘distinguished university graduates’15 into a mass-based nationalist organisation pursuing national liberation by extra-parliamentary means, including stayaways and passive resistance campaigns. Those changes were largely brought about by the ANCYL, which dominated Congress politics in the late 1940s. The league set itself the twin tasks of ‘impart[ing] to Congress a truly national character’ and opposing those who sought to provide ‘foreign leadership of Africa’.16 Youth leaguers stressed ‘the need for vigilance against Communists and other groups which foster non-African interests’.17 In practice the ANCYL’s programme entailed gaining control of the direction of Congress, while isolating organisations and individuals who either exerted influence over the ANC or sought to develop their own African support base.
The transformation of the ANC took place largely in the post-war years. During the war the organisation had concentrated on drawing up and popularising Africans’ Claims in South Africa and in the immediate post-war period it left grassroots organisation around civic issues to other organisations. Black trade unions grew, while squatter movements and bus boycotts represented a spontaneous popular response to the hardships faced by the black population.
In contrast, the Communist Party was directly involved in grassroots organisation in some townships, notably on the East Rand. Sapire describes the case of Brakpan location, where the CPSA mobilised residents around immediate local concerns such as wages, employment practices, the extension of passes to women, the shortage of housing, and pass law raids – precisely the kind of civic organising that would be so effective a few decades later.
The CPSA contested advisory board elections, winning all six seats in East London in 1942. It also won local council seats in Cape Town, East London and Johannesburg.18 It used the boards and vigilance associations as a means of establishing ‘footholds in location communities’.19 According to Sapire, CPSA members such as David Bopape and Gideon Ngake used their elected positions as platforms from which to defend local interests and instituted the CPSA as ‘the undisputed political force in the region’.20 The CPSA also ran night schools in the major centres, which, according to the Johannesburg District CPSA secretary, were ‘a very big factor in the development of the membership of the party’.21
The CPSA believed the national organisations would spearhead a national revolution aimed at abolishing racial discrimination and attaining equal rights for all. Thereafter, the struggle for socialism could follow, with the obfuscations of race removed. In 1940, however, the ANC was a small, weak organisation of the black elite, and, as the CPSA complained,
[t]he year 1940 has arrived with hardship and misery for the oppressed and poor peoples of the Union of South Africa … Unfortunately the year finds the forces of freedom as scattered as sheep in the presence of wolves. When talking of the forces of freedom, one cannot lose sight of the fact that the African people are potentially the most important of these forces. Therefore, if the Africans do not pull themselves together to face the enemies of freedom vigorously, not only will they let themselves down, but they will let their allies down also.22
Together with organisations such as the Springbok Legion and Friends of the Soviet Union, the CPSA successfully mobilised large sectors of the white population – Hilda Watts, for instance, won a seat on the Johannesburg City Council in the whites-only Hillbrow ward. CPSA members were also active in the black trade union movement. As a result of its high political profile and success in various spheres of operation, some in the party began to think of it as a potential mass movement in its own right, ignoring the unique conditions of the war; such thoughts came to a juddering halt when hostilities ended.23
In 1929 the party had accepted a Comintern directive which stressed the need to work within ‘the embryonic organisations among the natives, such as the African National Congress’ in order to transform the latter into a ‘fighting nationalist revolutionary organisation against the white bourgeoisie and British imperialists …’.24 By the end of the war the Communist Party had emerged as a significant force, but it remained party policy to work with the ANC and build it up.
Black CPSA members, however, were reluctant