These fervent young nationalists, the literature tells us, later mellowed into inclusive non-racialists and learned that non-racialism ‘was not very easy to accept at the beginning, because of immaturity, because of youthfulness’, according to ANCYL (and later ANC NEC) member Stanley Mabizela. 51While this seems true at the level of individuals, it is an inadequate analysis of the processes that took place. It also skips over the fact that it took youth leaguers nearly four decades to embrace the ANC’s non-racialism, in the sense that it is used here – a rather lengthy maturation.
The conflict operated on two main levels. Firstly, the Youth League reacted strongly to the CPSA’s repeated calls for a broad – non-racial – front of organisations opposed to segregation and apartheid. The broad front envisaged by the CPSA would ‘conduct mass struggles against race discrimination’ while underplaying exclusive nationalism by ‘develop[ing] class consciousness in the people’ and ‘forg[ing] unity in action between the oppressed peoples and between them and the European working class’.52
Non-racialism and class struggle became almost synonymous, which did the former few favours, since it took on the ideological, racial and other baggage of class analysis, guaranteed to raise nationalist hackles. The Youth League rejected the class content of non-racialism as proposed by the CPSA, insisting that in its place ‘the national liberation of Africans will be achieved by Africans themselves’;53 co-operation between the oppressed groups was acceptable only when the racial groups were organised multiracially – in ‘separate units’.54
Secondly, as we have seen, the two organisations were competing for first prize – managing the changing ANC at a time of growing black political mobilisation. And as such, they had very similar programmes in key areas. The Youth League argued that black South Africans ‘suffer national oppression in common with thousands and millions of oppressed Colonial peoples in other parts of the world’.55 But nationalism did not exclude socialism: it was a matter of priorities, according to Lembede, who argued ‘After national freedom, then socialism’.56 In this he was joined by Ashby Mda, who argued that the interests of the mass of Africans could be protected only by ‘the establishment of a true democracy and a just social order’.57
Mda defined ‘a just social order’ to include ‘full political control by the workers, peasants and intellectuals’ combined with ‘the liquidation of capitalism’ and ‘equal distribution of wealth’.58 The Youth League did not officially endorse socialism, but Lembede argued that ‘Africans are naturally socialistic as illustrated in their social practices and customs’ and concluded that ‘the achievement of national freedom will therefore herald or usher in a new era, the era of African socialism’.59
Nothing in this programme conflicted substantially with the CPSA analysis of the South African situation. Strategically, both organisations called for the radicalisation of the ANC leadership and a branch structure and mass base. Ideologically, the CPSA had accepted the primacy of the national question, following its adoption of the 1928 Comintern thesis, which endorsed ‘… an independent native South African republic as a stage towards a workers’ and peasants’ republic, with full equal rights for all races, black, coloured and white’.60
The concept of a socialist revolution happening in phases meant that the CPSA programme tallied with Lembede’s vision of national revolution followed by (African) socialism. Needless to say, in the heat of the battle neither side acknowledged (or even saw) these similarities.
The ANCYL, with a belief ‘in the unity of all Africans from the Mediterranean Sea in the North to the Indian and Atlantic Oceans in the South’, saw the struggle for equal rights as part of a pan-African anti-colonial movement.61 For the CPSA, the notion that black South Africans were colonially oppressed was at least implicit in the 1928 thesis. The idea of internal colonialism – to be the cornerstone of post-1953 SACP ideology – had been hinted at but not developed by the then CPSA member Eddie Roux in 1928:
[In South Africa] we have a white bourgeoisie and a white aristocracy of labour living in the same country together with an exploited colonial peasantry. Here the participation of the workers of the ruling class in the exploitation of the colonial workers is very apparent … the exploitation occurs within the confines of a single country.62
Caught up as it was in the factionalism of the period between 1928 and 1935, and thereafter in the Popular Front politics of the anti-fascist period, the CPSA did not assess internal colonialism and its implications until the late 1940s and early 1950s. At that point it became intimately commingled with debates over non-racial/multiracial organisational forms.
This should not be taken to imply that there were no differences between the ANCYL and the CPSA; the point is to try to focus on the precise location and nature of their conflict, which appears to have been a mixture of ideological disputes and a power struggle. That conflict came to work itself out over a particular issue – the form that racial co-operation should take.
The politics of non-racialism
The CPSA’s switch from initial opposition to active participation in the Second World War, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, generated widespread suspicion (while confirming the suspicions of many) of the extent to which it was Moscow’s lapdog. The party expended much energy during the war popularising the Soviet Union, and was seen by the Youth League as having an agenda which stretched beyond national liberation, was informed by a ‘foreign ideology’ and used ‘methods and tactics which might have succeeded in other countries, like Europe’.63
The issue on which the Youth League’s suspicion of the CPSA came to focus most directly was the form racial co-operation should take in organisational terms. The CPSA was concerned to avoid the emergence of a racially exclusive African nationalism of the type espoused by leading youth leaguers, which would obscure and retard the class struggle. In the 1940s the party stressed the need for the liberation struggle to be waged by a broad front of organisations led, not by the black bourgeoisie (which included most ANC and ANCYL leaders), but by ‘the class-conscious workers and peasants of the national group concerned’ so as to foster class-conscious racial unity.64
While both organisations called for the development of the ANC, the CPSA supported the emergence of a broad front of organisations (including the ANC) representing Africans, Indians, coloureds and trade unions65 in co-operation with which it could ‘… carry out its task exploring the class purposes of race oppression, creating a working class consciousness, breaking down national prejudices and providing leadership in the struggle for socialism’.66
Ironically, those who were members of both the CPSA and the ANC enjoyed the support of more conservative and established members of the ANC national executive.67 Both rejected the Youth League’s call for a complete boycott of elections, while more pragmatic ANC leaders supported CPSA calls for broad unity in opposition to racial discrimination. In 1947 this took shape as doctors Xuma, Naicker and Dadoo, representing the ANC, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) and the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC) respectively, signed the ‘Doctors’ Pact’, which accepted ‘… the urgency of cooperation between the non-European peoples and other democratic forces for the attainment of basic human rights …’.68
In 1946 the NIC began to mobilise support for a passive resistance campaign against the ‘Ghetto Act’. The campaign lasted for two years and resulted in the imprisonment of more than 2 000 resisters of all races (though predominantly Indian). Rallies and public meetings began to be held under the joint auspices of the African and Indian congresses, as well as the (coloured) African People’s Organisation (APO).
The Youth League’s position on racial co-operation was complicated by the presence of both an exclusive approach, which