The Origins of Non-Racialism. David Everatt

After the 1946 African miners’ strike the CPSA Executive Committee was tried for sedition by the once liberal-seeming Smuts government, in a process that dragged on from 1946 to 1948. White wartime support for the CPSA disappeared as the Cold War gathered force, and organisations such as the Springbok Legion, Friends of the Soviet Union and the Left Book Club either withered or closed, along with their wartime ability to reach a large white audience.

      The Trades and Labour Council was divided as the Nationalist Party (NP) made a serious bid for white working-class support. Attacks on the CPSA by both the United Party and NP governments culminated in the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, which outlawed the CPSA and also any doctrine ‘which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union’.⁸²

       The Communist Party and national liberation

      The CPSA in the late 1940s revealed differing approaches to the ‘national question’ and the national liberation movements in South Africa. Reduced to their simplest form these differences revolved around the emphasis given to class struggle in relation to the national struggle waged by the ANC and SAIC. To a perhaps surprising degree the differences took a regional form, with the party’s Cape region differing from those in Natal and the Transvaal.⁸³ Finally, race complicated all these differences. As Ben Turok has noted, the Communist Party in Cape Town was ‘probably the only fully non-racial organisation in the country at the time’ – but ‘it was apparent that, in Cape Town, whites played a disproportionately dominant role in the movement, to a degree not seen elsewhere, causing some resentment …’.⁸⁴