In his Preface to Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Jonathan Glover wrote:
… much English-language writing on ethics is limited by relative insulation from some of the twentieth century’s man-made disasters. There must be lessons for ethics in the events of this violent century … thinking about ethics is likely to be enriched by learning what we can about the causes of events we have been lucky to avoid.8
This is not a book on philosophy. Nor is it a book about contemporary South Africa. It is a history book. It seeks to help us understand how non-racialism emerged and the various forms it took in doing so in the 1950s, the decade that forged the ANC in its current form. It is primarily concerned with the impact of white participation on the struggle against apartheid. This impact, overwhelmingly, was on the ideologies and discourses of struggle. There were too few anti-apartheid whites to make any numeric impact; but they did have a powerful influence on the nature of the struggle, including ideology as well as the strategies and tactics used – and were visible testament to the non-racialism that all espoused, albeit in different ways and taking different forms.
Like Glover, we too can think about disastrous man-made events such as apartheid – which many of us were unlucky enough to live through – in order to better understand critical issues in contemporary South Africa. The history analysed here leads to questions about fundamental ethical issues that need to be considered by all South Africans living in the post-apartheid state. The intention is not to answer them, but to raise them, and hope that others will take them up.
The ideological associations of non-racialism
Part of the problem is that non-racialism was as undefined in the 1950s as it is now. The language of the time changed during the decade as non-racialism and the issues associated with it – what it meant, as well as how it should be reflected organisationally, the place and function of African nationalism, and so on – were fought out within and beyond the Congress movement.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s multiracial, non-racial, interracial and similar terms were used interchangeably. ‘Race relations’ was the core focus of white liberals associated with the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) in particular, but the term was widely used in progressive circles. All these terms, at that time, referred to formal equality between the races – very similar to the way the 1996 South African Constitution resolved the issue – although not necessarily substantive equality.
There was a common goal of equality under the law, but many paths to achieving it, as well as different ways of defining it. By the time the Second World War ended the African National Congress was campaigning unequivocally for full equality and increasingly used extra-parliamentary methods such as passive resistance campaigns in support of their struggle. White liberals – academics and professionals linked to the SAIRR, the Hofmeyr Society and other small organisations, elected Native Representatives and others – overwhelmingly supported a qualified franchise for ‘civilised’ natives and insisted on this being attained through gradualist, constitutional, parliamentary means.
Other white activists – members of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), non-CPSA Marxists and socialists, as well as a new, younger generation of white liberals and social democrats radicalised by the Second World War and the ideals they had fought for – supported the demand for full, immediate equality for all and were happy to use extra-parliamentary methods. As the decade unfolded the demand for full equality became common to liberals and radicals alike.
But what was less clear was how African nationalism and non-racialism would commingle – both in the struggle and later in a democratic state. While the ANC led the struggle for freedom it insisted on separate, race-based congresses, led by the ANC and joined under what was to become known as the Congress Alliance (referred to in this book also as Congress or the Alliance). This was multiracialism – racially distinct congresses allowing all races to participate in the struggle for freedom, but under African and ANC leadership. Whites were not allowed to join the ANC until the late 1960s, and could not sit on the National Executive Committee until 1985. The United Democratic Front (UDF), which spearheaded legal internal resistance to apartheid in the 1980s (while the ANC was banned and exiled), retained the multiracial approach of the Congress movement.
Multiracialism was one approach. The Communist Party – in both its pre-1950 CPSA and post-1953 South African Communist Party (SACP) forms – had a non-racial structure, where people of all races belonged to the same organisation. The Liberal Party was organised in the same way. Many whites sitting in the South African Congress of Democrats (SACOD), the white wing of the Congress Alliance, were deeply uncomfortable with their racial structure, and the ANC stricture that their task was to organise whites, the community to which they supposedly had easy access. (Many white activists, of course, were ostracised by other whites, who had no interest in their ‘communist’ message or ‘kaffirboet’ lifestyles.) As we see throughout this book, many white liberals and leftists wanted little or nothing to do with their fellow white citizens – they wanted to identify with, be seen with and work among black South Africans – ‘the path of least resistance’, ANC–CPSA stalwart Moses Kotane labelled it.
Marxists and socialists not in the SACP also resisted the whites-only basis of SACOD and the Congress Alliance more broadly, arguing that the struggle for equal rights for all races was obscuring the ‘real’ struggle, which was class-based and aimed at substantive equality for all. Non-racialism, in other words, was not merely a different way of structuring an organisation or political party but had (or obtained) distinct ideological overtones.
Over time the race-based structure of the Congress Alliance became a highly politicised issue. Liberals and Africanists saw the multiracial structure of the alliance as a vehicle designed by (white) communists through which they were able to exert overweening influence over the ANC. Lacking any significant numeric base, the argument went, white communists were still able to lead Congress by the nose via its multiracial structure, which gave them seats on the co-ordinating structures at the apex of the Alliance, regardless of their tiny numerical base. Non-SACP Marxists attacked multiracialism and the ANC for elevating national liberation above class struggle and socialist revolution; since 1928 the CPSA had supported the need for initial national liberation preceding a class-based struggle.
The dispute heated up throughout the 1950s and, as a result, people became more sensitive to the terms they used and what the different terms actually meant. By the end of the decade, ‘interracial’ had largely disappeared. ‘Race relations’ had largely returned to the Institute named after it. Multiracial referred to the way the Congress movement was organised, while non-racialism was both the way the SACP and the Liberal Party were organised and the stated goal of all anti-apartheid forces. Unless quoting from the time, this is the way in which these terms are used in this book.
Nationalism, socialism, liberalism, communism … and whites
But if terminology had become more precise the same could not be said of the understanding of how non-racialism would be realised under African nationalist leadership. In part this was because beneath the disputes about the structure of the Congress Alliance lay a deeper set of competing ideologies, whose differences were fought out over the multiracialism versus non-racialism debate. In the face of an increasingly vicious apartheid state and security apparatus, moreover, blurry ‘non-racialism’ had a much-needed feel-good factor and was a rallying cry for all those opposed to the implementation of apartheid.
And of course at the heart of the issue were white South Africans. In the face of growing