The campaign, as its organisers stressed, was multiracial; organisations were beginning to work together for common goals while remaining racially discrete. More than 2 000 volunteers of all races, but predominantly Indian, were imprisoned, and the Joint Passive Resistance Council stated:
The non-white population of South Africa is on the march, in tune with the forward surge of peoples of Asia and Africa and the democratic forces throughout the world … we feel confident that the decision of the N.R.C. will hasten the day when the alignment and unification of all Non-European forces against racial oppression will become a reality … We believe that the struggle of the non-whites in South Africa against colour oppression is one and indivisible.29
The need for a common front to oppose black oppression was a recurring theme of postwar Congress and CPSA propaganda. Informal co-operation between the ANC, the SAIC and the coloured African People’s Organisation (APO) began in 1946, and a year later they jointly organised what Xuma described as a ‘historic unity rally’.30 But as we shall see, a ‘common front’ was a lot easier to attain than a common organisational form that would give expression to all races but retain African leadership, the essence of the multi racial Congress Alliance structure that lasted while the congresses remained legal.
In 1947 Dadoo, Naicker and Xuma signed the ‘Doctors’ Pact’, which formally united the African and Indian congresses, not merging them but joining them in an alliance, each remaining distinctly race-based. Though equality was a shared goal, racial separatism was the organisational form for attaining that equality. Race was accepted, along with race-based organisations, in pursuit of racial equality. Unity moves among the black congresses were supported by the CPSA. The pro-Congress newspaper The Guardian, edited by CPSA members Betty Radford and Brian Bunting, gave prominence to speeches and articles calling for a black united front. CPSA conference resolutions called for the creation of a ‘broad fighting alliance’ to struggle for equal rights for all – though, as we see later, the Communist Party was less convinced of the need for racial separateness than for the need for unity among all forces opposed to segregation.31
Attaining unity at the grassroots level, however, was not a smooth process. In early 1949 violence flared between the African and Indian populations in Durban, leaving 123 dead, 1 300 injured and some 40 000 homeless. Not only were the Durban riots the most violent demonstration of the difficulties of achieving racial unity, they also provided the context for a reaffirmation of the 1947 Pact; the ANC and SAIC issued a statement which traced the roots of racial oppression and strife not to ‘racism’ but to ‘the political, economic and social structure of this country, based on differential and discriminatory treatment of the various groups’.32
Both the ANC and the SAIC had a series of internal issues to contend with, which had an impact on their approach to how to give organisational expression to racial cooperation in the fight for equality. That race was accepted as a given is clear, however awkward it may seem seen through a twenty-first-century lens. Various factors worked against the emergence of a single congress for all races, particularly within the ANC.
The ANC Youth League (ANCYL), formed in 1944, led moves to radicalise Congress. The League comprised outstanding young men of their generation, including law students Anton Lembede, Ashby Mda, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo. If the universal franchise had raised the bar for whites sympathetic to black demands for equality, the increasingly radical ANC, contemplating extra-parliamentary protest and pushed by a Youth League committed to ‘rousing popular political consciousness and fighting oppression and reaction’,33 would raise it yet further.
During the late 1940s, while many ANCYL members were drawn into mainstream ANC politics, some continued to espouse a racially exclusive form of African nationalism, as well as opposition to the CPSA, which was seen as white-dominated and an avenue for undue white (and communist) influence on Congress. This was a continuum in ANC thinking and was in tune with African nationalism on the rest of the continent at the time. It would bedevil the Congress Alliance throughout the 1950s and result in the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) splitting from the ANC in 1959, claiming (in the words of one-time PAC Secretary General Potlako Leballo) that the ANC:
… has made a catastrophic blunder by accepting foreign leadership by the whites. How can we have leaders who are also led? If this white leadership is denied, why was one Joe Slovo of the Congress of Democrats allowed to become Chairman of the ANC Commission of Enquiry in 1954, into disputes involving ANC policies?34
At the same time, both the ANC and the SAIC were concerned with internal struggles, particularly over more radical policies and strategies. The transformation of the ANC from a small petit bourgeois organisation using petition and constitutional action into a mass-based extra-parliamentary organisation demanding full and immediate equality was a long process.
White responses to African nationalism
The growth of African nationalism, the emergence of the ANC as the leading domestic African political organisation with an increasingly radical programme, and its alliance with the SAIC, confronted whites who supported a democratic future with a set of ideo logical and strategic questions.
Prime among these was African nationalism. Both white liberals and socialists warned of its dangers; liberals believed that it threatened to submerge individualism within the fervour of mass action, while the Communist Party maintained that it would obscure class alignments which cut across racial barriers. Both warned that nationalism could degenerate into racial exclusivity and race war. Both (initially, in the case of the Communist Party) supported a single, non-racial organisation.
There is no doubt that in the late 1940s and the 1950s progressive whites exerted undue influence (in relation to their numeric base and certainly in the context of segregation and apartheid) over the nature and course of African nationalism in South Africa.
This is not automatically ‘a bad thing’.35 There was considerable symbolic value to whites joining other progressives in developing the vision of a future where all races would live in complete equality – a non-racial future, where race was not the starting point of analysis or organisation and where they rejected exclusive African nationalism in the face of exclusive Afrikaner nationalism and broader white supremacy. The foundations laid by this small band of progressives shored up the ‘miracle’ of negotiating the end of apartheid and introducing democracy despite the blood-letting of the 1980s and 1990s.
According to the 1946 census, whites comprised 21% of the population (this halved to 11% by 1996), though barely a couple of thousand, at most, participated in non-racial politics, whether via the Liberal Party (1 500 at its peak), the congress movement (COD had a couple of hundred members at most), the CPSA–SACP (which was even smaller), or the trade union movement. Much of this book details the sacrifice, commitment and sheer bloody-mindedness of white liberals, radicals and communists in their struggle to ensure that non-racial principles shaped nationalism.
An argument can and has been made that more whites opposed apartheid than this book credits, evidenced by the dramatic marches of the Torch Commando, UP voters, early Black Sash members, later Progressive Party members and the like. The point is not to question the motives of the individuals involved but to accept that a very large gap existed between opposing apartheid and supporting full equality for all citizens.
The Torch Commando and Black Sash, for example, had their roots in opposing National Party moves to remove coloured voters from the common voters’ roll – a far cry from supporting universal suffrage. Their activities were acknowledged by the Congress movement and other black anti-apartheid groups but they made little or no substantive