The small band of whites who actively supported the dismantling of segregation and then apartheid and wanted to replace it with equality was a motley collection. It included liberals, who, themselves, covered a remarkably wide canvas. They were more or less radical and more or less wedded to parliamentary/constitutional forms of protest or direct action; some were committed to free-market economics, others to varying degrees of socialism. Many of the latter had started out believing in a qualified franchise but were radicalised by their involvement in black political and organisational work either through collaboration or competition with the Congress movement and the SACP.
There were other non-communist radicals, many of them graduates or teachers from the Army Education Service, who felt constrained in the Liberal Party, while sharing its wariness of communists (Helen Joseph is perhaps the best-known example). There were also white socialists, communists and Trotskyists, who reserved their most vituperative language for each other, and who fought out venomous ideological-cum-personal battles decade after decade.36
There were activist and beneficent Christians, Jews and atheists; pacifists and militants; and other variations in world view. They had two common values: they hated apartheid, and they hated each other – though not always in that order. They differed over relations with the ANC and the SAIC, the parliamentary or extra-parliamentary nature of their struggle for equal rights, the social and economic goals for which they struggled and the prominence of communists within the congresses and supporting organisations. Definitions of radical and liberal, and even of communist, centred not so much on ideological or economic questions but on participation in, and attitudes towards, the liberation struggle.
Liberals based their vision of future equality on the development of an African middle class through the extension of educational and social welfare services, and gradual incorporation into state structures, which the government was called on to create, in tandem with equally gradual incorporation into the body politic for ‘civilised’ and later ‘suitably qualified natives’. While, initially, no liberal party-political organisation existed, liberals were found in welfare organisations, churches, universities, the SAIRR, among the Native Representatives, and elsewhere.
Radical whites called for the immediate application of universal suffrage and supported mass-based extra-parliamentary campaigns, strikes and similar forms of protest. Some were to join the Liberal Party after 1953, more because of shared anti-communism than shared ideology (at least initially); others joined the Congress of Democrats, formed at about the same time. Radical whites, who included communists, Trotskyists, socialists, social democrats and others, were found in the CPSA, the trade union movement and the Springbok Legion, an organisation which operated as a soldiers’ trade union.
Before 1950 (when it was banned), the main political home for radical whites was the non-racial Communist Party, which supported equal rights for all. According to Hymie Basner, who left the CPSA in 1943:
There was no possible party to which a progressive young South African, whether Marxist or … of moderately liberal views, if he wanted to work in an organised group … against racialism, if he wanted to work even for common social decency, never mind about world revolution or South African revolution … there was no room for him to work in any organisation at that time except the communist movement. And during that period hundreds of middle-class youth who normally, in other countries would be joining the Labour Party or the Liberal Party, say in England or in France … would join the Communist Party.37
The support of socialists for the ANC, in contrast with that of liberals, was premised precisely on the absence of a significant African bourgeoisie and the resultant belief that the movement would not, therefore, become a home for black capitalists. As will become evident below, this view changed over time, and had to change as the ANC grew to become a powerful force in apartheid South Africa. Liberals called on the congresses to restrict themselves to constitutional methods of protest as the only means of ‘rational’ and ‘evolutionary’ societal development; radical whites, on the other hand, joined the ANCYL in criticising the ANC for failing to develop a branch structure and to deploy mass-based extra-parliamentary pressure.
White opposition to apartheid in the 1950s – where it mattered: in the cauldron of African nationalism, not sitting in the anterooms of white racist politics hoping to be invited into the main chamber – was divided between the South African Congress of Democrats and the Liberal Party; between radicals (including communists) and liberals.
Both Marxist and liberal theoreticians argued that segregation and apartheid restricted economic development. Government, they believed, would have to adopt a ‘commonsense’ policy and acknowledge the fact of black urbanisation and economic integration by awarding concomitant political representation. Rather than being overtly economic or ideological, as might have been expected, differences between the two were dominated by approaches to the methods and aims of the ANC-led struggle.
In 1947 Edgar Brookes, a Native Representative and leading liberal, stated: ‘If Liberalism be interpreted as an economic doctrine in opposition to socialism, not all of us would be very enthusiastic to defend it.’38 This was not merely the last blush of wartime pro-socialist sympathies: by the late 1950s the Liberal Party programme was considerably more radical in many respects than the Freedom Charter of the Congress Alliance. And both Marxists and liberals shared a viewpoint – later codified by the Communist Party as internal colonialism or ‘colonialism of a special type’ – from which oppression and resistance were understood in relation to the existence of colonists who lived cheek by jowl with their subject colony and had no metropole to which they could or would flee after decolonisation. For communists this was a theoretical construct to explain and accommodate the contradictions of national and class struggle; for liberals it emphasised the ‘logic’ of accepting a meritocratic, colour-blind future for South Africa.
Ideologically, liberals and radicals operated within a remarkably similar framework, dominated by the shared demand for the abolition of racial discrimination and the introduction of a policy based on individual merit rather than race. Communists and radicals may have agreed from the outset that this meant equality under African leadership; by the end of the 1950s (though not before) most Liberal Party members would probably have agreed.
The influence of African nationalism is pervasive. Where white opponents of apartheid differed was over the speed at which a non-racial solution could be reached and the best means of reaching it. Liberals sought the separation of middle-class groups from the mass of the African population and their incorporation in state and economy – the classic black buffer class, as it later came to be known. The liberal vision was evolutionary, steady and gradualist. It relied on a quiescent working class; extra-parliamentary action was seen as both potentially revolutionary and anathema to managed societal evolution.
Liberals called for the extension of social services as a necessary precondition for black advancement to a ‘civilised’ status and incorporation in a modern Western state. In contrast, radical whites supported and worked for the organisation of the working class through mass-based extra-parliamentary campaigns, and called for immediate universal suffrage. White radicals assisted with the formation of black trade unions and offered support for strikes, bus boycotts and other campaigns.
Although relations between liberals and radicals were marked by hostile rhetoric the white liberal/left comprised a relatively cohesive social grouping. Largely drawn from the professional, English-speaking upper middle class, dominated by academics, lawyers and journalists, the liberal/ left was interwoven with friendships and professional and personal relationships that criss-crossed ideological and organisational divisions.39 Through the 1940s the ANC slowly radicalised its programme, adopted extra-parliamentary methods and demanded unqualified white identification with both, a demand that was to sharpen divisions among white liberals and radicals.
The Communist Party 1945–1950
The Communist Party of South Africa, formed in 1921, was, for decades, the only non-racial