The growth of radicalism in the African National Congress, and especially its Youth League, seemed to be passing unnoticed. There was no attention to its new Charter of African Rights [Africans’ Claims] … And no recognition of the calibre of a new black generation with leaders like Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu. Only the stock-market speculators seemed aware of the rash of wild-cat strikes spreading across the Rand amongst the black mine-workers.40
But, as we see below, communists (black and white) were themselves lulled by wartime pro-Soviet sentiments into seriously underestimating both the strength of anti-communism within the nationalist movement it worked with and within South African society more broadly, and the forces of reaction and the lengths to which they would go in seeking to stop communists, real and imagined.
During the war years the CPSA had scored some minor successes in municipal elections in Johannesburg and Cape Town, but the onset of the Cold War marked the end of white voter support. Black membership increased significantly during the war, as party organisers such as David Bopape and J B Marks concentrated on African mobilisation over civic and trade union issues.41 The combination of increased African urbanisation and militancy created conditions conducive to the organisational work of CPSA members and, in 1944, the CPSA Central Committee noted both the growth of African industrial and economic action and the lack of political organisation: ‘Our members working in the various national organisations have done much in an individual way. A central and active leadership in this direction has been lacking for a time.’42
The CPSA was a heterogenous organisation, with both black and white party members playing important, though different, roles. White members had a high profile in supporting the war and fighting (white) elections. Black party members were involved in the 1944 Anti-Pass Campaign and in trade union and civic work. Their combined successes led some sections of the CPSA ‘to think in terms of mass membership’.43 A significant portion of the CPSA regarded legal parliamentary activity as the main field of party work, suffering what would later be termed ‘legalistic illusions’:
… the Party revealed certain weaknesses which had developed in its ranks, as well as its indestructible virtues. A certain tendency towards legalistic illusions had penetrated the Party and sections of its leadership. Despite the open threats of the Nationalist party to ban the C.P., no effective steps had been taken to prepare for underground existence and illegal work.44
In 1928 the CPSA had accepted a Comintern thesis that placed South Africa in the ambit of ‘colonial and semi-colonial countries’ and 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’.45
In what became popularly known (outside of the Communist Party, at any rate) as the ‘two-stage revolution’, the CPSA developed a national democratic programme that called for the immediate transfer of power to the majority population and effectively left socialist reconstruction to a later, secondary stage. In the late 1940s, as the ANC grew (in part through the active role played by black communists) and seemed to be taking up a position where it could provide the leadership necessary for the first stage of the revolution, CPSA–ANC co-operation evolved, despite opposition from the ANCYL and some older ANC members.
The post-war CPSA programme was explained in a 1945 pamphlet entitled What Next? A Policy for South Africa, which called for democratic rights for all, the nationalisation of the land and banks, a national health service and free and compulsory education, and supported increased industrialisation.46 Given the heterogenous nature of the party, the call for a national democratic programme met with some internal opposition. Academic Jack Simons, a leading Central Committee member and CPSA theoretician, defending What Next? at the party’s 1945 Conference, noted (in language that continues to echo in the Communist Party today): ‘Some of our comrades describe this pamphlet as “wishy-washy” … they do not consider it revolutionary in content.’ He continued:
Comrades, there are times when to be extreme ultra-revolutionary is to betray the cause for which we are working. Which is the more revolutionary today – to say you want the vote and equality of rights for the non-Europeans? Isn’t it more revolutionary to take up the struggle for housing for the people, for fair distribution of supplies and a Ministry of Food? We must find a policy which gives expression to the innermost needs of people of our country. What we lack too much is the spirit of sacrifice, the determination to get among the people and to take up the issues which most nearly affect them.47
The CPSA programme was clearly more radical than Africans’ Claims in its talk of nationalisation, which found increasing sympathy within the ANC and later expression in the 1955 Freedom Charter. The relationship between communists and African nationalists was never straightforward; according to leading CPSA–SACP member Michael Harmel, ANCYL leaders denounced communism as a ‘foreign ideology’ but ‘… found common ground with Communists in demanding a more positive and revolutionary ANC leadership and a turn from stereotyped and ineffective methods of struggle to radical mass action’.48
Harmel’s description is factually accurate, but smoothes over long-standing and deeply felt anti-communism. While many ANCYL and ANC members remained hostile to the CPSA and the high profile of white communists, the role of those white communists in visibly providing unqualified support for the black liberation struggle, including trade union and political work, was of substantial importance.49 By fully endorsing (the newly radicalised) Congress’s aims and activities, whites in the CPSA adopted a position that set the standard for radical whites in the 1950s and against which white anti-apartheid activists of all political hues would be judged.
The Communist Party’s decision to participate in alliances with non-socialist, nationalist organisations in pursuit of the ‘first stage’ of the revolution, rather than going it alone as a class-based party, had considerable effects on opposition politics, positive and negative. The CPSA encouraged the creation of a ‘broad fighting alliance’ against racial discrimination. Of particular significance for our story was its role in working with the Congress movement to develop grassroots mobilisation in producing statements of principle, starting with Africans’ Claims and finding its fullest expression in the Congress of the People campaign of 1954/55, which produced the Freedom Charter.50
In 1944 the CPSA proposed that ‘[t]he idea of a People’s Charter of Rights should be taken up jointly by three sections [the three national groups]’.51 This should emphasise a point that will become evident in this book: race was a given in the period under study. Parties and individuals fought for a future based on equality regardless of race, but it was not based on a denial of what they saw as the ‘fact’ of race. ‘National groups’ is, of course, a euphemism for race; the ANC’s talk of ‘the national question’ – which lasted beyond apartheid and into democracy – has exactly the same connotation.
Both the CPSA and the ANC expressed the desire to ‘get among the people’ and reunite formal organisations with the widespread black militancy of the period. With this in mind, in 1945 the CPSA called for the summoning of ‘a People’s Convention’, with the aim of producing a coherent, popular statement of national democratic goals, and to symbolise and give concrete form to the emerging black organisational unity.52 This became a common goal of the CPSA and the Congress movement in the post-war period.
The production of such a charter could not and did not precede the emergence of a unified alliance of forces opposed to racial discrimination, which took place a decade later. However, the method of drafting what became the Freedom Charter (in 1955) was envisaged in the late 1940s. In 1947 Yusuf Dadoo, president of the SAIC and a leading CPSA member, began implementing a joint resolution of the Transvaal ANC, the SAIC and the APO to convene a countrywide conference of all progressive organisations and to draw up a charter for democracy for all in South Africa.53
In early 1948 delegates