In the year of Mass Action for People’s Power!!!
Amandla! Maatla!
(ANC Lusaka Mission Archives, Box 84, Folder 9)
IN EXILE: VELLA PILLAY, ECONOMIC RESEARCH AND THE LONDON COMRADES
Yes, the empire was collapsing: Ghana had become free; Malaysia and [Tanzania] were getting independence. In London there were people from all over the world, little groupings supporting the liberation struggles in their different countries: Nigerians, Kenyans, Tanganyikans, Burmese, Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Indians, South Americans, West Indians, Irish. It was a very cosmopolitan environment, and we were bound by a unity we felt when we met one another. There was a commonality in our struggles, so I didn’t feel lonely, in spite of the insularity of the British (Maharaj in O’Malley 2007: 82–83).5
In a recently published paper, Vishnu Padayachee and John Sender (2018) deal at length with the role that radical economist Vella Pillay played for over half a century in economic policy analysis, both in exile and on his temporary return to South Africa in the early 1990s. While we draw significantly from that paper, we try here to provide a glimpse of policy debates in the years of exile by focusing on developments in London, building the story around the key figure of Pillay. Even his detractors – of which there were many, including in the SACP in the 1960s and some of the ‘neo-liberals’ in the ANC and in academia in the 1990s – would not be able to contest the claim that Pillay was the foremost ANC economist in London from the late 1940s until his return to South Africa in 1991. There were very few, if any, in the movement more qualified and experienced in economic analysis and policy than Pillay. His story is inextricably bound into the narrative of ANC exile politics and economics in the British capital for all those long and difficult decades. In fact, we would contend that to the extent that any significant discussion of economic matters and economic policy for South Africa occurred over this period within exiled ANC circles, Pillay likely would have been central to it.
Pillay was without any doubt a figure of very significant influence in the ANC–SACP in exile. When Oliver Tambo left South Africa in March 1960, he found a house in Muswell Hill, North London, close to the home of Vella and Patsy Pillay, and they struck up a political and family connection that lasted until Tambo’s passing in South Africa in 1993. By that time, Vella had returned to Johannesburg with Patsy to head up the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG) project (see chapter 4). As Ellis notes, ‘Vella Pillay, although rarely mentioned in ANC histories, was one of the main intermediaries between the SACP and Moscow …’ (2015: 40, emphasis added). In the 1950s and early 1960s, Vella and Max Joffe were the leading SACP figures in exile. There may have been a reason for this ‘omission’ as we will see soon. This may, however, be a necessary moment to draw attention to and make a small contribution to correcting this egregious Stalinist-style side-lining from history of such a significant intellectual and senior policy thinker of the South African liberation movement.
The front cover of Ellis’s book on the ANC in exile features a photograph of three key figures sitting around a low table covered in documents and deep in discussion. The occasion is the first visit by South African communists to an official meeting of communist and workers’ parties in Moscow on 3 November 1960. They were Yusuf Dadoo, the chairperson of the SACP since 1972, Mao Zedong, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, and Vella Pillay, the SACP representative in London at that time (Ellis 2015: 12–13, fn. 43). In 1962, Pillay accompanied Arthur Goldreich to a four-hour meeting with Deng Xiaoping in Peking (Frankel 2016: 77). But his story begins long before these early 1960s experiences.
Pillay was born in Johannesburg on 8 October 1923. After matriculation, he attended the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) where he studied part-time and graduated with a BCom degree. Like many others of his generation, he became politicised at university. He joined the Federation of Progressive Students at Wits and became deeply involved in the activities of the Transvaal Indian Congress. He soon joined the Communist Party of South Africa. In the mid-1940s, he became involved in resistance to the Pegging Act – a forerunner to later apartheid legislation, such as the Group Areas Act, which attempted to segregate and discriminate against Indians on matters of land, property, trade and residence. In June 1948, he married Patsy, another activist, in the Cape where racially mixed marriages were then still legal. But the looming National Party plans for stricter policing of racial boundaries and his acceptance by the London School of Economics (LSE) to study there for an Honours degree in international economics led the couple to move to the UK in January 1949. While studying at the LSE, again part-time, he relied on Patsy to keep them going financially; she had found a job as the secretary to Krishna Menon, the world-renowned first Indian high commissioner in London after independence.
Vella found a job as a research officer at the State Bank of China in London. There he remained a loyal member of staff for the rest of his working life, rising to the position of assistant general manager (the second in charge) by retirement. He remained an active member of the ANC in exile, writing for, distributing and smuggling copies of the African Communist and International Bulletin (which he helped to produce) into South Africa, ably supported by Patsy.
Soon after Mac Maharaj arrived in London in 1957, Pillay set about the task of building a cell of the SACP. Maharaj found this strange as he had thought that the Party had long ceased to function or even exist (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016). The unit consisted of Vella, Patsy and Mac. A few years later, Vella became the SACP Central Committee representative in the UK (O’Malley 2007: 82). He became the key link between the SACP in South Africa and the rest of Europe. When he visited London in May 1962, Mandela visited Pillay and Dadoo as the leaders of the SACP there, and laid out the view that the ANC had to be given greater pre-eminence on the international stage: ‘Mandela later met Yusuf Dadoo and Vella Pillay and informed them that the ANC had to project itself as an independent force, represented by Africans at international conferences. Firmly, he told Dadoo, this was not a departure from ANC policy, rather, an unbundling of being stuck in a nebulous image that appeared to represent everyone, in effect a break with recent ANC policy – and cross-Congress cooperation’ (Benneyworth 2011: 90).
Aside from such ethnic politics at play in exile, Pillay soon became a victim of both personal infighting and rivalries within the Party, which had little to do with ideology and was to some extent a result of the growing Sino–Soviet tensions in the early 1960s. It is not easy to untangle these. The SACP, arguably the Communist Party most steeped internationally in the repressive political practices historically associated with Stalinism, regarded Pillay’s employment at the State Bank of China with some suspicion. He had to be a Maoist, they believed, to work there. There was no small irony in their conclusion, given that the Chinese Communist Party, in fact, broke with the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 in a Sino–Soviet split. This came after the public revelations of Nikita Khrushchev condemning Stalinism, to the practices of which the SACP (and the Chinese Communist Party) remained slavishly committed throughout, and notwithstanding the formal distancing of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party from such political practices. But this was not all, far from it. For all of the 1950s, Pillay, as the SACP representative in Europe, was the key that unlocked ANC–SACP access to both Moscow and Beijing. However, when the generation of Dadoo’s communists (including Michael Harmel) arrived in London in around 1960, they resented this influence and apparently set about undermining Pillay. Maharaj recalls that in 1960 or 1961, on a boat on a Moscow river, Harmel or someone of that seniority in the Party presented Vella with a choice: either remain with the State Bank of China or face expulsion from the SACP. We know from Irina Filatova (2012: 528) that Pillay, Dadoo, Harmel and Joe Matthews were all in Moscow in late 1960, the second visit by Pillay and Dadoo in that year.
Vella refused to quit the Bank of China even when he was offered a ‘sweetener’ in the form of a job at an equivalent proposed Russian state bank in London. These key developments are captured by Maharaj as follows:
… the party had been dominated by white members and there was a need for many white members