Supplement to SEARCHLIGHT SOUTH AFRICA, VOL 3, NO 2

Supplement to SEARCHLIGHT SOUTH AFRICA, VOL 3, NO 2 THE TROTSKYISTS OF SOUTH AFRICA, 1932-48 Written and Assembled by Baruch Hirson PROVIDING AN economic background, a discussion of the working class movement of South Africa, and a history of the groups that were formed. There is also an essay on the organization of trade unions, pen-pictures of some of the leading members of the groups, a bibliog raphy of works on the Trotskyists and the movement that grew out of their activities in the Cape. Finally there is a review of three books that are apposite to this study. Caption: Top: Workers of the World Unite. Bottom: The Inauguration of the Lenin Club (Left Opposition), Cape Town 29 July 1933. From the family album of Anne (Averbach) Bloch. A Note On The Primary SOURCE MATERIAL USED IN THE ESSAYS THE HISTORY of the South African Trotskyists during the 1930s and into the next decade was never made available or discussed with new recruits. There were vague stories, but no hard facts. No former member of the groups wrote about his experiences, and there was a silence that was so extensive that some comrade's names could not be mentioned. I leamt in the 1940s that there had been a one-time nun in the leadership of the Workers Party of South Africa. But no details were available, even though she had died (as I later found) in 1942. The leading member of the WPSA, if mentioned at all, was always referred to as 'Mr B\ That was all. Even when we learnt in the 1970s that he was Mr Burlak we were never told his first name.The other main group, the Fourth International Organisation of South Africa (a pretentious name), was open, but we learnt little about its members or what they did. There was perhaps little to con ceal about their activities, because they did so very little. The histoiy of the groups in Johannesburg was also unknown. Nobody in Johannesburg had kept any records, there were no letters or minutes, and the names of most of those who joined the Trotskyist groups were not recorded. There was nothing, until the documents of the liberal Institute of South Africa became available and Lynn Saffery's files were opened. Only then did the story of Max Gordon become available. There were a few later discoveries, but like the tale of the three monkeys, nothing was seen, said, or heard. Then, in a deserted house in Cape Town, once the residence of Clare Goodlatte, a box of documents was found in the early 1980s. There is still a mystery surrounding this discovery. They apparently came into the possession of a 'stroller' (a person who lived on the proceeds of materials taken from deserted or demolished properties) who sold them in two portions. I was able to get copies of both sections. After maintaining absolute secrecy over five decades, the documents disclosing the inner working of the major section was hawked and sold. The papers included draft articles for the journal The Spark, minutes of meetings, documents, letters, membership forms and minutes. These documents (totalling a thousand or more), once un ravelled, provided an unique picture. This collection was complemented by letters written by Clare Goodlatte (the 'Red Nun') to a former student, found in the South African Library and supplemented by a search in the Department of Education at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, where she had once sat as principal of the teachers training college. I have found no documents of FIOSA. But when I visited the Library of Contemporary In ternational Documents at Nanterre in 1991 to look at the papers of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, I found a card referring to the papers of FIOSA. These cannot be viewed until the late 1990s without the permission of the unknown depositor. This continues the politics of madness. Even public papers in Europe only have a 30 years rule, and that is ab surd. I had no time to wait for permission, nor was I interested. If some historian wishes to in vestigate these documents at a later date, that gift to man- or woman-kind will be available to them. Except for the material in the WPSA collection, and a few documents in the Trotsky ar chives at Harvard, nothing else has been found. The documents of the WIL were largely destroyed when its rooms were burnt by arsonists. The papers and printed publications I salvaged at the time were placed in the care of the University of the Witwatersrand, and these were photographed at a later date for the Hoover Institute. I copied other materials from the collection held by Nachum Sneh in Beer Sheba. Nobody, other than myself, has written about the activities of the WIL An Economic and Political Background THE ECONOMIC BACKGROUND TO SOUTH AFRICA THE HISTORY of Southern Africa stretches back over millennia. It is a story of peoples who occupied lands before meeting with, and being con quered or incorporated by, peoples who moved from their original lands near the Cameroons across Africa and down the east coast. Some time after 300 AD the forebears of the African people entered the region now known as South Africa. Crafts were developed, metals mined, trade conducted and then seemingly abandoned until the predominant occupations became hunt ing, cattle herding and/or cultivation of crops. This was the position when the first whites arrived to set up a refreshment station for the ships of the Dutch East Indian Company (DEIC) in their pas sage to the East Indies. In the seventeenth century merchant capitalism, as sisted by the growth of shipping fleets, was the prevailing form of enterprise, and it was the might of the Heeren 17 (the directorate of the DEIC), not to mention their arrogance and aggression, that allowed the Dutch to take con trol of the Indies, and subsequently the Cape. The men who arrived at the Cape were servants of the DEIC, and were required to stay within the juris diction of the Dutch-appointed governor. Their task was to provision the passing ships and to feed and protect the local settlement. Men came first, and because there was a dearth of Dutch women, the earliest marriages or liaisons included many with the women of the local Khoi or San clans (known derisively as Hottentots and Bushmen respectively). The story of the region was of the dispossession of the local inhabitants: of their cattle and their land, of their decimation and their reduction to ser vitude. The DEIC also sent prisoners from Malacca and the east (described later as Malay people) who were reduced to slavery. These people provided a labour force that was otherwise not available, and in time they rose to be come the artisans employed in the Cape. More workers became available for the white settlers when the Khoi were subjugated and the African peoples conquered. Ethnicity divided the growing Cape settlement, and yet, at first, the colour barrier was set aside for those who were converted to Christianity, and 'free' men and women arose from the baptismal font. Even at the topmost levels colour was a matter of small concern; one of the appointed Governors being of 'mixed' blood. Only later were rigid ethnic boundaries defined and har dened, and religious conversion was no longer a passage to 'freedom'. The Governors at the Cape could not, or would not, control the outward Movement of the settiers, and extended the colony's boundaries to maintain 54 SEARCHLIGHT SOUTH AFRICA, VOL 3, NO 2, APRIL 1993 their control. Nor could the Governors stop trading, cattle rustling or clashes on the ever-moving borders, as the settlers met with African peoples, them selves moving down the coast. When the Xhosa people were confronted by migrating settlers in what is now the eastern Cape, they were defeated in frontier wars. This was the beginning of the subjugation of an entire people and their absorption into the settler economy as a servile class. The posses sion of the Cape by the Dutch prevailed until Britain, during the Napoleonic wars, claimed that its sea route to India was in danger. It occupied the region and added the Cape to its Empire. Marx has written in purple prose of the disastrous effect of the expansion of capitalism on the people of the colonies, and this needs no repetition. However, he argued that capitalism, with all its faults, transformed the world, established a single world market and undermined, if not destroyed, archaic social systems. This was the way of progress, and, concerned as Socialists might be for the colonised people, the sweep of capitalism across the globe was necessary and inevitable. The task of the colonies was to supply raw materials for the European countries, act as military or supply bases, and trade with their 'mother' countries. The settlers at the Cape were able to supply passing ships, but had little to trade, and they found no minerals to mine. This meant that the region that was to grow into the Cape colony was poor and remained poor, despite the development of its farmlands. Ostrich feathers, wool and hides and an in ferior wine were not the basis for large-scale capital accumulation. The first significant change in the nineteenth century occurred in or around 1836, when groups of Dutch in the eastern Cape, rejecting controls imposed by the new British administration - particularly on slavery and the status of Africans - crossed the coastal mountain ranges and moved into the interior of the country.

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