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The Suppression of Communism, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the Instrumentality of Fear During Apartheid

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The Suppression of Communism, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the Instrumentality of Fear During Apartheid THE SUPPRESSION OF COMMUNISM, THE DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH, AND THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF FEAR DURING APARTHEID. SAMUEL LONGFORD: 3419365 SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR PARTICIA HAYES i A mini-thesis submitted for the degree of MA in History University of the Western Cape November 2016. Supervisor: Professor Patricia Hayes DECLARATION I declare that The Suppression of Communism, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the Instrumentality of Fear during apartheid is my own work and has not been submitted for any degree or examination in any other university. All the sources I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by complete references. NAME: Samuel Longford: 3419365 DATE: 11/11/2016. Signed: ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. This mini-thesis has been carried out in concurrence with a M.A. Fellowship at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), University of the Western Cape (UWC). I acknowledge and thank the CHR for providing the funding that made this research possible. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the CHR. Great thanks and acknowledgement also goes to my supervisor, Prof Patricia Hayes, who guided me through the complicated issues surrounding this subject matter, my partner Charlene, who put up with the late nights and uneventful weekends, and various others who contributed to the workings and re-workings of this mini-thesis. iii The experience of what we have of our lives from within, the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie – the truth lies outside, in what we do.1 1 Slavoj Zizek¸ Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008): 40. iv CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. 1 ORIGINS: ‘JOHNNY GOMAS, THE UNFASHIONABLE TAILOR’. 3 A NOTE ON COMMUNIST HISTORIOGRAPHY. 8 CHAPTER OUTLINE. 13 CHAPTER 1. CONSOLIDATING COLONIALISM: ANTI-COMMUNIST DISCOURSE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY. 16 THE POLICE COMMISSIONER’S REPORT ON COMMUNISM: EXPERT KNOWLEDGE, AND THE NORMALISATION OF COLONIAL ‘TRUTH’. 18 COLONIAL ANXIETIES: THE PARALLEL MOBILISATION OF ANTI-SEMITISM AND ANTI-COMMUNISM AFTER THE RAND REVOLT. 27 DEFINING ‘WHITENESS’, THE COLONIAL WAR ON SPIRITS, AND THE ‘INNOCENT’ AFRICAN. 38 CHAPTER 2: AFRIKANER NATIONALISM, THE DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH AND THE COMMUNIST OTHER. 44 D.F. MALAN AND THE CONSOLIDATION AND HOMOGENISATION OF THE ‘VOLK’. 45 A NOTE ON WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE ‘ROOI GEVAAR’. 51 THE ‘BATTLE OF BLOOD RIVER’/IMPI YASENCOME: FOUNDATIONAL MYTHS. 55 THE DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH, CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM, AND THE COMMUNIST OTHER. 59 THE CHRISTIAN-NATIONALIST CRUSADE AGAINST COMMUNISM. 64 v CHAPTER 3: THE ‘ROOI GEVAAR’ AND BRAM FISCHER: COMMUNIST SPECTRES AND ‘VOLKSVERRAAIERS’. 72 THE MYTHOLOGISATION OF BRAM FISCHER: BIOGRAPHICAL PRODUCTION AND THE MESSIANIC. 73 ANTI-COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA AND THE MYTHOLOGISATION OF BRAM FISCHER. 78 GERARD LUDI: UNDERCOVER AGENT, ANTI-COMMUNIST EXPERT, AND SELF-PROCLAIMED HERO OF APARTHEID. 80 HENRY R. PIKE: A HISTORY OF COMMUNISM IN SOUTH AFRICA. 85 THE ‘ROOI GEVAAR’. 88 MARX AND THE COMMUNIST SPECTRE. 93 JACQUES DERRIDA’S SPECTRES OF MARX. 95 THE ‘ROOI GEVAAR’: AN IMPORTANT DETERMINANT IN SOUTH AFRICAN POLITICS. 98 CONCLUSION. 110 THE COMMUNIST OTHER AND THE ‘ROOI GEVAAR’: AS ALIBI. 110 CONTEMPORARY MANIFESTATIONS: 1) THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE AND THE SEEMINGLY NECESSARY OBJECT OF FEAR. 114 CONTEMPORARY MANIFESTATIONS: 2) BIOGRAPHICAL PRODUCTION AND THE MESSIANIC FIGURE OF HISTORY. 118 CONTEMPORARY MANIFESTATIONS: 3) HISTORY-AS-SPECTRE. 121 BIBLIOGRAPHY 126 vi ABSTRACT Between the 1917 Russian Revolution and demise of the Soviet Union, the communist Other, as godless deviant and arch enemy of the capitalist state, inhabited a specific space in the minds and imaginations of much of the Western world. S/he was one to be feared, one to be guarded against, and if possible, one to be suppressed by political, ideological, or military means. Such conditions contributed to the widespread suppression and banning of communist and communist aligned organisations. In South Africa this coincided with the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, and the consolidation and reconfiguration of ‘white’ supremacy in the form of apartheid.2 After a marginal National Party (NP) victory in 1948, the Suppression of Communism Act (1950) and the ‘Rooi Gevaar’ became synonymous with dissent and revolution within and beyond the apartheid state. For example, it was on these grounds that a series of high profile political trials – the Treason, Rivonia, and Fischer Trials – would be fought and lost on the first occasion. Each trial was based upon the assertion that the accused were communists or involved in a Soviet conspiracy that intended to depose the apartheid government through violent revolution. Conversely, communism is now popularly invoked in relation to narratives of struggle and the ‘triumph of the human spirit over adversity’, in which new and now old allies defeated the evil of apartheid, and ushered in an era of freedom, democracy, and reconciliation. As a result, communism and the SACP (the dominant political organisation associated with communism) have been incorporated into national histories that narrate the African National Congress’ (ANC’s) struggle and victory over apartheid, which culminated in Nelson Mandela and other political leaders returning to supposedly fulfil their destiny by ‘freeing the people’ from totalitarian rule. Having said this, I argue that the suppression of communism goes far beyond the limiting horizons of popularised political and ideological discourse, or indeed, violent acts of torture and murder directed towards those deemed to be a threat to the ‘nation’. In other words, debates surrounding communism are not merely representative of the state’s oppressive policies towards anti-apartheid activists, the global conflict between capitalism and communism, or popular narratives of suffering and struggle against apartheid. Alternatively, they were (and are) intimately linked with a nation-building project which, unlike violence sanctioned by the state or reconciled – at least on the surface – through symbolic acts like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), has been difficult to exorcise, come to terms with, and diminish in the contemporary. Put another way, although communism is intrinsically associated with the class struggle and class politics in South Africa, it was in fact driven by and interwoven with racist ideologies upon which apartheid and British colonialism before that were founded. With these debates in mind, this mini-thesis will attempt to remove communism from conventional discourses and re-place it within debates surrounding nation-building, and the formation of different subjectivities. This will be carried out not only as an attempt to “overcome the limitations of ideology”3 and further deconstruct legacies of oppression and violence, but also to think with the ways in which different groups perceive, mobilise and appropriate ideology as a means to foreclose resistance and reaffirm and maintain nationalist hierarchies of power within society. This mini-thesis will begin by exploring the ways in which communism has been perceived in South Africa. More specifically, it will consider how the idea of communism was mobilised and appropriated in relation to apartheid’s nation-building project. It will also thematically engage with the ways in which mythologies surrounding communism traversed the supposedly rational and irrational worlds, and, in the latter stages of this mini-thesis, will attempt to develop an argument – using Bram Fischer as subject – based upon Jacques Derrida’s notion of the communist spectre, and the importance of the messianic or, more importantly, the prophet in history. 2 The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was banned under the Suppression of Communism Act, 1950. 3 Premesh Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the shape of recurring pasts (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009): 127. vii INTRODUCTION . This mini-thesis is interested in the ways in which the idea of communism has been appropriated and mobilised by different groups during moments of political transition in South Africa. More specifically, I aim to explore how communism was used as a means to consolidate power and reaffirm the limits of citizenry and the state during apartheid. Through an exploration of the communist as object of fear (spectre), I hope to further deconstruct the ways in which nations are conceptually formed in relation to what becomes their antithetical Other. Furthermore, this project aims to think with the imaginary, or what Michel Foucault refers to as the ‘Realm of the Fantastic’, 1 in an attempt to reveal how anti-communist ideology, or more specifically, the mythologised idea of communism in South Africa, policed and maintained desired disconnections within and between ‘nations’. Working alongside this particular debate, I will attempt to think more generally with the ways in which particular epistemologies, discourses, and grammars are normalised as rational truth, and how they are mobilised as alibi to justify the enactment of violence and oppression or to legitimise the consolidation and reworking of long-standing power formations. In this sense we take up debates forwarded by Saul Dubow – or rather Martin Legassick’s critique of Dubow – who in A Commonwealth of Knowledge attempts to establish the genealogies of scientific discourses in South Africa, whilst at the same time, according to Legassick,
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