sub-factions of -factions as accusations and counter-accusations of 'revision­ ism', 'Bukharinism' and 'Trotskyism' were bandied about in a search for ideological purity. Majority factions had expelled minorities only to be expelled themselves in due course. Internecine doctrinal strife had displaced public political activity, $nd ultimately the Central Committee had moved from Johannesburg to Cape Town -fjai■. survwat. In Johannesburg, the Party had withered. Its debts were unpaid, its offices repossessed by landlords, its printing press sequestrated and its formal journal 'Umsebenzi' defunct. All that remained was a semi-secret sect.

My application for membership was accepted and I was placed 'on probation' for several months. I would be required to pay regular subscriptions, attend regular members' meetings, and 'carry out all tasks assigned to me'. The conditions - like most serious Party talk - were couched in a Party jargon which was new to me, heavy with references to 'aggregate meetings', 'functionaries', 'democratic centralism' and 'factionalism'. I began to learn the jargon. 'Aggregate' which I only knew in its building industry the main ingredient in a concrete mix^meant what w o root -of TMe wui III1 c u IIj * 'general meeting’. The jargon, I discovered, was not peculiarly South African but a species of international Communist-speak derived from the Bolsheviks and the Comintern. In its most impenetrable form we knew it as 'Inprecorr' language as invariably used in the columns of the Comintern journal: International Press Correspondence (Inprecorr.). The Communist Party not only had 'aggregate meetings'. It also had 'functionaries' rather than officials or office-bearers, a 'Political Bureau' (or PB) rather than an executive committee, and 'secretariats' in addition to secretaries. The jargon gave the Party an air of obscurity and foreignness. But it also gave its members a feeling of belonging to a select band much as rituals and secret signs do for Freemasons or Boy Scouts.

My first aggregate meeting was held at the South end of El off Street where the shopping area expired and gave way to urban wasteland. It was in a decrepit of-fice block in an unplanned sprawl of car parks, black municipal workers' compounds, municipal beerhalls and cemeteries of dead cars. The Bantu Mens' Social Centre - then the hub of the city's black cultural life - was nearby. Further south only huge windswept dumps of white mine sand. The Party office was about as far out of town as one could get while still claiming to be 'in town'.

27 The building's entrance hall and staircase were unlit. Mice, rats or cock-roaches rustled in the passageway, ft creaking wooden staircase led to a dimly lit upper landing. The Party 'premises' turned out to be a single room in which were some thirty kitchen chairs and a table, and about fifteen people, black and white. They looked me over briefly and went on gossiping amongst themselves. I recognised only one or two, members of the Labour League of Youth I had not expected to find there. No one introduced me to anyone. I sat hunched down in my chair until the meeting began. Late.

I had never attended a meeting with black people before, or been in a place where there was no apparent distinction between 'us' and 'them'. I was a dislocating experience but not threatening. It all seemed so casual, so natural that settling in to it was quite easy. I had expected to find myself on a new political plane, but not a totally new world in which black and white participated as equals. They talked and I listened. My perception of the world turned upside down. Colour barriers which had been an inescapable part of my daily world at home, school and work were missing. All reason for them seemed to have disappeared.

The very ordinariness of the proceedings disturbed me. I had come with romantic expectations of finding a circle of that comradeship and fraternity which had been missing from my experiences in the Labour Party. I had anticipated an atmosphere of tolerance and mutuality to fit my concept of a socialist society. It was nothing like that. Debate was fierce and adversarial. Speakers snapped at one another, attacked each other passionately and personally. The jargon words flew - factional, sectarian, opportunist, revisionist. Could this verbal warfare really lead the way to the new world of socialism?

Afterwards I came to understand that the wars of the aggregate meetings were the last throes of the years of feuding and faction-fighting which had brought the Party to its lowest ebb. I knew almost nothing of that past. I did not appreciate that this was a Party in transition, rediscovering its roots, and that exorcising old factional scores was in fact clearing the ground for a new-style Party. The meeting ended with a spiritless singi Internationale. No one spoke any words of cheer. Factions without so much as a 'goodnight', still arguing. The experience nearly turned me off the Party for ever.

28 Outside it was Saturday night, dark and wet in a deserted neighbourhood. For unexplained reasons aggregate meetings were always held on Saturday nights. I suppose it was a display o-f dedication, or a -form o-f self—flagellation like wearing a hair shirt. For everyone else, Johannesburg's Saturday nights were dedicated to 'having a good time' - drinking, dining, dancing and movie-going. Only the Communist Party imposed this monkish self-denial on itself, and even called absentees to account afterwards.

I bore with the hair shirt and gradually got to know the thirty or so men and women who were the 'aggregate' of the Johannesburg Communist Party. It was 1938. The Central Committee had been transferred to Cape Town and General Secretary Moses Kotane with it. A new District Committee had just been elected to bury past factional and doctrinal struggles and revive what could be rescued. Some of the veterans of past battles remained, like Willie Kalk of the Leather Workers Union and Sam Nikin of the Furniture Workers, still fiercely combative and smouldering over past conflicts. Others seemed more reconciled to the new order, like Issy Wolfson of the Tailoring Workers Union, the eMinence grise of the black members^Edwin Mofutsanyana, and his then wife Josie Mpama (or Palmer). The committee was an uneasy mix of gladiators from a factional past and some who had only arrived after the worst internal battles had ended. It was just starting to find its feet on the road to revival. The members, a mix of native South Africans with a good number of first or second-generation European immigrants, were a fair cross-section of Johannes­ burg's population though Afrikaners and blacks were under-represented. The District Committee accordingly was over-weighted with young white members.1

The only aggregate I recall from that time was concerned with a single issue - a proposal from the Minister of Defence, Oswald Pi row, for a National Register of white citizens whose skills could be conscripted by the state in time of national need. Pirow was the cabinet's most outspoken supporter of Hitler and National Socialism. He was also the author of the Riotous Assemblies Act which seriously curtailed rights of free speech and assembly. Any National Register sponsored by him would almost certainly have some sinister anti-democratic

1 In addition to the veterans named above, the District Committee so far as I recall included Archie Lewitton, Hilda Watts (later Bernstein), Michael Harmel, Ray Adler (later Harmel), Gessie Landman and Max Joffe. The members changed slightly from year to year and brought in, inter alia, also Yusuf Dadoo, Bram Fischer, Alpheus Maliba, Rowley Arenstein and, a few years later, myself.

29 purpose. The question -for the aggregate meeting was whether or not to encourage people to register. Was the Register preparation for resistance to ■fascism and war, or the start of a Pirowite force of storm-troops against the civil population?

Eli Weinberg had come from Cape Town to lead the discussion for the CC. I had never seen him before, but knew a little of his history. While still adolescent, he had been charged and imprisoned in Lithuania for left-wing activities. In South Africa with little English and no trade, he had foot-slogged his way around the country, getting the feel of it, particularly in the mountain areas of Basutoland (now Lesotho.) He had mastered English, acquired a working knowledge of Sotho and Afrikaans, and become an active trade-unionist and Secretary of the Commercial Travellers' Union.1

I forget the decisions of the CC/or. or the aggregate meeting on the National Register. It was, in any case,/no'importance. The whole idea sank from sight soon afterwards. That such a discussion took place at all, however, says something about the character of the Communist Party. There is a slightly ludicrous air around thirty ordinary citizens agonising about their attitude to a piece of legislation as if the fate of the nation depended on them. This, I soon learnt, was no more simple posturing than the declaration by the six tailors of Gloucester: 'We, the people of England...' The Party took its politics very seriously. Its small membership and following did not excuse it from its civic responsibilities. No one at that meeting could have been under any illusion that they were deciding the fate of the National Register - but that was beside the point. The point was to find the 'right line', and then to take the appropriate action which all other citizens and groups would be called on to take.

This seriousness - ludicrous though some people find it - struck me as one of the Party's strengths. It derived from the conviction that 'i^evertheless,, the world does move!' However small our own input, we can help^+w=wOT RPtliaV move* / * if not here and now then in future. This certainty that they were making

1 In the 1960's, he was banned from all trade union work by Ministerial decree. He turned his hobby of photography into a means of livelihood, and became a professional photographer and collected a considerable archive of photographs in and around the political movement in the years after 1950. He died in exile in Dar es Salaam.

30 history gave Party members the resilience to pull themselves back -from the brink extinction and to contemplate building a new Party out of the wreckage of the old.

By joining the Communist Party I thought I was ending my membership of the Labour Party. It did not work out like that. I was called to the routine new member's interview with the CP Secretariat, and explained my disenchantment with the Labour Party. They approved my sentiments, but argued that the Labour Party could be changed for the better from inside. The best contribution I could make to the cause of socialism would be to continue the good fight inside the Labour Party while at the same time helping to develop the Communist Party. I was only half convinced, but agreed to give it a try.

I was assigned to a Party group, and was expected to take part in all its activities 'not incompatible' with my membership of the Labour Party. The incompatibilities were not always obvious. In today's vernacular, the position might be described as 'entryism' or 'boring from within.' But in fact my aim was 'exitism'. I had no confidence that moribund Labour could ever become a force for radical policies, but I was talked into it.

My CP group was made up of seven or eight others who were also members of the Labour Party or the League of Youth. Hilda was one of them. It was not like the socialist crusade I had been looking for, but more like a Communist wing of the Labour left which I was trying to get away from. I stayed with it for want of anything better.

Unlike the Labour Party which had a profound disinterest in international affairs, the threat of war dominated the agenda of the Communist Party. Talk of an Anglo-Soviet defense treaty against Hitlerism were leading nowhere - negotiations were being left to a junior Foreign Office official without any power to reach an agreement. Late in the year, Stalin warned that, in the absence of such a treaty, the USSR would not 'pull the chestnuts out of the fire' for the West. The Labour Party seemed unconscious of the danger and remained entirely wrapped up in local political concerns. The Communist Party's concerns centred instead on the prospects of war and the need for an Anglo-Soviet mutual defence treaty.

31 In our concern at the threat of war we were unprepared for the manner of its coming. The Soviet announcement that it had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany threw us off balance. We had concentrated so much attention on the menace of fascism at home that perhaps we had been giving too little to the possibility of such a shock development abroad. Even so, it created less upheaval in our ranks in South Africa than it did in many other places where the shock waves split the ranks of Communist Parties and led to large-scale membership defections. In South Africa, so remote from the epicentre of the event, there were only minor rumbles.

Perhaps the loudest of them burst at a Saturday night 'aggregate'. There was nothing on the agenda to prepare us for Hymie Basner's dramatic denunciation of Soviet betrayal. Basner was one of the Party's intellectual eminences, a radical lawyer and a formidable orator. He was a short, stocky, red faced man with a choleric disposition, and a fine flow of language. His burst of passion spoke of bitter disillusion with the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party. He condemned the immorality and opportunism of the Soviet-German pact - and then dropped his bombshell. He was leaving the Party for ever.

Those who knew him better than I may have been prepared for it. To me, his denunciation came as a shock, almost blasphemy, but no one chose to reply. In dead silence he rose and started to stamp out. Then he turned in the doorway and fired a parting shot: 'Leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone!' What that meant I do not know, but inside the Party he had set off a minor earthquake. Outside, in all the turmoil of impending war it caused scarcely a stir. Nothing more was heard of it until months later, when Basner broke the cease-fire with a letter to the press explaining and defending his volte face.

Few other Party members reacted as Basner did. We were mentally prepared for the worst. The German armies entered Poland and Britain formally declared itself at war with Germany, marking the end of an era for Europe, and for South Africa. War brought to the surface all the stress lines in South African Parliamentary politics which had been contained for a decade by the coalition between Hertzog and Smuts - Afrikaner Party and SAP. After the economic crisis of the 1930'sjcontradictions had been papered over by the creation of a single party of white supremacy. The 'United Party' had mitigated the effects of the great depression on whites by intensifying the

32 exploitation of blacks, and ensured plentiful and cheap black contract labour for both farms and mines. Its formation had hived off the nationalist-minded Afrikaner minority into a 'purified' Nationalist Party shorn of Hertzogite compromisers - the 'official opposition' led by doctor of divinity D.F. Malan.

The strains of war shattered the Smuts-Hertzog coalition, and ancient nationalist-SAP contradictions surfaced again. The cabinet met to define South Africa's position in relation to the war - and split apart. Five ministers voted with Hertzog for South Africa to remain neutral; six with Smuts for a South African declaration of war on Germany. Malan's Nationalist Party could be expected to throw its weight behind Hertzog, but the majority in Parliament and between war and peace hung in the balance. The outcome might depend on two minority parties - the Empire loyalists of the small Dominion Party who would undoubtedly stand with Smuts; and the four MP's of the Labour Party whose leanings were uncertain. At the time of its greatest public popularity, Labour had formed a pact with Hertzog against Smuts' resort to martial law in the 1922 General Strike on the Witwatersrand. After the strike, the Labour-Herzog forces had humbled the Smuts government, and made way for a 'pact' government in which Labour ministers served under Herzog's premiership. That was then; now the Pact had given way to the United Party government of Smuts and Hertzog, with Labour on the sidelines. Where Labour would now give its support could be the most important decision in its history.

The Labour Party National Executive Committee met in emergency session in Johannesburg. Its three MPs and its Minister - Walter Madeley - had flown up from Cape Town, along with its lone Senator - Party chairman Jimmy Briggs. I attended the meeting as representative of the League of Youth. It was dominated by the Parliamentarians who all supported Smuts and the declaration of war. Compared with the CP debates, their speeches were strangely shallow, with little reference to the politics of the war, to the nature of fascism, to the fascist threat to trade unions, socialist movements or even the independence of nation states. They were however filled with indignation, even the passion of an unquestioning patriotism - or more correctly jingoism or Britishism. In place of analysis of the origins or possible consequences of war there was a lot of tub-thumping of my-country-right-or-wrong type.

33 That is, until M.J. van den Berg who represented a West Rand mining constituency in Parliament, claimed the floor. He was a burly former miner, fluent in English although his first language was Afrikaans, and the undisputed leader of Labour’s Afrikaner members. He chose to speak in Afrikaans, knowing that some of the NEC members would have difficulty in following. His oratory and bull voice brought an uninspired meeting to life - and to real politics. He poured out all the bitterness of Afrikaner nationalism in an attack on the advocates of war; all the pent up grievances of British concentration camps, of the destruction of the Boer republics, and of the deportations of those who refused to 'hands-up' at the end of the Anglo-Boer war. In an exposition of the ideology of 'blood-and-soi1', he bellowed that the Boerevolk would never be prepared to fight Britain's wars or accept Smuts' call to arms. The Labour Party should give Smuts a simple answer: we will not join your war now or ever!

His rant was heard in silence. No one seemed will in icillor Ben Weinbren, whose early politics had been learnt as a member of the Communist Party. His was the only substantial political speech of the evening. He stuck to the crucial issues - the nature of fascism, its threat to peace and progress everywhere, and the need for international unity to halt it. No one was prepared to follow him. The chairman called for a vote. Every hand except Van den Berg's was raised in favour of war. Van den Berg spoke again, a short bitter denunciation of a Party which had sold its soul to British imperialism,. Then he stormed out leaving a shocked silence behind him. His exit seemed to mark the end of his Labour Party membership and the loss of one quarter of its Parliamentary caucus. It seemed inevitable that most of the Afrikaners in the Party would follow him out. The meeting broke up, seemingly as concerned with the electoral implications for itself as with the fate of the country. Within days, the Party's next most prominent Afrikaner, Dr. Venter Odendaal, Party leader in the Transvaal Provincial Council, followed him out, taking many of the Afrikaner members with him.

When Parliament resumed, Hertzog's neutrality motion was voted down and Smuts' pro-war amendment carried with a majority of thirteen. Smuts took over as Prime minister and took Labour leader, Walter Madeley into the cabinet as Minister of Labour. I heard nothing of Van den Berg for several weeks. Then

34 there was a brief announcement in the press that M.J. van den Berg M.P. had been commissioned as Captain in the South African Army, and would be involved in army recruiting on the home front. 1

I had been a silent observer at Labour's decision making. In the Communist Party's I took part. Labour's decision had been pragmatic, and settled in a single evening. The Communist Party agonised for weeks over principle and theory. It went through a maze of doubt and reappraisal before it came to a binding conclusion. Ironically, Labour's quick decision could well have tilted the Parliamentary vote from neutrality to war, while the Communist agonising over 'the right line' was unlikely to have any immediate influence on the national decision at all.

The Communist Party's months of agonising should have been unnecessary. It had long called for international action against fascism and campaigned for a broad alliance against it. But the Soviet-German treaty had clouded the issue. Through the months that had led up to it, it had become clear that the Western powers were more concerned to contain the USSR and socialism than to confront fascism. Hence appeasement, the betrayal of Spain and Czecho-Slovakia, and the foot-dragging to avoid any Anglo-Soviet treaty. But the Party policy seemed clear enough. We were for a collective stand with the USSR, against fascism.

Stalin's warning about the West's chestnuts rang the first alarm. We did not react to it sharply enough. The bombshell of the Soviet-German non-aggression changed the equation. The Soviet Union was no longer to be a main component of a collective front. The call for an east-west alliance for peace or for war had become obsolete, but before policy could be reconsidered in the light of that reality, Nazi armies had crossed into Poland, and Britain and France had declared war. It was a turn we had never contemplated. The policy which had seemed so clear for so long was suddenly out of date. TVe Qwl/i? Political parties change direction as cumbrously as ocean liners. -Thi'S change of direction was made greatly more difficult /4ecffaae=pi our long-standing deference to the political expertise and experience of the Soviet Communist

1 Van den Berg never returned to the Labour Party. After the war, when the tide of white political opinion began to swing towards Nationalism, he stood as a National Party candidate in the 1948 election, was elected to represent his previous constituency, and became a cabinet minister in the National Party government.

35 Party as -far greater than our own. Our groups debated the problem while waiting -for words of wisdom from the Party leadership to guide us out of a maze. Before long, George Findlay brought us the 'line' from the District Committee. George* was a barrister with a golden tongue, great precision with words, and impeccable logic. 'The line', we were assured, had not changed. We were still in favour of a resolute stand against fascism - the Soviet action had not invalidated that, though it had acted surprisingly and at the eleventh hour to safeguard its own frontiers. Though the appeasers still hoped to stand by while the communist and fascist armies fought each other to the death, we must frustrate their plot by helping prosecute the anti-fascist war to the limit. This was a continuation of former policy but in the new circumstances of war.

It was brilliantly argued, and most of us went away spell-bound. But not quite satisfied; doubts remained. How could we be furthering the course of war while our Soviet comrades and allies headed in the opposite direction? Findlay had given - as always - a clear, logical anst^-. When two armies set out to make a co-ordinated attack on an enemy citadey^opp^s^te starting places, one army must march east while the other marches west. Q.E.D. Even in his impeccable logic it was not quite good enough to allay all doubts until the press Harry Pollitt, Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he conflict an 'anti-fascist war' and pledging his Party's , support for the war effort.

1 Findlay who lived in Pretoria, was a member of the Johannesburg District Committee which, at that time, included the Pretoria area. He and his activist wife Joan both drifted out of politics some time after the war. He was appointed an Acting Judge and was on course for a distinguished career until the Suppression of Communism Act intervened. Like other former communists, the Findlays were asked to give the 'Liquidator' rea­ sons why they should not be listed as 'statutory' communists.

Findlay replied by way of an open letter in the press: List, and be damned! The gist of his reply was that he would not apologise for any­ thing in his past. I do not have the text. If his reply did not have the literary quality of Lilian Heilman's to Senator MacCarthy: 'I will not cut my cloth to suit todays fashions!' the sentiments were the same. He was later appointed a judge despite it.

36 That announcement carried a lot o-f weight amongst us. The Party had enjoyed a close -fraternal relationship with the CPGB -for many years, and been greatly influenced in its view of world events by its journal Labour Monthly and the incisive 'Notes of the Month' written by its chairman, R.Palme Dutt. Divergence between us and the CPGB would have been as confusing as divergence between us and the Soviet Party. We were just settling down to the idea that we had been right after all when there was a contrary declaration form the Soviet Communist Party. This described the war as 'imperialist', and urged Communists everywhere to follow Lenin's 1914 precept of 'turning imperialist war into civil war.*

This was startling stuff. Our Party had no formal links with the Soviet Party but their views carried enormous authority. They had made their revolution and were actually building socialism while elsewhere communists were only talking of it. We turned back to serious consideration of Lenin's writings on war - the First World War. They did not make for easy application to another country in a different age and a different war. Smuts' white supremacist regime bore little resemblance to Imperial Russia, or South Africa's all-volunteer white army to the Tsar's conscripts. Lenin's thesis had dealt with a reasonably clear clash of rival imperialisms over territory. We were dealing with a war whose substance was in matters of democracy and independence of states.

We were still wrestling with interpretation of Lenin when confusion was worse confounded. A new statement from the CPGB repudiated Pollit's characterisa­ tion of the war and announced that he had been relieved of his position as Secretary. Before that could be *S taken aboard, a defini tive declaration from our own Central Committee -- - - ... the war as Tl> a struggle between imperialisms, neither 'people's war' nor 'anti-fascist war'. Whether they had arrived at that conclusion independently, or had deferred to the combined influences of the Soviet and British Parties was never clear to me.

At least we now had a formal a 'Party line', which seemed to derive from Clausewitz' aphorism that 'war is the continuation of politics by other means' than from Lenin. We would not be doing anything to help prosecute the war. Our

37 concentration would be on developing a mass people's movement against white supremacy. We would work -for all-out resistance to South African fascism and for the victory of a non-racial democracy within our own country.

Many commentators have seen this on-again off-again Party vacillation as evidence of a puppet Party following dictates from Moscow. It did not look like that from inside. The Soviet's views certainly caused much 4$ agonising, but were never more than a single factor in the final reckoning. The indecision and vacillation were .ofrouripwn.making, and a witness of the * r w < A + t » W l Y o. ■ seriousness with which we *iri t4 tn ri«ha+» m H rni ..... m- null, lu-iy-ln conclusion. Whether the CC itself also wavered back and forth along the way I do not know. The Johannesburg District Committee certainly did, but had the courage to admit error and reverse itself in the end. No political party can claim to be free from mistakes. Few have the integrity ever to admit them and back down.

However the policy was finally formulated, and accepted. Its twin-track attack on white supremacy and the war effort put us on collision course with both the factions of white politics. Government and its nationalist opposition were equally determined that war would not be allowed to interfere with white supremacy. But they were not omnipotent. The social, economic and political consequences of taking the country into war was not and could not be - like the vote in Parliament - just white man's business. In the end the consequences would be critically affected by that black majority which had been ignored and disregarded in all the Parliamentary sound and fury. We would be trying to bringing that majority's aims and aspirations into the reckoning. That was certain to guarantee us a rough ride in a country where politics has always been a rough business.

38 CHAPTER 3. 1939 - 1940

The country was at war, but nothing much seemed to change - no black-outs, no air-raid sirens, no conscription. Young white males were signing on -for •full-time service, and in the countryside young black men - but only -for non-combatant duty as cooks, stretcher-bearers and drivers. No call-up of peace-time Citizen Force regiments, no gas-masks, no food rationing. In Johannesburg, a white hooligan mob engaged in an alcohol-assisted round of 'patriotic' mayhem, setting German cars alight in the streets, beating up German civilians and trashing the German club. Outside of the city, a spate of random assaults on lone soldiers started. A mob of soldiers from their Potchefstroom camp hit back by smashing National Party premises. For a short while it seemed that Lenin's idea of turning imperialist into civil war was coming into its own. But the frenzy passed. Unthinking mob violence gave way to organised violence by secretive armed pro-Nazi groups, one of them led by ex prize-fighter Robey Leibbrandt who had been trained in Nazi Germany and been returned to South Africa by German submarine.

In parallel with the clandestine groups, a quasi-military organisation was organising and drilling militant white republicans. Calling itself the Ossewa Brandwag and reviving nostalgia for the Boer Republican commandos, it was turning away from Parliamentary politics towards military confrontation. The Smuts government showed little sign of concern - apparently satisfied that the OB, for all its militarist bluster, remained part of the essential consensus that political power was a white preserve.

Only the Communist Party stood outside that consensus. The black majority, still mainly rural, lacked any organised voice strong enough to influence the course of politics, but that too was changing. War was bringing rapid industrial expansion and drawing armies of rural men and women to the cities, especially to the Vaal triangle. Johannesburg's black population was growing inexorably into the city majority. Once impotent and barely visible

39 organisations were growing in confidence; trade-unionism and a new sense of national identity was developing. Urban blacks were starting to flex their muscles and to make their demands with a new-found militancy.

Most Communist Party members were engaged either in the trade-union movement or in the Party's most important activity - the running of night-schools for adult black workers. There was a growing network of these schools which taught basic reading, writing and arithmetic. They were set up in unlikely places like domestic garages and outbuildings in the white suburbs, or in unused store-rooms and offices in the central city. Black adults arrived after work, to be taught by Party members with no teaching qualifications but a good deal of dedication. The schools were not intended to be philanthropic or charitable. They had a serious political purpose. Through them, the Party would be put in touch with serious and responsible men and women, and would introduce them to social and political ideas through teaching the three Rs. It was a fruitful field. Many of the students took on active roles in the community and in trade unions, and provided a steady flow of recruits to the Party.

In its attitude towards the left, the Smuts government was proving little different from its predecessors We did not share the reverential view of Smuts' democratic credentials which had given him a saint-like standing in pro-war circles at home and abroad. His dismal record included responsibility for a military massacre of 190 men and women at Bulhoek in 1921 over non-payment of taxes; and the crushing by martial law of the 1922 Witwatersrand miners' strike with the loss of some 200 lives. He had collaborated with avowed pro-Nazis like Oswald Pirow and Eric Louw in the coalition government right up to the eve of war. We saw nothing in his record or his choice of his own cabinet to suggest that he had changed.

We expected his government to be white supremacist and anti-democratic at home even though it posed as anti-fascist and democratic. Our expectations were confirmed when, shortly after he took office detention camps were set up for the first time since the South African War. Ostensibly they were to be for enemy agents. Internment without trial of ethnic Germans and Italians began. Before long the distinction between enemy agents and anti-fascist opponents faded, and internment widened out to include anti-fascists. Some were members

40 of the Party, like Dr. Max Joffe and his brother Louis, a veteran of the South African army's South West Africa campaign in the 1st World War; and Issy Wolfson of the Tailoring Workers Union. Some were non-party trade unionists, like Max Gordon, a Trotskyist and organiser of black workers' unions on the Witwatersrand. There were others like Arnold Latti, an elderly Italian communist from Port Elizabeth who was a veteran of the struggle against Mussolini; and Fritz Fellner, an anti-Nazi refugee from Germany, trade unionist and husband of Johanna Cornelius of the Garment Workers' Union. And there was E.J.Burford, secretary of the Anti-Fascist League and member of my own branch of the Labour Party.

There was no apparent reason why these had been selected, and their internment went almost unnoticed by press and public. Burford's case drew the loudest protest as a result of his high-profile in anti-fascist campaigns. His only other political activity had been in the Labour Party which was itself a partner in the Smuts' government, but there was scant protest from the Labour Party hierarchy or its cabinet member, Walter Madeley. Other internments of anti-fascists could be ascribed to an excess of the security services. In Burford's case people inside and outside the Labour Party suspected connivance of the Party leadership in whose side he had been a radical thorn.

I had that same/ though now I am not so sure it was fully justified, even though anger at the leadership's failure to protest certainly was. Whether they were complicit in Burford's internment must remain in doubt. Their man in the cabinet, Walter Madeley, always struck me as an honest man - as career politicians go, but no radical. His politics were limited and parochial. He was one for whom the term 'the working class' meant the class of the skilled white artisan. Black workers were not part of it, though he probably understood their disabilities and deplored them. I doubt if he had a hand in Burford's internment, but I feel less charitable towards many of his colleagues in the Party leadership who constituted what we called the 'Headquarters clique'.

This was a cabal of Party cronies, almost all of whom held public or Party office. They hung out in a seedy beer- and smoke-laden Labour Party Club which occupied/floor below the Party head office. It was exclusively male, and had no amenities except the bar where they hobnobbed with a similar group of

41 cronies and bureaucrats -from the Trades and Labour Council next door. The financing and administration of the Club was a closely guarded secret. The radical left never used the place, but believed that its takings which should have gone into Party funds were secretly siphoned off to pay the election expenses of the insiders. We had no proof. At annual National Conferences, the left would ask to be shown the Club's balance sheet, and annually the procedures would be manipulated or filibustered to frustrate the demand.

The Club's finances were not important in themselves, but the refusal to offer an explanation of them exacerbated the political hostilities at the Conferences. These were becoming more confrontational year by year. A left-right division overshadowed almost every debate on policy - whether on such matters as strikes and civil liberties, or on social and economic legislative policy. Burford had been a regular speaker on such issues. For a short time, his internment became one of the divisive issues,1 but debate on policy towards the war did not. By tacit agreement, both left and right avoided the issue for fear of provoking an irreversible split. There was however no way to avoid full frontal confrontation over so-called 'Native Policy' which lay at the heart of almost every matter in dispute.

The Labour Party's socialism was explicitly a whites only project. It did not extend to voting rights or equal citizenship for the black majority or necessarily include the abolition of pass laws, segregation laws and the rest of the props to white supremacy. All such matters were lumped together under the rubric of 'Native Policy'. The loose left grouping was agreed on the need for radical revision of the Party's ‘Native Policy', but could never muster enough Conference votes to get it. Headquarters, that is to say the Party establishment, was better managed and not averse to reviving dead branches and members to ensure the vote in times of need. We thought that we won all the arguments, but still lost all the significant votes.

1 Burford - and most of the others - were released without explanation after some months in internment. Burford returned with anecdotes; of Italians at Marshall Square on their way to the internment camp singing 'Rule Britannia' by way of retort Germans who were taunting them with 'Deutschland Uber Alles’.'

42 After Burford's internment, the 1940 Conference was an especially ill-tempered and hostile affair. Though I was a branch delegate I do not remember taking any part in the debates. At the end left and right joined to sing - as always: 'We'll keep the red flag flying here!' and went off to face another year of uneasy inner-party peace. What we got was a bomb-shell - or more accurately, a drum-head court martial. Curt letters informed our Branch that it had been dissolved by the National Executive Committee - no reasons given; members who wished to do so could apply for admission to other branches. Burford and I both received letters informing us that the NEC had expelled us from the Party. There had been no hearing and no explanation. We had built up what had become the liveliest and largest Branch of the Party in the country, and the only one with a regular organ of its own. It was a petty act of reprisal for open criticism of a leadership whose democratic arteries had hardened. It was also counter-productive, and served to weaken and dispirit the Party still further.

At a time when Labour was going ever deeper into decline, the Communist Party was succeeding in hauling itself up from its own. Its Central Committee had been successfully reconstructed in Cape Town and had sponsored the revival of vigorous new District Committees in all four provinces. Archaic practices like the use of pseudonyms and of 'concealed' membership were being phased out, and dual CP-LP membership was being ended. Not long before my excommunication from Labour, all CP 'dual members' had been required to opt out of one party or the other, ending a long-standing Party practice. All 'dual members' were free to choose. With two exceptions, all the members of my group chose to opt out of the Labour Party.

The exceptions were Alex Hepple, who was a Labour Provincial Councillor and prospective Parliamentary candidate, and his wife Girlie. Alex was slightly older than the rest of. He had inherited a small factory which made him a small-time 'employer' and 'industrialist', an anomaly in the Communist Party. Their loyalty to the Party was unquestionable, but in the circumstances they were unlikely to be considered for any public leadership role. They and the rest of the group agreed that they could do more for the cause of socialism from a position in the front ranks of the Labour Party than from the back benches of the CP. The decision was a difficult one for them both, but in the end they decided to end their membership of the Communist Party. We had been

43 in the same CP group for some time. I liked them both and had a high regard for their honesty and commitment. We remained friends. Alex went on to become the Labour M.P. for Rosettenville and a principled member of the declining Labour group in public office1.

By that time Labour's decline was nearly terminal. The white-supremacist cancer had eaten away its core; its supporters had dribbled off towards the National and United Parties. Its final knell sounded in the 1948 General Election, when the Smuts government was turned out of office, taking the Labour remnants with it. Labour had been born out of a white artisan class which had, by now, lost all socialist orientation. It had been displaced from its niche by narrow nationalist and chauvinist factions. It had outlived its time, and for all practical purposes died in tandem with the Smuts government.2 Whether it was ever formally wound up I do not know.

Expulsion from the Labour Party felt to me like liberation. I had been petitioning the CP District Committee for the right to resign from it, and had been repeatedly turned down. The matter had been settled. I could now concentrate my political activity in the CP as I had wanted to do. It was a good time tor it. The CP was emerging into the public light from its reclusive and semi-clandestine past. It was moving out physically from its hole-in- corner premises to new offices in Progress Buildings, close to the heart of the city where the Carlton Centre now stands. It had replaced the press sequestrated in the times of decline with a new electric duplicator. It was starting publication of a new monthly 'Inkululeko' (Freedom) to replace the former and now defunct Umsebenzi (The Worker). Even the change of title indicated some shift of thinking.

1 Many years later, he helped Canon John Collins of St. Paul's Cathedral in London found the International Defence and Aid Fund which sustained hundreds, perhaps thousands of South African political prisoners and their families through the long years of apartheid.

2 A mixed-race Labour Party came into being in the period of the National Party government and its 'Tri-cameral Parliament'. It had no connection with the South African Labour Party except for its name, and inherited neither the former Labour Party's membership, ideology or programme.

44 Inkululeko had pages in the main African languages as well as English, typed on wax stencils and duplicated in the party offices. Hilda drew me into the production team in which she did skilled things like drawing the illustrations and hand lettering the headlines; Archie Lewitton typed the stencils with two fingers, and Mofutsanyana edited. I was only a gofer. We met at the office once a month, early on Sunday morning, and spent the day wrestling with the Gestetner machine, and collating and stapling the pages as they rolled off the press. By the time we came up for air in late afternoon, coated in printers' ink, a stack of some 1200 copies would be ready for distribution and sale. This was the start of a long unplanned career as a propagandist.

Inkululeko helped bring the Party out of the shadows and into the streets. Members were expected to hawk it at factory gates, railway stations and municipal compounds. Once such street-vending became a regular practice, it was logical to make it weekly and add the 'Guardian' to the vendors' stock in trade. The Guardian was not a Party organ. It was independent and radical, produced and edited weekly in Cape Town by Betty Radford and others. It was the only regular publisher of the news and views of the trade unions and the national liberation movements, and the Party. It was sold mainly through paid street vendors and commission agents. Our entry into the vending business was in part an attempt to boost its sales, but it was chiefly a deliberate effort to turn the party membership away from internal doctrinal wrangling and towards public activity in the real world outside.

For months, perhaps for years, I did my stint of vending at mid-day on Saturdays at the entrance to the Mai-Mai municipal beer-hall at the south end of Von Wielligh Street. At the time, the sale or supply of any form of alcohol to blacks was totally prohibited, the only exception being sorghum beer - so-called 'kaffir beer' - for on-consumption at municipal beer halls. Municipalities with total monopolies saw no reason to make their beet—halls anything more than comfortless drinking sheds. Mai-Mai was a bleak corrugated iron shed baking in the sun in a bleak wasteland of swirling red dust. My sales were quite brisk. The men - the customers were almost all men - had to be shown a page in their own tongue before paying up the penny for a copy of Inkululeko. It was always easier to sell the weekly two-penny Guardian, with eight pages in English - but whichever I was selling, it was an ordeal.

45 I -forced mysel-f into it as a matter of duty. I hated the approaching people in the street in the hope of extracting pennies from them, but enjoyed the noise and liveliness of the Mai Mai crowds. I grew used to an exchange of banter with sober men coming straight from work, and with rolling drunks coming out. My pitch was in a bustle of women street-traders roasting mealies and chicken legs on pavement braziers. Alongside us there were pavement barbers giving al fresco trims and razor-cuts to customers sitting on soap-boxes. Everywhere else in Johannesburg, newspaper selling was an occupation only for blacks - usually teen-age - and the buyers almost always white. Here the standard order was reversed - a white man selling to black buyers. Just being white in such an all black environment made me a curiosity. Men would stop and stare in disbelief. Occasionally the inebriated would jeer.

I was never threatened or even felt threatened. It was there at Mai Mai that I learnt to feel at ease in the midst of black people, and to move amongst them without self-consciousness. The psychological baggage of a life lived in exclusively white surroundings was rubbed away. Blacks ceased to be 'others' - menials, servants or 'victims of underdevelopment'. They became people, individuals.

After some years of Mai-Mai I moved to a different Party branch and handed over the Mai Mai pitch to others., My paper selling duties were transferred to the branch area of Braamfontein. In those days before it was 're-developed' with an unlovely mix of shops, high-rise offices and University overspill, it was a white working-class area of small semi-detached brick cottages occupied by white railway-men and some student lodgers. Branch members trudged door to door with Guardian every Sunday morning. We learnt to know where there might possibly be a buyer, where we would get a political argument on the doorstep but no sale, and where to pass rapidly in silence before we could be spotted by hostile householders and even more hostile guard dogs. To me it was a cheerless activity with none of Mai-Mai's compensations. Only missionary zeal kept me at it, and a belief that sooner or later one of my regular buyers would come to accept radical and left views; become 'educated' as our jargon had it.

That belief was constantly undermined by experience. My most regular customer was an Afrikaans speaking railwayman with an adult son. Every Sunday, one or

46 other o+ them duly handed over twopence and chatted on the doorstep about the state of the nation. The chat was costing me my Sunday morning leisure, but in the good cause of their 'education'. Eventually the doorstep talk turned to the question of crime. For white South Africans crime was a black phenomenon. Every white claims to have an expertise and a personal remedy for it. My best customer gave me his. 'Do what Paul Kruger would do. Tie the kaffir to a wagon wheel and give him a thrashing he will never forget!' The educational payoff for my Sunday with the Guardian!.

Did we really achieve anything at all by all that expenditure of time and energy? Did we really effect even a subliminal change in our buyers' thinking, or were we mortifying our flesh for the good of our own souls? I am not sure of the answer, or of what our Braamfontein customers were thinking when they handed over their two pence. Were they looking for alternative news, or just brushing us off cheaply? Perhaps they were simply being charitable and helping out an apparently poor white boy in need. I like to think that perhaps we did help to change some of their ideas and counter some of their prejudices. Perhaps when the white citizens finally had to choose between majority government and civil war, the Guardian might have influenced their decisions for the better.

Perhaps. Whatever the truth, those hours of paper selling were not wasted. We were spreading new information and new ideas which might have helped Braamfontein railwaymen and Mai-Mai beer drinkers to look at their country in a new way, perhaps to start adapting their minds to a new South Africa which was still fifty years away. Spreading ideas is not one way process. While trying to 'educate' others we were,educating ourselves. We were learning to work collectively, to listen to/^the man in the street' was saying and thinking, and to present our political ideas to them in an undogmatic way. Through paper vending we were rebuilding the Party as an open organisation in the public light, just like any other political party.

Openness while opposing the war effort had its price. Early in 1940, Yusuf Dadoo in Johannesburg and Dawood Seedat in Durban were arrested and charged with anti-war incitement. Both were prominent members of the Party, which initiated the biggest protest campaign of meetings, handbills and posters that it had been able to contemplate for years. My branch was to help campaign in

47 the Sophiatown area where our local organisation was under strength. Sophiatown now only exists in memories. It was bulldozed in one of Verwoerd's worst racial excesses, to make space for an exclusively white suburb provocatively named Triomf (Triumph).

At that time it was a multi-racial residential area where black people could own their own homes and live unemcumbered by the red-tape and round-the-clock controls of the municipal townships. It was a tight huddle of small run-down cottages which had once been single-family homes. As the war-time population grew, houses had been divided and re-divided until almost all were in multiple occupation, often with one family per room, and back yards had been built over with unauthorised annexes occupying every remaining inch of open space. It was a lively bustling place where people of all races and colours shared minimal facilities and deprivation. By night, householders locked themselves in, leaving the yards to jazz clubs and illegal shebeens, and the streets to petty gangsters, drunks, and packs of mangy dogs. We trudged the streets after midnight, night after night, with our stacks of protest leaflets. The people were asleep but the dogs were loose. We worked in pairs, up and down the streets, slipping leaflets under every door. Dead of night had been chosen as the best time to avoid police patrols and roving gangsters. Or perhaps just out of revolutionary romanticism. It was very scary. The streets were badly lit and potholed, and crossed by foul-smelling open ditches and overloaded drains. We crept guardedly to the front doors on dark front porches where lean mean guard dogs lurked in the shadows.

That too was a part of our learning and party-building - by ordeal. We learnt at firs ions of a sector of the black working class. We learnt support and morale, and developed a Party bond which can not be created by rules alone. In that period, the Party developed the exceptional levels of unity and voluntary discipline which became its most distinct characteristic in the years thereafter. Whether we affected the fate of Dadoo and Seedat hard to say. Both were found guilty and sentenced to short terms of imprisonment, making them the first martyrs of the years of the Communist Party revival.

Open-air political meetings had been held intermittently on the steps of the City Hall since the time of World War 1, and throughout the white workers'

48 strikes of 1913 and 1922. By the time of World War 2 meetings there had become irregular and infrequent - until the Party District Committee decided to revive the tradition. We started to hold public meetings there every Sunday evening. The steps provided a natural podium with speakers at the top of the steps and the audience spread along the pavement at the foot. We took our pitch in the centre of the podium, facing the clock on the old Rissik Street Post Office across the road, and simply held forth to anyone who happened to be passing - and often initially to no one at all.

The Party had no more claim to that prime site than anyone else. On Sunday evenings there precious few passing pedestrians. Almost no blacks lived in the city proper, and even they were kept off the streets by a night curfew unless they had a 'special pass'. The meetings were an all white affair, which all city members were expected to attend to form the nucleus of a crowd. That gave us an advantage over our lone-wolf competitors. The speakers were white , and the audiences white except for an occasional black straggler who might pause momentarily to listen from the outer fringes. But not for long - the white audience would soon make them feel alien and uncomfortable. The Party which was waging a consistent and resolute fight against the colour bar everywhere, never managed to banish it from the City Hall steps.

We had only a few experienced public speakers. Novices like me were simply thrown in at the deep end - without tuition and without any public address equipment. Our veteran speaker, Issy Wolfson of the Tailoring Workers' Union, was endowed him with a voice like a fog-horn which drowned out the noise of hecklers and passing traffic, and echoed back from the Post Office across the road. As far as I could see he never prepared his speech or used any notes, but his words flowed effortlessly, conjuring up instant slogans and drawing intermittent applause. Hilda was our most eloquent speaker. She too could conjure up the applause and rousing perorations, but from a base of meticulous preparation.

Most of our speakers' had learnt the art in the trade union movement. Betty du Toit of the Food and Canning Union, equally at home in English and Afrikaans. Willie Kalk of the Leather Workers pacing furiously like a caged lion; Danie duPlessis of the Building Workers' Union. The rest of us learnt as we went along, including the District Secretary Michael Harmel, Archie Lewitton and

49 several others. I was probably the most reluctant of them all. Attendances fluctuated between fifty and several hundred. Occasionally woatd. someone from the crowd would apply to join the Party, but recruiting was not the main aim. The purpose was to build ourselves a regular public forum in the centre of the city as a step towards establishing the Party in the mainstream of political life.

In time, the Steps on Sunday nights came to be known as the Party's platform. Other whom had been there from time to time before us, would also exercise their rights, and take advantage of what we considered to be our audience. These irregulars were a strange mixture. There was an elderly, vituperative, tub-thumping socialist radical named Dunbar, who thundered out minor variations of a sermon he had been delivering since the 1920s and the days of the International Socialist League (ISL). An altogether more tolerant old socialist and veteran of the 1922 General Strike, Jimmy Brown, preached the social panacaea of 'One Big Union'. Most vituperative and hostile of all our rival orators was a lone Trotskyist named Saperstein, drawn there I believe only to contest our message. He had no discernible message of his own except an unrelenting 'revolutionary' condemnation of all things Communist. At work as a pharmacist he wore a long white coat; on the Steps -*¥135- 'working class' gear of greasy leather lumber-jacket, patched jeans, checkered sweat-shirt and day old stubble on his chin.

I do not doubt they all believed in their messages much as we did in ours. However, only sheer cussedness can account for their persistence in the face of cruel heckling and howls of rejection from the audience. There was room on the podium for several speakers to operate simultaneously, a few yards apart. We would start our meetings strictly on time, regardless of who else might be speaking a few yards away, and rely on Wolfson's fog-horn to persuade the others to shut down for the night. As the Steps became known as the Party's platform, audiences of hundreds would appear from nowhere in response to any important happening like the capture of South African soldiers at Tobruk, the fall of Paris to the Nazis or the German invasion of the USSR.

Johannesburg still had some of the birth-marks of its mining camp beginnings. Political meetings were usually rowdy, and often rough. The Steps meetings became both, and a focus for hooligans looking for a punch-up with communists.

50 Gangs o+ young fascists took to mingling with the crowd, bringing a vicious tone to the jeering and heckling, shouting fascist slogans and trying to provoke a fight. As their confidence grew, they took to assaulting any of our members who they found in the street alone on the way to or from the Steps. They made random assaults on any passing blacks, and staged violent forays against the speakers on our platform. Sunday evenings on the Steps became a regular battle-ground.

We had either to surrender the platform or defend it physically. We chose defense, and organised a corps of our fittest and toughest members to protect the speakers, and to escort members to and from the meeting. That made us all feel safer, but made our meetings more fraught. Speakers would be balanced precariously at the top of the steps, while fists flew and bodies clashed all around them. The police who were usually there in force stood idly by, making no attempt to intervene. We were seeing a new model police force which was either surreptitiously encouraging the thugs or taking up positions to protect them. We would spend Sunday in stomach-knotting anticipation, and the evening in minor brawls and running street-fights. Sunday evenings regularly ended either in our casualty clearing station in Max Joffe's surgery overlooking the Steps, or in a inarch to Marshall Square to bail out comrades arrested for 'assault' or 'public disorder'.

The City Hall Steps meetings tested our nerves to the limit, but gave the Party a real presence in the city's politics. Growth was not - like the Steps meetings - confined to the white arena. In the black areas of the city, a parallel growth in Party confidence and activity was under way. Recruiting of new members was proceeding faster than amongst whites. Black Party members were advancing into leading positions in the trade unions, in the liberation movements and in township community organisations. The whole Party was growing up, and changing from a predominantly white sect into a predominantly black mass party. For the first time in its history, its membership began to mirror the real racial and class composition of the population as a whole.

51 CHAPTER 4. 1940-43.

The Communist Party operated as a non-racial enclave o-f its own. Inside the Party, there was a total black-white equality which could be -found nowhere else. But we were not Utopians trying to create a perfect enclosure o-f our own, shut o-f-f -from the world, but were trying to engage with that world, challenge its fundamental mores and customs, and ultimately change them. Yet there was a paradox. The more we involved ourselves in that wider world, the greater the pressure on us to temper our principles. Inside the Party and its committees, conferences and members' meetings, there was no colour differenti­ ation. But the more we moved out of that closed circle into the social and political mainstream, the more we divided into black and white streams - fraternal, nominally equal, but separate.

There was no way to avoid the divide except by withdrawing from the world. Social necessity imposed a racial division on our organisational forms and on our political activities. Despite us, residentially based branches would be either predominantly black or predominantly white according toTexisting race pattern in the area. Trade unions we belonged to were either 'white' or 'black' to accord with industrial laws. Election campaigns were prescribed by law for white candidates and voters, or for 'black'. The languages used at meetings were either English or Afrikaans in a white area or Zulu and Sotho in a black. Society locked us into this net of racial separateness. We had to conform or cease to function at all.

I was seconded to assist the Party branch in Vrededorp, which was a racially mixed slum area with close-packed cottages where single rooms were rented out by absentee landlords. The branch members were all new recruits, black, mainly middle aged men with no prior Party experience. MmHJUIHiTjr. The only member with a place big enough to hold ten or twelve people was an very large and forceful woman who had two back rooms and a kitchen. She was known as a 'shebeen queen': that is to say that she kept an unlicensed drinking place, with a stock of hard liquor and home-brewed beer in old petrol drums buried in the yard. Illegal things went on in her kitchen - including brewing beer and dispensing alcohol to blacks.

52

Collection Number: A3299 Collection Name: Hilda and Rusty BERNSTEIN Papers, 1931-2006

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