5 Urban political opposition and banishment

He was lonely in his death – a sad repeat of his life in isolation [banishment], before he went into exile. (E. Masilela, Number 43 Trelawney Park Kwa Magogo, referring to Ben Baartman)

ON 22 AUGUST 2002, a motion was tabled in the National Assembly in Cape Town on behalf of the African National Congress (ANC). It noted ‘with sadness the untimely death’ of Ben Baartman who ‘was a former combatant of uMkhonto weSizwe, an ANC stalwart and a communist to the end’. It stated further that the ANC ‘dips its banner’ in honour of a man who dedicated his life ‘to the freedom of the people of South Africa’.1 In 1959 Baartman had been banished from Worcester, 120 kilometres from Cape Town, to the Mngomezulu area of Ingwavuma 1,600 kilometres away near the border with Swaziland.2 Conflict during the 1950s was not restricted to the rural areas. In the urban areas too, there was widespread, broad-based and intense resistance to apartheid. A central demand was the extension of political and citizenship rights to all. The 1946 African Mineworkers Union (AMU) strike, and especially the violent response of the state, represented a turning point that ushered in a new phase of resistance. A key feature was the growing alliance between the black middle and working classes. The intensification of pass controls after the Second World War and the increasing subjection of middle-class Africans to influx control facilitated this alliance. The leadership of the ANC began to be drawn to a greater extent from the workers’ movement and this, together with the militancy of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) formed in 1944 by Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and others, propelled the movement in the direction of mass-based and militant forms of struggle.

156 URBAN POLITICAL OPPOSITION AND BANISHMENT

With the prodding of the Youth Leaguers, in 1949 the ANC adopted the Programme of Action, which rejected ‘segregation, apartheid, trusteeship and white leadership’ and committed the ANC to strike action, civil dis- obedience, boycotts and other forms of militant resistance.3 The 1950s witnessed the implementation of these tactics and the decade became a period ‘of large-scale, open and violent conflict between the state and the popular masses in South Africa’.4 A nation-wide strike was called on 1 May 1950 to protest against the Suppression of Communism Act, which effec- tively outlawed the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). The strike, uneven in its success, resulted in workers being killed and wounded at Newclare, near Johannesburg. In response, the ANC declared 26 June Freedom Day. These protests culminated in the Defiance Campaign of 1952, the most extensive non-violent resistance so far seen in South Africa. Organised by the ANC and the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), the Defiance Campaign called on volunteers to engage in disciplined protest action against a range of discriminatory and repressive laws, six unjust laws being specifically targeted. One of them was the Stock Limitation Act, which especially affected inhabitants in the rural reserves, and this was an attempt to draw rural communities into the campaign and link rural and urban resistance. None of the unjust laws was repealed, but the Defiance Campaign succeeded in mobilising and politicising thousands of people. The national member- ship of the ANC swelled to 100,000. Beyond this, the campaign also laid a firm basis for future inter-racial co-operation and joint action. The passage of the Bantu Education Act in 1953 led to renewed resistance, especially in the Eastern Cape and on the Witwatersrand. School boycotts were coupled with attempts to set up alternative schools, which were quickly crushed by state action. Later in the same year, a proposal was put forward at an ANC national conference for a campaign aimed at drawing up a Charter of Freedom. This proposal led to the Congress of the People campaign in which thousands of volunteers dispersed across the length and breadth of South Africa to collect the demands of workers, peasants, students and other social groups to gauge the kind of future South Africa they cherished. The campaign gave birth to the Congress Alliance, composed of the ANC, SAIC, the Coloured People’s Congress, the South African Congress of Democrats and the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU, formed in March 1955). The campaign culminated in the historic Congress of the People held in Kliptown on 25−26 June 1955. The

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