Comrades against apartheid: the ANC and the South African Communist Party in exile

220 Pages·1992·29.192 MB·English

by  Stephen Ellis, Tsepo Sechaba

Comrades
against Apartheid
The ANC
the South African
Communist Party
in Exile
Nkosi
sikelel'i Afrika
God
bless Africa
Comrades
against Apartheid
The ANC
the South African
Communist Party
in Exile
STEPHEN ELLtS
TSEPO SECHABA
James Currey
& LONDON
Indiana University Press
BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLIS
James Currey Lid
54b Thornhill Square, Islington, London N1 1BE / Ide
Indiana University Press is
601 North Morton Street E | SZ
Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 / 9 2_
© Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba 1992
First published 1992
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilisedi n any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
We are grateful to those scholars who have read drafts of this manuscript but who
do not unsh their names to be mentioned.
The photographs are reproduced with the permission of IDAF.
Brinsh Library Cataloguing in Pubhcation Data
Ellis, Stephen
Comrades against apartheid : the ANC and the
South African Communist Party in Exile.
I. Title. I. Sechaba, Tsepo
322.420968
ISBN 0-85255-353-6 (cloth)
ISBN 0-85255-352-8 (paper)
Librofa Crongyres s Catalin oPubgliciatinon gDa ta
Ellis, Stephen, 1992.
Comrades against apartheid : the ANC and the South African
Communist Party in exile / Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba
Pp. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-253-31838-6 (cloth) — ISBN 0-253-21062-3 (pbk.)
I. South African Communist Party. 2. African national
Congress. 3. South Africa - Politics and government —1961-1978
4. South Africa — Politics and government — 1978—_I. Sechaba,
Tsepo, 1992. II. Tide,
JQ1998.C64E45 1992
324.268'083—dc20 91-18439
Typeseti n 10/11 Plantin and with Gill display
by Opus 43, Cumbria
Printed in Great Britain
for Villiers Publications London N6
Contents
Introduction
!
The Communist Party
of South Africa
1921-50
9
The Spear
of the Nation
1951-68
26
3
The Party
Triumphant
1969-75
§2
4
From Soweto
to Angola
1976-9
79
>
Destabilisation
1980-3
103
6
Mutiny
1984
124
7
Rising
in the Townships
1984-5
i4]
States
of Emergency
1986-7
160
9
Soldiers
Diplomats
1987-90
175
CONCLUSION
198
APPENDIX. I: Acronyms
207
APPENDIX Ils: Glossary
209
INDEX
210
introduction
It is too soon to write a definitive history of the South African
Communist Party (SACP) since 1953, when it was established in its
modern form, or since 1961, when it took up arms in its struggle
against the South African state.
In many ways, there is no such thing as a definitive history of
anything. Any human experience, especially one which takes place
over a period of years and which directly affects thousands of lives, is
impossible to reconstruct in all its detail. Some important events are
never recorded in writing. Memories of meetings and conversations
become blurred by time or distorted by later feelings. In any case,
every history is partly a reflection of the people writing it and of the
times they live in. A history of the South African Communist Party
and of its relationship with the Afmican National Congress (ANC)
which might appear full and satisfactory now, would seem dated in a
few years’ tme. Even if it gave full and satisfying answers, it might
well appear to have asked the wrong questions.
Quite apart from these considerations, which apply to all writing of
history, the SACP poses very special problems of sources. Com-
munism was banned by law in South Africa in 1950. It was not
unbanned until February 1990. In the intervening period no loyal
Party member — and, on the whole, they were immensely loyal — would
willingly impart information about the Party for fear of committing
himself or his comrades to gaol or exposing them to the risk of
assassination. This pressing need for secrecy was grafted on to habits
of discretion and clandestinity which the Party had assumed since its
inaugural congress in Cape Town in 1921.
Despite the Party’s meticulous secrecy, written material is publicly
available for an investigation of its history. Much of this material falls
into two main categories. First there is information published by the
Party about itself. Like any political party, it has felt a need to
propagate information — including manifestos, resolutions, appeals,
polemical writings and so on — which in its case were designed to keep
the image of an illegal and beleaguered organisation alive in the public
mind. In addition to these basic political communiqués, the Party’s
leadership, which was composed essentially of intellectuals during the
years of underground existence, has shown itself to be preoccupied
with a sense of history. Perhaps this is normal for any group threatened
Introduction
with extinction. It is certainly to be expected in people holding deep-
seated Marxist beliefs, who are convinced that politics is not just the
product of individual human action and of chance, but is governed by
profound laws of historical development which Marxists can aim to
understand. Party journals such as The African Commumst and
Umsebenzi are valuable sources of information on the Party during the
period covered by this book. Also of great usefulness are books by
official Party historians such as Brian Bunting, who has written a
biography of the veteran South African communist Moses Kotane,
the Party’s General Secretary for almost forty years.' Other Party
members who have written on the history of the Party, or of the
socialist movement in South Africa, include Jack and Ray Simons?
and Michael Harmel.*? Edwin Mofutsanyana has given extensive
interviews on the early history of the Party to academic researchers.
There exist sympathetic biographies of Party leaders Bill Andrews‘
and S.P. Bunting.’
The second main source of information on the Party is the attacks
made on it by its political enemies. The South African public may
know little of a political party whose very name was banned from
public mention for so many years, as though it were tainted by some
strange form of leprosy communicable only through thought. But
sections of the South African state, and most notably the Security
Police, made it their business to gather information about the Com-
munist Party by reading its published information, by detaining,
interrogating and sometimes torturing its members, and by sending
spies to infiltrate it. Much of whatever information it was able to glean
by these means the Security Police has kept to itself. Some details it
has made public, no doubt often adding a good deal of disinformation
for public consumption. Anti-communism has been a constant theme
on the right of South African politics, and has often been carried to
extremes which make right-wing attacks on the SACP hard, or
impossible, to swallow. The Aida Parker Newsletter, for example, has
for years thrived on lurid anti-communist writing in which there are
many shades between the seemingly true and the clearly unlikely.
Curiously, perhaps, even this school of robust anti-communism has
produced only one full-length history of communism in South Africa,
that by Henry Pike, a right-wing American clergyman, first published
in 1985. It is an extremely polemical work replete with anti-communist
@ 1 Brian BuntMiosens gKo,tan e, South African Revolutionary (Inkululeko Publications,
London, revised edition, 1986).
2. H.J. & RE. Simons, Class and Colour tn South Africa, 1850-1950 (Penguin, Har-
mondsworth, 1969).
®3. A. Lerumo (Michael Harmel), Fifty Fighting Years (inkululeko Publications,
London, 3rd revised edition, 1987).
4. R.K. Cope, Comrade Bill: The Life and Times of W.H. Andrews, Workers' Leader
(Stewart Printing Company, Cape Town, 1943).
5. Bdward Roux, S.P. Bunting, a Poktical Biography, (published by the author, Cape
Town, 1944).
2
introduction
diatribes of the most vitriolic type. It was compiled from a wide range
of published sources and interviews with top security officers including
Gerard Ludi, one of the most successful of Pretoria’s spies, and
Hendrik van den Bergh, the former head of the now-defunct BOSS,
the Bureau of State Security.°®
In addition to these primary sources of information — the Party
itself and its sworn enemy, the South African state with its apologists
— there are other sources which could be considered en sara,
These include testimonies by former Party members or sympathi
who have renounced their beliefs and given accounts of their __
experiences to the public. Such sources could be said to include Dr
Eddie Roux, the early communist who grew disillusioned with the
Party and later published extensive criticisms of it,’ and Bartholomew
Hlapane, a member of the South African Communist Party Central
Committee who turned state witness, testifying in this capacity in
several trials and later giving evidence to an American Senate sub-
committee conducting hearings on Soviet bloc influence in the affairs
of southern Africa.* There was the so-called ‘Gang of Eight’, which
included several communists who publicly split with the Party and
with the ANC, accusing the Party of manipulating the Congress. In
these and similar cases it might be argued that former communists or
fellow-travellers gave information about those who had previously
been their comrades because they had been coerced into doing so by
the state, or that they were embittered individuals whose motives were
not disinterested; or that, like converts to any cause, their intellectual
conversion to anti-communism had required such an emotional
wrench as to cause them to become unbalanced in their judgement.
There may be some truth in these criticisms in some cases, especially
evidence supplied by a state witness such as Hlapane. Former political
prisoners in South Africa have described the pressure put on them
and their colleagues to give false testimony. Nevertheless, to discount
everything said about the Party by former members hardly suggests
objectivity or aids understanding. Such an attitude leads to the
position that nothing said about the Party is true unless it is officially
stated by the Party itself, which would be naive in the extreme.
All of these and similar sources — official Party histories, court
records, memoirs and so on — have been used by academic historians
such as Baruch Hirson and Tom Lodge who have made a speciality
6. Henry Pike, A History of Communism tn South Afrca (Christian Mission International,
Germiston, 1985).
7. Eddie Roux, Time Longer than Rope. A History of the Black Man's Strufgor gFrleeedo m
8 South Afnca (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2nd edition, 1964); Eddie
& Win Roux, Rebel Pity (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1972).
8. The Role of the Soviet Union, Cuba and Bast Germany in Fomenting Terrorism tn
Southern Africa. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Secuanrd iTertroryis m of
the Committee. of the Judiciary, United States Senate (2 vols, Government Printing
Office, Washington, 1982).
3
Introduction
of writing on the history of black and trade union politics in South
Africa, and have already done much to uncover or illuminate the
Party’s history at least until its suppression in 1950.°
One of the reasons why observers of South African politics have
tended to be either virulently anti-communist or rather indulgent in
discounting evidence unfavourable to the Communist Party has to
do with the nature of the Party’s arch-enemy, the South African state.
South Africa has been witness over the centuries to some of the worst
depradations of colonialism, meaning the conquest and settling of the
land by peoples of foreign origin, and of imperialism, meaning govern-
ment by a foreign power. It has also had experience of capitalism, in
the form of capital-intensive industry and mineral extraction accom-
panied by untold exploitation and misery. Most notoriously, South
Africa has been the home of apartheid, a policy of racial separation
condemned the world over and rejected now by the political party
which first enunciated the concept, the National Party. Hatred of, or
distaste for, the South African government and all its works has caused
many writers of liberal or socialist inclination to pass over in silence
some evidence concerning the SACP because to write anything critical
of the Party can be seen as helpful to its enemy. It is a measure of the
intensity of the political struggle in South Africa, which has engaged
the attention of the entire world, and has made objectivity appear an
almost quaint ideal.
The events of the last five years, however, have changed the political
landscape and the intellectual climate. The end of the Cold War, in
which South Africa had become quite centrally involved, now makes
it easier to write about the South African situation without being
labelled either pro-capitalist or pro-communist. The Soviet
government itself, held to be at the very centre of Marxist intrigue in
Cold War polemics, now has quite warm relations with the
government in Pretoria and no longer seeks its overthrow. The SACP
can no longer be portrayed intelligently as its tool or its shadow. The
South African government has abandoned its determination to
exclude from national politics all persons of colour and anyone it
deems to be a communist. It has unbanned the Party itself, allowing
it to go public to whatever degree it wishes. The struggle has ceased
to be primarily military, although the use of violence remains one of
the most striking features of South African political life.
The unbanning of the ANC and of the Communist Party, and their
suspension of the armed struggle, has opened up a vast space for
argument and legitimate persuasion: in short, for politics. This has
already had its effect among adherents of the democratic movement
in South Africa, the great numbers of people who have struggled
9. Baruch Hirson, YouFror st he Union. Class and Comemeunity Struggles in South Africa,
1930-1947 (Zed Books, London, 1989); Tom Lodge, Black Pohnes tn South Africa
Since 1945 (Longman, England, 1983).
4