Labour leaders felt unhappy about their party's prospects at the end of the war. 'We have abandoned propaganda work,' Morris Kentridge complained as he contrasted their 'timid inactivity' with the British Labour party's bold record. The war-truce had lasted too long. Imperial interests were harmful to the party if they demanded neglect of national issues. ' The Labour Party have been far too silent, submissive and inert.' As the next general election approached, the party turned its battery against the government. Botha was said to have ridden into power 'practically on the backs of Labour'; yet he and Smuts had rewarded them with whips and scorpions, cast British ideals into dust, and trampled British justice underfoot. Torn by apparently irreconcilable differences, Labour was scorned and reckoned to be 'down and out'. Each section insisted on its own point of view and found the other more hateful than the common enemy. ' Even its white ideal is challenged from within. Cursed by disintegration it treads the valley of humiliation and its enemies rejoice.'1
The party instituted a series of unity conferences in September 1919. Creswell queried the wisdom of the 'socialization' objective, not for reasons of personal principle, but because its ambiguity put off many potential supporters. The ISL received a belated invitation to an all-in conference in November which Ivon Jones attended in a 'semi-journalistic' capacity. He reported that the conference consisted of the old rump of Labour men without socialist guts, whose dominant aim was to get into parliament. The socialists, he claimed, had moved to firmer ground, leaving the reformists to fall back on their middle-class supporters. The League disdained 'the mugwump unity of a pot-bellied Labour Party without the fire of the Social Revolution'; and decided to contest the elections under its own banner.2 The decision, however, resulted in a major dispute within its ranks.
The issue of political versus industrial action flared again. Syndicalists asked why they should fight elections and not for the soviet republic. Dunbar and his cronies in the Industrial Socialist League heckled the ISLs speakers and pressed for the deletion of the 'political action' clause in its constitution. The critics were told that no less an authority than Lenin himself had denounced the 'infantile disorder' of anti-parliamentarism.3 This was so; but it was a moot point whether Lenin's argument held water in South Africa, where four-fifths of the working class had no vote. Jones conceded that conditions were unfavourable for a social democratic party. The 'political action' school brushed these considerations aside and stressed the propaganda value of an election campaign. Large majorities in the League's branches and at its annual conference in January 1920 endorsed the management committee's decision to contest elections.4
The conference also agreed, unanimously, to 'fall in line with world revolutionary trends' by affiliating to the Communist International. Andrews forwarded the application with the League's constitution and rules. They would show, he wrote, that 'our policy is on all fours with that of the Communist Parties of Europe and elsewhere'.5 The Comintern accepted the application and invited both the League and the SALP to send representatives to its second congress, which opened in Petrograd on 19 July. Neither could attend. The International published reports of the congress proceedings, resolutions and condition for admission to the CI. A long and spirited discussion followed among the League's supporters on the prospects of uniting left wing groups into one party. Preparations were made for an extraordinary conference, the convening of which was required by article 19 of the conditions for admission.
Andrews, Bunting, Barendregt and Tyler on the Rand and Hicks in Kimberley represented the ISL in the general election of March 1920. Hamstrung by the anti-parliamentarians in their ranks, they vowed that they hated electioneering and entered the fray only 'from a stem sense of duty'. Members were told not to canvass or engage in 'any other trick of vote-catching'. Their job was to distribute the election manifesto and 150,000 leaflets on bolshevism, soviet power, the colour bar, rising prices, and the Labour party's double-talk on race. The manifesto condemned the notion of reforming parliament, urged workers to reject capitalist misrule, and proclaimed all power to the soviets. Even radical voters might have found this mixture too heady a brew. The League's candidates lost their deposits. Andrews, defeated by Madeley in Benoni, topped the League's table with seventy-eight votes - 'the irreducible minimum of votes', he declared. He attributed the socialists' defeat to the timidity of petty bourgeois supporters, a reluctance to split the labour vote against Unionists, and resentment caused by the League's 'Don't Scab' leaflet.6
Labour's manifesto promised benefits to the poor and needy, reaffirmed the twin aims of socialism and segregation, and made no mention of class war or revolution.7 Creswell, more attuned than the radicals to the voters' mood, fought for the imperial connexion and against high prices, rents and profits.8 His mixture of British patriotism and economic welfare went down well on the Rand and in the port towns, but offered small comfort to Afrikaner workers, then at a crucial stage. They were wavering in their loyalty to the political generals of South African war vintage, and vacillated between national and class affiliations. Labour's cultural insularity and sheer Britishness repelled them, however, and muffed for all time its chance of winning their allegiance. ' Dutch workers as a body are not voting for Labour candidates as by all the rules of the game they should do,' complained the Labour World after the elections.9 Its correspondents gave some of the reasons.
Most of the Labour party's leaders, and all those in parliament, were immigrant and unilingual. They welcomed Afrikaners in their ranks, and expected them to communicate in English, the language of the master race. Sampson, one of the big four in the movement, deplored the 'fetish' of bilingualism, and would not make it a reason for dispensing with efflcient unilingual, meaning English-speaking, trade union officials.10 One correspondent wrote that the British working man voted for a Unionist or SAP candidate in preference to a Labour candidate who was not British-born. It was for this reason that no Afrikaners sat on the Labour benches in parliament. 'We have not played the game with our Dutch brothers, and we do not encourage them to stay with us and draw others.' Afrikaners were not wanted in the party, wrote another; they were used merely as a tool to advance the cause of British nationalism.11
Labour never made up on the roundabouts what it lost on the swings. It alienated Afrikaners by upholding British supremacy, and Africans by upholding white supremacy. Its members kept Coloured men out of skilled work in the north and solicited their votes in the south. The party won four seats in Cape Town and one in East London in 1920, and lost all but two of its Cape seats in 1921. The APO threw its full weight against Labour on both occasions; and also against Hicks, the ISL candidate at Kimberley in 1920, 'White Labour,' declared Abdurahman, 'has been, and is today, all over South Africa, the enemy of the Coloured people.12 It kept them out of motor workshops, building and electrical trades, slaughter houses and skilled mining work in the Transvaal, forced them to work for a lower wage, and then used this as a pretext for barring them from trade unions. White scabs took their jobs when Coloured workers formed their own unions and struck for higher wages. The 'white peril' would squeeze them to death if they failed to consolidate their industrial and political forces.13 The Labour party was their 'natural enemy'. They would show their contempt for it at the polls.14
The APO followed the Unionists into Smuts's camp. Abdurahman had attacked him in 1910 for his racialism, and now defended him as the champion of the British connexion against Hertzog's republicans. Like other white supremacy parties, Afrikaner Nationalists consistently appealed for Coloured votes, though never so blatantly as in 1920, when they were fighting hard in the Cape against an upsurge of British patriotism. The Nationalist party took the unprecedented step of putting its name to an election pamphlet addressed to 'Coloured Afrikanders',15 who were urged to vote for the party, ' the friends of South Africa and therefore our friends too'. Abdurahman and the APO were said to be 'politically bankrupt'. They had 'achieved nothing to better our condition 'because they pinned their hopes on Britain, the Unionists and Smuts. Yet Britain, once the world's greatest slave trader, showed beyond all doubt that she would never 'interfere on our behalf in the internal affairs' of South Africa. The Unionists were double-faced, and practised all the racial discrimination that they attributed to the Nationalists. As for Smuts, he had fought Indians, Labourites, the English and his own people; 'and now he wants to fight the coloured races'. The choice was this: vote British, and vote for a flood of British immigrants 'to drown us out in our own country'; or vote South African, and 'vote for our own protection'.
The Nationalist party in the western Cape worked through Coloured agents of a Nationalist-sponsored insurance company; a Coloured newspaper, the South African Clarion; and a Coloured political organization, the United Afrikaner League. C. Dantu, the chief superintendent of the insurance company's Coloured division, was also the head of the newspaper's publishing department and president of the UAL. The men under him included N. R. Veldsman, A. Arendse and Abe Desmore, all former or current members of the APO. They canvassed among the Coloured in one operation for insurance, newspaper subscriptions and votes.16 Their sole purpose, complained Abdurahman, was to fight the APO during elections on a platform made up of the Nationalist party's doctrine of disloyalty to the crown and its disgraceful abandonment of sacred principles sanctified by the blood of Coloured soldiers.17
The colour bar, and not republicanism, was the dominant issue, declared the Rev. Z. R. Mahabane, president of the Cape Native Congress. Africans had a duty to vote only for candidates who took a pledge to work for the elimination of racial discrimination.18 The white supremacy parties cleared the deck, however, in the general election of 10 March 1920. Labour won 21 seats, which raised it to the peak of its parliamentary career. The South African party won 42; Hertzog's Nationalists, 44; the Unionists, 25; and independents, 3 seats. Smuts, the SAP leader and premier since Botha's death in August 1919, remained uneasily in office with the backing of Unionists and independents. Labour held the balance in a House so divided, but its attachment to the British cause limited its ability to manoeuvre. The Creswellites pressed for price and profit controls, and would not vote with the Nationalist opposition to unseat Smuts. They wanted to avert a dissolution that would force them to defend their seats; and they refused to be made responsible for opening the way to an Afrikaner republic.19
Smuts and Hertzog resumed their pre-election unity talks, which had broken down on the republican question. The people, said Smuts, had outgrown the old racial feud between Afrikaner and English; they were sick and tired of party politics. He proposed a national all-party government. Creswell declined; and Hertzog refused to associate with such discordant elements as Labour and the Unionists. He offered instead to enter into a parliamentary pact with the South African party alone. Smuts was right in thinking that Afrikaners wanted unity. The demand came from party branches on both sides and threatened to sweep all intransigent leaders aside. They were forced to resume negotiations. More than 500 Nationalist and SAP delegates met at Bloemfontein in September 1920. Afrikaner churches blessed their deliberations in a national day of prayer, but divine providence failed the conciliators. The Nationalists demanded and Smuts refused to concede the right to agitate from within the alliance for sovereign independence and secession from the crown.20 Power and place were at stake in addition to principle. A bilateral pact such as Hertzog proposed would have assured him of the premiership; whereas Smuts was more likely to remain prime minister in an all-party coalition. Since neither would serve under the other, the popular movement for white national unity collapsed.
The South African party played its last card, absorbed the Unionists, and became in form as well as in function the spokesman of mine owners, industrialists and the British interest. Smuts went to the country in February 1921 to defend the constitution, he said, against secession. The Labour party accused him of wishing to upset the balance of power it held and to smash it in preparation for an attack on the white working class. The election caught the Labour movement in a state of disunity. Trade unions were indifferent or hostile to the political wing.
Socialist groups fought one another more than they fought the system.21 Representatives of the SALP and ISL met in November 1920 for unity talks. Creswell said he wanted a peaceful revolution, whereas the ISL wished to destroy the system by force and bloodshed. Andrews replied that it was the capitalist who used force on the workers, and without protest from the right wing, which had adopted a bourgeois outlook. The real gulf existed between the reformist ideas of the second international and the revolutionary tactics of the third.22
The fourth general election took place on 8 February 1921. The ISL advised all socialists to stay away from the polls except at Durban, where three League candidates had entered the lists. They obtained 140 votes in all, against the 2,310 votes cast for the Labour candidates. Harry Norrie, the veteran socialist and now a respectable town councillor, threw the weight of his SDP behind the Labour party. It fared badly, however, losing three seats in Natal and nine in other provinces to the SAP. Labour had failed for the second time to win the workers' support on a patriotic issue. When told that the empire was in danger they chose to vote for the jingos in the SAP-Unionist coalition. This won 79 seats, while the Nationalists won 45, Labour 9 and independents one. Smuts had gained a clear majority at the expense of Labour, which never fully recovered. The SAPUnionists would always outmatch it in protestations of loyalty to the crown. The Nationalist party, on the other hand, stole Creswell's clothes, made the white labour policy its own, and attracted Afrikaner workers by appealing to language, blood, and sentiment.
Africans watched developments on the white front with forebodings. The Rev. Mahabane traced the history and effects of racial discrimination in his presidential address at the annual convention of the Cape ANC in May 1920. All white party leaders, he said, from Abraham Fischer to Smuts, were determined to keep Africans and Coloured out of the parliament of white plutocrats. Yet Africans were the rightful owners of the land, and would never consent to the status of bondsmen. The whites were foreign fortune-seekers, who had seized supreme political power with Britain's aid, and used it to entrench themselves in the state, church, civil service and economy. They had renounced the Christian doctrine of universal brotherhood for the creed of 'God our Father, the White Man our Brother, the Blackman an Outcast'. The colour bar divided the two sections of the population into hostile camps, contaminated the country's moral life, and, unless checked, would end in civil strife.23
Mahabane, Makgatho and Rubusana were ministers of religion who combined politics with their profession. They belonged to the same social class as the Afrikaner ministers, teachers and lawyers who inspired and guided Afrikaner nationalism. Their race alone barred them from the centres of power. By rejecting white domination in terms of liberal and Christian doctrine, they were no less radical than socialists who rejected capitalist domination in Marxist terms; but they looked for relief to an electoral system in which their influence was at most marginal. Rubusana and Abdurahman contested provincial council seats in September 1920. Rubusana lost Tembuland by 200 votes; Abdurahman won Woodstock against H. A. Evans, the Labour party candidate, by 500 votes. This was the limit to which Africans and Coloured could go in their bid for direct representation.
Since parliament was closed to them, they fell back on welltried methods of petition and deputation. Rubusana and A. K. Soga led a deputation of Transkeian councillors and chiefs to Smuts in August 1920 over the Native Affairs Act of that year. This established a native affairs commission; provided for a system of local councils in the reserves; and authorized the administration to convene conferences of chiefs, councillors and 'prominent Natives' with a view 'to the ascertainment of the sentiments of the Native population'. Smuts, who piloted the bill through parliament, said 'we must convince the Native that we are taking the right step and are setting up the proper institutions in which his legitimate desires and aspirations can be satisfied'.24 His bill was a shoddy device to side-track the African demand for the right to sit in parliament. The ANC denounced the measure, and when it had been passed, demanded that the commission should include at least one African. Rubusana's deputation asked Smuts to delete the colour bar from the constitution and to include an African on the commission. He replied that whites were not in a mood for the one, and time was not ripe for the other.
The time was never ripe for Africans to sit on even so futile a body as the commission. Its impotence was shockingly revealed in May 1921 when it failed to avert bloodshed at Bulhoek location near Queenstown in the eastern Cape. The Israelites, a messianic sabbatarian sect, whose ritual included baptism by total immersion at midnight, the kiss of peace, and an annual passover, had made their headquarters in the location at Ntaba Langa - the Mountain of the Rising Sun. They had broken away from their parent body, the Church of God and Saints of Christ, founded in America by the Negro bishop Cowdry; but retained its title and tenet - 'God grant that we may all agree to love without respect to race, colour or condition.' The members of the church gathered in April of every year at NtabaLanga on land belonging to their prophet and leader Enoch Mgijima. They erected a tabernacle and dwellings, some on the common age because the surveyed lots were on marshy ground and unhealthy in wet weather.25 A small religious community of 1,000 men, women and children settled in the village, living peacefully and awaiting their redeemer. They committed no crime, apart from breaking a minor by-law by refusing to demolish huts built on crown land.
The Israelites took their religion seriously, interpreted the Bible literally, and alarmed white farmers, townsmen and officials by shutting themselves up in a world of their own and refusing to work for a wage. The white public agitated for their removal. The ISL gave warning in December 1920 that capitalism was planning 'a wholesale bloody slaughter' of the Israelites, probably because of the scarcity of farm workers. The time was near when the black-and-tan would be mobilized against white workers as well.26 The native affairs commission visited Bulhoek in April and reported that the Israelites were a law-abiding religious community and not a political movement. Many of them were religious fanatics who had disposed of all their worldly goods for the common cause and were penniless. Any attempt to remove them by force would be resisted. The government should therefore take no immediate action, other than to offer financial assistance and accommodation on crown land for the members who agreed to disperse.27
The government chose to disperse them by violence instead. Members of the church were summoned to give evidence in a case in which two white men were charged with culpable homicide arising from the killing of two Africans. The witnesses refused to attend court, and the police sent a mobile column of nearly 1,000 men to Queenstown. The native affairs commission, which included two well-known liberals, Dr. C. T. Loram and Adv. A. W. Roberts, visited Bulhoek again, met with unyielding defiance from Mgijima and his men, and advised the government to arrest the witnesses and remove the Israelites by force. Colonel Theodore Truter, the police commissioner, led six squadrons, a machine-gun and an artillery detachment, to Ntaba Langa in the early morning of Empire Day, 24 May. Presented with an ultimatum, the prophet replied that 'the time of Jehovah has now arrived'. The Lord had informed him in a vision that war would begin in 1914 'and from thence there shall be no peace on earth.... The whole world is going to sink in the blood. I am not the cause of it, but God is going to cause it.28
If this was so, the police were God's agents. While women and children prayed in the tabernacle, their men advanced, carrying sticks, assegais and crude swords beaten out of cartwheel bands. The police, who outnumbered the Israelites by two to one, held their fire until the men were only a few yards away. The slaughter took ten minutes, and claimed 190 lives. All those killed and wounded were shot in the front. Many were horribly mutilated with abdominal wounds and shattered limbs, torn by machine-gun fire. No cry of pain or appeal for mercy came from the wounded and dying. Many who could crept away to hide in the rough and hilly country around. The Israelite women scoured the veld after nightfall to bring in their men. One woman, a former teacher, carried twelve, one at a time, on a wheelbarrow from the outer darkness. The white press said that the advance 'into the jaws of death' could hardly be called bravery: 'it was pure fanaticism'.29 Smuts told parliament that the 'incident' would teach every part of the population 'that the law of the land will be carried out in the last resort as fearlessly against black as against white'.30
Colonel Truter said that the police had fired in self-defence. No action was taken against them. Enoch Mgijima and his two brothers were sentenced to six years' imprisonment; thirty other Israelites, to three years; and seventy, to eighteen months each Professor D. D. T. Jabavu told Fort Hare students that the government had shown as much patience and forebearance as could be expected; Imvo accused Nationalist and Labour party agents of causing unrest among Africans for personal and political gain.31 The African National Congress, in contrast, protested that the law which had been so brutally 'vindicated with such terrible effusion of blood ' was no more than a minor local by-law. It doubted whether equally drastic action would be taken against whites in similar circumstances; and complained that Smuts had turned down an offer from the ANC executive to mediate with the Israelites. Africans wished to live in peace, but 'if you hit the dog without ceasing it will in the end turn and bite you'. Congress condemned the police pogrom and the failure to respect religious beliefs; adjourned in honour of the martyred dead; and demonstrated through Bloemfontein's township behind a band playing the Dead March.32
F. S. Malan, the acting prime minister, agreed that the public wanted an inquiry. Merriman denied 'undue violence' by the police, and regretted that the 'Africa for the Africans' movement had not been stamped out years ago. 'Any time in Cape Town pure Bolshevik propaganda could be heard being taught in District Six.' Why did they drag these people in? asked Waterston: the socialists had never preached that Africans should arm themselves to kill the whites.33 The government side-tracked the demand for an inquiry by briefing the native affairs commission to report on 'disturbing influences' among Africans, their churches, and the Israelites in particular.
Five years later, when nearly all whites had forgotten the massacre, the commission gave a precise of the court proceedings without comment, and advised that there was no need for legislation to combat the ANC, Bantu Union, ICU and ICWU.
Religious and political organizations would continue to multiply. To prevent their becoming dangerous, government should adopt a permanent native policy and proper system of native administration.34
Down in Cape Town members of the United Communist party distributed a pamphlet headed MURDER! MURDER! MURDER! THE BULHOEK MASSACRE. Christians Slaughter Their Christian Brethren. Great Empire Day Celebration.' Wilfrid Harrison, the party secretary, and William Dryburgh, then in his eighties, were prosecuted for issuing the leaflet, and were sentenced under a placaat* of 1754 forbidding the publication of offensive, rebellious and libellous lampoons. The Appeal Court held that the statute was no longer in force and quashed the convictions; but W. Dryburgh, his son David, a well-known tailor in Adderley Street, and the hairdresser H. Green were fined on a separate charge of criminal slander for having called Truter, the police commissioner, a 'brutal assassin'.35 The Bulhoek massacre and the prosecutions made a deep impact on left-wing groups in the Cape and accelerated the movement towards unity.36
The ISLs annual conference in January 1920 had appealed for unity on the basis of the Communist International's twenty-one conditions of membership.37 These had been drafted, initially by Lenin, in expectation of approaching civil wars in Europe and the collapse of the Second International. To avoid its errors and prepare for the coming struggle, the Third International would be a single, integrated world organization rather than a loose confederation of independent national parties. The immediate need wasto precipitate a breach between socialists and communists; and to stimulate the formation of revolutionary parties characterized by the bolshevik attributes of 'democratic centralism' and 'iron discipline'. Every party affiliated to the Comintern must adopt the title The Communist Party of ... (Section of the Communist International), and abide by the CIs decisions. The twenty-one points set out the duties and functions of the affiliates. They were to purge themselves of reformists, combine illegal with legal work if necessary, agitate in the army and among the rural proletariat, win the support of trade unions, and defend the Soviet Union. Every communist party in an imperialist state was expected to give practical aid to colonial liberation movements and to demand independence for the colonial peoples.
This was a tall order for the Leagues three or four hundred members. The management committee remarked in December 1920 that much of the CIs thesis applied to a revolutionary situation, which was still far off in South Africa. Indeed, it might well be the last country in the world to adopt Communism. Their chief task was to educate, agitate and organize, rather than to speculate idly about the techniques of revolution or the form of a proletarian dictatorship. An illegal movement, for instance, was impracticable, being too easily betrayed and corrupted by police spies, and also undesirable, since the campaign for the elementary rights of combination, strike action and free speech should not appear as a conspiracy. Then, too, propaganda among the troops, though necessary, was very difficult, because of their brutalized attitude to black and until recently also to white workers. As for changing their name, the socialists could call themselves the Communist Party of South Africa (Section of the Third International), even though a faction in Johannesburg and Cape Town had jumped the title earlier in the year. Alternatively, the name Socialist Party would do. If they failed to attract many elements and were substantially the ISL over again, they might as well retain their old name for the sake of its local associations.38
The most warmly debated issue was the instruction to unite all militant socialists. They should not strive to unite for the mere sake of uniting, wrote Bunting, or repeat ideas of Russian bolsheviks that did not apply to South Africa.39 Lenin had advised British communists to seek affiliation to the Labour party. This could not be done in South Africa, first because the Labour party's constitution excluded any such affiliation, and secondly because Africans might turn against socialists who supported that party. In spite of such objections and the six years' feud between them, leaders of the League and Labour party had met in November 1919 to discuss the possibilities of cooperation. They agreed only that the gulf between them could not be bridged.40 The League's management committee reported to the annual conference in January that the Labou rparty would not merit their support unless it purged its ranks of '"patriots" and "social-traitors", of centrists and mere reformists, of opportunists, career-seekers, political adventurers, turncoats, and rogues'. A new 'socialist' party might become the stronger, and should continue the ISLs function, which was to show up the Labour party, oppose it at elections, goad it and scold it until it had mended its ways.41
Unity on the left seemed almost as remote as unity with the Labour party. Harry Norrie and A. L. Clark of the SDP in Durban rejected the twenty-one points, allegedly because they required an illegal organization and disruptive work in trade unions. 'It smells of Russia in pre-war days.'42 The Johannesburg Jewish Socialist Society (Paolei Zion) wished to retain its identity and applied on its own to the CL for affiliation.43 The Industrial Socialist League in Cape Town made a similar application in January 1920.
To add to the confusion, Dunbar's Industrial Socialist League in Johannesburg joined with other dissidents to form the Communist League. This in turn merged in September with the Industrial Socialist League of Cape Town into the Communist Party of South Africa.44 Its constitution affirmed the principle of mass action and no participation in parliamentary elections. The party undertook to organize workers irrespective of colour, craft or sex in communist groups and soviets to obtain control of production, seize political power, and defend their conquests by force. Every means would be used to 'remove existing prejudices between white, coloured and native workers and to bring them together in the struggle for Communism'.
This was strong meat for some members. A. Z. Berman resigned as editor of the Bolshevik, the party's official organ. Manuel Lopes, the secretary of the Industrial Socialist League and now of the CPSA, took his place. Representatives of the CPSA, SDF and Constitutional Socialist League45 held a series of meetings early in 1921 to discuss unity. The driving force came largely from E. J. Brown, an old member of the International Socialist League, who had been deported from the Belgian Congo in July 1920 for having formed a white trade union which agitated against the employment of Africans as engine drivers. Lopes was persuaded into accepting the CI's thesis on the need for parliamentary action. Even if it was wrong, he said, the whole world supported it, and South African socialists must fall into step. But the CPSA and CSL split on this issue and on the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat.46 Finally, only the SDF would accept the twenty-one points. It established the United Communist Party of South Africa in March 1921 with individuals from the other organizations. There followed the formation of a Young Communist League in Cape Town and, on the suggestion of its secretary, S. A. Rochlin, of a YCL in Johannesburg in May 1921. Dunbar's section of the CPSA in Johannesburg adhered to the anti-parliamentary line and refused to merge in the United Communist Party.
The ISL refused to tolerate any 'whining for "local autonomy of branches"' or other attempts to water down the principle of a strictly disciplined and centralized party. 'Better remain disunited' than admit centrists, anarchists and other improper elements. As to parliamentary elections, they were not really important in South Africa, where three-fifths of the population were disfranchised. In any event, the ISL belonged to the CI and was bound by its decisions. It would have to approve of the new party's programrne and constitution. A united party that jibbed at this requirement would not be worth forming.
Did the principle of unity apply also to the national liberation movement? There had been a difference of opinion on the issue in the Comintern's second congress of July 1920. Manabendra Roy, the Indian delegate, urged congress to reject 'bourgeois democratic nationalism' and give its full backing to revolutionary mass organizations under communist leadership. Lenin, who drafted the theses on the 'national and colonial question', took the broader view; but went some way to meeting Roy's objection by substituting the words 'national revolutionary' for 'bourgeois democratic'. The resolution as finally adopted declared that the CIs policy 'must be to bring into being a close alliance of all national and colonial liberation movements with Soviet Russia'. The form of the alliance would depend on the stage of development reached by the communist movement or by the revolutionary liberation movement in the colony or dependent territory. All communist parties were under an obligation to support by deed and word the revolutionary liberation movements in these countries.47 South Africa's socialists accepted the theses. Their traditional policies and sympathies coincided more closely with Roy's attitude to middle-class nationalism.
There could be no doubt as to the nature of Afrikaner nationalism. Bourgeois to the core, it was neither democratic nor revolutionary. Even the Labour party's right wing, which flirted from time to time with Hertzog's followers, recognized their role. 'Nurtured in racio-clerical Toryism, and built upon a caste foundation, they have already proved a priceless political and economic asset to the higher command of high finance.' For their 'orgies of tearing, raging claptrap and bitter racial venom' diverted attention from economic troubles.48 The radical socialists agreed that Afrikaner nationalism was antagonistic; and blundered by failing to distinguish between the nationalisms of an oppressor and the oppressed. Sectarianism and inadequate insights held them back from adopting Lenin's flexible approach. African nationalism, as they saw it, was a competitor, if not an enemy, and never an ally in the class struggle.
The ISL acknowledged that nationalism might for the moment be the most powerful available weapon against the social order; but it did not pursue this promising line of thought.49 The management committee put forward instead an unmodified class analysis, as in Bunting's statement on 'The ISL and the Coloured and Native Worker ' which he presented to the annual conference on 2 January 1921.50 South Africa, he wrote, was a 'unique case' of ruling and subject races jostling together; 'an epitome of what happens on a world scale.51 Just as the colonies impinged on workers in Europe and competed with them, so did the African compete with white workers in South Africa. Exploitation, the loss of land, and industrialism had diversified the subject races. While allowance should be made for the differences, the message of socialism to the African must be the same as to workers everywhere. Tribal peasants and farm labourers would be 'passive beneficiaries' of socialism rather than its creators. African industrial workers, however, had a definite part to play in the revolution. They would supply, if not the theory, then the bulk of the numerical strength, courage and spirit of the revolutionary labour movement.
Socialists should support the peasants' struggle against land owners, the Native Land Act, pass laws, and for the franchise. This followed from the Comintern's approval of national liberation movements. Yet 'nationalist native organizations' in South Africa, according to the League, were instruments of the ruling class - safety valves, like the S.A. Federation of Trades. African leaders were 'less concerned with the emancipation of their fellows from wage slavery than with an unproletarian ambition to rise in the social scale; leaning also for support on the capitalist-fed power and wealth of the chiefs'. The ideal of 'Africa for Africans' was reactionary in South Africa, for here the whites had come to stay. The crucial issue was how to bring about unity between white and African workers. Capitalism prevented unity. The white workers would sink to the black man's standards unless they raised him to their own through combined struggle. By excluding the African, the labour movement doomed itself to failure and to betrayal of socialist principles. By conniving at the policy of repression, it rendered inevitable what socialism alone could prevent: a race war between white and black.
The 100 delegates who attended the January 1921 conference included representatives of the League's branches, the Paolei Zion, CPSA, Indian trade unions, and individual members of the SAIP, SAIF and African unions. It was, the League claimed, the largest and most representative gathering of socialists yet held in South Africa. They decided, by forty votes to twenty-nine, that a 'Communist Party can at no time identify itself with any nationalist or other bourgeois party, and cannot support its platform' And further, they determined, there could be no unity with persons who refused to accept the principles of the Third International. Unity would be worthwhile only if it took the form of a strongly disciplined, centralized party affiliated to the CI. A committee was set up to call a unity conference, which met in Johannesburg on Easter Sunday. Five socialist organizations sent representatives, among them Norrie from Durban and Harrison from Cape Town.52 The chair was taken by Colin Wade, the Benoni dentist.
The conference adopted without dissent the CI's twenty-one conditions of membership, but held that article 3, relating to illegal work, did not apply to South Africa. Socialists who objected to parliamentary elections were urged to set their differences aside. The issue was unimportant, since the centre of political gravity lay outside parliament. The SDF, CP and Jewish Socialist Society in Cape Town had already joined forces in anticipation of a wider unity. Durban's Marxian Club and local ISL branch now also agreed to merge. Norrie and the SDP, however, insisted that the twenty-one points were generally unacceptable. The League replied that communist policy, being based on the 'immutable laws of human progress', would attract the best of the working class. South African communists, acting in unison with the millions who were flocking to the banners of the International in Europe, would 'bring the capitalist system, already tottering, crashing to destruction'.53
Nine delegates from the Rand54 and five from Cape Town55 met on 30 July 1921 in a 'humble upper room' in Plein Street, Cape Town, under the chairmanship of David Dryburgh, one of the four men standing trial at about this time on charges arising out of their protest against the Bulhoek massacre. The conference set up the Communist Party of South Africa (Section of the Communist International), adopted a constitution, elected an executive and vested the ISLs printing press and newspaper in the new party. With its headquarters in Johannesburg, Tyler in the chair, Bunting as treasurer and Andrews the secretary editor, it was virtually a continuation of the League. All the delegates and members of the executive were whites.56 Only whites spoke at the public meeting of 2,000, more than half of whom were Coloured and Africans, in the city hall on the 29th. The party's first manifesto appealed mainly to the white working man. The communists seemed as isolated from the masses as they had been in 1915. But they left no doubt about their determination to break through the racial barrier.
Their prospects were rated highly by the police commissioner in his annual report for 1921-2. South Africa, he wrote, was 'a suitable breeding-ground for the growth of the Bolshevik germ'. Cleavages between Afrikaner and English, black and white, worker and employer, and the effects of the post-war depression tended to stimulate teachings that 'anticipate the time when all will share everything equally'. The communists fostered socialist ideals, abused the authorities in vilest terms, proclaimed Lenin as the real saviour, extolled the Israelites at Bulhoek as the first South African bolsheviks, and promised a bloody revolution to exterminate capitalists, parsons, lawyers and politicians. The leaders included Englishmen, Dutchmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen and a high proportion of Russians, whose presence must be regarded with misgiving. Commercial travellers, hawkers and low-class store-keepers spread the propaganda and tainted the native population. The communists aimed to destroy parliamentary government and institute communes. This 'visionary vista of accelerated progress culminating in equality of blacks and whites' naturally appealed to the native races, who had no share in government. Repressive legislation and counter propaganda were needed to combat this insidious doctrine and instill respect for law and order.
The party anticipated such reactions. Its manifesto predicted an offensive by the government ' as the propaganda is seen to be working among the submissive helot races whose enlightenment and organization the ruling class dreads above all'. The communists would demonstrate as best they could that the reference of ' cheap docile labour' to the working-class movement was the most deadly blow that South Africa could deal to world capitalism. Their main duty was 'to establish the widest and closest possible contact with workers of all ranks and races! The industrial masses would provide the 'storm troops' of the approaching revolution. All workers should go forward to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a commonwealth without classes, where all men as fellow workers would receive 'the comfort and culture, the honour and the power'.57 The appeal went out to the entire working class; and ignored the large body of African, Coloured and Indian leaders who aspired to national liberation rather than working-class power.
It was reasonable to suppose that South Africans would live together in amity only after the white group had lost its monopoly of power. But who would bring about the change? Ivon Jones, writing from Moscow, where he and Sam Barlin attended the CI's third congress, gave the answer that seemed self-evident to communists at the time. Like many after him, he found that the colour of his skin, which gave him entry into the racial elite, was something of a handicap among radicals abroad. 'Why aren't you black?' he was asked. He confessed to feeling 'quite apologetic about our colour'. South African delegations should include Africans, but it would be a mistake to exclude whites. 'The African revolution will be led by white workers.' Yet his own analysis might have led him to doubt the proposition. He claimed that an increasing minority of white workers had learned since 1913 to put their hopes of emancipation in solidarity with the African. Yet the 'general tendency' was towards collaboration with the masters, who had realized their need to humour the white workers as a protection against the native masses. 8
Jones, wasting away from tuberculosis, had left South Africa in November 1920, never to return. The International paid him a great tribute on his departure. His 'insight kept the party clear on revolutionary policy and tactics', avoiding freakishness, right reformism and leftism. Reviewing his ten years of strenuous political work in South Africa, Jones wrote: 'if I have lived rapidly I have LIVED, for it is the Socialist movement that brought the zest into life for me. ' 59 Born at Aberystwyth, Wales, in 1883, he was orphaned at an early age, contracted tuberculosis, and left for New Zealand to recover 'by roughing it rabbit catching'. He settled in the Transvaal in 1909, worked as a clerk for the Victoria Falls power company, and came out on strike, the only office worker to do so, in 1913. Employed as a bookkeeper by the miners' union under Tom Mathews, he 'found out too much', according to Andrews, and was given notice. In 1914 he was elected general secretary of the Labour party and a member of the Transvaa! provincial council. He resigned from the party with other War-on-Warites in September 1915 and became the first secretary-editor of the ISL, retaining the post with interludes of ill-health until he left for Russia. 'A selfless man,' wrote Andrews, and an 'incorrigible optimist', Jones had no ulterior motives 'all he wanted was to build the movement'.60
He drafted a 10,000 word report on Communism in South Africa for the CI while he was at Nice on his way to Moscow.61 There he sat on Comintern committees and prepared documents as a specialist on colonial rule and nationalism. The report summarized his views and the ISLs policies before he became enmeshed in the Cls official apparatus. The divisive effects of Afrikaner nationalism, British chauvinism and white racialism, he pointed out, inhibited the growth of a strong socialist movement. The Labour party's only policy for Africans was 'the wholly utopian proposal of segregation of black from white in strictly delimited areas'. In South Africa '"class-conscious" meant white class-conscious'; and consciousness of class in white workers was 'fitful and easily lost'. Liberally paid out of the African's miserable underpaid labour, they lorded it over him and developed an increasing resistance to communist ideas.
Africans were passing through a period of acute social change from primitive communism, which persisted in the segregated reserves. These were in fact no more than 'cheap breeding grounds for black labour'. Peasants came to town to earn bride wealth, pay taxes, acquire schooling, learn the use of machinery, or to escape from tribal life. They had to contend with pass laws, starvation wages, slums and the denial of civic rights. Yet, in spite of his opposition, 'the Bantu is a happy proletarian Aided by the ISL and the IWA, he was awakening to the consciousness of class. His strikes revealed a capacity for industrial action as a more certain means of deliverance than tribal assegais.
What factors were favourable to revolution? Jones gleaned comfort from the sharp rise in the number of Afrikaner workers. They soon became good trade unionists and loyal agitators for their class within the limits of their colour. The industrial system was gradually weaning them from the most violent forms of prejudice. Africans, too, were forming class organizations which would 'soon dominate or displace' the Native Congress.
Congress itself was a small, loose coterie of chiefs, lawyers, clergymen and other educated persons who agitated for civic equality and political rights while fearing the mass movement of their people. The government patronized Congress and subsidized its press by advertisements, but was dubious about its latent revolutionary character. For the African's national interests could not be distinguished from his class interests. They formed the basis of a ' revolutionary nationalist movement in the fullest meaning of Lenin's term'.
The prospects were favourable. At the moment, however, the communist party depended almost entirely on a few advanced spirits drawn from the thin upper level of labour aristocracy. Africans, according to Jones, were unable to supply any active militants owing to their heavy social disabilities and political backwardness. The communists were absorbed in white trade unionism, which threw the more difficult task of native emancipation into the background. The African workers' movement was therefore being neglected. It required a special department with linguists and newspapers, the large funds for which were not available. The few militants who had shouldered the heavy burden for more than five years needed reinforcements. Like Crawford ten years earlier, Jones looked for aid to the international working class. 'A few missionaries, revolutionists who need a spell of sunshine, would be very welcome.'
Jones anticipated that the fall in gold prices - the source of the 'bribe fund' - would precipitate the crisis of 1922. The mine owners had cancelled the stop order agreement of 1916 in retaliation for an outbreak of unofficial strikes. This was a sure sign that the unofiicial garrison of white workers against the larger mass of Africans had become too costly. The industry could save its profits only by raising the black standard and depressing the white, 'making towards a homogeneous working class'. Jones underestimated the capacity and willingness of the ruling class to keep the white workers in a privileged position, and exaggerated the corrosive effects of industrialism on their national and racial prejudices. The chief error in his analysis was to minimize the role of African nationalism. If the educated elite could not emancipate themselves without a mass struggle, as Jones argued, they were bound to make a great contribution in the 'national revolutionary movement'. He disregarded the justice and significance of their demand for political equality, and generally failed to appreciate fully the mood of low-paid workers in town and country as reflected in the spread of the Transvaal farmers were then combining to put down strikes on farms, expel 'native agitators', and prevent African lawyers from defending farm workers in court. The ICWU held its annual conference at Cape Town in July 1921, with a view to bringing about unity with Kadalie's ICU. Conference agreed to make 16 December - the 'Dingaan's Day' of Afrikaner nationalism - a day of national mourning for the martyrs of Port Elizabeth and Bulhoek. Selby Msimang in his presidential address told the delegates that they had to contend with two desperate forces: the government, whose greed matched Shylock's, and the white trade unions. Africans and Coloured could extend the hand of friendship or reciprocate the insolence, and in either event must be organized.62 Kadalie boycotted the conference, and told Msimang that their organizations should maintain separate existences behind provincial barriers. Msimang replied that the split injured the workers' interests and offered to hand his branches over to Kadalie. He agreed, Msimang withdrew, and the ICWU merged into the ICU later in the year.63
The ICU's conference, which was held at Port Elizabeth in October, undertook to campaign against the pass laws, organize farm workers and miners, and press for the direct representation of Africans and Coloured at the international labour conference in Geneva. The ICU, and not Mr. and Mrs. Archie Crawford, could speak for the genuine workers of South Africa.64 James La Guma, the delegate from the ICU branch at Luderitz, proposed and conference agreed to inquire into the grievances of people in South West Africa. La Guma took over the secretaryship of the branch in Port Elizabeth and was transferred two or three years later to Cape Town as administrative and later general secretary, while Kadalie held the post of national secretary. Born at Bloemfontein in 1894 of French and Malagasy stock, La Guma went to work at the age of eight in Cape Town, took part in working-class demonstrations in 1906, and migrated to South West Africa, where he worked on diamond diggings near Luderitz during the war, and became one of the first Coloured radicals to abandon the concepts of Cape liberalism for Marxist theory and class struggle.65
Many Africans were also beginning to think in radical terms, said Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu in July 1920 at a missionary conference in Durban. 66 Born in 1885, educated at Lovedale, and refused entry to Dale College, a school for whites at King William's Town, he had correlated his education in England, where he matriculated, qualified as a teacher at Birmingham university, and obtained the B.A. degree of London university. Returning to South Africa in 1914, he joined the staff of the S.A. Native College at Fort Hare and helped his brother Alexander to edit Imvo after their father's death in 1921. Professor Jabavu, as he was generally known, listed the people's grievances: high prices and low wages; drought- and crop failure; taxation without representation; the Native Land Act; pass and other segregation laws; discrimination in schools, law courts, public services, post offices and trains. It was a well-worn catalogue of old complaints; but, warned Jabavu, leaders of a new type had appeared to arouse Africans against their oppression.
Members of the Native Labour Corps came back from the war with a strong sense of grievance and a determination to unite against the whites. Bolshevism and its nihilistic doctrines enlisted the support of many Africans in the northern provinces. Educated men, who were voteless and landless helots without a future, turned to agitation, stirring up the populace to violent deeds. Their socialism was not the mild variety of a Ramsay MacDonald's. It was heady stuff: atheistic and revolutionary. Fortunately, Jabavu assured the missionaries, a cure could be found. The Young Men's Christian Association, boys' clubs, games and other such social activities would divert activities and provide the desired antidote. This was shallow reasoning, and revealed Jabavu's refusal to face up to the realities of his society. Like many leaders of the ANC, he substituted clichés about Christian ethics, white patronage or British fair play for a precise analysis of social forces.
The African National Congress had plenty of followers but no theory of social change. The communists had plenty of theory but few followers, and tended to blame Congress for their weakness. They accused Congress of being wholly opportunist, of blinding Africans to their working-class status and so staving off their real emancipation.67 The communists failed to recognize the radical element in the ANC, which gave people a sense of national unity and purpose in their resistance to racial oppression. When Du Bois' second Pan African Congress met at Paris in September 1921, Andrews wrote that it and other racial or nationalist movements were mere ripples on the surface of a great upheaval. Africans and Negroes would yet learn to use the weapons of strikes and boycotts. Selope Thema, Dr. Dube and Sol Plaatje, who represented South Africa at the congress, were of the 'usual safe kind'. The communists' role, he said, was to expose the fallacy of racial and national aspirations. The only solution lay in the overthrow of capitalism.68
Revolutionary exhortations did not compensate for the failure to organize the lower paid workers. The party's resources were meagre, as Jones had pleaded, yet this was not the only restraining factor. Communists repudiated colour bars and racism; but when the Johannesburg delegates reported on the inaugural conference to their branch, it hesitated to accept Africans who applied for membership and debated the issue at three successive meetings.69 Africans were urged to form trade unions so as to win the white workers' respect. 'Let them see your organized strength,' advised Bunting, 'so that instead of shooting you down they must recognize you as worthy fellow labourers in the common cause.' It was the ICU, however, and not the Communist party, that recruited Africans and Coloured into a trade union in the early twenties. Besides being submerged in white unions and reluctant to offend them, the communists were sceptical about the possibility of turning the peasant worker, whom they called 'submissive, docile and backward', into a revolutionary. Their main function, they said, was to direct the militancy of white workers against the capitalist system, and to transform the race war into a class war.
Racial groups fought one another for jobs as unemployment spread. Mary Fitzgerald, now Mrs. Archie Crawford, the heroine of the 'pickhandle brigade' of 1911 led another charge in July 1921, but not against the 'boss class'. Her target was the Coloured proletariat. She and members of her Women's Industrial League stormed the premises of the French Club in Johannesburg, chased the Coloured waiters out, and forced the management to hire white girls in their place. While the Johannesburg town council under Labour pressure refused to issue motor drivers' licences to Coloured, the railway administration substituted whites at twice the wage for Coloured gangers. When Dr. Abdurahman led an APO deputation to protest against this treatment, the general manager of the railways, Sir William Hoy undertook to dismiss 800 Africans and employ Coloured men in their place. The Coloured ex-servicemen in the league of Comrades agitated for jobs held by Africans in all government and municipal services. That, protested Abdurahman, was no less detestable than the selfishness of white ex-soldiers who had shortly before demanded the dismissal of Coloured workers to make room for white Comrades. ' Who is to be sacked to make room for the native ex-soldier?70
Whites and Coloured competed also in politics. The Communist party fought its first election in Cape Town's ward 7, where Harrison stood for the municipal council against Abdurahman in September 1921. The APO reacted by attacking Harrison, communism and the Soviet Union. What man in his senses, it asked, would subscribe to communism 'in our society'? Abdurahman scored an easy victory, but the Labour party candidates, Dr. Forsyth and Charlie Pearce, won parliamentary by-elections in the Gardens and Liesbeek against SAP candidates who were backed by the APO. It attributed this defeat to African and Coloured resentment of the Bulhoek massacre; and challenged the Labour party to delete from its constitution the clauses relating to 'kaffir farming' and 'segregation'.
Alfred Palmer, editor of the South African Review, a paper which never has a kind word about Coloureds or Natives',71 won the provincial council seat in Liesbeek for the Labour party in November 1921. This was a bitter blow to the AP0, whose candidate, Matthew Fredericks, was a foundation member26 and its general secretary. His long and distinguished service to the community received poor recognition at the polls. He obtained only 400 votes in a constituency which had 1,100 Coloured and African electors. Most of them abstained or voted for Palmer and the Nationalist party candidate. It was humiliating, complained the APO, to see Africans voting for white candidates who belonged to 'two violent anti-Native political parties'.72
Capitalism and white domination, according to the communists, rested on the four pillars of racialism, nationalism, jingoism and reformism. White workers joined with their masters in keeping the black worker subject, and were themselves divided into warring camps. British workmen wearing war medals paraded behind the Union Jack when on strike and voted for the financiers and industrialists in the s AP Unionist coalition; Afrikaner workers joined trade unions and voted for Hertzog's Nationalist party. Coloured voters preferred Abdurahman to Harrison; Africans followed the ANC rather than the CP. Communist faith in the eventual triumph of class consciousness over false ideologies never wavered, however. These were momentary aberrations, symptoms of a vanishing order. Industrialization would free Africans and Afrikaners from their rural backwardness. Capitalism would reduce white workers to the African's standard and force them to recognize their class interests. Inter-racial solidarity would grow out of the class struggle. Armed with this theory, the communists anticipated and welcomed the great upheaval of 1922. They believed that it was the start of a revolution which would unseat the ruling class and usher in the ideal commonwealth.