The Nationalist party took office for a second time in June 1929 on the eve of the great capitalist depression and South Africa's worst drought in sixty years. Workers, white and black, skilled and unskilled were plagued by wage cuts and unemployment. Africans suffered most in the lean years. Government agencies put them out of work to provide jobs for whites, and tightened pass law controls to keep work-seekers out of towns. The African National Congress set its face against any form of mass action; the communists turned their programme of black power into a practical campaign for relief from unemployment and police persecution. Oswald Pirow, the Nazi-minded minister of justice, and his undersecretary, J. F. J. Van Rensburg, later kommandant-general of the Ossewabrandwag,* launched a counter offensive against the radical opposition to white supremacy.
The first shots were fired on 17 June 1929, at Durban, when six Africans and two whites were killed and 108 persons injured in a race riot. Its immediate cause was a boycott of municipal beer halls and an attack by Africans on the halls at the Point and in Prince Edward Street near the ICU's headquarters. Determined to smash the nigger ', white civilians followed the example set at Greytown and Weenen in 1928, beleaguered the ICU building, and hurled bottles through the windows. The men inside made a sortie from the hall and fought back, killing two whites. Africans rushed to the rescue from the Point and were driven back by police and the white mob, many of whom pursued the relieving column when it was in full fight. A band of white youths raided the deserted ICU premises on the following day, threw typewriters, stationery and files out of the window, and carted the safe away.1
It was clear from his investigations, reported Justice de Waal, the government's commissioner, that Africans were not solely or even primarily to blame. 2 There would have been no disturbance or damage had the civilian mob not attacked the ICU hall The whites were guilty of gross excesses; and he recommended clemency for the imprisoned Africans who alone had been prosecuted as a result of the affray. Describing the background, the commissioner formed that the African in Durban was 'a most loyal and law-abiding citizen, hardworking and thrifty, whose chief desire was to be left alone to earn as much as he could in the shortest possible time 'and then to go back to his kraal'. The beer halls, according to the report, had given general satisfaction from 1908 until Champion, a remarkable man, upset the local population by urging total racial equality and condemning municipal beer brewing. He allowed such notorious communists as Bunting, Wolton and Pettersen to use his hall for meetings; therefore it was idle of him to profess a horror of their doctrines, which contributed to the general unrest. J. S. Marwick, the member of Illovo, objected to any exercise of clemency, and thought that the commissioner had underestimated the effects of communist agitation; Oswald Pirow assured the House that the law would take its course.3
The riots were the first fruits of Hertzog's election victory, declared the communists. They appealed for a united front against the threat of more repressive laws and against the mounting terror of raids in townships for pass and tax offenders. Bunting took the initiative. Acting on a suggestion made at the Cominterns sixth congress and in discussions with the British party's colonial commission, he arranged an all-in conference in August to form a broad organization with a united objective. From this emerged the League of African Rights, the first successful coming together of working class and national radicals in the liberation movement. Gumede became the president; Doyle Modiakgotla of the ICU, the vice-president; Bunting, the chairman; N. B. Tantsi of the Transvaal ANC, the vice-chairman; Charles Baker, director of the party school, the treasurer. The committee included Thibedi, Kotane, and S. M. Kotu, the assistant secretary of the FNETU.4
A leadership so constituted was formed to combine militancy with a sense of what was practicable. The League planned to collect a million signatures to a petition for civic rights, and to organize anti-pass demonstrations on 'Dingaan's Day', 16 December, when Afrikaner nationalists came together every year to celebrate the defeat of Zulu impis in 1838 and to hear politicians ranting about contemporary black perils. It had been decided by the ANC in 1928 to make this an occasion for counter demonstrations, and the League hoped to enlist the Congress leaders in its endeavour. Armed with an emblem and a battle song, 'Mayibuye i Afrika' (Let Africa Return), the League girded itself for battle. The song, written by Tantsi and sung to the tune of Clementine', conveyed the aims:
We, the Black Race, cry for freedom! Africa, our Mother Land, Was taken from our fathers When the darkness hemmed them round.
Chorus:
Give it back now! Give it back now! Give us back our Africa! Let us break our chains - the passes, Rightly striving to be free.
Gumede, Makabeni, Bunting, Roux and ModiaKgotla the country, speaking from the League's platform, and collecting signatures to the petition. It had many enemies, reported Makabeni, especially among the educated. They were corrupted by the 'coward-breeding education, of the missionaries, who lulled the people into acquiescence in the seizure of their country by its new rulers. There was sufficient support for the petition, however, to alarm conservative leaders in the ANC. Mahabane announced that the Non-European Christian Ministers Association would confer on methods of combating 'the menace of Communistic propaganda'. 5 The communists replied with renewed appeals for a united front against Pirow's bill to amend the Riotous Assemblies Act.
Smuts called for measures to suppress 'communist propaganda'. What he really wanted, commented Forward, was machinery to be used against working-class organizations and free speech. Communism, 'a gogga emanating from the guilty conscience of society', was not acceptable anywhere outside Russia, 6 Hertzog agreed that legislation was needed to offset the effect of the judgement handed down by the Supreme Court at Grahamstown in the appeals of the Buntings and Gana Makabeni against sentences imposed by the magistrate of Umtata during their election campaign. The court upheld the appeal on the ground that the prosecution had failed to prove an intention to provoke feelings of hostility. They had preached communism, 'a recognized political faith', and 'it was not easy to declare with any precision what exactly was meant by the expression "to promote any feeling of hostility between natives and Europeans.7
The police explained that it was almost impossible to prove intent in such cases, and Oswald Pirow promised his electors at Gezina, Pretoria, that he would legislate communism out of existence. The publication of a bill to amend the Riotous Assemblies Act disclosed the means. 'To our mind it will mean the practical illegalization of the Communist Party,' declared the communists, but its main aim was ' to prevent all opposition to impending legislation against the African masses'. The bill would give the minister dictatorial powers to prohibit meetings and to banish persons from specified areas. All workers, irrespective of colour, should defeat this 'damnable piece of legislation, against 'the whole nationalist movement'.8
A united front seemed to be in the making on 10 November, when ANC, ICU and CP speakers addressed a mass meeting of protest in Johannesburg against the bill. Pirow's effigy, inscribed unbulali (tyrant), was ceremoniously burnt. 'You may be burning your own fingers warned Gwabini of the ICU. He and Ballinger counselled caution. Africans were disorganized and split into factions, and could not afford to antagonize authority. Pirow was a reasonable gentleman who would certainly be favourable to any case that was good or fair. Kadalie approved of this moderate tone. He would like to return to the ICU fold, he said, provided that it adopted a fighting policy.9
Pirow struck back in Durban on the 14th wlth a melodramatic display of force. He led 700 policemen armed with machine-guns, fixed bayonets and tear gas in a tax collecting raid on African compounds at 3.30 a.m. Tear gas bombs scattered African sightseers lining the streets, and there was no resistance. 8,000 were rounded up' and searched; 500 alleged tax defaulters were charged in six special courts, which sentenced those found guilty to pay the tax or serve a month's imprisonment. Tear gas had been used for the first time against inoffensive people who offered no resistance, protested Bill Andrews. They were heavily taxed without representation; and white workers, he added, must expect the same treatment in similar circumstances. Since the tax could have been collected by normal means, the operation was clearly intended to create a favourable atmosphere for the adoption of Pirow's bill.10
This 'bloody baboonery', as the communists called the highly publicized police performance, was preceded by inspired press reports of evidence - more sensational than the notorious Zinoviev letter, - of a revolutionary plot directed from Moscow to prepare the way for the black republic. 11 'Keep cool; keep your heads; do not be rushed or bluffed into false moves even by your own leaders,' warned the executive bureau of the CP on the 15th. Once more the guns and bombs of the imperialist exploiters, Dutch or English, are turned on the masses.' The cause of the trouble was not Soviet gold but Rand gold, dug out by Africans whose race had been enslaved, whose national life was crushed, who were treated as enemies for the enrichment of a gang of foreign plunderers.12
White workers were reminded of the attempts made to crush them in 1913, 1914 and 1922; and were urged to renew the struggle for working class rule. Africans were told to keep their courage and self-respect, their hope and faith in national emancipation. 'Demonstrate in your masses everywhere, particularly on Dingaan's Day.' Kotane declared that it was time to renounce oppression and to strive for liberty under the communist banner. The party had only begun to gain a footing among Africans, yet the government was already scared to death.
Pirow flayed the English press for doubting the existence of a communist conspiracy. The government had definite proof, he said, that the CP, ANC, ICU, and League of African Rights were in correspondence with the Communist International. Gumede was an elected member of its general council and, like several others, a graduate of the communist school in Brussels. The International had instructed the party in writing on 22 October to 'wage the struggle against the Native Bills and all other forms of oppression not through petitions, but in a revolutionary manner. Communists were told to call for militant demonstrations and strikes on 16 December under the slogan of 'Long Live the Native Republic'.13
At about this time, according to Roux, 'a telegram arrived from Moscow ordering the immediate dissolution of the League'. 14 The instruction was ill-advised. As a broad popular organization, with a limited and militant programme, the League of African Rights served a useful educational function, suited to the current level of political consciousness. Bunting pointed this out in a letter dated 29 October to the British partys colonial commission. Drawing on his Transkeian experience, he argued that the peasantry, having been crushed and degraded by alien conquerors, could scarcely be called the basic 'moving' force of revolution. Africans had no bourgeois propertied class to lead them, he contended, but at best only an intelligentsia. It tended to take the line of least resistance, to try peaceful methods and a moderate policy, 'because in the attempt to realize an immoderate one it will be immediately suppressed by force. The party had to counteract the tendency; and it could not do so effectively by wishful thinking. In effect, he maintained that the revolutionary situation envisaged by the Comintern did not exist.
The diagnosis was confirmed by the attitude of delegates at a conference of the Non-European Ministers Association at Bloemfontein on 6 December. Sixty representatives of churches, the ANC, the League of African Rights, the Cape Native Voters Association and the ICU condemned the Durban raid. Like Hertzog's 'black peril' election manifesto, they said, it was meant to stampede whites into accepting repressive legislation. The autocratic powers contemplated in Pirow's bill would be used cruelly and create endless racial strife. There was no substance in the allegations against the ANC and the ICU. Neither was in any way affiliated to the CP or the Third International. Indeed, the bulk of the people refused to be drawn into the communist fold. The few exceptions who joined the party did so only because they despaired of obtaining relief from the government.' The oppressive conditions under which the natives live are fertilizing the soil in which the Communist Party sows seeds of dissension.'15
'It was the old ANC' without Gumede's disturbing presence, reported Sam Malkinson, the party's leader at Bloemfontein. The delegates, he said, were trying 'to dam the rising spirit of the native mass'. He warned them that the government would yield only to organized force, but they preferred words to deeds. 16 The Rev. J. S. Likhing, general secretary of the African Orthodox Church, provincial president of the ANC in Griqualand West, and chairman of the convention, justified their timidity on the ground of political immaturity. The people, he complained, were hopelessly disorganized and divided by tribal and provincial dissensions. Internecine feuds, indifference and lethargy had reduced their political and industrial organizations to a condition of impotence. Even Doyle ModiaKgotla, vice-president of the League of African Rights, urged the convention to be reasonable. The delegates should accept Hertzog's proposal to give Africans in the north some representation in parliament at the cost of their franchise in the Cape. They rejected his advice, insisted on demanding all rights, privileges and responsibilities of citizenship for their people, and decided to launch a campaign for the removal of colour discriminations. The first step would be to seek a round-table conference with the government.
Congress and ICU leaders had no qualms about associating with white liberals. Gumede, T. M. Skota and Selby Msimang accompanied Oliver Schreiner, Howard Pim, Edgar Brookes and W. Ballinger on a deputation to E. G. Jansen, the minister of native affairs, on 9 December. They asked him to repeal the pass laws. This was out of the question, he replied, though he would consider proposals for the relief of educated persons. They might, for instance, be given a distinguishing badge which would make any exempted African recognizable at sight.17
Gumede alone of top ANC leaders refused to be intimidated. The League of African Rights, he told delegates at its first annual conference on 15 December, must mobilize the people against the government's plans to burden them with yet more restrictions under the proposed Native Service Contract Bill, Pirow's amendment to the Riotous Assemblies Act, and a new Urban Areas Bill. Other organizations were quarrelling endlessly and vilifying one another, yet the League could fulfil its mission if only 'we are men and women enough with the mind to work for the liberation of the oppressed Africans'. They looked confidently to the League against Imperialism for support, and hoped that the world would 'once more wake up and speak out for the cause of freedom. 18 On the next day, he, Kadalie, Bunting, and a small army of speakers addressed a Dingaan's Day demonstration held in Johannesburg under the auspices of the League, the ICU and the CP. The African National Congress stood aloof.
Demonstrations held in other big towns passed off without disturbance except at Potchefstroom, where about a hundred whites invaded the township and broke up an orderly gathering at which Marks and Mofutsanyana were the main speakers. 'Africa belongs to us,' declared Marks. 'You lie!' shouted a white bystander, and a revolver was fired at Mofutsanyana. The shot missed him and hit Hermanus Lethebe, a local party member, who died of his wounds. Joseph Weeks, secretary of the local school board and brother of the location superintendent, was put on trial for murder six months later and acquitted by the white jury. Eight white participants in the riot were convicted of public violence and dismissed with a caution at about the same time. 'For hooligans to shoot a Native is but to break a black bottle, and then congratulate themselves on being such good marksmen remarked Josie Mpama, one of the first African women to join the party. She, the Buntings and Chapman, a former chairman of the party, called a protest meeting in Potchefstroom after the trials, and had to demonstrate through the township before residents plucked up courage to attend.19
The party's eighth annual conference met on 29 December in a mood of grim determination. A year of unprecedentedly strenuous, struggle against 'an ever more ferocious oppressor' lay ahead. 'On top of Smuts's and Hertzog's whips come Pirow's scorpions.' The party's task for 1930 was to mobilize the people on a national scale for a 'native republic'. A start would be made by putting the communists' own house in order. The conference was expected to stop the wrangling of 'a few political demagogues, in the party who persisted in opposing the new policy.20
Weinbren, the chairman of the FNETU, and one of the main offenders, suddenly decided to settle in Cape Town. He left Johannesburg in January; an acknowledged 'staunch friend' and esteemed champion of the workers'. T. W. Thibedi, the general secretary of the Federation, was suspended from the party and then expelled for mismanaging trade union funds. Albert Nzula took his place, and was succeeded in turn by S. M. Kotu as secretary-editor of the party. Bunting grieved over the action taken against Thibedi, for many years the only African communist. The party had lost several other capable Africans, like La Guma, Ndobe, and Tonjeni, whom it could scarcely afford to lose, during 1929. But its cause was bound to win.21
Communists elsewhere shared this optimism. 'The outstanding feature of the present unrest'', reported a correspondent in the Comintern's journal, is the fact that the native workers are heading the struggle under the leadership of the CP.' The petition circulated by the League of African Rights was widely supported; mass demonstrations were being held in spite of great resistance from the government. The working class, from which came the driving force in the fight against imperialism, was more united than ever. This showed ' a tremendous advance in the development of the revolutionary native movement'.22
Right wing leaders in the ANC rejected revolution. It would leave the African in a worse condition than his present state, argued Moses Mphahlele, a noted poet and secretary of the Transvaal Congress. He and Mapikela of Bloemfontein started a public campaign for the removal of Gumede from the presidency. Pirow had smeared him and the ANC as forming part of the communist conspiracy. This was bad for Congress, said the conservatives, and they complained bitterly of Gumede's communism, munism, his visit to Moscow, his role in the League of African Rights, and, most of all, the ANCs affiliation to the League against Imperialism. ' I am not a Communist and I defy anyone to prove I am,' retorted Gumede, but he defended the party. Congress had worked with it in 1919 and again in 1927, accepted financial assistance from it in Johannesburg, and never had any trouble from those of its members who belonged to the ANC. The decision to affiliate to the League against Imperialism had been taken openly by the Congress leadership. As regards the League of African Rights, it was no more than the reincarnation of the old Funa Ma Lungelo - we seek our rights - movement. In any event, he was in sympathy with the communists, who alone pleaded the cause of the black proletariat.23
Hopes for a united front faded under the pressure of anti-Communist propaganda and the Comintern's directive. It was the party, and not the League, that called the next all-in conference on 26 January in Johannesburg to consider ways and means of defeating the new batch of racial laws. Invitations were sent to all trade unions and radical organizations. The only whites present, apart from communists, were members of the Garment Workers, Union and the Jewish Workers' Club. The TUC and its affiliated unions, reported Solly Sachs, refused to attend for fear of being identified with the party. The conference adopted a strongly worded resolution, calling for demonstrations, strikes, passive resistance and refusal to pay taxes, with a view to compelling the government of feudal landlords and slave drivers to abandon their repressive legislation. This was a pious gesture remarked Selby Msimang; the masses were not prepared to sacrifice lives without prospect of gain. The militants wanted a general strike, however, even though it might be unsuccessful or encounter the kind of resistance experienced at Durban and Potchefstroom. A large majority of the delegates agreed with Tantsi that the League of African Rights and the party should conduct the campaign.24
The League had to die, since the Comintern found it unworthy and the communists were unwilling to defy the decision. The party itself sent out a call for the general strike, with no more success than in the militant years of white trade unionism. This was not surprising. African unions were only just beginning to take root after the ICUs collapse, and scarcely existed outside the Rand and western Cape. The main obstacle was the law. There were many isolated African strikes - by dockers and quarrymen at Durban, brickmakers at Pretoria, laundry workers in Johannesburg and Cape Town, furniture and clothing makers on the Rand - but the police regularly arrested strikers and prosecuted them, usually with success, under the masters and servants laws. White trade unionists stood aloof, neither aiding nor protesting. The communists and national organizations protested, and never found a way to beat the law. In the circumstances and at a time of rising unemployment, even ardent syndicalists might have doubted the expediency of the general strike as a tactical weapon.
By adopting it, the party demonstrated its complete rejection of white supremacy and faith in the ultimate triumph of black power. This is a high time that we should all be pure, active extremists,' declared Edward Dambuza, one of a new crop of militants trained by Sam Malkinson in the Orange Free State. 'The Communist Party is the only party that fights honestly for the freedom of the black man in his birth country. 25 Thousands more shared his opinion. The decision taken in 1926 to train African members for leadership and draw them into top ranking positions had given the party a mass basis. Johannes Nkosi (1905-30), farm labourer, kitchen boy' and ICU official, who joined the party in 1926, was making great headway at Durban, where he went soon after the beer hall riots to organize a branch. Durban had the first communist town councillor, the Norwegian shipowner S. M. Pettersen, who slipped on to the council in a by-election in January 1929. G. E. Daniels was doggedly building a branch in the bitterly racialist atmosphere of Pretoria. Josiah Ngedlane had launched a branch with 100 members in Nadine, Cape Town. Node and Tontine, working closely with Comas, the party branch secretary, were organising Africans and Coloured in the western Cape into the most militant section of the ANC.
Much of the credit belonged to Dr Edward Roux, the new editor of Umsebenzi (Zulu-Xhosa: The Worker), as the party's paper was called from April 1930 onwards. It was published in Cape Town, where he had gone to take a job in the department of agriculture, which dismissed him after three months for his political activity. The paper soon became a powerful political force among Africans and Coloured, attracted hundreds of them on the platteland to the party, and filled a gap left by the closing down of Abdurahman's APO Publishing articles and letters in the major African languages, as well as in English and Afrikaans, Umzebensi attained a bigger circulation, covering a wider area, than either the International or the Worker ever achieved. Roux performed wonders on a budget of £7 10s. a weekly issue - £3 of which came from Bunting's private purse for printing costs, rent, postage and the editor's salary! As he pointed out, the party could no longer rely on big donations from whites. Most of its members were poor workers and peasants; and the few remaining white members were not exactly rolling in money. Only the 'exploited and oppressed slaves of Africa,' he urged, could keep their paper alive.
While the party grew in size and influence, the ANC withdrew into a state of passive acquiescence. The one bright exception was the Western Province division, which led the struggles of farm workers from Worcester to Carnarvon and Barrydale. 'Follow the example of Node, Tontine and other courageous leaders of the Cape, appealed Malkinson on the eve of the ANCs annual conference at Bloemfontein in April. Smuts, Geswell, Hertzog and Pirow, the communists warned, were 'united in their desire to crush the growing slave revolt and maintain British and Afrikaner imperialism. Only the united action of the whole national movement could save it from being altogether outlawed.26
Gumede made a similar appeal in the most forthright presidential address yet heard at a Congress convention. After describing the organizational and financial irregularities that he found on taking office in 1927, he examined the charges brought against him. Africans were dubbed agitators when they respectfully, constitutionally and moderately asked for the return of their rights. It was the spate of and-African legislation that had upset the relations between them and the white population. Speedy and drastic measures must be taken if they were to gain their liberty and keep their self-respect.
The world, he went on to say, was in a state of revolt and chaos. Chinese, Javanese and Indians were rising against their imperialist masters. At the same time, a terrible economic crisis threatened capitalism. Millions of unemployed were being added to an already chronic number. League of Nations talks, disarmament conferences and the like only served to hide the preparations for international war. soviet Russia was the only real friend of all subjected races. One of the ANCs aims should be to resist an onslaught against its true friend, whose ideal of emancipation inspired oppressed peoples everywhere.
Many of his people were under the illusion that they would obtain justice from Britain. Yet Ramsay MacDonald's government was at that moment trying to crush the oncoming Indian revolution. Africans had failed in their petitions to Britain, their supplications to the governor-general, their appeals to the South African government. Applications to the courts of law had resulted only in wasteful expenditure.
What was then to be done? They must rely on their own strength, on the strength of the oppressed colonial peoples, on the strength of revolutionary white workers. ' We have to demand our equal economic, social and political rights. That could be expressed in no clearer way than by demanding a South African Native Republic with equal rights for all, and free from all foreign and local domination. Four-fifths of the population were on their side, but they had to be organized, particularly in the towns and on the farms. 'Let us go back from this conference, resolved to adopt the militant policy' in 'the spirit which has been exhibited by oppressed peoples all over the world'. No other policy would bring liberation .27
Pandemonium followed. The conservatives, led by Mahabane and Dube, urged delegates to reject the speech. How could they approach the government if it was approved? Nzula, Comas, Node, Tontine, Champion and other militants rallied behind Gumede in a hubbub of shouts, recriminations and points of order. Mapikela, the chairman, asked Ballinger to soothe the meeting, but his intervention provoked more confusion. On the next day, conference condemned the white barbarians who had broken up African meetings, demanded protection by the authorities, and decided to ask the government for a round table conference. If it was refused, suggested Node, Congress should organize a national day of protest by means of strikes and mass demonstrations. Mapikela refused to accept his motion. 28 The conservatives had won the day. Gumede was ousted by fourteen votes to thirty-nine, and Seme became the new president with an executive that included Mahabane, Mapikela, Skota, Selope Thema, Dube and Dr A. B. Xuma. The parsons, chiefs, agents of the Chamber of Mines and other 'good boys', declared the communists, had effectively opposed any forward movement by the ANC.29
The conservatives and their white liberal advisers never quite understood their society or its power structure. They persisted in believing against all the evidence that liberation would come to them through reasoned argument, appeals to Christian ethics, and moderate, constitutional protest. Because of timidity, as Bunting alleged, or want of confidence in their people, they refused to mobilize them for mass struggle. Yet only by defying constituted authority - by 'pure active extremism' - could a voteless, fragmented proletariat and peasantry force it to consider their claims seriously. The main issues in parliamentary politics arose out of conflicts between British and Afrikaner interest groups. Neither side was interested in coming to terms with Africans, whose role was to supply labour at low cost for mines, farms and factories. All whites, apart from a handful of communists and liberals, were determined to maintain their supremacy through the ballot box, repressive sanctions and brute force.
White suffragettes got their way after twenty-five years of agitation when parliament extended the vote in 1930 to all white women over twenty-one. Universal adult suffrage for white men in the Cape and Natal followed in 1931. 30 Discrimination on grounds of colour was now a feature also of the Cape franchise, for the first time since 1852, and in spite of assurances given at Union and again in 1928 by Hertzog as regards the Coloured. He and Creswell argued that to impose a civilization test on any white person was tantamount to denying the civilization of whites in general. The logic was poor, and the Nationalist party's particular interests were unmistakable. It would gain most from the new laws, which doubled the size of the white electorate and halved the value of the African and Coloured vote.31
More votes for white supremacy went hand in hand with more repression for its opponents. The Riotous Assemblies Act of 1912 had been amended in 1914 to curb rebellious white workers. It was amended again in 1930 to curb the liberation movement. The minister was authorized to banish, ban or prohibit any person, public meeting or book, if in his opinion there was reason to suppose that they would cause hostility between whites and other people. He could punish without trial, and the courts had no power to overrule his decision. 'We are setting up a precedent which is fraught with the gravest concern,' warned Advocate Close, the member for Mowbray, on the third reading of the bill. 'Are we going to give away those rights and privileges which we have won, in the liberty of speech and the liberty of the person? 32 The House passed the bill by fifty-nine votes to thirty-five. Heaton Nicholls and three other Natal members of the SAP voted with the government; Madeley and three members of the LP voted with the opposition.
While the bill was passing through its final stages, police detachments moved into towns and hamlets of the Hex River valley in the western Cape. White farmers had violently disrupted an ANC meeting of Coloured labourers at Rawsonville a few weeks earlier. An African was killed in a 'beer raid' at Worcester in April. Race riots threatened, and the magistrate of Worcester prohibited meetings in the township. The ANC defied the ban by holding a demonstration on May Day. ' Rather let us die under the ANC banner than live under the slavery of the European,' declared a speaker. The police struck back on Sunday next, invaded the township with fixed bayonets, and fired, killing five and wounding sixteen Africans. Armed whites took to the streets, assaulting Africans and Coloured, and searching for Node and Tontine. They escaped after hiding for four days and returned to Cape Town, to resume their agitation against the right wing leaders of Congress.33
The communists saw their centre of political gravity shifting to the western Cape. Here, they believed, might be the textbook ingredients of a revolutionary situation. A bitterly exploited' rural proletariat, whose ancestors had been robbed of their land a hundred years ago, would form the backbone of the movement for a 'democratic Native republic'. The politically mature urban workers - dockers, railwaymen, factory hands - would provide the leadership. There was even a 'national bourgeoisie', consisting of Coloured and African parsons, doctors, landlords and shopkeepers, who needed mass support to free themselves from colour bars, yet feared the effects of a revolutionary upheaval. Abdurahman, the prototype of his class, gave 'nominal allegiance to the movement for national liberation', while insisting on the right of his daughter, Mrs Cissie Gool, to own a bungalow in the exclusive white suburb of Camps Bay.34
Villages and farm labourers might be moving forward, but Coloured intellectuals and artisans appeared to be standing still. As obsessed as whites with skin colour and hair forrn, they claimed to be 'brown people', denied any African ancestry, and rejected the vision of a black republic. Coloured voters continued to support white supremacy parties, in spite of a decision by a Non-European Conference, held at Cape Town in January 1930, to sponsor its own candidates for the provincial council. One African and five Coloured entered the lists in June. Two, Abdurahman and S. Dollie, fought each other in the Castle division; A. F. Pendla, solicitor's clerk and restaurant owner, scored 531 votes in Port Elizabeth North against the SAP candidate's 1,522; Samuelson lost heavily in Hottentots Holland; and Stephan Reagon of the APO, after defeating two white opponents on the Cape Flats, became the second Coloured man ever to sit in the council. The communists poured scorn on these proceedings. Freedom would be won, they claimed, not at the polls but by strikes, demonstrations and civil disobedience.35
Activists in the ANC took the same line and clashed with the conservative leaders. Splits developed within several Congress branches in the Transvaal, OFS and Western Cape, where James Thaele, the Lesotho-born provincial president, moved sharply to the right. A graduate of an American Negro college, and 'well versed in English, French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, according to Skota, he combined eloquence with political ambition. Like Kadalie in 1926, he accused the communists of being a 'white man's party, and agitated for their expulsion from the ANC. The militants rallied to their defence. Communists fought for the bottom dog, declared Sam Hoho, a former ICU organizer. It was largely because of the spirit Bunting left behind in the Transkei that the Bhunga had taken a firm stand in defence of the franchise.
While leaders squabbled 'like dogs over dry bones, complained A. M. Plaatjes, chairman of the ANC branch in Worcester, Hertzog, Smuts and Pirow were carrying out the orders of the white exploiters. 36 All public meetings were prohibited on Sundays in the country districts of the Western Cape. Node and Tontine (1895-1962), the 'black lion, found the injunction more of a nuisance than a serious handicap and went on organising farm workers in defiance of landowners and police. Pirow then used his new powers under the Riotous Assemblies Act. He issued notices in September and October banning Kadalie and Charles Baker from attending public gatherings on the Witwatersrand, banished Champion from Natal for three years, and prohibited Node and Tontine from entering the region between Worcester and George. Node replied in an open letter written in Afrikaans. 'Your party at one time protested against British Imperialism, he told Pirow. 'Now that you have won a measure of freedom for yourselves, you are assisting in keeping a whole nation in oppression and slavery.37
The bans and repression strengthened Thaele's hand. A special meeting of the ANC executive held in September dismissed Node from the post of provincial secretary because he advocated the Communist party's policy; prohibited 'leaders and propagandists with communistic doctrines ' from addressing Congress meetings and banned the sale of Umsebenzi on Congress premises. The militants fought back with a view to gaining control of the organization. Thaele defeated them by expelling Ndobe's adherants. They therefore formed an Independent African National Congress (Cape) and attempted to secure the affiliation of country branches. 38 The police beheaded the movement by deporting Node to Basutoland and forcing Tontine to retreat to Port Elizabeth. Congress in the western Cape never fully recovered from these blows and its fratricidal quarrels.
The government blamed 'communist agitators, for the widespread unrest, which was symptomatic of growing misery in rural areas and brutal repression by the police. An 'appalling problem of Native poverty', reported the Native Economic Commission of 1930-32, was developing in the reserves, where people were faced with mass starvation. 39 Drought, declining crop yields, overpopulation and lean herds were driving peasants to the towns. The authorities tried to divert them to the farms by erecting legal barriers under the Natives (Urban Areas) Act, amended in 1930 so as further to curtail the right of men to move into the towns and, for the first time, to block the entry of women.40
Urban Africans were being herded into the segregated ghettos called locations. Here, isolated from the rest of the working class, they could be pinned down, supervised, patrolled, prosecuted for non-payment of rent, and raided for taxes, passes or prohibited liquor. Swooping down in the early hours of the morning, the police posses invaded without warrants houses and compounds, forced the occupants out of bed, arrested those who could not produce tax receipts, lodgers' permits or passes, cuffed and kicked the victims into the waiting pick-up vans. The constant raids and surveillance were reducing the inhabitants to a state of sullen submissiveness, from which the communists tried to rouse them by organising campaigns against passes and tax laws. 'Whether educated or uneducated, rich or poor, we are all subject to these badges of slavery, wrote Albert Nzula in a passionate appeal for united action. 'We are slaves as long as we think we can only beg and pray to this cruel government.'
'Freedom or Death, cried Ngedlane in Cape Town. 'Let us go forward in the spirit of Dingaan, Makana and Moshesh to free our country from white imperialism.' The slogans rang out in towns throughout the country as the militants prepared for the great pass-burning demonstrations on Dingaan's Day. The communists invited the ANC, ICU and trade unions to take part in the preparations, and argued that the pass system was 'an inevitable accompaniment and prop of the whole system of robbery and forced labour'. When fifty delegates from towns in the Transvaal, OFS and Natal assembled at Johannesburg on 26 October, they met under the party's auspices. The rest of the liberation movement boycotted the conference.
Kadalie came out of his retreat at East London to warn people against the campaign. Dont burn your passes, he advised; dont follow the communists, who ever stir up trouble only to run away when it comes. Let them get money from Moscow to fight test cases in court, 'the only sensible way of getting rid of passes . In any event, the government would soon abolish passes, so that it would be foolish to fill the jails for a cause already won. The burning of passes, added Keable Mote and Robert Sello of the Transvaal ICU, would be 'the same madness which brought tragedy to the Ama-Xosa, in 1856, when Nongquase told them that if they destroyed grain and cattle, their ancestors would help them to drive the white invaders into the sea. Africans might be slaves, as communists alleged, and in that case 'we say, "Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise"'.41
So negative an attitude in men who for nearly ten years had headed the largest section of the liberation movement revealed a timorous immaturity and poverty of leadership. It was 'politically corrupt, declared the communists in a comment on recriminations between Kadalie, Champion and Ballinger. The crisis of leadership reflected the uncertainty and disunity of a people undergoing a transition to an industrialized society. The ANC, though more discreet than Kadalie, failed to take practical steps against the pass laws in spite of its decision in Octobcr 1928 to conduct a country-wide campaign for their abolition. Seme, Mahabane, Thema and their colleagues feared to take the plunge from angry rhetoric into militant mass activity. And so, deserted by their allies and crippled by Pirow's bans, the communists were left to conduct defiance unaided on 16 December.
It turned out to be a bonfire rather than the conflagration for which they had worked so hard. Thaele's followers broke up an anti-pass demonstration in Cape Town; 150 passes were burned in Johannesburg, 300 in Potchefstroom, 400 in Pretoria, and 3,000 in Durban. Here blood was spilt in a violent affray such as invariably terminated any large-scale campaign against racial oppression. The Durban branch of the party, which had grown into a powerful force under the able and devoted direction of Johannes Nkosi, began its Dingaan's Day demonstration on Cartwright Flats at eight o'clock in the morning. After four hours of speech making, the demonstrators prepared for a procession through the town, in defiance of a police command. A large force of policemen barred the way and, when the demonstrators bore down on them, attacked with clubs and assegais. Nkosi and three other Africans were stabbed to death and horribly mutilated by African constables.
The coroner commended the white police for their selfrestraint and put the blame squarely on the African constables. They had 'used more force than was requisite'; 'the use of assegais was not necessary'; and they had failed to exercise reasonable restraint. Several witnesses testified to having seen constables stab the murdered men, yet the police were strangely 'unable' to identify the killers. 42 They escaped prosecution, while twenty-six demonstrators were convicted of public violence, four being sentenced to six months, hard labour. Seven African witnesses swore that they had seen the chief constable shoot at Nkosi, who was stabbed after being taken into custody, but the court rejected the allegations.43
'An uncompromising fighter, he died as he lived, fearless and conscious of the great fight,' wrote Nzula in a widely circulated tribute to Nkosi. His final message in Zulu warned the workers to awake and throw off their shackles. 'Durban, that centre of British jingoism,' declared the Communist party, 'has once more been the scene of a fatal clash between the forces of the slave drivers' government and the rising tide of the African liberation movement.' The party's campaign against the hated pass laws was fully justified. Africans were prepared to make sacrifices and die in order to free their country from bitter oppression. There must be 'no crying off. We must avenge our martyred dead.' The anti-pass campaign should be extended to every location, farm, mine and factory.44
The party, struggling desperately in Durban to rally its forces and continue the burning of passes, was bludgeoned and broken by the police. Pirow banned all public gatherings on the Flats and drove hard against the militants. Using administrative procedures under the Urban Areas Act, magistrates declared that any African who held a party card or who worked with the party was 'idle, dissolute or disorderly' and liable to banishment for two years. Gana Makabeni, the new party organizer in Durban, was deported to his home in the Transkei. Abraham Nduweni, leader of an independent ICU branch, who had taken it en bloc into the party, was deported under escort to his village near Standerton. More than 200 communists and militants were banished to their rural homes in the next few months without any semblance of charge or trial. 45 Deprived of its leaders, infiltrated by spies and informers, the Durban branch was forced to instruct its members to comply with the pass and tax laws so as to avoid deportation.46
Critics have said that the campaign was premature; that it should have been preceded by a long, intensive course of mass education in the techniques of passive resistance. 47 Yet Africans had protested and defied the pass laws for some fifteen years. Both the ICU and the ANC put passes at the top of their long list of grievances. It was the futility of verbal protests and appeals to government that justified the campaign. Some way had to be found of stimulating the people to throw off habits of conformity and acquiescence before they had been coerced into accepting passes as an inescapable evil. Only a widespread, violent rejection could stop the rot. The criticism should have been directed at ANC and ICU leaders who betrayed the movement at a crucial stage when a combined effort might have forced the government to retreat.
Both the ANC and the Non European Conference, meeting at Bloemfontein in January 1931, discussed the burning of passes. It was one of the worst steps that could be taken, Seme told the ANC. They could obtain the respect of whites only by acting in a moderate way. The Rev. James Calata, Champion and Thaele urged Congress to rid itself of communists, who spread their doctrines under its auspices. The Non-European Conference appeared to be more militant. Right-wing leaders for the first time contemplated calling on people to destroy the passes. When Abdurahman suggested Dingaan's Day for the event, however, Kadalie objected that this would amount to forming a united front with the communists. Conference finally agreed to ask the government 'respectfully but strongly', to do away with the system, and, if it refused, to set aside a day in 1934 on which passes would be burnt. As though to underline its futility, the conference decided to send another grievance deputation to the British government; and again postponed the formation of a united body to coordinate African, Coloured and Indian political activities.48
The communists remarked derisively that the conference might as well have nominated the year 2034 for all the intention that it had of organising an anti-pass campaign. Dissensions in the ANC were 'symptomatic of its present decay and futility. Seme was expelling his rivals, including Thema, though both were 'good boys of conservative outlook'. Congress ' is now split into at least four sections and will soon come to rival the ICU in the multiplicity of its quarrelling groups, the opportunism of its leaders and its lack of a fighting policy'. 49 Before the year was out, however, communists, too, would suffer from the internal dissension that plagued the liberation movement in all its parts.
*Oxwagon Sentinel, CP. Chapter 20, p.483.