University graduates, teachers, students, journalists and a handful of artisans produced a new generation of Coloured radicals in the western Cape during the 1930s. Though attracted to communism, they could not square its class concepts with social realities. Embittered by civilized labour policies and the racial exclusiveness of white workers, they wanted an organization of their own in which they could synthesize Marxism and nationalism. Like Dr Abdurahman thirty years before, they refused to play second fiddle to whites of any description; but they turned their backs on his policies and strategy.
The African People's Organization was by then hardly more than a mutual benefit, burial and building society. Dr Abdurahman, though still pre-eminent in the Coloured community, had discredited himself and his party by clinging to the white liberals when they followed Smuts into Hertzog's camp. The younger generation disputed his authority and made a bid for leadership on their own account. Members of his own family led the revolt: his daughters Dr Waradia Abdurahman and Mrs Z. Gool; their mother Mrs Nellie Abdurahman; his son-in-law Dr A. H. Gool; the latter's brother, Dr Goolam Gool; and their sisters Minnie and Janub Gool. Growing up in a cross-cultural stream of Islamic and western influences, they straddled the ideological gap between Muslims and Christians.
Mrs Zainunissa Gool (1900-1963), affectionately known as Cissie and as rare a beauty as her grandmother, took up the weapons that her father had laid aside on entering the maze of white supremacy politics. He and she spoke at a meeting held in Cape Town on 27 April 1931, to protest against the bill that gave the vote to white women and denied it to Coloured, Indian and African women. 'I am slowly going Red,' she said. ' I fear that I shall be blacklisted as a revolutionary.' Could anybody conceive a greater tragedy, asked a sympathetic liberal, than ' this cultured woman going Red and meditating the casting of her personality and her talents to feed the flames of revolution?' 1 Three years later she, La Guma, Gomas and Ahmed Ismail debated whether they should form a new party in opposition to the APO.
'Clarity on this issue is of tremendous importance for us,' wrote Gomas, 'for we saw Communists farcically and dramatically opposing each other in this debate.' The party cried out for unity in struggle, yet it would be suicidal to wait until white workers, who were 'steeped in stinking social-imperialism and race hatred', opened their ranks. They used the slogan of equal pay for equal work to lay hold on the darker man's job; and aided the ruling class to add to his burden of oppression. Communists ought therefore to organize the people on colour lines for work, land, equality and majority rule. 2
In 1935 Cape Town celebrated one hundred years of emancipation from slavery and twenty-five years of George V's reign. Gomas was sentenced to six months' hard labour and Minnie Gool to one month's for distributing an anti-imperialist pamphlet which, the court ruled, impaired the monarch's dignity. 3 Gomas issued another pamphlet on behalf of the party, drawing attention to the sham of the centenary. Far from bringing freedom, emancipation made possible a form of servitude many times more subtle and deadly than slavery. The Coloured man knew only the freedom to starve; his women were exploited economically by day and sexually by night; his children, reared in slums, grew old and died before their time. 'Without land, bread and equality of opportunity, there can be no freedom. After a century, the non-European must still fight for that freedom which should rightly have been his since 1834.
The gist of this appeared in the preamble to a draft programme of the National Liberation League, founded in December 1935 with Cissie Gool as the president and La Guma as secretary. 4 It was probably the most emphatic and detailed claim yet made to complete equality before the law. The twenty-three specified aims included demands for equal voting rights and parliamentary representation; no bars to employment in public services or private enterprise; an end to discrimination in school, games, the army and social services; and the removal of bans on sex or marriage which 'legalise the fiction of race inferiority'. Radical in terms of orthodox liberalism, the programme showed no trace of socialist thinking apart from a homily addressed to white workers on 'wage slavery.
The League gave voice to the resentment and uncertainties of a depressed minority. As the report by the Cape Coloured Commission of 1934-7 showed, the Coloured were hemmed in by racial barriers and squeezed between the pressures of whites on top and Africans from below. Starved of food and education, wasted by drink and disease, housed in slums and farm hovels, the bulk of the people were being ground down into a state of degrading poverty and despair. Abdurahman, who sat on the commission, had tried to rescue his people by trading votes for concessions. The new radicals looked for salvation to militant mass action; though they, too, knew that the Coloured could not make headway on their own.
Visions of class solidarity had faded since the days when Abdurahman pleaded for unity with the labour movement. The League, however, renewed the plea in the interests of all workers, white and black. Neither could be free under Anglo-Boer imperialism; both should shed their prejudices and realize that they were 'inevitable' allies. White workers must cut themselves loose from the ruling class before it dragged them down 'to the oppressed and degraded position of the non-European'.
The appeal was no more than a pious gesture to Karl Marx's shade as long as white workers continued to exchange class attitudes for racial prejudices. It was to the African that the Coloured radicals looked for mass support, and they drafted the League's programme with him in mind. Their aim was 'national liberation', not socialism. They set out the grievances of 'Non-Europeans, and not of Coloured only; reserved a place on their national convention for the 'kings, chiefs, and princes, of Bantu tribes or clans; and stipulated that the leadership should ' at all times and on all governing bodies be predominantly non-European. In effect, and no doubt by intent, the League was cast in a mould that would enable it to compete with the African National Congress.
For this reason the League undertook to 'discourage organization on racial and sectarian lines among the oppressed peoples themselves. The clause should be scrapped, suggested Reginald Bridgeman, international secretary of the League against Imperialism. Such organizations were a consequence and not the cause of colour bars, he argued. 6 The clause remained, however, as a reminder that the ANC closed its doors to Coloured as well as to whites. Since Congress was sluggish and steeped in reformism, the League itself would rally the African masses to the cause of national emancipation. From then on and for the next twenty-five years, Coloured radicals of the western Cape would strive to shape the aims and strategy of African nationalism.
La Guma and Dr G. H. Gool, the League's new president, summoned their Fellow Non-Europeans, Businessmen, Professionals, Intellectuals, Workers , in September 1937 to a national convention of Bantu, Coloured, Indian, Malay . It must be obvious to all, they said, that our political line since the granting of the franchise to the non-European of the Cape has been tactically and ideologically incorrect. Because of ignorance or treachery, past leaders had put their trust in imperialist parties - South African, Nationalist, and United which had encircled their people with a forest of colour bars. Representing an imperialism within an imperialism, Afrikaner nationalists had no intention of freeing the subject races, and found a mass basis in the privileged white working class. 'Our only hope lies in unifying all those forces that feel the weight of oppression as we do, into a cohesive and determined whole in opposition to Imperialism.' 7
The African National Congress, Dr Seme promised at a special convention in January 1933, would set their people free if only every African took out a membership card. Let us now, he urged, 'extend our feeble hands to our grown up brothers in other parts of Africa and to the emancipated slaves in the United States of America, asking for their help. 8 He led a deputation in July 1934 to D. L. Smit, the secretary for native affairs, to explain ANC aims. It was not a political party, but a spontaneous national movement for social reform. Its leaders were respected men of distinction in whom the people had full confidence. Congress aspired to become 'the Native Parliament of South Africa' under their chief, the minister of native affairs. 'We all love him and respect his person and his position in the African nation, said the deputation. The ANC would be honoured if he were to attend their conferences. 'As our great chief he can meet us as his Councillors according to the Native Laws and Customs.' 9 Or so said Seme; and his cant barely hid the bankruptcy of his policy. Imbeciles and unpatriotic folk, he wrote, kept crying 'Congress is dead, Congress is dead', and yet did nothing to revive the national organization. 10
The APO had no better plan for defeating white labour policies than to recommend support for Coloured businessmen. Africans and Coloured, called together by Abdurahman and Jabavu at Port Elizabeth in January 1934, agreed on a boycott of firms employing only whites. Abdurahman, that 'arch lackey of the white ruling class, sabotaged the decision', complained Gomas a year later. 'This is all that has come of the thirty-four years' record of the APO.' It would never free the Coloured. 11
Radicals traced this futility to the influence of a 'native bourgeoisie. It existed, practically and ideologically, as a definite class, said J. B. Marks. Only by understanding the class structure could one distinguish between the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces. The bourgeoisie formed the ' social basis of national reformism' and dominated Congress, as was plain from its appeal for funds to set up businesses under African managers, chosen, no doubt, from among the traders in the ANC. 12
The theory seemed far-fetched to some communists. Eddie Roux, for one, thought that the 'bourgeois elements' scarcely formed an 'organized capitalist class'. Quoting a thesis of the Comintern's sixth congress in support, he argued that Anglo-Boer imperialism had stifled the growth of an African capitalist class. Jameson Coka agreed. He gave figures showing that Africans in Johannesburg owned between them only 230 dilapidated shops, coffee stalls, barber shops and eating-houses, which employed perhaps 450 persons and represented a capital of not more than £3,000. There was a widespread bourgeois ideology but no bourgeois class, he maintained, because the whites would not allow African entrepreneurs to take root. 13
Coka, himself an aspiring bourgeois, encountered these obstacles in person when he took up journalism as a career. 'The White Press,' he discovered, 'was almost inaccessible to an African writer unless he happened to share anti-Africanism. 14.After being expelled from the party, he tried to become an entrepreneur by publishing the African Liberator, and looked for financial backing to the white liberals whom he had previously berated. He now listed their good works and accused his former comrades of turning African trade unions into pawns. Black and white must cooperate, he pleaded; while every true Christian should do his duty by his black neighbour. 15
Such trite sentiment revealed the kind of reformism that some radicals detected in an African bourgeois class. Bach, its sternest critic before leaving for Moscow, insisted that there was a bourgeoisie in the form of 'higher traders, the moneylenders, the owners of small shops with hired labour, and others who in one way or another 'exploit the Native toilers and make money out of them. Having in mind this middle class, he disputed with Kotane in 1934 on the issue of the 'independent native republic. 16
Kotane argued that its first and true meaning implied two stages, one leading to a democratic state under majority African rule, the second to a full-blown socialism. Bach followed the hard line taken by Bunting in 1928 and insisted that the two stages were synchronic. One should take a second look at the reasoning, if only because it crops up in present-day discussions of policy for newly independent states. Can the middle class be trusted, radicals ask, to 'complete the African revolution', or should socialists form a party to compete with the bourgeoisie for power?
The bourgeoisie, said Bach, wanted to be free and therefore stood up against discrimination. The freedom that they had in mind included the right to exploit others, however, and this interest caused them to waver. They were afraid that workers when liberated would curb the power to exploit. They accordingly protested against white supremacy yet sided with it when workers took to open struggle, as Kadalie had done. If allowed to obtain control after the revolution, the bourgeoisie were bound to use it in their interests. This must not be allowed.
The alternative was for workers and peasants to seize power, introduce democracy, and move by degrees towards socialism. In that event, the slogans of an 'independent native republic' and a 'workers' and peasants' government' would represent an identical concentration of power. Persons who stressed the differences between the slogans and who wanted the bourgeoisie to control the independent republic were 'consciously or unconsciously the supporters of the Native bourgeoisie - they speak in its name'.
Bach laid too much stress on the middle class and undervalued its radical bent. Then, as now, Africans could not easily obtain or invest capital. Even today, few own factories, shares and real estate. The 16,000 business men, 100 doctors, 50 lawyers, 26,000 teachers, 7,000 nurses who, with clerks, salesmen, pastors and social workers make up the present-day African middle class', find no more dignity or security in the segregated ghettoes than do wage workers. These are the reasons, a contemporary African sociologist has noted, for the racial policies of the African National Congress and the Pan African Congress. 'The African middle class has no stake in the country, and sees its salvation in making common cause with the masses with whom it shares common disabilities.' Now, as thirty years ago, Africans of all ranks 'see their struggle as a struggle against white domination'. 17
This was how Kotane saw the struggle. ' I am first an African and then a Communist,' he told the conference of top party leaders in December 1938. 'I came to the Communist Party because I saw in it the way out and the salvation for the African people. 18 Born on 9 August 1905 of Tswana stock in the western Transvaal, he belonged to a peasant family, worked as herdsboy, domestic servant, waiter, miner and baker, attended confirmation classes, and taught himself to read and write as he went from job to job. He joined the ANC in 1927, the African Bakers' Union in 1928, and the party in 1929, when his political education really began. After spending a year at the Lenin school in Moscow, he returned in 1933 to become the party secretary and editor. A Marxist fledgling, ready to trade dialectics with the most doctrinaire of members, he was also a fervent patriot who showed no trace of colour consciousness in his dealings with whites. His theory of the class struggle blended harmoniously with a strong feeling of national pride.
Convinced that Africans could hold their own in fair competition, he despised white supremacy and would not tolerate any trace of it either in the party or in its approach to Africans. They were to be emancipated and not to be manipulated in a struggle for power. The Communist party and the African Congress were not competitors, he urged, but the mailed fists of a single political force which would succeed only if both were trained to strike their blows at the same time and in total agreement. Impatient of theory that seemed remote from current needs, he brushed Bach's polemics aside and made it his business to strengthen the two arms of the liberation front.
It was stirred into activity in 1935 by the appearance of the Hertzog-Nicholls bill to disfranchise Africans in the Cape. Seme and Professor Jabavu took the initiative in calling yet another convention to meet the challenge. The communists, having discarded Bach's 'go it alone, policy, also approved. The party, they said, had often suggested united action with the ANC and the ICU, which the leaders always refused. The more heartily we greet now the initiative of the African National Congress. This would be the first convention to represent the vast masses. 19
The mammoth convention', said to be the greatest ever held, met at Bloemfontein on 15 December 1935. It was brought together, said Jabavu, by the Madimo, ancestral spirits that guided the children of Makana, Sekhukhuni, Cetshawayo and Moshweshwe. The 400 delegates represented all the political clans, left, right and centre; trade unions, farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, churchmen, and a score of local communities. A people's front so widely based was bound to cheer the radicals and follow the moderates.
A cable from Moscow urging delegates to set about their historic task aroused great enthusiasm. The convention approved Gomas's motion that meetings of protest be organized in every village. No taxes should be paid, said J. B. Marks, until the people had won their rights. Dr G. H. Gool, the brother-in-law of Cissie Gool, wanted delegates to lay the basis of a national liberation movement against all repressive laws. The only effective decisions taken were to make the All African Convention a permanent body and to send another deputation to the prime minister. Clements Kadalie warned from past experience that the deputation would certainly fail. 20
Its mission was to oppose the bill and ask for a round-table conference. For reasons never explained, Jabavu, Mahabane, Champion, Selby Msimang and the other five delegates agreed, or gave the appearance of agreeing, to the compromise of a separate communal roll for Africans. The rest of the convention's executive, including Edwin Mofutsanyana and the Drs Xuma, Moroka and Molema, hurried to Cape Town. After a week of wrangling, the executive publicly rejected the compromise. But the damage had been done. Hertzog announced at a joint session of the two houses in February that he had accepted the compromise; and introduced an amended bill which was carried on the third reading by 169 votes to eleven. 21
Six members of the United party and five of the Dominion party, then angling for the Coloured vote opposed the bill. All Labour members voted for it, as did Malan's Nationalists after being defeated on a motion to treat Coloured and Africans as one group. Dr N. J. van der Merwe, leader of the Free State Nationalists, who seconded the motion, argued that social equality followed political equality and led to 'mixing of blood, which ruined the white race. Hertzog said much the same thing. Whites feared the 'intermingling of blood' and black domination, he explained. These dangers, hanging like a sword over their heads, prevented them from doing justice to Africans. 22
The vote-catching phrases were familiarly centred round the themes of blood, sex and black power. Behind them lay the alliance of maize growers, sugar planters, mine and factory owners, white workers and the urban bourgeoisie against all Africans, peasant, worker, intellectual and storekeeper. A handful of white liberals objected. J. H. Hofmeyr, the minister of the interior, told parliament that white civilization had no future ' save with the consent and goodwill of the non-European people'. Sir James Rose Innes, a former chief justice, headed a campaign to save the franchise. The bill, he said, brought South Africa nearer to fascism. When the shouting had died away, the role of the liberal was to soothe, to counsel patience, and to persuade Africans to make what use they could of the Representation of Natives Act.
African voters in the Cape were removed from the common rolls on which they had been registered since 1854. Voting on a communal roll, they would elect three whites to the assembly, then consisting of 150 members elected by whites and a sprinkling of Coloured; and two whites to the provincial council. Chiefs, local councils, urban advisory boards and election committees in all provinces were to elect four whites to the senate by a system of block voting. The act also created a Native Representative Council of six white officials, four nominated and twelve elected Africans. The councillors were to receive a stipend of £120 a year, discuss grievances, and tender advice which the government usually ignored. 'We have been asked to cooperate with a toy telephone, said councillor Paul Mosaka in 1946, on the verge of the council's collapse. 'We have been speaking into an apparatus which cannot transmit sound and at the end of which there is nobody to receive the message. 23
A small left-wing group foresaw the futility yet made no headway against the missionary-trained reformist leaders, lured by the meagre stipend or the prestige of sitting in a mock parliament. When the All African Convention met again in June 1936, Jabavu turned down proposals to boycott the elections. Africans could startle the whites, attract wide attention and win their rights 'by using the fear of a bloody revolution'; but to succeed, they must have complete unity and a perfect organization. Without these, a policy of reprisals resting on force might end in disaster. He preferred to use what could be used, fight for the repeal of colour bars, and encourage people to strengthen the African middle class of traders, doctors and lawyers. 24
'Trotskyists and other opportunists, said George Hardy, were playing into the government's hands by proposing a boycott. A foundation member of the British CP, Hardy (1884-1965), suspected a Trotskyist in every left-wing critic of communist policy. The son of a Yorkshire farm labourer who raised a family of nine on 18s. a week, he left school at the age of twelve, worked as a farm hand, joined the army, and migrated to Canada and the United States where he served as secretary of the IWW during the First World War. On the strength of his overseas experience, he was deputed to steer the South African party away from its alleged unreal and sectarian outlook. Almost wholly ignorant of the country's social structure, he thought it possible to detach poor whites and small farmers from their allegiance to Afrikaner nationalism. 25
A boycott, he argued, would fail, drive the militants into a blind alley, and prevent the Convention from becoming what it should be, a mass movement of Africans, Coloured and Indians. The proper thing to do was to elect staunch fighters against imperialism to parliament and the Native Representative Council. If the government expelled their representatives, the people would resist and make the boycott a political reality. 26
The African National Congress also decided to take part in the elections and to concentrate on strengthening the African's position in the economy. Dube, Mahabane, Msimang, Skota and Thema sat on the executives of both Congress and the Convention. Why then should they compete? asked Seme. He knew that the younger men wanted nothing less than social equality, whereas the ANC had little to do with such dreams. It was deeply concerned with the great beauty of our own African society'. 27 The Convention had failed in the purpose for which it was formed, he argued; and should be disbanded so that all patriots could fight from within the ANC under a single command.
Two hundred delegates meeting at Bloemfontein in June 1936 decided otherwise and formed themselves into a permanent Convention, to which all African religious, educational, industrial, economic, political, commercial and social organizations shall be affiliated'. Dr Seme, who attended, was elected to the executive committee together with Dr G. H. Gool. The office bearers were Professor Jabavu, president; Dr A. B. Xuma vice-president; H. Selby Msimarlg, the general secretary; R. H. Godlo, the record secretary; Z. K. Matthews and S. D. Ngcobo, the clerk-draughtsmen; and Dr J. S. Moroka, the treasurer. The 112 societies and communities represented at the conference spanned the whole range of the African and Coloured liberation movement; among them were the ANC, ICU, CP, National Liberation League, APO, and the Cape Voters' Association. 28
Personal ambitions, regional loyalties, the ANCs failures, and the evergreen hope that a new organization might cure old weaknesses influenced the decision to put the Convention on a permanent footing. Communists and Coloured radicals hoped to find a mass basis in its broad, loosely knit structure. The party's national conference in September undertook to weld it into a powerful movement. This was a major change in outlook. The communists were returning to their earlier concept of a united front with African nationalism.
Applying their faith in a grass-roots organization, they suggested that the Convention should form a network of local committees for immediate, daily needs. Given a broad and active basis all the year round, it could not possibly drift into becoming an annual debating society like the ANC. Moreover, and this was to be an important function, the committees would serve as the Convention's agents in elections under the Representation of Natives Act. They should aim at electing brave and trustworthy fighters under the Convention's banner. 29
The Convention never hoisted a party banner. Attempts to draw up a list of approved candidates threatened to split the assortment of political, religious, professional, welfare and residential groups. The Convention delegated the function of nominating candidates in the Cape to the Native Voters, Association and made no recommendations in the northern provinces. Former allies opposed one another in the elections of 1937 for the Native Representative Council. Of the ANC's leaders, only Dube in Natal, Mapikela in the Orange Free State and Selope Thema in the Transvaal were elected. Edwin Mofutsanyana, the communist candidate and a member of the Convention's executive in the Transvaal, was knocked out in the first round, which decided the nominations. H. M. Basner, a Johannesburg lawyer and the communist candidate for the senate in the Transvaal_OFS division, obtained more votes than Ballinger and two other candidates in the nominations, but lost the actual election to Rheinallt Jones by 66,000 votes to 404,000.
Mofutsanyana complained that the electoral colleges were inconsistent. They voted against him and for Basner, though both stood on the same platform. Apart from their lack of funds, the communist candidates failed because of the party's isolation from the rural population, the virtual disfranchisement of urban residents, and the conservative attitude of the electoral colleges. Deluded by a hundred years of missionary and liberal illusions, they disobeyed the mandate of the taxpayers whom they represented. Radicals had blundered, said Mofutsanyana, by allowing the urban advisory boards to become the agents of white municipalities. The proper course was to secure the election of militants who would conduct a struggle against high rents, lodgers' permits, beer brewing and other vexatious regulations. 30
Africans at Vereeniging, once a communist stronghold, went into battle on their own on Sunday, 19 September 1937. The police, carrying out raids in the township, were set upon by the infuriated residents. Using sticks, stones, iron bars and pocket knives, they drove the police away, killed two of their number and smashed the pick_up van. Reinforcements fired on the Africans, wounded many and arrested 450. Of the fifty_four charged, eleven were convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for periods ranging from three to seven years.
White racists agitated for a ban on communism and 'the liberalist doctrine of equality'. Hertzog said that Africans living in towns were in the 'white man's country' and must obey his laws. Anybody 'so presumptuous as to claim equal authority with the white man in the Union will experience the greatest measure of disappointment and failure'. 31 A commission of inquiry found that ill treatment by police and the municipality had contributed to the outbreak. The Communist party traced it to a brutal system of exploitation promoted by repressive laws snd daily assaults on the African's rights and dignities. ' The aim of these laws is to thrust Natives in huge numbers on to the labour market: to over_supply it, so that the Native is robbed of his fair chance of getting a competitive wage; and constantly to force him to sell his labour under threat of immediate arrest. 32
'African leaders are lagging behind the masses,' said the communists in a comment on the Vereeniging outbreak. 'Unless a new leadership is created and spontaneous fights are transformed into an organized struggle, the fight of the masses against oppression, the struggle for the liberation of the African people will be without success.' 33 The advice might be sound; but it could not be pursued until the movement had put its house in order.
Neither the communists nor the ANC were able to organize effective opposition against pass laws and other racial statutes that led to the conviction of one African in every fourteen. The party called for a mass defiance of the census held under the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1937. The most ferocious of the measures adopted to curb the movement of work-seekers from farms and reserves, the act was so framed as to limit the size of the African urban population to the bare number needed for 'reasonable labour requirements'. No other law caused so much alarm as this, for it exposed the great majority of Africans to a constant danger of being endorsed out of any town by hardfaced white bureaucrats. Appeals for a boycott of the census were moderately successful on the Rand and attracted a good number of the best fighters to the party. 'However this is not sufficient,' reported Mofutsanyana. 'Our independent work as a party has suffered a considerable setback in the last few years.' 34
The liberation movement, he pointed out, was almost confined to the industrial centres, 'while the bulk of the African people living in the reserves, protectorates and kraals remain isolated'. Little or no work was being done among them by the Convention, Congress or the Communist party. The movement had no press to speak of and hardly did more than hold occasional meetings in the towns. Since many leaders were badly trained in consequence and drifted into self-seeking careers, political organizations came and went like paper fires. The chiefs were another stumbling block. Their people respected them, though they were agents of the government. The government itself refused to let chiefs sit in conference with other members of the ANC and used them against the movement. Yet Basutoland's Lekhotla la Bafo (League of the Poor) had shown that peasants when properly led would oppose both chiefs and the colonial administration.
'Basutoland has now become the battlefield, where the exploited and oppressed peasants and workers fight against the imperialist forces,' claimed H. M. Tsoene, president of the Lekhotla. Facing a charge of criminal defamation that arose from an article in the Worker, he appealed to the communists for aid. L. C. Joffe, who represented the paper, was subpoenaed to give evidence for the prosecution and to produce the original article. He attended the court at Teyateyanang near Maseru in November 1937, refused to testify, and when threatened with committal for contempt of court, declared that communists would never betray the common people's struggle for freedom. His defiance caused so much excitement that the magistrate adjourned the case and released Tsoene on his own bond. 35
Transkeian and other peasants would follow the Sotho example, said Mofutsanyana, if the All African Convention would only provide them with a practical programme of struggle. The Convention would go the way of the ICU and ANC, to become an empty shell, noisy and without substance, unless it obtained mass support through live and active affiliated units. He and Marks took the initiative in forming a coordinating committee to revive the ANC in the Transvaal. With the Rev. S. S. Tema as chairman and Marks as secretary, the committee made steady progress in a series of meetings on the Rand and refused to be turned aside by the familiar charge that communists were attempting to capture the leadership. That was not their purpose, they said. Like others on the committee, they wanted to put new life into Congress for the sake of unity. 36
Both Convention and Congress met at Bloemfontein in December. The Convention ratified an amended draft constitution, which gave all chiefs a seat on the executive committee, and adopted a programme. It called for opposition to segregation and colour bars; franchise rights and direct representation in parliament; the removal of restrictions on the right of Africans to buy land; equal pay for equal work; the formation of cooperative societies; and measures 'to stimulate African latent gifts in trading and business capacity'. Pious resolutions were not sufficient, said Mofutsanyana in an address on labour and wages. The Convention must encourage trade unions and local committees to deal with immediate burning demands. Only in this way would it become the active representative of the whole nation. 37
The Congress celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with speeches on past glories and drew a veil over the reasons for its fallen state. With the Convention to spur them on, however, the active members voted Seme out of office. His place was taken by the Rev. Mahabane, then also vice-president of the Convention. Another cleric, the Rev. James Calata, an Anglican minister from Cradock in the eastern Cape, took on the post of secretary general. Mofutsanyana and Champion, who sat on the executives of both bodies, failed in their efforts to secure the affiliation of Congress to the Convention. Unable to develop a mass basis, the Convention lapsed into inactivity until the early forties when Coloured and African radicals in the western Cape revived it with the aim of putting themselves at the head of the liberation movement.
The Coloured formed a bridge between white and black, explained La Guma in 1937. Their existence made nonsense of pure race myth and of the agitation to put a ban on sex between members of different colour groups. He urged the darker races to rid themselves of their inferiority complex, and to combine in struggle for complete equality. 38 Having this in mind, the National Liberation League held a conference of trade unions, cultural societies and political parties at Cape Town in March 1938. The delegates agreed to form a Non-European United Front of Africans, Coloured and Indians against all colour bars; voiced their faith in the principle of working-class solidarity; and hoped that white labour would support their efforts to secure equality in political, social and economic life.
White supremacy politicians were then preparing for battle in the pending general election by pouring out a flood of poisonous propaganda. Afrikaner nationalists set the pace. They thundered forth against aliens, communists, Jews and men of colour; and issued an election manifesto that was to form the basis of their legislative programme after 1948. It promised to do away with African representation in parliament; stop the buying of land for Africans; remove 'surplus' Africans from the towns; segregate Africans, Coloured and Indians in separate areas, trade unions and places of work; reserve preferred jobs for whites; prohibit their employment by persons not of their own skin colour; and ban marriage or sex between whites and any darker man or woman.
Having lost the election, the Nationalists made ready for the next by circulating their racial programme throughout the country in the form of a petition, which so alarmed the government that it hastened to get in first. The Cape provincial council passed an ordinance giving municipal councils the power to enforce segregation in public places, buses and residential areas. Richard Stuttaford, the minister of interior, who had resigned office a year before because of an alleged insult to 'God save the King', gave notice of a scheme for 'complete and parallel' segregation. For the first time in a hundred years, the Coloured of the Cape were faced with the prospect of being herded into ghettoes.
'Race and colour discrimination is a weapon used by the rich to protect their interests,' said the communists, and they urged Africans, Coloured and Indians to unite against the colour bar. 39 The Non-European United Front circulated a counter-petition demanding the repeal of racial laws, and organized a great demonstration in Cape Town on 27 March 1939. 'Our weapons will be the strike, the boycott and peaceful demonstrations,' declared Mrs Gool, president of the NEUF and the Liberation League, in a powerful agitational speech. The demonstration that followed the meeting ended in a race riot. The police attacked the demonstrators outside the houses of parliament and continued to assault the residents of District Six, the Coloured quarter, until the early hours of the morning. 40
The government vetoed the ordinance and dropped its own segregation proposals. For once the militants could claim that they had blocked the way to racial totalitarianism. Instead of combining their forces for a further advance, however, they fell out with one another in a series of clashes. Abdurahman said that he preferred peaceful negotiation to forceful threats; and refused to join the NEUF or admit it to the APOs annual conference in April 1939. 41 Yet he had backed Mrs Gool when she stood for election and won a seat on the Cape Town municipal council in September 1938. His appearance on her platform gave rise to a dispute in the Liberation League between communists and Nationalists.
La Guma wished to debar whites from holding office in the League. The Coloured, he argued, should lead their own organizations and encourage young people to take their place in the van. Dr Gool said that he objected not to the presence of whites in the leadership but to 'the present reactionary and reformist policy' of the communists, who sacrificed the League's principles to the aim of winning elections. 42 La Guma's motion was defeated at the League's third annual conference. He and others withdrew, took possession of the books, and claimed to represent the League. This then expelled La Guma, Gool, A. Brown and Miss Hawa Ahmed for 'unauthorized activities', and took them to court, which ordered them to return the books and to refrain from collecting money in the name of the League. 43
Adding to the confusion, a group of white Trotskyists, calling themselves the Workers' Party, gave their blessing to the Goolam Gool faction and denounced the League's general council in scurrilous language through the medium of their duplicated paper the Spark. Two members of the group, Miss C. R. Goodlatte, a former nun turned Marxist, and Paul Koston, the owner of a bookshop, published an apology for the defamation. Their intervention gave rise to the notion that the League or the Coloured intellectuals who opposed it were followers of Trotsky. 44 The Coloured were actually radical nationalists who drew heavily on Trotsky's writings for their polemics with the communists; and who insisted that unity between Coloured, Africans and Indians should come before unity with whites.
Communists, Trotskyists and members of every racial group sat together at a Non-European United Front Conference in Cape Town on 8 April 1939. C. van Gelderen represented the Fourth International; B. Kies, the New Era Fellowship, a students' society allegedly under Trotskyist influence; G. R. Baloyi and his secretary J. B. Marks, the Transvaal United Front. The conference unanimously passed resolutions, moved by Sam Kahn, a young Cape Town lawyer, denouncing segregation and calling for complete equality. Boycotts, active and passive resistance, strikes and demonstrations, it was agreed, would be employed to free the people. Among those elected to the national council were Mrs Gool, the president; Baloyi, senior vice-president; M. Kotane, the secretary; W. H. Andrews, the treasurer; Dr Dadoo of Johannesburg and H. A. Naidoo of Durban. 45 The seed of a grand non-racial alliance had been planted; but seventeen years were to pass before it bore fruit.
All genuine opponents of class distinction or racial discrimination belonged together, said the communists. To exclude whites because of their colour would amount to an inverted racialism and a denial of class solidarity. All sections of the liberation movement, though divided by race and social conditions, were working along parallel lines and must converge in the course of struggle into one great army. Speaking at Pretoria, Josie Mpama urged Africans to forget that Coloured and Indians had failed to help them in the past, and to take the lead in the campaign for unity. The Transvaal ANC turned down a proposal to join the Non-European United Front. 46 Indians, rather than Africans, responded to its appeal in the north.
Tortuous negotiations between South Africa and British India had produced the Cape Town agreements of 1927 and 1932. Each was followed by anti-Asian legislation and bitter wrangling among the spokesmen of South Africa's 200,000 Indians. 47 The leaders tried to defend their position by taking part in white man's politics; but, unlike Abdurahman, had no votes to offer as a bargaining counter. Advised by India's agents general to cooperate with the government, the S.A. Indian Congress lost its sense of direction and floundered in a series of intrigues, deputations, dignified protests and abject surrenders. A section of the Natal community revolted in 1933, when the SAIC nominated S. R. Naidoo to represent it on a commission appointed to explore ways and means of inducing Indians to settle in distant lands. The victims would be Hindu workers and not the merchants who controlled the Congress, said Albert Christopher, a Durban lawyer, and he formed the Colonial-born Settlers' Indian Association.
The feud between the Association and the Natal Congress dragged on for seven years, while the SAIC itself fell apart in a struggle between Hindu and Muslim leaders. Steeped in religious and caste prejudice, they turned the marriage of the agent-general Sir Raza Ali, a Muslim, to Miss P. V. Sammy, a Hindu of Kimberley, in 1936 into an occasion for a political brawl. The president, secretary, treasurer and four other members of the S.A. Indian Congress, with twenty-two members of the Natal Congress, resigned their positions and demanded Ali's recall because, they said, his marriage was an insult to Hindu women and a threat to Indian unity.48 The indignation was largely spurious and contrived with a view to sweeping the Hindus into one camp behind Sorabjee Rustomjee, a prominent Parsee merchant and the political rival of A. I. Kajee. As a result of the split, Muslims obtained control of the SAIC, and Kajee became its undisputed leader. 49
The growth of trade unionism at that time added a new dimension to Indian politics in Natal. Among the organizers were communists, such as Mannie Peltz, H. A. Naidoo and George Poonen, whom Eddie Roux recruited to the party in 1934-5. Its African membership had almost disappeared under the police terror; but it was making steady gains among young Indian dissidents. They were South Africans, not expatriates, and they turned their backs on the narrow communal ways of their elders. Much of the friction among Indian leaders resulted from a new cultural trend that Naidoo and others of his group personified.
Born at Durban in 1915 of Hindu parentage, Naidoo and the rest of his family followed his grandmother into the Christian faith. The conversion encouraged his radical bent, which was to find full expression in the working-class movement, where he finally rejected all racial and caste taboos. Indeed, like Poonen later, he overcame the obstacles that stood in the way of an inter-racial marriage, and found a wife among his white party comrades. Emancipated Indians of Naidoo's generation came to despise the opportunism of the SAIC and the futility of its appeals to India, Britain and courts of law. The younger men wanted to break down the isolation of the Indian minority. Its only hope to putting an end to the stream of anti-Asian laws, they said, was to make common cause with Africans, Coloured and radical whites in a united front.
Kajee, on the other hand, wanted Indians to accept voluntary, self-imposed segregation - not to buy land from whites, employ them or marry them - in every area where segregation by statute threatened. The government regularly accepted the compromise, allowed the opposition to simmer down, and then passed the very law that Indians had tried to avert by surrendering their principles. This sequence of events preceded and followed the Transvaal Asiatic Land Tenure Amendment Act of 1936 and the Asiatics (Land and Trading) Act of 1939. They spelt ruin to the great bulk of Asians throughout the province; yet Congress acquiesced because the leaders hoped that a handful of property owners would benefit by obtaining title to land. A group of militants, calling themselves the nationalists, objected to any compromise. 'Passive resistance is the only way to defend our interests,' said Dr Y. M. Dadoo, and he formed a Transvaal section of the Non-European United Front.
Appeals for united resistance made little impact on the Muslirn traders and property owners who claimed to speak for the 25,000 Indian inhabitants of the Transvaal. Years of reliance on court actions, negotiations with governments, compromise and the bribery of white officials or politicians had dampened the spirit that once inspired Gandhi's satyagrahis. The idea of a political alliance with poverty-stricken, voteless Africans seemed no less dangerous than absurd to the conservative leaders. Even Gandhi disapproved. 50 Indians were 'different', he told the Rev. S. S. Tema at a world missionary conference in India; while Sir Raza Ali said in Johannesburg at a farewell ceremony that the way to avoid a Non-European front was to give Indians and Coloured the same rights as whites. 'We are thus led to ask,' remarked Imvo, 'whether Indians, strangers to Africa, have a stronger claim than the indigenous Africans in the Union to the equal franchise. 51
Indians, said Dadoo, had no more and no less of a claim than Africans. Neither would achieve equality without a long and hard struggle. Born at Krugersdorp in 1909, he was one of the few Transvaal Indians of his generation who refused to make commerce their career. After matriculating in India, he took a medical degree in 1936 at Edinburgh, where he joined the ILP and served as secretary to the local branch of the All India National Congress. Returning to Johannesburg to practise medicine, he made politics his chief occupation, and organized the nationalist group in the Transvaal Indian Congress.
Militants and conservatives clashed at a conference held at Johannesburg in June 1939 to decide the issue of passive resistance. Bottles, clubs, knuckledusters and knives were used on the nationalists, who scorned to defend themselves. Five were seriously wounded and one, Dahyabhai Govindji, died of his injuries. 'Better to die fighting for a righteous cause than live as helots' was Dadoo's message to a meeting held in Durban to mourn the death. Indian radicals in all provinces began to rally round him as the true leader of their people. 52
Mrs Gool's propaganda tour on behalf of the Non-European United Front in June and July brought valuable aid to militants in Natal and the Transvaal. They gained the support of Christopher and Rustomjee, both seeking to weaken Kajee's grip on the S.A. Indian Congress. Six thousand Indians, meeting in Johannesburg on 9 July, pledged themselves to take part in passive resistance on 1 August. The Indian community seemed willing and prepared to resume the struggle that Gandhi had initiated thirty years before. Then he, of all people, intervened to dampen their ardour. War threatened; the time was not ripe for satyagraha; and he had high hopes that India and Britain would act in order to bring about an 'honourable settlement'. 53 Dadoo acquiesced and called off the campaign. The impact of external events had once again turned the national liberation movement way from the path of mass struggle.