Parliament decided for war by eighty votes to sixty-seven on 4 September 1939. Hertzog resigned as premier, and Smuts formed a coalition ministry which included Madeley of the Labour party and Stallard of the Dominion party. The anti-war parties, led by Hertzog and Malan, fused in the 'Herenigde Nasionale of Volksparty'. This was scarcely more than a facade behind which factions struggled for leadership. The merger came to an end in November 1940, when the party's Free State congress rejected Hertzog's draft programme guaranteeing full equality to the English. He resigned from the party and parliament, leaving Malan in possession. Three parliamentary groups emerged from the wreckage: a reconstituted Nationalist party, the Afrikaner party led by Havenga, and Pirow's New Order; and all were harassed by the extra-parliamentary Ossewabrandwag under a professed Nazi, Kommandant-Generaal Dr J. F. J. van Rensburg.
All the factions refused to fight in Britain's war, set their hearts on a German victory, and aimed at the goal of a white man's republic; but they disputed bitterly about its content and their methods of struggle. Pirow preached the essence of Hitler's national socialism; Van Rensburg's storm troopers practised it by blowing up railways, power lines, telephones and post offices. Hertzog and Malan put their faith in the white man's parliament which had served them so well, and held divergent views on the relation between Afrikaners and English. The republic, Hertzog argued, should come into being with the consent of both, on the basis of complete equality, and through their assimilation into a common nationhood. Malan stood out for a modernized version of Kruger's republic, established if necessary by a bare majority in parliament and firmly seized by united Afrikanerdom. 1
The strength and strategy of the rivals, their policies and attitudes to one another, fluctuated with the fate of Hitler's armies. Pirow and Van Rensburg relied wholly on a German victory; Malan, the more wily, kept his escape lines open for the possibility of a German defeat. They wrangled over seats in parliament - always a major obstacle to Afrikaner unity - and fixed their eyes on the central issue: who was to be South Africa's Gauleiter under a Hitler peace?
Perspectives changed as the Red Army gained the upper hand. The Afrikaner tide of Nazi support passed its flood in 1943 after the surrender of 300,000 German troops at Stalingrad. Malan's party, securing forty-three seats at the general election in July, emerged as the only opposition in parliament. From then on the New Order disintegrated, the Ossewabrandwag lost ground, and the Nationalists, turning to their tribal drums, beat out the familiar battle cry of white solidarity against communism and the darker man.
Communists were the most uncompromising critics in the labour movement of the government's war policy. The Munich agreement, signed on 30 September 1938, by Britain, France, Germany and Italy, had convinced them that war could not be avoided, and that those who spoke for the western democracies could not be trusted. This view was elaborated in The Munich Swindle, a Guardian pamphlet issued soon after the event. Chamberlain, Daladier and the classes they represented, it declared, were not concerned to stem the tide of Nazi aggression; their chief aim was to turn it against the Soviet Union. Such doubts multiplied in the anxious months that followed, and were decisive in shaping the Communist party's attitude to the war up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Unlike communists in English-speaking countries, and without any prompting or instructions from outside, the party's central committee went into opposition immediately on the outbreak of war. It was an 'imperialist war' for 'raw materials, markets, capitalist domination, and the power to exploit colonial peoples in Africa and Asia'. 2 The War-on-Warites of 1914 had arrived at a similar conclusion, though with a different emphasis. The communists spent little time on denunciations of war in general and of capitalism. Their main endeavour was to rally the people against a government that claimed to defend democracy abroad yet enforced a vicious system of racial discrimination at home.
'The fight against Fascism must start in our own country,' the central committee argued in June 1939. 'It must be fought against the present system of poverty' cultural backwardness and race discrimination, which are the breeding grounds of the Fascist mind.' 3 That was the keynote of communist policies throughout the war. Every worker had a duty to fight for a 'free and equal South Africa', and not to defend gross inequalities and colour bars. Africans, Coloured and Indians, the party declared, would gladly join the army if they were given full rights of citizenship. They could not be expected to fight, however, as long as the army segregated them, limited them to manual labour, denied them the right to carry arms, and paid them half or less than half the white soldier's pay. 4
Like their predecessors in 1914, the Labour party's leaders brushed aside all doubts and undertook to back the war effort. Though bound by conference resolutions to reject any coalition, the national executive approved of Madeley's decision to enter the cabinet where, he explained, he could best encourage workers to defend democracy against fascism. 5 Trade union leaders, taking note of anti-war sentiments in their own ranks, adopted a more cautious approach. The Trades and Labour Council asked for safeguards against labour dilution and inflation; and demanded adequate representation on war emergency committees. Smuts assured them that he had a better understanding of their claims than in 1914, and promised to protect trade union rights. 6
The unions were divided on questions of principle. The first big clash took place at the TLCs annual conference in 1940 on a motion introduced by E. S. Sachs which denounced the 'selfish imperialist ends' of the belligerent states and urged conference 'to demand an immediate cessation of hostilities'. Afrikaner delegates refused to fight for the British who had deprived them of their independence. The communists maintained that the first duty of workers in all countries was to stop the war before it engulfed the Soviet Union and to intensify the struggle for socialism. Accused of having turned a complete somersault on instructions from Moscow, the anti-war group replied that not they but world conditions had changed. Sachs's motion was defeated, and conference decided by thirty votes to twenty-three that it would carry on the struggle ' until aggression had been eliminated'. 7
The divergence of theory never came close to an open schism. Facing the more immediate aggression of Afrikaner nationalism, the two factions presented a common front in defence of the worker's rights. The 'pro-Nazi, anti-trade union, anti-colour Nationalists' were the main enemy, declared the Communist party's central committee in 1940. It acknowledged that this approach 'weakened the line of struggle against the war, since it meant a passive acceptance of the Smuts Government and its war policy'. The only way to avoid the dilemma caused by the split in the ruling class was to oppose the war and to resist the Nationalists. 8
If communists were to emphasize their anti-imperial aims, they would drift into a dialogue with Afrikaner republicans who practised their own local brand of imperialism and were determined to maintain the existing class structure and system of colour oppression. It was not in South Africa's interests that this kind of republic should be established. The party's national conference of April 1941 came to this conclusion after a lengthy debate on a new constitution and programme. 9 Some delegates from Pretoria suggested that it might be necessary to support the Afrikaner movement for separation from Britain; but the majority felt that they could have no truck at any time with the most fanatical adherents of white supremacy.
Questions that had perplexed communists between 1927 and 1935 cropped up again. Would there be two stages or only one stage in the advance to socialism? Was it conceivable for South Africa to develop into a democracy under capitalism? Or would the struggle for democracy unleash such great forces as to make a socialist revolution inevitable? The conference agreed that it was impossible to trace the course of events with certainty. The 'national struggle' for inter-racial equality was bound to overshadow the class struggle. Workers were not the only ones who suffered oppression, and it was the party's mission to liberate all oppressed classes. With this perspective, the conference adopted a draft constitution that kept all options open. The party would prepare the way to a socialist republic by striving for the abolition of imperial rule, the introduction of universal adult franchise, and the removal of all colour bars that held up the progress of any national group or that divided the working class. 10
As in 1914, radical socialists parted company on the war issue with the African National Congress. A number of its affiliated bodies urged the leaders to refuse cooperation unless Africans were given full military training and the right to bear arms. The ANCs annual conference at Durban in December 1939 approved, however, of parliament's declaration of war, asked the government to 'consider the expediency' of admitting all peoples to citizenship, and called for the inclusion of all sect[ions in the defence system on equal terms. 11 The government ignored the plea and proceeded to recruit thousands of Africans to dig, fetch and carry for the white troops.
Coloured opinion was deeply divided. Dr Abdurahman, ailing and resentful of the United party's attempts to segregate his people, kept aloof. The APO was little more than a shell and gave no lead. Coloured ex-servicemen, proud of their record in the First World War and stirred by victorian loyalties to Britain, promised Smuts their unqualified support. Pale-faced Coloured enlisted as whites in the Cape Scottish Highlanders, while darker men joined a non-combatant essential services corps.
Militants in the National Liberation League and the Non-European United Front, led by Mrs Gool and Moses Kotane, agreed with the communists that their first duty was to struggle for democratic rights on the home front. Unless all South Africans were treated as citizens without discrimination, said the League, no government could expect to receive their loyal support. 12
Some of the leaders found the call to arms irresistible. Lance Morley-Turner, the League's assistant secretary and once an officer of the Black and Tans in Ireland, joined up, to become the 'Red Sergeant' whose jeep flaunted a red flag in the East African campaign. Booker Lakey, the League's general secretary, followed him into the army. With a characteristic independence of mind, James la Guma stood out for a united front with bourgeois democracy against the Nazis. Twice defeated in municipal elections, once by Abdurahman in 1939 and after his death in 1940 by Ahmed Ismail, the forty-six-year-old La Guma enlisted in September. Promoted to the rank of staff sergeant in the Indian-Malay corps, he went north with his regiment to Abyssinia, and was demobilized only in 1947.
Of all those in the liberation movement, the Indian radicals put up the strongest resistance to the government's war policy. In British India, where Congress had demanded the right of self-determination and independence, Pandit Nehru declared that his people would not fight to defend imperial rule. 13 Fired by this example, the militants, organized in a 'nationalist bloc', responded eagerly to the communist appeal for combined action against racial discrimination. They called for a boycott of the Broome 'penetration' commission, which had been set up in 1940 to investigate the extent of Indian occupation .n so-called white areas; and attacked the conciliatory policy of the bourgeois leaders who controlled the Transvaal Indian Congress, the Natal Indian Association and the Natal Indian Congress. 14
The conservatives, while praising the spirit of Gandhi's satyagrahis, discouraged all forms of mass struggle and sought relief from further discrimination by offering the services of Indian workers in the war. ' If the restrictions that bind us today are removed,' replied the nationalist bloc, 'we shall be the first to defend democracy.' Defeated on their war policy, the conservatives in the Association expelled seven committee members, including Dr G. M. Naicker and the communists C. I. Amra, H. A. Naidoo and D. A. Seedat. The militants then launched a campaign against the war and for citizenship rights that changed the political outlook of Indians in Natal. Members of the bloc were prosecuted under the War Measures Act, and Seedat went to jail in April 1941 on a charge of subversion.
Dr Dadoo, leader of the nationalist group in the Transvaal Indian Congress, served a sentence of four months' hard labour for similar offences arising out of protests against attempts to recruit men for the Indian labour corps. ' If we were as free as Europeans we would probably give our services as freely,' he said at a recruiting meeting in Pretoria; and he issued a miniature charter of rights in the name of the Non-European United Front. 'Don't support this war, where the rich get richer and the poor get killed,' he appealed. When standing trial on a charge of incitement under war emergency regulations, he told the court that the war would be just only if full democratic rights, freedom and independence were extended to the oppressed peoples of South Africa, India and the colonies. 15
Internment camps were reserved for whites, either German and Italian nationals or South Africans who opposed the war. An overwhelming majority of the latter were members of the Ossewabrandwag, among whom a small group of left-wing internees maintained a lonely and unhappy existence. They included the communists Arnold Latti, Dr Max Joffe and his brother Louis; the trade unionists Max Gordon and Fritz Fellner, husband of Johanna Cornelius; the veteran socialist J. E. Brown and E. J. Burford of the Labour party, both interned because they agitated against Madeley's presence in the cabinet.
The Joffe brothers and Gordon were accused of spreading communism and forming trade unions among Africans. 16 Their crime, the Johannesburg district party committee protested, was to resist efforts of employers, aided by many trade union leaders, to lengthen hours, dilute labour and keep down wages. This was a 'scurrilous attack', the Trades and Labour Council said, and it decided to abandon interned communists to their fate. They were the supreme quislings, maintained A. A. Moore in his presidential address to the Council's annual conference in April 1941. They exploited genuine grievances and democracy for their own aim of frustrating the war effort. 17 Archie Crawford had sold the workers in 1915, Bill Andrews commented sadly, whereas Archie Moore went further: he was giving them away.
The immediate cause of Moore's splenetic outburst was a dispute over Madeley's Factories Act of 1941. In the original draft, the minister was authorized to prohibit the employment of any class of workers in a specified occupation. A number of industrial unions protested in a memorandum drawn up by Solly Sachs that the purpose of this 'Nuremberg clause' was to introduce racial segregation such as the Nationalist party had proposed. Madeley told a trade union deputation that 'it was frequently desirable in some instances to separate European females from Africans' and invited the TLCs assistance. 18 Sachs, acting in 'a purely technical capacity', thereupon submitted a draft clause that would allow a factory inspector to prevent 'objectionable contact' between white women and employees of any other class.
This was acceptable to the right-wing leaders, who welcomed any measure likely to discourage the employment of Africans; but the radicals renewed their pressure and forced the minister to withdraw the clause. Accused by the Nationalist opposition of yielding to communist agitation, Madeley assured them that he would introduce healthy racial separation through the medium of regulations under the act. When these appeared, it was found that the minister, purporting to safeguard the physical, social or moral welfare of workers, could require an employer to segregate them by race or sex on the factory floor, in rest rooms and toilets. 19 Madeley had given way to the Nationalist party and racists in the trade union movement.
In matters not involving a racial taboo or direct conflict with white workers' interests, the trades council could be persuaded to recommend an identical treatment, as when it asked the minister to avoid racial differentiation in benefits under the Workmens Compensation Act of 1941. This was no more than a sop to the radicals, since all parties knew that neither parliament nor the mine owners would agree to a departure from the principle of discrimination embodied in the original act of 1934. In terms of the statute of 1941, a non-African, if totally disabled, received a lifelong pension equal to seventy-five per cent of his monthly earnings. An African, similarly incapacitated, was entitled to no more than a lump sum of £150 - the equivalent of a pension for only three and a third years in the case of a worker earning £60 a year. 20
Inferior in status and segregated by law, the African was isolated from the mainstream of the labour movement. White workers with few exceptions accepted discrimination as a normal and desirable condition. Solly Sachs claimed to have no colour prejudice; yet he, too, compromised under the pressure of inciters to race hatred. In 1940 his garment workers' union in Johannesburg established a separate branch for its Coloured members, ostensibly 'to educate them in the spirit of militant trade unionism and to train leaders in the factories'. 21 Once introduced, segregation gradually spread, until it included separate entrances, lifts and offices for Coloured and African garment workers. They resented segregation, and Sachs maintained that it was the only way by which he could appease the 'violent prejudices' of his white members. 22
Obsessed with protecting and promoting white privileges, the country failed to use all its available resources at a time of urgent need. Imports fell drastically, the supply of goods to civilians was regulated and reduced, a serious scarcity of material required for the military developed, and the number of skilled workers fell far short of the demand. Yet white supremacists in every walk of life refused to release the productive capacity of black and brown South Africans; and excluded them from the centres opened in 1940 to train skilled and semi-ski]led workers for the engineering, electrical and motor trades. White women were trained in factories to produce armoured cars, guns and shells; but only unskilled labour was made available to Africans and Coloured in the whole field of industrial war work.
Only a society deeply divided and despotically ruled could tolerate so glaring a contradiction between its war aims and its war effort. Smuts never agreed to arm Africans, not even in the darkest period of the war; nor would the craft unions ever relent in their determination to keep them out of the skilled trades. It was 'no good training 40,000 mechanics for 1,000 jobs', delegates at the Trades and Labour Council conference told Ray Alexander in April 1942, when she moved that the facilities of the Central Organisation for Technical Training should be extended to Africans and Coloured; and the Council rejected her proposal. She returned to the attack in the following year, and persuaded a majority to recommend free compulsory education for children of all races; but, said J. Calder of the electrical workers' association, 'we will never agree at the present stage that the trades should be thrown open to everybody'. 23
On 22 June 1941, when German troops crossed the Soviet frontier, the Communist party's central committee called for the defence of the home of socialism. Its defeat would be capitalism's greatest triumph; its victory would bring about the destruction of fascism, the liberation of oppressed nations, and a rapid transition to world socialism. Consequently, all workers, democrats and oppressed peoples should redouble their efforts in the struggle for liberty and social justice. 24 The central committee complained in August that the war effort was hampered by the refusal to arm Africans, Coloured and Indians, or to employ them on skilled work. Churchill and Roosevelt had declared their intention of allowing all peoples to choose their own form of government. 'The Communist policy is to press for these rights to be granted not only in Europe after the war, but here and now within the British Empire itself.' Only by granting full rights to the peoples of Africa, India and the colonies could the fight for democracy become a reality.
Afrikaner nationalists accused the communists of turning Africans against the whites. Critics of another kind said that the party had changed sides on instructions from Moscow. According to Eddie Roux, the party as ever subordinated 'the South African struggle to the needs of the world situation' after the invasion of the Soviet Union. 25 The communists claimed to be consistent in principle, and saw no conflict of interests such as Roux implied. A complete mobilization of resources would lead to complete liberation from national oppression. If Africans were trained for skilled work and to use arms, they could no longer be treated as inferior. Communists drove the point home by condemning discrimination in the pay of soldiers: 12s. 3d. a day for a white private with wife and child, 7s. for a Coloured or Indian, and 2s. 3d. for an African. The scales, remarked Inkululeko (Freedom), the party's fortnightly in Johannesburg, revealed the government's stubborn insistence on fighting the war on a colour bar basis. Yet discrimination undermined morale in the army, discouraged civilians and harmed the whole war effort. 26
Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December and the sensational advances made by her troops brought the danger of war nearer home. A communist party statement issued in January 1942 called for complete mobilization, the rapid training of Africans, Coloured and Indians for skilled work, and the creation of a national army in which men of all races would bear arms and receive the same treatment. In February, after the fall of Singapore, the party warned that South Africa under existing policies was as powerless as Malaya to resist an invasion. When the Cape provincial council urged the government to prohibit ' subversive Communist activities', the central committee replied in May that many of its members were on active service or otherwise engaged in promoting the war effort. Proposals to arm Africans, train them for skilled work, and raise their living standards to the white man's level were of primary importance to the country's future. 27
'Before the Japanese take this country,' Smuts promised parliament on 11 March 1942, 'I will see to it that every Coloured and every Native that can be armed will be armed.' This must be done now, urged the communists, and they warned people not to put their trust in the Japanese, whose victories in the Pacific fired the imagination of many Africans and Coloured with the hope that they, too, might be liberated by an invasion. Such wishful thinking, said Dadoo, resulted from the oppressive nature of the regime. 'Free us to defend our homes and our country before it is too late.' 28 Kotane, the party's general secretary, echoed the appeal in a widely distributed pamphlet. south Africa is what we Non-Europeans allowed her to be,' he declared; and 'in the future she will be what we ourselves make of her.' If Africans, Coloured and Indians were organized and stood together, there would never have been industrial and social colour bars. 29
The party broadcast its message at meetings, in a steady output of leaflets and pamphlets, and through the medium of its press: Inkululeko, a fortnightly published at Johannesburg in African languages; the Ware Republikein (True Republican), addressed to Afrikaner workers; the Call, a duplicated journal published in Durban; and the Guardian, whose circulation rose from 12,000 in 1940 to 42,000 in June 1943. A Defend South Africa campaign, launched in 1942, attracted large audiences and many recruits to the party. Its membership increased from 400 to 1,500 between April 1941 and December 1943. These figures represented a stable body of politically educated activists, who were expected to fill a leading role in trade unions, national movements, local communities, factories and radical organizations.
Edwin Mofutsanyana, Alpheus Maliba and John Lekgotha represented the party in elections to the Native Representative Council in 1942. Though defeated, they received wide backing in the rural areas of the Free State and Transvaal, where Maliba (1901-67) had founded the Zoutpansberg Cultural Association, an organization of Venda peasants. 30 He came to Johannesburg in 1935, learnt to read and write in the party's night school, and was elected to the local district committee. A leader of the Venda and the African National Congress, he was banned from political work in the 1950s and imprisoned under the 'terrorist' act in 1967. He died in his cell, allegedly after hanging himself, on 9 September 1967.
Nine white communists entered the field in the parliamentary elections of 1943: four on the Rand, three in Cape Town, one in Durban, and one in East London. 31 All were South African born; four were Afrikaners; six were trade unionists with a working-class background. They suffered defeat, polling only 6,800 votes between them, or one-tenth of those cast in the nine constituencies, but they claimed to have brought home to voters the need for unity against poverty, disease and oppression. The Labour party won nine seats with the support of the United party and the Trades Council. Solly Sachs and Johanna Cornelius, backed by the Transvaal garment workers' union, stood and lost in the name of the Independent Labour party on a platform of 'progressive capitalism'.
Criticized for having ignored African and Coloured claims in his electioneering campaign, Sachs replied that the communists were wrong in 'preaching pure doctrinaire Socialism'. He was more successful with the policy of forming parallel racial unions and concentrating on the struggle for higher wages. The 'Bourgeois Bolsheviks' who led the party, he said, had committed 'terrible blunders' which 'brought the greatest disaster to the Working-class Movement'. It was because of them that hundreds of thousands of white workers had turned to the camp of reaction. 32
Reproaches of this kind had been levelled against radical socialists since Crawford's time; and the communists, unabashed, continued to fight elections on a platform of democratic rights for all. Their first successes came towards the end of 1943, when Sam Kahn and Betty Radford, the talented editor of the Guardian, were elected to Cape Town's city council. She and her husband George Sacks, a leading surgeon, had joined the party in 1941 after serving a long apprenticeship in radical politics. Assisted by a small unpaid editorial staff and without financial backing, she started the paper in 1937, edited it for eleven years without any monetary reward, raised its circulation to 50,000 by the end of the war, and made it a model of left-wing journalism.
Twenty-five years of work against hostile propaganda, said Bill Andrews, the Communist party's chairman, had been rewarded by the election of the first communists to an official body. Reporting on progress at the end of 1943, the central committee claimed full justification for its policy of appealing to white voters to reject all colour bars, which kept four-fifths of the population in servitude and strengthened capitalism. By adopting it, the party had achieved the impossible. 'We have brought together in our organization men and women of all racial groups in South Africa, working together in comradeship for common ends on a basis of complete equality. We have done this in the teeth of bitter opposition and in the face of the dominant prejudices of society.' 33
Others on the left shared this optimism. ' Congress is looking up,' said the veteran James Gumede at the ANCs annual conference in December 1943.'I see in the enthusiasm and youthfulness of the delegates a new hope.' 34 The conference adopted a Charter of Rights modelled on the Atlantic Charter drawn up by Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941; and undertook to support an anti-pass campaign launched by the Johannesburg Communist party in November. 'We must demand full adult ranchise,' declared Dr Xumain his presidential address. 'If you talk of action,' said Kotane, 'we are all behind you.'
The army, a body of volunteers without any conscripts, showed that white South Africans could be more tolerant of darker men and women when abroad than at home. The Army Education Service opened the minds of front line troops to progressive ideas, while the Springbok Legion organized them for political action on a liberal programme. Formed in September 1941, the League grew out of a Union of Soldiers initiated by Morley-Turner in Libya and a parallel movement started in a South African army camp by Vic Clapham, the Guardian's cartoonist. Its six-point programme undertook to secure a fair deal for soldiers, ex-servicemen and their dependants; preserve unity between the races; defend democracy and promote Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Fighting Talk, a lively journal published in English and Afrikaans, carried on a vigorous campaign for soldiers' rights, condemned racial discrimination, and alerted the League's 40,000 members to the disruptive work of nazified nationalists.
Victories on the battle front and high profits at home engendered a mood of euphoria in the pro-war parties. Amid much talk in 1943-4 of social security for all, the government extended school feeding schemes, old age pensions and invalidity grants on discriminatory scales to black and brown South Africans. Optimists thought that the time was ripe for a reversal of apartheid policies. ' Isolation has gone and I am afraid segregation has fallen on evil days too,' Smuts had philosophized at the height of the war danger. 36 Yet he would not introduce reforms liable to weaken the structure of white supremacy. Shortly before the general election of 1943, he decided to disarm the Nationalists and placate the Coloured by introducing administrative segregation. Coloured affairs were to be dealt with by a special section in the department of interior and by a permanent commission of Coloured notables.
Communists and Coloured radicals made an immediate and emphatic protest. Separation, they predicted, would lead to segregation along the lines of the detested native affairs department. The New Era Fellowship, a leftist debating society, took the initiative in forming the Anti-CAD on 28 February 1943. Its mission was to obstruct the proposed Coloured Affairs Department and to 'canalize all non-European sentiment and endeavour - economic, political and social - in one mighty stream that will expunge from the statute book all discriminatory legislation'. 37 Apart from I. B. Tabata, the leading members were Coloured intellectuals: Dr Goolam Gool, the chairman; his wife, Miss H. Ahmed; his sister, Janub Gool (Mrs Tabata); B. Kies, R. E. Viljoen, A. Fataar and the Rev. D. M. Wessels.
Dr F. H. Gow, president of the APO and leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, advised the community to accept the government's 'gesture of goodwill', but a large number of his members turned against him. Some 200 delegates attended the first National Anti-CAD conference in Cape Town on 29 May 1943. They represented 109 societies and groups, including branches of the APO, Communist party, National Liberation League, Non-European United Front, trade unions, teachers' and students' organizations. The conference decided to institute a political and social boycott of the Coloured Advisory Council, and to promote a united front against all forms of discrimination. 38
The Anti-cad would remain Coloured and 'eventually founder on the rock of isolation', Kotane pointed out, unless it broadened its scope to include the demands of Indians and Africans. 39 Aware of this weakness, Gool and his colleagues attended a conference convened by the All African Convention at Bloemfontein in December. An assortment of political bodies, trade unions, ratepayers' societies, church and welfare organizations agreed to form a Non-European Unity Movement on the basis of a Ten Point programme, and with an executive of sixteen members: eight from the Convention, four from the Anti-cad, and four from the S.A. Indian Congress; with Jabavu as the chairman, Gool and A. I. Kajee as vice-chairmen. 40 Kajee and his fellow Indians declined.
Kajee was then negotiating the Pretoria Agreement with Smuts, who undertook in 1944 to suspend the 'Pegging' Act on condition that a licensing board be appointed to control the occupation by Indians of houses formerly occupied by whites in Durban. When this was made known, another storm of protest divided the Indian community. Voluntary segregation, said Dadoo, will lead to 'national suicide'; Dr G. M. Naicker and twelve other members of the Natal Indian Congress executive repudiated the agreement; and an Anti-Segregation Council was formed to agitate for adult suffrage on a common roll. 41
Representatives of the S.A. Indian Congress, the All African Convention and the Anti-cad met in the midst of this uproar at Johannesburg in July to resume negotiations on the proposed unity movement. The Indians suggested cooperation on specific issues, such as passes, the Pegging Act, and the Coloured Advisory Council; and were told that the Ten Point programme constituted an absolute minimum for unity. That was quite unreal, Dadoo argued, and unacceptable to the reactionary leaders of Congress. Moreover, neither the Convention nor the Anti-cad was a representative body, since they relegated the APO to a subordinate position and virtually ignored the African National Congress, which 'most certainly has roots among the African people as their premier national body'. 42
Dadoo maintained that the leaders of the Anti-cad wished to 'isolate the African National Congress and to revive the defunct All-African Convention'. He thought that the better approach was to strengthen 'existing national liberatory organizations, by making them live and active bodies'. The executives of the ANC, APO, SAIC and Anti-cad should lay a basis for unity through cooperation in common struggle. The Anti-CAD insisted, however, that agreement on principle must come first; and undertook to appeal to the Indians over the heads of the 'merchant class'. 43
Though open to all societies 'genuinely willing to fight segregation' and prepared to accept its programme, the Non-European Unity Movement attracted few Indians or whites, and consisted mainly of Coloured and African intellectuals in the Cape. The programme itself was not a stumbling block. Less comprehensive and specific than tile National Liberation League's charter, it contained nothing that would displease a radical. Its objectives were similar to demands put forward by opponents of discrimination since 1910: equality of franchise rights, civil liberties and personal security; freedom of education, movement and occupation; and a 'revision' of the 'land question', the legal code, taxation and labour laws in accordance with the principle of equality. The wording was meant to be restrained, vague and ambiguous, so that the programme might appeal to the wide range of political opinions represented in the Convention and the Anti-CAD. 44
The Non-European Unity Movement made the programme its chief battle ground. No meeting, demonstration, strike or passive resistance met with approval unless it was 'principled' in terms of the programme, and directed by the NEUM. Making non-collaboration its major principle of struggle, and the boycott its great weapon, the NEUM called for withdrawal from the Coloured Advisory Council and the Native Representative Council. 'There must be a parting of the ways,' announced the All African Convention's executive committee in July 1944: 'Either with the people against the Government, against the oppressors, or with the government against the people. The appeal, the demand of the Convention should go out to all the elected members of the NRC to resign collectively and immediately. Should a few refuse to serve the interests of the people, the rest must expose them.' 45
By the end of 1944 the Anti-CAD claimed to have penetrated every type of Coloured institution, gained control of the APO and the Teachers' League of S.A. isolated the Coloured Advisory Council and discredited its members. Reviewing its record three years later, Brian Bunting, son of S. P. Bunting and later a member of the Communist party's central committee, wrote that Anti-CAD had 'brought some of the most militant figures in the Coloured community to the fore'. 46 The spirit of nationalism kindled by La Guma, Gomas and Gool in 1935 when they founded the National Liberation League was spreading slowly through the community.
One cannot tell how far the spirit spread. From all accounts it made small progress among artisans, other workers or businessmen. Though deeply resentful of colour bars, they shared the white man's language and culture, enmeshed with him at many levels and regarded themselves as an integral part of his society. The great bulk of Coloured were indifferent or hostile to the idea of unity with Africans which the Anti-cad put in the forefront of its campaign. New fissures consequently developed. Conservatives, led by Dr Gow, chairman of the CAC, and his successor George Golding formed rival organizations: the Coloured People's National Union and the Teachers' Educational and Professional Association. Without popular support, the boycott movement failed to achieve its aim of breaking 'the chain of collaboration' that bound the people 'through their leaders to their oppressors'. 47
The Anti-cad intended, Tabata explained in January 1945, to form local coordinating unity committees which would 'draw the community into the struggle, prepare the masses for a concerted onslaught against oppression and rally them in the fight for liberation'. The phrases struck a familiar note, as did his warning that group prejudices would not disappear overnight. 'If we try to ignore historical processes we shall break our necks.' People must be taught to forget their racial groups and think only of their common oppression. They would reach that stage by taking part in actual struggle on the basis of the Ten Point programme. 48
Apart from racial animosities between Coloured and Africans - which the government and conservative Coloured leaders exploited to the full - the teachers who controlled the Non-European Unity Movement had to cope with grave personal problems. Employed in government and mission schools under a strict disciplinary code, they risked their careers if they joined in direct, physical and potentially unlawful forms of protest. Even the most courageous might hesitate to jeopardize a hardwon status and means of livelihood in a society that offered few openings of equal worth to an educated Coloured or African. Partly for this reason, the NEUM held its followers back from joining in demonstrations, strikes and defiance campaigns organized by the African National Congress and its allies; concentrated instead on propaganda; and called for a boycott of segregated institutions.
The boycott was a strategy of withdrawal, useful in so far as it developed a group resistance to segregated institutions, though without an appreciable effect on the administration, which could readily dispense with African and Coloured advisory boards or councils. Teachers could therefore demand a boycott with immunity; and at the same time give vent to resentments by denouncing as 'quislings' and 'collaborators' those who took part in elections to the 'dummy councils'. Among them, said B. M. Kies, a prominent teacher and leader of Anti-CAD, were 'dozens and dozens of so-called Radicals and Socialists and Communists who paid lip-service to the emancipation of the Non-European, while they rode into the Council or Parliament on his back, or grew rich at his expense by organizing trade unions'. 49 This was an inaccurate statement. There were then three communists on the Cape Town municipal council and none in parliament. No communist trade union official earned more than the workers whom he organized.
The Anti-CAD, like the APO in its salad days, initially followed the Marxist line. 'We, the Non-European oppressed, ' said Kies, 'must never confuse the European worker, aristocrat of labour though he may be today, with the European ruling class.' Economic exploitation, national or colour oppression, sprang from the same root; and the white worker must willy-nilly find his way to the Coloured and African worker, his real ally, on the basis of the Ten Point programme. The door would be kept open to him, for the Anti-CAD had no desire to replace the White Herrenvolk by a Black Herrenvolk.
Colour dichotomy soon took the place of class dichotomy in the polemics of the Anti-CAD. It lumped all whites together worker and employer, liberal and racist, communist and capitalist - under the 'herrenvolk' label. This approach seemed to correspond more closely to the outward appearance of things, appealed to the heightened colour consciousness of a sorely stricken minority, and served to discredit the communists, whom the Anti-CAD regarded as its greatest rival. By abusing them, it warded off the danger of being persecuted as a subversive organization, and discouraged its members from being attracted to a non-racial radicalism. The main achievement of the Anti-CAD was to immobilize a generation of Coloured intellectuals, immunize them against Marxist theory, and isolate them from the rest of the liberation movement.
Confident of their theoretical and technical competence, the Coloured nationalists of the Anti-CAD rejected white leadership in every sphere. It was their destiny, they said, to lead the masses to freedom, not through irresponsible and opportunist minor skirmishes, but in one great battle that would sweep all colour bars aside. This holistic concept of 'principled struggle' against the 'whole machinery of oppression' was never put to the test. Tabata, Kies and Gool dissipated their energies on denunciations of militants outside their ranks and turned 'non-collaboration' into a synonym for inactivity. The diatribes bred a mood of angry defiance in many Coloured and African teachers in the Cape, and alienated African and Indian congressmen.
Young intellectuals in the ANC, no less confident of their own ability to lead, formed the African Youth League in 1943. Some, like Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela and Govan Mbeki, had studied at Fort Hare; Anton Lembede, the League's president, was a lawyer from Seme's office; Walter Sisulu, another foundation member, had come up the hard way through the gold mines and factories. 50 The League, too, called for non-collaboration, boycotts and a programme of positive action; and related its demand for equality and freedom to a vision based on traditional African values adjusted to the conditions of an industrial society. Much of the ANCs history for the next five years centred round a conflict between Xuma's old guard, on the one hand, and the young militants or communists on the other.
Further signs of a resurgent militancy appeared: an epidemic of African strikes, the Alexandra bus boycotts, and a great campaign against the pass laws in 1944. Between 40,000 and 60,000 Africans and Coloured lived in Alexandra township about nine miles from the centre of Johannesburg. In August 1943 thousands walked eighteen miles a day to and from work rather than submit to an increase in bus fares from 4d. to 5d. Having won the first round after protesting with their feet for nine days, they resumed the struggle in November 1944 against another attempt to raise the fare. The Alexandra branch of the Communist party, led by Gauer Radebe and David Bopape, secretary of the Transvaal ANC, called on the residents to walk. For seven weeks they trudged to Johannesburg and back again before they could claim a victory. They 'have displayed the courage, unity and determination', said the communists, 'which is necessary for all of us if we are to win the kind of South Africa we want'. 51
Thousands of homeless African families took possession of vacant land adjoining the big township of Orlando in Johannesburg; built shelters out of split poles, packing cases, hessian, canvas, paraffin tins or corrugated iron; adopted the slogan sofazonke' - we die together - coined by their leader James Mpanza; and defended Shanty Town against the government, police and municipality. Prohibited from buying land, Africans were condemned, wrote Hilda Watts (Mrs Bemstein), the only communist on Johannesburg's city council, 'to breeze-block slums, to sub-tenancies, to sharing rooms, to living with their families in corridors, shacks and yards, without any immediate hope of relief'. 52 Squatters' camps sprang up in peri-urban areas throughout the country as Africans, hamstrung by law and neglected by the housing authorities, found their own solution to the problems caused by overcrowding in segregated ghettos.
Shanty towns, Dr Xumatold an anti-pass rally at Cape Town in April 1944, grew out of conditions created by repressive laws that were ' calculated to deliver the African worker to the European employer as the cheapest form of labour'. 53 Land hunger forced peasants into the towns, only to be harassed under pass laws which he described as 'an instrument of oppression, a stigma of inferiority, an economic barrier to progress and self respect'. 54 Under his leadership, the African National Congress threw itself into the campaign initiated by Johannesburg communists against the pass system and urged its branches to take part in forming a network of local anti-pass committees.
African nationalists were breaking away from the reliance on verbal protests, respectable conformism and red-baiting that had demoralized Congress under Seme's rule. The decision to embark on mass action, galvanize Congress branches and enter into an open alliance with communists began a process that was to result in the Congress Alliance of 1955. The National Anti-Pass Council elected in May at a conference attended by 540 delegates included Xuma as chairman and the communists Dadoo as vice-chairman, Bopape as secretary, Josie Mpama as a trustee, Mofutsanyana, Marks, Maliba and Kotane. 55 Never before had militants in the liberation movement established so broad a basis for active struggle.
The campaign produced a whirlwind of propaganda but failed to reach the target of a million signatures to a petition. When a deputation headed by Dadoo and Selope Thema took it to Cape Town in June 1945, the acting premier J. H. Hofmeyr refused to meet them. Six years of war had made no change in the essential elements of the social structure. Uniformed members of the Ossewabrandwag, meeting in Johannesburg on the eve of Labour Day, heard Fuhrer van Rensburg accuse communists of plotting to set up a black republic. A week later nearly 2,000 African miners assembled to discuss a report on their union by its chairman J. B. Marks. In September Springbok Legionaires routed a Nationalist party conference in Johannesburg and suffered 160 casualties in clashes with Nationalists and the police. The country was back to normal.
The Communist party's central committee met in July to chart a course for the immediate future and found small reason for optimism. The united front phase of defensive action, it concluded, had come to an end. The war boom would give way to economic depression and an attack on the worker's standards. White supremacists would resume the offensive against African, Coloured and Indian rights. A period of bitter class and national struggle lay ahead. The Malans, Pirows and van Rensburgs would attempt to impose the kind of fascist dictatorship that had been defeated in Europe. 'The ultimate result of failure to raise the living standards of the poorest section and to extend democracy will be wage cuts and loss of democracy for all.' 56
The Labour party was more hopeful. Encouraged by postwar discontent and Labour's victory in Britain, the national executive decided that Madeley should withdraw from the cabinet and issued a statement to this effect shortly before Johannesburg's municipal elections in October. The party's electoral manifesto denounced the communist policy of equal rights for all. Right-wing Labour leaders appeared on public platforms with Nationalists in a campaign for stern measures to cope with the crime wave. ' One or two public Iynchings would do a lot of good,' suggested R. Knevitt, the Labour candidate in Braamfontein, and his party agitated for stricter pass laws, including a 9 p.m. curfew for all Africans. 57 The Communist party's four candidates were defeated, and Labour won five seats, giving it 18 in all and an uneasy control of the council against the divided opposition of 16 United party and 7 Nationalist councillors.
An emergency committee, chaired by Colin Legum, editor of the Illustrated Labour Bulletin and author of the manifesto, urged the government to deport Mpanza and expel squatters from Orlando township. His motion was carried by twenty-seven votes to two after an angry debate in which Hilda Watts, the solitary communist on the council, accused Labour of betraying its principles and disregarding its tradition of struggle against undemocratic deportations. Would the council have dared to call in the police against homeless whites? she asked. 58 The Labour right wing, however, persisted in its efforts to woo a reactionary electorate by demanding repressive action in defence of white supremacy.
Madeley tendered his resignation from the cabinet on 3 October 1945, in deference, he said, to his party's wishes and in order to free himself for winning the peace. That could not be done, he explained, under the system of private enterprise for profit to which the government adhered. In March he claimed that he had resigned becallse of the government's failure to implement promises made during the war. In September he resigned from the party over the issue of franchise rights for Indians, and declared that a faction in his own ranks had forced him to leave the cabinet in retaliation for the United party's refusal to conclude an electoral pact with Labour in the municipal elections. 59
Smuts's Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Bill of 1946 prohibited land transfers between Indians and non-Indians in Transvaal and Natal, except in ' exempted areas' or with the minister's consent. To sugar the pill, Smuts proposed to give Indians two white representatives in the senate, three whites in the assembly, and two, who might be Indians, in the Natal provincial council. Nationalists and Dominionites protested angrily that Indians had no claim to any political rights. The Labour party caucus agreed to the principle of residential segregation, but not on the franchise clauses, and decided that members should vote according to their conscience. Madeley and M. J. van den Berg voted with the opposition, Christie, Latimer, Payne, Sullivan and Wanless, for the bill. 60
Repudiated by their national council, Madeley and van den Berg resigned from the party, the latter to join the Nationalists. Other resignations followed from Labour's slender parliamentary ranks: senator Henderson, the party's general secretary, Duncan Burnside, Miles-Cadman and Sullivan, who took refuge in the United party. Thirty-seven years after Union, the Labour party had five seats in a parliament of 153 members. Madeley announced that he would form a new party on an anti-Indian platform. He was not a 'copybook maxim socialist', he declared. Labour had fallen into the hands of communists, 'chancers' and intriguers; but 'one could not achieve socialism by handing over the franchise to a body of Indian capitalists'. If capitalism was bad, Indian capitalism was ten times worse. 61 He died in May 1947, rejected by and rejecting the party in which he had spent his entire political life.
Successive electoral pacts had limited the party to a handful of constituencies and undermined the morale of its branches. For the sake of seats in the white supremacy parliament, Labour consistently betrayed its socialist principles. Its appeals to colour prejudice and racial passions encouraged white workers to look for security to the big battalions of the ruling class. Facing political bankruptcy, collapse or absorption by its rivals, the party tried to retrieve its fortunes. A special conference held in November 1946 adopted a new programme for the 'Non-European'. 62 South Africa's racial policies, it declared, met with much criticism abroad, gave 'unrealistic advisers ' an opportunity 'to mislead the Non-European', and should be 'lifted above the cockpit of party-political fights'.
It was a sentimental appeal without political substance. Only the communists accepted an invitation to attend an all-party conference to discuss the policy. The programme itself revealed much muddled thinking, a mild liberalism, and tenacious adherence to the essentials of white supremacy. Among other things, the Labour party wished to do away with the exploitation of 'cheap and docile' labour, include Africans in the definition of employee under industrial laws, provide industrial training for Africans with safeguards for white workers, and give Coloured and Asians the right to elect persons of their own race to parliament. Africans would continue to be represented by whites, but on a bigger scale. Radical only in terms of Labour's traditional attitudes, the programme reflected the militant mood aroused by the Indians' passive resistance campaign and the African miners' strike of 1946.
Thousands of workers had joined the Natal Indian Congress. With this reinforcement, the Anti-Segregation Council routed the Kajee-Pather leadership in October 1945 and took control of Congress. 'Our programme,' announced Dr Naicker, the new president, 'is to enable Indians to live as free citizens in a free society.' 63 Some months later, Dr Dadoo became the president of the Transvaal Indian Congress. A conference of the S.A. Indian Congress held at Cape Town in February 1946 called on Indians to prepare for 'a concerted and prolonged resistance' against Smuts's ghetto bill. 64 Passive resistance councils were set up in Natal and the Transvaal. Segregation, declared Dadoo in April, led to political and economic serfdom, inculcated a feeling of inferiority and subservience to the ruling class, crushed the spirit of freedom, and assisted the growth of fascism based on racial hatred and white domination. 65 A joint passive resistance council appealed in June for 'a day of Hartal' (mourning) as soon as the governor general assented to the bill. 66
Indians showed once again that they were the most cohesive and politically mature community in the subjugated population. More than 2,000 resisters - among whom were 300 women, as well as factory workers, peasants, doctors, lawyers, teachers and shop assistants - went to jail in the next two years. Some followed the example of Gandhis satyagrahis by illegally crossing the Natal-Transvaal border; most were convicted on a charge of occupying land reserved for whites. Dr Dadoo and Dr Naicker were among the first batch of prisoners. Convicted for a second time and sentenced to six months' hard labour, the two leaders were among the last of the resisters to be released in July 1948. The Nationalists were then in power, and the passive resistance council suspended the campaign. Before long the new government repealed the franchise provisions but retained the ban on transfers of land to Indians. 67
The resisters could console themselves with the knowledge that they had left a permanent mark on African and world opinion. The African National Congress, Dr Xumasaid in April 1946, stood four square behind the campaign. Bogged down in the struggle against pass laws and shaken by the effects of the miners' strike in August, African leaders could hardly offer more than moral backing. But they drew the correct conclusions. In March 1947 Xuma, Dadoo and Naicker signed a declaration of unity in which they undertook to work together for full franchise rights and equality with whites. A basis was being laid for closer cooperation between Africans and Indians than any achieved elsewhere in Africa.
Natal Indians decided in March 1946 to press for immediate economic sanctions, the withdrawal of India's high commissioner, and an appeal to the United Nations. 68 Thus persuaded, the Delhi government under Nehru recalled the high commissioner, cut off trade relations with South Africa and indicted its racial policies before the general assembly of the United Nations in November. Smuts pleaded that the position of Indians was a purely domestic affair; but his critics, led by Mrs Pandit and Alexei Vyshinsky, carried the day. An overwhelming majority of the assembly demanded that the treatment of Indians should conform to agreements between India and South Africa and to the relevant clauses of the Charter. Smuts fared no better with his proposal to annex South West Africa. That, said Mrs Pandit' would mean 'permanent helotry' for Africans. The assembly recommended instead that the territory be placed under United Nations trusteeship. White South Africa had suffered a serious moral defeat. National liberation could claim its first significant victory in the long struggle to arouse world opinion against white supremacy.