'You can do what you like, you can shoot us, arrest us, imprison us, but you are not going to break our spirit,' said Paul Mosaka in the Native Representative Council, when it met in August 1946 at the height of the miners' strike. 'We shall continue fighting for our rights until the day dawns when we shall have the right to live like human beings in the land of our birth, in the land that is ours.' 1 An energetic businessman in Johannesburg and co-founder with senator H. Basner of the African Democratic party, Mosaka voiced the feelings of all the elected councillors. He condemned the 'wanton shooting by the police' and blamed the strike on the government's refusal to recognize African trade unions. On a motion introduced by Dr Moroka, the council unanimously deprecated 'the Government's postwar continuation of a policy of Fascism which is the antithesis and negation of the letter and spirit of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Charter'; called for the abolition of all discriminatory legislation affecting non-Europeans; and decided to adjourn the council in protest. 2
This defiant mood was also evident in the African National Congress. Meeting in October, it dismissed an appeal by Kadalie and Msimang to organize yet another petition to parliament. An overwhelming majority of the 500 delegates voted instead for a motion introduced by Moses Kotane, general secretary of the Communist party, and Anton Lembede, leader of the ANC Youth League. Their resolution urged Africans to struggle for full citizen rights, and to boycott elections to the NRC and to parliament. 3 It appeared to be a drastic reversal of policy; yet as events would show, the African elite were not prepared to cut themselves off from the 'toy telephone' of the Native Representative Council, or to surrender the prospect of office, salary and a political platform.
The council reassembled on 20 November to hear the acting prime minister, J. H. Hofmeyer, deliver the government's reply. He rebuked councillors for making 'violent and exaggerated statements' and refused to entertain the idea of repealing discriminatory laws. Legislation to recognize African trade -unions was being drafted, he said, but they would not be permitted on the mines. The rebuff caused much resentment, which councillors expressed during a week of fruitless argument. Unable to extract 'a more reassuring' statement of the government's intention to bring its policy into line with the changing conditions of African life', the councillors abandoned the session, in order, they said, to consult with the people. 4
The people, speaking through delegates to the ANCs annual conference in December, called for a boycott. So also, did the Communist party's conference in January 1947, though with an implied reservation. Doubting both the tactical value of a boycott and the ANCs determination to see it through, the party agreed only to 'participate in any active campaign to make this decision effective'. Communists on their own could not conduct a boycott campaign, Kotane explained. 'The initiative came from and will in future have to come from African organizations.' 5 Edwin Mofutsanyana was more explicit. boycotts, he argued, were a method of struggle and not a principle of policy. They might be an effective weapon if and when 'there exists a situation in which the masses are organizing and mobilising for a new upsurge against the existing order of society, and from which can emerge a real - not verbal, but active - struggle for State power'. 6
Apart from any differences of theory, communists had a practical objection to a rigorous boycott policy. Being a nonracial party, they could take part in elections at many levels. African communists sat on advisory boards and contested elections to, the NPC. Coloured communists stood for election to municipal councils in the Cape. White communists fought in municipal, provincial and parliamentary elections. The party had a long electioneering tradition and was intent on putting its policy of racial equality under socialisrn before all sections of the population. It was a class party, argued H. A. Naidoo, a member of the central committee, and should not tail behind the national organizations or become so closely identified with them as to lose its independence. Its purpose was to lead persons of all races and nations towards a united socialist South Africa. 7
The communists loyally refrained from contesting a Transkeian by-election in June 1947. Douglas Buchanan, a prominent white liberal, was returned unopposed in the teeth of a strong boycott movement. 8 It was apparent that no boycott could be complete; and to succeed in raising the level of political understanding, the campaign should be conducted by a resolute and single-minded body of activists. The communists drew this conclusion and noted with misgiving that members of the Native Representative Council had discussed their future with Smuts in May. He would make no promises, he emphasized, and was merely throwing out 'a bone for the Council to chew on'; but he suggested an enlarged and wholly elective council with subordinate legislative powers. Six months later the caucus of elected councillors issued a statement spurning the bone; though they did not call for the dissolution of the council. They proposed instead that it be given wider powers; and that Africans in the north be allowed to elect white representatives to parliament and provincial councils. The only acceptable policy, said the councillors, was one that would give their people a sense of security and recognize them as citizens of this country and not things apart '. 9
Hofmeyr was prepared to concede that claim in principle. Africans, he told parliament, were integrated as wage earners, consumers and taxpayers into a single society with whites and shared some of their interests. By standards of elementary justice and for the sake of the white man's own security, Africans were entitled to a measure of political representation according to their state of development. 10 It was a logical, eloquent and futile appeal. The Nationalist opposition declared that the Native Representative Council was ' a breeding ground of agitators'; and demanded racial segregation - 'politically, residentially and as far as practicable, also industrially '. The Nationalist view prevailed. Smuts had thrown away such opportunities as the war presented to broaden the basis of the franchise, strengthen his party and move towards an open society.
African leaders persisted in their efforts to open the door by appealing for inter-racial collaboration on the basis of justice, goodwill and social realism. Their reluctance to force the issue to breaking point came to the surface at the ANCs thirty-fifth annual conference in December. Delegates were in two minds about the boycott but agreed that Congress had failed to mobilize people behind its policy. Oliver Tambo of the Youth League and Gana Makabeni suspected that some leaders had deliberately sabotaged the decision; Xuma doubted its wisdom; and Mofutsanyana complained that there was no discipline in Congress. 'A positive boycott,' he said, 'must be one in which the leaders go to the people in town and country.' 11
A compromise resolution was adopted by sixty-seven votes to seven. It affirmed the boycott in principle and nullified it in practice. To advise the electorate to abstain from voting, conference agreed, would cause great confusion, divide their ranks and leave the field clear for collaborators to undermine the campaign. Congress would intensify the boycott campaign, and the most effective way of attaining this objective was to work for the return of sitting councillors as far as possible and to secure the election of others on a boycott ticket. The resolution left the field wide open to all candidates for office under the Representation of Natives Act.
The act was a vicious piece of racial discrimination which cloaked the country's undemocratic social order, declared the Communist party at its annual conference in January 1948. Parliament would continue to perpetuate backwardness and oppression as long as the vote was denied to Africans, Coloured and Indians. The primary aim of communists in the forthcoming general election would be to bring about the defeat of the pro-fascist Nationalist party, advance the struggle for a universal franchise, and rally the people for socialist democracy. The party would put up its own candidates for parliament and support those candidates in elections to the Native Representative Council who pledged themselves to work for the abolition of the council, the repeal of the act, and the introduction of universal franchise. Edwin Mofutsanyana, Alpheus Naliba and A. S. Damana would represent the party in the NRC elections. 12
The conference also demanded the withdrawal of criminal charges then pending against members of the central executive as a direct consequence of the strike by African miners in 1946. Detectives had raided the party's offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg on 16 August during the strike. Ten days later a preparatory examination was opened in Johannesburg against forty-seven men and five women, who were charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act and war measure 145. It was the biggest political trial since 1922 and the most representative in the country's history. The accused included 31 Africans, 11 whites, 6 Indians, 3 Coloured and 1 Chinese. At least twenty-nine were communists, among them Moses Kotane, the party's general secretary, Danie du Plessis, secretary of the Johannesburg district committee, and the other ten whites on trial. One was advocate Bram Fischer, grandson of the first prime minister of the Orange Free State. The Africans included J. B. Marks and J. J. Majoro of the African miners' union; Gilbert Coka and sixteen other members of the African National Congress. Dr Yusuf Dadoo, chairman of Johannesburg's district committee and president of the Transvaal Indian Congress, had been brought under escort from Newcastle, Natal, where he was serving a sentence of imprisonment for his part in the passive resistance campaign against the ghetto act.
The trial ended in an anti-climax on 16 September. Kotane and five other accused were discharged. The remaining forty-six, having pleaded guilty to aiding an illegal strike, were fined £15 or £50, half of which was suspended. It was evident that the government had made up its mind to go after bigger game. On the 21st, police officials acting on instructions from Harry Lawrence, the minister for justice, swooped down on radicals in the six largest towns and removed papers, letters, pamphlets and books. It was the biggest police raid to date and extended to many private homes as well as to the offices of left trade unions, the Springbok Legion, the Guardian, the central and district committees of the Communist party.
The party's executive committee accused the government of pursuing a political vendetta. 'With an eye on the impending by-elections and the future General Election, the Government is trying to steal the thunder of the Nationalists, who for years have been creating the bogey of a "communist menace''.' Then too, the government was subservient to the gold mining interests, those die-hard opponents of progress, who objected both to trade unions for low-paid workers and to democratic rights for all sections of the population. Worst of all was the dangerous trend revealed by the raid towards administrative lawlessness. It is a trend paralleled by the developments in Italy, (Germany and other countries that resulted in Fascism. Unless checked by the united forces of democracy, the Government's policy must similarly result in Fascism here. 13
After two months spent in working through the huge mass of documents, the police arrested eight members of the central executive committee in Cape Town: W. H. Andrews, the national chairman; Moses Kotane, the general secretary; Fred Carneson, secretary of the Cape district committee; I. O. Horvitch, who succeeded Andrews as chairman in 1949; Lucas Phillips, an African trade union secretary; Betty Radford, editor of the Guardian; H. J. Simons and Harry Snitcher. They appeared in the magistrate's court on 16 November and were remanded for a preparatory examination, which opened on 20 January with a dramatic and misleading propaganda statement by the public prosecutor, Dr Percy Yutar. 14
The crown, he said, would bring a charge of sedition as a result of the miners' strike during August 1946; and perhaps an even more serious charge relating to the securing of classified military information. Evidence would be led to show that the party had 'secret police' and a 'military bureau'; and that there was talk of building a 'proletarian army'. Because of financial difficulties and a decline in membership, he suggested, the party had made a desperate bid for the support of Africans. It became more militant and attempted to gain control of trade unions, particularly the African miners' union, whose secretary, J. B. Marks, sat on the Johannesburg district committee. In the event, Dr Yutar maintained, the party had engineered the strike as part of a plot to overthrow the government and substitute a communist regime by means of 'revolutionary upheavals for the seizure of political power by the workers'.
The supposed breach of the Official Secrets Act turned out to be a legal technicality relating to appeals for a boycott of boats carrying cargo to troops in Indonesia. What the prosecution called 'secret police' were in fact the Springbok Legion, which had no organizational ties with the party. The number of party members in good standing fell from 2,000 to 1,800 between January and November 1946, but the decline could not be regarded as serious or permanent. As for the sedition charge, it became evident during the twenty-four days of the preliminary trial that the prosecution relied mainly on obscure passages in letters exchanged between the Johannesburg district committee and the central executive on the likelihood of a strike by African miners.
As far back as May, the district committee had drawn up a plan of campaign involving the formation of five broad non-party committees to assist in the event of a strike. On receiving the report, the central executive hastily instructed its Johannesburg office to postpone further action pending discussions with the general secretary. Any decision to strike had to be taken by the miners' union and not by the party. A subsequent letter suggested, in somewhat cryptic language for security reasons, that the entire trade union movement on the Rand should be mobilized to induce the mine owners to negotiate. If all else failed, and a strike appeared to be unavoidable, it should be conducted by trade union leaders in cooperation with the miners' union and other sympathetic parties. 15
The accused elected to give evidence at the preliminary hearing and were subjected to an exhaustive inquiry about their policy, the role of communists in trade unions, and their attitude to strikes. The party stood for unity of workers regardless of colour, Dr Simons told the court, and had made 'a singular contribution to the labour movement in the promotion of racial harmony '. Communists were required to be active in the unions for which they were eligible and had done much to organize unskilled and semi-skilled Africans, Coloured and Indians. 'A good Communist must win the confidence of the workers by proving that he is a good trade unionist' honest and reliable.' But it was not the party's function or intention to decide policy for the unions, control them, call workers out on strike or for that matter tell them not to strike. 'This would be construed as interference, and the Party policy was not to interfere with trade unions.'
The strike, said witnesses for the defence, was a genuine and justifiable protest against exploitation and bad treatment. Senator Basner, the parliamentary representative of Africans in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, told the court that the authorities were well aware of the miners' discontent. Marks and Majoro had reported to him in May 1946 that the men were threatening to strike whether or not the union agreed. He then tried to persuade Dr Steyn, the minister of justice, to set up a board of arbitration, but without success. The strike would have been avoided at that stage, the senator thought, if any small increase had been offered. To receive a living wage, the miner required four times his existing rates of pay, or something like the 10s. a day demanded by the union. To make that possible, the government would have to reorganize the industry, in which it was a major partner.
Dr Yutar rejected the defence's explanation. 'The African mine workers,' he argued, 'constituted a very fruitful and ripe field for the Communist Party. There were 400,000 of them in one bloc, and it would be possible for the Communist Party to make and win demands for them, win their support and so strengthen the union and the party.' He inferred that J. B. Marks, the union's president, 'received his instructions from the Johannesburg District Committee with the approval of the Central Executive Committee'. The magistrate thereupon committed the accused for trial on charges of sedition arising from the strike and of contravening the Official Secrets Act in the 'Hands Off Java' campaign of October 1945.
Seven of the original accused and two others appeared before a special court in Johannesburg on 16 October. 16 They objected to irregularities in the proceedings; the court upheld the exceptions; the prosecutor withdrew the charges; and the police re-arrested the accused in open court. After a fresh preparatory examination had taken place in December, the accused were again committed on a charge of sedition and stood trial in Johannesburg on 3 May 1948. 17 The seditious element, said the attorney general, flowed largely from the basic principles of communism. The African miners' union, he contended, was a concealed wing of the party; the strike had been engineered by the Johannesburg district committee; and the central executive had conspired to initiate the strike, which resulted in the use of violence against the state authority.
There was no doubt of the party's strong and continuing interest in the miners' union since the pioneering work carried out by Bunting and Thibedi in 1930. A fresh start was made in 1940 by the party's national conference, which gave the Johannesburg district ' a particular duty ' to organize the miners. Reporting on progress a year later, Michael Harmel, the district secretary, explained that the party could not manage on its own. ' The African miners are cut off from the rest of the people, are constantly changing and going back to the countryside.' Moreover, the Chamber of Mines behaved as though trade unionism on the mines was illegal. That attitude should be challenged, he urged, by means of a broad and public campaign. The issue concerned all sections of the working class because the organized strength of 300,000 miners would benefit national liberation and the trade union movement. ' It is our duty to bring the realization of these facts to every worker and particularly to every Non-European.' 18
As a result, the Transvaal African Congress called a conference in June 1941 for the purpose of electing a committee to organize the miners. This was done. The union soon developed a momentum of its own, and became an autonomous body, paying its way and making its decisions without external control. To support his contention that the union was no more than a concealed wing of the Communist party, the prosecutor relied on mere inference and the fact that Marks belonged to the party. He omitted to point out that Marks was also a member of the ANCs national council.
The prosecution never could trace a causal link between the central executive committee and the strike, or establish the element of unlawful violence and political revolt that constitutes the crime of sedition. For these reasons. the attorney-general failed to present a valid indictment. It was quashed in the final trial in May because, the judges said, the accused 'are entitled to know in what way they are alleged to have taken part in the gatherings where sedition is alleged to have been committed'. 19 So ended the abortive trial. The Nationalist government took office later in the month and withdrew the charges in October, two years after the first arrests of the communists.
The after-effects of the long legal battle made a greater impact than the trial itself. Unable to convict the communists by judicial process, the government outlawed them by statute and ministerial decrees. The trial created an atmosphere favourable to the enactment of the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950. That in turn led directly to an alliance between the Communist party, the African National Congress and the Indian National Congress. From the mass of documents seized during the raids, the police extracted information for the listing, banning and persecution of communists and their supporters. By and large, the miners' strike and the witch hunt conducted by the Smuts government prepared the way for a further development of the police state under the Nationalist regime.
It was a miracle, some Nationalists said when they won 'the most dramatic and astounding' election in the country's history. 20 Die Transvaler, then edited by Dr Verwoerd, gave praise in its leading columns to divine providence. 'That which seemed humanly impossible was possible to God who has always watched over Afrikanerdom. It behoves each and all of us who contributed to the victory to thank Him in prayer for what He has brought to pass.' 21 Believing that they had supplanted Jews as the chosen people, Afrikaners gave credit to the god of the Old Testament, the god of wrath, vengeance and jealousy against the idolators. Brandishing the sword of white supremacy, they marched under the banner of Christian nationalism to their Jerusalem of Afrikaner domination.
Malan's Nationalists and Havenga's Afrikaner party had joined forces in an electoral pact. Profiting from the bias in favour of rural constituencies and an advantageous delimitation, they obtained seventy-nine seats with a minority vote of 443,700. Opposition candidates polled 623,500 votes and won 71 seats, of which 65 went to the United party and 6 to Labour. 22 The Nationalists scored their biggest gains in country districts of the Transvaal and Cape; and took eight seats on the Witwatersrand and five in Pretoria. 23 'The Nationalist party is no longer on its way to the city,' they exulted. 'It has arrived.' 24 A large proportion of voters in the party's urban constituencies were Afrikaner miners, railwaymen, transport, factory and steel workers. The Labour party retained four seats on the Rand and two in Natal with the backing of the United party; but the Nationalists were becoming the political representatives of the white working class.
That was a major theme in the Nationalists' pre-election propaganda. The worker, they said, was the 'nerve-centre and driving-force' in economic life; no less necessary than capital, and entitled to the special care of the state. A Nationalist government would discourage class war; defend the national interest against organized money power; guarantee the worker a proper wage; insure him against unemployment, accidents and illness; protect him from communist domination in trade union; enforce racial segregation in the unions; and exclude Africans who were 'Obviously not fit for trade unionism'. The Nationalists claimed that they had for years championed the cause of labourers in the civil service, railways, factories, mines. 'And now that the last remains of the Labour Party has fallen into the lap of the capitalistic United Party, the National Party has become absolutely indispensable to the worker.' 25
The Nationalist party was no less indispensable to the pale skins of the ruling race, said Malan when he announced his election platform on 20 April. 26 'Will the European race in the future be able and also want to maintain its rule, its purity, its civilization; or will it float until it vanishes forever, without honour, in the black sea of South Africa's Non-European population?' Only a Nationalist victory, he warned, could save the whites from coloured blood, the black peril and the red menace. Communism was their greatest enemy and the Srnuts-Hofmeyr government its best agent. Communist agitators and foreign influences had raised the demand for the removal of apartheid measures to a dangerous level of intensity. If they took office, the Nationalists would dissolve the Communist party; deport Indians; segregate the Coloured, with privileges over the African; do away with the Native Representative Council and with parliamentary representation of Africans, bar them from white universities and exclude those who were 'redundant' from the towns.
The communists proclaimed that their message of workers' unity, racial equality and socialism had made a deep impression. Future historians, wrote Kotane on the occasion of the party's twenty-sixth anniversary, would no doubt pay tribute to its work in educating and organizing Africans, Coloured and Indians. 'When people talk of the struggle of Non-Europeans for democracy, equality of opportunities and for full citizenship rights, they never think of this as being the result of the political education by communists.' But the Chamber of Mines, the big farmers and Afrikaner churches understood the party's role and what it meant to the people. That was why the reactionaries were calling for its suppression. 27
Communists held leading positions in the African and Indian congresses, the Non-European TUC and the Trades and Labour Council. Active party branches functioned in country towns of the western and eastern Cape, the main centres of Natal and many towns in the Transvaal. Progress was being made also in rural areas, said Kotane, reporting on a conference - called by the Pretoria district committee in November 1947- of delegates from Lydenburg, Middelburg, Nelspruit, Pietersburg, Pienaarsrivier and Makapanstad. 28 They complained of low wages and bad treatment on farms, evictions from reserves and municipal land, unpaid forced labour for tribal authorities, and of tribalists who compelled Christian boys to undergo circumcision rites. The problems were so diverse that the conference was unable to suggest a general solution, though it worked out a remedy in each instance. 'The important thing about the Conference,' Kotane added, 'is that some start has been made.'
Three communists - Fred Carneson in Cape Town, Danie du Plessis and Michael Harmel in Johannesburg - contested seats in the general election and were heavily defeated on a platform of votes for all. ' We have only one aim,' the party declared in its election manifesto: 'to advance the struggle of the workers of all races and religions against the capitalist class, and to build a free and equal socialist republic.' The capitalist parties sought to divide the workers by fomenting race hatred and appealing to colour prejudice. Only under socialism would it be possible to eliminate the root causes of racial conflict: poverty, ignorance, the fear of unemployment, competition for jobs and insecurity. 29
The party blamed Smuts for the Nationalists' victory and warned that it had placed supreme power in the hands of men who were determined to stamp out the last vestiges of political freedom. Smuts, said the central committee, had prepared the way by failing to deal with fundamental issues. He had appeased the parties of reaction and resisted all attempts to broaden the basis of democracy. ' So long as the franchise is restricted largely to the European population, it will be impossible to prevent the growth of reactionary forces in our political life, based on the exploitation of the voteless Non-European majority.' The party urged trade unions and the national liberation movement to close their ranks and continue the struggle for full political and citizenship rights for all South Africans. There was no other way of guaranteeing that 'freedom will survive and flourish'. 30
The communist cause continued to flourish in spite of the sedition trial, police harassment and the government's threats. In November 1948 Sam Kahn, one of the party's representatives on the Cape Town city council, was returned to parliament by an overwhelming majority of African voters in the western Cape. 31 His victory, wrote Stanley Silwana, a member of the YCL in 1923, 'clearly shows that the African rank and file is swinging to the Left - a warning to African leaders that they must move with the times'. 32 Kahn's election, said Kotane, enabled the party and the African people 'to have a voice, if only a lonely one, in a Parliament dominated by an arrogant, reactionary and racialistic capitalist ruling class'. 33
The sword of Damocles was hanging over him, Kahn told the House in his maiden speech on 27 January. He was threatened with 'dual-medium liquidation', both as a communist and as a representative of Africans. Let no man imagine, he urged, that the government's real or only aim was to abolish the Communist party. 'Democracy itself is in jeopardy.' Parliament would never be able to solve the country's problems until it included the representatives and spokesmen of Africans, Coloured and Indians. They would yet break the Lilliputian knots of pass laws and apartheid. South Africa had no future unless it released the enormous productive forces that lay dormant in the people.
In March he visited the Rand and Pretoria to address a series of meetings on the theme of 'Apartheid and Equality - the Communist Party's Answer'. C. R. Swart, the minister of justice, ordered the meetings to be banned under the Riotous Assemblies Act. Members of the special branch trailed Kahn everywhere, even to the Zoo, where he guided them, he explained, because he 'had a certain nostalgia for this House' . If the government persisted in regarding the ideal of equal human rights as a danger to public peace, said Kahn, the time would come when magistrates and jack-booted policemen might read the Riot Act from pulpits where priests were preaching the doctrine of human brotherhood. Towards the end of the session, Swart banned him from attending any public gathering on the Rand for a period of one year. 'It adds insult to grievous injury,' Kahn told the House, 'that it should be done to one who is a member of Parliament.' In reply to a member who said that Johannesburg was not his constituency, Kahn retorted: 'Where there is an injustice in South Africa, there is my constituency.'
His sarcasm goaded the Nationalists beyond endurance, while his cool and systematic reasoning exposed their myths and taboos, as in the debate on the 'mixed marriages' bill, which would prohibit marriage between a 'white' and a 'not white' person. He called the bill 'the immoral offspring of an illicit union between racial superstition and biological ignorance'. Its author, Dr Donges, minister of the interior, was the country's 'leading political misanthropologist', who had discovered a new germ, the 'bacillus blanc supremacoccus', and was now elevating melanin to the rank of a deity. Apart from the million registered Coloured, at least half a million of the officially registered whites were actually of Coloured descent. That surely was 'no mean miscegenatory feat'.
Sir de Villiers Graaff, later Smuts's successor as leader of the United party, and member for Hottentots Holland - 'a very aptly-named constituency' quipped Kahn - dealt with the bill's legal implications. Even more significant and shameful, Kahn argued, were the 'so-called master race theories' of the pigmentocrats, who would expose every marriage to the hazard that some nosey-parker might reveal a skeleton in the ancestral cupboard. There was nothing biologically disharmonious, inferior or evil about the offspring of mixed marriages. The evil lay in the social pattern that doomed them to an inferior status and deprived them of privileges which should be the inherent right of every citizen. 'Would you marry a Coloured woman?' interjected a member. 'Are you a marriage broker? Have you a client you are seeking to marry?' Kahn replied. He concluded by saying that the remarks coming from the government benches could have been lifted bodily out of the speeches of Goebbels, Streicher, Rosenberg and Hitler. They, too, were once regarded as cranks; but from their theories of racial superiority came the concentration camps, crematoria, and the conflagration that led to the slaughter of many millions.
Never before had parliament listened to so pungent and uncompromising a condemnation as Kahn's of the racial taboos, discrimination and oppression that made up the substance of apartheid policies. This was more than the Nationalists were prepared to tolerate. Using procedures laid down by the Suppression of Communism Act, the government unseated him in May 1952, together with Fred Carneson, the communist representative of Africans in the Cape provincial council. Swart simultaneously banned the Guardian, which promptly reappeared as the Clarion, and ordered leading party members - among them Kotane, Dadoo, Marks, Bopape and J. N. Ngwevela - to resign from their organizations and not to address political meetings for two years. 'What has brought me into conflict with this government,' Kahn told the House in his last parliamentary speech, 'has not been my belief in socialism or my belief in a republic, but it has been my advocacy of complete equal rights for black and white in this country. That is what I am being tried for, and they wish to make that the modern blasphemy, the twentieth-century heinous crime in politics.' 34
African voters demonstrated their contempt for these methods by electing Brian Bunting, editor of Advance (the Clarion's successor) to the vacant parliamentary seat in November with a record majority. 35 He was expelled in turn in October 1953 on a motion supported by the United party opposition, which had voted against Kahn's expulsion. 'It has been suggested,' said Bunting in the House, 'that I should abjure my past opinions and announce myself to be a reformed character. I am not prepared to do so. If the price I have to pay for being true to my opinions is expulsion from this House I am prepared to pay it.' In his last speech he warned the House that when government degenerated into a tyranny, the people were historically justified in using force to overthrow it and to bring about a better social order. 36
Africans in the Cape western division went to the polls once again in April 1954 to elect a successor to Kahn and Bunting. Ray Alexander (Mrs H. J. Simons), the banned ex-secretary of the food and canning union, contested the seat. 'If I had my way,' she told the electorate, 'an African - one of you - would be taking my place.' The campaign was in full swing when parliament hastily amended the Suppression of Communism Act so as to exclude her and any other listed communist. In spite of the discouragement, she was returned by an overwhelming majority. 37 On her attempting to enter the House, the police forcibly removed her from its precincts and then served a notice informing her that she was 'incapable' of being elected. She recovered damages for the assault but never took her seat. The voters had sacrificed their privilege of being represented, but their victory, she assured them, ' once again taught the oppressors that the people cannot be bullied into slavish submission'. 38
As much could not be said of the white labour movement. It buckled and broke under the pressures produced by the Nationalist victory of 1948. The disintegration involved three trends, each marked by bitter wrangling over the status of African unions and the role of communists. First in order of time came the secession of Afrikaner unions centred in Pretoria. This was followed by the departure of conservative unions led by English officials, many of them foundation members of the Trades and Labour Council. The third stage resulted from action taken by the government under the Suppression of Communism Act.
Nine Pretoria unions formed the ko-ordinerende Raad van S.A. Vakverenigings (Coordinating Council of S.A. Trade Unions) in 1948, allegedly because of the TLCs refusal to exclude Africans, and were joined a year later by the miners' union, then under the control of Afrikaner nationalists. Representing only 28,000 workers, the Raad was a small, sectarian body, yet it received preferential treatment from the government and strengthened the influence of racists in the white trade unions. The activities of the Trades and Labour Council 'have been marked by timidity, hesitation and compromise', the Communist party's central committee reported to its national conference in January 1950. 39 Instead of taking a resolute stand against the Nationalists, the council was scheming to appease them by isolating the African. He, too, was at fault and, like the white worker, should learn to place his class interests above 'national' interests. By remaining outside the TLC, the African unions had deprived it of a valuable ally against the fascists. The communists would resist the pressure of 'nationalism' from every quarter; and 'strive to bridge the gap that is widening with the impact of racialism in the trade unions'.
Intimidated and divided, the right wing had no heart to resist attacks on the low-paid workers. The new government was no more successful than its predecessor in preventing inflation. Retail price indices showed an average annual increase of eight points between 1948 and 1954 as compared with an annual increase of four points in 1937-46. An amended scale of cost of living allowances grossly favoured the higher-paid and predominantly white wage earners. 40 The government stopped the payment of family allowances to Indians in December 1948; excluded rural Africans from school feeding schemes in 1949; and reduced the food grant for African pupils in the towns from 2d. to 1.5d. a day, as compared with the 6d. allowed for every white pupil, on the pretext that Africans should support themselves. An amendment in 1949 to the Unemployment Insurance Act deprived Africans earning less than £182 a year of benefits and excluded seasonal workers because, the minister of labour alleged, they would rather live on benefits than work for farmers and mine owners. 41
The second wave of secessions from the Trades and Labour Council took place in 1949-51. Printers, engine drivers, municipal employees and Natal furniture workers left because of, they said, the TLC's 'African policy', the refusal of radicals to compromise, and more specifically 'the disharmony created by the Communistic element'. 42 To appease them, the right wing proposed to exclude politics and Africans from the council's proceedings; but the rupture became final when parliament passed the Suppression of Communism Act. Intimidated by the penalties prescribed for listed communists and fearing the effects of guilt by association, thirteen unions disaffiliated in the next six months, among them the boiler makers, iron moulders, woodworkers, electricians and bank officials. 43 In October 1951 most of the breakaway unions formed the S.A. Federation of Trade Unions. It represented sixteen unions with 80,000 members, opened its doors to all registered unions, including those with Coloured and Indian members, and barred affiliation by African unions.
Relatively strengthened by the defection of the conservatives, the militants in the TLC were able to elect Issy Wolfson as its representative to the conference of the International Labour Organization and the World Federation of Trade Unions in 1949; but the council moved sharply to the right when the Suppression of Communism Bill appeared in 1950. Though the TLC denounced the bill as a threat to trade unionism and civil liberties, the Amalgamated Union of Engineers undertook to support legislation outlawing organizations that aimed at ' a totalitarian form of government'; and Jerry Calder, the TLCs president, four members of its executive, and six other trade union leaders assured the minister of justice that they supported the bill. The council subsequently decided to assist any of its members who were unjustifiably accused of being a communist, and to show no sympathy to an avowed communist or supporter of communism. 44
The first banning orders issued against trade unionists under the act were served in May 1952 on Wolfson and Sachs, both members of the TLCs national executive. It was then stirred into calling a conference of registered trade unions to discuss the effects of the act on the trade union movement. Africans were excluded from the conference, and this set the tone for the betrayal that followed. Some fifty delegates from the Koordinerende Raad walked out when they realized that the conference would not pass their motion of confidence in the government. Another batch, headed by the bank officials and engine drivers, followed after conference had rejected their motion of cooperation with the government. To avert more withdrawals, the militants agreed to a mild resolution urging the government to give banned trade unionists a right of appeal to the courts. George McCormick, president of the S.A. Federation of Trade Unions, congratulated the delegates for not defending communism. It was their 'bounden duty', he said, to rid themselves of the communists in their ranks, and that, he added, meant anyone who preached equality of rights for all persons irrespective of colour. 45
A few unions, notably those of the garment, canning and laundry workers, struck work and demonstrated in protest against the removal of their banned leaders. The general body of trade unionists made no attempt to defend either their colleagues or the principle of trade union autonomy from arbitrary interference by the state authority. The Suppression of Communism Act authorized the minister of justice to prohibit any listed communist from holding office or taking part in the activities of a union. What the Nationalists had failed to do by
means of slander, intrigue and subversion, they accomplished by act of parliament. By the end of 1955, the minister had driven fifty-six officials out of the unions. 46 Among them were 28 whites, 17 Africans, 7 Coloured and 4 Indians; and g out of 26 members of the Trades and Labour Council's national executive.
They were expelled because they championed the cause of racial equality and liberty for all South Africans. Anyone who held similar views ran the same risk, the prime minister indicated in 1952. 'All six members of the Labour Party in the House of Assembly were "Liberalistic". Some of them came very close to communism. The Native Representatives wanted equal rights for Natives in all ways and they were also not far from communism.' 47 The banned leaders ' were probably among the most competent trade union organizers in the country', and had done 'a great deal for their members', said Schoeman, the minister of labour, 'but he was determined that they should not gain control of Unions'. 48
By eliminating the communists, the government removed the main obstacle in the trades council to the adoption of a colour bar for which racists had hankered since 1947. They wanted it more eagerly than ever to restore their numerical strength and prestige. In 1952 the council had fifty-one affiliated unions representing 82,600 workers, as compared with 111 unions and 184,000 members in 1947. 49 Snubbed and ignored by the government, the council had no representative on a committee appointed by the minister of labour in 1953 to assist him in drafting legislation for compulsory apartheid in trade unions. 50 To retrieve its fortunes and obtain official recognition, the council dissolved itself in October 1954, regrouped under the name of the S.A. Trade Union Council, and adopted a constitution that limited its members to unions 'other than those of African workers or those which include Africans'. Some of the breakaway unions including the printers, boiler makers, woodworkers and electricians - returned to the purified fold; while the handful of unions that rejected colour bars merged with the Non-European TUC to form the S.A. Congress of Trade Unions.
South Africa is entering a period of bitter national conflict,' the Communist party's central executive warned in its report to the annual conference of 1950. 51 Racial oppression and an aggressive Afrikanerdom were provoking a corresponding national consciousness in other population groups. 'On all sides the national and racial differences are being emphasized, and the realities of the class divisions are being obscured.' The party itself could not escape the effects of compulsory segregation and language differences. Its African membership was increasing by leaps and bounds, and tended to be concentrated in unilateral branches in the townships. A similar process of ethnic grouping could be observed among non-African party members, particularly outside the main urban centres. This was an old problem, and the party would continue as before to preserve its international class character by means of political education, general members' meetings, social functions and joint activities.
Communists were the only ones able to ' transcend racial feelings', Kotane noted in a report on violent clashes between Africans and Indians at Durban in January 1949. 52 Africans had rioted, stabbed and clubbed Indians, raped women, burnt houses, looted stores; and in turn were fired on by Indians, police and soldiers. The estimated casualties were 142 deaths - 87 of them African - and 1,087 wounded; 300 buildings were destroyed and 1,700 were damaged. The inevitable commission of inquiry put the blame on the indiscipline of urban Africans, their resentment of Indian traders and landlords, the example of lawlessness set by Indian passive resisters, and the unsettling effects of agitation by British liberals at home and abroad against racial policies. 53 Durban communists accused white racists of spreading 'poisonous anti-Indian propaganda'; while Indian and African Congress leaders traced the ultimate causes to the system of racial discrimination and 'the preaching in high places of racial hatred and intolerance'. 54
Xuma, Naicker, Kotane and other leaders set an example of tolerance and goodwill by appealing for closer cooperation between the two communities, mutual understanding and unity in struggle for national liberation. Kotane drew attention to the effect of social inequalities. Indian businessmen, he regretted, practised segregation against Africans in tearooms and cinemas, charged exorbitant rents for shacks, grew rich in trading with Africans and yet refused to employ them as salesmen, clerks, bus drivers or conductors. High-sounding political statements meant little unless backed by the people. Africans, Indians and Coloured would achieve real unity only when they met 'as equal partners in the common struggle'.
Africans and Indians might agree on united action, but Coloured leaders of the Non-European Unity Movement held back, vented their rage on the communists, broke up their meetings in Cape Town, and charged them with 'using the liberatory struggle only to bargain with the ruling class in their essential role of collaboration and deception of the people'. It was an odd kind of collaborator who bore the main brunt of persecution by the ruling class, said the communists, and they urged the NEUM to emerge from its boycott laager for battle against the enemy. 55 The gap between the two organizations could not, however, be bridged after the collapse of the campaign in 1948 against racial segregation in Cape Town's suburban trains.
Both took part in setting up a train apartheid resistance committee to organize a civil disobedience movement. Big meetings were held, volunteers were recruited, and ten of the organizers, including Dr and Mrs Gool, B. M. Kies, and the communists Fred Carneson and H. A. Naidoo were acquitted in the magistrate's court on charges of incitement to public violence, creating racial hostility and instigating a breach of railway regulations. The communists proposed to send batches of defiers into the coaches reserved for whites, while Gool and Kies argued that only 'principled mass resistance would succeed'. It was suicidal adventurism to act before the people had been fully organized. Delay would be fatal to the campaign, said the communists, and they resigned from the committee because the majority had 'rejected our repeated requests that action be taken to defy the regulations'. 56 The Coloured had been betrayed by the 'false organizational and political concepts of the Unity Movement' and should look elsewhere for a new leadership. 57
The Coloured teachers of the Anti-CAD and the NEUM had no taste for humiliating encounters with policemen, courts and overcrowded prison cells; and deplored the 'vulgar exhibitionism' of Indian passive resisters. Far from being 'heroes', Naicker, Dadoo and M. D. Naidoo had deserted the people in their hour of need and were contaminating them with the poison of Gandhi. The Anti-CAD was more responsible and disdained to seek 'the sanctuary of jail'. 58 Such political polemics appealed also to members of the Cape African Teachers Association. Led by A. C. Jordan, C. M. Kobus and I. Tabata in the western Cape and by N. I. Honono and W. M. Tsotsi in the Transkei, CATA acceded to the NEUM and strengthened its resolve to gain the allegiance of Africans through the medium of the All African Convention.
Twelve African leaders issued a declaration of intent in October 1948. Alarmed at the government's ' callous disregard of the fundamental rights of Africans ', they would convene an all-African conference with a view to pooling their forces on a common programme of action for liberation. The signatories included Dr Xuma, president of the African National Congress; Professor Jabavu, president of the Convention; Dr J. S. Moroka, a senior member of the Convention's executive; and the Rev. Mahabane, president of the NEUM. Dismayed by the prospect of being ousted by the proposed merger, the Coloured intellectuals denounced it as an insincere manoeuvre of liberals and reactionaries in the ANC. The only basis for principled struggle was the Ten Point programme, said the Cape western committee of the Convention, and it repudiated Jabavu's agreement to unite with Congress. 59
A joint conference presided over by Xuma and Jabavu at Bloemfontein in December agreed to merge the two organizations in spite of strong protests by a group of NEUM delegates. I. B. Tabata proposed that the ANC should affiliate to the Convention and accept its federal structure, the Ten Point programme and a policy of 'non-collaboration with the oppressor'. That, objected Professor Matthews, meant that one mouthpiece wanted to swallow the other mouthpiece. A federation, Kotane pointed out, would perpetuate differences. 'We want to eliminate conflicting directions, interests and ideologies. We want one political organization.' The conference agreed and adopted Mahabane's motions endorsing the October statement and instructing the executives to work out the details of a unity programme. 60
Meeting at about the same time in Bloemfontein, the Convention accepted Jabavu's resignation and installed a new president, the Fort Hare graduate, former teacher and budding lawyer, W. M. Tsotsi, who could be relied on to maintain the NEUM's role in a federation. He and other members of his executive met the ANCs leaders in April 1949 and failed to agree on the crucial issue. The Convention wanted a federal organization embracing a wide range of African, Coloured and Indian associations - political, religious, economic and social; while Congress, unwilling to risk being swamped by so heterogeneous an assortment, insisted on a national All-African organization. This was tribalism masquerading under the banner of nationalism, said Tsotsi at the Convention's conference in December, and he accused Congress leaders of being hostile to Coloured and Indians as well as to whites. 61
This was untrue, said Dr Moroka, the ANC's new president at a meeting in Newclare, Johannesburg, in February 1950, a week after police raids on the township had resulted in violent clashes with the residents and the arrest of more than 600 men and women. 'I want to assure the Coloured and Indian communities that they need have no fear of African nationalism. We are fighting for their freedom as well as for our own, and will join hands with those Europeans who are prepared to fight with us.' 62 Past presidents had said as much, but his words were the more significant because of a spate of apartheid laws and the emergence of a hard core of militants in the African Youth League, to whom Moroka owed his election and Dr Xuma his defeat at the annual conference of Congress in December 1949.
The League's programme of action appeared in July over the signatures of James Calata, A. P. Mda, G. Pitje, Robert Sobukwe and M. Secenywa. 63 It repeated old slogans; rejected segregation, apartheid, trusteeship and white leadership; reaffirmed Lembede's scheme of commercial and financial cooperative enterprises; undertook to consolidate trade unions into an industrial wing; and struck a new note by claiming the 'right of self-determination'. The League's aim was to achieve 'national freedom from White domination and the attainment of political independence '.
There were obvious ambiguities in the formulation, as communists were quick to point out. 64 Self-determination and independence implied a right to secede, and that was hardly possible unless the country were partitioned into a 'black' and a 'white' state, which would amount to apartheid. Or did the League have in mind the expulsion of the white population? The wording was less important than the intention. The young militants of the ANC were feeling their way to the concept of 'black power' such as the Communist party had projected in its slogan of 'an independent native republic' in 1928.
Three leaders of the Youth League, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, urged Xuma in December to accept their principles of African nationalism, Africa for the Africans, and a boycott of segregated institutions. The first two, he replied, were consistent with the policy of Congress since its inception, but he objected to a boycott because it would split their ranks. 65 The League thereupon threw its weight behind Moroka and secured his election on a boycott platform at the annual conference of Congress later in the month. Sisulu became the secretary general, and the programme of action was adopted as the official policy of Congress. It had taken a new turn, as events would show. The boycott decision had little effect, however, for reasons set out by the Communist party's central committee in a report to its annual conference of January 1950.
Boycotts, the party explained, might extract concessions from the ruling class when it needed cooperation, as in war or to forestall a revolutionary situation. That clearly was not the position. On the contrary, the government itself proposed to abolish the native representative council, advisory boards and the African franchise. This being so, the boycott movement tended to turn in on itself, isolate people from active struggle, and produce a negative acceptance of segregation as a despairing alternative to equality. 'For apartheid (the humiliating substitute for "the right of self-determination'') does afford a protected field for a small number of Non-Europeans (traders in locations, teachers, ministers of religion, politicians, even trade union organizers) who will use national sentiment as a weapon against European competition.'
Misgivings on the efficacy of boycotts received confirmation in January 1949 when Gordon Mears, the secretary of native affairs, told councillors that the government had decided to do away with the Native Representative Council. It was merely advisory, created a sense of frustration and served no useful purpose. 66 Dr Verwoerd, the Hollander who made it his mission to rescue Afrikanerdom from British imperialism, pronounced the death sentence two years later at the council's last session. The government, he said, 'deemed it essential' to abolish the council, which would accept nothing less than equality with whites in parliament. So impotent a body was bound to produce 'irresponsible criticisms' and 'must necessarily fail'. He proposed to substitute a 'natural Native democracy' by reviving tribalism and chiefly rule in the reserves under a Bantu Authorities Act. 67
The government had contemptuously rejected every claim advanced by the liberation movement in half a century of struggle for social justice, national unity, and equality of treatment. Arrogating to itself all the pride and power of nationhood, Afrikanerdom denied to Africans the right and opportunity to evolve from tribe to nation. Parliament was set to work, laying the statutory foundations of the ghettoes foreshadowed in the Nationalist party's election appeal for 'total apartheid as the ultimate goal of a natural process of separate development'.
There was nothing natural in the Unemployment Insurance Amendment Act of 1949, which excluded the great bulk of Africans from benefits; the Railways and Harbours Amendment Act of 1949, which enforced racial segregation in trains; the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950, which outlawed sex in all its forms between pigmented and non-pigmented persons; the Population Registration Act of 1950, which classified people in racial groups according to skin colour and descent; or the Group Areas Act of 1950, which imposed compulsory residential segregation on whites, Coloured, Malays, Asians and Africans. There was nothing natural about the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, the political cornerstone of this racial totalitarianism, which outlawed the Communist party and gave ministers dictatorial powers to ban organizations, newspapers, periodicals, gatherings and persons deemed to promote the spread of statutory communism.
'Those who are keeping us down do so not because we are Communists,' Dr Moroka told 528 delegates to a Defend Free Speech Convention at Johannesburg in March 1950,' but because they want to exploit us, they want to eat the fat of the land alone.' 68 Called together by the Transvaal ANC, Indian Congress, APO and Communist party, the delegates demanded the removal of bans on Sam Kahn and Yusuf Dadoo, protested against the threatened pass law for women, and declared Freedom Day on 1 May, when people of all races would stay away from work so as to demonstrate for freedom, land and the repeal of colour bars.
The appeal went out from Moroka; from J. B. Marks, president of the African miners' union; from Gana Makabeni, president of the Non-European Trade Union Council; from Indian and communist leaders throughout the country. ' Force will be met with force,' the police commissioner threatened. And the joint secretaries of the convention, David Bopape, Yusuf Cachalia and Dan Tloome, replied that no violence was or ever had been advocated or contemplated. But violence came to the Rand on 1 May, as the police broke up gatherings in the evening, attacked groups of Africans who defended themselves, and fired, killing eighteen Africans and wounding more than thirty. 69
James Moroka, a graduate of Edinburgh university, physician, landowner, businessman, and great-grandson of the Rolong chief Moroka who had sheltered the Voortrekker leader Andries Hendrik Potgieter in 1836, summoned the ANC's executive to an emergency meeting on his estate at Thaba 'Nchu in the Orange Free State. The committee decided on a national day of protest, a general strike of all freedom lovers, both to commemorate 'Africans who have lost their lives in the struggle for liberation', and to demonstrate against the Unlawful Organizations Bill, the forerunner of the Suppression of Communism Act. Though appearing to be directed against communists' declared Sisulu, the bill was designed to suppress the struggles of all oppressed peoples. The whites were determined to keep Africans in a state of permanent subordination; and the African National Congress would resist by all the means at its disposal. 70
Dr Malan, the premier and former predikant, insisted that South Africa outlaw communism. He sent the bill to a select committee which returned it with stiffer penalties and more draconian powers. United party members on the committee proposed to make communism a treasonable offence punishable with death; John Christie, the Labour leader, and Mrs Ballinger, who represented Africans of the eastern Cape, voted against the measure. Its immediate purpose was to liquidate the Communist party, place its members and supporters under police surveillance, hound them out of political life and the trade unions, and reduce them in terms of civic rights to the African's status. The long-range aim was to destroy the liberation movement and entrench white supremacy behind despotic ministerial powers.
In addition to the doctrine of Marxian socialism as expounded by Lenin, Trotsky and the Third International, communism was defined as any doctrine or scheme which aimed at the establishment of a one-party state, or at changing the social order by unlawful acts, or at bringing about any change under the direction of a foreign government, or at the encouragement of hostility between whites and other races 'the consequences of which are calculated to further the achievement' of a one-party state or of social change by unlawful acts. The definition had far less significance in practice than the arbitrary discretionary powers vested in the government to ban, prohibit and deport without a right of appeal by the victim to courts of law.
'Remembering the path which has been blazed by our members for over thirty years and inspired by the example of such fighters for freedom as Nkosi, and many others, who died for their opinions, let us face boldly the renewed and perhaps more ruthless attacks which are threatened,' said Bill Andrews, then just turned eighty, in a message to the party. Its central committee lodged a firm and sombre protest with the select committee. ' Threatened with forcible disbandment, facing the prospect of endless persecution of our members, we have every right to expect from the instigators of this measure a precise statement of the charges levelled against us, the evidence on which they are based, and an opportunity to make our reply before an impartial tribunal. Instead, we have received nothing but abusive and uncorroborated statements, and a fait accompli in the form of a Bill. 72
After surveying the party's record, its policies and its relations with trade unions and the national movements' the central committee examined the long range effects of the bill. Its main aim was to stifle the demand so vigorously advocated by the party for democratic rights and equal opportunities for all. Punitive action would be taken against any organization with similar objectives. 'There can be little doubt that once the Communist Party of South Africa is outlawed, all those individuals, organizations, churches and institutions who raise the demand for an end to racial discrimination in South Africa will be branded in terms of this Bill and declared illegal.' No law could 'crush the desire of the overwhelming majority of the people in South Africa of all races for a society based-on justice and equality'. No government could 'deprive those who are fighting for socialism of their passionate desire for peace and security for all, which we believe is only possible under the socialist order'.
The central committee met at Cape Town in June with the knowledge that no amount of protest would stay the enactment of the suppression law. There were seventeen members, all of whom have appeared in these chronicles: Andrews, Bunting, Carneson, Dadoo, du Plessis, Fischer, Harmel, Horvitch, Kahn, Kotane, La Guma, Marks, Mofutsanyana, Naidoo, Poonen, Simons and Wolfson. They had to decide on how best to continue the struggle. Deep-seated loyalties, communist tradition and fierce contempt for the oppressor urged them to defy. On the other hand, could the party make the transition to illegality without being annihilated? The police were in possession of its membership lists, seized during the raids of 1946; attempts to create the skeleton of an underground organization had failed. After years of activity in the full glare of publicity members could not be expected to adopt illegal methods overnight. Having joined a legal party, was it proper to expect them to incur the severe penalties prescribed by the bill without long discussion and preparation which were not possible in the circumstances. Moreover, and this weighed heavily, the experience of the German Communist party under Nazi rule had shown the difficulty involved in passing from legal to illegal work without a pause.
Except for Andrews and Harmel, who voted against the resolution, the committee decided on dissolution. Kotane and I. O. Horvitch, the national chairman, visited each party district in turn and explained the decision. It was accepted without dissent. Sam Kahn read the declaration of dissolution in the house of assembly on 20 June. 73 'Recognizing that on the day the Suppression of Communism Bill becomes law, every one of our members, merely by virtue of their membership, may be liable to be imprisoned, without the option of a fine, for a maximum period of ten years, the Central Committee of the Communist Party has decided to dissolve the Party as from today.'
The decision was forced on the party by a government with a majority of seven in the assembly and one in the senate - where sat the former Communist party member S. M. Pettersen, now a Nationalist senator. Voted into office by a minority of the electorate, representing at most one and a quarter million people in a population of eleven million, the government had adopted the fascist technique of destroying the democracy that it professed to defend. ' Such vestiges of democratic rights as have been left in South Africa, are being extinguished in the present Parliament by a clique in its efforts to impose a dictatorship, suppress all opposition, and remove every obstacle to a fascist republic.'
'Communism and Socialism have stood the test of time. For more than a hundred years, in one country after another, the enemies of the people have ruthlessly, inhumanly, sought to crush the movement for social justice and economic liberation, for the end of class war, for peace and socialism.' In spite of all these attempts, communism lived on, gaining in strength and stature. 'Rooted in the history of the working class, expressing their deepest aspirations and needs, Communism cannot be destroyed as long as society is divided into two worlds: rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed.' Fascism could not kill the will for the good life. 'Nothing can stop the people of South Africa in their struggle for full democracy, for removal of colour bars, for justice and for socialism.'
June 26 was declared the national day of protest and mourning. If ever there was a time when the African people were required to put their eight-million force behind the principles of democracy, in alliance with other freedom-loving members of the South African community, that time has come,' urged Dr Moroka. Leaders of the Indian Congress, APO, and Communist party pledged their support and joined the ANC on a coordinating committee with Sisulu and Cachalia as joint secretaries. The Congress Alliance was taking shape. ' Never before in the history of South Africa,' Dr Dadoo noted, 'have the national leaders acted so swiftly and with complete oneness of purpose to beat back the fascist attack of the Government on the lives and liberties of the people.' They were rewriting the country's history, declared Sisulu, in a new era of liberation. 74
The call for a general strike met with wide response on 26 June. Renamed Freedom Day, it became a focal point for resistance in later years. It was on 26 June 1952 that the African National Congress launched a campaign for the defiance of unjust laws which resulted in the imprisonment of more than 8,000 and the enactment of more repressive laws. In terms of the Criminal Laws Amendment Act of 1953, a person convicted of breaking any law by way of protest against any law could be sentenced to a maximum of £300 fine, three years' imprisonment, and ten lashes, while leaders who incited others to commit such an offence were liable to a fine of £500, five years' imprisonment and fifteen lashes. The Public Safety Act of that year authorized the government to proclaim a state of emergency amounting to martial law for a period of twelve months.
In the hour of dissolution as a legal party, the communists could claim the achievement of an objective that had been central to their purpose since 1928. The class struggle had merged with the struggle for national liberation. In its report to the last national conference before the dissolution, the central committee charted the course of struggle for the coming years. 75 It will be appropriate to present the thesis in the present tense and to examine its implications in terms of the existing society.