sub-factions of -factions as accusations and counter-accusations of 'revision­

ism', 'Bukharinism' and 'Trotskyism' were bandied about in a search for

ideological purity. Majority factions had expelled minorities only to be

expelled themselves in due course. Internecine doctrinal strife had displaced

public political activity, $nd ultimately the Central Committee had moved from

Johannesburg to Cape Town -fjai■. survwat. In Johannesburg, the Party had

withered. Its debts were unpaid, its offices repossessed by landlords, its

printing press sequestrated and its formal journal 'Umsebenzi' defunct. All

that remained was a semi-secret sect.

My application for membership was accepted and I was placed 'on probation' for

several months. I would be required to pay regular subscriptions, attend

regular members' meetings, and 'carry out all tasks assigned to me'. The

conditions - like most serious Party talk - were couched in a Party jargon

which was new to me, heavy with references to 'aggregate meetings',

'functionaries', 'democratic centralism' and 'factionalism'. I began to learn

the jargon. 'Aggregate' which I only knew in its building industry

the main ingredient in a concrete mix^meant what w o root -of TMe wui III1 c u IIj *

'general meeting’. The jargon, I discovered, was not peculiarly South African

but a species of international Communist-speak derived from the Bolsheviks and

the Comintern. In its most impenetrable form we knew it as 'Inprecorr'

language as invariably used in the columns of the Comintern journal:

International Press Correspondence (Inprecorr.). The Communist Party not only

had 'aggregate meetings'. It also had 'functionaries' rather than officials or

office-bearers, a 'Political Bureau' (or PB) rather than an executive

committee, and 'secretariats' in addition to secretaries. The jargon gave the

Party an air of obscurity and foreignness. But it also gave its members a

feeling of belonging to a select band much as rituals and secret signs do for

Freemasons or Boy Scouts.

My first aggregate meeting was held at the South end of El off Street where the

shopping area expired and gave way to urban wasteland. It was in a decrepit

of-fice block in an unplanned sprawl of car parks, black municipal workers'

compounds, municipal beerhalls and cemeteries of dead cars. The Bantu Mens'

Social Centre - then the hub of the city's black cultural life - was nearby.

Further south only huge windswept dumps of white mine sand. The Party office

was about as far out of town as one could get while still claiming to be 'in

town'.

27

The building's entrance hall and staircase were unlit. Mice, rats or

cock-roaches rustled in the passageway, ft creaking wooden staircase led to a

dimly lit upper landing. The Party 'premises' turned out to be a single room

in which were some thirty kitchen chairs and a table, and about fifteen

people, black and white. They looked me over briefly and went on gossiping

amongst themselves. I recognised only one or two, members of the Labour League

of Youth I had not expected to find there. No one introduced me to anyone. I

sat hunched down in my chair until the meeting began. Late.

I had never attended a meeting with black people before, or been in a place

where there was no apparent distinction between 'us' and 'them'. I was a

dislocating experience but not threatening. It all seemed so casual, so

natural that settling in to it was quite easy. I had expected to find myself

on a new political plane, but not a totally new world in which black and white

participated as equals. They talked and I listened. My perception of the world

turned upside down. Colour barriers which had been an inescapable part of my

daily world at home, school and work were missing. All reason for them seemed

to have disappeared.

The very ordinariness of the proceedings disturbed me. I had come with

romantic expectations of finding a circle of that comradeship and fraternity

which had been missing from my experiences in the Labour Party. I had

anticipated an atmosphere of tolerance and mutuality to fit my concept of a

socialist society. It was nothing like that. Debate was fierce and

adversarial. Speakers snapped at one another, attacked each other passionately

and personally. The jargon words flew - factional, sectarian, opportunist,

revisionist. Could this verbal warfare really lead the way to the new world of

socialism?

Afterwards I came to understand that the wars of the aggregate meetings were

the last throes of the years of feuding and faction-fighting which had brought

the Party to its lowest ebb. I knew almost nothing of that past. I did not

appreciate that this was a Party in transition, rediscovering its roots, and

that exorcising old factional scores was in fact clearing the ground for a

new-style Party. The meeting ended with a spiritless singi

Internationale. No one spoke any words of cheer. Factions

without so much as a 'goodnight', still arguing. The experience nearly turned

me off the Party for ever.

28

Outside it was Saturday night, dark and wet in a deserted neighbourhood. For

unexplained reasons aggregate meetings were always held on Saturday nights. I

suppose it was a display o-f dedication, or a -form o-f self—flagellation like

wearing a hair shirt. For everyone else, Johannesburg's Saturday nights were

dedicated to 'having a good time' - drinking, dining, dancing and movie-going.

Only the Communist Party imposed this monkish self-denial on itself, and even

called absentees to account afterwards.

I bore with the hair shirt and gradually got to know the thirty or so men and

women who were the 'aggregate' of the Johannesburg Communist Party. It was

1938. The Central Committee had been transferred to Cape Town and General

Secretary Moses Kotane with it. A new District Committee had just been elected

to bury past factional and doctrinal struggles and revive what could be

rescued. Some of the veterans of past battles remained, like Willie Kalk of

the Leather Workers Union and Sam Nikin of the Furniture Workers, still

fiercely combative and smouldering over past conflicts. Others seemed more

reconciled to the new order, like Issy Wolfson of the Tailoring Workers Union,

the eMinence grise of the black members^Edwin Mofutsanyana, and his then wife

Josie Mpama (or Palmer). The committee was an uneasy mix of gladiators from a

factional past and some who had only arrived after the worst internal battles

had ended. It was just starting to find its feet on the road to revival. The

members, a mix of native South Africans with a good number of first or

second-generation European immigrants, were a fair cross-section of Johannes­

burg's population though Afrikaners and blacks were under-represented. The

District Committee accordingly was over-weighted with young white members.1

The only aggregate I recall from that time was concerned with a single issue -

a proposal from the Minister of Defence, Oswald Pi row, for a National Register

of white citizens whose skills could be conscripted by the state in time of

national need. Pirow was the cabinet's most outspoken supporter of Hitler and

National Socialism. He was also the author of the Riotous Assemblies Act which

seriously curtailed rights of free speech and assembly. Any National Register

sponsored by him would almost certainly have some sinister anti-democratic

1 In addition to the veterans named above, the District Committee so far as I recall included Archie Lewitton, Hilda Watts (later Bernstein), Michael Harmel, Ray Adler (later Harmel), Gessie Landman and Max Joffe. The members changed slightly from year to year and brought in, inter alia, also Yusuf Dadoo, Bram Fischer, Alpheus Maliba, Rowley Arenstein and, a few years later, myself.

29

purpose. The question -for the aggregate meeting was whether or not to

encourage people to register. Was the Register preparation for resistance to

■fascism and war, or the start of a Pirowite force of storm-troops against the

civil population?

Eli Weinberg had come from Cape Town to lead the discussion for the CC. I had

never seen him before, but knew a little of his history. While still

adolescent, he had been charged and imprisoned in Lithuania for left-wing

activities. In South Africa with little English and no trade, he had

foot-slogged his way around the country, getting the feel of it, particularly

in the mountain areas of Basutoland (now Lesotho.) He had mastered English,

acquired a working knowledge of Sotho and Afrikaans, and become an active

trade-unionist and Secretary of the Commercial Travellers' Union.1

I forget the decisions of the CC or the aggregate meeting on the National/or.

Register. It was, in any case,/no'importance. The whole idea sank from sight

soon afterwards. That such a discussion took place at all, however, says

something about the character of the Communist Party. There is a slightly

ludicrous air around thirty ordinary citizens agonising about their attitude

to a piece of legislation as if the fate of the nation depended on them. This,

I soon learnt, was no more simple posturing than the declaration by the six

tailors of Gloucester: 'We, the people of England...' The Party took its

politics very seriously. Its small membership and following did not excuse it

from its civic responsibilities. No one at that meeting could have been under

any illusion that they were deciding the fate of the National Register - but

that was beside the point. The point was to find the 'right line', and then to

take the appropriate action which all other citizens and groups would be

called on to take.

This seriousness - ludicrous though some people find it - struck me as one of

the Party's strengths. It derived from the conviction that 'i^evertheless,, the

world does move!' However small our own input, we can help^+w=wOT RPtliaV move*/ *

if not here and now then in future. This certainty that they were making

1 In the 1960's, he was banned from all trade union work by Ministerial decree. He turned his hobby of photography into a means of livelihood, and became a professional photographer and collected a considerable archive of photographs in and around the political movement in the years after 1950. He died in exile in Dar es Salaam.

30

history gave Party members the resilience to pull themselves back -from the

brink extinction and to contemplate building a new Party out of the wreckage

of the old.

By joining the Communist Party I thought I was ending my membership of the

Labour Party. It did not work out like that. I was called to the routine new

member's interview with the CP Secretariat, and explained my disenchantment

with the Labour Party. They approved my sentiments, but argued that the Labour

Party could be changed for the better from inside. The best contribution I

could make to the cause of socialism would be to continue the good fight

inside the Labour Party while at the same time helping to develop the

Communist Party. I was only half convinced, but agreed to give it a try.

I was assigned to a Party group, and was expected to take part in all its

activities 'not incompatible' with my membership of the Labour Party. The

incompatibilities were not always obvious. In today's vernacular, the position

might be described as 'entryism' or 'boring from within.' But in fact my aim

was 'exitism'. I had no confidence that moribund Labour could ever become a

force for radical policies, but I was talked into it.

My CP group was made up of seven or eight others who were also members of the

Labour Party or the League of Youth. Hilda was one of them. It was not like

the socialist crusade I had been looking for, but more like a Communist wing

of the Labour left which I was trying to get away from. I stayed with it for

want of anything better.

Unlike the Labour Party which had a profound disinterest in international

affairs, the threat of war dominated the agenda of the Communist Party. Talk

of an Anglo-Soviet defense treaty against Hitlerism were leading nowhere -

negotiations were being left to a junior Foreign Office official without any

power to reach an agreement. Late in the year, Stalin warned that, in the

absence of such a treaty, the USSR would not 'pull the chestnuts out of the

fire' for the West. The Labour Party seemed unconscious of the danger and

remained entirely wrapped up in local political concerns. The Communist

Party's concerns centred instead on the prospects of war and the need for an

Anglo-Soviet mutual defence treaty.

31

In our concern at the threat of war we were unprepared for the manner of its

coming. The Soviet announcement that it had signed a non-aggression pact with

Germany threw us off balance. We had concentrated so much attention on the

menace of fascism at home that perhaps we had been giving too little to the

possibility of such a shock development abroad. Even so, it created less

upheaval in our ranks in South Africa than it did in many other places where

the shock waves split the ranks of Communist Parties and led to large-scale

membership defections. In South Africa, so remote from the epicentre of the

event, there were only minor rumbles.

Perhaps the loudest of them burst at a Saturday night 'aggregate'. There was

nothing on the agenda to prepare us for Hymie Basner's dramatic denunciation

of Soviet betrayal. Basner was one of the Party's intellectual eminences, a

radical lawyer and a formidable orator. He was a short, stocky, red faced man

with a choleric disposition, and a fine flow of language. His burst of passion

spoke of bitter disillusion with the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist

Party. He condemned the immorality and opportunism of the Soviet-German pact -

and then dropped his bombshell. He was leaving the Party for ever.

Those who knew him better than I may have been prepared for it. To me, his

denunciation came as a shock, almost blasphemy, but no one chose to reply. In

dead silence he rose and started to stamp out. Then he turned in the doorway

and fired a parting shot: 'Leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone!' What

that meant I do not know, but inside the Party he had set off a minor

earthquake. Outside, in all the turmoil of impending war it caused scarcely a

stir. Nothing more was heard of it until months later, when Basner broke the

cease-fire with a letter to the press explaining and defending his volte

face.

Few other Party members reacted as Basner did. We were mentally prepared for

the worst. The German armies entered Poland and Britain formally declared

itself at war with Germany, marking the end of an era for Europe, and for

South Africa. War brought to the surface all the stress lines in South

African Parliamentary politics which had been contained for a decade by the

coalition between Hertzog and Smuts - Afrikaner Party and SAP. After the

economic crisis of the 1930'sjcontradictions had been papered over by the

creation of a single party of white supremacy. The 'United Party' had

mitigated the effects of the great depression on whites by intensifying the

32

exploitation of blacks, and ensured plentiful and cheap black contract labour

for both farms and mines. Its formation had hived off the nationalist-minded

Afrikaner minority into a 'purified' Nationalist Party shorn of Hertzogite

compromisers - the 'official opposition' led by doctor of divinity D.F. Malan.

The strains of war shattered the Smuts-Hertzog coalition, and ancient

nationalist-SAP contradictions surfaced again. The cabinet met to define South

Africa's position in relation to the war - and split apart. Five ministers

voted with Hertzog for South Africa to remain neutral; six with Smuts for a

South African declaration of war on Germany. Malan's Nationalist Party could

be expected to throw its weight behind Hertzog, but the majority in Parliament

and between war and peace hung in the balance. The outcome might depend on two

minority parties - the Empire loyalists of the small Dominion Party who would

undoubtedly stand with Smuts; and the four MP's of the Labour Party whose

leanings were uncertain. At the time of its greatest public popularity, Labour

had formed a pact with Hertzog against Smuts' resort to martial law in the

1922 General Strike on the Witwatersrand. After the strike, the Labour-Herzog

forces had humbled the Smuts government, and made way for a 'pact' government

in which Labour ministers served under Herzog's premiership. That was then;

now the Pact had given way to the United Party government of Smuts and

Hertzog, with Labour on the sidelines. Where Labour would now give its support

could be the most important decision in its history.

The Labour Party National Executive Committee met in emergency session in

Johannesburg. Its three MPs and its Minister - Walter Madeley - had flown up

from Cape Town, along with its lone Senator - Party chairman Jimmy Briggs. I

attended the meeting as representative of the League of Youth. It was

dominated by the Parliamentarians who all supported Smuts and the declaration

of war. Compared with the CP debates, their speeches were strangely shallow,

with little reference to the politics of the war, to the nature of fascism, to

the fascist threat to trade unions, socialist movements or even the

independence of nation states. They were however filled with indignation, even

the passion of an unquestioning patriotism - or more correctly jingoism or

Britishism. In place of analysis of the origins or possible consequences of

war there was a lot of tub-thumping of my-country-right-or-wrong type.

33

That is, until M.J. van den Berg who represented a West Rand mining

constituency in Parliament, claimed the floor. He was a burly former miner,

fluent in English although his first language was Afrikaans, and the

undisputed leader of Labour’s Afrikaner members. He chose to speak in

Afrikaans, knowing that some of the NEC members would have difficulty in

following. His oratory and bull voice brought an uninspired meeting to life -

and to real politics. He poured out all the bitterness of Afrikaner

nationalism in an attack on the advocates of war; all the pent up grievances

of British concentration camps, of the destruction of the Boer republics, and

of the deportations of those who refused to 'hands-up' at the end of the

Anglo-Boer war. In an exposition of the ideology of 'blood-and-soi1', he

bellowed that the Boerevolk would never be prepared to fight Britain's wars or

accept Smuts' call to arms. The Labour Party should give Smuts a simple

answer: we will not join your war now or ever!

His rant was heard in silence. No one seemed will in icillor

Ben Weinbren, whose early politics had been learnt as a member of the

Communist Party. His was the only substantial political speech of the evening.

He stuck to the crucial issues - the nature of fascism, its threat to peace

and progress everywhere, and the need for international unity to halt it. No

one was prepared to follow him. The chairman called for a vote. Every hand

except Van den Berg's was raised in favour of war. Van den Berg spoke again, a

short bitter denunciation of a Party which had sold its soul to British

imperialism,. Then he stormed out leaving a shocked silence behind him. His

exit seemed to mark the end of his Labour Party membership and the loss of one

quarter of its Parliamentary caucus. It seemed inevitable that most of the

Afrikaners in the Party would follow him out. The meeting broke up, seemingly

as concerned with the electoral implications for itself as with the fate of

the country. Within days, the Party's next most prominent Afrikaner, Dr.

Venter Odendaal, Party leader in the Transvaal Provincial Council, followed

him out, taking many of the Afrikaner members with him.

When Parliament resumed, Hertzog's neutrality motion was voted down and Smuts'

pro-war amendment carried with a majority of thirteen. Smuts took over as

Prime minister and took Labour leader, Walter Madeley into the cabinet as

Minister of Labour. I heard nothing of Van den Berg for several weeks. Then

34

there was a brief announcement in the press that M.J. van den Berg M.P. had

been commissioned as Captain in the South African Army, and would be involved

in army recruiting on the home front. 1

I had been a silent observer at Labour's decision making. In the Communist

Party's I took part. Labour's decision had been pragmatic, and settled in a

single evening. The Communist Party agonised for weeks over principle and

theory. It went through a maze of doubt and reappraisal before it came to a

binding conclusion. Ironically, Labour's quick decision could well have

tilted the Parliamentary vote from neutrality to war, while the Communist

agonising over 'the right line' was unlikely to have any immediate influence

on the national decision at all.

The Communist Party's months of agonising should have been unnecessary. It had

long called for international action against fascism and campaigned for a

broad alliance against it. But the Soviet-German treaty had clouded the issue.

Through the months that had led up to it, it had become clear that the Western

powers were more concerned to contain the USSR and socialism than to confront

fascism. Hence appeasement, the betrayal of Spain and Czecho-Slovakia, and the

foot-dragging to avoid any Anglo-Soviet treaty. But the Party policy seemed

clear enough. We were for a collective stand with the USSR, against fascism.

Stalin's warning about the West's chestnuts rang the first alarm. We did not

react to it sharply enough. The bombshell of the Soviet-German non-aggression

changed the equation. The Soviet Union was no longer to be a main component of

a collective front. The call for an east-west alliance for peace or for war

had become obsolete, but before policy could be reconsidered in the light of

that reality, Nazi armies had crossed into Poland, and Britain and France had

declared war. It was a turn we had never contemplated. The policy which had

seemed so clear for so long was suddenly out of date.

TVe Qwl/i?Political parties change direction as cumbrously as ocean liners. -Thi'S change

of direction was made greatly more difficult /4ecffaae=pi our long-standing

deference to the political expertise and experience of the Soviet Communist

1 Van den Berg never returned to the Labour Party. After the war, whenthe tide of white political opinion began to swing towards Nationalism,he stood as a National Party candidate in the 1948 election, was electedto represent his previous constituency, and became a cabinet minister in the National Party government.

35

Party as -far greater than our own. Our groups debated the problem while

waiting -for words of wisdom from the Party leadership to guide us out of a

maze. Before long, George Findlay brought us the 'line' from the District

Committee. George* was a barrister with a golden tongue, great precision with

words, and impeccable logic. 'The line', we were assured, had not changed. We

were still in favour of a resolute stand against fascism - the Soviet action

had not invalidated that, though it had acted surprisingly and at the eleventh

hour to safeguard its own frontiers. Though the appeasers still hoped to stand

by while the communist and fascist armies fought each other to the death, we

must frustrate their plot by helping prosecute the anti-fascist war to the

limit. This was a continuation of former policy but in the new circumstances

of war.

It was brilliantly argued, and most of us went away spell-bound. But not quite

satisfied; doubts remained. How could we be furthering the course of war while

our Soviet comrades and allies headed in the opposite direction? Findlay had

given - as always - a clear, logical anst^-. When two armies set out to make a

co-ordinated attack on an enemy citadey^opp^s^te starting places, one army

must march east while the other marches west. Q.E.D. Even in his impeccable

logic it was not quite good enough to allay all doubts until the press

Harry Pollitt, Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain,

he conflict an 'anti-fascist war' and pledging his Party's ,

support for the war effort.

1Findlay who lived in Pretoria, was a member of the Johannesburg District Committee which, at that time, included the Pretoria area. He and his activist wife Joan both drifted out of politics some time after the war. He was appointed an Acting Judge and was on course for a distinguished career until the Suppression of Communism Act intervened. Like other former communists, the Findlays were asked to give the 'Liquidator' rea­sons why they should not be listed as 'statutory' communists.

Findlay replied by way of an open letter in the press: List, and be damned! The gist of his reply was that he would not apologise for any­thing in his past. I do not have the text. If his reply did not have the literary quality of Lilian Heilman's to Senator MacCarthy: 'I will not cut my cloth to suit todays fashions!' the sentiments were the same. He was later appointed a judge despite it.

36

That announcement carried a lot o-f weight amongst us. The Party had enjoyed a

close -fraternal relationship with the CPGB -for many years, and been greatly

influenced in its view of world events by its journal Labour Monthly and the

incisive 'Notes of the Month' written by its chairman, R.Palme Dutt.

Divergence between us and the CPGB would have been as confusing as divergence

between us and the Soviet Party. We were just settling down to the idea that

we had been right after all when there was a contrary declaration form the

Soviet Communist Party. This described the war as 'imperialist', and urged

Communists everywhere to follow Lenin's 1914 precept of 'turning imperialist

war into civil war.*

This was startling stuff. Our Party had no formal links with the Soviet Party

but their views carried enormous authority. They had made their revolution and

were actually building socialism while elsewhere communists were only talking

of it. We turned back to serious consideration of Lenin's writings on war -

the First World War. They did not make for easy application to another country

in a different age and a different war. Smuts' white supremacist regime bore

little resemblance to Imperial Russia, or South Africa's all-volunteer white

army to the Tsar's conscripts. Lenin's thesis had dealt with a reasonably

clear clash of rival imperialisms over territory. We were dealing with a war

whose substance was in matters of democracy and independence of states.

We were still wrestling with interpretation of Lenin when confusion was worse

confounded. A new statement from the CPGB repudiated Pollit's characterisa­

tion of the war and announced that he had been relieved of his position as

Secretary. Before that could be *S

tive declaration from our own Central Committee

a struggle between imperialisms, neither 'people's war'

nor 'anti-fascist war'. Whether they had arrived at that conclusion

independently, or had deferred to the combined influences of the Soviet and

British Parties was never clear to me.

At least we now had a formal a 'Party line', which seemed to derive from

Clausewitz' aphorism that 'war is the continuation of politics by other means'

than from Lenin. We would not be doing anything to help prosecute the war. Our

taken aboard, a defini... Tl>-- - - the war as

37

concentration would be on developing a mass people's movement against white

supremacy. We would work -for all-out resistance to South African fascism and

for the victory of a non-racial democracy within our own country.

Many commentators have seen this on-again off-again Party vacillation as

evidence of a puppet Party following dictates from Moscow. It did not look

like that from inside. The Soviet's views certainly caused much 4$ agonising,

but were never more than a single factor in the final reckoning. The

indecision and vacillation were .ofrouripwn.making, and a witness of the*rw<A +t»WlY o. ■

seriousness with which we *iri t4 tn ri«ha+» m H rni ..... m- null, lu-iy-ln

conclusion. Whether the CC itself also wavered back and forth along the way I

do not know. The Johannesburg District Committee certainly did, but had the

courage to admit error and reverse itself in the end. No political party can

claim to be free from mistakes. Few have the integrity ever to admit them and

back down.

However the policy was finally formulated, and accepted. Its twin-track attack

on white supremacy and the war effort put us on collision course with both the

factions of white politics. Government and its nationalist opposition were

equally determined that war would not be allowed to interfere with white

supremacy. But they were not omnipotent. The social, economic and political

consequences of taking the country into war was not and could not be - like

the vote in Parliament - just white man's business. In the end the

consequences would be critically affected by that black majority which had

been ignored and disregarded in all the Parliamentary sound and fury. We would

be trying to bringing that majority's aims and aspirations into the reckoning.

That was certain to guarantee us a rough ride in a country where politics has

always been a rough business.

38

CHAPTER 3. 1939 - 1940

The country was at war, but nothing much seemed to change - no black-outs, no

air-raid sirens, no conscription. Young white males were signing on -for

•full-time service, and in the countryside young black men - but only -for

non-combatant duty as cooks, stretcher-bearers and drivers. No call-up of

peace-time Citizen Force regiments, no gas-masks, no food rationing. In

Johannesburg, a white hooligan mob engaged in an alcohol-assisted round of

'patriotic' mayhem, setting German cars alight in the streets, beating up

German civilians and trashing the German club. Outside of the city, a spate of

random assaults on lone soldiers started. A mob of soldiers from their

Potchefstroom camp hit back by smashing National Party premises. For a short

while it seemed that Lenin's idea of turning imperialist into civil war was

coming into its own. But the frenzy passed. Unthinking mob violence gave way

to organised violence by secretive armed pro-Nazi groups, one of them led by

ex prize-fighter Robey Leibbrandt who had been trained in Nazi Germany and

been returned to South Africa by German submarine.

In parallel with the clandestine groups, a quasi-military organisation was

organising and drilling militant white republicans. Calling itself the Ossewa

Brandwag and reviving nostalgia for the Boer Republican commandos, it was

turning away from Parliamentary politics towards military confrontation. The

Smuts government showed little sign of concern - apparently satisfied that the

OB, for all its militarist bluster, remained part of the essential consensus

that political power was a white preserve.

Only the Communist Party stood outside that consensus. The black majority,

still mainly rural, lacked any organised voice strong enough to influence the

course of politics, but that too was changing. War was bringing rapid

industrial expansion and drawing armies of rural men and women to the cities,

especially to the Vaal triangle. Johannesburg's black population was growing

inexorably into the city majority. Once impotent and barely visible

39

organisations were growing in confidence; trade-unionism and a new sense of

national identity was developing. Urban blacks were starting to flex their

muscles and to make their demands with a new-found militancy.

Most Communist Party members were engaged either in the trade-union movement

or in the Party's most important activity - the running of night-schools for

adult black workers. There was a growing network of these schools which taught

basic reading, writing and arithmetic. They were set up in unlikely places

like domestic garages and outbuildings in the white suburbs, or in unused

store-rooms and offices in the central city. Black adults arrived after work,

to be taught by Party members with no teaching qualifications but a good deal

of dedication. The schools were not intended to be philanthropic or

charitable. They had a serious political purpose. Through them, the Party

would be put in touch with serious and responsible men and women, and would

introduce them to social and political ideas through teaching the three Rs. It

was a fruitful field. Many of the students took on active roles in the

community and in trade unions, and provided a steady flow of recruits to the

Party.

In its attitude towards the left, the Smuts government was proving little

different from its predecessors We did not share the reverential view of

Smuts' democratic credentials which had given him a saint-like standing in

pro-war circles at home and abroad. His dismal record included responsibility

for a military massacre of 190 men and women at Bulhoek in 1921 over

non-payment of taxes; and the crushing by martial law of the 1922

Witwatersrand miners' strike with the loss of some 200 lives. He had

collaborated with avowed pro-Nazis like Oswald Pirow and Eric Louw in the

coalition government right up to the eve of war. We saw nothing in his record

or his choice of his own cabinet to suggest that he had changed.

We expected his government to be white supremacist and anti-democratic at home

even though it posed as anti-fascist and democratic. Our expectations were

confirmed when, shortly after he took office detention camps were set up for

the first time since the South African War. Ostensibly they were to be for

enemy agents. Internment without trial of ethnic Germans and Italians began.

Before long the distinction between enemy agents and anti-fascist opponents

faded, and internment widened out to include anti-fascists. Some were members

40

of the Party, like Dr. Max Joffe and his brother Louis, a veteran of the South

African army's South West Africa campaign in the 1st World War; and Issy

Wolfson of the Tailoring Workers Union. Some were non-party trade unionists,

like Max Gordon, a Trotskyist and organiser of black workers' unions on the

Witwatersrand. There were others like Arnold Latti, an elderly Italian

communist from Port Elizabeth who was a veteran of the struggle against

Mussolini; and Fritz Fellner, an anti-Nazi refugee from Germany, trade

unionist and husband of Johanna Cornelius of the Garment Workers' Union. And

there was E.J.Burford, secretary of the Anti-Fascist League and member of my

own branch of the Labour Party.

There was no apparent reason why these had been selected, and their internment

went almost unnoticed by press and public. Burford's case drew the loudest

protest as a result of his high-profile in anti-fascist campaigns. His only

other political activity had been in the Labour Party which was itself a

partner in the Smuts' government, but there was scant protest from the Labour

Party hierarchy or its cabinet member, Walter Madeley. Other internments of

anti-fascists could be ascribed to an excess of the security services. In

Burford's case people inside and outside the Labour Party suspected connivance

of the Party leadership in whose side he had been a radical thorn.

I had that same/ though now I am not so sure it was fully justified, even

though anger at the leadership's failure to protest certainly was. Whether

they were complicit in Burford's internment must remain in doubt. Their man in

the cabinet, Walter Madeley, always struck me as an honest man - as career

politicians go, but no radical. His politics were limited and parochial. He

was one for whom the term 'the working class' meant the class of the skilled

white artisan. Black workers were not part of it, though he probably

understood their disabilities and deplored them. I doubt if he had a hand in

Burford's internment, but I feel less charitable towards many of his

colleagues in the Party leadership who constituted what we called the

'Headquarters clique'.

This was a cabal of Party cronies, almost all of whom held public or Party

office. They hung out in a seedy beer- and smoke-laden Labour Party Club which

occupied/floor below the Party head office. It was exclusively male, and had

no amenities except the bar where they hobnobbed with a similar group of

41

cronies and bureaucrats -from the Trades and Labour Council next door. The

financing and administration of the Club was a closely guarded secret. The

radical left never used the place, but believed that its takings which should

have gone into Party funds were secretly siphoned off to pay the election

expenses of the insiders. We had no proof. At annual National Conferences, the

left would ask to be shown the Club's balance sheet, and annually the

procedures would be manipulated or filibustered to frustrate the demand.

The Club's finances were not important in themselves, but the refusal to offer

an explanation of them exacerbated the political hostilities at the

Conferences. These were becoming more confrontational year by year. A

left-right division overshadowed almost every debate on policy - whether on

such matters as strikes and civil liberties, or on social and economic

legislative policy. Burford had been a regular speaker on such issues. For a

short time, his internment became one of the divisive issues,1 but debate on

policy towards the war did not. By tacit agreement, both left and right

avoided the issue for fear of provoking an irreversible split. There was

however no way to avoid full frontal confrontation over so-called 'Native

Policy' which lay at the heart of almost every matter in dispute.

The Labour Party's socialism was explicitly a whites only project. It did not

extend to voting rights or equal citizenship for the black majority or

necessarily include the abolition of pass laws, segregation laws and the rest

of the props to white supremacy. All such matters were lumped together under

the rubric of 'Native Policy'. The loose left grouping was agreed on the need

for radical revision of the Party's ‘Native Policy', but could never muster

enough Conference votes to get it. Headquarters, that is to say the Party

establishment, was better managed and not averse to reviving dead branches and

members to ensure the vote in times of need. We thought that we won all the

arguments, but still lost all the significant votes.

1 Burford - and most of the others - were released without explanation after some months in internment.Burford returned with anecdotes; of Italians at Marshall Square on their way to the internment camp singing 'Rule Britannia' by way of retort Germans who were taunting them with 'Deutschland Uber Alles’.'<J|nd of/tola^' by his police escort not to carry his suitcase into the internment camp.'The boy will fetch it!' Which a black adult duly did. Apartheid South Africa a thin line between tragedy and farce.

42

After Burford's internment, the 1940 Conference was an especially ill-tempered

and hostile affair. Though I was a branch delegate I do not remember taking

any part in the debates. At the end left and right joined to sing - as always:

'We'll keep the red flag flying here!' and went off to face another year of

uneasy inner-party peace. What we got was a bomb-shell - or more accurately, a

drum-head court martial. Curt letters informed our Branch that it had been

dissolved by the National Executive Committee - no reasons given; members who

wished to do so could apply for admission to other branches. Burford and I

both received letters informing us that the NEC had expelled us from the

Party. There had been no hearing and no explanation. We had built up what had

become the liveliest and largest Branch of the Party in the country, and the

only one with a regular organ of its own. It was a petty act of reprisal for

open criticism of a leadership whose democratic arteries had hardened. It was

also counter-productive, and served to weaken and dispirit the Party still

further.

At a time when Labour was going ever deeper into decline, the Communist Party

was succeeding in hauling itself up from its own. Its Central Committee had

been successfully reconstructed in Cape Town and had sponsored the revival of

vigorous new District Committees in all four provinces. Archaic practices like

the use of pseudonyms and of 'concealed' membership were being phased out, and

dual CP-LP membership was being ended. Not long before my excommunication from

Labour, all CP 'dual members' had been required to opt out of one party or the

other, ending a long-standing Party practice. All 'dual members' were free to

choose. With two exceptions, all the members of my group chose to opt out of

the Labour Party.

The exceptions were Alex Hepple, who was a Labour Provincial Councillor and

prospective Parliamentary candidate, and his wife Girlie. Alex was slightly

older than the rest of. He had inherited a small factory which made him a

small-time 'employer' and 'industrialist', an anomaly in the Communist Party.

Their loyalty to the Party was unquestionable, but in the circumstances they

were unlikely to be considered for any public leadership role. They and the

rest of the group agreed that they could do more for the cause of socialism

from a position in the front ranks of the Labour Party than from the back

benches of the CP. The decision was a difficult one for them both, but in the

end they decided to end their membership of the Communist Party. We had been

43

in the same CP group for some time. I liked them both and had a high regard

for their honesty and commitment. We remained friends. Alex went on to become

the Labour M.P. for Rosettenville and a principled member of the declining

Labour group in public office1.

By that time Labour's decline was nearly terminal. The white-supremacist

cancer had eaten away its core; its supporters had dribbled off towards the

National and United Parties. Its final knell sounded in the 1948 General

Election, when the Smuts government was turned out of office, taking the

Labour remnants with it. Labour had been born out of a white artisan class

which had, by now, lost all socialist orientation. It had been displaced from

its niche by narrow nationalist and chauvinist factions. It had outlived its

time, and for all practical purposes died in tandem with the Smuts

government.2 Whether it was ever formally wound up I do not know.

Expulsion from the Labour Party felt to me like liberation. I had been

petitioning the CP District Committee for the right to resign from it, and

had been repeatedly turned down. The matter had been settled. I could now

concentrate my political activity in the CP as I had wanted to do. It was a

good time tor it. The CP was emerging into the public light from its reclusive

and semi-clandestine past. It was moving out physically from its hole-in-

corner premises to new offices in Progress Buildings, close to the heart of

the city where the Carlton Centre now stands. It had replaced the press

sequestrated in the times of decline with a new electric duplicator. It was

starting publication of a new monthly 'Inkululeko' (Freedom) to replace the

former and now defunct Umsebenzi (The Worker). Even the change of title

indicated some shift of thinking.

1 Many years later, he helped Canon John Collins of St. Paul's Cathedral in London found the International Defence and Aid Fund which sustained hundreds, perhaps thousands of South African political prisoners and their families through the long years of apartheid.

2 A mixed-race Labour Party came into being in the period of the National Party government and its 'Tri-cameral Parliament'. It had no connection with the South African Labour Party except for its name, and inherited neither the former Labour Party's membership, ideology or programme.

44

Inkululeko had pages in the main African languages as well as English, typed

on wax stencils and duplicated in the party offices. Hilda drew me into the

production team in which she did skilled things like drawing the illustrations

and hand lettering the headlines; Archie Lewitton typed the stencils with two

fingers, and Mofutsanyana edited. I was only a gofer. We met at the office

once a month, early on Sunday morning, and spent the day wrestling with the

Gestetner machine, and collating and stapling the pages as they rolled off the

press. By the time we came up for air in late afternoon, coated in printers'

ink, a stack of some 1200 copies would be ready for distribution and sale.

This was the start of a long unplanned career as a propagandist.

Inkululeko helped bring the Party out of the shadows and into the streets.

Members were expected to hawk it at factory gates, railway stations and

municipal compounds. Once such street-vending became a regular practice, it

was logical to make it weekly and add the 'Guardian' to the vendors' stock in

trade. The Guardian was not a Party organ. It was independent and radical,

produced and edited weekly in Cape Town by Betty Radford and others. It was

the only regular publisher of the news and views of the trade unions and the

national liberation movements, and the Party. It was sold mainly through paid

street vendors and commission agents. Our entry into the vending business was

in part an attempt to boost its sales, but it was chiefly a deliberate effort

to turn the party membership away from internal doctrinal wrangling and

towards public activity in the real world outside.

For months, perhaps for years, I did my stint of vending at mid-day on

Saturdays at the entrance to the Mai-Mai municipal beer-hall at the south end

of Von Wielligh Street. At the time, the sale or supply of any form of alcohol

to blacks was totally prohibited, the only exception being sorghum beer -

so-called 'kaffir beer' - for on-consumption at municipal beer halls.

Municipalities with total monopolies saw no reason to make their beet—halls

anything more than comfortless drinking sheds. Mai-Mai was a bleak corrugated

iron shed baking in the sun in a bleak wasteland of swirling red dust. My

sales were quite brisk. The men - the customers were almost all men - had to

be shown a page in their own tongue before paying up the penny for a copy of

Inkululeko. It was always easier to sell the weekly two-penny Guardian, with

eight pages in English - but whichever I was selling, it was an ordeal.

45

I -forced mysel-f into it as a matter of duty. I hated the approaching people in

the street in the hope of extracting pennies from them, but enjoyed the noise

and liveliness of the Mai Mai crowds. I grew used to an exchange of banter

with sober men coming straight from work, and with rolling drunks coming out.

My pitch was in a bustle of women street-traders roasting mealies and chicken

legs on pavement braziers. Alongside us there were pavement barbers giving al

fresco trims and razor-cuts to customers sitting on soap-boxes. Everywhere

else in Johannesburg, newspaper selling was an occupation only for blacks -

usually teen-age - and the buyers almost always white. Here the standard

order was reversed - a white man selling to black buyers. Just being white in

such an all black environment made me a curiosity. Men would stop and stare in

disbelief. Occasionally the inebriated would jeer.

I was never threatened or even felt threatened. It was there at Mai Mai that I

learnt to feel at ease in the midst of black people, and to move amongst them

without self-consciousness. The psychological baggage of a life lived in

exclusively white surroundings was rubbed away. Blacks ceased to be 'others' -

menials, servants or 'victims of underdevelopment'. They became people,

individuals.

After some years of Mai-Mai I moved to a different Party branch and handed

over the Mai Mai pitch to others., My paper selling duties were transferred to

the branch area of Braamfontein. In those days before it was 're-developed'

with an unlovely mix of shops, high-rise offices and University overspill, it

was a white working-class area of small semi-detached brick cottages occupied

by white railway-men and some student lodgers. Branch members trudged door to

door with Guardian every Sunday morning. We learnt to know where there might

possibly be a buyer, where we would get a political argument on the doorstep

but no sale, and where to pass rapidly in silence before we could be spotted

by hostile householders and even more hostile guard dogs. To me it was a

cheerless activity with none of Mai-Mai's compensations. Only missionary zeal

kept me at it, and a belief that sooner or later one of my regular buyers

would come to accept radical and left views; become 'educated' as our jargon

had it.

That belief was constantly undermined by experience. My most regular customer

was an Afrikaans speaking railwayman with an adult son. Every Sunday, one or

46

other o+ them duly handed over twopence and chatted on the doorstep about the

state of the nation. The chat was costing me my Sunday morning leisure, but in

the good cause of their 'education'. Eventually the doorstep talk turned to

the question of crime. For white South Africans crime was a black phenomenon.

Every white claims to have an expertise and a personal remedy for it. My best

customer gave me his. 'Do what Paul Kruger would do. Tie the kaffir to a wagon

wheel and give him a thrashing he will never forget!' The educational payoff

for my Sunday with the Guardian!.

Did we really achieve anything at all by all that expenditure of time and

energy? Did we really effect even a subliminal change in our buyers' thinking,

or were we mortifying our flesh for the good of our own souls? I am not sure

of the answer, or of what our Braamfontein customers were thinking when they

handed over their two pence. Were they looking for alternative news, or just

brushing us off cheaply? Perhaps they were simply being charitable and helping

out an apparently poor white boy in need. I like to think that perhaps we did

help to change some of their ideas and counter some of their prejudices.

Perhaps when the white citizens finally had to choose between majority

government and civil war, the Guardian might have influenced their decisions

for the better.

Perhaps. Whatever the truth, those hours of paper selling were not wasted. We

were spreading new information and new ideas which might have helped

Braamfontein railwaymen and Mai-Mai beer drinkers to look at their country in

a new way, perhaps to start adapting their minds to a new South Africa which

was still fifty years away. Spreading ideas is not one way process. While

trying to 'educate' others we were,educating ourselves. We were learning to

work collectively, to listen to/^the man in the street' was saying and

thinking, and to present our political ideas to them in an undogmatic way.

Through paper vending we were rebuilding the Party as an open organisation in

the public light, just like any other political party.

Openness while opposing the war effort had its price. Early in 1940, Yusuf

Dadoo in Johannesburg and Dawood Seedat in Durban were arrested and charged

with anti-war incitement. Both were prominent members of the Party, which

initiated the biggest protest campaign of meetings, handbills and posters that

it had been able to contemplate for years. My branch was to help campaign in

47

the Sophiatown area where our local organisation was under strength.

Sophiatown now only exists in memories. It was bulldozed in one of Verwoerd's

worst racial excesses, to make space for an exclusively white suburb

provocatively named Triomf (Triumph).

At that time it was a multi-racial residential area where black people could

own their own homes and live unemcumbered by the red-tape and round-the-clock

controls of the municipal townships. It was a tight huddle of small run-down

cottages which had once been single-family homes. As the war-time population

grew, houses had been divided and re-divided until almost all were in multiple

occupation, often with one family per room, and back yards had been built over

with unauthorised annexes occupying every remaining inch of open space. It was

a lively bustling place where people of all races and colours shared minimal

facilities and deprivation. By night, householders locked themselves in,

leaving the yards to jazz clubs and illegal shebeens, and the streets to petty

gangsters, drunks, and packs of mangy dogs. We trudged the streets after

midnight, night after night, with our stacks of protest leaflets. The people

were asleep but the dogs were loose. We worked in pairs, up and down the

streets, slipping leaflets under every door. Dead of night had been chosen as

the best time to avoid police patrols and roving gangsters. Or perhaps just

out of revolutionary romanticism. It was very scary. The streets were badly

lit and potholed, and crossed by foul-smelling open ditches and overloaded

drains. We crept guardedly to the front doors on dark front porches where lean

mean guard dogs lurked in the shadows.

That too was a part of our learning and party-building - by ordeal. We learnt

at firs ions of a sector of the black working class. We

which can not be created by rules alone. In that period, the Party developed

the exceptional levels of unity and voluntary discipline which became its most

distinct characteristic in the years thereafter. Whether we affected the fate

of Dadoo and Seedat hard to say. Both were found guilty and sentenced to short

terms of imprisonment, making them the first martyrs of the years of the

Communist Party revival.

Open-air political meetings had been held intermittently on the steps of the

City Hall since the time of World War 1, and throughout the white workers'

learnt support and morale, and developed a Party bond

48

strikes of 1913 and 1922. By the time of World War 2 meetings there had become

irregular and infrequent - until the Party District Committee decided to

revive the tradition. We started to hold public meetings there every Sunday

evening. The steps provided a natural podium with speakers at the top of the

steps and the audience spread along the pavement at the foot. We took our

pitch in the centre of the podium, facing the clock on the old Rissik Street

Post Office across the road, and simply held forth to anyone who happened to

be passing - and often initially to no one at all.

The Party had no more claim to that prime site than anyone else. On Sunday

evenings there precious few passing pedestrians. Almost no blacks lived in the

city proper, and even they were kept off the streets by a night curfew unless

they had a 'special pass'. The meetings were an all white affair, which all

city members were expected to attend to form the nucleus of a crowd. That gave

us an advantage over our lone-wolf competitors. The speakers were white , and

the audiences white except for an occasional black straggler who might pause

momentarily to listen from the outer fringes. But not for long - the white

audience would soon make them feel alien and uncomfortable. The Party which

was waging a consistent and resolute fight against the colour bar everywhere,

never managed to banish it from the City Hall steps.

We had only a few experienced public speakers. Novices like me were simply

thrown in at the deep end - without tuition and without any public address

equipment. Our veteran speaker, Issy Wolfson of the Tailoring Workers' Union,

was endowed him with a voice like a fog-horn which drowned out the noise of

hecklers and passing traffic, and echoed back from the Post Office across the

road. As far as I could see he never prepared his speech or used any notes,

but his words flowed effortlessly, conjuring up instant slogans and drawing

intermittent applause. Hilda was our most eloquent speaker. She too could

conjure up the applause and rousing perorations, but from a base of meticulous

preparation.

Most of our speakers' had learnt the art in the trade union movement. Betty du

Toit of the Food and Canning Union, equally at home in English and Afrikaans.

Willie Kalk of the Leather Workers pacing furiously like a caged lion; Danie

duPlessis of the Building Workers' Union. The rest of us learnt as we went

along, including the District Secretary Michael Harmel, Archie Lewitton and

49

several others. I was probably the most reluctant of them all. Attendances

fluctuated between fifty and several hundred. Occasionally woatd. someone from

the crowd would apply to join the Party, but recruiting was not the main aim.

The purpose was to build ourselves a regular public forum in the centre of the

city as a step towards establishing the Party in the mainstream of political

life.

In time, the Steps on Sunday nights came to be known as the Party's platform.

audience. These irregulars were a strange mixture. There was an elderly,

vituperative, tub-thumping socialist radical named Dunbar, who thundered out

minor variations of a sermon he had been delivering since the 1920s and the

days of the International Socialist League (ISL). An altogether more tolerant

old socialist and veteran of the 1922 General Strike, Jimmy Brown, preached

the social panacaea of 'One Big Union'. Most vituperative and hostile of all

our rival orators was a lone Trotskyist named Saperstein, drawn there I

believe only to contest our message. He had no discernible message of his own

except an unrelenting 'revolutionary' condemnation of all things Communist. At

work as a pharmacist he wore a long white coat; on the Steps -*¥135- 'working

class' gear of greasy leather lumber-jacket, patched jeans, checkered

sweat-shirt and day old stubble on his chin.

I do not doubt they all believed in their messages much as we did in ours.

However, only sheer cussedness can account for their persistence in the face

of cruel heckling and howls of rejection from the audience. There was room on

the podium for several speakers to operate simultaneously, a few yards apart.

We would start our meetings strictly on time, regardless of who else might be

speaking a few yards away, and rely on Wolfson's fog-horn to persuade the

others to shut down for the night. As the Steps became known as the Party's

platform, audiences of hundreds would appear from nowhere in response to any

important happening like the capture of South African soldiers at Tobruk, the

fall of Paris to the Nazis or the German invasion of the USSR.

Johannesburg still had some of the birth-marks of its mining camp beginnings.

Political meetings were usually rowdy, and often rough. The Steps meetings

became both, and a focus for hooligans looking for a punch-up with communists.

Other whom had been there from time to time before us, would

also exercise their rights, and take advantage of what we considered to be our

50

Gangs o+ young fascists took to mingling with the crowd, bringing a vicious

tone to the jeering and heckling, shouting fascist slogans and trying to

provoke a fight. As their confidence grew, they took to assaulting any of our

members who they found in the street alone on the way to or from the Steps.

They made random assaults on any passing blacks, and staged violent forays

against the speakers on our platform. Sunday evenings on the Steps became a

regular battle-ground.

We had either to surrender the platform or defend it physically. We chose

defense, and organised a corps of our fittest and toughest members to protect

the speakers, and to escort members to and from the meeting. That made us all

feel safer, but made our meetings more fraught. Speakers would be balanced

precariously at the top of the steps, while fists flew and bodies clashed all

around them. The police who were usually there in force stood idly by, making

no attempt to intervene. We were seeing a new model police force which was

either surreptitiously encouraging the thugs or taking up positions to protect

them. We would spend Sunday in stomach-knotting anticipation, and the evening

in minor brawls and running street-fights. Sunday evenings regularly ended

either in our casualty clearing station in Max Joffe's surgery overlooking the

Steps, or in a inarch to Marshall Square to bail out comrades arrested for

'assault' or 'public disorder'.

The City Hall Steps meetings tested our nerves to the limit, but gave the

Party a real presence in the city's politics. Growth was not - like the Steps

meetings - confined to the white arena. In the black areas of the city, a

parallel growth in Party confidence and activity was under way. Recruiting of

new members was proceeding faster than amongst whites. Black Party members

were advancing into leading positions in the trade unions, in the liberation

movements and in township community organisations. The whole Party was growing

up, and changing from a predominantly white sect into a predominantly black

mass party. For the first time in its history, its membership began to mirror

the real racial and class composition of the population as a whole.

51

CHAPTER 4. 1940-43.

The Communist Party operated as a non-racial enclave o-f its own. Inside the

Party, there was a total black-white equality which could be -found nowhere

else. But we were not Utopians trying to create a perfect enclosure o-f our

own, shut o-f-f -from the world, but were trying to engage with that world,

challenge its fundamental mores and customs, and ultimately change them. Yet

there was a paradox. The more we involved ourselves in that wider world, the

greater the pressure on us to temper our principles. Inside the Party and its

committees, conferences and members' meetings, there was no colour differenti­

ation. But the more we moved out of that closed circle into the social and

political mainstream, the more we divided into black and white streams -

fraternal, nominally equal, but separate.

There was no way to avoid the divide except by withdrawing from the world.

Social necessity imposed a racial division on our organisational forms and on

our political activities. Despite us, residentially based branches would be

either predominantly black or predominantly white according toTexisting race

pattern in the area. Trade unions we belonged to were either 'white' or

'black' to accord with industrial laws. Election campaigns were prescribed by

law for white candidates and voters, or for 'black'. The languages used at

meetings were either English or Afrikaans in a white area or Zulu and Sotho in

a black. Society locked us into this net of racial separateness. We had to

conform or cease to function at all.

I was seconded to assist the Party branch in Vrededorp, which was a racially

mixed slum area with close-packed cottages where single rooms were rented out

by absentee landlords. The branch members were all new recruits, black, mainly

middle aged men with no prior Party experience. MmHJUIHiTjr. The only member

with a place big enough to hold ten or twelve people was an very large and

forceful woman who had two back rooms and a kitchen. She was known as a

'shebeen queen': that is to say that she kept an unlicensed drinking place,

with a stock of hard liquor and home-brewed beer in old petrol drums buried in

the yard. Illegal things went on in her kitchen - including brewing beer and

dispensing alcohol to blacks.

52

Collection Number: A3299 Collection Name: Hilda and Rusty BERNSTEIN Papers, 1931-2006

PUBLISHER: Publisher: Historical Papers Research Archive Collection Funder: Bernstein family Location: Johannesburg

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