Essentially, the theory and practice of 'apartheid' as expounded and implemented by the Nationalist Party, is a continuation of the policy of its predecessors in South Africa over three centuries, from the days of Jan van Riebeeck: the oppression and exploitation of the majority of the people for the benefit of the rich and privileged. But, coming at a time when the bestiality of German Fascism had aroused the world against racialist and herrenvolk ideas, a time when hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa were asserting their rights to independence and human dignity, the policy of apartheid, that revolting mixture of neo-Nazism, colonialist arrogance and Calvinist righteousness, was pursued with a lunatic thoroughness and callous disregard for humanity that shocked and outraged the conscience of the world.
Under the successive regimes of Malan (1948), Strijdom (1954), Verwoerd (1958) and Vorster (1966) a mountainous burden of oppressive and discriminatory legislation was piled upon the shoulders of the already overburdened African, Coloured and Indian people. Pass laws were made even more stringent and extended to African women. 'Non-whites' were herded like cattle into ghettoes ('group areas'), 'Bantu homelands', 'resettlement areas' and farm prisons. The vestigial franchise rights of African and Coloured men in the Cape Province were abolished.
These attacks on the people were accompanied by an endless succession of measures to suppress the rising tide of resistance and opposition which they evoked; to destroy what freedom of speech and organisation existed; to transform South Africa, step by step, into a fascist police state, ruled by lawless terror.
The United Party which virtually monopolised the Parliamentary 'opposition,'(1) excelled itself from year to year in its servile support of government policies, divesting itself of every shred of the democratic principles it had once pretended to, and vying with the Nationalists in degrading appeals to white chauvinism and red-baiting. More and more obviously the only real forces of opposition and resistance revealed themselves outside white politics and its Parliament, in the black working class and the liberation movements of the oppressed people.
These movements rose to the challenge, achieving a steadily growing measure of inner strength and unity, of revolutionary clarity of purpose and leadership.
It will always be to the credit of the African National Congress that when the first major onslaught was launched to illegalise the Party of the working class, it did not stand aside but courageously took the lead and threw all its resources into the fight for the legal existence of the Communist Party.
As soon as the terms of the Unlawful Organisations Bill became known in May 1950, the National Executive Committee of the ANC called an emergency conference in Johannesburg. Attended by representatives of the executives of the South African Indian Congress, the APO and the Communist Party - the SA Trades and Labour Council and the Labour Party declined invitations - the conference heard an analysis of the Bill and reviewed the government's record.
Dr. Dadoo, for the SA Indian Congress, made an impassioned speech calling for the setting aside of past differences and the establishment of unity against fascism and for freedom. Nelson Mandela, O. R. Tambo, W. Sisulu and other leaders of the Youth League, now on the NEC of the ANC, responded in like spirit. If the attack on the Communist Party, said Tambo, were allowed to pass without resistance, none of the democratic organisations would be spared. 'Today it is the Communist Party,' he declared. 'Tomorrow it will be our trade unions, our Indian Congress, our APO, our African National Congress.'
The conference resolved on mass action, in protest against the law to suppress the Communist Party and other undemocratic measures. 26 June 1950 was set aside as a day of mourning for those killed by the police on 1 May, a day of nationwide strikes and protests. A joint committee was established to implement the decision.
The campaign that followed, and the massive response from all parts of the country, marked a milestone in the development of the unity in action of the national liberation movements of the oppressed peoples, together with the revolutionary working class movement, the 'Congress Alliance'.
To bring together all these broad forces was no easy task. Years of government divide-and-rule policy towards African, Coloured and Indian people had not been without effect. The seeds of political and ideological division had been sown among the various sections of the people. To achieve the cherished goal of the Communist Party, of unity of Communist and non-Communist patriots in the common liberation struggle, meant hard and patient work, not only to break down long-cultivated prejudices and misunderstandings that existed in the liberation movement, but also to eliminate sectarianism of all kinds within the ranks of the Communists themselves.
The concept of June 26 as Freedom Day was born in 1950. It was to become a rallying day for the forces of freedom in the years that followed, years in which the Communists, at every level of the movement, set a standard of loyalty, courage and devotion which cemented the unity of liberation and working class forces in common struggle and sacrifice.
Though the first Freedom Day action had been mainly concentrated in the urban areas, the signs were already present of an upsurge in the rural areas as well. During 1950, at Witzieshoek, in the Orange Free State, the peasants came out in rebellion against the state policy of cattle-culling and their shortage of land and starvation conditions of life. Many were killed and wounded in clashes with the police, following which a number of African leaders were sentenced to heavy sentences for public violence'.
In 1951 the government embarked upon its long and stubborn campaign to remove the Coloured men of the Cape Province from the voters' roll. The first reaction of the Coloured people was militant. A united Franchise Action Council was set up in Cape Town, and over 15,000 Coloured people marched through the streets of the city following a mammoth meeting on the Grand Parade. Unfortunately this promising movement was wrecked - as were many other movements of the Coloured people - by the Trotskyite-influenced leadership of the so-called Non-European Unity Movement.
In 1952, again on June 26, the African and Indian Congresses launched the Campaign of Defiance of Unjust Laws, in which 8,500 disciplined volunteers systematically flouted various apartheid measures and suffered imprisonment.
Undoubtedly the movement was partly based on the experience of South African Indians' passive resistance campaigns of 1906 and 1913, and this has led some observers to equate the Defiers of 1952 with the Gandhian doctrines of 'soul force'. The parallel is incorrect. The Defiance Campaign was not designed to end the system of white supremacy by the sacrifices of its victims; it was seen as an effective form of training and mobilising disciplined volunteers in non-violent action at a time when other (i.e. violent) means were not yet accepted by the majority of the people or their leaders. It was for that very reason that the campaign was supported by Communists and other revolutionaries, and that the very first volunteers included Kotane, Dadoo and other Communist leaders.
In February 1953 the government brought in a law to kill the campaign by imposing ferocious penalties for any legal offence committed as a protest. Clearly new methods were called for.
Yet the effects of the campaign fully justified its planners. It transformed the character of the African National Congress, from what may have seemed to many a body of words to one of deeds. The Defiance Campaign marked the transition of the ANC from a loosely knit body to an effective organisation in which men of action counted for more than orators, in which workers of town and country, and young men and women, played an increasingly preponderant role. The temper of the 'new Congress' found a warm answering chord among the masses, who surged to the ANC in support and membership.
The leadership was correspondingly strengthened. Dr. Moroka, who had succumbed to the pressure of the state to 'dissociate himself' from 'Communism' during the trial of Congress leaders which followed the campaign, lost his position as Congress President at the next annual conference. He was replaced by a man who was to become the symbol of African courage, militancy and resistance until his death in 1967, Chief Albert John Lutuli.
The Indian Congress, likewise, greatly consolidated its ranks around Dr. Naicker in Natal, Yusuf Dadoo in the Transvaal, and their militant colleagues.
The defiance campaign stimulated the growth of new democratic movements among minority sections of the population. The African People's Organisation was succeeded by the Coloured People's Organisation (later, Coloured People's Congress) under the presidency of James la Guma. A meeting of white Congress supporters was convened by the ANC and addressed by O. R. Tambo, after which it was decided to establish the Congress of Democrats, unconditionally committed to uphold the Congress policy of equal votes, rights and opportunities for all.
It was these four organisations which joined forces to call the Congress of the People (June 26 1955) which met at Kliptown, near Johannesburg, after 18 months of intensive preparation.
Despite the illegalisation of the Party in 1950, the great majority of the Communists remained at their posts in the working class and liberation movements, but they did not lose sight of the need, reinforced by daily experience, for independent, collective, Marxist-Leninist discussion, organisation and leadership. Immediately after dissolution, the seasoned Marxist-Leninist core came together to hammer out a course of action in the light of South African realities. Two minority views were expressed. The first was that Communists should withdraw from all public activities in such mass organisations as were still legally permitted, to concentrate on 'the underground'. The other was that there was no need for the Communist Party at that stage in South Africa
The majority firmly rejected both of these incorrect views. It was vital to maintain such mass work as was legally possible. An independent Marxist-Leninist party was essential as well, both to fulfil its long-term mission of winning a socialist South Africa based or workers' power, and also to ensure the success of the immediate fight for national liberation and democracy. Hence the Communists, as part of an organised collective body, had both to participate actively in the public, legal mass movement, and to combine this with persistent planned illegal work to rebuild and strengthen the Party as the vanguard of the most advanced class, the working class.
Accordingly, a provisional centre set to work to accomplish these twin, and related objectives. Through methodical, though necessarily cautious, work Party cells and district committees were established ir the main centres of the country. By the beginning of 1953 a national conference was convened, which adopted a programme and rules and adopted the name, the South African Communist Party. Its purpose was 'to carry forward and raise still higher the banner of the Communist movement under the new and testing conditions of illegality'. Its task was that of 'combining legal mass work with the illegal work of building the Marxist-Leninist Party'. While distinguishing itself in its name and approach from the former CPSA which 'despite its great achievements and struggles . . . proved incapable of surviving under illegal conditions', the reborn Party declared itself 'the heir to the tradition created by the CPSA... of unflinching struggle against oppression and exploitation, for unity of the workers and freedom-loving people of country, irrespective of race and colour'.
The Party and the liberation and trade union movements worked under ever-increasing difficulties.
From May, 1952, the government set about systematically eliminating legal radical opposition through the Suppression of Communism Act and a stream of additional suppressive legislation.
Scores of trade unionists and African and Indian Congress leaders were served with government notices 'banning' them from working for or belonging to their organisations to which they had devoted their lives. Among the trade unionists banned were J. B. Marks, president of the Council of Non-European Trade Unions and of the ANC (Transvaal), Dan Tloome, CNETU secretary, I. Wolfson, treasurer of the Trades and Labour Council, other TLC leaders such as R. Fleet, W. Kalk, E. Weinberg and B. du Toit. Some of the orders were extended to those who had long severed their connections with the Party, such as E. S. (Solly) Sachs, the secretary of the Garment Workers' Union.
The Guardian, the fighting democratic weekly, was suppressed. Its resourceful staff, including such outstanding Communist journalists as Brian Bunting, Lionel Forman, Govan Mbeki, Ruth First and M. P. Naicker, continued their work by producing Advance, New Age and eventually Spark as each succeeding journal was banned.
The movement also produced, during the fifties, journals of a high calibre, such as Fighting Talk, under the editorship of Ruth First, and Liberation, edited by Dan Tloome, whose reviews and analyses of current events played an important part in raising the political level of the movement as a whole.
The government arbitrarily expelled Sam Kahn from Parliament and Fred Carneson from the Cape Provincial Council. The African voters of the Western Cape, responded by electing Brian Bunting to Parliament, and when he was also removed yet a third Communist was elected, Ray Alexander (Mrs. Ray Simons). But by this time the Suppression of Communism Act had been amended to make it illegal for Communists to be elected, and she was not allowed to take her seat in Parliament.
The Suppression of Communism Act was followed by a whole series of repressive laws - such as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, the Public Safety Act, Sabotage Act and Terrorism Act - coupled with an unparalleled increase in the machinery of dictatorship - the army and the police - placing virtually unlimited powers in the hands of the state to detain, torture and murder political opponents and place the entire country under a permanent state of 'emergency' and martial law.
The oppressed majority and their organisations protested and resisted against every new step on the road of fascism. They went further, in deciding to convoke a true people's 'parliament' or constituent assembly; one which would embody in a single charter the aspirations of the people for a free and democratic South Africa.
At its annual conference at the end of 1953 the ANC, on the proposal of one of its most senior members, Professor Z. K. Matthews agreed to convene a mass representative gathering of men and women of all national groups in the country, to reach an understanding of the sort of South Africa which could enable its people to live together in amity. This far-reaching proposal was given substance at a meeting of the executives of the ANC, the SAIC, the Coloured People's Organisation and the Congress of Democrats, presided over by Chief Lutuli in March 1954. It was agreed to convene a 'Congress of the People' through which the masses themselves could express their own demands and wishes.
This decision generated widespread enthusiasm. The joint campaign committee organised thousands of meetings in every corner of the land; in urban and rural areas, in factories and mine-compounds, in the Reserves and villages - even in the prisons. Local Committees were set up in every corner of the country. They were enjoined to collect the people's demands, express their grievances, and forward them to the organisers for incorporation in a people's charter of rights. The campaign continued for more than a year.
On 26 June 1955, the Congress of the People was held at Kliptown, near Johannesburg. The preparations had been hampered by continuous police interference, with organisers arrested, meetings disrupted. Even on the eve of the Congress itself road-blocks had been set up and hundreds o f delegates stopped. Yet, over 3,000 made their way to the great open square at Kliptown.
Many familiar faces were absent. Of the three men honoured by the gathering with the traditional African order 'Isitwalandwe' only one - Trevor Huddleston - was there to receive it. The other two, Chief Lutuli and Dr. Dadoo, were banned by Ministerial order, and hundreds were compelled to be absent by similar edicts. Yet it was the most representative gathering South Africa had ever seen: men and women of every national group - the great preponderance Africans - from almost every corner of the land.
An army of armed police surrounded the gathering. The organisers had collected the thousands of demands and proposals and distilled their content into a single document which at the same time expressed the people's hatred of racist South Africa as it is, and their vision of the free South Africa of the future - the Freedom Charter.
As the gathering began to discuss and adopt the clauses of this memorable document, the police moved in, demanding the names and addresses and searching the persons of the delegates. But the meeting went on with the work it had come to do. Under the sten-guns of the intruders, it proceeded to adopt the Charter, clause by clause, the adoption of each being punctuated by the singing of the people's anthem, Nkosi Sikalel' iAfrika.
The Freedom Charter, in the words of Nelson Mandela, is 'a beacon to the Congress movement and an inspiration to the people of South Africa'. For the first time all the major democratic forces in the country found a common programme. The Charter was subsequently endorsed by national conferences of the SA Indian Congress, the Coloured People's Congress and the Congress of Democrats; by the SA Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and in the 1962 Programme of the South African Communist Party.
Essentially, the South African Freedom Charter stems from the tradition of the proclamations of rights of the French and American revolutions and echoed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. It demands rights which are honoured -- at least in theory -- in almost every country: an equal say for all in the process of making and administering laws, equal access to education, culture, and economic opportunities for all men and women, regardless of race or colour. The Charter is not a socialist manifesto. Its demands for the redivision of the land among those who work it, and the nationalisation of mineral wealth and monopoly-owned industry, are clearly attributable to the historical realities of a country where the white minority has forcibly appropriated nearly all the country's land and assets, rather than adherence to socialist doctrine on the part of all those who made and support the Charter.
Yet, in Mandela's words, the Freedom Charter is 'a revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisages cannot be won without breaking up the economic and political set-up of present South Africa.' It was for this reason that the ruling classes of South Africa regarded the Charter as 'High Treason'.
To prove treason, however, in a court of law, required more than a government statement. The security police began an intensive drive to amass such evidence. The homes and offices of hundreds of Congress members and supporters, trade unionists, members of the peace movement and other bodies were raided and searched by the police; thousands of books and documents seized. After eighteen months they were ready to present their case in Court. On 6 December 1966, one hundred and fifty-six men and women from all over South Africa were arrested at dawn and flown to Johannesburg in military aircraft to face charges of Communism and High Treason. They included the foremost leaders of the Congress Alliance, provincial and branch leaders and rank-and-file members, men and women from every national group and walk of life.
The news of the trial aroused tremendous anger and indignation among the freedom-loving people of South Africa and their innumerable friends the world over. Bearing banners and placards - 'We Stand By Our Leaders' - thousands of Congress supporters gathered around the Johannesburg Drill Hall when the trial opened, to be dispersed by police baton charges and gunfire. The trial also evoked passionate interest and support among broad democratic circles abroad. The prosecution - headed until his death by the Nazi ex-Minister of Justice Pirow - set out to prove that the Freedom Charter was a blueprint for a 'Communist state', to be attained by force and violence. These contentions were torn to shreds by a brilliant team of defence lawyers, including Bram Fischer, and by the accused themselves, whose ranks included such able legal men as Duma Nokwe, Joe Slovo, Nelson Mandela, O. R. Tambo and J. Matthews.
The preparatory examination and trial lasted from December 1956 until March 1961, when all the accused were found not guilty and discharged. But by that time the Nationalist Party had abolished all tracks of the rule of law and political victims could be dealt with outside the Courts.
Hardly one of the treason trial accused escaped punishment in the sixties. Some were placed under house-arrest and other restrictions. Many were jailed for life and other long-term sentences. Others were forced into exile from the country. Many were detained and tortured, some murdered.
In addition to convicting those accused, the government intended the treason trial to intimidate the resistance movement, to break down its unity, to smear the movement as 'Communist', and in the process to divide the Communists among the accused from their colleagues. In each and every one of these objectives it failed miserably. In the long years of the treason trial the leaders of the different organisations, of different communities and ideological outlooks, came to known one another better, to respect one another and learn from one another. Not a single one of those accused took the road of asking for a separate trial or 'disassociating' himself from Communism.
Far from breaking the spirit of the people, the years of the treason trial saw an upsurge of mass activity on almost every front.
There were historic bus boycotts in Alexandra Township, Johannesburg, Evaton, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and elsewhere where tens of thousands of people acted in solidarity.
African women carried on a stubborn and militant struggle against the extension of the pass laws to them. Following the great demonstration of August 1956 in which 20,000 women converged on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the ANC Women's League and the non-racial Federation of South African Women led militant protests, not only in Johannesburg and Durban, where thousands were arrested, but in many country areas of the Transvaal, Orange Free State, Cape and Natal, such as Lichtenburg, Standerton, Balfour and Zeerust, as the government implemented its policy of issuing women's passes piecemeal, beginning in the rural areas. Thousands of women were arrested and sentenced for destroying their passes.
Faced with rising living costs, though all strikes of Africans were and remain illegal, numerous strikes in fact took place for higher wages, followed by mass arrests and imprisonments. Following the precedent of the first Freedom Day, the workers came out time and again at the call of the Congress movement (joined from 1955 by SACTU - the newly founded SA Congress of Trade Unions) in massive 'stay-at-homes' to back their political demands. As Sol Dubula later commented in The African Communist (No. 24,1966) the years of the treason trial were
all the years in which, for the first time in our country, the national general political strike made its appearance. Time and again the great industrial complexes of the Witwatersrand, the Eastern Cape, Natal and elsewhere were brought to a standstill, as hundreds of thousands of African and other workers answered the Congress call, and stayed at home. They struck for basic political demands, despite lack of recognized trade unions, loss of pay, police intimidation - and despite repeated scabbing appeals by most of the people who now lead PAC.
SACTU was formed following the cowardly desertion of principle by the leaders of the Trades and Labour Council, who dissolved that body to establish the colour-bar 'South African Council of Trade Unions' whose constitution excluded African workers. The Unions which had fought against this surrender joined in 1955 to join the Transvaal Council of Non-European Trade unions to set up, on 5 March 1955, the first South African trade union federation truly to fight both the political and industrial colour bars, in word and in deed, the South African Congress of Trade Unions.
Rejecting the treacherous slogan 'No politics m the trade unions' SACTU boldly tackled the great main problems - the industrial colour bar, the pass laws, the absence of political and civil rights - of the mass of workers, as well as demands for better wages and conditions. It adopted the Freedom Charter and associated itself in the Congress Alliance. It launched a major campaign, around the demand for a national minimum wage of £1 a day, for the organisation of the mass of unorganised workers in town and country. Its leading organs - unlike those of the former TLC - reflected the composition of the working class of our country, including, as well as White, Coloured and Indian workers, African trade unionists such as Leslie Massina, J. Gaetsewe, and M. W. Shope (successively general secretary) and S. Dhlamini (national president).
The closing years of the fifties were a period in which increasingly the oppressed people of the rural areas fought back against the government, involving increasingly revolutionary forms of mass action.
In 1958 massive unrest erupted in Zeerust, following the women's destruction of pass books at Linokana, Gopane, Witkleigat and Motsoedi, and the deportation of a patriotic chief. The people set up their own courts, and tried and executed four pro-government quislings. Massive state reprisals followed.
In May of the same year the people of Sekhukhuniland revolted against the imposition of 'Bantu authorities' as a first step towards the creation of a 'Bantustan'. Similar battles were fought in Zululand, Tembuland and Pondoland. The setting up of people's courts and the sentencing of traitors initiated in Zeerust was emulated in Tembuland and Zululand. The white state suppressed these risings ferociously, many peasant leaders being deported, sentenced to long prison terms and their homes burnt down. In Sekukhuniland sixteen peasants. including a woman, were sentenced to death and executed.
Writing in The African Communist (No. 11, 1962) L. Legwa wrote:
'Particularly bitter struggles took place in Pondoland, a portion of the Transkei which retained independence until 1894 when the British government forced its annexation to the Cape by coercion and fraud . . . The whole district of Bizana fell into the hands of the mountain men - the freedom fighters. They set up people's courts and levied taxes on black and white in the area.
The government resorted to extensive military actions. A state of emergency - which has still not been lifted - was declared over the whole area of the Transkeian Territory. More than 5,000 peasant leaders were arrested and detained. Hundreds were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. Thirty-two leaders were sentenced to death...''
In addition to these major struggles, innumerable campaigns were carried out in various fields. A successful potato boycott (in protest against slave conditions on potato farms); a boycott of nationalist firms - later to be echoed on an international scale - vigorous action against the 'Western areas removal scheme' which destroyed whole African living areas in Johannesburg - all these and many other activities made up the pattern of political life in the fifties as reflected in the columns of The Guardian and its successors, analysed and evaluated in such periodicals as Fighting Talk and Liberation.
In all these and many other epic struggles of the fifties, the Communist Party and its members played a worthy role. As Bram Fischer later pointed out in his great court address while on trial for his life (28 March 1966) he realised that as he became more deeply involved with the Congress movement of those years - 'that is, the movement for freedom and equal human rights for all':
that it was always members of the Communist Party who seemed prepared, regardless of cost, to sacrifice most; to give of their best, to face the greatest dangers. in the struggle against poverty and discrimination.
By the end of the fifties it was plain that a showdown was impending between the fascist rulers of South Africa and the oppressed people. The great series of militant non-violent struggles, general strikes and boycotts had succeeded in arousing the people and mobilising them behind the Congress banner as never before. But neither these campaigns nor the ever-mounting world chorus of condemnation of apartheid had succeeded in wringing a single concession from the Nationalist Party government, which merely reacted by redoubling its methods and machinery of terror. It became increasingly clear to the masses and their leaders that new methods, a new approach, was needed in the fight against the colonialist-fascist regime. The violent struggles of the rural people, especially in Pondoland, unarmed or ill-armed as they were, had shown the way.
The new phase of the struggle was precipitated by an unexpected and tragic event - the massacre at Sharpeville on 21 March 1960.
As in every developed country various splits and divisions existed within the ranks of the oppressed and exploited people. Various 'left' or 'right' factions split away from the main body of the liberation movements, arising from petit-bourgeois confusion or outside intrigues. For example in the Cape, especially among Coloured intellectuals, a body styling itself the 'Non-European Unity Movement', largely under Trotskyite influence had a long and malodorous record of sabotaging, under ultra-revolutionary slogans, every struggle launched by the Congress movement or the Communist Party. Several right-wing splinter movements had begun in the ANC, invariably under the slogans of anti-Communism and alleged Indian or European influence in the ANC
In the late fifties a new group of this type made its appearance in the ANC Calling themselves 'Africanists' they launched a campaign of vicious calumny against the Lutuli-Sisulu leadership and the Freedom Charter. At the end of 1959 the Africanists, having failed dismally to gain support within the ANC, broke away to form their own organisation, the 'Pan-Africanist Congress'.
Little more might have been heard of this body had it not been for the grim incidents of the following March. Learning that the ANC had decided to launch a fresh major offensive against the pass laws at the end of that month, the PAC adventurously called its own 'anti-pass campaign' a week earlier. Africans were summoned to go to local police stations on that day and deliver up their passes in 'a non-violent way'. For the most part, the call fell on deaf ears, the African workers awaiting a call from their recognised and tested leaders. But in two areas, Sharpeville in the Transvaal and Langa in the Cape - in both of which ANC organisation was weak - crowds of Africans did peacefully assemble at the police stations. The reaction of the police shocked South Africa and the world, exposing the police state in all its naked brutality. They opened fire with sten guns mounted on trucks, shooting the fleeing crowds in their backs, killing and wounding people indiscriminately.
The reaction was angry and immediate. In answer to the call of President Lutuli, Africans throughout the country staged a highly-effective one-day strike, and thousands followed his example by burning their passes. Africans in Cape Town came out on strike for more than two weeks.
The government declared war on the people. A state of emergency was proclaimed. At least twenty thousand young Africans were indiscriminately arrested and a further two thousand 'politicals' - men and women of all national groups known or thought to be active in the ANC and other democratic organisations - arrested and detained for months without trial. The African National Congress (and for good measure the PAC as well) were declared illegal organisations.
It was this crisis, coming on top of all the previous acts of repression, which convinced both the masses of oppressed people and their leaders that the days when resistance could be confined to 'non-violent' and 'legal' methods had gone forever. The ANC, despite the loss of so many of its leaders and cadres, functioned throughout the emergency. The Communist Party - which had already illegally, in October 1959, produced the first issue of The African Communist, in Johannesburg - came out with its first illegal leaflets for mass distribution in all the main industrial regions of the country.
The leaders of the liberation movement and the Communist Party - both those in detention and those who had evaded the police net and were living in hiding - came to the same conclusion. It was necessary to abandon 'non-violence' as the sole means of struggle, and to begin preparations to meet state violence and terror with retaliatory violence.
These conclusions were strengthened by the temper of the masses as the historic 'all-in' African conference held in Maritzburg under the leadership of Nelson Mandela in March 1961 protested against the so-called 'referendum' of white voters under which South Africa was to be declared a 'Republic'. The conference called for a National Convention to decide on a new constitution for South Africa, failing which a general strike would be called to coincide with the declaration of the Republic on 31 May, 1961.
In the event, the Republican 'celebrations' were overshadowed by the placing of the country on a war basis to smash the strike. Despite all these repressive measures - and the treacherous scabbing activities of such bodies as the PAC and the Trotskyites - tens of thousands of workers responded to the strike call throughout the country. It was the last peaceful general strike call issued by the liberation movement. During the years 1951-1961 the working class of South Africa had, time and again, shown its magnificent solidarity and spirit in a whole series of political strikes - without strike funds and facing grave risks of victimisation. These strikes had been of immense value and importance. But the time had come for new tactics and methods.
The people's patience is not endless. The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices - submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa.
Manifesto of Umkhonto We Sizwe, 16 December 1961
At the end of 1961, backed by the African National Congress and the Communist Party, a new organisation made its appearance on South African soil: Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation. It announced its existence not only in words but also in deeds - a series of sabotage explosions in all parts of the country.
The explosions were accompanied by a manifesto declaring that in the situation of terror existing in the country the masses could no longer rely on peaceful methods of struggle but would hit back with every means in their power.
Umkhonto we Sizwe's sabotage operations were never intended as an end in themselves but as a stage towards the building of a people's army of liberation in South Africa. They served notice of the end of an era of militant, but non-violent struggles alone; the opening shots in what will undoubtedly prove a long and bitter, but certainly in the end victorious, war of liberation.
The path of armed resistance and struggle was one not lightly or easily taken by the South African people's liberation movements and their Communist Party. For many years they had striven by every possible means, with indomitable courage, patience and persistence to achieve a non-violent transition to people's power. Civil war has been forced upon our country by the racial arrogance, greed and ruthlessness of the colonialist ruling class.
The general line and direction of Party policy was fully confirmed by the membership at the fifth national conference held illegally in Johannesburg in 1962.
The Conference performed an enormous service to the working class and oppressed people of our country by adopting the new Party Programme - The Road to South African Freedom, - intensive discussion of a first draft in every unit and among non-Party circles of revolutionary workers. Hundreds of amendments were submitted, considered and in many cases incorporated.
The Programme reaffirmed the Party's adherence to the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism, which were briefly described and summarised (an essential need in a country where the dissemination of Marxist ideas had been prohibited for over a decade.)
It proceeded to give a clear Marxist analysis of the character of South African society - a special type of colonialism 'in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them'. Hence:
As its immediate and foremost task, the South African Communist Party works for a united front of national liberation. It strives to unite all sections and classes of oppressed and democratic people for a national democratic revolution to destroy White domination. The main content of this Revolution will be the national liberation of the African people. Carried to its fulfilment, this revolution will at the same time put an end to every sort of race discrimination and privilege. The revolution will restore the land and the wealth of the country to the people, and guarantee democracy, freedom and equality of rights, and opportunities to all The Communist Party has no interests separate from those of the working people. The Communists are sons and daughters of the people, and share with them the over-riding necessity to put an end to the suffering and humiliation of apartheid. The destruction of colonialism and the winning of national freedom is the essential condition and the key for future advance to the supreme aim of the Communist Party: the establishment of a socialist South Africa, laying the foundation of a classless, communist society.
The 1962 Programme marked a major advance in the theoretical development of the South African Communist Party, and indeed - as in its section on 'The African Revolution' - made a significant contribution to the development of Marxist thought throughout the continent.
This was continued and greatly amplified by the party's journal, The African Communist, which for more than a decade now has helped to spread the enlightening ideas of Marxism-Leninism in Africa and among Africans and other interested thinkers in every part of the world.
An important statement, The Revolutionary Way Out published early in 1963 applied the thinking of the Party programme to a detailed analysis of events taking place in the country.
A whole series of heavy blows was sustained by the Communist Part, and the entire liberation movement during the first half of the sixties, at the hands of the fascist government and its secret police, modelled on the Gestapo.
The government was determined to smash every vestige of the valiant resisters who had so skilfully utilised every possibility of legal protest in the previous decade. All the journalists who had produced The Guardian and its successors down the years, as well as Fighting Talk, Liberation and other democratic journals, were served with ministerial notices preventing them from engaging in any sort of journalistic activity.
Many leading cadres were placed under house-arrest. Intensive efforts were made to infiltrate police spies and provocateurs into the ranks of the movement. A very substantial addition was made to the funds and activities of the special branch of the police.
Counter-measures were taken by the liberation movement. A number of leading members, including O. R. Tambo, M. M. Kotane, J. B. Marks and Y. M. Dadoo were sent out of the country to conduct various aspects of the work of the movement in exile. Numbers of young militants were recruited and sent abroad for combat training as guerillas of Umkhonto we Sizwe. Following the example of Nelson Mandela, a number of leaders of the Party and the Congress organisations were directed to leave their homes and assume new identities and disguises. Secret headquarters were set up at a farm in Rivonia, near Johannesburg and elsewhere.
Due to inexperience and to some extent underestimation of the enemy, many of these measures proved inadequate. Following a successful tour of Africa and elsewhere on behalf of the ANC Mandela returned to his underground work, but he was captured by the police in Natal.
In July 1963 a serious reverse was suffered when police raided the Party headquarters at Rivonia. What followed is described in the resolution* adopted by the Central Committee of the Party on its fiftieth anniversary:
Following a raid on the underground Party headquarters at Rivonia a number of the most outstanding revolutionary leaders, both Communists and non-Communists, were arrested and tried on charges of planning to overthrow the state by armed revolutionary struggle. Despite world-wide protests, including a 106-1 vote at the United Nations General Assembly, 8 of the accused were sentenced to life imprisonment: Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Mhlaba, Goldberg, Kathrada, Motsoaledi and Mlangeni.
Hundreds of Congressites and Communists were detained without trial, subjected to prolonged torture and some even murdered in the police cells. The great majority of those detained refused to testify against their comrades, even to the point of death. But a few were broken by the police, resulting in yet further trials, such as that of Mkwayi, Kitson and others, also resulting in life sentences, the execution of the trade unionists Mini, Khayinga and Mkaba in November 1964, and the rounding up of thousands of Party and Congress supporters, and trade unionists throughout the country. A further heavy blow was sustained by the Party in 1965 with the arrest and sentence to life imprisonment of Comrade Abram Fischer who had been living in hiding and leading the underground work of the Party at that time.
Looksmart Ngudle, Babla Saloojee, Caleb Mayekiso, Alpheus Maliba, are but a few of the many Congressites, trade unionists, Communists and other political prisoners who died in the cells under torture and were alleged by the police to have taken their own lives.
It is impossible here to enumerate all the brave sons and daughters of South Africa who have been killed, imprisoned, deported to remote areas, and otherwise victimised by the fascists for fighting for the freedom of their country and their people.
At home, the revolutionary workers have patiently rebuilt the machinery of the Party, learning from past mistakes and creatively devising new methods and strategies to meet the terrorism of the police state. A number of Party leaflets distributed in the country, especially in the later sixties, their widespread distribution, and the inability of the police to make any arrests, attesting to the courage and skill of the comrades responsible.
A further tribute to the resilience and growing vitality of the Party was the successful holding of an augmented meeting of the Central Committee in 1970.
The 1970 Augmented Central Committee Meeting was an important milestone in the history of the Party. Since the last National Conference of the Party in 1962, several full Central Committee meetings had been held. A regularly functioning and active Executive had been appointed to direct and intensify the activities of the Party.
But the particularly difficult conditions facing the Party, especially the widespread dispersion of cadres, made it impossible to convene a meeting sufficiently representative in character, which could review the activities of the Executive, assess the lessons of our successes and failures, and decide the future policy and leadership of the Party.
Formidable tasks therefore faced the Augmented Meeting. Following widespread discussion at all levels of the Party, the Meeting - comprising a majority of non-members of the Executive, including a number of Party members who had already participated in armed struggle - was called to review comprehensive organisational and political reports from the Executive.
Far-reaching developments in South Africa, on the African continent and in the international situation face the Party with new problems and
tasks. The hard and dangerous work of rebuilding the Party's organisational structure under conditions of ferocious terror; the unfolding of the armed struggle for the advance of the South African revolution; the mobilisation of the working class and rural masses, and the various strata of oppressed people; the strengthening of the national liberation movement headed by the African National Congress; the unfolding of a broad people's alliance in Southern Africa against the combined forces of South African imperialism, Portuguese colonialism and the illegal Smith regime - backed by international finance-capital; these and related problems occupied the focus of the meeting's deliberations.
In addition, the meeting reviewed and assessed the Party's international policy. It endorsed the policy and activities of the Executive in relation to the international Communist movement, and decided upon measures to strengthen our activities in this field.(2)
The meeting adopted a number of major policy decisions, reflected in the resolutions. After re-electing the General Secretary and Chairman of the Party, it proceeded, by democratic means, to appoint a new Executive .
The main political resolution of the meeting was summed up in a rousing 'Call to the People of South Africa', the text of which is appended to this volume. Two important clauses read:
Paying tribute to the heroism of the fighting men of Umkhonto we Sizwe, we pledge unqualified support for the liberation army in its aims to recruit and train guerilla fighters, to spread the area of guerilla war to the heart of the Republic.
Believing firmly that the building of our Party as the Marxist-Leninist vanguard of the working class is a vitally important contribution to the victory in the common struggle, the meeting instructs the CC to direct its main efforts to the reconstruction of the Party at home as an organisation of professional revolutionaries, closely in contact with the working class and peasantry and able to carry on the propaganda and organisation of the Party in the face of police terror. A good deal of the discussion at the meeting was focussed on the strategy and perspectives of armed struggle under South African conditions, on the basis of a document on this theme circulated by the executive and in the light of the combat experience already gained.
The meeting adopted a resolution setting forth a number of guidelines on this question, pointing out that the armed struggle was not to be approached as a purely military question, but that operations must be planned to arouse and organise the masses. Any theory that localised operations of full-time guerillas would in itself generate revolution was rejected; as also was the concept that organised armed activity should await complete political mobilisation and advanced nationwide organisation.
While the principal operations would be initiated in and based on rural areas, armed activities in the towns were an indispensable 'corollary front'.
Emphasis was laid on the character of the fighting force as one of political cadres, subordinate to the political movement, and based on conviction and commitment rather than traditional bourgeois-type army discipline. Political and military leadership must be co-ordinated and eventually integrated.
The Augmented Central Committee Meeting also devoted much of its attention to the complex and exacting problems of organisation, propaganda and the maintenance of high standards of conduct and discipline in the present testing conditions. A series of practical decisions were taken on these subjects, as well as on the strengthening of the liberation alliance and the raising to yet higher level the unity of Communist and non-Communist fighters for national liberation which has characterised the development of the movement in South Africa.
Messages of congratulation, greeting and good will were received from all over the world on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Party's foundation, 30 July 1971. The executives of the African National Congress of South Africa, the South African Congress of Trade Unions sent cordial greetings. Messages of solidarity and support were received from the fraternal Parties of the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and other socialist countries of Europe as well from these of all the principal capitalist countries. From Asia the Party received messages from Vietnam, Korea, Japan, India and other fraternal parties; from Canada and the USA and a number of South American Parties.
In the Soviet Union a special all-day seminar was devoted to the occasion, opened by Central Committee member Academician A. M. Rumyantsev and addressed by SACP chairman J. B. Marks and leading Soviet scholars. (The text of Comrade Rumyantsev's address is published in full in the African Communist, No. 47, Fourth Quarter 1971).
A special session of the African National Congress Youth and Students' summer seminar held in the German Democratic Republic in July/August 1971 on the theme "Problems of National Liberation" was also devoted to a discussion of the history of the SACP, its contribution to the national liberation movement in South Africa and its role in the international Communist movement.
Inside South Africa itself, implementing the decision of the Central Committee to concentrate efforts on reconstruction of the Party at home, the Party produced stickers, reading 50 FIGHTING YEARS - 1921-1971 which appeared in public places throughout the country. The occasion was marked too by the publication of the first issue of the new underground journal, Inkululeko-Freedom.
Perhaps it is appropriate to leave the last word in this chronicle of the heroic and still continuing work of the South African Communist Party to the anonymous authors of this brave new paper.
A Paper is a Weapon proclaims the editorial:
The publication of the first issue of 'Inkululeko-Freedom' as a regular underground journal of our Central Committee represents a big step forward for our Party.
In the new conditions which face us, organisation is everything. Without it all the undoubted anger of our people cannot be directed to deal effective blows to the enemy. The spreading of understanding is the very beginning of organisation. That is why a newspaper is an organiser. A grasp of Marxist-Leninist theory and its application to our conditions not only provides the true guidelines for action but also reinforces the conviction that the ending of all forms of exploitation - economic, racial and political - is both historically necessary and inevitable.
Around such a revolutionary organ there must grow a bond between all units and advanced representatives of the liberation and working class movements. It must become a spur to those who are still seeking a path of struggle and the thread which directs them to revolutionary commitment, organisation and action.
Inkululeko-Freedom continues in the great tradition of our Party's journal and newspapers, like The International, Umsebenzi and Inkululeko and fighting organs like the Guardian, Liberation, Fighting Talk and others which have throughout our history played an indispensable role in furthering the revolutionary tasks which face our people.
The ideas which will fill the pages of this journal are hated by the enemy because they are liberating ideas. The enemy will hound you and persecute you if they catch you spreading it. But your battle cannot be won without risks and without sacrifice. Of course you must be careful in the way you use it and if you work cleverly vou can outwit the enemy and his agents and informers.
INKULULEKO-FREEDOM IS YOUR PAPER! SPREAD IT EVERYWHERE! ORGANISE AND EDUCATE FOR THE REVOLUTION !
The journal outlines the history of white conquest and domination in South Africa, and then shows how the Communist Party has from its inception fought to bring about a revolutionary change, in association with other liberation organisations in South Africa and with the world Communist and anti-imperialist movement. A brief history of the Communist Party concludes with a summary of the decisions taken at the recent meeting of the Party's Central Committee.
The journal declares:
On this our fiftieth anniversary, the Central Committee and our whole Party salutes those who are constructing socialism and fighting imperialism. We reaffirm our confidence in the principles of Communism and internationalism of victory for our people and for the working class and pledge
to intensify our efforts - whatever the sacrifices - to help liberate the mass of our oppressed people from race domination and to bring about an independent South Africa free from all forms of exploitation.
unqualified support for the armed revolutionary cadres of the whole movement to spread the areas of armed combat to the heart of our country.
the intensification of our efforts to build our Party as the Marxist-Leninist vanguard of the working class and to fortify it in the face of police terror.
the strengthening still further of the unity of all true patriotic forces as expressed in the alliance headed by the African National Congress.
'WE CALL UPON THE WORKING PEOPLE OF OUR COUNTRY AND ESPECIALLY THE WORKERS AND OPPRESSED AFRICAN, COLOURED AND INDIAN PEOPLE TO UNITE THEIR RANKS TO RESIST TYRANNICAL DOMINATION IN EVERY SPHERE AND BY EVERY MEANS AND TO WORK FOR THE CONQUEST OF POWER BY THE PEOPLE.
'LONG LIVE COMMUNISM AND TRUE INTERNATIONALISM!'
'LONG LIVE THE ALLIANCE OF PATRIOTIC FORCES!'
'LONG LIVE THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY!'
Notes:
1. Until 1960 there were three representatives of Cape African voters in Parliament; the Labour Party lost its remaining three MPS in the 1958 general election.
2. A good idea of the Party's general line of policy on these questions is contained in J. B. Marks' address, as head of the SACP delegation at the 1969 Moscow conference of Communist and Workers' Parties, and reproduced in Appendix XIII.