One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.from "Asolando" by Robert Browning
Reversing the Kiplingesque idea that white stands for virtue and black for sin, a South African Native once said of Sidney Bunting "He has a white skin but a black heart." South Africa, land of the colour bar and racial oppression, has had its white nigrophilists-James Hooper, the Irishman who was hanged in Cape Town in 1808 for leading a slave revolt; Thomas Pringle, who became secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society; Johan van der Kemp, who shocked even his fellow missionaries by marrying a coloured slave: woman; John Philip, missionary, philanthropist and political wire-puller, whose name is still anathema to South African upholders of the Voortrekker tradition; the Schreiners; Bishop Colenso; and many more. South African history is full of them.
Sidney Percival Bunting was a nigrophilist of modern type, a communist and agitator, whose aim was to organise revolt of the blacks rather than to plead their cause in the halls of the mighty. He had more in common with a James Hooper than a John Philip. He was better known in the location than in the drawing room. There is some danger that his life story may be forgotten. I have tried to give same account of his work and character as far as they are known to me. I write from personal knowledge of only the last twenty years of his life. He was 63 years old when he died. He seldom spoke about himself and it has not been easy to fill in the details of his earlier career. For such information as I have been able to collect about his early days in the labour and socialist movement I am indebted largely to his widow, Mrs Rebecca Bunting, to Colonel F. H. P. Creswell, to Mr F. A. W. Lucas, K.C., to Mr Charles Mussared, to my father, and to Mr S. A. Rachlin, always a mine of information on such matters. I also wish to thank Mr Issy Diamond, Mr Bennie Weinbren, and a number of other friends in Johannesburg, who have helped materially, in seeing this book through the press.
The circulation of the manuscript among a number of persons who had known Sidney Bunting, and who had played some part in the events recorded, resulted in a controversy as to whether it should be published. Some members and sympathisers of the Communist Party felt that it would do harm to that organisation and urged that it should not appear, or at least should be re-written in such a form as not to cause offence. Others, including a leading official of the Party, were equally emphatic that it would not harm the Left movement and urged that a knowledge of the Party's past, including mistakes and shortcomings, was essential to a correct understanding of the movement. "It is necessary," they said, "to learn from the mistakes of the past." My own opinion is that the book should appear, because there should be an account of Bunting's life and no one else is likely to write one, while I have been in a unique position to do so. As for re-writing the manuscript so as not to offend anybody, that seemed to me an impossible task.
The book is mainly an unvarnished record of the facts, and Bunting wrote so much that I am able to give his story largely in his own words. I have not refrained from commenting on certain matters- nor have I been able to avoid bringing my own affairs into the narrative to some extent. Some orthodox communists may quarrel with this book, and opponents of the Left may imagine that it provides confirmation of their views. To the former I would suggest-that no true revolutionary can afford to be ignorant of the history of his party, and that here he may find valuable information on how NOT to conduct political affairs. To the latter I would say that the Communist Party in South Africa is still the only political organisation of any consequence in this country which fights in season and out for the political, social and economic emancipation of all the people in South Africa. That is a virtue which should weigh more with liberal-minded and intelligent people than any present shortcomings or sins of the past.
The Bolshevik movement has demanded and obtained from its servants a peculiar and extreme form of loyalty. It has demanded and obtained from deviators even when condemned to death, confessions which hove puzzled and amazed the world. The force which made Soviet Russia a first-class fighting power, which broke the Nazi armies before Stalingrad and is now clearing them from Soviet soil, is based on a degree of unity almost unbelievably thorough. The means by which this unity was achieved may have shocked some of us; but, in Russia at any rate, their ultimate efficiency cannot be called in question. Sidney Bunting was an Englishman whose loyalty to Bolshevism was proof against denunciation and expulsion. In this he was a true follower of the Bolshevik tradition.
In fairness to Mrs. Bunting I must state that she does not agree with much that I have written both as to the character of her husband and with regard to the Communist International and its role in South African affairs. Readers will understand that my comments, such as they are, are my own responsibility.
This book is offered as a tribute to the memory of a great man whose contribution to the cause of racial freedom in South Africa was unique.
EDWARD ROUX
Cape Town. 1943
Many of the Englishmen who came to fight in the Boer War remained to play their part in South African affairs when the war was over. Among these was a young man of 27, Sidney Percival Bunting. He arrived in South Africa in 1900. Three years earlier he had won the Chancellor's Prize, for classical languages, at the University of Oxford.
Bunting came of a distinguished family of Wesleyan churchmen. His great-grandfather, Jabez Bunting, was born in Manchester in 1779, the son of a Methodist tailor. At the age of 19 he began to preach, became a full fledged Wesleyan minister at 24 and before long was well on his way to becoming the acknowledged leader of the Wesleyans in England. There is a life of Jabez Bunting written by his second son, Thomas Percival Bunting. There were to have been two volumes, but only the first was published. An interesting light on Jabez's character i6 found in a memorandum written by him in 1803 when he was contemplating marriage. He lists the virtues and shortcomings of the young woman in whom he was interested. He is not sure that her piety i6 deep, though he thinks it sincere. She has only recently become a Methodist, having been brought up a Calvinist (Presbyterian), and she has not yet completely broken with Calvinistic views and expressions. Her dress is too gay and costly and worldly. But she would probably promise to make the necessary amendment, " On proper representation." On the whole, he decides that his judgement now speaks the same language which his affection has suggested. " And I feel my mind at liberty " he concludes, " yea, I trust, Divinely led and inclined to take the first opportunity of professing my attachment and soliciting a favourable answer. Whatever be the event of this intended application, O Lord, my God, my Father, my Friend, prepare me for it, and sanctify it to my present and eternal good."
The rigid Puritanism of the Wesleyan wag combined with a feeling of sacrifice and struggle, the struggle of a persecuted but completely justified minority against the powers of privilege and authority. Jabez as a boy at Manchester Grammar School suffered from the taunts of his fellows when they found he was the son of a Methodist tailor- a double gibe this, reflecting both on his religion and his social status. In 1803 (according to a note in Jabez's diary) Methodist soldiers in the army were still being persecuted "for attending Methodist preaching," when not on duty. At Gibraltar two received 200 lashes and another of the brethren was under sentence of 500 lashes. It was not foreign to the Bunting tradition to be associated with unpopular causes.
William Maclardie Bunting, the eldest son of Jabez, also became a Wesleyan minister. The second son, Thomas P. Bunting, was a scholar and a musician. Thomas's son, Percy William, was born in 1836. of him quite a lot has been recorded. He founded the contemporary Review in l882 and was its first editor He was knighted in 1908. From the notices which appeared at the time of his death in 1911 we can gather that he was " a man of deep aesthetic sensibility, a musician of no small order. The artistic world claimed him for its own. He took refuge from the trials and disappointments of life in the works of the great composers. Yet with aesthetic sensibilities he united enthusiasm in behalf of moral purity. He ever stood by the side of those who sought to rescue women from shame and men from yet more shameful vies. Up to the time of his death he was chairman of the National Vigilance Association, and gave the closest attention to its work. He freely risked his reputation and professional interests in this cause. Again, Sir Percy Bunting was a man of thought. He freely entertained every conception that claimed his attention, although he might not finally adopt it." 1
The journalist W. T. Stead said that Percy Bunting was " one of the soundest of Liberals and most simply sincere of Christians." His interest in music is testified to by an anonymous writer who also gives us some idea of the earlier environment of his children." No one knew Sir Percy Bunting well who did not know how large an element music formed in his life. A gift inherited in his family was well cultivated in him. When at Cambridge he was recognised by Sterndale Bennett as one of his right hand men in forming the Bach Society there
His older friends will never forget the music they first heard him play on the piano, and he was unsurpassed as an accompanist of choral or solo singing. As his children grew up many were the hours he spent with them as they performed the best chamber music together...."
It was in the great cause of down-trodden womanhood he went travelling in company with a small band of English people, Mrs Josephine Butler's movement led Mr and Mrs Bunting in the earliest stages of their married life into many a circle abroad, to which the unpopularity of their cause-the very mention of which was considered shameful-attracted only people of the highest principle. Congresses and conferences took places in Geneva, Berne, Genoa, Antwerp, Brussels, The Hague, Stockholm. . . The Bunting children have vivid recollections of holidays abroad in their 'teens, which wound up with their parents' attendance at meetings in some foreign town, whilst they went sight-seeing as well they might, and received kindly notice from some of the best people they ever hoped to meet."
Sidney Percival Bunting, was born in London in 1873. He was one of four children-two girls and two boys. His mother, who must have been a powerful influence in moulding his character, was, before her marriage, Mary Hyett Lidgett. She died in 1919. From a booklet, Lady Bunting-In Memoriam, which was written by a group of her friends, we get an intimate picture of the sort of environment in which S. P. Bunting grew up.
Mary Lidgett also came of Methodist stock. " Her father was a man of strong character and sturdy piety. AB a young man he had found peace-in (God among the Methodists of Hull." At quite an early age she became interested in politics. The first political movement to claim her attention was the Italian struggle for freedom. Her early heroes were Mazzini and Garibaldi As a young woman she went travelling in Italy, and it was in Switzerland that she first met Percy Bunting.
Mrs. Bunting's "parlour" in London was a rendezvous for political refugees of all sorts, and for representatives of other unpopular causes. There you might meet Russians; Armenians, Poles and Italians, as well as American abolitionists, Korean nationalists, Chinese, Indians, English suffragettes, and many more. She met Booker T. Washington when he was in England, and other Negro Americans. Once the great Mr Gladstone him self came to dinner.
But it was not only the exotic and romantic cause which claimed Lady Bunting's attention. Her main interest and work was among the-poor in London. She was a constant visitor to workhouses, and she organised a society for servant girls. Though described as " unconventional " in her attitude to religion, she was strongly motivated by religious sentiments. She played a leading part in the movement for the reform of the London music halls, where, it was said, drink was sold on the premises and salacious songs were sung. She herself visited the music halls to obtain confirmation of this. She was a regular attendant at church, and continued to go (to the Presbyterian Church at Regent Square) even after she grew old and deaf and was no longer able to hear the sermon.
Young Sidney Bunting was educated at St Paul's School and afterwards went to Magdalene college, 0xford I have been able to obtain very little information concerning his character and interests at this period. Professor Freemantle, who once taught at Cape Town and who was a contemporary of his at Oxford, told me the following. Bunting, he said was a brilliant classical scholar, not only remarkable in his year, but one of the most brilliant known-at Oxford. Winning the chancellor's prize (in 1897) was child's play to him. His great ambition however was to study philosophy. But at philosophy he proved an abject failure, being quite unable to satisfy his examiners. His was an empirical type of mind. Formal logic and metaphysical systems he found muddling and unreal. perhaps we can trace in this fact the aversion he showed towards the more abstruse aspects of the Marxism he afterwards came to profess. I remember him in later life confessing that he could not manage to read ; Das Kapital. The Communist Manifesto however with its violent denunciation of the bourgeoisie, its call to the workers of the world to unite, appealed to him. " This is the sort of thing we want to study," he said, " not all this high-flown stuff about theory of value and dialectics. I once had to read Hegel at college but it did not appeal to me."
There were two influences in Bunting's university days of which we can be reasonably certain, influences which contributed to his adult outlook, though we cannot say that they alone formed his character; One of these was the music of Beethoven; the other the poetry of Robert Browning. It has been said that the poetry which means most to us is that which we read in our youth. Quotations from Browning figured prominent]y in Bunting's writings. The Bible; the classics' and Browning-these were the main sources from which he draw his numerous illusions and metaphors. But from Browning he got more than mere literary phrases to point a moral or adorn a tale.
Fear Death?-to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote I am nearing the place ....
No I let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers The heroes of old . . . 2
The influence of Beethoven was probably more subtle but just as strong, and led in the same direction. Romantic heroism, fighting for a cause, pursuing a major theme through the intricacies: of life-the mind of that youthful Bunting must have been full of such ideas. But at that time he had not as yet found a cause to fight for.
Sidney Bunting came to South Africa on military service in 1900. What he thought at that time of the rights and wrongs of the Boer War I do not know. It is probable however that he believed in the civilising mission of the British Empire. He was not the man to fight in a cause he did not think right.
When the war was over he decided to remain in South Africa. He worked for a firm of lawyers in Cape Town and took his degree of Bachelor of Laws at the South African College. Afterwards he went to Johannesburg and worked in the legal profession there. At this time he must have been in moderately good circumstances.
Early in the Nineteenth Century a relation of Bunting's mother, a seafaring man by the name of Captain Lidgett, brought a group of settlers out to Natal. They were granted some land at a place subsequently called Lidgetton, near Maritzburg. Most of the settlers failed to make good and the land lay idle until about 1904, when the family in England decided to plant it under wattle. John Lidgett, Bunting's cousin who was then resident in Johannesburg, was made manager of the new venture. The whole family bought shares to finance this wattle plantation. Bunting also took a few shares in it, not many, and was made director at a salary of 100 pounds a year.
He still retained a great interest in music and assisted in founding the Johannesburg Musical Society in 1902. He became well known as a musical critic, and wrote in this capacity for the newspapers. He played both the piano and the viola. It was curious to see this man, with his huge hands, playing the piano with such a delicate touch. One wondered how those thick fingers could fit between the keys. It was because of the same enormous fingers that he preferred the viola to the violin. As a pianist he was, like his father, chiefly known as a sympathetic and efficient accompanist.
For the next few years music seems to have claimed most of his attention. About 1905 or 1906 he was often to be met at the Wyberghs'. They were cultured people, interested in music and ideas. Some years later Wybergh was the editor of the Labour Party's weekly newspaper, but in 1906 he had not yet become a socialist. Bunting's interest in politics may have been stimulated by Wybergh's growing absorption in the subject. Johannesburg has always been a centre of violent political activity. In those days memories of the Reform Movement and the Jameson Raid were still strong.
In I905 the question of a labour supply for the Witwatersrand gold mines became a burning issue. The war had been fought largely in the interests of the mine owners. Now that the Kruger government was gone and the Transvaal was in the hands of a government sympathetic to the claims of high finance, the wines looked forward to an era of prosperity. But without adequate supplies of cheap labour there could be no future for the Witwatersrand Native labour could be got, but only in inadequate quantities. The highly developed indentured labour system, with its accompanying labour tax on all adult Natives in South Africa, with its control over the Protectorates and its elaborate network of recruiting agents, was yet: to come; (Rhodes had shown the way with his Glen Grey Act in the Cape ten years before.) The mine owners conceived the idea of importing indentured Chinese labourers from Hong Kong. In spite of opposition they went forward with the scheme and by the beginning of 1906 there wore 50,000 Chinese coolies working on the mines.
The opposition came from various quarters, from the newly formed Labour Party, and particularly from the White Labour Policy Association. The latter was led by F. H. I'. Creswell and Peter Whiteside. Creswell had been an engineer in the employ of the mines. He had tried to persuade the mine owners to use white labour for unskilled and semi skilled work. White skilled labour there was in plenty. The new scheme involved the employment of whites as unskilled workers new idea in South Africa. It was not, as Creswell has stated emphatically, a proposal to run the mines with white labour only, but to use what ever labour was available, whether white or black. After the Boer War there were large numbers of unemployed Europeans in South Africa.
Creswell believed that his scheme would work, but the mine owners did not support him; They decided to import the Chinese. Creswell resigned his job and entered the political arena. When the first elections for the Transvaal Parliament were held, in March, 1907, Creswell stood as an independent but was defeated by 39 votes.
Bunting's sympathies appear to have been with the mine owners. Both he and Creswell were members of the Atheneum Club. When the news of the election results came through, Bunting was overheard in the club saying, " Well, Creswell is defeated. That's one good thing."
The election victory of the Liberals in Britain in 15306 led to the settlement of the " Chinese question." By the end of 1907 the bulk of the Chinese had been repatriated. But the South African Labour Party remained a " white labour " party. This in spite of the fact that white workers were outnumbered by black workers in South Africa by more than four to one.
In 1908 Bunting went on a visit to England. In that year his father was knighted, and he may have gone to take part in the celebrations. On the boat on his way back he met members of the Australian cricket team, returning via the Cape after a tour in England. With them he discussed the white labour policy, by this time firmly established in Australia. Back in Johannesburg, he confided to Creswell, "There may be something in this white labour policy of yours."
He always appeared to give in grudgingly. And yet he felt he had to " come out with it " when he changed his mind. " I have never known anyone," said Creswell, " who believed so firmly in doing what he thought was right regardless of consequences.
"A report in the Johannesburg star for October 4, 1909, announced the formation of a "White Expansion Society " whose object was to "promote the improvement of present conditions and the rapid expansion of 8 permanent European population, both agricultural and industrial, in South Africa." Patrick Duncan was president and S. P. Bunting honorary secretary.
." From what we know of his ancestors, this seems to have been in the Bunting tradition. Once he had accepted in theory the correctness of Creswell's position he had to do something about it. And so in 1910 during the first elections for the Union Parliament, when Creswell stood, this time as a Labour candidate in the Jeppestown constituency, Bunting came forward to help him. He closed his lawyer's office for a month and flung himself heart and soul into the fray. " Without him," said Creswell, "I should probably have lost the fight." Bunting had not yet joined the Labour Party, but he was evidently thinking about it In September 1910 he said gruffly to Creswell, ' Might as well join the Labour Party. Won't do any harm." Bunting had a peculiar voice, a sort of modulated bark with a distinct flavour of Oxford.
So he joined the Labour Party and from that day his life was given to politics.
But he had some way to go before he became a convinced revolutionary. Charles B. Mussared, who knew him at this time, says that Bunting was then still more of a liberal than a socialist. Mussared, who was working on the mines and who had taken an active part in the trade union movement on the Rand since 1903, had started a fund for the Tonypandy strikers in South Wales. Bunting came and helped. They raised a lot of money from the trade unions. According to Mussared this helped to give Bunting a better idea of the sufferings of the working class. His sympathies became more definitely proletarian.
In 1913 came the strike of the Rand gold miners, with riots and shootings-the " July Strike," as it came to be called. It gave to the young labour movement its first crop of martyrs. It roused passions. It started the wave of Labour expansion which went on with gathering force till it crashed on the rocks of divided doctrine with the outbreak of the Great War in August, 1914. The strike had been brewing for some time. It began with a dispute-on the New Kleinfontein mine on the East Rand, where wages had been reduced; but within a few days it became a general strike involving the railways, the trams and almost the entire industry on the gold reef.
A mass meeting on the Johannesburg market square was dispersed by mounted police armed with pick-handles. The crowds then rioted, burning down the central railway station and the Star newspaper offices. They then surged towards the Corner House (headquarters of the Chamber of Mines) and the Rand Club (chief rendezvous of the mining magnates). Here a British dragoon regiment opened fire, killing some dozens of people and wounding many others. But the Government had few troops or police at its disposal and the strike ended in a truce in terms of which the workers' representatives called the strike off and the Government guaranteed that there would be no victimisation, while undertaking to inquire into the grievances of the men.
Of Bunting's views on the July Strike we can be left in no doubt; An article from his pen appeared in the Worker of July 10. I have Bunting's file of the Worker, and though the article in question is not signed, it has been re edited in his hand writing, apparently for publication elsewhere. In any case there can be no mistaking Bunting's style. He begins by saying that it is not his intention to copy the Rand dailies by refraining from comment for fear of inflaming public opinion. Nothing that he could say would inflame public opinion more than it was inflamed already. Never (he goes on) in the history of industrial warfare had the response to the call for strike action been so complete or ranged through so many industries. No stirring orations, like Henry the Fifth's before Agincourt, were required. The volunteer movement when Napoleon threatened England from Boulogne was not more eagerly taken up. (Bunting often interspersed his newspaper articles with historical and sometimes classical allusions. ) The whole industry . of the Rand was brought with comparatively little effort to a standstill. Starting on the East Rand the centre of gravity moved, as the strike became general, to the centre of Johannesburg. The mining magnates saw the thing at their very door. The " mob," on whom for weeks the parasites of the town clubs 3 had been praying for a chance of turning maxims and cold steel, were concentrating into a confined area, to air their grievances and to be butchered to make a Rand Club holiday. The workers were holding a big meeting on the market square. They were ordered to disperse, but before they could do so the troops came, horse and foot, armed to the teeth.- A brutal charge was made and many were injured. The crowd then marched to the station to find more armed men awaiting them there. These however were soon overpowered, though at the cost of more casualties (none fatal), and the trains were stopped.
The burning and looting of part of the station (Bunting writes) was practically the only serious piece of comparatively pointless and ill-directed " hooliganism " that occurred. The rest of the so called " outrages," such as the burning of the offices of the Star newspaper had abundant explanation or pro vocation behind them. And those who demonstrated before the Rand Club building were not far wrong in looking upon it as the shrine and temple of the "upper class consciousness" against which they were out to protest and fight.
Bunting goes on to describe the subsequent shootings, the negotiations between the strike committee and the Government, and the peace settlement. He concludes the article: "And so ended the first act of South Africa's working class revolution, whose end is not yet."
The man who wrote this account had changed his ideas rather radically since he arrived in South Africa thirteen years before.
The July strike was only the beginning of a battle between the white miners and the Chamber "which went on at intervals for a dozen years or so. The workers had won a partial victory. but the-Government (with Smuts and Botha in the saddle) and the Chamber of Mines were not willing to let it go at that. Both sides prepared for the next round. Bunting was in the thick of it.
At the end of July he became secretary of the Trades Hall Society, a part-time occupation-he still kept his legal practice going. By December 1913 he was already campaigning in Bezuidenhout Valley as official Labour candidate in the provincial council elections due early the following year.
The next major clash on the industrial field came sooner than most people expected. It stated with a strike of the railwaymen, who were government servants, in the second week in January, 1914. Again there was the threat of a general strike on the Rand, with the miners coming in also. But Smuts and Botha were prepared and immediately the Government took drastic action. Poutsma, the railwaymen's leader, was arrested, it was said, on a trumped-up charge. This was followed by a declaration of martial law before the strike leaders could act. Secretly the Government arrested nine of the leading trade unionists, sent them by express train to Durban and placed them on the steamship Umgeni for deportation to England. The subsequent events are well known-the storm of indignation against the Government when the public realised what had happened, the efforts of the strikers and their friends to secure a writ of habeas corpus declaring the deportations illegal, the unsuccessful attempt by Lucas and Creswell to board a tug and intercept the Umgeni when it passed Cape Town on its way to England, the stormy debate in Parliament when Smuts asked for and received a vote of indemnification, and the tremendous labour meetings which welcomed the deportees when they arrived in London.
During these exciting times Bunting was in and out of the Labour Party's office in Johannesburg all day long. He and F. A. W. Lucas acted as legal advisers to the Labour Party.
Smuts and Botha smashed the strike. But it was done at the cost of their popularity in the country. The Labour Party grew by leaps and bounds. . In the Transvaal provincial elections in March, 1914, the Labour Party secured a majority of one. Bunting was returned for Bezuidenhout Valley with a substantial majority.
It was during this election campaign that I first saw Bunting. My father, Philip Roux, was the secretary of the Bezuidenhout Valley-branch of the Labour Party and his druggist's store was a centre of political activity.
I remember going with my father to here Bunting speak at an election meeting in the southern part of the valley. It was the first political meeting ever held in that part of the constituency. A crowd of a hundred or so gathered in the dark on an empty plot and listened to the speakers who spoke from an empty box lighted with a solitary lantern. I was only ten years old at the time and my recollections of what was said at that meeting are scanty. Nor could I see the speakers clearly. I remember the chairman saying that perhaps Mr Bunting was not well known as yet to most of the audience, but he described the speaker as a coming man in the Labour movement and one whom his listeners should get to know.
Up to this time Bunting's political activities had been largely behind the scenes. He was not a good speaker. I remember my mother saying that Bunting was " difficult to listen to."
The chief achievement of the Labour majority in that provincial council-the second after Union-was the extension of free secondary education to all European children in the Transvaal It also introduced for the first time a measure for the rating of site values.
About this time Bunting showed an increased interest in the Afrikaans speaking (Dutch or Boer) workers. He realised that a labour movement which confined its attention to the largely English speaking aristocracy of labour was not likely to become a really effective popular party. It should also work among the Afrikaans speaking country folk, the plattelanders. It was the commandos from the backveld who had proved the Government's main support during the period of martial law in January. During his election campaign Bunting had held meetings in the more rural parts of his constituency where he had come into contact with Afrikaner audiences. He decided to learn Dutch (probably Hollands) and lived for a time with the Rev Brandt's family. As yet there is no hint of any special interest in the real underdog in South Africa-the black man.
During the first half of 1914 it seemed that the South African Labour Party had a great future.
Its membership was growing rapidly; branches were being formed all over the country. Parliamentary by-elections in industrial areas had gone in its favour. It had captured the Transvaal Provincial Council. It had the support of the great majority of English speaking workers, and it was becoming increasingly popular with the middle classes. The Dutchmen too were coming in, though here there was competition with the new Nationalist Afrikaner opposition led by General Hertzog, who had broken away from Botha and Smuts.
But this spectacular growth of the Labour Party came to a sudden halt in August, 1914, with the outbreak of the first world war. The South African Labour Party was split-as were almost all labour and socialist parties throughout the world-into pro-war and anti-war sections. With a pro-war majority all hope was lost of winning the Dutch workers, who went over to Hertzog more any more. With war-fever growing, the Labour Party could not hope to compete with the out and out jingo parties. The general election of 1915, which, had there been no war, might have resulted in Labour becoming the strongest group in Parliament, found the party divided and weakened. Its chance of winning a majority of the white workers in South Africa seemed to be lost for ever.
For Bunting the outbreak of war marked a further significant development in his political outlook.
To the members of the South African Labour Party, as to many people in that Victorian world, the war came like a bolt from the blue. To fig}it for one's country, or to oppose the war: these were the alternatives. There was great confusion among the leaders of the party. Some few on either side took a definite stand from the very start. Creswell, the leader of the Party, immediately offered his support to the Government for " seeing the war through," as he put it. He was followed by his half-dozen fellow labourites in Parliament, the only exception being W. H. Andrews, who however did not come out against the war till some months later.
Wybergh, who at this time was editing the Worker, was also pro-war. He had a leading article on August 6 calling on every worker to support the Government. " When a trade union is engaged in a struggle,'' he wrote, "it is the right and duty of every man to use his own intelligence in deciding whether or not the terrible necessity for a strike has arisen. But once a strike has been declared it is the duty of every man, whether he up proves or not, to take his share in the work and the risks involved. If he does not he is rightly called a scab, even if he doesn't belong to the union at all.... In the same way the man who, When his country is at war, refuses to do his duty is a scab and deserves the contempt of all." In the next issue The Worker published a letter from my father asking that his name be put at the head of the Worker scab list, because he "refused to murder another man with whom he had no quarrel." Other members of the Party w-ere equally emphatic in their opposition to the war, among them Colin Wade, member for Germiston in the Provincial Council, and David Ivon Jones, the secretary- of the Party.
Bunting was not among those w ho had their opinions all ready formed on August 4. It was said of him that he always took some time to make up his mind; but when he had formed an opinion wild horses would not tear him from it. My father recalls a meeting between himself, Bunting and some other members of the Party which took place in his shop a few days after the war was declared. Bunting, he says, did not know where he stood. He was looking for advice. A few days later, however, he had decided that he could not support the war. Creswell, returning from the Parliamentary session at Cape Town about the middle of August, found Bunting definitely anti-war. At that time Bunting was sharing a house with the Wyberghs. It was an old wooden bungalow in the northern suburbs on a hill overlooking Orange Grove, and built during the Boer War as officers' quarters. On the wide verandah Creswell and Bunting sat and argued. Bunting held that if everyone could refuse to fight there could be no war, and therefore it was everyone's duty to refuse to fight. Creswell could not agree with this. " If you are attacked, you have got to fight," he said.
Now that Bunting had decided on the moral aspect of the question, it was, as always, necessary for him to do something about it. Merely to be anti-war was not enough; one had to act anti-war. And so you find him among the group of left wingers who founded the War on War League in September, 1914. They made him treasurer.
The War on War League did not come to be a political party. The majority of its leading members were also members of the Labour Party and endeavoured for a time to remain there.
There was an anti-war majority at the Labour Party's annual conference held in East London in January, 1915. But the anti war section did not force the issue and left it to individual members to do as they pleased.
A curious situation arose ill the Transvaal Provincial Council where the Labour caucus was divided on the war issue, at least seven of the twenty Labour members being anti-war. " There, when a Unionist, in the obvious hope of exposure and emphasising a Labour split, forced the war debate .... the Labour men accepted the challenge with equanimity; and having expressed their divergent views without reserve, they proceeded to the next business, continued to pass the measures they were elected to pass, and voted solid as before." 4
As war fever mounted, the pressure on the Labour Party to rescind the East London decision grew rapidly. A special conference w as held in Johannesburg on August 22. By 82 votes to 30 the delegates decided " to support the Imperial Government wholeheartedly in the prosecution of the war. " In a short time all avowed anti-war members had either resigned or been expelled.
By this time the members of the War on War League felt that that organisation had served its purpose. What was wanted was a political party to preach the doctrines of international socialism. An " International Socialist League of South Africa" was therefore formed and the first issue of the new weekly paper, the International, appeared on September 10. The Chairman of tile new organisation was W. H. Andrews (previously chairman of the Labour Party); the vice-chairman were J. A. Clark and A. F. Crisp, both members of the Transvaal Provincial Council; G. Weinstock, formerly treasurer of the Labour Party, was treasurer; and the secretary, David Ivon Jones, had been the Labour Party's secretary.
Bunting, of course, was a foundation member of the I.S.L. In the third d issue of the International appeared an article of his headed '' A World to Win." His outlook had developed. since he spoke to Creswell at the bungalow a year before. "By itself mere Internationalism, beaming at every foreigner, cuts as little ice as mere anti-war pacifism at any price. Your genteel Peace Societies, your Y.M.C.A.'s, your boosting of Teuton music or chemistry or of English sport, have been tinkling cymbals. The only `war on warites' who have proved worth taking into account are Socialists; and the only Internationalism with anybody in it, events have shown, is International Socialism. Not negative opposition to war or to national pride, not even the mere denial that the British workers had any quarrel with the German workers, but the positive common Cause, the thing worth fighting side by side for, is what makes things go "
Bunting was always condemning his own past. The things in Which he once believed he came to doubt, then to disbelieve and then to attack bitterly. The British jingo, the pious Christian pacifist, the member of an exclusive club, the mere "Labourite"; all these he had been (or imagined he had been), and all these he attacked in turn. When he wrote it was as though he were arguing with his previous Belt, repeating the old ideas and demolishing them one after the other. Here was the Non-Conformist conscience: the devil was within as well as without, and had to be suppressed ruthlessly.
It was often difficult for European radicals to understand the attitude of the South African labour movement to the black man. To Socialists in England it would seem that a labour movement in a colonial country should be primarily concerned with the vast mass of socially-oppressed and economically exploited Natives. The South African Labour Party, in spite of its constitution, was not a socialist or even a labour movement at all in the true sense of the word. It was essentially a political party of an aristocracy of lab our trying to maintain a remarkably high standard of living in the face of competition from the low paid masses of Native Africans. The South African tradition (except in the western Cape, where artisans were originally coloured slaves) was that skilled work was reserved for whites and all unskilled labour was done by blacks. The Labour Party sought to maintain this tradition. It was concerned in preventing any encroachment by Africans on the traditional spheres of skilled labour and in maintaining and improving white wages and conditions. Such an attitude is quite understandable in a world where organised groups arise almost automatically to protect vested interests. What is not so easy to Understand is tune liberal intellectuals from Europe should come to South Africa, join the South African Labour movement and accept without question the traditional white labour attitude towards the black worker.
Sidney Bunting was ten years in South Africa before he joined the Labour party. It was five more years before he developed an interest in the black workers. On the face of it it seems a strangely slow development; and yet it was much more rapid than that of many other South African " socialists,' who continued to regard the black people, if not with antagonism , at least with a feeling of complete indifference.
That Bunting ended in the nigrophilist camp was perhaps inevitable in a man of his character. He had joined the Labour Party because he sensed the grievances of the white workers and admired their struggle against a powerful Chamber of Mines. The July strike had filled him with bitterness against a ruling class and its government, which did not scruple to shoot men down and to imprison and deport without trial He had accepted the idea of a working class revolution as the great goal of humanity. He had seen the necessity of bringing in the Dutchman. When the war broke out he had accepted the logic of his position as a socialist: his loyalty was to the working class not to any national government. Now the logic of events had made him a leader of a group of international socialists. As an international socialist he could not but realise that the main social fact in South Africa was the subjugation of a black majority by a white minority. The slogan of his Party was "Workers of the world, Unite !" That could mean nothing else than that white and black workers must unite together. It meant that a socialist must preach inter racial working class unity. And more than that. For Bunting it came to mean that a white socialist, regardless of consequences, must go out into the highways and byways and help the black workers to organise for freedom.
It was, I believe, some time in 1915 that Bunting came to this decision. There were some in the I.S.L. who agreed with him; there were many who in fact did not. They were willing to admit, in theory perhaps, that the black workers were the most exploited section of the community. But it was quite another thing to court the persecution of the authorities and the hostility of the bulk of the white workers which would inevitably follow if Bunting had his way. And so there began a struggle in South African socialist ranks-a struggle between those who believed that the black worker should be the prime factor in the socialist movement and those who believed otherwise. This struggle has taken many forms. It was not concluded in Bunting's time; it goes on to this day.
Among those who were prominently associated with Bunting in the inner-party struggle for the recognition of the black worker was David Ivon Jones. He was an interesting character who to-day has been largely forgotten, a consumptive who came to South Africa for his health, a man full of dynamic spiritual energy, a good linguist. I have mentioned him as secretary of the Labour Party and as one who broke with the official leadership on the war issue. Whether it was Jones or Bunting or both together who started the nigrophilist campaign in the I.S.L. I have not been able to ascertain. Jones, writing on October 1, 1915, on the " Parting of the Ways," said: " An Internationalism which does not concede the fullest rights which the Native working class is capable of claiming will be a sham. One of the justifications for our withdrawal from the Labour party is that it gives us untrammeled freedom to deal, regardless of political fortunes, with the great and fascinating problem of the Native. "
The I.S.L. put up two candidates for the Parliamentary elections in 1915: J. A. Clark and W. H. Andrews. Andrews stood for the constituency which had returned him some years before. But Clark and Andrews together got only 140 votes. It was a " Khaki election "; the Labour Party also lost seats; Creswell, in spite of his " See It Through " policy was defeated in Bezuidenhout Valley by thirteen votes. Andrews retired for the time from professional politics. He went " back to the bench," getting employment in an engineering shop in Durban.
Meanwhile the anti-war activities of the League were rousing the resentment of the authorities and there began a series of legal prosecutions of leading socialists. In the first of these, Bunting, Dunbar and Jones were arrested, because of speeches made at a public meeting. In those days there were no " war emergency regulations " and mere opposition to the war was not a criminal of fence. The prosecution found it impossible to frame a charge. Cramer, the public prosecutor, had a most unpleasant task to perform. " I am sorry," he said, " I am not now in the position of asking for a substantial penalty. Mr Bunting may smile (as I see he is doing) as much as he likes, but I shall assure him that next time I shall press for a substantial penalty."
The I.S.L. held its first national conference in Johannesburg on January 9, 1916. Bunting came forward with a ' petition of rights " for the Native worker. His resolution read " that this League affirm that the emancipation of the working class requires the abolition of al] forms of Native indenture, Compound and passport systems; and the lifting of the Native worker to the political and industrial status of the white.'' This did not meet with the unanimous support of the conference. No one openly expressed race prejudice or denied that the black man was entitled to freedom. But there was an attempt to avoid a specific Native program me by asserting that there was no Native problem, only a · worker's problem." An amendment by Dunbar to this effect was lost. Colin Wade then got the last part of the motion changed to read '' and the lifting of the Native wage worker to the political and industrial status of the elite; meanwhile endeavouring to prevent the increase (in numbers) of the Native wage workers, and to assist the existing Native wage workers to free themselves from the wage system." Reviewing the conference, Ivon Jones remarked in the next issue of the international: " There were some misgivings on the result of the debate on the Native question - Bunting's achievement. The misgivings arose from the inclusion of ' political rights ' in the status which Native workers should aim at. However, the motion was carried by an unmistakable majority."1
There were those in the League who thought no doubt that the conference decision On tile '' Native question," theoretically correct though it might be, would remain at that, a mere ex press ion of opinion. But I have already pointed out that with Bunting pious attitudes were not enough. He started to work to get his fellow- socialists to live up to their resolution. From now on, article after article by him appears in the International, all hammering away on the Native issue. " The solidarity of labour fails the moment it is divided on colour, race or creed and the socialist philosophy fails if there are more races, colours or creeds in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in its philosophy ". (International, February 18, 1916).
But more than this. Bunting was now working to bring the black man to the movement-into the League itself. Tilts was something Which made some of his fellow socialists gasp. Bunting mentions in the article just quoted how Saul Nsane and a number of other Africans were cordially welcomed at all I.S.L. lecture class in the Johannesburg trades hall. In April George Mason, one-time deportee, now back in South Africa, was induced to give a lecture on " Trade Unions and the Native Question." Mason had been one of the few members of the trade unions anal the Labour Party u ho had urged the organisation of the African workers, and, at the Kleinfontein mine in July, l.1913, he had managed to persuade the black workers on strike with the whites. At this lecture Jones records that he usual monotone of white faces in the audience was broken in the presence of a dozen dusky ones, representatives, more or less, of an awakening million u ho may not be ignored in the capitalist scheme, tat less in the socialist one." Two months later further new- Ground was broken when an African actually addressed all audience in the Trades Hall. He was Robert Grendon, editor of the African National Congress newspaper, Abantu Batho. In January, 1917, the socialists contested a parliamentary by election in the Johannesburg constituency of Troyeville. Colin Wade was chosen as the I.S.L. candidate and he was opposed by Creswell, who was serving with the army in German East Africa. The " capitalist party," the S.A.P., also had a candidate. Colonel Creswell, '' the boy in khaki," was the popular favourite. Apart from labour support he [had] the powerful backing of the Rand Daily Mail. He topped the poll. Colin Wade scored only 32 votes, " the lowest yet recorded for I.S.L. " as -the International commented at the time. This extremely low vote was attributed not merely to the general unpopularity of the anti-war cause but also to the League's openly pro-Native policy. Wade's election manifesto contained incidental references to the slave status of the African workers and had called for industrial organisation irrespective of race, colour or creed.
Jones took comfort in the fact that the great mass of the proletariat, in which the I.S.L.,., if it were not to be utopian, must find its economic basis, was black, therefore disfranchised, and therefore not represented in the Troyeville electorate. "Whether it be 82 votes or 2 votes, this must increasingly become the political issue for us: freedom to combine and political rights for the Native worker. "
The I.S.L. was making contacts with Africans. Black men were attending their meetings periodically as listeners and sometimes even as speakers. But something more vital was needed, as both Bunting and Jones realised. In July, 1917, they started what were described as " a series of gatherings of Natives to study the working class movement. " These soon resulted in the formation of a black workers' union. The idea was to develop it on the lines of the American I.W.W. as an " all-in union" for unskilled labourers When asked what they wanted, the Africans had replied " Sifuna zonke " (We want everything), and this was taken as the motto of the new organisation, which they decided to call the Industrial Workers of Africa. Socialist leaflets began to appear in Zulu and Sotho.
The fact that while socialists w ere beginning to take an active interest in the black workers did not go unnoticed by the authorities. Members of the Government including Botha, The prime minister, began to make speeches denouncing the white men. who were fomenting unrest all long the blacks. It was said that the Government had detectives on their track but it was necessary also that public (i.e. white) opinion should be aroused.
There was considerable development of Native African politics at that time, by no means all of it due to the handful of white socialists in Johannesburg, though they Undoubtedly did all they could to help it. In February, 1918, there was a boycott of the concession stores on the mines, ascribed by the Rand Daily Mail to the " sinister influence of socialists and pacifists." It was also hinted that German gold was subsidising the movement. Questions were asked in Parliament and Botha answered that the Attorney-General was deciding whether criminal proceedings should be taken.
In June, 1918, the so-called " bucket strike " broke out. Those were the days before water-borne sewerage became general in the " Golden City." African sanitary workers, feeling the pinch of the rising cost of living and inspired no doubt by a successful strike of the white municipal workers, " downed buckets" and demanded sixpence (other reports said one shilling) a day more. The authorities drafted in Native police as scabs. But there were not enough of these to do more than attend to schools, hospitals and the like: private residences had to be neglected. The strikers numbering 152 were arrested and sentenced to two months' imprisonment under the Master and Servants Act. The Chief magistrate, Macfie, addressing the bucket carriers after sentence had been passed said: "While in gaol they would nave to do the same work as they had been doing, and would carry out that employment with an armed escort, including a guard of Zulus armed with assegais and white men with guns. If they attempted to escape and if it were necessary, they would be shot down. If they refused to obey orders they would receive lashes as often as might be necessary to make them understand they had to do what they were told."- Cape Argus, 11/6/18.
The authorities then took action against those Whom they Considered to be the instigators of the strike. Five Africans (leaders of the African National Congress and three Europeans (members of the I.S.L.) were arrested and charged with incitement to violence. Their names were J. D. Ngojo, A. Cetyiwe, H. Kraai, D. Letanka, L. T. Mvabaza, S. P. Bunting, H.C.Hanscombe, and T.P.Tinker The preliminary examination in the magistrate's court on a charge of incitement to violence attracted great attention and the occasion w as used by the socialists to 'put over'' to the general public as much propaganda as possible. This was the sort of occasion in which Bunting delighted, and here his legal knowledge stood him in good stead. The Crown tried to show not only that the socialists, working through the Industrial Workers of Africa, were the chief cause of the " bucket strike " and a strike of Native miners which followed it, but that they were responsible for a dozen other happenings all over the Witwatersrand where Africans had gone on strike or rioted in protest against passes and other wrongs. The accused had no difficulty in showing that they had played no direct role in any of the strikes or riots; in fact their first knowledge of the "bucket strike" was a report in the press. They were concerned in propagating the doctrines of socialism and industrial unionism. They believed in strike action but only When it was prepared by adequate trade union organisation. They had considered that the Natives were not well enough organised for strike action and had advised accordingly. .As the case proceeded the public prosecutor looked more and more foolish, and, though the accused were committed for trial, the Attorney-General refused to prosecute and the charges were withdrawn.
In the course of the proceedings it came out that the Criminal Investigation Department had sent a large number of black detectives to join the I.W.A. One of them had actually become secretary. Tile charge against the socialists was based chiefly on the affidavit of an African detective, Luke Messina, who as a result of the trial was charged with perjury and confessed that he had made a false affidavit against Bunting at the instance of the authorities. (International, 26/9/19.)
One of the results of the I.S.L.'s interest in Africans was the expulsion of the socialists from their offices in the Johannesburg 'Trades Hall (in November, 1917). This was preceded, in September, by an order from the Trades Hall Society declaring that in future rooms in the building would be let for the use of Europeans only. In protest Bunting resigned the secretaryship of the Trades Hall Society, his place being taken by J. Gow-, the secretary of the Labour Party. For the next issue of the International Bunting wrote a long article denouncing all " colour bar " labourites. He referred to an incident a few weeks before when the members of the administrative council of the S.A.L.P., on seeing some non-Europeans on their way upstairs to attend an I.S.L. conference, "scuttled out of their meeting room below and over to the Grand National Hotel like women who have seen a mouse or tenants who have discovered bugs.... The Trades Hall resolution ... brings to a head the most important issue in the Labour movement in South Africa
. . It is a challenge to the Socialists who recognise the class struggle; u sneering intimation to the underpaid, uneducated, unskilled toilers that they need not hope for the co-operation of the whites, who, on the contrary, will oppose their efforts at emancipation; a wilful decision of the ' trustees ' of the working class movement to sell it for a ' place in the sun,' where they clink glasses with magnates, with the d-d niggers as their footstool.... The wages system for ever, they chuckle, provided ours are high and yours low an injury to one is an injury to all-unless he's black. Down with capitalist exploitation-of ' Europeans ' only ....
" Fools! Do they not see that they are tools in the hands of the capitalist, who flatters and pampers them not because he doesn't want cheap black labour, but because he does; who retains them as white boss boys, trading on their silly pride, while tie educates the Natives eventually to oust them; who uses them not to keep the ' nigger ' out but only to keep him down, and shoot him down when required.
' No, they do not or will not see it. Then tear down that blasphemous legend ' Labor Omnia Vincit ' over the Trades Hall gateway. And substitute ' All hope abandon ye Who enter here,' for the solidarity of lab our, the hope of the world, is by that snobbish, churlish resolution abandoned, spat upon and disowned! "
In addition to his activities on the Native field, which had now become a dominating interest in his life, Bunting during those hectic war years was engaged in the general rough and tumble of socialist agitation and propaganda. He had taken over much of the hum drum work of the movement. He was always-s busy writing for the weekly paper. When Jones was away or ill he acted as editor. He eventually became treasurer of the League. He tried to carry- on his lawyer's practice, though much of his legal work too was in connection with the movement and it is doubtful whether he made much money out of it. Fortunately he still had a small income from his investments in the wattle plantation which helped to keep the wolf from the door.
There were quite a number of arrests and police raids, in most of which Bunting figured. In almost all cases the police failed to secure convictions. In August, 1916, Jones was arrested in connection with an anti-war pamphlet, entitled Let Saints on Earth in concert Sing. Bunting, as legal adviser, quickly appeared at the charge office, only to be arrested himself and charged jointly with Jones. They were charged with contravening the Public Welfare Act by communicating matter ``calculated to create alarm or incite public feeling.'' Bunting was sentenced to six weeks' hard labour or £25 fine. Jones' case was held over pending Bunting's appeal to the Supreme Court' which quashed the magistrate's verdict. In this trial' as in others' F A.W. Lucas' gave his services as advocate. He had been on a visit to Europe when the split occurred in the Labour party On his return he took his stand with the antiwar section but did not join the I.S.L. from whom he differed on theoretical grounds. Lucas by this time was a fervent follower of Henry George and his theory of the single tax.
Bunting was an active member of the Transvaal Provincial Council till the end of his term of office in 1917. Lucas recalls that on one occasion when the Labour members tried to prevent an adjournment there was an all-night sitting and Bunting spoke for four hours, quoting at times from the Bible and at others from the Declaration of Independence. In March, 1917 Bunting moved a motion in the council condemning the martial law censorship regulations and recommending their repeal by the Union Government. The motion was within an ace of being passed and would have been had not one of the Labour members, George Hills, ratted, making the voting 19 for and 20 against. Bunting and Colin Wade were the chief participators in the debate.
Bunting stood again for the Provincial Council, in June, 1917, but without success. Revolutionary Socialist candidates at any time would have had little chance of being returned, and with war fever still raging an anti-war candidate could hope for little more than a token vote. Bunting's old constituency, Bezuidenhout Valley, was an English area, and he realised that he would get few votes there. The cosmopolitan constituency of Commissioner Street was therefore chosen. The League put out election leaflets in Yiddish' as well as English. Meetings were held in the Jewish quarter, with speakers in Yiddish. All to no avail. Bunting got only 71 votes, which the International optimistically described as an improvement on Colin Wade's 32 votes in Troyeville at the beginning of the year. Andrews did very much better at Benoni with 355 votes.
From 1917 onwards the attention of South African socialists was drawn more and more to the epoch-making events in Europe. The Kerensky revolution made them prick up their ears. Socialists all over the world were sending delegates to the Stockholm Socialist Reace Conference, and the League, not to be outdone, nominated Andrews as their delegate. He left in August, 1917. He returned a year later, having failed to get further than London.
In November, 1917, came the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, welcomed by the South African socialists as tangible proof of the ultimate triumph of their faith.
In December' 1916' Bunting married. Like his great-grandfather he chose a wife from "within the movement." She was Miss Rebecca Notlowitz' a Jewish emigree from the Baltic. Like many of the Jewish comrades brought up in the socialist movement in Russia, she was full of the most intense loyalty to the cause, an active participant in the daily work of the League.
Of Bunting's lovemaking there is little on record. It was probably done in the midst of a whirl of committees, public meetings and propaganda. Sometimes they had a quiet interval on a Sunday afternoon when they went walking and Bunting read passages from Browning' perhaps in an effort to help Rebecca with her English. There were two sons born of the marriage-Arthur and Brian.
With the end of the war in November, 19l8, the revolutionary movement all over the world grew rapidly. Also the censorship of news which had existed during the war years, was lifted to some extent. The pages of the International became filled more and more with reports of overseas events, the great Russian revolution, the overthrow of the old government in Germany, strikes all over the world. The white membership of the I.S.L,,. began to grow rapidly' though it never became a really large organisation. 5 Native affairs began to play a smaller part in the activities of the I. S.L. as well as in the pages of its newspaper. Who could be bothered with politically backward and largely unorganised Africans when such resounding events were happening overseas? Work among Africans, never very popular with the rank and file in the League, was crowded out or left to a few ``cranks,'' of whom Bunting and Jones were the most outstanding and persistent.
These two manfully struggled on, trying to educate the white workers in general and their fellow socialists in particular on the importance of what they called the '' black proletariat.'' Jones started night classes for Africans' teaching them to read and write. He got them to write on their slates " Workers of the world unite ! You have nothing to lose but your chains and a world to win.'' But few Natives actually joined the League. They felt uncomfortable and shy at white meetings. The Industrial Workers of Africa did not long survive the " Bucket Strike." constant police attention probably scared Africans away.
In 1919 there was a wave of Native strikes, riots and pass burnings' which, in so far as they were not spontaneous unorganised outbursts, were directed by the African National Congress. There were numerous arrests and imprisonment's' and Bunting appeared frequently in the Johannesburg magistrate's court as attorney defending Africans who had fallen into the clutches of the police. One day at the end of March' 1919' while coming out of court' he was set upon by a lunch - hour mob of whites and " frog-marched.'' 'this consisted of being carried face downwards by four ruffians, each of whom had hold of a limb.
Now it so happened that the wave of Native unrest' the pass burnings and the riots (the latter consisting chiefly in the beating up of Africans by the white mob) coincided with a strike of white municipal workers which led to the so-called "Johannesburg Soviet.'' The striking tramway men had decided, in order to keep the public on their side' to run the trams themselves for the duration of the strike. This they did under the direction of a strikers' "board of control''' and it was this organisation which came to be described as a "soviet."
At a meeting between the Town Council and a strike deputation "Councillor O'Hara drew attention to the considerable Native unrest in town, and asked if the strikers were going to stand by the community in the event of any Native trouble. Several members of the strike deputation gave an assurance that they would stand by the Council in this particular matter'' (Star, 31/3/19). It is clear that by tile '' community '' was meant the white population and that there was no question of any fellow feeling between white and black strikers.
It also happened that two days before the '' soviet '' was started two alleged Bolshevik emissaries' who declared they had come straight from Red Moscow' arrived in Johannesburg. They addressed a crowded meeting in the Johannesburg Town Hall (where of course it was illegal for Africans to be present) amid scenes of the most unbounded enthusiasm.
Hot from being manhandled by the white mob and with his brain teeming with all these events' Bunting sat down to do his weekly write-up for the International. What he wrote on this occasion is such a good example of his rather complicated style, his passionate appeal for justice for the black man, and his bitter contempt of all hypocrites, particularly those so-called socialists and communists who shared in the general race prejudice' that I shall quote him at some length. He begins by describing the setting up of the white strikers, 'Board of Control' and goes on to say: " To criticise the personnel or intelligence of the Board would perhaps be out of place here. We can at any rate congratulate the municipal workers on having grasped the idea that the old-fashioned strike for better conditions, often unsuccessful and yet more often ruinous to the workers' funds is being replaced today by the movement for Workers' Councils, destined not merely to 'control' industry and public institutions but to take them over from the present private owners or bourgeois public bodies and work them in the interest of the working class.''
Here follow certain obvious criticisms of the Board. It did not represent even the white workers as a whole but only the municipal employees. ''the organised workers of private industries were not invited to send their delegates.'' It made no attempt to extend its activities beyond Johannesburg, to call into being similar councils in other areas. It had announced itself as a ''temporary institution'' pending the settlement of the strike, which of course was not the idea behind the soviets.
' But,,'' he goes on, what is far more fundamental is its glaringly limited and sectional character within the ranks of the working class. Where did it reveal that solidarity of Labour, the hope of the world ? Municipal workers, indeed ? Where were the masses, the underdogs of Bantu race who far outnumber the whites in Municipal employ ? Where, for instance, on this Board, were any delegates of the Sanitary Boys whose demand for 1s. a day rise nearly a year ago was at the time and has ever since been haughtily ignored by the whites? Presumably they were to be 'controlled ' by the 'Board of Control '-the very word ' Board ' suggests all-powerful directors' not communists' and 'control ' of any except non-workers is not the meaning of Bolshevism.
"The International Socialist League . . . can firstly improve the occasion by again preaching the eternal verities of the movement in South Africa; and is thus in duty bound to repeat its warning' as before, that no workers' movement or revolution is worth the bones of a single champion which ignores or excludes the vast mass of the workers of this country' the most flagrantly opposed victims of the most glaring form of capitalist exploitation' the exploitation of the black races and their labour by white capital: for that is after all broadly the summary of the labour position in South Africa. And if the upper white artisans are not with these masses' they are against them; they are consciously or unconsciously kicking against the pricks of the proletarian movement they profess to espouse.
"If indeed there were ' nothing doing ' on the part of the underdogs, or if the attitude of the white workers were one of only benevolent neutrality to them, their position would be more excusable. But there is something doing down below there: a movement of emancipation far more national (or rather international), more far-reaching, more cutting at the root, more brave and self-sacrificing, than mere white Bolshevism can ever be; a passive resistance movement at present in protest against that outward and visible sign of semi-chattel slavery of the Natives, the Pass Law.
''Nor is there much sign of benevolence either. On the contrary, the Municipal Workers' spokesmen have even been offering to help quell the ' Native menace and the Central Strike Committee passed a resolution last Monday which while graciously admitting that the Native was entitled to organise to improve his position, offered assistance to the (Government to prevent outrages on white women and children. Outrages on white women and children ? What right have these people, who could not work for a day without a horde of ' outragers ' to serve them, who are ensconced in a labour system which demands hundreds of thousands of these `outragers' as its indispensable basis, to complain of Black Peril? And for that matter when has 'black peril ' ever resulted from a Native movement for emancipation? But more than this' what protest have these men made against the outrages on black men and women taking place daily under their eyes in Johannesburg this very week? Why have they not offered their services to these their fellow-workers to protect them from the police and troops just called in to shoot them down and from the aiding and abetting white mob? What have they to say against the wholesale outrages' the burning injustices committed on black workers daily in the so-called courts of justice? Against the determined refusal, despite all the rise in the cost of living, of any increased wage to these toiling, sweating slaves?...
"As this paper has often pointed out, the capitalist class see the point and seize their opportunity. It is a godsend to them that a Native strike is running simultaneously with the white one. As long as they can thus count on the middle-class obsession of white workers who want a revolution merely to install themselves in command of the subject race, they are quite safe. While the orator shouts ' Workers of the world unite,' someone whispers ' the Kafirs are rising' -oh, then, presto, let's bury the hatchet with our bosses, who will give us guns instead to shoot their slaves with ....
"It is humiliating to have to keep on emphasising that the essence of the Labour movement is Solidarity, without which it cannot win. The outstanding characteristic of the capitalist system in South Africa being its Native labour, the outstanding movement of the country must clearly be the movement of its Native labourers ....
"The Johannesburg lunch-time crowd, many of them no doubt Trade Unionists fresh from cheering Bolshevism in the Town Hall, not only jeered at the outrages but helped to catch and belabour any male or female Native luckless enough to be abroad at the time, proceeding afterwards to mob the editor of this paper as a presumed sympathiser with their victims ' Native menace ' indeed! What gross distortion is this? Who are the menacers but the whites armed to the teeth' who the menaced every time' if not the timid' unarmed defenceless blacks, who voluntarily collect all sticks when they hold meeting; our miserable slaves' who cannot even ' act constitutionally, without the whites-English and Dutch-standing to arms, whose reward for every Petition of Right is to be told they are 'disloyal to the King '-what wonder?-and' while flouted by officials indoors' to be kicked by Cossacks outside' or kicked, mauled and battered in their hundreds to and at the Marshall Square cells, like Homer's 'souls sent gibbering to Hades'? Is it nothing to you, all ye 'Bolshevists ' who pass by? Or you 'Spartacists,' can you see Spartacus' the slave leader, or Liebknecht who took his mantle joining in yesterday's lynching affray'? ....
'Ye fools and blind' Can you not see that by taking up this white against black red herring you are straying exactly where de Wet, Minister of Justice, Mentz, Minister of Defence, and some of you so-called Labour leaders want you to stray ? That you are playing completely into Capitalism's hands? That by scaring you with native risings, and flattering you as the ' ruling class ' of Labour, the master Glass drives you clean away from that united action of the industrial workers of Africa before which alone it trembles? Well, well, then, go on in your old ruts: let your Native fellow workers, like the Russian moujiks, be more progressive than you, and, if you will not help their advance, let them advance without you and in spite of you!"
Hard on the events in Johannesburg came more excitement and trouble for the white socialists' this time in Natal. Jones had gone to a sanatorium at Maritzburg to be treated for his consumption' and, while he was there' he and the local socialists had improved the occasion by putting out a little pamphlet called The Bolsheviks Are Coming, which, together with a translation into Zulu and Sotho, they distributed in numbers among the population in Maritzburg and Durban. Jones and Green, the leader of the Maritzburg socialists, were immediately arrested by the police. In a bitter article in the International Bunting wrote: " To emphasise their British love of freedom and fair play, the employers of Comrade Green have sacked him, his wife has been turned out of the cafe she has been keeping and Jones has been ordered to leave the Health Institute in Longmarket Street.''
Jones and Green were charged with inciting to public violence and also with failing to submit their pamphlet to the (Censor before publication. The thing which seemed to annoy the authorities most was that it was addressed " to the Workers of South Africa-black as well as white.'' The two socialists were sentenced by the magistrate to a fine of £75 and four months' imprisonment each, and 10 pounds or one month' each. However, the appeal to the Supreme Court succeeded and the prisoners were finally discharged.
In July, 1919, the I.S.L. started a campaign to raise funds for buying its own printing press. The press meant further work and trouble for Bunting. At first things went fairly well. The Bolshevik revolution had created great enthusiasm particularly among the Jewish community. Coming to South Africa as poverty-stricken refugees, many of them had "made good,'' in fact had become capitalists, great and small. But numbers of them retained a warm sympathy for the revolutionary movement, a sympathy which they were quite willing to express in Gash. They looked to the International to supply news of the happenings in Russia' which it did. As time went on however, and the Bolshevik revolution failed to spread over the globe, this enthusiasm died down and it became more difficult to obtain money. Bunting kept long lists of "sympathisers'' and was always moving about collecting whatever he could get for the press. Running the press was a constant cause of anxiety. Skilled white artizans, members of the Typographical Union, were employed. Their wages were high and had to be paid promptly every week. The manager of the press was a reliable fellow and a good printer; but he was said to suffer from lead poisoning, he had an uncertain temper and had to be handled carefully.
One cause of trouble was Bunting's handwriting' which was atrocious, and he was always redrafting and altering his manuscripts till they looked like jig-saw puzzles. The linotypists had a bad time.
In February, 1920, there was a big strike of African miners. Over 40,000 came out. The strike was broken by the simple process of drawing a police cordon round every compound. Each group of workers thus isolated was told that all the rest had gone back to work In the absence of an African miners' union or central strike committee this method eventually succeeded' though not without bloodshed. European civilians also joined in the fray' attacking with "revolvers and other weapons" a meeting in support of the strikers called by the African National Congress at Vrededorp ' Johannesburg.
There was the usual scabbing of white. workers on black strikers and, as Bunting said, "no single clear call from any trade union leader.'' ' The demands of the Natives are vague,'' he wrote. "The strike is undoubtedly an instinctive mass revolt against their whole status and pig level of existence. The Native Congress has had very little to do with the movement other than to hold a watching brief. The strike is in no man's control. Organisation with the compounds there is' of course' but of necessity there can be very little definite organisation between mines owing to the 'cordon sanitaire' of police ringed round each compound.''
The strike is peaceful at first, but '' violence is provoked at last.'' The police try to force an entrance into the compound at the Village Deep Mine. The Bantu miners resist and eight are reported killed. Rumours are "very insistent'' that the strikers on several mines have been driven down below at the point of the bayonet.
The I.S.L. issued a magnificent Don't Scab leaflet largely Bunting's work) appealing to the white miners, but without any obvious result. The leaflet said: "White Workers ! Do you hear the new Army of Labour coming ? The Native workers are beginning to wake up. They are finding out that they are slaves to the big capitalists. Food and clothing are costing more and more, but their wages remain the same, away down at the pig level of existence.
"But they want to rise Why not? They want better housing and better clothes' better education and a higher standard of life.
' They have seen the white workers getting more and more wages to meet the rising cost of living. They have noted that our power is due to organisation and they are following suit. They are uniting in a new Army of Labour.
''White workers ! Do not repel them ! The Native workers cannot rise without raising the whole standard of existence for all.
" They are putting aside their tribal differences and customs; they are entering the world-wide army of labour. They are putting aside sticks and assegais and are learning how to withhold their labour unitedly with folded arms. They are learning how to win the respect of white people by peaceful picketing and organisation. They are falling into line with the trade union movement of the whole world. It is an insult to the Trade Union movement to bring in troops when any workers go on strike, as if they were unreasoning savages. The fact that they can combine proves they are nothing of the kind.
''When White workers go on strike they enrol Special Constables. Do not allow yourselves to be enrolled as Special Constables against Native strikers. It is an insult to your own Labour movement.
"White workers! On which side are you? When the Native workers are on strike we are all thrown idle. Thus they prove that all sections of Labour are interdependent, white and black Solidarity will win!
'' White miners! Don't you feel humbled when you cannot go down below because your hammer boys won't go down? Learn the lesson ! Your interests and theirs are the same as against the Boss.
"Back them up ! The Chamber of Mines will be asking you to take up the rifle to dragoon the Native strikers. Don't do it ! That would wreck the Labour movement in this country.
'' Be on the side of Labour, even Native labour, against our common capitalist masters. The Natives have shown that they can stop the mines as well as you can. Get them on your side.
- " Beware ! The Chamber of Mines may use the crisis to break the white unions. They may march the Natives back to their kraals under armed guard find starve them into submission on the road. Meanwhile the white workers will be starved into accepting the masters' own terms.
Therefore, DON'T SCAB! DON'T SHOOT! Don't take a rifle against your own hammer boys, and see that if the Natives are sent back to their kraals they go by train, where they may- be under public inspection all the time.''
It was a tragedy that such a moving appeal should fall on deaf ears. The belief, implicit in all Marxist propaganda, that fundamentally the interests of all workers are one, was never questioned by Bunting. And yet the white workers believed that they had nothing in common with the blacks. A realist, not obsessed with the Marxist doctrine, might have pointed out that the white miners earned ten times as much as the blacks, that many of them employed black servants in their homes, that n victory of the Black miners would have increased the desire of the mine-owners to reduce the status of the white miners, since any Increase in black wages would have to be met either by a reduction in white wages or a reduction in profits.
Bunting knew all this, but still he kept on, hitting his head against the stone wall not only of racial prejudice but of the economic fact which bolstered up the prejudice.
Ivon Jones left for Europe in May, 1920. He went to the South of France and while there met Karl Radek with whom he became very friendly. Radek invited him to attend the Second Congress of the Communist International in Moscow. Jones stayed on in Russia. From the point of view of his health it was the worst place for a consumptive to be. He died in a Crimean sanitorium in 1924, but not before he had learnt Russian and translated a number of Lenin's early writings into English. In this work he was a pioneer-at that time Lenin's writings were almost completely unknown to English-speaking r ' socialists.
Jones' departure left Bunting to fight a lone fight He was the only remaining leader in the I.S.L. who was really enthusiastic about work among the blacks.
In 1921 the International Socialist League was merged in the new Communist Party of South Africa which became affiliated to the Communist International with headquarters in Moscow. The unity conference was held in Cape Town and resulted in the merging of the I.S.L. the Industrial Socialist League (a Cape Town group)' the Marxist Club of Durban and one or two smaller bodies. Bunting was one of the delegates of the I.S.L.
The new party was still almost exclusively a white party and it is significant that under its new name the I.S.L. returned to its offices in the Johannesburg Trades Hall. The majority of the executive felt that their main work was among the trade unions and that the Trades Hall was a strategic centre.
In 1922 came the last great white miners strike or "Rand Revolt.," All the white miners at that time 22,000 in number, struck work in protest against the decision of the Chamber of Mines to dismiss some 2,000 "redundant'' white workers' thereby decreasing the ratio of white to black workers on the gold mines. The white coal miners and the employees of the V.F.P.. Company' which supplied electric power to the mines' also struck at the same time against wage reductions. On the coal mines the strike failed to bring the industry to a standstill' the proportion of white miners there being very much less than on the gold mines. On January 27 the Inter-national reports that "after three weeks' idleness the white workers on a section of the Transvaal coal mines find that the withdrawal of their labour has resulted in the mines being run without them at most normal, and in some cases above normal, output. The Native miners plus a few white officials have kept and are keeping the mines going' while some mines in the Transvaal and all the mines inn Natal remain unaffected by the strike . . . There is no longer a strike in the coal mines: there is simply a thousand or fifteen hundred men out of work.',
The position on the gold mines was different. There the white miners were able to hold up mining and milling operations, mainly because of the fact that the engine drivers were no longer working the skips and amateurs could not replace them. Large numbers of African miners were no longer able to work and some thousands were sent back to the reserves, thus saving the Chamber the cost of feeding them.
The strike soon developed into a general fight by white labour for the maintenance of the colour bar in industry. The opposition parties in Parliament, the English "" Labour Party ' and the Boer "Nationalist Party,'' strongly defended the strikers. Under the slogan "for a white South Africa,,' they organised meetings throughout the country. Boer farmers, many of whom had relatives working on the mines, sent quantities of foodstuffs to assist the strikers. "Commandos'' were formed on a semi-military basis. They marched through the streets with banners, while terrified Natives scattered to right and left. One of these banners contained in itself an interesting epitome of the ideology of some of the strikers. It was an old banner, originally used in some previous Labour or Socialist demonstration and it bore Karl Marx's slogan, "Workers of the world, unite!'' Someone had "'modernised'' it so that it read : "Workers of the world, fight and unite for a White South Africa !'.
The strike placed the socialists and communists on the horns of a dilemma. The sentiments of the strikers and their leaders' with a few notable exceptions, were strongly anti-Native. The slogan, `" a white South Africa,,, was one which no true socialist could support But workers were on strike; there was war between "capital" and "labour"; the Government was drafting thousands of troops' police and special constables to the Witwatersrand with the obvious intention of shooting down the workers on the slightest provocation. Smuts, the Prime Minister, had said, after the early negotiations had broken down' that the Government should no longer intervene in trying to effect a settlement but would "allow things to develop.'' Almost all the socialists felt that they had to support the strikers, though some few of them made reservations. In fact the majority of the Communist Party flung themselves wholeheartedly into the struggle and left the `'reservations,"-to Bunting. I remember seeing, Bunting often during those hectic weeks. He never spoke at any of the hundreds of meetings. Other members of his Party did; some of them, particularly Bill Andrews, were leading orators. Whether Bunting was deliberately ignored by those who organised the meetings or whether he chose to take a back seat I do not know. 6 Probably had he pushed himself forward they would have let him speak, for soap box men were in demand; though what he would have said would not have been popular. Like a gruff bear he would go about among the crowds" mumbling his criticisms to those who cared to listen" and always with a bundle of internationals under his arm. In the Party paper he was able to have his say.
He tried to "rationalise'' the Communist support of the strike. In the International in the second week of the strike he wrote: "This strike is sometimes called a strike against the abolition of the colour bar. But although anti colour feeling runs high" the true issue is not racial. Essentially it is a strike against the further lowering of wages which the capitalists of the whole world are trying to enforce; essentially it is not a strike of white men as whites; it is a strike of workers as workers....The colour bar taken literally as a restriction on non European workers is of course unfair. To the extent, however" that it helps to keep up higher wages and the number of those drawing them" it serves the interests of all workers. Nor would its abolition benefit more than a mere handful of Coloureds or Natives."" He suggests that the strikers should adopt "" The unanswerable slogan of equal pay for equal work."" If the Chamber would adopt this principle "not a dozen white men would be displaced."
Bunting here professes the accepted view of the white Socialists that the interests of both black and white workers are ultimately the same (a view which I have criticised above at least in as far as its application to the mines is concerned). Believing in this identity of interest he appeals to the strikers to become "class cons<3ious" and not to be drawn into attacks on Natives. "One of the surest methods to defeat a white strike in South Africa is to get up a "Kafir rising cry" as was done for instance in 1919: the workers forget their own cause and rush off to shoot niggers just what the bosses want in order to keep their proletariat terrorised. Slaves" attack your enslavers" not their enslaved: hit the masters" not the men""
A few of the strike leaders held this point of view" particularly the leaders of the so-called "Council of Action", Spendiff Fisher and Shaw. These were members of the Miners" Union who had been expelled from that body some time before for conducting an " illegal strike'" i.e. a strike not authorised by the Executive. When the big strike broke out they came for ward as an alternative or " Left" Ieadership in opposition to the moderate or "Right'' leadership of the official executive of the miners' union and the South African Industrial Federation. They were joined by W. H. Andrews' secretary of the Communist Party. As the strike developed and the extremists came more to the fore' leadership tended to pass out of the hands of the Federation into those of the Council of Action which aimed at a general strike. On the other hand the Boer elements in the commandos were working for an armed revolt. It was in the commandos that most of the anti-Native feeling found expression. Spendiff and Fisher made it their business to combat this. On one occasion when a strikers' mass picket was trying to "pull out'' the workers at the Johannesburg telephone exchange' crowds of interested sightseers gathered, among them many Natives. At one point a group of strikers " broke loose " and started assaulting the Natives . Fisher noticed it. Running hastily to the spot he forced the whites to stop. Pointing to the cordon of soldiers encircling the telephone exchange he shouted " There's the enemy. Leave the blacks alone. '
But the Buntings' Spendiffs and Fishers were unable to check the rising tide of anti Native feeling. At Fordsburg and Apex there were clashes between whites and blacks. At Prim rose' near Germiston, the strikers attacked the compound with guns and a number of Africans were shot. Other Natives were killed at various points along the Reef. 7
Meanwhile in Cape Town the racial issue was becoming paramount. The white trade unionists called big meetings and collected funds in aid of the strikers. The (Coloured and Native organisations called rival meetings to protest against the idea of "a white South Africa" and against the Native pogrom which they alleged with some truth was taking place on the Rand. The largest of these meetings was addressed by Dr. A. Abdurah man, the Coloured leader, and by Clements - Kadalie, of the I.C.U. (We shall hear more of the I.C.U. Iater.)
The strike culminated in the expected armed revolt on the Witwatersrand. The strikers seized certain areas, disarmed the police, and set up their own councils ("soviets" they were called by some enthusiasts). The revolt was suppressed with much bloodshed and for some months Johannesburg and the- Witwatersrand were under marital law.
Spendiff and Fisher died in Fordsburg, a white working class suburb of Johannesburg, which was held by the strikers for some days and retaken by the Government forces only after it had been bombarded from the air and by artillery. At the graveside of Spendiff and Fisher I heard a young Afrikaner striker speak. He said: "We fought for a white South Africa. We do not wish to oppress the Native. But we want to maintain a standard of living for our wives and our children." It was the only occasion during the whole of the strike, which lasted nearly three months, that I heard any expression of Afrikaner striker opinion which was not hostile to the black man.
The (Communist Party report of the strike took the form of a pamphlet called Red Revolt and The Rand Strike written by Bunting. His attitude was summed up in the quotation from Browning on the front page-"That rage was right in the main, that acquiescence vain. " The workers were right in striking and fighting: they were wrong in making of their case a racial issue.
From the beginning of March till the end of May, 1922, the International was not published. The revolutionary movement was "underground." Hundreds of ex-strikers, trade union leaders, labour and socialist politicians were in gaol or hiding from the police. There were a number of summary (and quite illegal) executions of strikers by the military. Bunting was also involved in the general round-up by the police and was kept in custody for two weeks, but he was then released as there was no specific charge against him. During this period of martial law he wrote his pamphlet Red Revolt and prepared to go overseas, where he had been meaning to go for some time, partly to take a holiday and partly to report to the Communists in Britain and Russia the recent events in South Africa. There was a gathering in the Party offices in the Trades Hall, where Bunting was presented with " a case of pipes and a morocco bound copy of 'Red Revolt' containing the signatures of a large number of members of the Party, and Mrs Bunting with a gold brooch with the Soviet Star and emblem in enamel." They left with their two sons for I)urban on June 2, 1922.
Writing from London on July 27, Bunting says: " Having spent a month since arrival in the bourgeois circles I started life in, I feel rather like Walton Newbold when he says: ' I don't know much about Communism, but I can tell you a lot about Capitalism.' Thus, to get in touch with the workers, we have had to go and look for them, not always successfully even, dare I say, in Communist circles." He described the rather backward political outlook of the third class passengers on the boat going over. Among them were " some proper White (Guards who, seeing our young hopeful of four and a half with a tiny bit of red flannel at the end of a stick, told him to' take it down or he would be pitched overboard."
Bunting found in the British Labour movement very little of that growth in revolutionary spirit which had seemed to promise so much in the years immediately following the war.
" We arrived just as the Labour Party had turned down, by a greatly increased majority, the Communist Party's application for affiliation; and soon afterwards the Miners' Federation, by eight to one, declined to join the Red International of Labour Unions....Here are Henderson, Thomas, Macdonald and Hodges carrying with them the great mass of the workers in preaching negotiation and peace with the masters, or deriding the heroic efforts of the Soviet Government, or parrying, without a single genuine or honest argument, the plea of the Communist International .... One can almost fancy these leaders recruiting British workers to crush ' Lenin and Trotsky ' where the Churchill's ' fear to tread.' " However, " Tom Mann says that class consciousness is spreading fast all the time."
Of any hope of emancipation for the colonial peoples he found little evidence in Britain. Though " Bloomsbury is alive with members of the subject races of India and Africa learning to be Western, i.e. bourgeois, even if anti British, and parading with English lady companions to show how civilised they have become.... Yet the workers of those countries, as of Britain, remain as much as ever the slaves of what, even if it is less British., is only the more the crushing power of exploiting Capitalism."
On their way to the Soviet Union the Bunting's spent some days in Berlin. Bunting's letter, dated Berlin, August 15, 1922. gives a most interesting account of the German capital under the shadow of inflation. " It is still a great capital, but no longer the ' brilliant ' capital, beloved of Capitalism, that it must have been in the Kaiser's day.... The town has something of a fly blown look about it, as if for the last few years it had had to subsist on its past glories. But, besides that, it must be conceded that the war to end war has really 'abolished militarism,' so far as obtrusive appearances go, in Berlin. There are still plenty of troops ready to suppress Communists, no doubt; but they must be kept behind the scenes. Beyond a little display of flags and swords by some students bedizened in grotesque uniforms (a little covert Monarchist demonstration of no importance), we have noticed no public rattle of the sword.... Patriotism is discredited. With this goes what is surely a great improvement in manners both as compared with the Germany one knew or imagined before and with England to-day. There is no swank worth mentioning in the Berliner now, not even among the bloods, such as they are, and the ' upper ten ' do not parade their · superiority,' nor do ' Hoi Polloi ' acknowledge it at all as grossly as in England; people of all conditions live in the same quarter, the same buildings even, and throng the same. boulevards and restaurants in one jostling crowd-without ostentatious 'respect of persons' and without servility, except that tipping is extremely prevalent....
' The Government here is a Coalition Government led by the Social Democrats, with whom the Independent Socialists are uniting to the exclusion of the Communists. It is a petty bourgeois, in short, a 'Labour' Government, the most effective and deadly weapon Capitalism has yet invented against the working class."
Bunting notes that arrests of Communist speakers and editors are pretty frequent, but the Party seems not to be weakened but rather strengthened by the persecution. The Party is no longer an association of 'peculiar people' but a powerful and active political party with widespread and genuine support from the workers throughout the chief industrial area of Germany. The visitors went to a social and heard the communist violinist Soermus and, what specially delighted Bunting. recitations by the Communist 'speaking chorus' who declaimed revolutionary poems in unison, forty or fifty voices together, with great effect, as though they meant it. " What is striking in all these meetings is the very outspoken revolutionary sentiments expressed and the immense fervour, conviction and enthusiasm, not to say violence, with which they are expressed.
What they call 'sedition' or 'incitement to violence' in South Africa is nothing to it 1 "
From Berlin the Buntings went on to Moscow, to that "Mecca of the working class movement." In Berlin everything was going down; in Moscow everything was going up though from a low level, as Bunting admits, the workers having "touched bottom" in an economic sense during the civil war and the famine.
On the day after their arrival they attended a monster demonstration at the Red Square on the day of the young Communists. " One hundred thousand were there," writes Bunting, "in serried ranks with scores of bands and countless banners, expressing confidence in the revolution and vowing death to world capitalism. Here, after all, is the secret of the Soviet Power. And what humane and intelligent faces; Yes the soldiers and police too; not those brutalised enemies of the workers, those dogs we know too well, 8 but decent kindly fellows, who appealed in friendly tones to their ' comrades,' the young people, to keep the line, and were responded to as comrades. "
The great thing in Russia, says Bunting, is the political liberty which the workers have gained, and he writes at length, as "one who has some experience of Marshall Square," contrasting the persecutions of Johannesburg and the freedoms of Moscow. "Whether Moscow is described as hell (as a Riga doctor called it to us) or as heaven, is mainly a question of class point of view. To us, for our part, this first Marxian step of proletarian political control, as the prerequisite of workers' control of industry, seems more important, more valuable, more far-reaching and wonderful than ever. It makes the stimulating atmosphere of Moscow so congenial that, in spite of facts that some Randites would not look at, but which we enjoy the more because we feel it is about the same as most others get here, in spite of distance and (to me) unknown language [Mrs :Bunting of course could speak Russian fluently], in spite of the call to action at home, we shall, I feel sure, be sorry to leave it when our time is up. "
As a musician Bunting was impressed with the Moscow orchestra of eighty performers who played, without a conductor, Liszt's Prelude and the Meistersinger overture. he filled many columns of the International with writing about Russia. In a little while " Russia is all agog with the Fifth Anniversary of her Revolution and coinciding with it, the opening of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International," which Bunting attended as the delegate of the South African Communist Party. Ivon Jones was away ill in the Crimea, and poor Mrs. Bunting, after coming all these thousands of miles to attend the (Congress, was taken ill and had to miss it. Bunting describes at length the demonstration of the army in the Red Square with 'Trotsky taking the salute and 30,000 soldiers cheering him.
At the Congress Bunting heard speeches by Lenin, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Losofsky and Trotsky, who spoke one day for 7.5 hours on end, using three languages in succession. He does not say anything in these letters to the International about discussions on South Africa, but he does mention the crowds of Non-European delegates-"from Turkey to China and Japan. "
The Buntings left Moscow on November 20 and were back in London on December 14. Mrs Bunting was still ill and they had to postpone their departure for South Africa. 9 They arrived in Cape Town in March, 1923.
It might be asked what effect had Bunting's visit to Moscow and his attendance at the Fourth Congress upon his ideas about Communist discipline and doctrine. In an "open letter," published in the International on March 30, he deals at length with two matters which the Congress had discussed and which were also causing controversy in the South African Party, viz.: "immediate demands" and the "united front."
This was chiefly in reply to certain Cape Town members who took a "left" attitude on these questions. One gathers that the type of united front advocated was what subsequently came to be called the "united front from below," though Bunting does not use this expression. By supporting "immediate demands" the Party will gain the support of the masses even though these demands appear on the surface to be "reformist" and not "revolutionary"-and thus discredit the Labour Party. " The charge against the Second International, and here against the S.A. Labour Party, i8 not its support of daily demands, but the fact that in effect, in any crisis, being anti-revolutionary, it nearly always comes down on the side of the bourgeoisie and betrays the workers, until today, as Zinoviev says, 'it is the main proof the bourgeoisie.' If the Labour Party carries out its professions it would be unobjectionable, if insufficient. The Communist Party, with revolution as its prime aim, certainly endeavours to emphasise and intensify the struggle as such, the demands themselves, rather than any supposed remedies."
And he quotes the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, the only bit of classical communist literature he really knew by heart: "The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate and momentary aims and interests of the working class, but in the movement of the present they also defend the future of that movement."
Bunting, in all his political statements, insisted on putting things in his own way. One notices an absence of the formal phraseology which one expects from the doctrinaire communist. In 1923, it is true, such "Imprecor Language" (as it subsequently came to be called, after the abbreviated name of the lnternational Press Correspondence, the official organ of the Comintern) was not very noticeable even in MOSCOW. Later it became very common, but to the end of his days Bunting never used it.
In view of what happened later, his views on opposition official doctrine inside the party are worth recording. "The alternative to this real support of daily demands is, especially in ,times of crisis, not merely to ignore them or stand aloof from them, but to oppose them, in other words to support the other way-that is what it comes to-which I gather is more or less what some of those I am addressing [certain "leftists" in Cape Town] actually did in connection with the Rand strike of last year. Can they not see that that is coming dangerously near to playing traitor to the working class, a crime far more unforgivable in Communists than even in the Labour Party?" And again: " Hence it is almost incumbent on our Party to accept this view as a matter of discipline; and Comintern discipline becomes a more important matter every year, every month. It was noticeable how at the Congress one party after! another would say: ' Yes, the United Front, etc., is all very well for other parties, but not for us'; but no one else ever agreed with them, not even those who made the same claim about their own country; each thought his own country exceptionable but all the rest normal; and the result was that the Congress turned them all down and exempted nobody . . . Let us drop the bigotry which dates from older days, when the socialist movement was more of a debating society, and consequently bred splits, left and right wings and so on. The Communist International is leaving all that behind.... To day the Comintern is an engine, a conquering force. . . It is a power which is determined to win the world in our day. lt should be our privilege, not to stand on a Cape Town dunghill and crow that we know better, but to march in solidarity with it to win the world victory we all desired. Just because the Party must go right into the masses it must keep its own quality of membership up to the highest possible mark. It is there that ' purity ' is necessary. our members must be, to the last man, ' unspotted from the world.' "
Five years later Bunting himself was to be accused of the crime of ' South African exceptionalism,' and he was displaced from his position as a leader of the Party on the very grounds that the Party should be made "pure."
Exciting events had been taking place on the Rand while Bunting was away. During the strike, the "Red Revolt" and the period of martial law which followed, the Government had arrested hundreds of strikers and labour sympathisers. The courts began to work at top speed. Long terms of imprisonment, and death sentences too, were meted out to those who had taken up arms against the authorities. In November, 1921, three of the strikers (Long, Hull and Lewis) died on the gallows in Pretoria singing the " Red Flag." The Government was planning to hang others, but the demonstration at the funeral of the three men was so enormous (the procession was about four miles long) and the Government was becoming so very unpopular, that there were no further executions. Tom Mann, the veteran socialist leader, came out from England to help the campaign for the release of the strike prisoners.
The struggle was by no means over when Bunting came back to Johannesburg. He took over the secretaryship of the Communist Party and the editorship of the International from W. H. Andrews, who left in May, 1923, to take his seat on the Executive Committee of the Communist International, to which he had been elected by the World Congress held in November.
It was from this time that I began to get to know Bunting more intimately. I, and a number of other young people, had formed a Communist youth organisation in 1921. By the end of 1922 I was taking quite an active part in C.P. affairs, distributing leaflets, selling the International, speaking at street corners, and attending the inevitable committee meetings. In 1928 I joined the Communist Party and was shortly put on the Executive Committee as a representative of the Young Communist League.
When I first came into the communist movement my attitude on the "Native question" was not much different from that of many of the other members, both in the youth section and in the party. As far as I remember I was not consciously hostile to or prejudiced against black men. The "workers of the world" were the white miners, tramwaymen, building artizans, and so on, who had trade unions and fought strikes. The blacks were simply disregarded. When the Young Communist League addressed itself to the "working youth" it meant of Course the young white workers, apprentices, and so on. My conversion to "labour nigrophilism," if I may call it that, occurred some time in 1923, and was due largely to Bunting's articles in the International. Another who influenced me in the same direction was Willie Kalk, a young cabinet maker of German origin-whose father had been a social democrat in Germany. Willie Kalk and I soon began to urge upon our fellow members of the Y.C.I. that our main job was to preach communism to the young Natives. We wanted to bring the "Native youth"-with whom we had as yet made no contact and of whom we knew very Iittle-into the organisation. We at once met with opposition. Sarah Sable, our secretary, feared and disliked Natives, and we got no support from her. Solomon Sachs, one of our most forceful and capable members, admitted that the Native youth should be organised, "but," he said, "in a separate organisation."
At the first annual Conference of the Y.C.L.-held, 1 think, early in 1924 we had a stormy debate on the subject, where Sachs carried the day and the "pro Natives" were in a minority of three. We, the ,nigrophilists, were not prepared to accept defeat and we appealed to the executive committee of the Young Communist International, which had its headquarters at that time in Berlin. The Y.C.I. gave us its wholehearted support. Sarah Sable retired from league activities and Sachs left shortly for a visit to England and the Soviet Union. So Kalk and I had things our own way. The Y.C.I. became officially pro Native, though it was a long time before our work among Natives actually bore fruit, and then it was the adult Natives rather than the "youth" among whom we began to work.
The nigrophilist group in the Party was pushed very much into the background by the 1922 strike and the exciting events which followed it. Bunting, as I have said, was playing almost a lone hand. In 1923 and 1924 the main interest of the Party was the defeat of the Smuts Government and all efforts were directed to this purpose. Nothing else seemed really to matter. A united front of the Labour Party and the Nationalists came into being. It came to be known as the Nationalists-Labour " Pact. " To the Pact the Communist Party gave its almost unqualified support.
The general election, which took place in June, 1924, was precipitated by a number of by elections which went against the Government. Smuts, always impatient, was not prepared to wait till 1926 when an election would in the ordinary course of events have become due. He released the remaining strike prisoners and hoped that this gesture would win favour with the electorate. In fact it did not save him but was taken as a sign of weakness.
Both the Labour Party and the Nationalists were known to be anti-Native in outlook, but even they for the moment seemed to be learning the lesson of working Glass solidarity-at least in the Cape where a certain proportion of the African and Coloured workers had the vote. The Labour Party in Cape Town invited representatives of the I.C.U. and other Native organisations to meet them in conference. The Labourites went so far in wooing the Non Europeans of the Cape that they actually had a Coloured delegate, from one of the Cape Branches, at their national conference early in 1924.
The Nationalists also were prepared to drop their nigrophobia for the time being for the sake of getting Native votes in the. Cape. In fact even prior to the Rand Strike (in 1921) General Hertzog, their leader, had written to Kadalie, secretary of the I.C.U., enclosing a donation and asking for co-operation for the "common good of South Africa" and for sympathy between the "white and the black Afrikaner."
So Bunting and those of us who thought as he did had few qualms in supporting the candidates of the Labour and Nationalist parties in the election campaign.
But we did try, without much success, to keep the "Native issue" well to the fore in Communist propaganda during the election campaign. I re member the executive meeting at which we discussed the election manifesto to be issued in the name of the Party. The majority of the committee, including Andrews, who had arrived back from Moscow in February, 1924, were not keen on mentioning the Natives at all. Bunting, Kalk and I on the other hand wanted the Natives brought in. We managed to get two matters which concerned Natives included in the "list of demands." One was "the abolition of pass and passport laws and mine workers' records of service"-the last a comparatively unimportant grievance of white miners; included here so that the white workers should not be unduly offended at being asked to help in the struggle against the pass laws, which would otherwise have been a purely Native grievance. The other demand was for the "extension of educational facilities to all sections of the population. " Again no specific mention of Africans was made, and the readers of the manifesto were left to infer that we meant that black children should have free education-an inference which would not be easy, as many of them, if asked how big was the population of South Africa, would have replied "a million and a half," unconscious of the fact that there were six or seven million Non Europeans besides.
However, Bunting drew up the manifesto, and there were parts of it which the executive for very shame could not erase. He wrote: "We are out to bury Caesar (i.e. Smuts), not to praise the Pact." The Smuts Government had "frankly governed the South African people, White, Indian, Coloured and Native, with the sword. Its career of bloody repression of the workers is without parallel in any other part of the British Empire with the exception of India.... In a country so politically backward as South Africa from the working class point of view (though advanced from the capitalist point of view) the defeat of the South African Party Government will in itself mean an appreciable step forward in the march towards complete emancipation. "
The election, in which the C.P. put up no candidates-to do so would have split the anti-Government vote; for the Communists were not admitted to the Pact-resulted in a victory for the Labourites and Nationalists. Labour gained five seats giving them a total of 18 Members of Parliament. Two Labour members, Creswell and Boydell, accepted seats in Hertzog's cabinet.
It soon became clear that the new regime was going to be just as reactionary as the old one in its attitude to the African people. In fact it seemed that the Natives had fallen out of the frying pan into the fire. The white workers who had gone on strike and taken up arms for a "white South Africa" were defeated on the industrial field in 1922; but they won a political victory in 1924. The Pact Government was soon to entrench the white workers as an aristocracy of labour by writing into the constitution of South Africa a law which made it illegal for black persons to be employed in skilled work. The " Colour Bar Act" did not come until 1925, but already in August, 1924, the new Government began to put into practice its "civilised labour policy" which consisted in sacking Natives in Government employ and replacing them by white men. Protests by the I.C.U., which reminded Hertzog that they had supported him in the election, were of no avail.
This new situation strengthened the hands of Bunting and the other nigrophilists in the Party. In the Cape the Native union, the I.C.U., was going from strength to strength, and it had begun to spread to the other provinces. Kadalie, seeking to enter Natal to organise the I.C.U. there in August, 1924, was forbidden by the Government to enter that province. The right of the Natives to trade union and political organisation was becoming a major issue in South African politics. The Cape Town branch of the C.P. - after Johannesburg the most important section of the Party - became enthusiastic supporters of the policy of carrying the communist message to the Non Europeans.
The Native question was the major issue at the C.P. conference held in Johannesburg during the Christmas holidays in 1924. Bunting found that he had vociferous allies. We of the Young Communist League had delegates at the conference, and we were wholeheartedly behind Bunting. From Cape Town came a strong delegation equally keen on a radical change in the direction of work among Natives. One of their leading members was S. Buirski, an eloquent debater who could not be suppressed and who came with reports of tumultuous support by Africans at Communist meetings in the Gape.
On the other side were the "conservatives" headed by W. H. Andrews and C. F. Glass. Behind them were many of the "old guard" of trade unionists and old time socialists who believed that the white workers were the "main revolutionary force.
It was interesting to contrast the two leading protagonists-Andrews and Bunting. For many years they had been the two most outstanding figures in the Left movement in Johannesburg. In many ways they were poles apart. Andrews was handsome, with white hair and blue eyes, of stately appearance, reserved, careful of his dignity, a lucid and eloquent speaker, a clear and concise writer, an aristocrat of labour who had entered the socialist movement through the trade unions. There was nothing "woolly" about him: in a crisis he could make up his mind quickly; he had no patience with people who dithered. Bunting was dark, restless and ungainly, with the most determined jaw and a big nose. He was not a natural orator. His writing was often, though not always, abstruse and involved. Anxious to do justice to all parties concerned, and scrupulous in weighing all the possible consequences of any decision he might take, he seemed in 8 crisis over careful and slow. He was an idealist rather than a realist. He had no care for his personal dignity or s