Sidney Percival Bunting

by Edward Roux

Contents

Preface

1. Non Conformist Background
2. South Africa and the Labour Party
3. War on War
4. Approach to the African
5. Storm and Stress
6. Aftermath of War
7. Rand Revolt
8. To Moscow
9. Victory of the Nigrophilists
10. Transition
11. Upsurge
12. Black Republic
13. Tembuland Campaign
14. League of Rights and Pass-Burning
15. Right Danger
16. Expulsion
17. Monolithic Party
18. Last Days

Preface

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

Chapter 1

NON-CONFORMIST BACKGROUND

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.

Chapter 2

South Africa and the Labour Party

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.

Chapter 3

War on War

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.

Chapter 4

Approach to the African

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! "

Chapter 5

Storm and Stress

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.

Chapter 6

Aftermath of War

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.

Chapter 7

Rand Revolt

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.

Chapter 8

To Moscow

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."

Chapter 9

Victory Of The Nigrophilists

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 safety. He held that the cause must be served first and only.

Andrews did not appear at his best at this conference. He was getting tired of his job
as secretary of the C.P. He felt that the movement was floundering and that it was getting
nowhere. He did not believe in fighting for lost causes. All the talk about the Native
revolutionary masses left him cold. He believed that the Communist Party should work among
the organised workers, which meant the white workers. He thought that it could best
function as the radical wing of the orthodox labour movement. He did not say very much at
the conference.

The Bunting faction decided to make the question of the attitude to the Labour Party
the main issue at the conference. We felt that our main revolutionary task was among the
Natives. By trying to get into the Labour Party as an officially recognised ''left
wing" the Party was in effect turning its back on the Native masses. We therefore
opposed the motion that the C.P. should once more apply for affiliation to the Labour
Party. This idea of getting into the Labour Party, was, we said, a mere mechanical copying
by the South African communists of the policy of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In
Britain, where the masses of workers were in the Labour Party, there seemed some sense in
it. But in South Africa, where the overwhelming majority of the oppressed and
exploited-the Non Europeans-were not only not in the Labour Party but actually excluded
from the franchise, it was ridiculous for genuine revolutionaries to make the chief aim of
their Party affiliation with a group of reformists who in any case would not admit them at
any price.

Andrews made a formal statement, quoting the decision of the Comintern on the question
of the Labour Party in Britain. He left most of the talking to Glass. We were not
convinced. We secured a narrow majority against applying for affiliation.

A few days later Glass publicly resigned from the Communist Party. In an interview with
the Star he declared that he did not agree with the policy of the Communists. They were
running after the Natives "who could not possibly appreciate the noble ideals of
Communism." This was the only direct resignation. Many others who disapproved of the
new line gradually became less active and finally dropped away, to reappear perhaps on an
occasional May Day or November the Seventh to show that they still believed in the workers
of the world and the social revolution.

Andrews resigned his position as secretary early in 1925. He retained his membership of
the Communist Party, regularly paying his subscription every year, but taking no part in
the work of the organisation. He became secretary of the new Trade Union Co-ordinating
Committee (subsequently renamed the S.A. Trade Union Congress), a body which took the
place of the old South African Industrial Federation, which had died after the 1922
strike. In his new sphere Andrews could concentrate on trade union administration where he
was really more at home. He remained a leftist and could be relied upon to support any
radical resolution at congress and committee meetings. When the I.C.U. applied for
affiliation to the S.A.T.U.C. in 1928 they found a supporter in Andrews.

The decision of the December, 1924, conference meant a definite turning point in the
history of the Communist Party of South Africa. From now on to be a Communist meant that
one was identified openly and always with the movement for the emancipation of the black
people in South Africa. The work of Bunting and Jones, commenced in 1915, had at last been
consummated. But a long and difficult road lay ahead. It was one thing to declare that the
Party was the leader of the African masses. It was another thing to make it so in fact.

Chapter 10

Transition

The defection of Glass, the retirement of Andrews and the growing lack of enthusiasm of
the membership, meant a decline in Party activities. The whites were going or gone; the
blacks had still to be recruited. With the whites went a large part of the Party income.
The Party press no longer paid its way. Bunting sank a large part of his private fortune
in it, but it was no use. The debts mounted up. The idea of sacking the white compositors
and employing Native printers, defying the aristocrats of labour, salvaging the machinery
and starting afresh on a new basis never occurred to any of us, certainly not to Bunting.
The white trade union tradition persisted while the debts mounted.

In the meantime we had not yet struck root among the Africans. Various attempts were
made to get into contact with politically minded Natives. The I.C.U. was growing.
everywhere and this was considered the best field to work in. During 1924 the Young
Communist League had roped in two promising young Africans, Thomas Mbeki (a labourer) and
Stanley Bilwana (a school teacher). These had attended the Party conference in December,
1924. The white Young Communists assisted them in founding the Johannesburg branch of the
I.C.U. -the first in the Transvaal. I.C.U. meetings began to be held regularly. I remember
speaking at dozens of them under the chairmanship of a young man called Mazingi, whom a
year later we came to suspect of having been in the employ of the police.

Kadalie came north in 1925 and decided to make his head quarters in Johannesburg. For a
time he and the Communists Co-operated closely. The Communists at this time were the only
whites really interested in the I.C.U., and the I.C.U. leaders liked to show a white man
occasionally on their platforms. We found in the numerous meetings an excellent field for
verbal propaganda and a sale for our newspapers, though the International-now renamed the
South African Worker-did not carry much news of special interest to Africans; and articles
in the vernacular, though they did appear, were very infrequent. In the Cape things had
developed much further and a number of leading I.C.U. members had joined the Communist
Party.

In 1925 a Communist night school was started. This was held at 11, Main Street, in the
Ferreirastown slum, in a Native church building, hired on certain nights for the purpose.
There were no electric lights. Enthusiastic white Communists tried by candle-light to
teach semi literate Africans to read involved passages in Bukharin's " A.B.C. of
Communism." It was all very amateurish, but we felt it was the beginning of something
new and grand. The organiser of the school and the chief factotum in Native work was T. W
Thibedi. He had been a member of the I.S.L. in the old days of Jones and the Industrial
Workers of Africa. For years he had been the only black man in the Party. Now he proved
himself a remarkably good organiser. Gradually the Communists began to get a Native
following.

Communist propaganda among Africans was simple and straightforward. It was almost
exclusively what one might call a " working class approach . " An article in
Sotho by Thibedi published with. English translation in the S.A. Worker in 1926 contains
the following: " There are only two groups of people on the earth and they are as
follows:-

1. The group of the capitalists who stand only to govern the workers and make laws by which
   they succeed in robbing the workers of the product of their labour power.
2. The second group is that of the workers which is the one that makes everything necessary
   for life.

" These two groups do not agree, but face each other like a Cat and a rat . . .
Now it is the duty of all workers of all countries to unite and fight against the
capitalists and their laws and against the robbery that is made by the rich. If you
workers wish to live in nice houses and get all the necessities of life, you must
overthrow the Capitalist government and start government where capitalism and poverty
shall not be known, as they have done in Russia.... Workers of South Africa arise. and by
all means do the same as the Russian workers "

But propaganda was not all such formal stuff. Thibedi visited the Cornelia coal mine as
"shop steward of the I.C.U." and then published a fine article, describing the
conditions of the workers. An African, Malamela, gave a lecture in Sotho on "Country
Life-How Capitalism Has Changed It. " This was translated and reported at length in
the Party paper. The Communists were beginning to "get down to it."

Meanwhile the I.C.U. was growing rapidly. Kadalie was becoming a power in the land. And
with the growth of the I.C.U. came signs of a a change in its attitude towards the
Communists. This great mass movement, nominally a trade union, had, after the early
strikes at Cape Town and Port Elizabeth in 1919 and 1920, simply gone forward with its own
momentum. It had drawn in tens of thousands of Africans who saw in it a promise of
freedom. But it had organised the Africans en masse, not in industrial unions. It had
confined its activities to meetings, resolutions and protests. Since 1920 it had organised
no strikes; it had not brought about any improvement in the wages and conditions of the
thousands who joined in the Orange Free State, the Transvaal and Natal. Naturally a "
left wing " began to develop among its members-a left wing that shouted for action.
The policy of the leadership began to be questioned. It was natural that the Communists
should become less popular with Kadalie, and with Champion-now leader in Natal. The
communists were giving aim and direction to the feeling of discontent and they were
becoming dangerously powerful in the upper ranks of the organisation.

At the same time many other white people were becoming interested in the I.C.U., people
like the liberal nigrophilists and some of the missionaries; Howard Pim and Rheinallt
Jones, leaders in the " Joint Council " movement; Ethelreda Lewis, the novelist;
the Rev. Ray Phillips of the American Board of Missions. These people had some influence
and they were more "respectable" than the Communists. Kadalie looked to them for
support, and they in turn looked to Kadalie for a more moderate and conciliatory policy.
By the middle of 1926 this new anti-left tendency was definitely brewing.

At Maritzburg in Natal, L. H. Greene, the local communist, was admitted to the
I.C.U.-although he was a white man. In the Transvaal we whites had thought it best not to
join the I.C.U.-it would have seemed too much like interference. Greene published in the
S.A. Worker in August an article on the work of the I.C.U. in Maritzburg in which he put
forward some gentle criticism of the leadership. He suggested that the subscription of 2/
a month was too high. He and the " left wing" were in favour of a penny a week.
Their slogan was " members, not money."

Champion replied to Greene by a letter to the S.A. Worker in which he stated that
Greene as a member of the I.C.U. had no right "to pick up pens and pose as an
official or reporter just because he happens to be a white man amongst the illiterate
black fools.... We want 2/- for every member that joins in accordance with the terms of
our constitution. We shall not be Jim-crowed by anybody, whether he has a white face or
not." It WAS very difficult for any white person, in or out of the I.C.U., to
criticise. He was damned before he started by the colour of his skin. Bunting replied
editorially in conciliatory tone, though maintaining the right of criticism: "We wish
to point out that the Communist Party wishes nothing but well-being to the I.C.U., but
must also state at the same time that all working class matters are of vital concern to
the C.P. The points raised by Comrade Greene were not simply matters of internal
machinery, but points of interest to the whole working class movement. "

But in Johannesburg relations between I.C.U. and Communists still seemed to be cordial.
In August (1926) Kadalie went on a tour of Natal, defying the Government order that he
should not enter that province. No attempt was made to arrest him and he returned to
Johannesburg a hero covered with glory. At a huge meeting in the I.C.U. hall he was
received with applause and the singing of the " Red Flag." Bunting and Sachs
also spoke at this meeting which was reported at length in the S.A. Worker.

In September, 1926, I left for England with a scholarship to study botany at Cambridge.
Bunting was not very keen on my going either to Oxford or Cambridge. " The life at
these old universities is very pleasant but very insidious, as I know from
experience," he told me "Hadn't you rather go to London University?" It was
the old nonconformist attitude of " get thou behind me, Satan." I also thought I
should go to London, not that I doubted that I should remain a revolutionary, but that I
thought I should be more free in a non residential university. However my professor at
Johannesburg advised the Botany School at Cambridge and to Cambridge I went-and did not
regret it. Bunting once more became secretary of the Party-a post which I had held since
the resignation of Andrews. James Shields, a newcomer from Scotland, became the editor of
the paper.

Soon after I arrived in England I heard news which, in spite of all forebodings, came
as a shook. The Communists had been expelled from the I.C.U. It happened on December 16,
1926, at the annual national conference of the I.C.U., held at Port Elizabeth. On a motion
moved by Champion, the Communist members of the I.C.U. executive were given the
alternative of resigning from the C.P. or. being expelled from the I.C.U. Three of them -
John Gomas, Cape Provincial Secretary, J. A,. La Guma, General Secretary, and E. J.
Khaile, Financial Secretary-refused to leave the C.P. and were expelled. The first two
were Cape Coloured and the third an African. Thomas Mbeki, who at this time was Transvaal
Provincial Secretary, held out for a day or two and then capitulated.

To illustrate how unprepared the communists were for this blow, I quote from a letter I
received from Bunting, written by him on December 15, 1926, the day before the expulsions:
" Behind the scenes the I.C.U. Secretary (Kadalie), who, when all is said is vain and
anxious for limelight, though not yet a bad lot, is coming under the influence of
reactionaries including Champion, who is now hostile, and quite a coolness now prevails
between us. But it would be quite a topsy-turvy event if the mass he represents should be
jockeyed into going to Amsterdam [i.e. joining up with the " reformist "
International Federation of Labour Unions]. I think the fight should not be unduly
intensified into a split, but our views must be made to prevail on every occasion of
division, and the rank and file accustomed to act as a team and take the lead."

After the split, the I.C.U. seemed to go on from strength to strength, but it had
expelled the only forces which might have saved it from disaster. In a few years' time it
was in a state of decay and disintegration and the communists were busy picking up the
crumbs. But at the time it seemed that the communists were a voice crying in the
wilderness. A C.P. manifesto addressed to the members of the I.C.U. and calling upon them
to reverse the decision of their leaders, met with no real success. The Johannesburg, Port
Elizabeth, Cape Town and Vereeniging branches of the I.C.U. raised protests, but they were
simply ignored by the leadership. In any case, the communists could not stand up against
the cry of '' no interference by whites. " The fact that Kadalie and his leading
followers were hobnobbing with non-communist whites behind the scenes was not known to the
rank-and-file.

In 1927 the I.C.U. affiliated to Amsterdam and Kadalie went on a triumphal tour of
Europe. He had reached the zenith of his power and fame.

In the meantime the communists turned to other avenues of work among Africans. They
found in the African National Congress-long since eclipsed by the I.C.U.-some who were
prepared to work with them. Early in 1927, delegates were sent to the Anti-Imperialist
Conference in Brussels. J. T. Gumede went as delegate from the African National Congress,
while the South African Communist Party was represented by La Guma. Even the S.A. Trades
Union Congress sent a delegate-Dan Colraine, who had come to the fore as a leftist during
the 192 strike. After Brussels Gumede and La Guma went to the Soviet Union, where Gumede
had the wonderful experience for a black man, of being lionised in a white man's country.
La (Guma discussed South African politics with Bukharin, of which more was heard
afterwards.

Meanwhile, the financial position of the Party, and particularly of the press, was
going from bad to worse. Already in his letter of December 15, 1926, Bunting had said:
" I personally have been preoccupied . .-. . with the financial battle which is
raging severely at present, and in which few Party members can assist. In spite of all
efforts it remains impossible to raise funds to pay out ' X ' [to whom the press had
become indebted] and as that is still as necessary a step as ever, a sale may occur any
moment, meaning a fresh start for the paper-possibly an interregnum may be involved."

However, the International carried on till August, 1927, before the final crash came.
The press was sold out, the Party cleared itself of debt, but was left without a press and
without a paper. Bunting was afterwards blamed for the loss of the press, but it seemed to
me that he had done all that human effort could have' done in the only way that was
envisaged at the time.

After Bunting, the most dynamic figure in the Party at this time was Solly Sachs who
had returned to Johannesburg in 1926. Sachs was young, intolerant and aggressive, active
and capable, and determined to carve out a career for himself in the revolutionary
movement. Bunting wrote: " We are having a conference here at Christmas [1926], at
which Solly will no doubt have the most to say-I wish he would learn to say it in a less
aggressive manner: perhaps he will some day."

In July, 1927, the Party left the Trades Hall, and moved to offices at 41a Fox Street,
in the heart of what was then still a predominantly Native quarter. This was the final
break with the old line. From now on the main interest was centred in the African masses.
From now a new kind of Communist Party was to appear in South Africa.

Chapter 11

Upsurge

In 1928 things began to move. The communists began to reap the harvest of growing
influence and membership, the reward of three years of struggle to establish themselves as
a predominantly African organisation.

The South African Worker was revived on a new basis. It was now a " Native
paper." More than half the articles in it were printed in the Bantu languages: Xhosa,
Zulu and Sotho. Gone were the white compositors. In their place appeared an old Native
printer and his boy, who turned the handle of the old fashioned printing machine in the
Party office in Fox Street. It was not a very elegant paper from a printer's point of
view, but it was the first real communist paper South Africa had seen. The paper was
edited by Douglas Wolton, a young Englishman who had joined the Party in Cape Town in
1925. He had married a Jewish comrade, Molly Zelikowitz, who was petite, vivid, excitable,
and a magnificent public speaker. The two of them were to play an important part in the
history of the South African Communist Party during the next few years.

Another helper who put in valuable work at this time, was Charles Baker. A schoolmaster
from England, he had lived in South Africa many years, and had taught in government
schools up and down the country. He was an ex-Roman Catholic and a militant atheist, a
supporter of the Rationalist Press Association. His chief business in life was to denounce
religion as the " opium of the people," and to trounce the missionaries as
" agents of imperialism." He was fond of quoting Swinbume:

" We have done with the kisses that sting, The thief's mouth red from the feast,
The blood on the hands of the king, And the lie at the lips of the priest."

Baker became the principal of the communist night school in Johannesburg. Under his
guidance the school expanded rapidly in its new and better premises in Fox Street. Better,
but still with many shortcomings. The school was on the ground floor of a slum tenement.
There were not enough desks to go round. Blackboards there were none, so the comrades
blackened the walls. The neighbouring rooms were occupied by poor-white down and-outs,
prostitutes and methylated spirit drinkers. Lessons were interrupted by stamping on the
ceiling or by drunkards trying to force their way into the school room. Night passes were
a great problem. Every African, if he wishes to avoid arrest after 9 p.m., must carry a
" special pass " signed from day to day by his employer. Many employers would
not give passes to attend a communist school. The teachers therefore had to write out the
passes themselves, a laborious business. Afterwards they had special forms printed, which
made things easier.

In the country districts too, the Communist Party made progress. At Vereeniging
communists were refused admission to the location by the superintendent. But they held a
meeting outside at which 2,000 attended. Several hundreds joined the Party, including
numbers of women. At Potchefstroom the location went over en bloc to the communists.
Thibedi had gone there to hold a meeting and had " addressed a large audience of more
than 1,000 people." His speech was interrupted by detectives and finally he was
hauled off to the charge office in a motor car followed by the entire audience. A melee
ensued between the superintendent of the location and some of the women in the audience,
which now showed a very menacing attitude. A truncheon was drawn and used. Finally a
compromise was effected and the crowd agreed to become quiet if three of the audience were
permitted to accompany Thibedi in the motor car to the charge office. Bunting went to
Potchefstroom to defend Thibedi at the trial. The charge was one of inciting to hostility
between the races. Bunting addressed the court for an hour and Thibedi was acquitted.

The magistrate (Mr Boggs) took up a very liberal attitude. He said there was perfect
freedom in South Africa for all races to enjoy full rights of speech and assembly. If the
Natives felt oppression by pass so laws or any other Government acts, there was no law to
prevent them organising for the repeal of such measures, provided they organised
constitutionally. The Communist Party was a legal organisation in this country, and if the
European or Native workers wished to join it, there was nothing to prevent their doing so.

Hundreds of Natives crowded the court and lined the streets outside the whole day long;
and when the verdict was declared there were tremendous scenes of enthusiasm. A meeting
was immediately called on the market square and Wolton started a speech from a wagon on
which a red flag was flying. A group of whites, " who had attended the court
throughout the day with an ever-growing attitude of sullenness and displeasure, as the
discharge of the accused became evident," came to the meeting and began to interrupt
the speaker who thereupon addressed them as " fellow white workers." This seemed
to displease them more than ever, and they attacked the wagon and assaulted the speaker.
Both whites and blacks then scattered and obtained sticks from a nearby wagon. The fight
became general; the police intervened. Finally the communists led the crowd back to the
location. As a result of this affair, practically every man, woman and child in
Potchefstroom location joined the C.P. White leadership has often been a hindrance to the
communists, for Natives are naturally suspicious of whites, even those who claim to be
their friends. They feel that, however friendly a white man may be, he usually has some
sinister motive: at the best, he may be trying to make money out of them. But here they
had seen white communists assaulted by the local whites whom they knew for their
oppressors. That proved that the communists were genuine. Another factor which increased
the prestige of the Party, was Bunting's defence of Thibedi. A lawyer who could win a case
and get an African out of the hands of the police must indeed be a man of great power and
influence.

The charge against Thibedi, viz " inciting to hostility between the races, "
was a new crime in South Africa. In 1927 the Pact Government had passed a special law to
enable the authorities to deal with the growing Bantu liberation movement. (clause 29 of
the new Native Administration Act stated:

" Any person who utters any words or does any other act or thing whatever with
intent to promote any feeling of hostility between Natives and Europeans, shall be guilty
of an offence and liable on conviction to imprisonment not exceeding one year or to a fine
of one hundred pounds, or both."

The law also provided for the confiscation and destruction of " anything intended
to be used for the purpose of committing such an offence." Presumably this gave the
authorities the right to seize and destroy newspapers and books circulating among Natives.
There was no intention of using the law against whites who incited to race hatred against
blacks. Such incitement is an almost daily occurrence in South Africa, but in no instance
has anyone been charged with such an offence. On the other hand the law was used against
persons who protested against the unfair treatment of blacks.

An incident which took place at Paardekop, another country location, illustrate., the
difficulties experienced by the police in coping with white agitators among the Natives.
Thibedi and Baker went there to attend a public meeting of the local branch. Mounted
police were present but did not interfere till the meeting ended, when they informed Baker
that he had infringed the Urban Areas Act, and that they would arrest Thibedi accordingly.
When asked by Baker why they did not arrest him, the reply was that Thibedi was a Native l
After further argument, the police took both Thibedi and Baker in charge, together with
seventeen other Natives, and marched them off to the superintendent's office. That
gentleman was not to be found, having gone off to Standerton. The police then decided to
march their prisoners to the police station at Platrand, a distance of fifteen miles. Here
the Natives were locked up without food or blankets, and next morning fined half-crown
each by the police. Thibedi was released with the others, and he and Baker were ordered to
appear before the magistrate at Platrand a week later. The charge however, was
subsequently dropped.

In the meantime the Johannesburg communists were breaking new ground in the field of
Bantu trade unionism. Hitherto Native unions, such as the Industrial Workers of Africa and
the I.C.U. had been rather loosely organised political parties rather than trade unions in
the strict sense of the word. They had taken in every black man who cared to join and they
had made little or no effort to organise the workers in particular trades or industries.
But now an attempt was made to organise proper trade unions. The chief mover in this new
venture, apart from Thibedi (who was a genius at getting people together, whether workers
in a particular industry, women, location residents, or whatever were needed at the
moment) was Bennie Weinbren, a white communist. He drove a laundry van and began his trade
union career by organizing his fellow white laundry workers. He then turned his attention
to the black laundry workers, and started the Native Laundry Workers' Union. Other small
unions were quickly added to the list during the early months of 1927-Native bakers,
Native clothing workers, and Native mattress and furniture workers.

The headquarters of the new unions was in the Communist Party offices at 41a, Fox
Street, which, what with the night school, trade union meetings and other activities,
became the rendezvous of hundreds of Johannesburg Natives. At first many of the new
adherents were rather vague as to the nature of C.P. membership. Asked to prove they were
members of the Party,. they would produce a trade union card, or night school pass. It was
all very shocking to some of the Comintern purists, but as time went on things began to
sort themselves out.

The new unions were eventually organised in a " Non European Trade Union
Federation," of which Weinbren was the chairman and Thibedi the chief organiser.
There were a number of strikes in the different industries concerned. Many of them
resulted in defeats, but this did not seem to damp the ardour of the members. W. H.
Andrews came and addressed meetings, giving the new organisation the blessing of the white
Trade Union Congress.

Towards the end of 1928 Weinbren claimed that the N.T.U.F. had 10,000 members on the
Witwatersrand.

At the end of February, 1928, J. T. Gumede returned from his tour of the Soviet Union.
He claimed that he had brought back the " key to freedom." He held meetings at
different centres, meetings at which leading members of the C.P. shared his platform. This
gave a further fillip to communist membership and prestige.

May Day 1928 was a " fine show," as Bunting afterward described it to me. The
Labour Party and the T.U.C. organised the usual white workers' demonstration, but it was a
" poor show " with an audience of about 300. The communists, while they sent a
speaker to the white meeting, concentrated on a separate meeting for black workers, where
thousands came and subsequently marched through the streets with their communist and trade
union banners, led by an African brass band.

Bunting must have felt that this was worth the years of argument and struggle. There
was still no real unity of black and white workers-far from it-but the " African
proletariat " was definitely on the march, behind the red banners of the Communist
Party.

In the meantime nemesis had come upon the I.C.U. Topheavy, without an educated rank and
file, riddled with government spies and provocateurs, financially corrupt, the battle
ground of rival leaders, its most genuine revolutionary elements expelled, the huge
structure came toppling down and split into fragments. Champion broke away, taking with
him the whole of Natal. A " ginger group," headed by Keable Mote, seceded in the
Orange Free State. The Cape Town branch refused to acknowledge Kadalie's leadership, and
declared its independence. In the midst of it all, William Ballinger, the long awaited
" adviser " from Britain, arrived in South Africa. His presence did not stop the
rot.

On the contrary it seemed to accelerate it; for before very long he and Kadalie
quarrelled and Kadalie himself broke away to form the " Independent I.C.U." By
the end of 1928, the I.C.U. was a declining force. The Communist Party, on the other hand,
was definitely on the upgrade.

Chapter 12

Black Republic

The " upsurge " of 1928 had brought into the movement a number of interesting
and colourful personalities - mostly Africans. Of these, the most outstanding was Albert
Nzula, a man of unusual ability, though with very grave faults which afterwards proved his
undoing. A teacher at the A.M.E. mission school at Wilberforce in the Transvaal, he had
attended a communist public meeting at Evaton in August, 1928. He was impressed by the
fact that Wolton had continued to address the meeting even after rain began to fall.
Writing to the S.A. Worker a month later, he says: " After reading through Communism
and Christianism [a book by Bishop Brown, who had been defrocked by the Episcopal Church
of the United States because he declared he could reconcile the teachings of Jesus of
Nazareth, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx !] I have come to the conclusion that every right
minded person ought to be a communist. I have hesitated all the time because communism has
been misrepresented; I have been brought up on capitalistic literature which is never
satisfactory when it tries to explain working class misery. I am convinced that no halfway
measures will solve the problem.... I am prepared to do my little bit to enlighten my
countrymen on this point."

Nzula was, in the phraseology of the movement, a Bantu intellectual, an African
teacher. So also were S. M. Kotu, Edwin Mofutsanyana, and John Marks. Kotu and
Mofutsanyana were honorary officials of the C.P. in Potchefstroom. The location
superintendent refused to allow them to reside in the location, because they were
communists, and, as the law did not allow them to sleep in the town (where they were
employed) they had for a period to sleep out on the veld, until they finally obtained a
ruling from the local magistrate, " that a member of the Communist Party as such
should not be classified as an undesirable person." Mofutsanyana was to prove one of
the most loyal and steadfast of communists; but he was slow, not, very eloquent and lacked
" drive."

Kotu was of more mercurial temperament and a good platform man. He did not last as long
as Mofutsanyana.

The only African woman who played any part in the communist movement at this time was a
Potchefstroom recruit, Josie Mpama. Her people were old residents in the location and the
authorities found it difficult to deport her numbers of African workers came into. the
Party at this time. Three of them deserve special mention: Gana Maka beni, Johannes Nkosi
and Moses Kotane. They were workers who were attracted to the Party through the trade
unions, and they received most of their education (political and otherwise) at the Party
night school. Kotane, who was an avid reader, was subsequently to become one of the
Party's theoreticians, in which capacity he proved himself capable of holding his own with
any of the white intellectuals.

It was now seven years since the formation of the South African Communist Party and its
affiliation to the Moscow Comintern. Hitherto the Comintern had taken no very active
Interest in its tiny branch in South Africa. The local communists had tried to .follow the
" general line " of the Comintern. I have already referred to the discussions on
the " united front" and " immediate demands " where Bunting had
appeared as the exponent of the " correct line " in opposition to the "
left deviations" of certain Cape Town members. But these polemics had been
exceptional. In general the South African revolutionaries had got along with the minimum
of Comintern theory and in any case had been left largely to work out their own salvation.
During the dispute over the " Native question " in 1924 there had been no
guidance from Moscow, except what had come indirectly through the Young Communist
International to the youth section in South Africa.

But from 1927 onwards for a number of years Comintern " directives " became a
very real thing in this country. This was primarily due to an increased interest by Moscow
in the colonial countries. At this time the Bolsheviks regarded British capitalism as the
main enemy. British diplomacy was trying to build a White wall round Red Russia: Poland,
the Baltic states, Rumania, were in the British sphere of influence; their armies were
being subsidised with British capital. The Soviet had made a treaty with Versailles-ridden
Germany. And now the Soviet, through the Comintern, was trying to hamstring the British
Empire by organising liberation movements in the British colonies, of which South Africa
was one.

Apart from these special circumstances which called forth an interest in South Africa,
there had been a general growth in the organisational apparatus of the Comintern. The
various manoeuvres of the Comintern, determined primarily by the situation in the Soviet
Union and the relations between that country and the capitalist powers, were reflected
more strongly in the individual communist parties throughout the world. Hitherto any
swings to right or left in the South African movement had been determined by local
conditions. But from now on the South African communists were expected to fall into line
with " the world revolutionary movement," which meant in practice that they had
to repeat the " guiding slogans " which at any particular time were "
correct " in the Russian party. Of course, such general slogans were always supposed
to be adapted to the local conditions in any particular country. But these "
adaptations" did not save the individual parties from violent changes of policy,
which, on looking back on events, seem to me now to have been misguided in the extreme.
They had disastrous results for the individual parties and in the long run they did not
help the world revolutionary movement or even the progress of the Soviet Union itself.

The spate of Comintern directives, theses, and criticisms to which the South African
communists now became subjected, nonplussed Bunting, dazed and finally overwhelmed him.
For one thing, he was a slow thinker. Every step in his advance from a non conformist
liberal to a revolutionary socialist had meant a mental struggle. Slowly he had advanced,
clinging tenaciously to one set of ideas, giving them up with difficulty and then, when he
had made the transition, adhering to the new ideas with equal tenacity. And because
policies meant so much to him, because he held views so strongly, he could not be a facile
manoeuverer. He was no Machiavelli: the end did not justify the means. He could not easily
advocate one thing to day, and another to-morrow with his tongue in his cheek, and justify
his behaviour by appealing to some ultimate abstraction. Also, ever since -his " come
down " in philosophy at Oxford, he had been annoyed with hair-splitting dogma and
formal theory.

Now suddenly the South African communists, with Bunting at their head, found themselves
caught in a whirlwind of theory. The Comintern had decided to " bolshevise" its
affiliated sections, the C.P.S.A. among them. Theoretical clarity became the order of the
day. Directions from Moscow based on " Leninist " principles must replace
empirical methods of trial and error. The various stages of the revolution must be
grasped. Appropriate slogans corresponding to the main tasks of the period must be
enumerated. Campaigns must be waged against various " dangers " real or
hypothetical. Above all a " bolshevist leadership" must be created,
social-democratic forms of organisation abolished, and the Party purged of
"opportunist, vacillating and non-proletarian elements."

The storm which was approaching, a, storm which ultimately was to wreck the Party (at
least for a period) and destroy its influence over the Bantu masses much more effectively
than ever the police of the South African Government could have done, appeared at first as
a little cloud on the horizon, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand. La Guma, when he had
visited Russia in 1927, had had a discussion with Bukharin (then a leading figure in the
Comintern) on the situation in South Africa. It was agreed that the struggle in this
country was primarily an anti-imperialist one. The country was a colony or semi-colony of
British imperialism. The Bantu, like the Indians and Chinese and other colonial peoples,
were suffering national oppression. They were being deliberately kept in a backward
condition by British finance capital and its South African ally (Boer imperialism), in
order that super profits might be extracted from them. Most of these super-profits were
then exported to Britain, though part was distributed among the South African capitalists
and landowners as a bribe to induce them to help in keeping the Natives in subjection. It
wag clear therefore that the main task of the revolution in South Africa was to overthrow
the rule of the British and Boer imperialists, to set up a democratic independent Native
republic (which would give the white workers and other non exploiting whites certain
" minority rights") as a stage towards the final overthrow of capitalism in
South Africa.

Accordingly, a " draft resolution on South Africa " was drawn up by the
Comintern and sent for discussion to this country early in 1928. The main slogan of the
Party was to be " an independent Native republic, as a stage towards a workers' and
peasants' government." The draft resolution was to be discussed and finally adopted
by the sixth world congress of the Communist International, due in Moscow by the middle of
the year.

To Bunting and the great majority of fellow Party members the new slogan came like a
bolt from the blue. And to me. when I received the news in England, it was equally
startling. Was it not similar, we said, to Marcus Garvey's slogan "Africa for the
Africans" which the C P. had always opposed as the exact opposite of
internationalism? How could we reconcile such a cry with our steadfast aim and slogan:
" Workers of the world, unite!" We, as South African communists, had claimed to
represent the aspirations of all workers, black and white; and now we were being asked to
go before the masses as a purely black, even, as we saw it, as an anti-white Party. Almost
all the white communists were indignant and black communists like Thibedi, who had been
trained in the old tradition, equally so. True, we had left the white workers' trades
hall, we had fought to make the C.P. a predominantly black party; but we had always
advocated the unity of the workers.

We did not want to put the black man on top and the white man underneath. We wanted
them to be equal.

Though the majority reacted in this way, there was a minority which welcomed the
slogan. These were led by the Woltons and La Guma. Bunting and his wife were sent to the
Sixth Congress to put forward the views of the majority. The Woltons sent a minority
report.

The South African Party was entitled to three delegates at the Sixth Congress. As I was
in England and almost on the spot as it were, I was invited by the Party to be the third
delegate. I met Buntings in London in July, 1928.

On our way across Europe to the Soviet capital we had plenty of time to discuss the
slogan. The Buntings were inclined to regard it as all due to La Guma. It had all started
with his discussion with Bukharin a year before. La Guma was a bit of a racialist. One
gathered that if La Guma had never visited Moscow the slogan would never have been born.
With this interpretation I found it hard to agree. I felt that the slogan was derived from
Comintern theory, but that it was a false interpretation of such theory. I said that we
South African communists were very backward with regard to theory and that we should
realise our shortcomings in this respect. I harped on this matter a lot during our
journey, but agreed with the others that the slogan was incorrect.

We spent a few days in Berlin, where the Reds had fought on barricades on May Day a few
weeks before. The German C.P. was still powerful and growing in strength and was fighting
the Social Democrats for the leadership of the working class. But there was another party
in the field which had not been there on Bunting's last visit to Germany in 1922. Hitler
and his Nazis were becoming a power in the land. We did not see any brown shirts or
red-front fighters-we were unlucky in not seeing any big meetings during the few days we
were there-but we saw posters everywhere, chiefly Nazi and Communist.

Bunting and I wandered through the streets eating cherries -the red-fleshed sort, at a
few pfennig a kilogram. I recalled walking through the streets of Jeppe eating buns with
Bunting while we canvassed for C. F. Glass in a provincial council election campaign-it
must have been in 1924. ' Bunting's difficulty about making up his mind appeared in small
things as well as great. One morning on a street corner we three discussed whether we
should go to Potsdam or the Tiergarten. Somehow it finally rested with Bunting to make the
decision and we wasted minutes while he tried to make up his mind. Finally, after some
false starts, we decided to go to the Tiergarten and rushed off only to see our bus
disappearing round a corner I

We took the train through Warsaw to Moscow where we and crowds of delegates from all
over the world were welcomed with bands and banners. Our main occupation in Moscow was not
seeing the sights but attending innumerable meetings and discussing the slogan. Mrs.
Bunting found the social atmosphere at the Sixth very different from that of the Fourth
Congress in 1922. Then there had been a spirit of comradeship; comrades had exchanged news
about conditions in their different countries. They had all been friends together, members
of one big revolutionary movement. But now there were numerous factions and cliques, each
trying to curry favour with the powers at the top, each with its own axe to grind.
Comrades were afraid to discuss things openly for fear of being accused of political
"deviations." Perhaps we South Africans were particularly sensitive to the
absence of a spirit of fraternity, for we were deliberately cold-shouldered by some of the
delegates, and the American Negro delegate, Ford, refused to speak to us. The story had
gone round that the South African delegates were " white chauvinists "

We had come to Moscow bursting with a desire to state our case. But we could not find
anyone in authority who was pre pared to listen to us. We were told by " Comrade
Bennett" that the South African question would be decided by the Anglo-American
Secretariat, which included Negro Africa within its scope, and of which Bennet was
Secretary. This body would meet the South African delegates later. In the meantime we
attended the general meetings of the Congress, listened-to the big speakers and put our
names on the speakers' list, 60 that we too should have our say in due course.

Bunting soon took a violent dislike to Bennet, whose other name, we understood, was
Petrovsky. Most of the Comintern functionaries had strings of aliases and one never knew
for certain what their real names were. Bennet was a blond with a thin face, long nose and
protruding eyes. " A slimy fellow " Bunting commented. But we had to put up with
Bennet. He was the official channel through which all matters relating to the South
African party must go.

Bunting's first chance to speak to the assembled delegates occurred on July 23. In
this, his first speech, he did not make any direct reference to the slogan controversy,
though he tried to prepare the ground for the coming fight by giving the congress an
account of conditions in South Africa. He emphasised the proletarian character of the
Native movement, pointing out that the greatest militancy had been shown on the industrial
field and that vast masses of "peasants" in South Africa worked on the mines and
other industries, returning periodically to the land.

Bunting criticised Bukharin's leading speech which had referred only to the "
masses " in the colonies and had said nothing of the colonial proletariat as such.
"The draft programme of the Communist International says that there are two main
revolutionary forces: the ' proletariat' in the countries at home, and then ' masses ' in
the colonies. I beg to protest against this bald distinction. . . Is not that distinction
between European ' proletariat ' and colonial ' masses ' exactly the way our ' aristocracy
of labour' treats the black workers? The 'prejudice' of the white worker is not that he
wants to kill the black worker, but that he looks upon him not as a fellow-worker but as
Native ' masses.' The Communist Party has declared and proved that he is a working man as
well, like anyone else, and I want to bring that experience to the notice of the Communist
International."

Bunting's fight for thirteen years had been to bring the black worker into the South
African labour movement, to get the white " socialist " to recognize the black
man as a fellow worker. All this emphasis on the non proletarian character of the black
masses-the need for a slogan'based on the anti imperialist national " agrarian "
revolution-seemed to him to belittle the work of the South African Communists. A close
study of the colonial policy of the Comintern would have shown him that the colonial
proletariat was not ignored by the followers of Lenin and that a leading role was assigned
to it in the national revolution. Here, as in many other cases, Bunting's almost complete
lack of doctrinal knowledge, made him appear a blundering novice among the hard-bitten
functionaries, like Petrovsky, who had probably burned the midnight oil while they pored
over the works of Lenin and Stalin and the voluminous theses of the Comintern.

The trouble was really the uncomradely atmosphere at Moscow. Bunting, though slow, was
capable of learning. If he had been taken in hand by sincere revolutionaries who were
willing to recognise him for what he was, a courageous and honest- est fighter, and who
were prepared to bear with him, it would have been a different story. There really was a
very bad spirit in Moscow. Bunting protested, but without any visible effect.

" The Communist International is a chain, and the strength of a chain is the
strength of its weakest link. Little parties like ;ours are links in the chain. We are not
strengthened but belittled in the way I have mentioned. If our parties are weak, then they
should be strengthened. Better communication is required. It will perhaps surprise you to
know that until about months ago we have not had a letter (except for circulars) from the
Communist International for five or six years. That a thing which has to be attended to
immediately. At any ate, we ask to be considered a little more as representing annually
masses of workers, and not treated with, shall I say, a sort of step motherly or
scholastic contempt 88 representing mere shapeless masses? When I came here an official of
the Communist International [it must have been Petrovsky] said ' We are going to attack
you.' That is rather a poor sort of reception to give to representatives elected by the
vote of the Party, in which there is-huge preponderance of Natives. It is rather a poor
reception to give to their representatives before anything has been discussed to say ' we
are going to attack you.' We came here to take counsel together as to how we could
strengthen each other. Certainly in our own party, whatever the difference between us, we
do not treat each other like that."

The promised attack came a few days later in speeches by Dunne (an American delegate)
and Bennet Petrovsky. They declared that the South African delegate had made a "
social democratic " speech. In the course of his speech Bunting had described
conditions in the African continent as a whole, pointing out how different were the
conditions in the eastern, western and southern parts, and he had said: " Conditions
in south Africa are quite different from any other part of that. continent. South Africa,
is, owing to its climate, what is called a ' white man's country' where whites can and do
live not merely as planters and officials, but as a whole nation of all classes,
established there for centuries, of Dutch and English composition." Part of this
statement, entirely removed from its context, was quoted by Dunne to prove that Bunting
was a " white chauvinist.

Bunting replied to this distortion with an official statement, suggesting that perhaps
he had been wrongly heard, as he was not a clear speaker. But it is more than likely that
his traducers had deliberately distorted his remarks in order to discredit him. It was
fortunate perhaps that official stenographic records were made of all speeches.

In the meantime we were trying hard to get past the facade of bureaucrats, jacks in
office, and time servers, which seemed to constitute the "Comintern," as We
found it, to those real Bolsheviks whom we believed were somewhere in Moscow-real
Leninists who would listen and understand and appreciate, who would not be out to attack
us but to give us their comradely advice. Mrs Bunting, in particular, was certain that
inner core was somewhere to be found and she persuaded Bunting to write articles which she
translated into Russian for Pravda.

I also was drawn in to writing descriptive articles showing the complexity of South
African conditions. One, I remember, I gave as a speech to the Congress. It dealt with
revolutionary movement of the white miners on the Rand, 1913, 1914, and 1922 strikes, etc.
Whatever effect these efforts may have had on the ' real Bolsheviks" they did not
alter the attitude of the bureaucrats.

Bunting's speech on the slogan question was delivered on August 20. I do not propose to
quote the whole of this speech which occupied fourteen pages in the stenographic report.
It was a much more sophisticated speech than any of his previous efforts. At least it
referred frequently to Comintern theses and resolutions, particularly to the Colonial
Thesis of the Second Congress. He emphasised that the " Native bourgeoisie" in
South Africa was to all intents and purposes non-existent. The national revolutionary
movement could be regarded in the main an anti-imperialist movement in which national and
class interests tended to coincide.

Bunting maintained that the work in South Africa had shown that the slogans of the
Party were adequate. "We have 1,750 members" he said, "of whom 1,600 are
Natives, as against 200 a year ago, and we are adding to that and also organising militant
Native trade unions which have learnt to conduct strikes. We are also combating and slowly
overcoming white labour chauvinism, which we found yields when confronted with organised
masses of Native fellow workers face to face. We put through joint strikes of white and
black which were victorious, also an amalgamation of white and black unions into one, an
unprecedented thing in South Africa . . . Such are the surrounding circumstances in which
a Native republic slogan would be launched, and we consider it would, not in theory-
perhaps, but certainly in practice, arouse white workers' opposition as unfair to the
minority, and would thereby not only emphasise the contradiction between national and
class movements, but put the whole Native movement at a great disadvantage unnecessarily
and without oompensating advantage.

It will not avail, when such suspicions are aroused to put them off with smooth, '
empty liberal phrases,' to the effect that ' national minorities' will be safeguarded,
especially when no definition of these safeguards is given-for that matter no definition
is given of the precise meaning of ' Native Republic ' itself. But expressions like '
South Africa is a black country,' 'the return of the country and land back to the black
population,' ' South Africa belongs to the Native population,' etc., though correct as
general statements, do invite criticism by the white working and peasant minority who will
have to fight with the black workers and peasants if the bourgeoisie is to be
overthrown....

"As the slogan will certainly be interpreted by the exploited whites,- as it has
indeed been interpreted by ourselves (so much so that its defenders [in South Africa] have
defended just that interpretation of it) it means that the exploited whites are to become
in their turn a subject race, that the Native republic in spirit if not in letter will
exclude all whites, and that the land without exception will belong to the Natives-not as
a matter of the verbal drafting of a resolution but as a matter of fact. The slogan will
have to be re-drafted on less nationalist lines if it is to avoid giving that impression.

"Of course, no one denies that the immense majority must and will exercise its
powers as such, from which it follows that a minority of the exploited is also entitled to
its proportionate voice and share in power and land. The ' Native republic ' is defended,
indeed, as a mere expression of majority rule, but it obviously goes beyond that, and the
little difference makes all the difference when it comes to combating white chauvinism; it
handicaps propaganda to that effect.

"It may be asked, why are we so concerned about the fate of a comparative handful
of whites? It is certainly strange that we of the C.P.B.A., who are accustomed at home to
work almost exclusively among and for the Native masses, and who are always attacking
white chauvinism, should find ourselves obliged here in Moscow to take up unwonted cudgels
for the white minority. But the reason is not any special love for the Aristocrats of
labour, or any chauvinist preference for the whites as is superficially and malignantly
suggested in the draft resolution, but first the need for labour solidarity and second a
true valuation of the forces at our disposal. Our infant Native movement, any
revolutionary Native movement, lives and moves in a perpetual state bordering on
illegality; on the slightest pretext it can be suppressed either by prosecution or
legislation or by massacre or pogrom. We are therefore always looking for allies, or
rather for shields and protections behind which to carry on; and even the bare neutrality,
much more the occasional support of the white trade unions, etc., is of incalculable value
to us "We have always instinctively felt this need of white labour support, but it is
only when threatened by this' slogan with the 1088 of it, that we realise how very useful
it is to us, and how impossible it is to agree with the defenders of the slogan who say '
To hell with white labour support, damn the white workers' ! 10 It is easy to sit here
and, on limited experience of our local atmosphere to lay down a policy and say ' It will
be all right; you don-t understand; this slogan will not alienate, it will attract the
white workers !' We who would have to go back and preach it, we who have had all these
years to drive a composite team, to work in both camps, black and white, who have learned
the art of doing it on uncompromising Marxian lines by long and hard experience of the
enormous difficulties arising out of this very race question, the crucial question of
South African labour-on a matter like this we must be heard with respect. We say that the
white workers are unquestionably going to be alienated by the present slogan and that
instead of support from white labour we are thus quite likely going to get its hostility
and Fascist alliance with the bourgeoisie."

It is now fifteen years since Bunting made this speech and it is probable that any
communist or other labour radical in South Africa would today endorse every word of it.
But in Moscow in 1928 it was considered rank heresy. The left extremists in the Comintern
who, under the slogan of " Down with social fascism," were busy making any sort
of working class unity in Germany impossible and preparing the way for Hitler's seizure of
power, were not likely to adopt a more reason able attitude towards Bunting and the little
band of communists in South Africa.

A week or so. later the '' South African question '' at last came up for discussion
before the Anglo-American committee. We were invited to be present. The meeting was held
round a table in a large room. Petrovsky was chairman and there were some half-dozen
others, including a Russian or two and representatives of the American and British
parties. Petrovsky opened the proceedings and- called on Bunting, who spoke at length,
very much on the lines of the speech he had made before the open congress and from which I
have quoted. Two of the American delegates (Lovestone and Pepper) were apparently more
interested in some affair of their own (there was the usual crisis in the American party
and the rival factions were fighting for Comintern support) and while Bunting was only
half-way through his speech they left the table and retired to a corner where they carried
on a whispered conversation. Petrovsky sat with an indulgent smile on his face. It wag
clear that nobody was really interested in what Bunting was saying. In fact we had been
told confidentially that whatever we might say the slogan would not be altered. But I was
annoyed - with the blatant indifference of the Americans, I interrupted the proceedings
and demanded that the pair in the corner should return to their seats at the table. And so
they had to sit and hear Bunting-at the end. It was our only victory in MOSCOW and a'
hollow one at that. Nor could we take much comfort later when we heard that the Lovestone
Pepper faction had lost the day and the Foster faction had triumphed.

A few days after this I had to return to England. The Congress was almost over, but we
were told there would be another meeting of the Anglo-American Secretariat, and that the
final instructions to the South African party would then be given. The Buntings stayed on,
hoping for some last minute change of heart by Petrovsky, or rather by those higher up who
decided these things.

On September 11 Bunting was back in London. He wrote to me from there. He was evidently
very tired and suffering from nervous strain. He had taken the discussions on the slogan
and our failure to get it altered, very much to heart. "As I still want a
holiday," he wrote, "I am disposed to put in time here till October 18 [when the
P. and O. boat was due to sail] in search of health and good sleep, but the Party wants us
back at once. Still, our party life and work is going to be a desperate business from now
on, the ' slogan ' is now ' law ' (all my latest efforts were treated with exactly the
same contempt as when you protested at their not listening) and we are in for a hell of a
time, however much we 'make the best of it,' in fact I can't see the future at all
clearly; so it seems better to go back fit than early."

At this time I must have been trying to convince myself that the slogan was
theoretically correct, that our failure to understand it was due to lack of theoretical
knowledge. I wrote a letter to the Party in South Africa in which I said something to this
effect, and I sent a copy to Bunting. He wrote me again on September 14: "I did not
write to S.A. .re slogan or anything else.(because the absorbing topics are away from the
slogan) until yesterday when I just gave the result and said I had not changed my views
much but thought we might be able to make the best of it. I can't say I share your ' Mea
Culpa ' view re lack of theory . . . there is no great question of theory behind the
advocacy of the slogan, nor of lack of theory behind our objections to it; and I still
think the switching off from class struggle to race struggle an exaggeration, and a
departure from Lenin, quite apart from what you call expediency (as if 'theory' were
something above expediency or expediency below theory). I asked Petrovsky to draw an
election manifesto for Harrison [who had been suggested as a communist candidate for Cape
Flats in the coming parliamentary elections] but he declined."

There was a lot more in this letter in reply to various things I had said in my letter
to the C.P.S.A. Bunting concluded, " Well, the question will resolve itself into a
different one in South Africa, we shall have to get our speeches written out and passed by
Counsel before delivering them, or else go wholesale to gaol, which would be ' inexpedient
1' See you soon."

I was staying for another year at Cambridge but I met the Buntings again in London
before they sailed for South Africa. He was full of apprehension for the future, but, as
he said, "determined to make the best of it." There was never any question of
his loyalty to the demands of the Comintern even when he did not agree at all.

Chapter 13

Tembuland Campaign

My next letter from Bunting was dated December 5, 1928.

When they got back, he wrote, they found the Party split sideways and edgeways with
quarrels, intrigues, back-biting, etc., to incredible lengths. The differences over the
slogan had led to general bad blood, with the Woltons and La Guma versus all the rest, but
some of the rest also versus Thibedi. The branches were bewildered at this excess of
partisanship at the head office and the trade unions were quite paralysed, especially by
disagreements between La Guma and Thibedi. "As far as I can judge," said
Bunting, " everybody concerned is to blame, and not least the Woltons for announcing
in the middle of all the trouble that they are retiring to England at the end of the year.
We left them last June, despite differences of opinion, on the best of intimate terms, but
in our absence they have worked up a case against us to make you shudder, and try as we
will to ignore it, it has destroyed all real confidence between us. What letters have been
sent to Moscow all these months from them and La Guma we can only guess; we see now that;
our very unpleasant experiences there were the result of a violent secret preparation in
the shape of reports which, as you know, ' Bennet ' and Co. never showed us, but the
contents of which we can imagine from the contents of another missive to Moscow which it
seems was read, before despatch, by Baker and Thibedi, cutting us and others to pieces-so
that we feel we have been unwittingly dealing all this time with some very deep customers.
Well, it is all very depressing, and will take a lot of liquidating. "

Bunting was also bothered with financial and domestic affairs. With Wolton going away
he felt he would have to give full time to party work and this meant giving up (or rather
not restarting) his legal practice, thus losing whatever income it might bring. He did not
know what to do with his children.

On the boat he had written a pamphlet of sixty pages, Imperialism and South Africa,
being a report on behalf of the delegates of the S.A. Communist Party on their return from
the Sixth Congress of the Communist International. It was, he says in his letter,
"the best foundation I could think of for the slogan. "

On landing at Cape Town they had been met by "a regular hurricane fire of alarmist
newspaper scares about Moscow and South African Natives," as Bunting described it.
"We were pestered for interviews about ' Mrs Rebecca Bunting's opposition to the
slogan' [a distorted account that had appeared in the South African papers during the
Congress] and to clear the air I wrote a letter on the subject to the Star of November 17.
Next day we delivered our message [at a public meeting in Johannesburg]. We were
threatened and warned of arrest, but although we have made a number of speeches since,
always dogged by crowds of detectives, nothing has happened beyond Chinese crackers thrown
at an indoor meeting of the Trades Hall last Sunday by a woman in tow with Stewart, the
man we spotted at the Cape Town Conference three years ago, and now openly connected with
the C.I.D.

" We advertised a meeting specially for white trade unionists, but I don't think
any came; the hall was full of miscellaneous whites. Tinker 11 is hot against us. I gather
this is the attitude of such trade unionists as bestir themselves to take any interest at
all. Andrews says he certainly is not going to have anything to do with a Black Republic
Tramwaymen, indicating me, shout to each other ' kill him.' Of course none of this is new
but the white working class can only be won by very patient propaganda ....and even then
they prefer to be apathetic. The S.A.T.U.C. has turned down an invitation to the Anti
Imperialist League. I could see that Andrews was against accepting, though the ostensible
reason I believe was lack of finds-as if they had forgotten that Colraine's expenses were
paid ! [Colraine had been the T.U.C. delegate to the previous Anti-Imperialist Congress in
Brussels.]

" White bourgeois are generally hostile, but more-ready I think to admit that what
we say is true,' though they want to cling to Empire, not Black Republic. Benson the
lawyer said ' A lot of us would be with you if you were not a communist and in tow with
Moscow.' A parson said ' That's the stuff we ought to be preaching at St. Mary's.' And
Marka of Market Street said ' I agree with every word '-i.e. of my speech of . November
18. Well, if we can even split the white bourgeoisie a little, even though the trade
unionists hold aloof and the bar loafers are hostile and the Dutch murderous, it is
something.

" As for the Natives, Wolton has reeled off the 100 word slogan 12 at them several
times, but I couldn't see that it caught on like that. He has presented it too much- as a
new incantation fresh from Moscow but it hasn't appealed like that. We shall see whether
there is anything in it, or a ' trumpet call." Later on Becky went to Potchefstroom
to a women's meeting, with Molly and coloured Mrs Bhola, a new chum from the African
National Congress, and when Molly spouted the magic formula, a member of the branch said '
Nothing new in that, it is what the communists have been always hammering at, and we must
go on hammering.'

"Despite Moscow's malignant obstinacy, I notice both Woltons and I have presented
the slogan as a matter of 'majority' in the sense of your amendment: equality, liberty,
etc..; These are the simpler creeds that tell. Even so, the I.C.U. has been inclined to
repudiate the Black Republic, and-the A.N.C; has been silent. Many of our black members
and trade unionists are-against' it, and I have to champion it (with rather bad grace I
confess, for though it is challenging-to white-it does not seem to me inspired or
inspiring as regards blacks) by saying: " Well, the wording is a bit harsh, but after
all, we have always told the Natives they have got rule and I think they will settle down
as the October drought gives place to rain....

During the discussions in Moscow I had suggested as an alternative to. - the official
slogan, the following: " An independent workers' and peasants' South African
republic, with equal rights for all toilers irrespective of colour, as a basis for a
Native majority government." This had been turned down without discussion.

" I am hoping that perhaps the Woltons will get out of their huff and decide to
remain after all, though they have sold their furniture and given up their (half share of
a) house.... They have so far declined to give reasons for their departure, but the chief
one seems to be that the office holders in the Party should all be black. But why,
therefore, desert the party and the country ?"

The Communist Party of South Africa held its seventh annual conference in Johannesburg
at the beginning of January,

There were 30. delegates, 20 Black and 10 White, representing, according to a report of
the credentials committee, nearly 3000 members. In a lengthy programme which he drew up,
and which the conference endorsed, Bunting outlined his idea of the " Native Republic
" as follows:

" .... The Party devotes special attention to the national cause of the Native
people as such, not indeed in the sense of a campaign ' to. drive the white man into the
sea,' but in the Lennist sense of underlining the prime importance of supporting movements
for complete national liberation of colonial peoples' removing all the political social
disabilities which make their enslavement, restoring to them the lands and liberties taken
away from them by foreign conquerors, settlers and financiers, and vindicating their
right, as the majority and in the truest sense the people of Africa, to equality,
emancipation, independence and self determination, and hence (for freedom here means
power) to predominant political power in their own country- on a basis, however of equal
rights for Europeans and other minorities as ' most favoured nations."

Thus in his own words, not in the stilted jargon of the Comintern,. did Bunting express
his own views and those of the Party for whose existence he was largely responsible. It is
almost incredible that he should have been dubbed a white chauvinist and misleader.

He wrote to me on January 9, saying: " We got over our crises at our conference (a
very fine one, splendid country delegates). We agreed on interpreting the slogan as
meaning much the same as a (predominantly and characteristically Native workers' and
peasants' republic, and not meaning a black dictatorship; and though some wanted to move
amendments; and references back I felt bound, while allowing full discussion for the sake
of arriving at an understanding, to disallow these as contrary to the Comintern statutes
enjoining ' unreserved acceptance. After the 4 and half days' conference was over we got a
cable from Inkpen (for E.G.C.I) requesting the postponement till March but cabled back
that it was all over, slogan adopted, and we were now trying to finance elections. Wolton
came out with his attack on the Party, very poisonous and diseased, but h reply he was
induced to stop till after the elections, and his charges were not taken seriously. He is
to fight Cape Flats and I, Tembuland. The head office will have to be in suspense, but we
have got a Native assistant secretary, Nzula whose trust worthiness will still have to be
proved, I fear, as his record is not quite irreproachable: but we'll see. Weinbren and
Thibedi are still irreconcilable to the slogan, especially W., who is leading the Native
trade unions against it-an awkward position which, however, must I think burn itself out.
(I also think the slogan. defective, but we can get along with. it, and may make a hit,
will see). I shall soon be departing for the wilds- a real adventure it will be, and
Government. may shut us up there, the law prohibiting meetings there is in force now, and
may be stiffened ! "

The Cape was the only province in South Africa where certain number of Non-Europeans
had the vote, though even there only whites were allowed as candidates. There were only
two constituencies where Non Europeans formed as much as half the electorate: Cape Flats -
a suburb of Cape Town with a large number of both Coloured and African voters; and
Tembuland-the Transkeian constituency in the Eastern Province where approximately half the
electors were Africans. It was thought at the time that Cape Flats, where there was a
Party group, offered the better field for a communist candidate and Wolton was very keen
on fighting it. Characteristically; Bunting did not contest Wolton's choice but accepted
for himself the less promising task of fighting in Tembuland.

The Tembuland campaign of 1929 we may regard as one of Bunting's most outstanding
achievements It ended in his defeat, but a defeat which was in a sense a personal victory.
The Communist- Party until now had been a party of the large towns and the smaller urban
locations. In places like Potchefstroom contact had been made with a number of Bantu farm
labourers and labour tenants. But in no instance hitherto, except perhaps in the visits to
the Basutoland Lekhotla la Bafo (League of the Poor) had the red flag been carried into
the Native reserves. The Transkei is by far the most important of South Africa's "
Native territories." It has a population of over a million Bantu, and only some
20,000 whites; it extends nearly two hundred miles from east to west and over a hundred
miles-from north to south. In the course of the campaign, which lasted three months,
Bunting sent frequent reports to Johannesburg and these were printed in the S.A. Worker.
He was accompanied by his wife and by Gana Makabeni, whose home was in the Transkei.
Makabeni acted as Xhosa interpreter- and general political agent. They hired a motor van
and Native driver in Durban and set out leading a sort of " caravan life," as
Bunting describes it. They entered the Transkei on March 8, 1929.

" On entering these 'sacred territories,' BUNTING wrote, '-' the police began
their attention at once no doubt on advice from Durban or 'higher up.' Wherever we made a
halt they scrutinized our Native passes and our car licence, and at Umtata, the 'capital'
they threatened us all with prosecution, and have actually arrested our driver for
entering the Transkei without a permit, although he, like Comrade Gana, was born here.

The case was timed to hamper our movements and is still} pending. Eddie Litshaba (the
driver) is out on 10 pounds bail though the maximum fine is 1 pound. Our slightest move is
watched. and reported by the police from place to place. Moreover, the chief magistrate on
our arrival informed us that our campaign was discountenanced by the authorities, who
would refuse us any facilities or any information beyond what we were legally entitled to.
The chiefs have been told to sake no active part. in the election campaign-and their
salaries are at stake 1 Of course we knew that before, but it is more unblushing than we
expected. The European population, generally, too, with one or two exceptions not
communists but at least professing some sort of liberalism or labourism) are more vulgarly
hostile than I for one. quite realised they would be: they have not so far offered us
violence like the aristocrats of Potchefstroom, but have already repeatedly threatened to
shoot us. The Christian parsons appear among the most reactionary of all. Generally the
whites seem to consider themselves, like the three tailors of Tooley Street, to be ' the '
people of the country. As for the Native people, whose own reserve we supposed this to be,
our general impression so far is -that they are more held down here than anywhere else in
South Africa. By a long regime of ' segregation ' and congestion, all the stuffing seems
to have been knocked out of them-so at least the authorities probably flatter themselves:
perhaps we should rather say it is bottled up, with a very heavy official hand on the
cork.

" There is no branch of the Congress; the I.C.U. broke up some time ago (although
some still say they ' vote for Kadalie '), and there is no other Native organisation
except official bodies like advisory boards, and, especially, the ' Transkeian (General
Council' or ' Bhunga,' a Native mock parliament controlled by white officials, which seems
mainly concerned in praying the Government to make petty reforms which the. Bhunga has no
power to make itself . . .

" The Native voters consist mostly of lawyers' clerks, teachers, recruiting
clerks, etc., and perhaps tend to consider themselves A superior caste, but we have
already urged on them the duty of using- their ' privilege ' in trust for the whole of
their people, and this we hope most of them will do, secretly, though openly they may have
to kow-tow to their bosses. As for the mass of the Natives, they are already ours wherever
we establish contact.

" We held our first meeting on the 6th on the market square, Umtata, the two halls
having been refused to us. Amid a running fire of white shopkeepers' jeers, etc (although
their customers are almost exclusively black) the big Native audience heard us
gladly-never had they heard such a gospel, least of all from a white man. Our speeches
became the talk of the whole district, and we propose, though everywhere the whites
beseech us to depart from their coasts, to go from village to village delivering a like
message. The police for their part will do their d...est to shut us up.

" More than ever we can see how completely these territories, with all their
officials and paraphernalia, are to day mere appurtenances of the Chamber of Mines. The
people have just so little land per family, and are taxed just so much, that they can only
subsist by sending their men to the mines. And the whites simply batten on the couple of
pounds brought home by each mineworker after his dreary contract has expired."

A few days after writing this, Bunting was arrested, together with Makabeni and Mrs
Bunting. They were charged under the " hostility " law for speeches made at a
meeting, and, in the case of Mrs Bunting, for distributing Imperialism in South Africa and
the C.P. programme, and convicted by chief magistrate Welsh-Bunting to 50 pounds or six
months' hard labour, and the others to 30 pounds or three months' each. Fortunately they
were able to bail themselves out and go on with the campaign pending an appeal to the
Supreme Court in the course of the trial a verbatim report of the meeting taken by a local
newspaper correspondent, was handed in by the police, but the magistrate refused to allow
it to be read to the court because of the large Native audience present.

They visited the mission station at Buntingville, " named " says Bunting
" after an ancestor of mine, a Wesleyan divine." 13

" The parson in charge was the first-no, I beg the first one's pardon the second
white man in the Transkei to behave at least decently to us, even in giving us a small
hall to hold a meeting in, the weather outside being dreadfully bad."

They went on to Queenstown, still followed by the police. couple of Bantu " police
boys " were told off to follow them about. (Gana writes: " When we stop they
watch us and see what kind of food we eat and how we go to bed. When we camp for the night
they have to do likewise. If we divide up our party they do the same, one following
Bunting, another following me. I went up and down the same street (in Queenstown) so that
the people could see what I was doing, and the C.I.D. man kept following me without any
shame until the shop boys laughed at him. He had no time for a meal and had to eat out of
a paper.

After covering a wide area they returned to Umtata, only to be arrested again "
for practically all the speeches" they had made since the previous prosecution. Again
they were convicted and allowed out on bail pending appeal. " Fortunately," says
Bunting "we have managed to get our appeals to Grahamstown (the Supreme Court)
postponed until June 24, after this election . to the chagrin of many here. But such tame
speeches I can't help wondering how many years of imprisonment Lord Olivier, say, or even
the editor of the Star would be doing if he came here, or where else in the world a
candidate is brought to court for every election speech. "

At Cambridge I got a letter from Bunting, dated Umtata, May 14. " I have no time
to write," he says "it needs a book to describe everything here . . . We have
got to live on less, but I quite take to mealie-pap (the Natives can't afford even that)

and the field, the scope, and among all except the good-boy voters the response is
unlimited. Most voters I fear are good boys, divorced from their people, so though the
latter welcome us overwhelmingly everywhere, they are voteless; the voters may vote S.A.P.
still." Then in a postscript: " Ask my sister [in London] to show you my letter
to her of even date; of course such things are not put to her as I would put them to you,
e.g. the poison of missionary education."

The African voters made up almost exactly half the elector ate and there were a few
Coloured voters-as well. There were two candidates in addition to Bunting, the official
government (S.A. Party,) candidate, Payne, and an independent, Hemming. It seemed
therefore, that Bunting had a good chance of winning the seat, for it was clear from the
start that he had the sympathy of the overwhelming majority of the Bantu inhabitants. But
Bunting got only 289 votes, enough to save him his deposit. On the face of it, it was not
a great victory but really it was quite 8 creditable performance if one considers the
facts. ALL the forces at the disposal of the Government were used to discredit him.
Officials openly entered the lists against him-something which would have provoked a
crisis in South African politics if it had happened to, say, a Boer nationalist candidate
in an ordinary election in a purely white constituency.

Bunting had already come to Umtata and the election campaign was in full swing when the
chief magistrate said to the Bhunga: " People will come among you from all over the
country, some even from overseas, and will try to tell you about new doctrines.... They do
not care whether you are going through bloodshed and tears as long as they can get you to
adopt their doctrine.... Your needs will become disturbed.... The Governor-General is in a
position to deport a person who makes himself a nuisance . . . I would like to remind you
of the agitation which is going on round about us just now and ask you to use your best
efforts to try and quell it."

Reporting the results of the election, the S.A. Worker said (actually they are
Bunting's words, though he refers to himself in the third person): "The shadowing
everywhere by police, their interruption of the candidate's speeches (sometimes they.
actually addressed his meetings themselves) and their personal interference between him
and the electors actually had the effect they must have contemplated-of frightening the
Native voters and Native people in general from his meetings. Many even leading Natives
visibly shunned our candidate owing to the tick like presence of the C.I.D.: and not a few
voters continued so scared that, wishing to vote for Bunting, they dared not go to the
poll at all.

" Apart from that the constant arrests and legal proceedings taken altogether
lasted some five weeks-a big slice out of a campaign lasting little more than three
months. Owing to the necessity of being constantly at or within call of the court at
Umtata, Bunting had to rely on scratch meetings often at less than 24 hours' notice.

"Election leaflets given to voters were brazenly taken away from them by the
detectives, who would also come up and listen to private conversations, and intimidate
bewildered voters just before our candidate would come up to them.

'' When Bunting applied for inspection of the record of his preparatory examination
while it was still pending, he found that it was not at the magistrate's court at all but
at the office of the police, who had already typed on the front sheet, in anticipation of
the court's decision committed for trial,' on a number of charges named, two of which had
not yet figured at all in the proceedings. It was a common thing to see a magistrate in
the middle of a case go off to lunch in company with the prosecutor and police
officers."

The Buntings and Makabeni won their appeal in July at the Supreme Court in Grahamstown
which held that there was no intention on the part of the appellants to promote feelings
of hostility, as they were merely preaching the doctrines of communism which was a
recognised political faith. AB a result some fourteen charges made by the authorities at
Umtata against one or other of the three Communists were dropped. They included a charge
of criminal. slander of the chief magistrate of the Transkeian Territories and one of
contempt of court, as- well as many charges under the " hostility clause " of
the Native Administration Act.

Meanwhile Wolton had been fighting the election at Cape Flats. Things looked well at
first with Wolton leading a huge procession of residents of Ndabeni Location to demand
reforms from the Cape Town city council, but on election day the promised votes were not
forthcoming. Wolton got only 93 votes and lost his deposit. This comparative failure of
Wolton's contrasted with Bunting s comparative success, was a factor (so Mrs Bunting
believed) in completing the estrangement between the two leading communists in South
Africa. It did not seem to matter very much at the time because the Woltons left for
England in July with no very clear indication that they intended to return to South
Africa.

Chapter 14

League of Rights and Pass-Burning

At the time of the Sixth Congress of the Communist International there had been some
discussion in Moscow about the need for a " mass organisation " under C.P.
guidance. It was held that the wholesale recruiting of Africans into the Party was 8 bad
thing, as in this way the organisation was being swamped by individuals who had no real
understanding of Marxist principles. The Comintern favoured the idea of a small and select
party of trained revolutionaries working through a larger " mass organisation."
In this way the communists would preserve the purity of their ideas and the Party would be
able to give a clear and decisive lead on all questions. The advice was based on
experience in India,. the East Indies, and other colonial countries. It was held that a
similar method would do equally well in South Africa. Bunting and I accepted the
suggestion, and while in England I discussed it at some length with the colonial committee
of the British Communist Party. We were both back in Johannesburg in August, 1929, and we
proceeded, with. the help o£ the Party, to put the idea into practice. While he was in
the Transkei Bunting had started a tentative experiment on the new lines. A group of new
recruits at Manzana had been formed provisionally-into a " League of Native
Rights," a " designedly innocuous organisation," as he called it "
with the preservation and extension of the Native franchise and universal free education
as the prime objectives, the Communist Party's interest in the scheme not being expressed.
but not necessarily to be concealed." We all thought the. name excellent and
accordingly called a public meeting at the Inchcape Hall, Johannesburg, where the
"League of African Rights" was launched as a " national organisation.' The
new organisation was immediately joined by J. T. Gumede, who was made president, and by
Doyle Modiaghotla (of the Ballinger section of the I.C.U.) who became vice-president. The
chairman wag Bunting and the vice-chairman N. B. Tantsi of the A.N.C. Nzula and I were
joint secretaries. Charles Baker was treasurer.

The League called upon all to join who were interested in the struggle of the black man
for freedom in Africa. It drew up a " petition of rights," with demands for the
abolition of the pass laws, the retention of the Cape Native vote and the extension of the
franchise to Africans in the three northern provinces, universal free education, and full
rights of freedom of speech and public meeting irrespective of race. On the lines of the
Chartist movement in England it proposed to get a million signatures to the petition and
to present it to Parliament. It took for its slogan " Mayibuye i Afrika (" May
Africa come back ") and for its badge a black, red and green emblem. Tantsi and I
wrote to the tune of " Clementine " a song, " Mayibuye," which caught
on like wildfire.

The L.A.R. was a big success from the start. Political fever among Africans was still
running high. The " beer riots " in Natal in June had inflamed Bantu public.
opinion. The I.C.U. was breaking up, but there were thousands who were still politically
minded and looking for just such an organisation as the League, which would rally all the
forces of the national movement. Thousands of petition forms were issued and signatures
began to come in from all over the country. A big conference was planned to take place in
Johannesburg on the approaching Dingaan's Day (December 16).

In the midst of it all a telegram arrived from Moscow ordering the immediate
dissolution of the League.

We were dumbfounded, to say the least. Had we not started this new movement on
instructions from Moscow? The reasons for the order were not given in the telegram but it
was indicated that a letter would follow. Like good " Leninists," though with
sorrow in our hearts, we carried out the order from headquarters. " There is nothing
for it," said Bunting " we will have to do as we are told." The-petition
forms which continued to come in for some time were dropped into the waste-paper basket.
And so we missed our chance. Eight years later the E.C.C.I. was instructing the South
African communists to develop just such an organisation as the L.A.R. but the political
enthusiasm of the masses and the prestige of the Party had declined so catastrophically in
the interval that nothing could be done.

When the letter from Moscow arrived in due course we learned that the L.A.R. had to be
dropped because it was putting forward " reformist " demands, that it was
bolstering up reformist leaders, such as Gumede, and that the communists would not be able
to control it, which seemed to us nonsense. I drafted a long letter in reply, defending
our action in starting the L.A.R. and this letter was endorsed by the Party executive and
sent to the E.C.C.I. But the Muscovites again were adamant. 60 we carried on without our
auxiliary mass organisation.

Towards the end of 1929 there were many alarmed and excursions. Pirow, the new minister
of justice, announced a new bill, an amendment to the Riotous Assemblies Act, which would
give him the power, without reference to the Courts, to banish any individual from any
part of the country, to forbid any individual to attend public meetings and so on. This
move towards fascism was justified in the eyes of the Government by the obvious
shortcomings of the race hostility law as a weapon against the African movement, and it is
probable that the decision of the Supreme Court in acquitting Bunting on the charges
arising out of the Transkeian campaign led directly to the introduction of the bill.

We replied to the new threat with a big campaign in which the African National Congress
and both the Kadalie and Ballinger sections of the I.C.U. joined. There were big meetings
at which Pirow was burnt in effigy. These did not prevent the bill becoming law. It passed
its final reading in May, 1930.

Dingaan's Day, 1929, was marked by big demonstrations in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and
other centres. The African National Congress in Cape Town had, the year before, conceived
the idea of counter demonstrations on this day when white South Africa celebrates its
triumph over Dingaan " and his dark hordes." The Communist Party readily fell
into line with this idea. On Dingaan's Day, 1929, white civilians attacked the Communist
meeting at Potchefstroom with revolvers. One African communist, Hermanus Lethebe, was
murdered.and Mofutsanyana and Marks had narrow escapes.

A protest meeting was held in Potchefstroom on the following Sunday. The location oh
this occasion was fully guarded by the police and no further trouble took place. On
December 28 the dead man was buried. Several hundred people marched in the funeral
procession, which was also guarded by the police. Bunting delivered the funeral oration.
Mafutsanyana reported " that- the people of Potchefstroom are not at all cowed by
these brutal shootings, but are even more determined to fight against tyranny and
terrorism."

Six months later Joseph Weeks was tried for murder before a visiting judge and a white
jury at-Potchefstroom. The evidence showed that Weeks discharged the contents of his
revolver at the Natives and was reloading when he was arrested by Detective Classens
No-evidence was given that any other person had fired the shots.. In spite of this the
jury returned a verdict of not guilty."

In November, 1929, I left for Cape Town to take up a post in the Government Department
of Agriculture. I held it for only three months, when I was dismissed for engaging in
political activities. I thought I saw a good opportunity of getting the Party newspaper,
the South African Worker, printed in Gape Town more regularly and efficiently than in
Johannesburg. It was at that time only coming out at irregular intervals. I wrote Bunting
accordingly and the executive agreed. We gave the paper the title Umsebenzi (the Worker)
and it re started as a weekly in April, 1930. We decided to start a big campaign for a
nation wide burning of passes on the following Dingaan's Day.

In a long letter to me Bunting emphasised that the new venture should not lightly be
undertaken or abandoned. " You can't play fast and loose with a legal connection like
that, it is not so volatile, nor can you, I think, with the running of a paper. " (He
was trying to restart, his legal practice and, finding it difficult). He was doubtful if
it was advisable to start a weekly; it might be better policy to make it a fortnightly for
the time being. This advice I did not follow, being confident that I could manage a
weekly, and feeling that an agitational newspaper should appear as frequently as possible.

Referring to the threatening new legislation he writes: " I think we may be able
to carry on, whatever form Pirow's bill eventually takes, though subject to greater
persecution. Still, as editor you will have to take particular precautions; in particular
I must go into the question whether advocacy of pass-burning is in itself an offence. As
regards the pass-burning itself, inviting wholesale gaolings, it will I think mean a very
long campaign of preparation. We needn't rely on the gaols being-too full; they will make
camps or islands for the prisoners as in Dutch India. The question is rather, will a
really big number undergo the sacrifice? Hot air at a couple of meetings is no guide: the
inert mass is great.

During the period when Umsebenzi was published in Cape Town (i.e. until the end of
1930) Bunting sent money to help keep the paper going. I afterwards learnt that he was
sending 3 pounds a week out of his private pocket. In view of the state of his finances it
must have been a hard struggle to do this.

We went ahead with our campaign for the pass-burning. The communist movement grew,
particularly at Durban and Bloemfontein. At Durban, Johannes Nkosi, a one-time domestic
servant and general labourer, who had been sent from Johannesburg, was building up a big
branch in the face of some opposition from Champion's I.C.I.J., which was still strong in
that area. In Bloemfontein a Jewish comrade, Sam Malkinson, was training a group of
African revolutionaries of whom the most outstanding was Isiah Ntela. Ill the Western Gape
Province- we were co-operating closely with Bransby Ndobe and Elliot Tonjeni, militant
leaders of the African National Congress. All along the "Garden Route," from
Cape Town to Port Elizabeth, branches of the A.N.C. were established. They regarded
Umsebenzi as their newspaper and I wrote an Afrikaans version of the Mayibuye song which
was soon being sung enthusiastically by Coloured farm-labourers as well as Africans.

In the meantime domestic troubles were developing in the Communist Party branch in
Johannesburg. They were centred largely in the personalities of T. W. Thibedi and A.
Nzula. Thibedi was accused of mismanaging the affairs of the trade unions of which he was
organiser. He was expelled from the Party. Bunting wrote " Thibedi has gone, but I
doubt if all who cast stones at him are without sin even of the same kind. The
.investigation ordered by the Conference was a mere empty affair, though it could have
been given some content but they would not wait, and expelled him. I very much opposed the
scamping of a proper inquiry. Nzula, as the virtual successor of him and Weinbren in the
Federation, has so far accomplished nothing; indeed the unions are at a very low ebb. We
are very short of good ' functionaries ' ! "

The trouble with Nzula was much more serious. He had been Wolton's favourite, and
Wolton before leaving had expressed the desire that he should be made secretary of the
Party. He was in many ways outstanding-a good brain, an eloquent speaker. But he was a
hopeless drunkard. Now Bunting, for all his atheism and revolutionary socialism, was in
personal matters very much the son of his fathers-a rigid puritan. Drunkenness was
something he could not tolerate, and Nzula was often grossly drunk. There were occasions
when he came drunk to committee meetings, was very aggressive and shouted at everyone.
Once he was so drunk that he rolled under the table and lay there while the fleeting went
on. To make matters worse Nzula used frequently to drink in company with a crony of his,
one Mhlongo, an African detective employed by Marshall Square. And if there was one thing
Bunting hated more than drunkards it was detectives. Bunting could not handle this
situation. Nzula had supporters and to expel him would have meant to split the branch.
Besides the Comintern would have been outraged at such an example of " racial
chauvinism." He tried to reason with Nzula. He administered reproofs at committee
meetings when Nzula was sober. It was no use. So for a time they carried on with Nzula as
best they could. It was not a happy situation. Finally they simply had to remove him from
the secretaryship.

As Dingaan's Day approached we tried to take stock of the situation. Would the masses
follow the lead of the Party and burn their passes? The situation in the Cape did not
count because there were no passes in that province. In the Orange Free State we had a big
following and it seemed likely that there we should achieve a real success. In Durban we
were growing and might pull something off. On the Rand the position was doubtful. In
October the Party invited all African organisations to a conference in Johannesburg, to
prepare for Dingaan's Day.

The conference was considered a rousing success. Fifty delegates from outside
Johannesburg attended. All present, with the exception of some of the I.C.U. and Congress
leaders, pledged themselves to burn their passes on Dingaan's Day and go to prison if need
be. Bunting wrote: '' Our conference was an interesting exposure of the orthodox leaders
and also a revelation of grit on the part of I think most of those on the floor, but after
all even if there were 600 people present what a flea bite is that out of the
millions?"

On December 7, nine days before Dingaan's Day, Kadalie suddenly appeared at
Bloemfontein, some said with Government connivance. He had been out of the public eye for
months, in retirement at East London and with the threat of deportation to Nyasaland
hanging over his head. He addressed a large meeting in Bloemfontein and denounced the pass
burning campaign. The Government, he said, would find space in the gaols for the
lawbreakers. Africans could do nothing until they were properly organised. They must join
the I.C.U. The masses in Bloemfontein did not join the I.C.U. and many of them opposed
Kadalie. But his action was sufficient to cause a rift in the lute. It was enough to spoil
the one hundred per cent. unity which was necessary if the pass burning was to succeed(l.

On the evening of the 16th the communists could take stock of the passes burnt.
Johannesburg reported a mere 150. Nzula had dramatically placed his pass exemption
certificate in the flames. But it was raining, the meeting was not big and the masses aid
not respond. As far as the largest town in the Union was concerned the passive resistance
move was a failure. Pretoria was a little better with 400, but still not enough to make a
real impression. Potchefstroom's 300 was better for a small town, but even there it was
only the C.P. members who burnt their passes.

The only centre where the pass-burning reached mass proportions was Durban. There, at a
large meeting on Cartwright's Flats, about 3,000 passes were burnt, together with poll tax
receipts, hut tax receipts and other documents. The Durban borough police, black and
white, attacked the meeting, the former armed with assegais, the latter with revolvers.
Nkosi tried to calm the crowd but was struck down or shot down while still on the
platform. The Africans resisted with sticks, stones and other missiles. Before they
dispersed the meeting the police had mortally wounded or killed four men (among them
Nkosi) and seriously wounded twenty others.

There followed a reign of terror in Durban. Dozens were imprisoned and hundreds were
deported. Attendance at a party meeting or possession of a party membership card was
sufficient, if discovered by the police, to ensure one's arrest and deportation. The.
Party in Johannesburg tried hard to keep some sort of organisation going in Durban, but as
fast as organisers were sent they were arrested and deported.

The Party had few means of carrying on an underground struggle. The Africans of Durban
continued to burn passes. Passes also were collected. from the surrounding districts and
brought in bags to Durban for destruction. Many who were deported came back to Durban,
often on foot, only in the majority of cases to be arrested again and put in prison. If
only the rest of the country had displayed the heroism of Durban we might have smashed the
pass law. As it was we had lost a fine leader and other brave supporters and we had not
achieved our object.

Chapter 15

Right Danger

Just before the pass burning campaign reached its climax Douglas Wolton turned up
unexpectedly in Johannesburg (November 13, 1930). Bunting wrote to me in Cape Town the
next day. He said that Wolton stated that he had been instructed by the executive
committee of the Comintern to engage in full time work for the Party in South Africa. It
appeared that he had spent some time in Moscow. He brought back two lengthy resolutions of
the E.C.C.I. on South Africa, one political and the other organisational. " They were
on more or less familiar lines'? wrote Bunting, "with-a bit more elaboration, in no
way tending to greater clarity, on the subject of the bourgeois democratic revolution,
etc., and with the anticipated condemnation of me in particular and also of you, as
chauvinists, social democrats, etc. I had hesitated a couple of weeks over sending in my
resignation (as acting secretary) as there was really nobody to take over my jobs But
Wolton's arrival at once made it easy and he was appointed to take over my duties until
the Party Conference. I enclose cheque for 6 pounds to keep up the weekly payments of £3
for November 1 and November 8, which. will be my last. -Wolton, like Sachs. is for
terminating the Cape publication of the paper and the conference will probably carry that
with acclamation, but I will produce your letter." [I had written in defence of
continued publication at Cape Town and stating my doubts as to the possibility of
producing a weekly paper in Johannesburg.] " I must say that to my mind it has been
providential that the paper was carried on at the Cape this year, and something very
convincing ought to be brought forward before an arrangement which has on the whole worked
smoothly is terminated. "

From a letter written on November 29: " Wolton is leaving to night for Gape Town
to introduce the ' new line ' to the Cape Town branch. At the Johannesburg branch meeting
last night, at which I was absent owing to stomach trouble (my first absence this year) he
held forth something on the lines of the enclosed ?'_ a summary of the speech taken down,
I think, by Mrs. Bunting, which I have lost. "It reminds me of the conference of two
years ago when he made a violent attack on me, and the rank and file said that they did
not want to listen to all this quarrelling. I cannot help thinking that under cover of
theses, C.I. resolutions, etc., there is a long-standing personal antipathy or jealousy
.... I hate fighting for position and have not yet decided whether I ought to do it or
not. I am afraid this campaign is again militating against the pass campaign, in which
neither Wolton (the ' Comintern Representative' and with all the dictatorial airs of one)
nor Sachs is taking or intends to take any public part. My letter to the executive
[outlining his views on the party situation] has been ignored and scarcely anybody has
read it, although I think it is the truth."

When Wolton visited Cape Town he and I had a long talk on the transfer of the paper and
other party matters. It was unthinkable, he said, that the Party newspaper should not be
under the immediate control of the executive. It was impossible to have the paper
published a thousand miles away. Strict adherence to the Party line was essential. The
paper must go back to Johannesburg and I with it. He was confident they could maintain
regular publication. I saw the logic of his remarks and agreed to pack up my type and go.

I found I did not share Bunting's dislike of Wolton. I had always thought him sincere,
and now I was further impressed by his confidence in himself and his mission, his
determination to make the Party a real Bolshevik-organisation. He seemed to have Just
those qualities in which Bunting was lacking. Here was a man with a definite theory of
revolution, with a clear cut doctrine and a programme of action-all beautifully
co-ordinated and tabulated. Next to him Bunting appeared a mere empiricist. I was
impressed. I was prepared to work with him.

The ninth conference of the Communist Party of South Africa was held in Johannesburg at
the end of December, 1930. This conference was run on lines quite new to us in South
Africa-. Here was the new Bolshevik.'- monolithic " method: the Party must be hewn
from a single piece of stone. Gone was the old " social democratic " method of
electing officials. Wolton submitted a list of names for the new committee and asked that
they should be voted for en bloc with a broad hint that anyone who voted Against the list
was disloyal to the Party and the-Comintern. Accordingly the new Bolshevik leadership was
installed. I, as an ideologically weak member who nevertheless showed willingness to
learn, found myself on the new committee, but Bunting was left out. He did not fight
against the decision. He said " All right. Perhaps I'm too old. Perhaps I don't know
enough about communist policy. Let a young man take over.

Wolton wrote a report of the conference for the first issue of Umsebenzi to be
published in Johannesburg. "For the first time in the history of the Party," he
wrote, " the conference was able to make a general analysis of the situation and
tasks of the Party in this country in terms of Leninist theory. The conference faced the
mistakes of the past and on the basis of the political and organisational resolutions of
the Communist International, determined to avoid such errors in the future. Chief among
the dangers to be confronted is the Right Wing danger, expressing itself in a lack of
faith in the revolutionary capacity of the Native masses and resulting in the past in a
reformist or chauvinistic outlook on the part of the party leadership (opposition to the
Native Republic slogan, formation of the League of African Rights, running after Kadalie,
etc.). "

Wolton had got most of this stuff-out of the resolution of the E.C.C.I. which he had
brought with him from Moscow. The resolution itself, 3 lengthy document, was published in
installments in Umsebenzi. -Referring to a letter Bunting had sent to the colonial
commission of the British Communist Party, the E.C.C.I. said: It is evident that
Comrades-Bunting and Roux attempted to lay a theoretical basis for reformist views. These
comrades have elevated to a theory the chauvinist views they gave utterance to at the
Sixth Congress of the C.I. and which were severely condemned by the Congress. They are
attempting to revive the theory of South African exceptionalism and are rejecting bhe the
thesis of the Sixth Congress on the colonial question as inapplicable to South Africa.
"

There followed a long list of Bunting's sins He denied the revolutionary role of the
Native peasantry '' by trying to skip the bourgeois democratic stage of the revolution to
the ' pure r proletarian revolution." He was trying to reduce the Native movement for
national independence to a mere reformist struggle for equal rights. And so on and so
forth. From all this flowed " the opportunist tactical line expressed in the League
of Rights and still more glaringly in Bunting's letter which says that ' even the most
honest move must choose the line of least resistance I The Communist Party is compelled to
try peaceful methods. . . a moderate policy, because in the attempt to realise an
immoderate one it will be immediately suppressed by force.' "

If a prophet had told Wolton and the Comintern bureaucrats who composed this document
that in less than five years' time the Communist Party would have dropped all mention of
the Native Republic and would be content with a mere struggle for equal rights, that it
would be trying to make a united front " from above " with labourites, bishops
and " reformists " of all kinds, he would have been laughed to scorn. And yet
the new line was to be-just as sacred as the old one, as much bolstered up with Leninist
theory, and all who opposed it were to be condemned in equally scathing terms. The truth
was really that the ultra left line of 1931 and the ultra right line of 199/5 were
determined solely by the situation in the Soviet Union and the demands- of Soviet. foreign
policy. In 1931 England was leading the movement to build a "white wall" round.
the Soviet Union. Hence the need. to weaken the British Empire. from within. Hence support
for national revolutionary movements in the colonies. And hence the Native Republic
slogan.

Hitlerite Germany had become the chief danger. There was a military, alliance between
France and the U.S.S.R. Anthony Eden had been to Moscow. A "people's front" was
in existence in France. Hence a soft pedalling of anti British slogans and a willingness
to co-operate with reformists.

But the Native Republic slogan was supposed to be based on an analysis of the
relationship between the African masses. and Anglo-Boer imperialism, and these relations
had not altered fundamentally between 1931 and 1935. If it was "inexpedient" to
stress the slogan of a Native Republic in 1935 it was probably just as inexpedient to do
so in 1931, and Bunting was probably right.

Poor Bunting tried to reply to these attacks. He sent in a letter to Umsebenzi which I
inserted, probably without Wolton's permission for I remember I got into trouble over it.
The maintained that he had been deliberately misquoted and his remarks wrenched from their
context. " I said the Africans had been crushed and degraded by their conquerors. Is
that to say I am in favour of their being crushed and degraded, ' accept white
domination,' am a chauvinist, have ' a complete lack of faith in the Natives' ? Why,
surely, our whole policy and activity would be an utter futility, and a conscious one at
that, if we had no faith in the Africans and their high destiny as a race; surely all our
Party's work in recent years, including mine as (to quota Comrade Nzula) ' Its most active
member,' is direct evidence of such faith. Chauvinist? I invite any rank and file African
reader of this paper, not primed against me, to quote any genuine case of chauvinism, or
of ' a contemptuous and patronizing attitude towards Negroes' as such, on my part (or Com.
Roux). 'Accept white domination' indeed? Why, what has been the main and practically the
only burden of all our party effort, especially since the Congress (including e.g. the
pass burning campaign)-perhaps even too much to the exclusion of the pure proletarian
movement-if not to push forward African liberation and independence,-to overthrow the
white rule, and, not in words only but still more in deeds, to advance, not a mere '
reformist struggle for equal rights ' (Native reformists indeed look on us as their chief
enemies), but the slogan of the Native Republic or, as we put it more idiomatically in the
African, 'Mayibuye Africa'? Are we then such hypocrites, or lunatics, that we do not mean,
not only what we say, but what we do?"

At the foot of Bunting's letter was an editorial note stating that the reply of the
political bureau would appear next week. The reply began by saying that "the
publishing of the letter from (Comrade Bunting . . . must be sharply condemned as a
violation of democratic centralism, in that discussion was re-opened after the 9th Party
Congress had decisively adopted the new Party line. Furthermore, the publishing of the
letter reveals an underestimation of the right danger by the ' compromise ' to the right
wing in opening the columns of Umsebenzi for the ventilation of right wing statements. In
view however of the publishing of this letter it, now becomes necessary to reply to some
of the points raised. "

There followed various doctrinal arguments about Bunting's heresies regarding the
agrarian movement and South African exceptionalism. The statement ended by giving "
three of the most serious aspects of white chauvinism of the right-, wing." These
were " (a) the removal of Native functionaries from the -leadership of the Party, (b)
the social democratic campaign of v vilification against leading Native comrades in the
Party, and (c) the sabotage of political training of Native cadres."

Any further reply from Bunting was disallowed, though was boiling over with indignation
at this fresh crop of " unwarranted charges." Wolton had referred to ' Native
functionaries - and " leading Native comrades " in the plural, but to the best
of my knowledge there was only one person concerned and that was Nzula. Charge (a) then,
referred to Nzula's removal from the secretaryship after he had repeatedly come drunk to'
meetings and (b) to Bunting's-strictures on Nzula for getting drunk. The only charge that
had some small basis of fact was (G) that- Bunting (or the displaced leadership) had not
started any training classes on Marxist-Leninist theory. This could hardly be made a case
of chauvinism, however? for Bunting always regarded Marxist-Leninist classes as something
very unreal, and bookish. He could have replied that the Party had conducted a night
school for African workers and that some of the best "functionaries," like
Kotane, Makabeni, and Nkosi, had been trained in that school.

At this time Molly Wolton was still in Moscow, attending a course of political
instruction at the Lenin School. But Wolton had secured a valuable lieutenant in the
person of Lszar Bach, a young communist from Lithuania who had recently come to live in
South Africa. Bach was the " ideal Comintern type," soft spoken but
thorough-going. He had an amazing knowledge of Comintern doctrine, could quote Marx,
Engels, Lenin and Stalin, chapter and verse, on any conceivable aspect of policy, and he
knew the various theses and resolutions of the Comintern practically by heart.- He had
that delight in intellectual subtleties which one often finds in Jews who have studied the
Talmud as part of their early training, Wolton and Back became in practice the
"bosses" of the Communist Party. They insisted on an African majority on the new
Political Bureau. But the African members, though intensively coached in the theory and
practice of the " new line," were made thoroughly subservient. In fact the Party
was as much dominated by Europeans as ever.

The Party newspaper, Umsebenzi, under the new regime was not a great success At once it
assumed a graver and less popular character. "Imprecor language became the prevailing
style. Almost all Wolton's writings and speeches began with a reference to the deepening
economic crises. African comrades soon gave him the nickname " Deepening economic
crisis." The paper became less of a newspaper; the record of events was swamped by
long doctrinal articles; slogans were multiplied; "directives for struggle," of
the most complicated lengthy and impossible kind, took a prominent place. Five weekly
issues were printed at the beginning of 1931, then the paper became a fortnightly. Within
a year it was again. being printed at irregular intervals and -its circulation had slumped
badly.

At the end of February, 1931 I Was sent to Cape Town, where John Gomas and I threw
leaflets from the gallery of Parliament on March 6, "day of struggle against
unemployment. "From Cape Town I went to Durban to try to hold together what was left
of the Party organisation there, under conditions approaching very near to complete
illegality.

On my way to Cape Town I halted at Bloemfontein on instructions from the Party, to
interview the local branch and explain why Malkinson had been removed from the executive.
Malkinson was among those who were considered politically unsound by Wolton. For this
reason he had not been put on the new " political bureau," though, as the most
active communist in the Orange Free State it had always been taken for granted in the past
that he was entitled to a seat in the leading committee of the Party. Malkinson simply
could not understand why he had been deposed. Nor could Ntela and the other African
communists in Bloemfontein. They had written to Johannesburg asking for an explanation. I
was sent to give them this explanation, but I am afraid I was a bad advocate, not
understanding it very well myself. The comrades at Bloemfontein said, " Malkinson
built up this branch. He taught us about the (Communist Party. He has always helped us and
stood with us in our struggle. Because of his activities he has been ordered by Pirow not
to attend any public meeting in Bloemfontein. Now you tell us that Comrade Malkinson is no
good and you have removed him from the executive. Why?" I replied that Malkinson
lacked theoretical clarity, that he did not understand the new kind of Bolshevik Party we
were trying to build up in South Africa. The political bureau must consist of 100 per
cent. Bolsheviks, etc. Naturally I did not convince them.

The Bloemfontein Branch sent another letter to Johannes burg demanding Malkinson's
reinstatement. Wolton and Bach immediately summoned a meeting of the political bureau and
Malkinson was expelled " for fractional activities against the party line."
"That will show the right wing that we mean business," said Wolton. By this step
the Bloemfontein branch of the Party was destroyed. Malkinson was out; Ntela and the
others lost their enthusiasm. Wolton was " crushing the right danger," but he
was also smashing the Party.

And this was only a beginning.

In the meantime in Johannesburg, the Party, though hindered somewhat by its
preoccupation with the '' right danger, " was still able to strike fear into the
hearts of the authorities. By this time the boom of 1928 v as definitely over and
unemployment was growing among both black and white workers. The Party was able to gain
considerable influence not only among the black unemployed but also among the whites. Its
most popular agitator was Issy Diamond, a barber by profession, who became known for his
humorous speeches. On May Day, 1931, for the first time in the history of the
Witwatersrand, there was a joint demonstration of black and white workers on a large
scale. According to Umsebenzi some 3,000 Bantu and 1,500 Europeans assembled at Newtown
market square and "with cheers for the solidarity of black and white workers, "
moved off in a procession. They passed the offices of the Native Affairs Department and
the police headquarters with resounding boos, and then marched to the front of the city
hall where a big meeting was held. This spot had been a well known meeting place for
generations, but never had a Native crowd gathered there. When the communist procession
arrived the so called " United May Day Committee," consisting of representatives
of the white Labour Party and trade unions, was holding its meeting (a small one) in
typical white fashion. The communist procession "swept up with banners flying and
completely overwhelmed the gathering of reactionaries forcing them to close down their
meeting." After the meeting a large crowd of unemployed, consisting largely of
Natives but with a fair number of whites as well, marched to the Carlton Hotel, led by
Diamond and shouting " we want bread." A rush was made to get in, but police
closed the doors. The demonstration then: went to the historical Rand Club and again
attempts were made to enter. The police replied with a baton charge in the course of which
white and black unemployed and police were mixed up in a general melee. " Several
white workers repeatedly rescued prisoners from the hands of the police and inflicted
severe punishment on the thugs of Pirow." Native banner bearers fought valiantly to
retain the flags they were carrying, one of them " being batoned into insensibility
" by the police.

Following the riot eight Europeans and two Africans were arrested and charged with
"public violence." The two Africans were fined 2 pounds each. Two Europeans, De
Villiers and Jones (unemployed and with previous convictions) were sentenced to eighteen
months' hard labour apiece, and Diamond for " incitement to violence" received a
twelve months' sentence.

Bunting, though no longer in favour with the political bureau, was still prepared to
serve the Party. He acted as Diamond's attorney in the big trial and also in a number of
less important trials which had preceded it; for Diamond had been very active in the
period immediately before May the First. For instance he had led a group of white
unemployed into one of Johannesburg leading restaurants where they had asked for food
until they were thrown out by the police. Bunting's conduct during these trials was
subsequently used against him, as we shall see.

Wolton's plan during this period was that he and Bach should remain as far as possible
in the background, not exposing themselves to undue risks, but keeping a strict eye on
policy and tactics; while others, like Diamond and me and of course some of the African
comrades, should function as the public instruments of the Party. I did not think then,
nor do I believe now, that this was due to cowardice on Wolton's part; for he had shown
and was to show again that he was prepared to face the music. It was rather "
revolutionary realism. " Why should the brains of the Party, on whom so much
depended, be exposed unnecessarily to the danger of arrest and imprisonment? But Bunting
and. Diamond did not see it in this way. Bunting snorted his contempt; and Diamond still
cynically recalls how, on the occasion of the May Day meeting, Wolton and Bach stood on
the outskirts of the crowd listening to his speech and noting all " deviations "
for future reference.

Chapter 16

Expulsion

It was not until September, 1931 that Wolton and Bach finally " liquidated the
Right Danger." For months they had been working up a case against Bunting. They had
secured certain supporters in the Party. But Bunting remained the great leader in the eyes
of the African rank and file both inside and out side the Party. All the talk about
"deviations,'' the long-winded resolutions and theses in Umsebenzi, meant absolutely
nothing to them. Charges of " white chauvinism " seemed equally unreal, for was
not Bunting known in locations up and down the country as the man who defended Africans in
Court and asked no payment ? Years afterwards some communists were selling literature in
an out-of-the-way location. An old African was interested. " Who are you?" he
asked. "We are from the Communist Party,". they answered. "Oh, I know the
Communist Party," the old man said, "he wears big boots."

A resolution of the political bureau was published on September 4, 1931. It began with
a lengthy statement on " the deepening world crisis" and the international
dangers of "social fascism" and the "right danger," and went on to
enumerate the shortcomings of six leading communists who were thus notified of their
expulsion from the Party . The statement declared that " the right wing activities of
Comrade S. P. Bunting have not lessened but have on the contrary increased from month to
month until they assume the form of fractional activities against the line of the Party.
" Examples of the "continuous ventilation of the non-party line of Bunting"
were firstly that "when defending Diamond in court in connection with the Frascati
Restaurant case he had compared the struggle of the unemployed for bread to a students'
rag." Bunting had stated in court that the unemployed had entered the cafe to ask for
food to draw public attention to the fact that they were starving. Their behaviour was no
more criminal than that of students out for a " rag."

The second offence was that in defending the unemployed arrested on May Day (when the
fracas had occurred outside the Carlton Hotel and the Rand Club) Bunting had "
appealed to the magistrate to have vision and thereby treat the prisoners leniently."
Again, when Diamond was on trial for contempt of court Bunting had persuaded him to
apologise to the court. It was further stated that a " number of elements " had
been gathered "round the expelled member Thibedi" in an attempt to reinstate him
to membership, "in the process popularising . the differences that exist between
Comrade Bunting and the Party leadership. " Another reason given for Bunting's
expulsion was that he had addressed a meeting of the African Bantu Club and had spoken on
the same platform as members of the I.C.U. and African National Congress. He-had spoken in
the name of the Communist Party and this constituted "a compromising of the Party
and-a further reflection of the dangerous work of Comrade Bunting."

The other expelled members were W. H. Andrews, C. B. Tyler, Solly Sachs, Fanny
Klenerman and Bennie Weinbren. It was claimed that Andrews had lost all organisational
contact with the Party for many years "merely claiming nominal membership on
paper." "All the work of Comrade Andrews has been of a purely individual
character with no reference to the Party." This was essentially true. Andrews'
membership of the Party was unreal, In addition he was accused of having spoken on the
" social fascist " (i.e. Labour Party and trade unionist platform) on May the
First and of having failed to publish a declaration renouncing this
"counter-revolutionary action" when instructed by the Political Bureau. Thus the
C.P. got rid of its most well known member in the ranks of the white trade unionists and a
man who had consistently supported the cause of the Left and of Native unionism in the
Trades and Labour Council.

O. B. Tyler was another example of one who had drifted steadily away from
organisational contact with the Party and who had pursued an "individual line"
in his work as secretary of a "reformist trade union"-the Building Workers'
Industrial Union. His "drift to the right" had reached a stage where
"disciplinary action" had to be taken.

Fanny Klenerman was accused of not having undertaken any work for the Party and of
having conducted an uninterrupted campaign against the Party leadership.

The chief charge against Solly Sachs was that he had persuaded the Garment Workers'
Union, of which he was secretary, to- support neither the African May Day Committee
(communist) nor the United May Day Committee (reformist) but " to go on a picnic
instead of demonstrating on the streets."

Last on the list was Bennie Weinbren, founder an l president of the Native Trade Union
Federation. He was accused of having " conducted his trade union work along purely
social democratic lines, involving the workers in class collaboration machinery. "
This meant that Weinbren, while protesting against the reactionary portions of the
Industrial Conciliation Act and the Wage Act, was in favour of trade unions using the
legal machinery as far as possible to secure better wages and conditions for the workers.
This subsequently came to be regarded as quite orthodox communist strategy.

The expulsions in Johannesburg were followed by expulsions in other centres. In
September J. Pick, an old stalwart of the Party in Cape Town, was expelled for "
fractional activities against the leadership." La Guma suffered a similar fate, a
month later.

The expulsion of " the Right Opportunist Bunting clique " was subsequently
fully endorsed by the Executive Committee of the Communist International, which called
upon the C.P. in South Africa "to continue and intensify the struggle against Right
opportunism and all remnants of Buntingism." (Umsebenzi, 18/1/32)

The expulsion came as a terrific shock to Bunting - and not only to him but to hundreds
of his friends and enemies throughout the country, who knew him as a courageous and
leading exponent of communism in South Africa. All the leading newspapers referred to it
and published summaries of the statement, of the political bureau. It seemed to the man in
the street that the Communist Party was committing suicide, for practically all those who
were regarded as leading white communists were in the list of the expelled. The expulsions
did more than anything else to alienate party sympathisers and fellow travellers and to
lower the prestige of the Party.

There was some attempt on the part of the African rank and file of the Party to disavow
the decision of the political bureau and secure Bunting's reinstatement. Gana Makabeni and
a number of others took up the cudgels on his behalf. At Johannesburg and Potchefstroom
protests were made by members. But democracy had disappeared from the C.P. and Wolton had
the few branch executives which might have intervened well under his control.

Bunting addressed a printed leaflet to the Party membership. It was headed "
Private, for circulation among members of the Communist Party only," and dated
Johannesburg, October, 1931. " Dear comrades of the Communist Party," it began.
" No doubt you have heard of the recent expulsions, and perhaps you have wondered
what is the reason for them. Speaking of my own case only, I believe the great majority of
the comrades, and the African comrades in particular, will say they know of no reason why
I should be put out of the Party.

" The trouble does not emanate from the membership, how ever, but from the new
leadership installed at (or rather before) last conference, which really means Com.
Wolton, for the rest of the leading personnel remained much the same as before. Some of
you may remember how bitterly, and as I think, falsely, Com. Wolton attacked me at our
1928/9 conference and how that conference did not want to hear anything of such quarrels.
Since Com. Wolton's return from Europe last year, however, the attack has been greatly
intensified, until it has become almost a ' frame up.' What have I not been charged with
during the past few months? ' Chauvinism;' 'opportunism,' 'right wing deviation,' 'being
against trade unionism,' 'against the Pass Campaign,' etc., etc., -to all of -which I
plead, and I believe your verdict should be, not guilty ! Similarly with the charges
published in Umsebenzi .... about 'sabotage work' or 'fractional activities' being against
trade unionism,' 'against the Pass Campaign,' in connection with T. W. Thibedi, the
African Club, etc.-rather thin charges, I think you will agree, even if true, but actually
quite false as the members of my group and all others who know the facts (except a mere
handful attached to Head Office who have reasons for not knowing them) will testify.

"In short, my expellers cannot clearly state any of their reasons except by
grossly and knowingly distorting the truth. Or they say T do not follow the ' party line.'
The only line I know is that published in our Party programme, Conference Resolutions,
etc., in accord with the Communist International, and this I follow. No other ' line,'
even if authoritative, has been given out except this lying ' anti-Bunting ' line, to the
propaganda of which much time and man power has been sacrificed, with the result that much
real Party work has been scamped or most inefficiently conducted and party membership and
general agitational activity have shrivelled almost to a skeleton (and then they blame me
for all that too !)

" Well, without engaging in anything like an opposition or a split, I am obliged,
in applying to the next Party Conference for reinstatement, to ask you all for your
support. That does not mean that I hanker after ' leadership,' let the best man lead,
whoever he is. For a year already I have worked hard as a rank and filer, especially on
the founding of a miners' union, and should have been content so to continue. I only want
this 'ban,' passed by a small dictatorship without giving any notice (much less a hearing)
either to me or to you, to be removed so that I may resume doing my bit in the great war
for African emancipation-free this time, I hope, from the persistent misrepresentation,
boycott, and persecution-especially behind my back, to which I have been subjected for
over a year past.

"It will not be so easy for you to do what I ask. The present leadership will
possibly do its utmost (and controlling the party machine it can do much) to prevent you
from securing free expression of your will, through your own freely-chosen delegates, at
the conference. It may say ' this appeal of Bunting's is fractional ' or ' opposition to
the leadership cannot be tolerated ' or ' Bolshevism does not believe in hearing both
sides, ' or it may try to shelve the matter altogether. But if there is something wrong
with a party or its bureaucracy, if there is some danger or poison or disease at work,
must you just hold your tongue and say ' Ja baas' ? No, you cannot be deprived of your
right to put matters in order at a party conference, and for that purpose to ascertain and
discuss all the facts beforehand. If, therefore, you think that in the interest of the
Party and the African masses I should be reinstated, I beg you not to be indifferent or
inactive, not to be bluffed or intimidated, but to assert yourselves by insisting on the
conference being held and the matter properly placed on the agenda, and by sending
delegates definitely instructed to cancel the expulsion resolution.

Yours ever fraternally, S. P. Bunting. "

It seemed to me that there was something very unpolitical, not to say naive, in this
statement of Bunting's. There had been misrepresentation, boycott and persecution no
doubt; there were indications of a frame-up too, but surely there was much more to it than
that ! What had happened could not be attributed only or even mainly to Wolton's
malignancy, to a mere personal grudge on his part. There was enough evidence to show that
Wolton was trying to introduce a new policy in the Party and that he was carrying out to
the best of his ability the instructions he had received from Moscow. Our experience at
the Sixth Congress, the various theses and letters from the E.C.C.I., all pointed to a
definite line of policy which the Comintern was seeking to impose on its sections. If
Bunting believed that the policy of the Comintern was wrong let him go to the root of the
matter and say so. I for one still believed that the Comintern was right in the main
though I felt some qualms about the cold-blooded Machiavellian way in which Wolton was
setting to work. I was in Durban when the expulsions took place and I was not consulted
about them.

Though I was not happy about Bunting's .removal from the Party I acquiesced in it,
partly because I felt that I did not completely share his outlook, and partly because I
realised that any protest would have resulted in my own expulsion. Without the Party
machine behind me I should have been unable to continue with the work I was doing in
Durban. I was to find myself dragged still further along the path of shameful acquiescence
in the months that followed.

I came to Johannesburg on a brief visit at the end of December, 1931 and took part in
the next round in the fight against Bunting and the "right danger." Bunting had
sent a letter to those Party members he believed sympathised with his cause, inviting them
to a meeting in the Inchcape Hall on Sunday morning, December 27! to consider what steps
should be taken to secure the revocation of the expulsions. The meeting was described as
"private." A copy of the letter came into the hands of Wolton and Bach a day of
two before the 27th. They hastily summoned a meeting of the political bureau to decide
what steps should be taken to counteract the Buntingites. Now a conference of "Labour
Defence" (Ikaka) had been arranged for that same Sunday morning. I forget whether it
was Wolton or Bach who suggested the idea that we should transfer the Labour Defence
meeting to the Inchcape Hall. We should go there, occupy the hall and start our meeting an
hour or so before the Bunting meeting was due to begin. Then when the Buntingites came
they would interfere with our meeting at the peril of being charged with sabotage l I was
appointed chairman of the " Labour Defence " meeting. Bach undertook to provide
an audience from members of the newly-established Jewish Workers' Club, who could be
relied upon to support the official party. The members of the club were mostly young men
and women from Poland and Lithuania, earnest adherents of the Communist International, but
with as yet only a very limited knowledge of the movement in South Africa or the events
that had led to Bunting's expulsion. They had been told that Bunting was a traitor, and
that was enough for them.

When Bunting, Makabeni and the others arrived at the hall they found our meeting in
progress. For a time they kept quiet, too much taken aback to do anything. Then some of
them began to shout " This is our meeting. Why have you taken our hall ?" A
fight started between the Jewish Workers and the Africans. Makabeni went outside to get a
stick. Blows were exchanged. I and some of the less fanatical people on our side
intervened and managed to stop the fight. But Bunting's sup

porters remained and insisted that it was their meeting. Finally the proprietor of the
Inchcape Hall, a Coloured friend of the movement, forced both parties to leave the hall,
which he then locked up. In the next issue of Umsebenzi the following appeared:

" BUNTINGITES SMASH UP IKAKA CONFERENCE

" Agents of Pirow and Hertzog prevent Exposure of Prison Brutalities

" The Johannesburg District Conference of Ikaka, held on Sunday, December 27, at
the Inchcape Hall, was convened in order to develop a Union-wide campaign against the
brutal prison regime existing in South Africa and to launch a mass demand for the
introduction of a special prison regime for political prisoner in South Africa.
Representatives from factories and various districts were present.

" At the outset it was clear that Bunting (the expelled communist) had organised
groups of renegade communists and others in order to prevent the delegates from speaking
of the prison conditions which they had experienced. At a later stage in the conference
the Buntingites, at a given signal, shouted down the speakers and commenced a fight.

" Several of the Buntingites were thrown out of the hall, but finally, due to the
widespread fight which developed, the conference had to be closed.

" Thus the Bunting clique again clearly reveals itself as a definite agent of the
Government to muzzle the workers and prevent any organisational work being done.

"Against the united front of Pirow, the employers and the Buntingites the masses
must rally their forces to fight back. demanding the abolition of gaol brutalities and the
introduction of a special prison regime for political prisoners."

Against men who used such methods Bunting stood no chance. The campaign against him
went forward relentlessly. He was a member of the "non-party organisation," the
Friends of the Soviet Union. The F.S.U. had held a meeting at Marabastad Location,
Pretoria, and Bunting had been sent there by the Johannesburg committee as one of the
speakers. At the meeting a leaflet published by the Communist Party was distributed among
the crowd. The leaflet was an attack on Bunting. It denounced him among other things as an
" imperialist bloodsucker." A copy was handed up to Bunting on the platform, and
in his speech he referred to it briefly, denying the charges contained therein. The C.P.
then instructed its " fraction " in the F.S.U. to demand a vote of censure on
Bunting by the executive of that body on the ground that he had committed a breach of
discipline by using the F.S.U. platform for ventilating his private quarrel with the
Communist Party. Bunting was accordingly censured, though he defended his behaviour in a
capable speech. During the debates he leaned across the table and asked a woman member (a
newcomer to the Party who was having her first experience of " fraction work "):
" l}o you think I am an imperialist bloodsucker?" She answered " No."

At the next general meeting of the F.S.U. there were stormy scenes when a resolution
was moved stating that " Fractional elements were using the platform of F.S.U. in
order to slander the Communist Party, the Communist International and other revolutionary
organisations." Bunting again defended himself, admitting that he had referred to the
Communist leaflet when he spoke at the Marabastad meeting, but stating that he had to do
so, though briefly, as the leaflet was distributed to the audience by Joffe, a member of
the F.S.U. committee and of the Communist Party, who had accompanied him to Marabastad.
Bunting was followed by Party speakers who attacked him on the usual lines. They included
John Marks. While Marks was speaking, Mrs Bunting shouted an interruption from the back of
the hall. Marks replied with some not too complimentary epithet and then Bunting was
observed walking swiftly towards the platform. Whether his intention was to hit Marks or
merely confront him was not clear. He was stopped by the audience before he reached the
platform.

The incident was reported in typical style by Wolton in the next issue of Umsebenzi
with the heading "Buntingites attempt to wreck F. S . U. meeting-White chauvinist
attack on Native speaker" . . " Bunting stated his case admitting that he had
attacked the Communist Party at these meetings. He stated his case without interruption.
Numerous white speakers followed and gave examples of the counter revolutionary work of
the Bunting group, but it was only when a Native speaker came forward that the real
violent white chauvinist line of Bunting and his clique was demonstrated. Immediately
Comrade Marks (Native committee member of the F.S.U.) took the platform, Bunting male a
violent rush for the platform to physically attack Comrade Marks. Only due to the
intervention of a white worker was Bunting prevented from injuring the Native speaker.

" This incident coming on top of all the other activities of the Buntingites
immediately caused speaker after speaker to rise and demand the expulsion of the Bunting
clique from the F.S.U., pointing out that the open Fascist activities of these elements
called for the entire liquidation of this group. The workers and oppressed peoples of
South Africa increasingly understand the demagogy of the Bunting group who by
counter-revolutionary deeds give the lie to all the pretensions of serving the
working-class movement and openly reveal the Buntingites as agents of Imperialism, of
Pirow, Hertzog and Smuts."

Though many of us deserted Bunting, there was one man who stuck to him through thick
and thin. Gana Makabeni defied Wolton and the P.B., and openly championed Bunting's cause.
But Wolton was not in a hurry to expel Makabeni even after various attempts to win him
away from Bunting had failed. For one thing Wolton was trying to show that Bunting was a
white chauvinist. It was a bitter pill to have to admit that an outstanding African leader
like Makabeni was in the Bunting camp. Another thing that weighed with the P.B. was the
fact that Gana was the popular secretary of the African Clothing Workers' Union. However,
Gana's intransigence showed no signs of abating and finally, in March, 1932, it was
decided that " drastic disciplinary action must be taken." Makabeni was
therefore formally expelled from the C.P. on the ground that He had " openly
conducted propaganda in favour of Bunting and the reactionaries" all that he had
opposed an attempt by the C.P. to secure the disaffiliation of the .African Clothing
Workers' Union from the ' reactionary (white) Garment Workers' Union " led by Sachs.

Wolton and Bach claimed that the rank and file of the African Clothing Workers' Union
had remained loyal to the Party and the African Federation of Trade Unions. But it seemed
that Makabeni had taken a substantial section with him, and it was not long before he had
the entire union in his hands.

Gana's subsequent activities are a fine example of devotion and consistency. During the
depression years 1932 and 1933 the African Clothing Workers' Union was in a bad way. But
Gana stuck to his purpose. He obtained work as a labourer in a furniture factory and
conducted the affairs of the union in his spare time. The organisation weathered the storm
and became one of the most successful African unions.

Chapter 17

Monolithic Party

For some time there was little reference to Bunting in the columns of Umsebenzi. That
"counter revolutionary" was believed to have retired from active political work.
On account of his health and on medical advice he had given up his lawyer's business,
which in any case had been more of a liability than an asset. After recovering from a
partial stroke and spending a period in hospital, he got work as a viola player in the
orchestra of the African Theatres Trust.

The Communist Party in the meantime was undergoing an even more thorough process of
"bolshevisation." Molly Wolton had returned from Moscow where she had spent a
year at the Lenin School. In addition a representative of the Comintern had come to South
Africa and was actively guiding the Party along the new line of complete bolshevisation.
Nzula and another African had been sent to the Lenin School. 14

With these new additions to its leadership the Communist Party found itself "
Ideologically strengthened." A most elaborate programme covering every field of
activity was drawn up, and such party members as remained were subjected to the most
rigorous discipline. New trade unions were to be built up. The African miners were to be
organised. Peasant leagues were to be started. Political training classes were to be made
compulsory for all party members. Special day schools for " functionaries" were
to be held from time to time. Umsebenzi was to be enlarged and its circulation increased
ten fold Everything was planned down to the minutest detail. The Party was to be
completely re organised in factory, farm, and street nuclei. Organised party fractions
were to function in all the trade unions and other " mass organisations." Every
committee, every group, every individual was to be given a definite task or tasks and an
elaborate time schedule was laid down for their fulfilment.

The only drawback about this scheme was that there were not enough people to carry it
out.

The expulsions had robbed the Party of many active and capable people. Whole branches
had disappeared in the purging of the Right Wing. Trade unions which had once been close
to the Party had come to regard the C.P. as their chief enemy. " Mass organisations
" like the Friends of the Soviet Union had become narrow sectarian groups consisting
almost exclusively of Party members. The hundreds of Africans who had followed the Party
had been completely mystified by the anti-Bunting campaign and had become politically
indifferent. The denunciation as " social fascists," "national
reformists," "agents of imperialism," etc. of all who did not accept the
Party line unreservedly had caused the Party to become an ever-narrowing sect.

In addition. such forces as were available for carrying out this stupendous programme
were still further reduced by a process called " preparation for illegality."
Certain comrades were told that they were not to identify themselves publicly with the
Party. They were to remain behind the scenes, functioning on secret committees which would
direct the work. These secret functionaries had practically nothing else to do but draw up
gigantic plans which the over-burdened " legal functionaries " strove in vain to
carry out, At one stage practically all the open work of the Party was done by two of us,
Louis Joffe and myself, though in the end neither of us was considered good enough for
membership of the political bureau.

By October, 1932, most of us who worked in the Party and those who still read Umsebenzi
were beginning to forget about Bunting. We were having a hectic time; trying to organise
the unemployed both black and white; carrying on at Germiston, in the face of bitter
police persecution, a campaign against the lodger's tax; fighting a parliamentary by
election with Comrade Marks as our " Native demonstration candidate" 15 ;
helping the garment workers in a bitter but futile strike, while at the same time we
fought Solly Sachs, their union secretary.

Suddenly we were reminded of that " imperialist bloodsucker Lord Bunting," as
he was now called. To the general charge of " rightism " was now added a new one
of '' alliance with counter-revolutionary Trotskyism."

The evidence on which this new attack was based was rather scanty. A new paper, the
Maraphanga, had appeared, edited by T. W. Thibedi. Thibedi had evidently written to
,Trotsky and received a letter from him in return, but the Maraphanga did not appear to
have any definite political line. Thibedi was not a theoretical Trotskyist. Almost the
whole of the new paper was in the vernacular and dealt with various Native grievances.
There was no mention of Bunting; no attack on the communists. I, for one, did not know
what to make of Thibedi's new effort.

But within a day or two came another piece of information which might have had some
bearing on Thibedi and the Mara'phango,. The one-time manager of the I. S. l. Press was
now running a small printing works of his own, and he was doing work for the Communist
Party. In my capacity as manager of Umsebenzi I used to visit his office quite frequently.
One day, shortly after the Maraphanga had appeared, I met Bunting coming out of the
printer's office. Inside, by some strange chance, I noticed lying on the office desk a red
card, similar to a Communist Party membership card, but with the caption " Communist
League."

Like detectives hot on the scent- the Political Bureau now proceeded to put two and two
together. Bunting was starting a " Communist League " in opposition to the
Party. The Maraphanga, although it did not say so, was the organ of the new body. Thibedi,
on his own admission, was in league with Trotsky. Bunting was behind Thibedi and was
helping to subsidise his paper.

This was grist to the mill of the Comintern " rep," who ordered a special
double-size edition of Umsebenzi which he practically filled with articles denouncing the
" counter-revolutionary alliance of Bunting and the Trotskyites." Much of this
writing was vile stuff (for instance, Bunting was described as the " prominent son of
Sir Percival Bunting, an aristocratic British peer and a firm fighter for British
imperialist domination-himself a rich lawyer and an absentee landlord now exploiting
Natives on a wattle farm in Natal") and I told my fellow members of the editorial
board that I did not like it.

They replied " You yourself have provided the evidence. How can you suggest that
Bunting is not in alliance with the Trotskyists ?" I replied that we did not know for
certain but should wait for more definite evidence.

A few weeks later Wolton announced that there were too many white members on the
Political Bureau. At that time there were four Europeans: the two Woltons, Bach and
myself. Wolton suggested that the number should be reduced to three and these should be
the three " most thoroughly Bolshevik white comrades." I was charged with having
shown weakness over the articles on Bunting. Furthermore I had had frequent disputes with
Molly Wolton, my chief fellow member of the editorial board, about the general tone of
Umsebenzi. It was clear that I did not have a proper understanding of the Party line. The
Comintern representative (whom personally I found a very likeable fellow) agreed with
Wolton's proposal, and accordingly,- I lost my seat on the P.B. I was instructed, how
ever, to continue my technical work in connection with the publishing of Umsebenzi, which
I did.

I have never been able to discover exactly what happened behind the scenes in the
Maraphanga-Communist League affair. Bunting made no public reply to the attacks on him in
Umsebenzi. Apart from the card on the printer's desk, nothing more was ever seen or heard
of the Communist League. After its first number, the Marapharaga did not appear again.

- Bunting never did start an opposition party, though he was asked on many occasions to
do so. On visiting Cape Town he was invited by the " Communist Opposition Group
" to speak at the Lenin Club and did so. But in his speech he strongly urged that
there should be no revolutionary party outside the C.P. and he said he would not assist in
forming one.

Chapter 18

Last Days

Far from being a "rich lawyer and an absentee landlord exploiting Natives on a
wattle farm in Natal," Bunting was by no means well off. When his fingers became
partially paralysed and he could no longer play the viola, he was glad to accept a post as
caretaker of a block of flats.

But before the state of his fingers made it impossible he did get some satisfaction
from orchestral playing. While touring South Africa with the orchestra he met old friends
in different parts of the country-among them Colonel Creswell on his farm near Bellville
on the Cape Flats.

In the subsequent history of the Party that expelled him, he lived to witness a
dramatic justification of his own standpoint during the bitter years when he was denounced
as a chauvinist and counter revolutionary.

The Comintern representative left South Africa towards the end of 1932. In December of
that year the Woltons went to Cape Town where they played a prominent part in a tram and
bus workers' strike. The communists organised a group of militant tramway workers to
oppose the secretary of the union, Stuart, who, they alleged, was trying to negotiate an
agreement in favour of the bosses. In the midst of the strike Wolton was arrested on
charges under the Riotous Assemblies Act and the Conciliation Act. He was not allowed bail
until the strike was over. In May, 1933 he was sentenced to three months' hard labour.
This was his second period in gaol within eighteen months (he had served three months
early in 1932 following articles which had appeared in Umsebenzi alleging gaol brutalities
inflicted on African prisoners in Natal). The continual arrests and imprisonment's, the
hectic life they led and the financial insecurity which always dogged the footsteps of the
communist agitator in South Africa seemed to have a depressing effect on the Woltons.
Molly had a weak heart; the doctor advised her to give up her public speaking which wag
doing her no good.. Their daughter, born in 1926, was having no sort of family life, being
" parked " now with this woman comrade and now with that.

When Wolton came out of prison in August, 1933 he found a letter from his brother in
England, offering him employment on the Yorkshire Times and a home for Molly and the
child. The temptation was more than they could resist, and the Woltons left hurriedly for
England without obtaining the permission of the Political Bureau in Johannesburg. It was a
gross breach of the discipline they had so loudly and fanatically enforced on their fellow
members in the Communist Party for some years. To the Buntings and the other expelled
members. it seemed evidence of the insincerity of the denunciations and the expulsions and
of the whole campaign against the " Right Danger."

The departure of the Comintern representative and of the Woltons led to changes in the
leadership in Johannesburg. The desertion of the Woltons had done much to discredit their
policy and some party members were now almost brave enough to look round with open eyes
and to ask themselves whether this narrow sectarianism and extreme " leftism "
was really doing the Party any good. Two African members of the P.B. who had been the
roughly trained in the anti-right tradition, left to study in Moscow. Lazar Bach had now
to carry largely on his own shoulders the burden of the struggle against the "Right
Danger."

The Political Bureau was now so depleted that new blood had to be brought in. Josiah
Ngedlane, an old stalwart from the Cape, and John Gomas, came to Johannesburg and were
given seats on the P.B. Moses Kotane was another addition. I also found myself back on the
committee. As I was a full - time worker in the Party and virtual editor of Umsebenzi,
this was almost inevitable. Without any overt change of line or any new resolutions or
theses the Party began slowly to follow a more realistic policy. Umsebenzi was published
as a weekly from the beginning of 1934. It was enlarged, made more readable, and it soon
became once more the most widely circulating Bantu newspaper. Bach continually pointed to
" serious deviations " in articles in the paper; he tried to keep the Party tied
down to the old line, but he was in a minority on the P.B. and we went ahead in spite of
him.

During this period some of us were able to re-establish friendly personal relations
with Bunting. His old itch to do something was still upon him. He developed an interest in
collective farming, on the Russian model, and wondered whether anything could be done to
propagate the idea in the Native reserves. In December, 1933, he wrote a pamphlet, and, as
the Party now had its own press, he asked us to print it, which we did, " purely as a
business proposition."

This was Bunting's last pamphlet, his last piece of political writing. He called it
" An African Prospect- an Appeal to Young Africa, East, West, Central, South."
Though addressed primarily to Africans, it was written in his usual involved style. As an
effective political tract it was a failure, but as Bunting's final testament, it is of
interest to us. Here he slates his belief in the inadequacy of the old liberalism. "
Liberalism 'is not enough' to-day. Its real job seems after all to be, at best, to reduce
some of the superficial (though serious) disparities and brutalities of imperial rule in
order to safeguard that rule from the dangers of ' unrest '; but it does nothing to relax
the imperial grip on the Colony or the vampire activities of its capitalists." In
this situation the oppressed masses of Africa should look rather to Soviet Russia for
inspiration and an example to follow. Bunting attacks again those " parlour
Bolsheviks " he knew so well in South Africa, " who thrill and gush over this '
Russia for the Russians ' but never think of translating it into terms of Africa; Some
perhaps even hope, subconsciously or secretly, that Socialism will never come to Africa in
their time !" After various attacks on the fascists, the segregationists, the
penny-in-the slot reformists, who think for instance with Father Huss of the Roman
Catholics that co-operative societies alone will be the salvation of the blacks, "
forgetting that blacks and even poor whites have next to no property to pool or co-operate
with, and especially if the races are barred from co-operating, " Bunting goes on to
discuss a general plan for the redemption of Africa.

" Let us suppose (skipping, as others have done, the problem of ' how to get
there') that Africa decides for Marx, and that her working masses, organised as a
Government of workers and peasants for the whole continent, and led perhaps by some sort
of all-African ' Communist Party,' command sufficient political and military power (for '
Red Armies ' may be needed to defeat sabotage, disruptive or subversive movements, and
recrudescence of the old order) to carry that decision into effect, on more or less
similar lines (adjusted to local custom and to later Russian experience) to those of the
1918 Russian constitution from which we have already quoted:

" ' With the fundamental aim of suppressing all exploitation of man by man, of
abolishing for ever the division of society into classes, of ruthlessly suppressing all
exploiters, of bringing about the Socialist organisation of society and of establishing
the triumph of Socialism in all countries, the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets . . .
decrees:

" ' (a) In order to establish the socialisation of land, private ownership of land
is abolished; all land is declared national property, and is handed over to the workers,
without compensation, on the basis of an equitable division carrying with it the right of
use only.'

" '(b) All forests, underground mineral wealth and waters of national importance,
all-live stock and appurtenances, together with all model farms and agricultural concerns,
are declared public property.'

" We will imagine that some sort of Pan-African ' State Planning (Commission ' and
' Supreme Economic Council' has been created. Given cash to pay sufficiently attractive
salaries, as the Soviet also had to do in its initial stages to secure the beat technical
advice, or alternatively given a fair modicum scientific patriotism. we may even
anticipate that this Government will from the outset have at its disposal the sincere
services of the finest expert brains, specialists and engineers, besides organisers,
business managers, auditors, etc., of the whole continent and more, eager to play a part
in making the very best of all its available resources ' for the utmost benefit of all
concerned ' and that the ' co operation to the fullest extent ' of existing technical
staffs to that end can be guaranteed."

From this he goes on to discuss the need for an agricultural survey leading to the
planning of farming on a continental scale, with the planned transition of tribal
agriculture to collective farming on modern lines. "Altogether a Five Year Plan will
doubtless be not enough for Africa; with its ' So many worlds, so much to do So little
done, such things to be ' (those words so prostituted by Rhodes) thirty or fifty years
will be well spent on the work, in fact there is no limit to human progress once the
forces hitherto imprisoned are set free."

Finally there is an appeal to the African leaders themselves.

" Then why falter, why flounder, why wag your heads between Yea and. Nay, asking
what ' the authorities ' would say if you came out boldly for your people-the authorities
who, as you well know, are placed where they are in the interest of that small class? Why
fight against the change to please them, why not grasp it with both hands, every one of
you (there is safety in numbers) throwing yourselves heart and soul into the lifegiving
task of ushering in the New Age? It is not ' faddism,' it is the sober and serious
recognition of plain facts that inspires men and women to work hard, even ' fanatically '
for a better life, realising that ' it must come ' in both the indicative and the
imperative sense, that both the future and the right and the duty are on the Socialist
side.

" The demand of a nation of a hundred and twenty million human beings for release
from their chains must some day sweep the length and breadth of the whole African
continent like a tidal wave; the mightier its sweep, the more irresistible its power and
the speedier and more bloodless its victory.... May it come quickly !

The new era of comparative reasonableness in the Communist Party, which came in
unobtrusively by the back door after the departure of the Woltons, was not destined to
last very long. We reformers on the P.B. were rather timid at first and not quite sure of
ourselves, fearing perhaps the heavy hand of Moscow if we should move too far to the
Right. We did not deal with Bach as he and the Woltons would have dealt with us. We
allowed him to keep his seat on the P.B,. and I for one argue that he should be kept there
" because of his theoretical knowledge and his value as a critic."

But Bach steadily strengthened his position. He was supported by Louis Joffe, who, as
financial secretary of a very small party now consisting almost entirely of paid
functionaries, was a powerful ally. Bach found numerous " Right deviations '' in the
articles in Umsebenzi and in the public speeches and activities of various comrades. In
particular he found Moses Kotane guilty of " petit bourgeois national
reformism," because that comrade had suggested the organisation of a united front of
Non European organisations in which the Party should not thrust itself too openly to the
fore. Kotane maintained that the Party tended to ruin every " united front mass
organisation " by blatantly controlling it and dictating its policy. A united front
to be successful must be a genuine united front in which Africans could feel that they
really had some power and control.

Bach did not merely criticise Kotane's proposal. but found in it evidence of a
fundamental deviation. The trouble lay in the fact that Kotane's interpretation of the
slogan of a Native Republic was incorrect. The slogan controversy therefore flared up
again, but on a different level. It was no longer a question of being for or against the
slogan but for or against a certain interpretation thereof. Kotane, who could quote
chapter and verse with a facility equal to Bach's, maintained that the Original
formulation of the slogan was correct. This had stated that the Native Republic was a
stage towards a workers' and peasants' government. But while the Comintern representative
was in South Africa the slogan had been altered so that the Native Republic had become
synonymous and synchronous with the workers' and peasants' government. This was the
interpretation which Bach supported.

I do not propose to go into the details of this controversy, which resulted in stormy
debates into which all the Party members in Johannesburg were drawn and which lasted often
into the small hours of the morning. The theoretical arguments seemed to me to be but the
cover for disagreements on the practical work of the Party. Some of us took the line that
Bunting should never have been expelled, that the trade unions had been driven away by an
extremist and intolerant party leadership, that the whole campaign against the Right
Danger was not justified-by conditions in South Africa and had been most unfortunate. We
questioned whether the Party should continue to domineer in the mass organisations,
antagonising all non-party fellow travellers in the trade unions and in the Friends of the
Soviet Union, and whether Louis Joffe should continue to act as dictator in the
newly-formed Anti Fascist League.

When it was proposed to re-open the Party night school, which had been dead for years,
and to try to make the Party headquarters a centre of social activities, this was
described by Bach as a social democratic deviation-"Not because I am opposed to the
school as such," said Bach, "but because the pro posed re-opening of the school
has been put forward in such a way as to suggest that there is something wrong in the
Bolshevik system of organisation of the Party." These subtleties were beyond the
comprehension of some of his followers; one of them, Peter Ramutla, declared '' You shall
start your night school over my dead body. "

On the P.B. matters had reached a climax. But that body was equally divided between the
Bach and Kotane factions. Bach, however, was favoured by fortune.

Suddenly there arrived back from Moscow two of the comrades who had been sent there for
training. Without any argument they resumed their seats on the P.B. In their hands rested
the final decision. It did not take them very long to make up their minds. They voted for
Bach's interpretation of the slogan, and in the same breath condemned the whole outlook
and criticism of the opposition.

In September, 1935, disciplinary action was taken against the " Right deviators.
" Some half-dozen of our more vociferous supporters were expelled from the Party,
because they had " attacked the line and leadership of the Party," and had
"thus sown discontent in the ranks of the Party and mass organisations sympathetic
-to the C.P.S.A." Kotanc, Ngedlane and I were expelled from the Political Bureau.
Issy Diamond was suspended from membership of the Party for three months " for being
associated with elements that have been conducting fractional activities against the line
of the Party, both in the Party and in the mass organisations. " The published
statement of the P.B. which announced the expulsions, ended as follows: " Now that
the situation is clarified, we sincerely hope that all those who have been previously
confused will now see their way clear to following the Party line and leadership."

Apparently many of the Party sympathisers were not at all clear, for the leadership
found it necessary to call a special public meeting at the Jewish Workers' Club at which
Edwin Mofutsanyana, on behalf of the P.B., made a speech explaining and justifying the
expulsions. At this meeting, in defiance of all Party discipline, I replied to the P.B.,
defending those who had been expelled and demanding their re-instatement. I was also able
publicly, for the first time, to express my regret at my compliance in the expulsion of
Bunting and my silence during the discreditable attacks that were subsequently made on
him.

Bunting was present at the meeting. I met him a few days after. He was the same old
gruff bear. " We were glad to hear your confession," he said. We spoke of the
future of the Party.

He thought nothing good would come of it until the " bad elements " were
removed. These people, however, were still in the saddle and the expulsions had
strengthened their grip on the Party machine. But I was full of hope that the " new
line " expounded by Dimitrov at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, which had just
been held, would usher ID a new phase in party policy. The " people's front "
was now the policy. There was no more emphasis on the "Right danger." Instead
the chief danger was " sectarianism." It appeared that practically all the
parties of the Communist International had made sectarian leftist mistakes, thus tending
to isolate themselves from the broad masses. In fact what had been happening in our small
Party in South Africa seemed to mirror exactly what had been happening., in the Communist
Parties in Germany, India, Bulgaria, Brazil and a dozen other countries.

I hoped that the Comintern would now admit its mistakes in South Africa, remove Bach
and Joffe from the leadership, and restore the expelled members. Perhaps it would even
allow Bunting to return. But nothing of the sort happened. Kotane, Gomas and I had sent an
urgent telegram to Moscow stating that the sectarian leadership was splitting the Party
just when the Italian attack on Ethiopia made unity of the left movement essential. We
asked for the immediate intervention of the Comintern in South Africa. As a counter-blast
to our telegram, the P.B. sent a representative, a Russian comrade named Richter, to
Moscow.

In reply to the telegram the Comintern asked the Party to supply them with more
information about the split, and finally asked that representatives of the opposing
factions should go to Moscow to talk things over. Bach went immediately. An African
comrade representing the opposition went some weeks later. I did not go, It was months
before any reply came from Moscow, and then it was simply: " We are not interested in
discussing past mistakes. Here is the new line. Get on with it." Bolshevik
self-criticism apparently was demanded only of comrades who found themselves-in a minority
in opposition to the official line; it did not apply to the Comintern itself. In fact some
comrades declared: " The Comintern does not make mistakes. If mistakes were made in
South Africa it was because the instructions of the (Comintern were not carried out, or
because Moscow was misinformed about the situation in South Africa."

The subsequent history of Bach was peculiar.. He did not return to South Africa. He
became involved in the purge and the anti-Trotskyist trials. He had shared a room with
Lurie who was accused of communicating with Trotsky and executed. The charge against. Bach
was that, though intimate with Lurie, he had not informed the Party that I.Lurie was
receiving letters from abroad. Bach was officially expelled and was sent away from Moscow,
to some rural area. Many in Johannesburg believed that he was subsequently shot. There has
been no confirmation of this and he may still be alive. That Bach of all persons should
have gone over to Trotskyism seems to me utterly absurd. Strangely enough Richter and his
brother (who was an editor of a Jewish newspaper in Moscow were also involved in the purge
and were expelled from the Party. That happened to them is still not known to me.

The last time I saw Bunting was at the beginning of May, 1936. We met at a political
meeting (perhaps it was the annual May Day social) and I walked part of the way home with
him. Ethiopia had just collapsed before the blackshirt armies and we discussed the "
international situation," as one does on such occasions. I remember him saying what a
pity it was we had not a powerful Communist Party in Africa " to unite" he said,
"all the scattered anti-imperialist forces in a common front against
oppression." He also told me about his fingers, how they would sometimes fail to
respond to his brain, and how it interfered with his viola playing. The doctors, he said,
did not seem able to help him.

On May 24 he had a stroke and they took him to hospital.

As he lay there dying, in the bed next to his by a strange coincidence was one of his
old Comrades, Gideon Botha.

Gideon Botha was one of the few Afrikaners in the left movement in South Africa. He had
been a member of the International Socialist League. Previously he had been a gold miner
and had taken part in the strikes of 1913 and 1914. I remember dimly hearing him speak in
Afrikaans on the I.S.L. soap box, on a windy night at the time of the First Great War
Afterwards he joined the Nationalist Party and played some part in the 11922 strike. He
came back to the left movement and joined the Friends of the Soviet Union in 1931. He wag
present when Bunting was expelled from that body. In 1932 and 1933 he helped the Party in
its work among the white unemployed, proving extremely valuable as an Afrikaans speaker.
Now he was seriously ill and Bunting was dying in the bed at his side.

On Monday, May 25, Bunting's condition was serious. The nurses brought screens and put
them round his bed. Botha shouted out: " Bunting. Comrade Bunting, I d d not vote for
your expulsion from the F.S.U. Believe me, I did not." Whether Bunting heard we do
not know. He was probably unconscious by that time, and he died before morning.

Botha was not the only one in the movement whose conscience troubled him about the way
Bunting had been treated. There was a guilty feeling that his death was in some sense a
result of his expulsion, for it was said that it had so weighed upon his mind that his
health had given way. In any case he had undoubtedly worn himself out in the service of
the movement which he more than any man had created and which had turned and denounced
him.

We all went to the funeral: old trade unionists and members of the I. S.L. long since
outside the Party, the African trade unionists, and the Party itself, both expellers and
expelled.

There was a red flag, draped in black, and among the pall bearers were three Africans,
as was fitting.

Bennie Weinbren had organised the funeral and he had allowed four speakers: C B. Tyler
for the old guard; Gana Makabeni for the African workers, Willie Kalk for the Part
leadership, and me for the opposition. Officially Kalk represented the Leather Workers'
Union and I was the Party speaker Tyler made an orthodox funeral oration. Gana, who had
loved Bunting, was too overcome to say very much. My own remark were less tactful than was
fitting at such a scene of unity. Kalk put the " Party line " which was that
Bunting's great service was to bring the black workers into the movement, and for this
they honoured his memory.

" De mortuis nil nisi bonum." In an obituary notice Umsebenzi said: '
'Comrade Bunting was for a number of years the leader of the Communist Party and as such
has taken up the cause of the oppressed and exploited people of South Africa Although he
was excluded from the Communist Party, due to a persistent disagreement on fundamental
principles, his honesty and devotion to the cause of the workers and oppressed people of
the country were unquestionable. The historical significance of the role played by Comrade
Bunting in the history of the revolutionary movement of South Africa lies in the fact that
he realised the great importance of the Native masses in the anti-imperialist struggle,
and that under his leadership the Communist Party began to organise these masses for the
struggle for their emanci pation. thousands of exploited and oppressed South Afrioans will
remember Comrade Bunting as a staunch fighter." A fuller account of Bunting's role in
the revolutionary movement was promised for the next issue, but it never appeared.

The Spark, the Trotskyist organ published in Cape Town, was more lavish in its praise:
" The Revolutionary Movement has lost a valuable member. But in Bunting, South Africa
has lost something more than a valuable member, something more than an honest
revolutionary. It has lost a leader, a pioneer, a Bolshevik. And the Revolutionary
Movement in South Africa, so poor both in quality and quantity, will find it difficult to
replace a man of Bunting's calibre. Such men are rare.

" He was one of the first to break not only with the Labour Party, but with Social
Democracy; one of the first to hail the October Revolution in Russia, one of the first to
form the Communist Party. And as an ardent Communist he had to fight, and did fight
enemies of every possible kind-Imperialism and Capitalism and their lackeys; the Labour
Party; anarchists of various 'brands inside the Communist Party; and last, but not east,
white chauvinism. When, moreover, he had succeeded in building up a Communist Party, he
was deposed and expelled . . . for opposing as unsuitable the slogan of ' Native Republic
'

" Bunting will always remain a living symbol in the South African Revolutionary
Movement. For none in South Africa as so beloved as Bunting by the Bantu workers and
peasants who, thank;, to him, were drawn into the movement. It ; they who most fully
appreciated his great loving heart, the qualities of his character, and his crystal-clear
honesty as man and as a revolutionary. This is not the time to recall his faults and
mistakes. Who among us is faultless and which of us does not make mistakes?

The memory of Bunting will remain with us."

One of the finest tributes to Bunting's life and struggle was the establishment of the
Sidney Bunting Memorial Scholarship, at the South African Native College at Fort Hare. The
money is subscribed annually by a group of Bunting's old friends, and it has enabled many
young Africans to carry on their studies at South Africa's only Native university college.
Unfortunately the capital sum needed to put the scholarship on a firm basis has not yet
been raised. In the meantime, however, the money required every year to keep- the
scholarship going has been regularly subscribed. The honorary treasurer of the fund is
Advocate F A W. Lucas.

It is not easy to say in a few words what I feel about Bunting. His was a peculiar and
complex character. He retained throughout his life certain characteristics developed by
his early training, much of the outlook of the Wesleyan liberals from which he sprang.
There was his intellectual honesty and the feeling that he was under a moral obligation to
do what his conscience dictated, whatever the consequences. combined with this was a
marked empiricism and an almost pathological aversion to formal theory. " This rage
was right in the main, that acquiescence vain," he was fond of quoting. " In the
main "-not utterly and absolutely, but only in a general sense, was any particular
political formula right or wrong. Affairs were complicated; one had to take the line that
seemed best on the whole, realising always that there were many aspects to every problem.
This explains, I think, the complexity of his writing, the frequent parentheses and
interpolations. Every statement had to be complete-the whole truth not merely part of it.
It explains also that tendency to dither in a crisis, that inability to make up his mind
quickly, which made him a difficult leader and annoyed many of his fellows in the Party.

And yet he had a tremendous drive, a tremendous sincerity, a tremendous persistence.
While others gave up the struggle, he carried on. To be a communist in South Africa to day
is to be a nigrophilist-a " kafferboetie." That was Bunting's achievement.

The tragedy in his life was a double one. The Party he had built the Comintern he had
served, expelled and denounced him. That was tragic enough. But the greater tragedy was
that he did not understand why this child of his, this thing he had adored, should turn
and rend him.

And yet he remained loyal; he remained a communist; he died believing in the Soviet
Union and in the Communist Party.

Was that sheer obstinacy or was it the finest tribute that could be paid by a great man
to a great cause?