6 July 2021

On Sunday, 4 July 2021 the South African Communist Party (SACP) lost one of its outstanding stalwarts and longest serving member from the mid-1940s, comrade Norman Levy (91), a recipient of the SACP’s Moses Kotane Award conferred on him by the 3^rd Special National Congress of the Party in 2015 in recognition of his selfless service and absolute dedication to the SACP and the working-class struggle for liberation and socialism. The SACP sends its message of heartfelt condolences to his twin brother, Leon Levy, an outstanding comrade in his own right, the founding President of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), and to the entire Levy family.   

In memory of comrade Norman Levy, peace-loving South Africans need to unite behind the national imperative of defending our democracy and expanding and deepening it to its full development. To achieve this aim, we also need to work together to radically reduce unemployment, poverty, and inequality, with the working-class building and deepening its unity to eliminate economic exploitation, towards fundamental change. The SACP will strengthen its work to that end, including building a widest possible patriotic front and popular Left front.  

Born on 7 August 1929, Norman Levy became part of the struggle during the 1940s when he was 14 years old. He described it as falling into politics—he was riding his brother’s bicycle and found a meeting on the side of the road. The meeting was addressed by Hilda Watts, a candidate of Communist Party for the Johannesburg Municipal Council. The words made sense to him. Thus, he stayed to listen. Hilda was addressing about 12 or so people. Most of them were black domestic workers, with some whites standing on the outside of the group. A young man, Philip Lieberman (16) came over and introduced himself as a communist. He invited Norman to the next weekly meeting of the Young Communist League (YCL).

And then he went to the meeting. Present at the meeting were about 30 people, including Ruth First (18), Joe Slovo, Philip Lieberman (16), Lionel Forman (16), Paul Joseph, and Lucas Masebe, the National Chairperson of the YCL then.

In his last year at school, in 1946 the Communist Party committed itself to the mineworker’s strike, assisting with writing and photocopying leaflets and transporting union officials to meetings. Norman Levy was still at school, while helping with photocopying leaflets on a Gestetner copier and collating them for distribution to the workers in the mining compounds.

The Communist Party contributed tremendously in establishing the African Mineworkers’ Union. Levy attended the meetings of the union, which he describes as like rallies, as an observer from the YCL. He was also the YCL’s Secretary for Literature. He distributed the leaflets from the Communist Party which dealt with many topical issues of the day.

In 1950 when the Suppression of Communism Act was passed, Levy was placed on the “liquidators list”. This meant he was named as a communist and banned. By then, he had been in the Communist Party for six years. 

In the same year, 1950, the Central Committee took a tactical decision to dissolve the organisation. He remembered the meeting addressed by Moses Kotane, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, in a room where the Party members, including Levy, still at school, held night school classes teaching literacy every Thursday night. He describes the “stunned silence” and then he questioned whether the message was intended for the people in the room.

Yes, it was. The members were now “on their own”. They had “no organisation” to which they could belong. In response to the banning within a short period of time the Communist Party reconvened underground and reconstituted itself as the South African Communist Party, however. This became the new operating reality, leading to the reconfiguration of the Alliance.

The outcome was the Congress Alliance comprising the African National Congress (ANC), the Congress of Democrats, the South African Indian Congress, the South African Coloured People Organisation—later the Coloured People Congress, and the South African Congress of Trade Unions, with the Communist Party as an underground formation and its members active in all the congress formations. This deepened the organisational principle of dual membership, with all congress alliance formations but one led by communists. However, Chief Albert Luthuli, President of the ANC worked very closely with Moses Kotane, the SACP General Secretary.

Cde Norman Levy was part of the Congress of Democrats.

He was later in the group of 156 comrades who were charged with treason in the famous Treason Trial which lasted 5 years when all the charges were dropped. Cde Norman was acquitted in 1958.

On 3 July 1964 Levy was detained under the 90-day detention law. After 54 days he was charged with membership of the SACP and furthering the aims of communism. He stood trial with Abram Fischer and 13 others. On being found guilty he was sentenced to three years imprisonment. He went into exile after his release, to continue the struggle. International isolation of the apartheid regime was one key pillar of the struggle in exile.

The other pillars of the struggle were underground organisation in South Africa, dating back to the banning of the Communist Party, and the armed struggle, also started by the SACP as President Nelson Mandela says in his autobiography, the Long Walk to Freedom. The banning of the ANC ten years after the banning of the Communist Party forced the ANC to also add underground organisation to its pillars of the struggle. Similarly, through the formation of uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the joint ANC and SACP liberation army, the ANC also pursued the armed struggle as a key pillar of the struggle.

As Mandela says in the book, the machinery that the SACP had already established, and which had carried out several operations against the apartheid regime, together with that experience became an important resource in the formation of the MK.

The fourth pillar of the struggle was mass mobilisation in South Africa, which also played a crucial role towards our victory against the apartheid regime in 1994.

Levy returned from exile after the democratic breakthrough of 1994 to design affirmative action frameworks for a technical committee of the Labour Relations Forum at CODESA. He created programmes for the then University of Durban Westville for interns, and later headed the Centre for Community and Labour Studies. Levy also worked for the University of the Western Cape, School of Government, during which time he served on the Presidential Review Commission for the transformation of the public service—responsible for re-designing the presidency and recasting the public service.

At its 4^th National Congress held in 2014, the Young Communist League of South Africa awarded comrade Norman Levy an honorary lifetime membership.