South Africa's Radical Tradition: A Documentary History Vol. I, 1907-1950. Edited by Allison Drew. Buchu Books, Mayibuya Books, UCT Press, Cape Town.
reviewed by Charlie Van Gelderen
Apartheid did not arrive suddenly in 1948, with the election of an (Afrikaner) Nationalist Party government, but was the culmination of an historic process that began when the Dutch East India Company first set foot in the Cape 400 years ago.
This book is particularly valuable because it depicts very clearly the part played by the early industrial and political organisations of the (white) working class in setting the scene for the racism that dominated South African society till almost the end of the 20th century. The birth and growth of the socialist and labour movement is the theme of this thoroughly researched book.
Socialism and trade unionism came to South Africa with the arrival of skilled workers, mainly from Britain, who came to work in the diamond and gold mines at the end of the 19th century, and the mainly Jewish immigrants fleeing from Tsarist oppression in Eastern Europe.
The British workers brought with them their trade unionism; the immigrants their socialism. Between them they laid the foundations of the labour and socialist movement in South Africa. The carefully researched documents in this book faithfully chronicle the evolution of those movements.
While the workers from Britain were often fiercely engaged in militant struggle against their employers, they never looked on the mass of unskilled Black labourers drawn into the mining and industrial complex as fellow workers. On the contrary, they regarded them as a threat to their own relatively privileged positions. In a letter to Ramsey MacDonald, then secretary of the British
* South Africa Labour Party (August 1905), the Cape Labour party complains that "the interests of the savage Zulus, the comfort of the Chinese... the convenience of the Indian coolies seem to come nearer the heart of the English Labour Party than the continued oppression... of their white brethren of the same flesh and blood!"
The general strike on the Rand in 1922 was mainly fought - sometimes in armed struggle against the state - against the employment of Blacks as skilled workers in the mines. Their slogan was "Workers of the World Unite to Keep South Africa White." Though the early socialists and, after 1920, the Communists, were critical of the openly racist and xenophobic Labour Party, they accepted the traditional view of the Marxist movement that the socialist revolution would be headed by the organised industrial workers - who were, for the most part, white.
They tried to overcome this with all sorts of euphemisms, like "Black and White Workers Unite," or, as W.H. Andrews, a founding father of the Communist Party, put it, "Equal Pay for Equal Work."
It was not till the Comintern foisted the Native Republic thesis on the South African Communist Party in 1928 that the party began an in-depth study of the issues involved. Until then, it had regarded the movement for national liberation and democratic rights as reformist and subordinate to the struggle for socialism.
And it was not until April 1935, when Leon Trotsky intervened with his Remarks on the Draft Theses of the Workers Party of South Africa, that South African left oppositionists and Trotskyists began to recognise the importance of the national question.'
This book will long remain a standard text book for all interested in the history of South Africa and the role played in that history by the socialist, labour, and national movements. We can only look forward to Volume Two. * Notes 1. Writings of Leon Trotsky 1934-35, Pathfinder Press, New York.