FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE?
As Putin’s invasion of Ukraine hits the one-year mark, the ANC’s support for the occupier continues unabated. It’s worth asking about the foundations of this relationship. Political pragmatism? An ideological affinity? Or a shared historical loathing of t
With Russian warships at our shores and South Africa’s lamentable record at the UN, where it regularly abstains from voting against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is right to wonder just how we got here. Most people know the USSR lent the ANC a helping hand during apartheid. But the story is as much about Western betrayal as it is about Russian support.
It goes without saying that the British, as colonial masters in the Cape, had a somewhat chequered record. But it can also be said that there was a progressive arc to colonial laws up until 1892. In 1807, the Brits banned the slave trade (though not the practice of slavery). In 1824, they passed Ordinance 19, which attempted to stop the abuse and ill-treatment of slaves. In 1828, the passing of Ordinance 50 made all free people of colour equal under the law. In 1834, slavery was abolished entirely. And in 1854, Britain agreed to South Africa’s first nonracial constitution, which allowed all men of all races over the age of 21 to vote if they earned more than £25 a year.
Of course, there was still a large degree of racism in the colony and the frontier wars did Britain little credit. But an educated black middle class was rising from Cape Colony schools such as Lovedale and Zonnebloem College — a middle class that developed social as well as political aspirations. And it was from this class that the ANC grew.
Britannia rules the hearts
Many of these men and women — from Tengo Jabavu and Walter Rubusana to
Sol Plaatje, his wife Elizabeth, and Robert Grendon — believed in political progress. As Plaatje wrote, his life in the Cape Colony was happy and “full of pleasant anticipations”. And though it might seem strange now, many believed in Queen Victoria as their protector.
Grendon, editor of the ANC’s first newspaper, AbantuBatho, in fact dedicated his great epic poem, Paul Kruger’s Dream, “to Britannia ”— the country that had freed the slaves and given him the right to vote. His opening lines read:
Great Britannia—thou—that givest/Equity to ev’ry man,/Thy enactments are the purest,/Since this changeful world began.
Grendon and Plaatje were both on the side of the British during the South African War. What’s more, the British colonial forces in South Africa always had large contingents of black and coloured soldiers. The Mfengu in the Eastern Cape had, from 1835, taken the side of the British. In 1846, the Khoekhoe leader Andries Botha and his men saved the British ammunition wagons at the battle of Burnshill by leading an offensive against King Mgolombane Sandile’s Xhosa. As the colonial official Andries Stockenström put it, Botha “fought bravely for the British Crown” and “paid taxes to the colonial government”.
Five years later, when Botha’s sons rose in rebellion against the British in the Kat River, it was he who was arrested.
The Khoekhoe had legitimate concerns that the British were about to betray them by re-enacting vagrancy laws that would dispossess them of their land. In the end, the British didn’t do this, but they did convict Botha of high treason and sentence him to death, despite a lack of evidence against him.
The liberal John Molteno (the first prime minister of the Cape) and Stockenström, who had both fought alongside Botha, wrote to London to protest. They stated: “Her Majesty has not in her dominions a more loyal subject, nor braver soldier.”
Botha ultimately received his freedom from the queen — but such British interventions were rare events.
The British betrayal began in earnest in 1892, when Cecil Rhodes’s Franchise & Ballot Act took away the rights of many black and coloured voters. In response, the first organised multiracial protest organisation, the Coloured People’s Association, held rallies. Grendon wrote to British prime minister William Gladstone, pleading with him not to recognise the act. But nothing came of these protests, and black and coloured
voters were struck off the voters roll.
But the greatest threat to black political rights came with the Union of South Africa and its constitution, the South Africa Act. Not only did the constitution offer no rights to black people in the Transvaal, Orange Free State and Natal, but it also chipped away at their rights in the Cape.
Britain could have prevented this. The South Africa Act had to pass through the British parliament, after all.
So, in 1909, the leaders of the early ANC (or what would be called the South African Native National Congress, or SANNC), along with Jabavu and Abdullah Abdurahman, organised a deputation to Britain to try persuade the British parliament not to pass the racist act. Former Cape prime minister William Schreiner was persuaded to head the deputation in the hope that the British would take their position more seriously. Even The Times of London called the legislation “no Act of Union but rather an Act of Separation”.
But the British simply washed their hands of the issue, and the racist South Africa Act sailed through the House of Commons.
In 1914, another deputation was sent to Britain by the SANNC to try to stop the Natives Land Act. Again, they received short shrift from the British officials. After World War 1, the ANC again tried to send a deputation. This time Plaatje managed to get an interview with British prime minister David Lloyd George.
The record of what Plaatje said still exists in the archive: “I do not expect the prime minister to go over there and catch General [Jan] Smuts by the scruff of his neck and say, ‘You must relieve these people or I will knock you down!’ What we want done is simply in a constitutional manner. It is useless to go and tell our people that the [British] government is absolutely powerless.”
As Plaatje explained, his people had been doggedly loyal to the British and now it was time for the British to intervene on their behalf against an evergrowing set of unjust laws. But nothing came of it.
What we do know is that Lloyd George sent a letter to Smuts, then prime minister of the country, expressing his concern. But that was it — and Smuts took not the slightest notice.
With this, Plaatje’s generation had exhausted diplomacy. Their loyalty had been met with indifference and at times contempt. A new path was required — and Russia, from the outside at least, had some pretty enticing credentials.
Even the author Olive Schreiner, who in her final years became a staunch supporter of colonial freedom movements, saw this. Before the Russian Revolution she had even begun to refer to herself as a Bolshevik.
By the 1920s communism was sweeping across the world, and South Africa was no different. Black and white alike were drawing inspiration from tales of revolution and the proletarian “miracle” in the USSR.
In 1927, James la Guma was the first black South African to travel to Moscow to represent the Communist Party of South Africa. There, he gained the sympathy of Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin’s right-hand man and the head of the Comintern (the body that advocated for world revolution).
In Moscow, La Guma and Bukharin came up with the slogan for a “Native Republic” that demanded black majority rule, and the USSR showed an active interest in supporting this idea.
Despite this — and right up until the 1940s — many ANC members such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Anton Lembede remained unconvinced by communism and the support of the
USSR. But, slowly, they were won over.
As historian Tom Lodge points out, the USSR offered the ANC and its Communist Party allies “a continual source of funds, equipment, training and diplomatic support”. This was a far cry from anything that either Britain or the US had ever been willing to offer.
A marriage of convenience
But just how little the USSR actually cared for the rights of the colonial oppressed can be shown by its interaction in Algeria.
French-Algerian writer Albert Camus was brought into the Algerian Communist Party in 1935 largely to recruit Arabs he was friendly with. Camus, however, left the party in disgust after the USSR instructed the party to give up the Arab cause. Stalin had decided the USSR’s interests would be better served by a strong French colonial government that could fight the Germans.
Then, after World War 2, when it suited the USSR better, it re-engaged and supported the National Liberation Front against the French colonial government.
The USSR’s anticolonialism was, in other words, always influenced by a healthy dose of pragmatic self-interest. It took its Cold War with the West into the heat of Africa’s colonial wars of independence. But in these battles it nevertheless played a major role in independence and, in South Africa, in the antiapartheid cause.
The ANC turned to the USSR after more than a century of unfulfilled British promises. But how to reconcile this with South Africa’s current relationship with Vladimir Putin’s Russia is something a little more difficult to explain.
Putin’s Russia is not the USSR, just as the ANC is the no longer the organisation of Plaatje, Tambo, Sisulu and Mandela.
What the ANC does share with Putin’s regime is endemic corruption and an inbred mistrust and dislike of the West. Of course, the ANC has legitimate historical reasons for its distrust: it was the
West that betrayed the party and its cause in the first place.