Reggie September: Influential member of ANC inner circle in exile
1923-2013
REGGIE September, who has died in Joburg at the age of 90, was a member of the ANC’s and South African Communist Party’s innermost circles of power during the struggle against apartheid.
He spent almost 30 years in exile. Less than 10 years after returning to South Africa, he married the daughter of one of the most vocal champions of apartheid and enemies of communism, former National Party cabinet minister Marais Steyn, which he joked was poetic justice.
September was ordered into exile by the SACP in 1963. In 1965, he became the chief representative of the ANC in Britain and western Europe until 1978.
A stickler for discipline and order, he knocked the organisation into much needed shape, causing resentment among Africanists in the movement, who believed the ANC should be run by black Africans, not a coloured person from the Western Cape.
From Europe, he was deployed to Lusaka and served on the ANC’s most important decision-making body and true focus of power at the time, the revolutionary council, headed by Oliver Tambo.
At the ANC’s conference in Kabwe in 1985, September, along with Yusuf Dadoo and Joe Slovo, both of them also members of the council, were the first non-Africans to be elected to the national executive committee.
September, Dadoo and Slovo were all members of the SACP’s politburo and formed an extremely influential bloc in the revolutionary council, initiating many of its decisions and raising angry questions about where power in the ANC really lay.
September subscribed to the armed struggle, but he understood perfectly well that its chief value lay in attracting international political and financial support for the ANC.
He decried the “mistaken idea that we are going to liberate South Africa from the outside”. In this, he was rather less of a romanticist and more of a hard-headed realist than most of his colleagues.
September returned from exile in 1991 and, as part of the ANC’s national executive committee, helped to draw up the Groote Schuur minutes that ended the armed struggle and paved the way to negotiations with the apartheid government.
He was an ANC member of par- liament for 10 years, from 1994 to 2004.
September was born in Wynberg in Cape Town on June 13 1923, the son of a carpenter.
He attended Trafalgar High School, the alma mater of a number of future anti-apartheid activists and Robben Island inmates, where robust political debates about racism were encouraged by the teachers.
He knew all about Marais Steyn and was amused that he should have ended up marrying his old foe’s daughter
In his teens, he came under the influence of SACP leaders Moses Kotane and James La Guma, and joined the National Liberation League of Cissie Gool.
After matric, he worked as an apprentice in the shoe industry before becoming a full-time trade unionist.
In 1953, he was one of the founders of the South African Coloured People’s Organisation in opposition to the Non-European Movement led by the likes of Neville Alexander, which strongly opposed any form of collaboration with the ANC.
In 1956, he was among 156 leaders charged in the famous Treason Trial. He was detained without being charged for five months during the 1960 state of emergency that followed the Sharpeville massacre.
He was jailed again the following year and served with a banning order.
September met Steyn’s daughter, Melissa, in the mid-1990s when his son, Mark, and her daughter, Anna, became partners.
September and Melissa, a professor of sociology who started the Centre for Diversity Studies at the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand, married in 1998 after the death of his former wife, Hetty McLeod, herself a trade unionist and stalwart of the liberation struggle.
He knew all about Marais Steyn and was highly amused that he should have ended up marrying his old foe’s daughter.
Steyn had just died and the two never met. September believed they would have got on well. He certainly got on terrifically with Steyn’s widow, Susan, teasing her gently about the past to their mutual amusement.
For all his revolutionary past, September was an infinitely gentle and profoundly humane man. He did not benefit financially from the new South Africa or his role in the struggle, never tried to and never resented those who did.
He said his reward was seeing people of different races living together in a country free of apartheid.
This was what he had fought for, he said. It was the only reward he wanted and it made him endlessly happy.
September, who was bedridden for almost a year after suffering a stroke, is survived by Melissa, who was his fourth wife, and three children.