The Red sons of Africa
The SACP holds a unique place in the history of communism worldwide in that it is one of the world’s oldest surviving communist parties. As it prepares to celebrate its centenary, a book on its history in SA reveals its considerable impact on South African mainstream politics,
Professor Tom Lodge began working on a history of South African communists when the SACP was a relative youngster; at 63 years old it would have just managed to scrape into phase two of the country’s vaccination rollout plan. That was back in 1984, when the country wasn’t gripped by rona gevaar but rooi gevaar (for those who swallowed the apartheid government’s anticommunist propaganda).
Thirty-seven years later Lodge’s tour de force, Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party, has finally been published to coincide with the party’s centenary this weekend.
Red Road to Freedom takes readers on a 100-year tour of the Communist Party and brings to life colourful characters, many of whom are slipping — or, indeed, have slipped — away from our collective memory. Lodge shines a light on the party’s secret history, reveals its controversies and analyses its evolving ideology. He also plots its trajectory from the days when joining the party was by invitation only to it becoming a mass movement, and explores its relationship with the ANC (spoiler alert: it’s complicated).
Above all, Red Road to Freedom provides fascinating insights into how a band of communists shaped the country’s struggle for freedom.
Lodge is based in Ireland, where he lectures in peace and conflict studies at the University of Limerick. Before that he was a political studies professor at Wits University and a leading authority on all things politics. As one fellow Wits academic said: “Tom is like a fire extinguisher — you just point him and he gushes.”
In 1984, a year after his seminal book, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945, was published, he started to do research on South African communists.
So, what was it about South African communists that intrigued him?
“Several things,” says the 69-year-old academic, who grew up in Nigeria, Borneo and Britain.
“I had the normal middle-class Cold War childhood. My parents were liberal and though they weren’t particularly political, their sympathies were generally speaking on the anticommunist side of the Cold War. I spent a large part of my childhood in Africa, where my father, a British Council officer, worked, and I got attracted by African history, which I started studying. I came to South Africa to take up a post at Wits University in the mid-’70s. In South Africa the Communist Party, together with the ANC, stood for principles that one could admire and this intrigued me because it was at odds with the kinds of beliefs that I encountered when I was younger.”
During Lodge’s research for his book on black politics he built up a detailed picture of the resistance movement during the 1940s and 1950s and became convinced that there was a story about the Communist Party that needed to be told.
But there was a snag: there wasn’t enough information. Actually, that’s not quite true. There was plenty of information, but no one was willing to share it. Lodge ran into a wall of silence because the party was secret. SACP activists were willing to talk about certain things, but not about the most important things. This was not only because the Communist Party was illegal but also because its relationship with the ANC — one of the issues Lodge wanted to explore — was “a matter of some delicacy” and the party didn’t like to speak about it in public. After a year of brick walls he put the project on ice.
After political parties were unbanned in 1990, the Communist Party entered a period of glasnost where veterans who wanted to leave their mark in history wrote memoirs and handed their documents to universities.
“Though the Communist Party’s own archive doesn’t exist — or if it does exist it’s not open to the public — you can track the party’s internal records through the papers that have been left to universities by different activists,” says Lodge, who was able to mine a treasure trove of data from before the party’s inception through to the present.
Eight years ago there were no good reasons to put off the task and Lodge, who was dean of the faculty, dusted off his notes from 1984 and “in between balancing budgets, attending meetings and doing all the boring things that university managers do”, began working on Red Road to Freedom.
The SACP is one of the world’s oldest surviving communist parties and its impact on South African mainstream politics has been considerable.
One of the Communist Party’s considerable contributions, says Lodge, was making the struggle, and therefore post-apartheid SA, nonracial.
“I think the Communist Party’s contribution, which was absolutely critical, was in demonstrating very persuasively that there were white men and women and other people who are not African in the sense that the term was used, who were willing to make common cause with black South Africans and suffer the same kind of treatment from the state. It’s one thing to be nonracial in an abstract sense but it’s much better if you have hard evidence of interracial solidarity, and that’s what many of the key people in the Communist Party supplied.”
He’s quick to add that he’s not saying the ANC wouldn’t have been committed to nonracialism, but the strength of its commitment does owe a lot to the party.
Of course, the party itself had its own struggles with nonracialism. In 1922, a year after it was established, the Communist Party of SA (as it was known before it was banned and then reconstituted as the South African Communist Party in 1953) aligned itself with the mainstream white labour movement. It supported striking mineworkers who famously held aloft banners declaring: “White workers of the world to unite for a white South Africa”.
Lodge says the party had no choice but to support the strike.
“I mean, here you have a strike led by the most powerfully positioned group of workers in South Africa, a militarised insurrectionary movement directing itself against the state. The leaders of that strike certainly included people who were racists and were defending the sectarian interests of white workers, but it also included people who believed that sooner or later white miners would have to make common cause with black workers. But if you were a Marxist in the 1920s, how could you not be galvanised or excited by the sight of a class-based movement, albeit of white workers, pitting itself against
In South Africa the Communist Party, together with the ANC, stood for principles that one could admire
the state, arming itself and calling for the overthrow of capital?”
The strike was defeated (some strikers were jailed and a few were hanged) but the consequences were that the white workers got more or less what they wanted: job reservation.
According to Lodge, the capitulation of the trade union movement to this deal prompted the Communist Party to begin turning away from the cause of white labour and to identify more fully with trying to build a labour movement among black South Africans.
One of the intriguing questions that Lodge delves into in some detail is Nelson Mandela’s relationship with the Communist Party and whether he was a member of the party.
“There’s still a certain amount of residual doubt about whether he was actually a member,” says Lodge. “The state had always said Mandela was a communist, while his defenders argued that he wasn’t, that he was a Western-type democrat.”
There’s no documentation that decisively shows that Mandela was a member of the Communist Party, but, according to Lodge, between 1960 and 1962 he attended meetings as a member of the party’s central committee, and senior party members had every reason to believe he was a member of “the family” , as they called it.
“Whether Mandela himself believed he was a communist is a more difficult question to answer,” states Lodge.
“He was attracted to the party, he liked and trusted its leaders and he may have considered himself to be one of them, but we just don’t know.”
What we do know, he adds, is that Mandela was trying to turn the ANC into an organisation willing to incubate an armed insurrection, and it increasingly became obvious that the kinds of people who were willing to do this with him were communists.
Lodge’s research took him to all sorts of places, including rural England where he ate cucumber sandwiches with Douglas Wolton, the general secretary of the party in 1929.
Wolton, a Yorkshireman, arrived in SA just after World War 1 and was appointed to supervise the party by the Comintern, the Soviet-controlled organisation that advocated world communism.
Lodge points out that compared to many others, the South African party was lucky in its relationship with the Comintern because “only three of its members ended up in gulag camps”.
He said one of the most surprising things he discovered about the Communist Party during is research was the inability to make generalisations about it.
Another thing that surprised him was that he encountered “very few Stalinists” in the party. “Stalinists in the sense of people who were ideologically rigid or pushed a line. There are probably still people in the party who suggest that Stalin was misjudged, but what I tended to find among the members I met was much more intellectual openness than I expected.”
According to Lodge, by far and away the party’s most successful achievement in its 100 years of existence was building the organisational infrastructure in the late 1940s and early 1950s that enabled the ANC to become a mass movement and to really occupy the political space that existed for black South Africans in such a way that its legacy would continue for the next 40 years.
And its biggest failure?
“Not being sufficiently prepared at the end of the 1980s for national liberation because there were opportunities for it to have extracted more from the negotiations,” he says, adding that the party was locked into an idea of socialism that made it very contemptuous of Western-style social democracy.
“During that transitional period and in the early years of the ANC administration, more thinking and planning could have been done particularly on how to reduce inequality and how to re-engage with the rest of the industrial world in ways that would have been more advantageous. Instead, the party was too ready to capitulate to an idea that we need to restore a vigorous liberal capitalism. The extent to which members of the party were involved in arrangements that have subsequently been labelled as neoliberal was quite considerable. The party didn’t have strong policy alternatives with respect to how you might manage the economy.”
Lodge spent years “getting to know” the early communists who founded the party and I wonder what they would think of the state of the Communist Party 100 years on.
“They’d be amazed,” he says.
“The party today is a mass movement. It has a signed-up membership of somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000, that doesn’t translate into influence because numbers don’t, and it’s hardly the tail that wags the dog at the moment. You can probably count a significant number of communists in top ANC structures but when they’re within the ANC they don’t behave as communists. I think the leaders of the party in 1921 would be startled to see the extent to which the party has enmeshed itself in a nationalist movement.”
Even though it’s enmeshed in the ANC, the SACP hasn’t been able to use its agency to shift public policy in a way that would enable things like more employment-generating forms of economic activity and more effective land reform, says Lodge.
“When it’s had a chance to influence policy it hasn’t been terribly successful,” he adds.
There are communists within the party (and noncommunists within the ANC) who would like to see the party disentangle itself from the ANC and emerge as a separate force.
Lodge points out that since 2004 there has been an assertive minority proposing that the party should contest elections separately, which it did, standing in 21 wards in Free State by-elections in 2017. It won none but secured about 8% of the vote, which was enough to be allocated three of the proportional representation council seats and eat into the ANC’s support. The result for the SACP wasn’t encouraging, but Lodge believes the party may arrive at the point where it will have no choice but to go it alone because its historical alliance with the ANC “by no means guarantees forever a place in the sun for the party”.
“Every time the issue has come up in a serious way whether the party should contest the election separately, the party has opted for caution,” he says, adding that present policy is that the party should continue to abstain from independent electioneering, but the ANC in constituting its candidate lists should “reflect the composition of the alliance”.
The SACP is one of the world’s oldest surviving communist parties and, according to Lodge, it’s outlived most other communist parties because its identification with the antiapartheid struggle gave it credibility.
We’ve been chatting for a couple of hours and there’s just time for one last question. “Professor Lodge,” I ask, “are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t think I’m really the joining sort. And, to be honest, to have joined the Communist Party at the time when I might have been tempted to do so would have required an enormous amount of courage. I don’t think I’m brave enough.”
There’s a lengthy pause.
“In any case,” he says, “I was never asked.” Red Road to Freedom is an extraordinary and compelling book that should be read by anyone who wants to make sense of how SA got to where it is today.