Brian Bunting, 1975: Moses Kotane, South African Revolutionary, Chapter 2
The National Question Part 3 of 4: Africanisation 05 MosesKotane Moses Kotane, 1905-1978 Following the conference, however, the Africanisation of the Party was speeded up. Black party members were recruited in greater numbers and played an active role in existing organisations like the ICU (until Communists were expelled from the organisation in 1926), and the African National Congress. The Party started an African night school in Johannesburg, founded a number of African trade unions. Slowly the racial complexion of the Party began to change. It was not all plain sailing. In the period during and after the second world war, the idea of multi-racialism, of blacks and whites meeting and discussing together, belonging to the same organisations, became more widespread, if still anathema to the majority of whites, especially those in government. But in the twenties, the Communist Party was pioneering, breaking new, ground, frightening even some of its own members with its audacity. At the 4th Party congress held in Cape Town in December 1925, the same W. Kalk who had at the previous conference demanded that the Party fight for equal rights for blacks, complained that some people were pushing things too far. Speaking in the session held on Christmas Day, December 25, he protested: "Comrade Roux should not say at public meetings in Johannesburg that natives should walk on the pavements, etc. That is what causes trouble at the meetings". The majority of conference delegates, however, stuck to their guns. For the first time, a Communist Party conference was attended by a number of black delegates - J. Gomas, E.J. Khaile, P. de Norman - and for the first time a black was elected to the Party's Central Executive - the veteran T.W. Thibedi, who had been the main African activist for so many years in the Communist Party and before that in the ISL. He was followed in 1926 by J.A. la Guma, Gana Makabeni and J. Phahlane, while Jacob Tjelele was elected to the Central Executive in 1927. On June 21st, 1926, the Central Executive decided that articles in the African languages should be published in the Party paper, now named the South African Worker, though at the same meeting it was decided, after a long discussion, that the time was not ripe to appoint an African organiser. Nevertheless, the Party was getting its roots down. At the sixth congress of the Comintern in Moscow in August 1928, Bunting was able to inform the delegates that the Party then had 1,750 members, of whom 1,600 were Africans as against 200 a year before, "though", he added, "so far the effectiveness, the 'specific gravity' as it were, per head remains greater among the white members; thus the central executive of the Party, for example, contains only 3 or 4 native members out of a total of 13 simply for want of more efficient native comrades available as yet. Responsibility and initiative are not yet highly enough developed among most of our native membership, and some of our principal energies have for several years been devoted to the effort to develop them." There were some among the Party membership who felt that the failure of the blacks to pass the "specific gravity" test flowed not from their inadequacy but from the wrong policy pursued by the Party on the national question. One such was James la Guma, a Coloured Party leader from Cape Town who, together with ANC leader J.T. Gumede and TUC representative Daniel Colraine attended the February 1927 congress of the League against Imperialism in Brussels. Gumede had told the Brussels conference: "I am happy to say that there are Communists in South Africa. I myself am not one, but it is my experience that the, Communist Party is the only party that stands behind us and from which we can expect something". Shortly after his return, at the ANC conference which opened at Bloemfontein on July 28, 1927, Gumede expressed his opposition to the expulsion of the Communists from the ICU, and pointed out "that of all the political parties in the country, the Communist Party was the only one which honestly and sincerely fought for the emancipation of the oppressed natives". The conference endorsed his report of the Brussels conference proceedings, elected Gumede its new President-General and, for good measure, elected E.J. Khaile, a CP member who had been expelled from the ICU in terms of Kadalie's anti-Communist policy, as ANC general secretary. CP relationships with the ICU might be strained, but with the ANC at this period they were cordial, especially in the Cape, where in 1927 la Guma and Gomas were elected respectively secretary and chairman of the local ANC branch. Later in the year la Guma and Gumede were invited to visit the Soviet Union, where la Guma had discussions with Bukharin and other members of the Comintern Executive in Moscow. On his return to South Africa Gumede proclaimed of his visit to the Soviet Union: "I have seen the new world to come, where it has already begun. I have been to the new Jerusalem". On February 27, 1928, he attended a meeting of the Central Executive of the Communist Party by special invitation and reported on his visit to the Soviet Union. Though he never joined the Party, his close collaboration with it was to provoke the antagonism of the more conservative elements in the ANC who finally brought about his defeat in the election for President at the 1930 ANC conference. On March 15, 1928, just over two weeks after they had listened to Gumede's enthusiastic report, the Party's Central Executive heard a report of a somewhat different nature from la Guma, who had spent some days in Cape Town before following Gumede to Johannesburg. The minutes of the meeting report la Guma as stressing that "Bukharin had said that the white workers in South Africa, soaked as they were with imperialist ideology, were not of primary revolutionary importance in this country" This same CEC meeting had under discussion a draft "Resolution on the South African Question" drawn up by the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI) in preparation for the sixth congress of the CI held in Moscow in August and September 1928. The draft contained many of the ideas placed before the ECCI by la Guma when he was in Moscow. The main "Thesis on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies" adopted by the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International dealt with South Africa only in passing, devoting most of its attention to the world picture as a whole. Emphasising that the theses on the national and colonial questions drawn up by Lenin and adopted at the second congress were still valid and should serve as a guiding line for the further work of the Communist Parties, the 6th congress declared that since the second congress, "the actual significance of the colonies and semi-colonies, as factors of crisis in the imperialist world system, has vastly increased . . . the vast colonial and semi-colonial world has become an unquenchable blazing furnace of the revolutionary mass movement. "The establishment of a fighting front between the active forces of the socialist world revolution (the Soviet Union and the revolutionary Labour movement in the capitalist countries) on the one side, and the forces of imperialism on the other side, is of fundamental importance in the present epoch of world history. The toiling masses of the colonies struggling against imperialist slavery represent a most powerful auxiliary force of the socialist world revolution. The colonial countries at the present time constitute for world imperialism the most dangerous sector of their front". The resolution repeated the judgment of the second congress that "the alliance with the USSR and with the revolutionary proletariat of the imperialist countries creates for the toiling masses of the people of China, India and all other colonial and semi-colonial countries, the possibility of an independent, free, economic and cultural development, avoiding the stage of the domination of the capitalist system or even the development of capitalist relations in general." South Africa in this resolution was grouped with three other areas under the general heading "The Negro Question", the other three being 1. the United States and some South American countries in which the compact negro masses constitute a minority in relation to the white population; 2 the negro states which are actually colonies or semi-colonies of irnperialism (Liberia, Haiti, San Domingo); 3. the whole of Central Africa divided into the colonies and mandated territories of the various imperialist powers. The entire section on South Africa, a single paragraph in a 63-page document (and even this paragraph was missing from the first draft), read as follows: "In the Union of South Africa, the negro masses, which constitute the majority of the population, are being expropriated from the land by the white colonists and by the State, are deprived of political rights and of the right of freedom of movement, are subjected to most brutal forms of racial and class oppression, and suffer simultaneously from pre-capitalist and capitalist methods of exploitation and oppression. The Communist Party which has already achieved definite successes among the negro proletariat, has the duty of continuing still more energetically the struggle for complete equality of rights for the negroes, for the abolition of all special regulations and laws directed against negroes, and for confiscation of the land of the landlords. In drawing into its organisation non-negro workers, organising them in trade unions, and in carrying on a struggle for the acceptance of negroes by 'the trade unions of white workers, the Communist Party has the obligation to struggle by all methods against every racial prejudice in the ranks of the white workers and to eradicate entirely such prejudices from its own tanks. The Party must determinedly and consistently put forward the slogan for the creati6n of an independent native republic, with simultaneous guarantees for the rights of the white minority, and struggle in deeds for its realisation. In proportion as the development of capitalist relationships disintegrates the tribal structure, the Party must strengthen its work in the education in class-consciousness of the exploited strata of the negro population, and co-operate in their liberation from the influence of the exploiting tribal strata, which become more and more agents of imperialism This was not the resolution discussed at the meeting of the CEC of the South African Party on March 15, 1928. That was a much longer document discussing in detail the situation in South Africa and setting out the tasks confronting the Party. This special resolution on South Africa stated, inter alia: "The Party must orientate itself chiefly upon the native toiling masses while continuing to work actively among the white workers. The Party leadership must be developed in the same sense. This can only be achieved by bringing the native membership without delay into much more active leadership of the Party both locally and centrally. "While developing and strengthening the fight against all the customs, laws and regulations which discriminate against the native and coloured population in favour of the white population, the Communist Party of South Africa must combine the fight against all anti-native laws with the general political slogan in the fight against British domination, the slogan of an independent native South African republic as a stage towards a workers' and peasants' republic, with full equal rights for all races, black, coloured and white. "South Africa is a black country, the majority of its population is black and so is the majority of the workers and peasants. The bulk of the South African population is the black peasantry, whose land has been expropriated by the white minority. Seven eighths of the land is owned by the whites. Hence the national question in South Africa, which is based upon the agrarian question, lies at the foundation of the revolution in South Africa. The black peasantry constitutes the basic moving force of the revolution in alliance with and under the leadership of the working class." The resolution also stated that "the Party should pay particular attention to The embryonic organisations among the natives, such as The African National Congress. The Party, while retaining its full independence, should participate in these organisations, should seek to broaden and extend their activity. Our aim should be to transform the African National Congress into a fighting nationalist revolutionary organisation against the white bourgeoisie and the British imperialists, based upon the trade unions, peasant organisations etc. developing systematically the leadership of the workers and The Communist Party in this organisation". The difference between this resolution and the main resolution adopted by the 6th congress is at once apparent. Whereas the main resolution calls merely for the "creation of an independent native republic, with simultaneous guarantees for the rights of the white minority", the special resolution on the South African question called for "an independent native South African republic as a stage towards a workers' and peasants' republic, with full equal rights for all races, black, coloured and white". This addition of a socialist perspective to the slogan on the objectives of the national liberatory movement reflects the struggle over the "native republic" issue which occurred in the Communist Party of South Africa from the moment that the first draft was received by them in 1927. In his first reaction, Bunting reported to the Comintern that "at our party conference at the end of 1927 the proposal had a mixed reception", and it was resolved to defer discussion until after Ia Guma and Gumede had returned from Europe. But in the course of setting out his preliminary objections to the "native republic" slogan, Bunting provided one explanation of why the majority of the South African CP members were lagging in their approach to the national question. "The basis claimed for the slogan", said Bunting, "is no doubt Lenin's famous thesis on colonial affairs adopted at The Second Congress of the CI in 1920. Unfortunately it has been impossible to obtain a copy of this thesis to refer to" (My italics.) Bunting added that his sole knowledge of the thesis was derived from quotations which -"are believed to be correct" - presumably incorporated in the work of other writers. It is as well to bear in mind that, although Marxist writings were slowly spreading through the colonial world, the South African Party appears to have been framing its policies on the national question without full access to the vital discussions which had been going on in the Comintern for the previous seven years. At any rate, when the slogan was formally discussed at that CEC meeting in Johannesburg on March 15, 1928, the ECCI's draft was supported in discussion by la Guma, Douglas Wolton and his wife Molly, but opposed by V. Danchin, E.S. Sachs, B. Weibren, Gana Makabeni and Thibedi, who dubbed it "Garveyism" and racialistic. According to the minutes, even Wolton admitted that the thesis was open to misunderstanding and that its acceptance at that stage would endanger the party. -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. 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