Table Of ContentMANDELA, SOBUKWE AND LEBALLO
THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY
AND THE PAN AFRICANIST CONGRESS
Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela Potlako Kitchener Leballo
1925 - 1978 1918 - 2013 1915 - 1986
Bernard “Ben” Leeman
[email protected]
5 July 2016
SEQUENCE OF EVENTS
1940 The African National Congress (ANC) revives its fading fortunes by electing a cautious
but modernizing president, Dr Alfred Bitini Xuma
1944 Radical young Africans associated with Anton Muziwakhe Lembede decide to form the
ANC Youth League (ANCYL) rather than a more militant separate party
1945 John Beaver “J. B.” Marks revives the Communist Party’s reputation in the Miners
Strike but consequent repression makes it impossible to utilize miners for political
agitation for decades
1947 Lembede dies and is replaced by the ineffectual theorist Ashley Peter Mda
1948 The Purified National Party of Dr Malan wins the national election and, despite its slim
majority, ignores its own economic advisers to implement apartheid
1949 The ANCYL succeeds in having a compromise strategy The Programme of Action
adopted as ANC policy, which imitates Gandhi and Nkrumah’s examples of peaceful
mass protests but without due consideration for counter measures against the
possibility of white regime extreme retaliation. Dr Xuma is replaced by Dr Moroka as
ANC president
1950 Kwame Nkrumah’s Positive Action campaign in Gold Coast (Ghana). Nelson Mandela
is appointed leader of the Defiance Campaign volunteers
Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) dissolves to avoid prosecution
1951-2 Inspired by Nkrumah’s February 1951 election victory in Ghana, thousands of ANC
volunteers and affiliated minority ethnic organisations defy the pass laws and other
race-based restrictions. Basutoland African Congress (BAC) founded in Basutoland
against ANC wishes. P. K. Leballo heads most powerful (Transvaal) BAC branch.
March 1952 Nkrumah becomes prime minister in Ghana.
Dec 1952 The ANC leadership calls off the Defiance Campaign, frightened by escalating
violence and impeding legislation. Dr Moroka is sacked and replaced by Chief Albert
Lutuli
1953 The Criminal Law Amendment Act and Public Safety Act deter political activists
from professional classes from confrontational activities. Growing anger from lower
class ANC activists against leadership’s perceived cowardice. Communists secretly
form South African Communist Party (SACP) and gain control over Congress of
Democrats, Indian Congress, SACPO, and SACTU. ANC secretary general Walter
Sisulu secretly visits Soviet bloc without Lutuli’s knowledge
1954 Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe and P. K. Leballo take over the leadership of the
Africanist Movement from Mda and lead campaign against clandestine communist
control of ANC
1955 Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. secret members of the SACP, manipulate The
Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter events, taking advantage of Lutuli’s
lethargy and isolation, to reduce the ANC to the position of a mere equal in a five
man SACP executive committee in charge of the Congress Alliance: ANC, SAIC,
SACPO, COD and SACTU.
1956 Inept blanket arrests of past and present activists and subsequent Treason Trial give
2
international publicity to Congress Alliance leaders but exacerbate corruption and
mismanagement in the Transvaal ANC. Africanist strength escalates
1957 Oliver Tambo alters the ANC Constitution to entrench elitist undemocratic structure
of Congress Alliance. Nkrumah’s Ghana independent
1958 Basotho leader Ntsu Mokhehle elected to AAPC (“African Comintern”) Steering
Committee but British government imposes adopts new constitution on Basutoland
similar to Congress Alliance. Oliver Tambo closes ANC Transvaal Province
Conference to prevent election of Robert Sobukwe in place of Nelson Mandela.
Mokhehle advises Sobukwe, Leballo and Madzunya to form a new party backed by
the AAPC of Kwame Nkrumah. BAC become Basutoland Congress Party (BCP)
1959 April formation of the PAC Africanist Congress. Sobukwe becomes president with
Leballo as secretary-general. Rapid recruitment of young male lower class activists
with considerable assistance from Mokhehle’s BCP
December ANC and PAC conferences both plan for national demonstrations in 1960.
Challenged by ANC, the PAC decides to launch a major campaign rather than gain
experience first
1960 Ntsu Mokhehle wins 36 out of 40 seats in the Basutoland election but 40 additional
nominated members relegate him to a minor role. However, BCP controls eight out of
nine local government district councils. PAC demonstrations commence on 21 March
with significant support from Basotho communities in the Transvaal and Cape. Main
PAC leaders arrested before shooting at Sharpeville kills over 69 protestors. Pass
laws suspended
March 30 Colonel Terblanche disobeys orders to save Cape Town from probable
police-PAC carnage. State of Emergency declared. PAC and ANC banned. Verwoerd
survives assassination attempt and believes he has divine mission. Pass laws
reinstated. PAC leaders jailed on 4 May – Sobukwe for three years. 1950’s rural
tensions in the Transkei escalate and coalesce into Poqo movement. ANC, Unity
Movement and PAC all claim leadership but PAC eventually takes over.
1961 March 25-26, All In Conference Mandela announces formation of All Action
Council. Police respond in May by arresting over eight thousand suspects. Mokhehle
attacked for criticising Mandela. November 1961 formation of ANC military force,
Umkhonto we Sizwe led by eleven SACP members under Mandela and ostensibly
modelled on the Israeli Irgun movement but emphasizing sabotage not combat.
1962 Mandela secretly leaves South Africa for other African states and obtains basic
military training in Ethiopia. Urges an end to Alliance domination of ANC. Arrested
in August after probable SACP betrayal and sentenced to five years jail. Leballo
escapes to Basutoland from Tongaland detention and takes over as acting PAC leader.
PAC violence in the Cape.
1963 Poqo/PAC Mbashe River bridge murders and other violence leads to severe white
criticism of NP regime. Leballo warns that the coming war will cause widespread
white civilian deaths. The British police raid PAC HQ in Maseru. Leballo evades
capture for six months. Sobukwe detained after completing his sentence and sent to
Robben Island. MK high command captured at Liliesleaf farm, Rivonia, along with
Mandela’s incriminating diary. “Rivonia Trial” begins. PMU formed in Protectorates.
1964 Mandela receives life sentence. Leballo expelled from Basutoland. Royalist-ANC
oriented Marematlou Freedom Party (MFP) support plummets following Rothe
murders. Shift in anti-BCP forces from MFP to NP-Catholic missionary OMI backed
BNP. Nkrumah declares one party state and himself as president for life.
1965 Overconfidence, neglect of eastern mountains, and SACP funding costs BCP election
win. BNP government derided as NP-OMI puppet-“government of herd boys.”
3
Leabua Jonathan becomes prime minister after by-election. Traditional chiefs replace
elected district councils.
1966 Leabua Jonathan meets Verwoerd in Pretoria. Vorster becomes prime minister after
Verwoerd’s assassination. October independence for Lesotho. Thaba Bosiu violence –
the Lesotho King attempts to become executive monarch and BCP tries to swamp
government offices and seize power. King signs “suicide clause” and becomes a
restricted recluse. February, Nkrumah overthrown by coup.
1967 Albert Lutuli killed on railway line. Oliver Tambo becomes acting ANC president.
1968 Leballo, with Sobukwe’s support, reorients PAC towards a synthesis of Africanist
thought with Maoism. Attempts to militarise exiles fiercely opposed by PAC exiled
reformists.
1970 Ntsu Mokhehle wins the January general election but is denied power by a British
mercenary led coup with links to rogue South African intelligence operatives.
1974 Following release from detention, BCP activists launch an unsuccessful rising.
Refugee Basotho are recruited by Leballo and Mokhehle as Lesotho Liberation Army
(LLA) ostensibly as APLA guerrillas and trained in Libya. Portuguese coup enables
Moscow –allied movements to take power in former colonies but Machel permits
PAC’s ally ZANU to establish bases after ZAPU ineptitude
1976 Refugees from the Soweto and Cape rising solve the ANC/SACP and PAC
recruitment problems.
1977 ANC/SACP ally to Leabua Jonathan to thwart BCP and PAC. Steve Biko, designated
PAC deputy leader, murdered in detention
1978 Former CIA deputy director Ray Cline, funded by international extreme right wing
Anti-Communist League, establishes office in South Africa to fund Inkatha, UNITA,
RENAMO and other organisations. The Carter administration pressures PAC to adopt
detente and dialogue. Massive American and Nigerian bribery buys support for
American and Tanzanian backed David Sibeko’s reform faction. LLA quarantined in
Tanzania. Leballo elected chairman (not president) of PAC and Sibeko seizes power
when Leballo leaves for England. White APLA officer funds LLA escape from
Tanzania to begin war in Lesotho. Sibeko assassinated by angry APLA leaders.
1979 Guerrilla war begins in Lesotho. Zephaniah Mothopeng, senior PAC member inside
South Africa and clandestine APLA recruiter, imprisoned
1980 11 March Tanzanian troops kill, wound, detain and split up ALPA for refusing to
follow Vus Make and accept Nyerere’s decision that it is too dangerous to fight
Pretoria. Zimbabwe becomes independence. Leballo arrives in Harare. LLA asks him
for help since Mokhehle had disappeared.
1981 Tanzania installs Pokela as PAC leader and demands Mugabe expel Leballo when
APLA troops in Tanzania reject Pokela. Leballo arrested and deported to Libya.
Mokhehle, beset by declining health and mental pressures, leaves Botswana to hide in
South Africa. Cline’s operatives take him to Lisikisiki near Port St John’s where he
assists American, Rhodesian and other agents experiment with psychological
methods and physical torture to “turn” guerrillas.”
1985 Pokela dies suddenly in Harare. Leballo manages to unite former rivals and in
January begins to pressure Lesotho commander Justin Lekhanya to remove Leabua
Jonathan and restore democracy. Twentieth-fifth anniversary of Sharpeville
demonstrations lead to ongoing violence. Agitation by internal political organisations
more effective than external ANC/SACP and PAC
1986 Leballo dies of hypertension aged seventy (not sixty as he claimed). PAC degenerates
into inept, corrupt, murderous, mystical fascism. Lekhanya, also under pressure from
Pretoria, seizes power shortly after Leballo’s death but appoints Lesotho Communist
4
Party leader Sefali Malefane and former MFP secretary-general Bennett Khaketla as
ministers in his coup government. Leballo buried at Lifelekoaneng but Lekhanya
forbids public attendance. Mokhehle returns to Lesotho
1991 Release of Nelson Mandela
1992 Lekhanya removed in a coup
1993 Mokhehle wins every seat in the Lesotho national election but BCP eventually splits
into four after he fails to address his brother Shakhane’s corruption
1994 Mandela elected president of South Africa, one of very few Communist Party leaders
globally elected in a democratic vote. Parasitic SACP members elected under ANC
umbrella. No viable left wing party contents the elections. Tanzanian-puppet PAC
wins 1.25% of the vote and five seats
1999 PAC wins 0.71 % of the vote and three seats
Death of Ntsu Mokhehle
2003 PAC vice president Patricia de Lille breaks away to form new Independent
Democrats party (ID). Walter Sisulu dies and SACP reveals he was a secret member
of the party
2004 ID wins 1.7% of the vote and seven seats.
PAC wins 0.73 % of the vote and three seats. Its leader, Mokotso Pheko, who claims
two bogus degrees, is later sacked for corruption. He is replaced by Letlapa
Mphahlele, a psychotic murderer
2009 PAC wins 0.27% of the vote and a single seat
2012 Fiftieth anniversary of Sharpeville Massacre
2013 Nelson Mandela dies and SACP reveals he was a secret member of the party
Julius Malema launches Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party
2014 PAC wins 0.21% of vote (one seat). EFF wins 6.4 % (25 seats). De Lille’s IP merged
with the main opposition Democratic Alliance party.
2015 Letlapa Mphahlele re-elected PAC leader
5
INTRODUCTION
Nelson Mandela was, and will remain, a major historical figure. Unfortunately, he has been ill-served by
biographers and, in the opinion of many – especially the Africanists/Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) – should
have, in his autobiography, elaborated on defining episodes in his career, in particular the events of late 1962
following his return from Ethiopia. He was a far more complex activist than portrayed as the “Messiah come to
claim his realm” in the majority of biographies; and succeeded despite major errors that have been expunged
from most commentaries. Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe and Potlako Leballo are hardly known outside Southern
Africa, which is indicative of media manipulation and antipathy towards grass roots movements hostile to
European ideologies. They were leaders of a type of movement that has since proliferated elsewhere in Africa
and the Middle East where exasperated, younger, less-educated activists, seize the initiative from conservative
elites.
The first draft of this work was written in 2010 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre.
In that work, Nelson Mandela’s career between 1953 and 1960 was likened to the Shakespearean tragic hero
Hamlet, prince of Denmark, another dithering aristocrat who acted too late; and Walter Sisulu was compared to
Judas Iscariot. Not surprisingly, no publisher or even printer in South Africa considered producing it. That
proved fortunate because the political history of South Africa between 1950 and 1960 has undergone a
reassessment following the disclosure after Mandela’s death in 2013 that he, like Sisulu, had been a secret
member of the clandestine South African Communist Party (SACP)1 and were responsible for betraying Albert
Lutuli’s trust and placing the ANC under the control of the SACP. Whereas many liberation movements have
benefited significantly from communist links, the SACP’s Eastern European/Indian leadership’s ultra cautious,
micro-management style of trying to overthrow the South African regime, through potato boycotts and the like,
finally exasperated Mandela. His silence on his secret party membership probably reflects either his lack of
commitment or a deep feeling of regret. Whatever his attitude, Mandela’s Communist Party links stifled the
South African liberation movement, split the African National Congress (ANC) on class lines and confounded
African politics by relegating the ANC to the role as an emasculated stooge of the Soviet Union rather than a
party committed to mass action. Since the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other Western security
organisations were either aware or extremely suspicious of Mandela’s involvement, it cost the ANC support of
American administrations from Eisenhower to Reagan as well as sections of the Civil Rights Movement, and
other African-American organisations. It even placed Mandela on a “terrorist” list. Had Mandela not arranged
the coup that related the ANC to SACP control in 1955; and had the ANC stayed aloof from the Cold War, the
ANC would not have wasted the years 1955 - 1989 posturing as a Soviet vanguard movement that incited even
more unsavoury American intelligence elements to infest the region. It is even possible that freedom could have
come much earlier to South Africa. Mandela could have broadened the ANC’s appeal by accommodating the
Africanists, instead of trying to kill their dynamism. They, in turn, later admitted they should have stayed in the
ANC and fought out issues rather than forming the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959.2 The Sharpeville Massacre
of 21 March 1960 was certainly an indirect result of Mandela’s decision to curb mass activism and place the
ANC under SACP. In summary, the story of the South African liberation struggle is really of only two
movements striving for supremacy – the South African Communist Party and the Pan Africanist Congress.
From 1955 to the present (although partially influenced by the collapse of the Soviet union), the ANC has been
merely a brand name exploited by the SACP, which has provided three of its members - Mandela, Mbeki and
Zuma - as presidents and still gets elected to parliament along with COSATU (the trade union movement),
masquerading as ANC. Despite ostensibly democratic elections, real power is invested in the troika (ANC
elitists/COSATU/SACP), which represents the urban professionals, big business and privileged miners.
The United States, which opposed the ANC for decades because of the SACP’s control, characteristically
destroyed effective opposition by its inept manipulation of the PAC 1978-1980 and its “outsourced”3 attempt to
make Inkatha a viable force.
Although the Sharpeville Massacre is probably the most famous event in South African history next to the
election of Mandela as president, there are very few serious accounts of the issues that led to the national
1 Obituary of Professor Stephen Ellis, The Independent (UK) 18 August 2015
2 Several remarks to this writer by Potlako Leballo
3 The USA privatized some of its foreign policy by using ex CIA operatives. The prime example was Ray Steiner
Cline, who was funded by the Anti-Communist League, an organisation he helped found (or even created) while
CIA chief in Taiwan.
6
demonstrations that day, which Mandela himself opposed. Although neither the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC)
president Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe nor Potlako Kitchener Leballo, PAC secretary-general and eventual PAC
leader and army commander, wrote about their experiences, some perceptive accounts survive. The best among
them are Martyrs and Fanatics by Peter Dreyer, a member of the South African Liberal Party; African
Liberation Movements by Richard Gibson, an African American Marxist; An African Explains Apartheid by
Jordan Ngubane, a political maverick; and Black Power in South Africa by Gail Gerhart. These writers
personally knew or interviewed in depth the major players such as the PAC and/or Africanist ANC leaders
Sobukwe, Leballo, Ashley Peter Mda, and Nyakane Michael Tsolo, although Gerhart did not use some very
insightful interviews relating to the class aspect of the Africanist Movement when she finally published her
work. Of great value are Forty Lost Years by Dan O’Meara and The Apartheid State in Crisis by Robert Price,
as they facilitate placing the rise of the Africanist Movement and the PAC in their social and economic context,
representing the rise after 1945 of the African urban lower middle class, still strongly linked to its recent rural
past. Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (pages 345-377) is a revealing account of finally coming to
terms with his role in the Freedom Charter and Congress Alliance’s intrigue that so damaged resistance to
white rule. Works by Tom Lodge, a hostile white elitist; and Kwandiwe Merriman Kondlo, whose doctrinal
thesis was supervised by Afrikaners, are deeply flawed by reliance on evidence taken from inept police
informers4 and self-styled former PAC activists whose attempts to ingratiate themselves with ANC for gainful
employment in 1993/4 were matched by the venom they displayed distancing themselves from their more
principled comrades. Sobukwe and Apartheid by Benjamin Pogrund, a close friend of Mangaliso Robert
Sobukwe, the PAC president, is surprisingly shallow although Pogrund, as he admits, had somewhat distanced
himself from Sobukwe in the lead-up to Sharpeville. One of the potentially most accurate analytical accounts,
unfortunately never completed, should have been by Stephen Franklin Burgess, a much troubled Marxist
American academic5. My own 1984 PhD magna cum laude thesis on the ANC, PAC, SACP and BCP-Lesotho
is still downloaded on average three times daily on www.academia.edu, so it may have some merit.
The Sharpeville Massacre was very much the result of the failure of the ANC, despite the 1949 Programme
of Action, to become a mass democratic movement. The inexorable implementation of draconian apartheid
legislation in the 1950s desperately required a united African opposition but the years 1952-1960 were wasted,
as leading ANC/SACP officials and theorists from relatively privileged backgrounds fought to entrench
themselves against “socially unacceptable” rivals from the increasingly militant and expanding urban African
lower and lower middle class. This was the period where Mandela should have asserted himself as the major
African nationalist (leaders elsewhere made their move when much younger) but was instead distracted by the
multiracial good life, his career, and higher class aspirations. The malaise of the 1950’s created a political
culture lasting today. Whereas the Cuban revolution accomplished astonishing social, educational, medical,
military, sporting, land distribution and other achievements within a short time of seizing power, the “new”
South Africa, after twenty-two years, remains a crime ridden society with major health problems and an
astonishingly escalating disparity of wealth far worse than under the apartheid regime. The ruling
ANC/SACP/COSATU alliance is rooted in the conspiratorial undemocratic elitism of the 1950’s that led to
Sharpeville. In Professor Iliffe’s words, “The deeper reality [of 1994] was that two elites [black and white]
sought a settlement which would enable them to contain, and perhaps in part relive, the immense pressures from
below bred by demographic growth, mass poverty, urbanization, education, and the demands of youth…”. Now,
as the “settlement” generation passes away, there can be a more open discussion of that period of history no
longer dominated by academics, journalists, and writers sympathetic to the ANC.
Bernard “Ben” Leeman
Former PAC education secretary
APLA Intelligence and liaison officer to the BCP/LLA 1977-1981
Adjutant to Potlako Leballo, 1980-1986
Co-editor The Africanist
5 July 2016
4 Kondlo calls me “Benjamin” and both he and Lodge call Potlako Leballo “Potlake”. Neither had military
experience nor association with mainstream pre-1986 PAC/APLA . Lodge is not known to have any knowledge
of Venda, Sotho, Zulu or Xhosa languages. PAC compared Lodge’s research to a British liberal visiting Nazi
Germany, using only Gestapo files to write a denigratory attack on Jewish resistance.
5 Burgess eventually became an instructor at Maxwell Airforce Academy, Alabama, USA
7
CHAPTER ONE
On 21 March 1960, thousands of supporters of the newly formed Pan Africanist Congress (PAC)
presented themselves for arrest at Sharpeville police station south of Johannesburg. Some, including of
of their main leaders, Mike Nyakane Tsolo, were taken into custody but the others, wavering between
good humour and impatience, remained outside. Eventually, a scuffle triggered the police into opening
fire upon the crowd, killing at least sixty nine. Most were shot in the back. The massacre and its
immediate consequences panicked the country’s white population but, despite African restraint, the
white, predominantly rural Afrikaner farming members of the National Party regime banned the two
major African political movements, the militant PAC and the more conservative African National
Congress (ANC), forcing them into armed conflict.
To those who have a better knowledge of the events that led to Sharpeville, the majority of
accounts read as if the narrator is addressing an audience hoping they will not notice a gigantic
elephant standing behind him. The elephant represents what cannot be mentioned and certainly not
published in the “new” South Africa: the issues that reflect extremely badly on many ANC and SACP
“heroes” and which nearly obliterated the ANC from history.
There were four main factors behind the events that led to the Sharpeville Massacre. The first was
obvious. Africans wanted opportunities to lead prosperous meaningful lives and therefore an end to
minority white rule and racial persecution. They naturally received support from the Indian and
“Coloured” (mixed race) communities and also from a few white dissidents: liberal, communist and
otherwise. The second, barely alluded to any work on Sharpeville, was an attempt by Basotho
politicians in and outside Basutoland (Lesotho) to play a significant role in South African politics as a
means to rectify historical injustices and establish a powerful role in a future united “Azanian” state.
The third was the culmination of a struggle that had split the ANC into two parties on class lines and
mostly concerned the most effective strategy to achieve freedom. Lastly, there was the highly
controversial, even treacherous, behaviour of Nelson Mandela, the ANC deputy national president
leader, and Walter Sisulu, the ANC secretary-general, who, taking advantage of the ANC president-
general Albert Lutuli’s stress–induced indolence, succeeded in subordinating the ANC in 1955 to
control by the well funded, but clandestine, minuscule, and slavishly Moscow-oriented South African
Communist Party, which they had secretly joined and whose philosophies and vision were in total
contrast to those of the ANC.
The ANC had been founded in 1912 by a group of westernized Christian professionals, traders,
and members of the old royal houses and court circles. The party was at first a sort of social network
among the aristocracy, its feudal retainers, main stream Christians, and the westernised elite that
advocated parliamentary democracy and mercantile Christian capitalism on the British model, which
blended male democracy (women were first admitted as ANC members in 1943) and the rights of
hereditary nobility, while encouraging a socio-economic system that emphasized personal acquisition,
individual land tenure, career diversity, consumerism, the monetarization of relationships, and free
trade. Its political strategy was completely ineffectual and characterized by polite petitioning to the
Afrikaner-dominated Union government. As a consequence of the ANC’s failure to oppose the 1936
Land Acts and move beyond its narrow appeal to relatively privileged Africans; it was in danger of
being disbanded in 1940. It owed its revival to a new leader, a modernizer named Dr Alfred Bitini
Xuma (1893-1962), and the establishment of a radical Youth League inspired by Anton Muziwakhe
Lembede. Despite, or maybe because of, its conservatism, the ANC nevertheless faced down
challenges from a number of rivals, some with international links, such as the Marcus Garvey’s United
Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Clements Kadalie’s Industrial and Commercial Union
(ICU), the Trotskyite Unity Movement and Paul Mosaka’s short lived African Democratic Party
(ADP).
8
From 1945 onwards, the ANC leadership’s most valuable ally was the Communist Party (CPSA),
founded in 1921. The CP wanted to establish a Soviet Republic. It politicized industrial workers in
order to create a vanguard to seize control of the country. Until recently, the Communist Party was
dominated by ethnic minorities, particularly Jewish Eastern Europeans and descendents of migrants
from British Imperial India (modern India and Pakistan). In the 1920’s, the CPSA did valuable
pioneering work, encouraged by Joseph Stalin’s decision to support a “Black Republic” and its
successful alliance under CPSA secretary-general Albert Nzula6 (1905-1934) with the ANC’s radical
president-general (1927-1930) Josiah Tshangana Gumede (1870-1947). However, by 1940, the
CPSA’s credibility was in serious jeopardy for slavishly supporting Soviet dictates, which had shifted
from African revolution to acceptance of colonial rule and an alliance with Nazi Germany. One of the
important consequences of this Soviet reversal was that other anti-colonial movements, such as the
Chinese and Indo-Chinese communist parties, became far more self reliant, while George Padmore,
the former Soviet agent for African revolution, also took an independent stance, recruiting Kwame
Nkrumah and other future African leaders to a more militant approach against White rule.
Xuma recognized that the old ANC leadership style, apart from Gumede’s, had been somewhat
lackadaisical and attached to the notion that high academic qualifications, royal blood and professional
status guaranteed adulation and support. Though Xuma was from a royal Xhosa background, he
abolished the party’s House of Chiefs, established an efficient centralized secretariat and accounting
system, called for full participation of Africans in the Union, and allowed all races to join the party.
He removed the word “Native” from the ANC’s name and united the party by abolishing the autonomy
of the four provincial ANC’s. He favoured a socialist agenda and joint action with the CPSA. Padmore
accused him of being a CPSA fellow traveller but years later, in 1959, Xuma covertly (so as not to
antagonize his wife) joined the PAC. Despite the steady expansion of the ANC under Xuma, the party
was unable to gauge popular support for its actions outside the townships and the best it could do in
such circumstances (especially during the Second World War) was to create a competent
administrative structure with a political program more radical than the 1930’s but not radical enough
to provoke the minority racist regime into banning it. Xuma still sought accommodation with the
ruling United Party – he was later encouraged by the friendly greeting he received from white
regime’s prime minister, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, at the United Nations in 1946.
By 1940, the ANC had achieved little or no success in galvanizing support from the subsistence
farmers, urban professionals, and underpaid artisan class but the creation of the ANCYL attracted a
new generation of young African activists representing a wider socio-economic class.
Industrialization, consumerism, education and urbanization were already diversifying African society
before it was exposed to new influences and pressures in the Second World War. Between 1940 and
1950, the number of urbanized Africans rose from 14 to 22 per cent and their numbers in the
manufacturing industries by 81%. After 1945, manufacturing always contributed more to the economy
than mining, which thereafter sometimes even dipped below agriculture (e.g. 1950 – 1955).
Eventually the demands of manufacturing would be the major force for ending minority European
rule.
The ANC and CPSA, except for the brief flurry in the late 1920’s, had advocated polices that were
too narrow in their appeal. Occupations were diversifying (see Table 1)
6 Nzula was sent for studies in Moscow where he became an alcoholic and suspected Trotskyite. He died of
pneumonia after falling asleep drunk in a snowdrift.
9
Table 1. SOUTH AFRICAN WORKFORCE 1950 – 1970
Sector 1950 (%) 1960 (%) 1970 (%)
Agriculture 40 36 28
Mining 22 23 21
Manufacturing 25 27 37
Commerce 13 14 14
Total Figures 2,219122 2,561,850 3,160619
Inevitably the new rising generation of schoolteachers, artisans, nurses, former soldiers, petty
entrepreneurs, lesser clergy, clerks, migrant workers, subsistence farmers, criminal gangs, factory
workers, sports enthusiasts, and unemployed youth were impatient. They were interested in a far wider
range of economic and social issues. The rapidly expanding African townships with a high
concentration of intelligent, skilled, innovative and ambitious workers, forming networks in long term
residential areas, inevitably heightened political awareness and facilitated political organization. For
example, African industrial unrest escalated after 1940 and, by 1945, trade union membership reached
128,000, five times what it had been in 1940. Afrikaner economic and political power was still
overwhelmingly rural and mindful of the Uitlander experience, when foreign white skilled workers
and foreign investment threatened their power. Afrikaners were hostile to the rapidly expanding urban
African proletariat. Consequently, there was a significant Afrikaner shift against Smuts after his 1943
election victory in the interest of Afrikaner self-preservation. The white electoral system was highly
skewed in favour of rural Afrikaner constituencies and this was reflected until the late 1960’s in the
regime’s parliament.
Whereas Xuma’s ANC was advocating eventual African equality in every sphere of South African
society, the competing imperial United Party and republican National Party rivals within
Afrikanerdom were rooted deeply in the past. Smuts still dreamed of using the British imperial
connection to enhance South Africa’s world status and gain local advantages as he had done after the
First World War. Indicative of his mindset, Smuts complained, when he lost the 1948 election, that his
old comrades had deserted him. An aide pointed out that all his old comrades were dead. Dr François
Malan, who defeated Smuts in the 1948 election, still sought revenge for Smuts’ refusal to spare the
First World War traitor, Jopie Fourie, and sought to transform South Africa into a holy Afrikaner
fascist arcadia. Colour and religion aside, the majority of black South Africans and the whites who
controlled business and industry probably supported the ideals of the Xuma’s ANC – peace, education,
land redistribution, economic cooperation, wage equality, an end of the pass system, and eventual
universal franchise. The advent of Malan’s hideous experiment in social engineering in 1948 (which
his own think tank opposed) was indeed, in Dan O’Meara words, the start of forty lost years.
The nature of the PAC’s national protests in 1960 was inspired by resistance ideologies developed
by the ANCYL. The original idea for an ANC Youth League came from Manasseh Moerane, who later
became editor of The World and joined Moral Rearmament, which Padmore identified as a significant
threat to African liberation with its appeal to achieve upper middle class status mitigated by Christian
values and “good works”. The ANC Youth League (ANCYL) was founded under William Nkomo at
the Bantu Men’s Social Centre in Johannesburg in April 1944. The ANCYL became a dynamic closet
revolutionary but ostensibly radical vanguard movement under Nkomo’s successor as president, Anton
Muziwakhe Lembede (1914-1947), a puritanical Zulu intellectual from a poor subsistence farming
family, who had originally considered forming a separate organization to the ANC. Lembede had
gained his BA, LLB and Masters degrees through distance education from UNISA but provided a
focal point for a younger generation of African politicians particularly associated with University
College, Fort Hare. However, from the very start, the ANCYL was divided into two main camps that
eventually caused civil war within the ANC. Lembede himself was rural oriented and rejected both the
British-oriented ANC objective of a capitalist industrial economy and neglected rural class sustaining
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