Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
OF NON-RACIALISM
WHITE OPPOSITION TO APARTHEID IN THE 1950s
David Everatt
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
Chapter 9 The Freedom Charter and the politics of non-racialism, 1956–1960 195
Notes 215
Bibliography 249
Index 265
Acknowledgements
Books generate debts, and I owe many people far more than I will ever be able to repay.
A few, however, deserve special mention.
This book began life as a doctoral thesis in the dark and gloomy days of the 1980s,
and I owe my supervisor, the inimitable Stanley Trapido, far more than I knew when
we worked together or even fully grasp now. His is one of the many voices in my head.
Secondly, to all the remarkable people who populate the pages of this book, many of
whom I had the privilege of meeting, all of whom were unfailingly generous with their
time, their private papers, their memories, their gossip and all of whom – from conserva-
tive liberal to radical Trotskyist – shared an indefatigable belief in the ultimate triumph
of non-racialism over apartheid. Their generosity of spirit and commitment to the ideal
of a democratic South Africa taught me more than they will ever know, and all I can
offer is deeply sincere thanks and this book.
The original thesis was typed in the days when floppy discs were considered the
height of technological sophistication. When I came to re-work the thesis into a book,
floppy discs could reduce computers to hysterical laughter – but no more than that.
So my thanks to Phindi Hlatswayo who painstakingly re-typed the entire thesis (onto
a stiffy disc, as useful nowadays as a floppy disc…).
Raymond Suttner pushed me to publish, and I would never have done so without his
prompting. He, Rupert Taylor and Gerry Mare all offered good advice on how to improve
the manuscript, for which I am enormously grateful. I even took some of that advice!
And finally, family and friends, the people who have to look politely interested in
lengthy mealtime perorations about obscure yet (surely) fascinating moments in the
past – my thanks to you one and all. But don’t imagine you’re getting a free copy in
return for listening….
Introduction
We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:
That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no gov-
ernment can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people1
We, the people of South Africa … Believe that South Africa belongs to all who
live in it, united in our diversity.2
Among the most consistent threads in the discourse of liberation in South Africa was
a commitment to non-racialism. How strong that thread was – unbreakable3 according
to some, distinctly fragile according to others4 – can be debated. But from the 1955
Freedom Charter to the 1996 Constitution non-racialism has featured significantly in
the canon of all anti-apartheid organisations. The same applies internationally.
But it has also become clear since democracy was ushered in, in 1994, that a critical
weakness was the failure to define non-racialism, to give it content beyond that of a
slogan or a self-evident ‘good thing’.5 It made intuitive sense, uniting races where
apartheid divided them. But beyond that, what was the meaning of non-racialism?
The 1996 Constitution implicitly defined it as a democratic state where the rights of
every citizen are equally protected by the law. But is non-racialism the same as formal
equality? Is there no more to it than that, nothing to do with the actions or moral base
of individuals? Is it a passive or an active state? Are there specific types of action
required of a non-racialist, or is it all left to the state or political parties or courts to
resolve? For example, should the erstwhile non-racialist follow the advice of Warren
Beatty (in Bulworth) when he suggested that non-racial democrats should pursue ‘… a
programme of voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended procreative racial deconstruction’,
2 | THE ORIGINS OF NON-RACIALISM
by which was meant, he explained, ‘… everybody just gotta keep fuckin’ everybody till
we’re all the same color’6?
If for some reason this fails to appeal, does non-racialism require (some other types
of) pro-action on the part of the would-be non-racialist? And if so, what form should
this take? Is equity or redress involved, whereby the non-racialist can or should make
amends for the racialism of the past? How, and to whom, and for how long? Who
decides when enough is enough? And most importantly, how can this be done at an
ethical level? How do we move beyond repentance and redress – the latter currently
the focus of much state activity – and look to building new citizens and a new society
on a new moral basis, where individuals are not immediately pigeonholed socially, eco-
nomically, psychologically, intellectually or morally, by their race? How do we create
spaces where citizens can leave behind the trappings of race and engage as fellow
South Africans? There are no guidelines for being a genuinely non-racial citizen of the
new South Africa.
Worryingly, no one – including the African National Congress (ANC)-led govern-
ment – seems to know what a ‘normal’ post-apartheid state looks like, or how we will
know when we reach it. South Africa has been in a transition or undergoing transfor-
mation since 1994 – overwhelmingly, and appropriately, based on racial redress. But
how will we know when South Africa has stopped becoming and has arrived?
There is a more compelling philosophical question underpinning the issue, namely
is it possible for non-racialism to be realised under a nationalist government? Is non-
racialism compatible with nationalism at all? Non-racialism was crafted by the African
nationalist resistance movement in response to apartheid, itself a nationalist-fuelled
ideology; but it remains questionable whether that same African National Congress is
able to throw off the constraints and racial blinkers of nationalism and truly embrace
non-racialism. Much of this book analyses the warnings – of radical Marxists, liberals,
socialists, humanists and others from the 1950s – that nationalists, in the words of
Moeletsi Mbeki (brother of the more famous Thabo), were not militant democrats:
African nationalism was a movement of the small, Westernised black elite that
emerged under colonialism. Its fight was always for inclusion in the colonial
system so that it, too, could benefit from the spoils of colonialism.7
Ever since the African and Indian congresses formed an alliance, the approach has
been ‘equality under African leadership’. Post-apartheid experience to date suggests
that this is incompatible with non-racialism.
We live in an official non-racial democracy that insists on using the same racial
classification system as apartheid in order to measure how far we have travelled from
our shared, racist past. This is reasonable: disadvantage was created by race, and dif-
ferentiated by race (Africans had fewer rights than coloureds, who had fewer than
Introduction | 3
Indians, who had fewer than whites) and we need to measure whether previously dis-
advantaged people are receiving the democracy dividend. But we lack any pointers
showing us where we are going, or when – if ever – the need for racial classification will
fall away. And with it, when racial pigeonholing (ideologically, socially, inter-personally,
discursively) will be sloughed off so that, as Walt Whitman (in The Mystic Trumpeter)
would have it, it will be ‘enough to merely be! Enough to breathe!’
Initially, repentance and forgiveness – symbolised by Archbishop Tutu and President
Mandela – dominated the post-apartheid moral and political terrain. But once the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission wound up its work, and Mandela stepped
down after five years as president, these took a backseat to the aggressive work of
developing a national bourgeoisie, the historic task (in the view of many) of the national
democratic revolution. Redress is primarily exercised through state-sponsored vehicles
such as affirmative action and broad-based black economic empowerment, which seek
to ensure that state and some private sector resources are channelled to the emergent
black bourgeoisie. The failure to generate sustainable pro-poor growth has resulted in
some thirteen million citizens receiving social grants. The predictable white (and
Indian and coloured) resentment over ‘reverse discrimination’ is endemic. The result
is that non-racialism has retreated to the realm of the individual and the private,
rather than being societal and, by definition, public. Non-racialism has no common
pro-active moral content in post-apartheid South Africa.
In his Preface to Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Jonathan
Glover wrote:
This is not a book on philosophy. Nor is it a book about contemporary South Africa.
It is a history book. It seeks to help us understand how non-racialism emerged and the
various forms it took in doing so in the 1950s, the decade that forged the ANC in its
current form. It is primarily concerned with the impact of white participation on the
struggle against apartheid. This impact, overwhelmingly, was on the ideologies and
discourses of struggle. There were too few anti-apartheid whites to make any numeric
impact; but they did have a powerful influence on the nature of the struggle, including
ideology as well as the strategies and tactics used – and were visible testament to the
non-racialism that all espoused, albeit in different ways and taking different forms.
Like Glover, we too can think about disastrous man-made events such as apartheid –
which many of us were unlucky enough to live through – in order to better understand
4 | THE ORIGINS OF NON-RACIALISM
critical issues in contemporary South Africa. The history analysed here leads to ques-
tions about fundamental ethical issues that need to be considered by all South Africans
living in the post-apartheid state. The intention is not to answer them, but to raise them,
and hope that others will take them up.
1960s, and could not sit on the National Executive Committee until 1985. The United
Democratic Front (UDF), which spearheaded legal internal resistance to apartheid in
the 1980s (while the ANC was banned and exiled), retained the multiracial approach
of the Congress movement.
Multiracialism was one approach. The Communist Party – in both its pre-1950
CPSA and post-1953 South African Communist Party (SACP) forms – had a non-racial
structure, where people of all races belonged to the same organisation. The Liberal
Party was organised in the same way. Many whites sitting in the South African Congress
of Democrats (SACOD), the white wing of the Congress Alliance, were deeply uncom-
fortable with their racial structure, and the ANC stricture that their task was to organise
whites, the community to which they supposedly had easy access. (Many white
activists, of course, were ostracised by other whites, who had no interest in their ‘com-
munist’ message or ‘kaffirboet’ lifestyles.) As we see throughout this book, many white
liberals and leftists wanted little or nothing to do with their fellow white citizens – they
wanted to identify with, be seen with and work among black South Africans – ‘the path
of least resistance’, ANC–CPSA stalwart Moses Kotane labelled it.
Marxists and socialists not in the SACP also resisted the whites-only basis of
SACOD and the Congress Alliance more broadly, arguing that the struggle for equal
rights for all races was obscuring the ‘real’ struggle, which was class-based and aimed
at substantive equality for all. Non-racialism, in other words, was not merely a differ-
ent way of structuring an organisation or political party but had (or obtained) distinct
ideological overtones.
Over time the race-based structure of the Congress Alliance became a highly politi-
cised issue. Liberals and Africanists saw the multiracial structure of the alliance as a
vehicle designed by (white) communists through which they were able to exert over-
weening influence over the ANC. Lacking any significant numeric base, the argument
went, white communists were still able to lead Congress by the nose via its multiracial
structure, which gave them seats on the co-ordinating structures at the apex of the
Alliance, regardless of their tiny numerical base. Non-SACP Marxists attacked multi-
racialism and the ANC for elevating national liberation above class struggle and
socialist revolution; since 1928 the CPSA had supported the need for initial national
liberation preceding a class-based struggle.
The dispute heated up throughout the 1950s and, as a result, people became more
sensitive to the terms they used and what the different terms actually meant. By the
end of the decade, ‘interracial’ had largely disappeared. ‘Race relations’ had largely
returned to the Institute named after it. Multiracial referred to the way the Congress
movement was organised, while non-racialism was both the way the SACP and the
Liberal Party were organised and the stated goal of all anti-apartheid forces. Unless
quoting from the time, this is the way in which these terms are used in this book.
6 | THE ORIGINS OF NON-RACIALISM
A note on methodology
This book began life as a doctoral thesis, written in the 1980s. The research focused
heavily on secondary materials, including existing collections belonging to individuals
and organisations, as well as private papers made available to me by many activists of
the time (most of which I managed to archive in various university libraries in South
Africa and the United Kingdom). I also conducted a series of interviews (listed in the
references) with activists from the period.
8 | THE ORIGINS OF NON-RACIALISM
In the 1990s, however, everything changed: the ANC was unbanned, Mandela
released, apartheid crumbled with a whimper, democracy was ushered in and a new
South Africa was born. Of course, a great deal did not change – precisely the reason
for returning to this topic, where non-racialism remains undefined and racial classifi-
cation and race-based thinking remain pervasive after fifteen years of ANC rule.
Rewriting the thesis as a book has allowed me the opportunity to introduce new
material, primarily from the biographies of many key actors from the period (see the
Reference section). But it should be clearly stated that I did not embark on a second
round of qualitative research; that the respondents who were interviewed were over-
whelmingly white activists from the 1950s, and more black respondents might have
provided differing perspectives; and that the book does not attempt to engage with
current discourses around race, identity and related topics. How damaging these factors
are to the overall thrust of the book is left to the reader to decide.
This is a history book. It tries to tell the story of a remarkably talented, courageous
and visionary generation of activists, of all races, and the ways in which they dreamed
up a possible future for South Africa. It is the task of those of us fortunate enough to
live in ‘the new South Africa’ to see whether or not we measure up to the standards
they set and change accordingly – in areas such as self-sacrifice, service, bravery, cama-
raderie – in essence, full and active citizenship. Above all, South Africa carries global
expectations, as the ‘miracle’ of the 1990s, that we can and will give meaning to non-
racialism, and create a society that truly belongs to all who live in it, black and white.