1950–1951

May Day had been celebrated in Johannesburg for as long as I could remember. It was the ‘workers’ day of unity’, celebrated in a uniquely South African way, with rigid black-white separation.

On May Day mornings white trade unionists would parade through the city with union banners and slogan-decorated trucks. In the afternoon they would adjourn with their families to a sports meeting, with beer and speeches, before going home. Then, after working hours, black workers would gather in thousands for their May Day at the Bantu Sports Ground.

The white event was regularly organised by a so-called ‘United May Day Committee’ composed of representatives of all the supporting bodies – mainly white trade unions. For some years I represented the Labour League of Youth on the committee, and then later the Communist Party.

Between summers the committee would hibernate until summoned back to life by its perennial honorary secretary, Cissy Grootewal. If she had a life beyond the committee I heard and saw no sign of it. She would vanish like the cuckoo on a Swiss clock as soon as the day was past and reappear only when the next one was coming close. She was a gaunt, schoolmistressy lady, who nurtured and managed the committee and annual celebrations almost singlehandedly. She was tireless, and meticulous over detail. Without her white May Day would probably have vanished into dust.

My own part on the committee was slightly schizophrenic. For weeks beforehand I would take active part in the design and construction of the decorated motorised ‘floats’ for the parade. There my involvement with the ‘United’ May Day ended and the excitement of the black rally at the Bantu Sports Ground at the bottom of Eloff Street took over.

The starting time was flexible and waited for enough men and women to arrive after a full working day. Singing started in the great open-air stadium while the tiers filled slowly with thousands of people. By the time the master of ceremonies, Gana Makabeni, opened the formalities the sun would be down and the audience in total darkness under an amazing canopy of stars. A flat-bed truck parked in the centre of the arena served as the speakers’ rostrum, with speakers and master of ceremonies spot-lit by the headlights of two cars.

This book contains ninety-eight longer or shorter texts in which individuals who would later be considered Khoesan gave their opinions on the political, social and ecclesiological events and proposals of largely the middle decades of the nineteenth century, from around 1828 to the 1860s, with outliers in both cases. This, then, is a continuation, or perhaps a reformulation, of work which I have conducted over the years, notably on the Griquas of Philippolis and the Kat River Settlement.

Between them, I hope, these texts, properly understood, provide a window into the experience and understanding of European colonial suppression, which the Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo. Their reactions to the circumstances in which they found themselves, and which they attempted to forge to their own advantage, were of course highly specific. The conditions under which the Khoesan had to endure colonial conquest and subjugation were significantly different from those of other South African peoples. Nevertheless, these texts provide a commentary on colonial life which is at once unique in its detail and extent, at least for the period, and which also presented a model for later forms of African nationalism. This was devised, in part, on the basis of precolonial Khoesan ideas of worth and right, and so can form an example for those who still, or again, consider themselves to be of Khoesan descent. At the same time, the importance of the conversations between the Khoesan and the missionaries for the formulation of these texts cannot be overstated.

The backstory

Before the European conquest of South Africa, the south-western parts of the continent were inhabited by people who called themselves Khoekhoe and called those around them San. The distinction between the two was economic and, to some degree, linguistic. Neither group practised agriculture, except for some narcotics, but the Khoekhoe had very considerable herds of sheep and cattle, while the San lived as hunter-gatherers and raiders. The wealth of some Khoekhoe formed the basis for political power, and as a result there were a number of long-lasting political groupings. Nevertheless, that power had to be continually demonstrated, and chiefs could lose their authority with their stock.

INTRODUCTION

Capital accumulation in South Africa started off as a process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2010: 48–49). War, violence, predation, thievery, criminality, fraud … these were the means by which the indigenous people were dispossessed of their communal lands, and by which the basis to wealth in this country passed into the hands of the capitalists.

South Africa was incorporated into the world economy as an enclave – as a colonial economy established by imperialist class interests primarily for the exploitation of its raw material resources (Mhone, 2001). Our economy was typically characterised by a capital-intensive sector co-existing with a capital-starved traditional economy. Although often described as ‘dual’, they are by no means ‘separate’. The capitalist sector, particularly the gold mining industry, was critically dependent on the traditional economy for the ongoing supply of ‘ultra-cheap, ultra-exploitable’ supplies of labour (Johnstone, 1976). By providing a subsistence base, the traditional economy in effect lowered the minimal acceptable wage threshold of labour (Wallerstein, 2003), thereby ensuring the very existence and sustainability of the capitalist system in this country.

Herein lies the root of our so-called National Question for, historically, class rule in South Africa has been about institutionalising ‘systems of duality’ in our society in order to extend and maintain the conditions of exploitation. It is against this background that divide and rule as a fundamental mechanism of class rule needs to be understood.

Capitalism's interests were served by dividing the nation, by perpetuating a core-periphery duality in society and the economy.

Historically, this has created the conditions of struggle in South Africa. It explains why opposition that was predicated on the principle of ‘one single South African nation’ has had revolutionary implications – why a call for a non-racial democracy was a fundamental threat to the very basis of capital accumulation.

While the mission record provides some access to African voices, and also to the response of Africans to the Hermannsburgers, it is necessary to venture beyond the mission record to gain a clearer understanding of such voices. Here, autobiographies are a useful source, though of course, such writing is not unmediated. Conventional notions of authorship and the subject are challenged in an account which suggests that a ‘host of people’ are normally involved ‘in the making of autobiographical accounts’. The reasons for collaboration in autobiography are varied. Although such textual collaboration ‘mirror[s] an intimacy in personal relationships’, it is necessary to distinguish between ‘advocatory texts, where the writing author speaks on behalf of the oral narrator’, ‘texts in which the writing author plays a mediating role’ and ‘truly collaborative texts in which the participants are on a comparatively equal footing’. This chapter explores two autobiographies in the light of these considerations. Although these autobiographies are not direct reflections on the transition from mission education to Bantu Education, they nevertheless provide insights into, and a sense of, the experiences of Africans with regard to education by the Hermannsburg Mission. In a context where the formal archival records provide little in the way of such experiences, these autobiographies are very useful. In parts, they provide an interesting contrast with Micah Kgasi's Thutô ke eng?, discussed in Chapter 1, which is only partly autobiographical.

In 1971, a London-based publisher, C. Hurst and Company, published Naboth Mokgatle's Autobiography of an Unknown South African, and in 1986 the Killie Campbell Africana Library together with Natal University Press published Paulina Dlamini: Servant of Two Kings, essentially a book of reminiscences, or a memoir, compiled by Heinrich Filter. Kgasi was born in the late 1870s or early 1880s, in the Western Transvaal. Paulina Dlamini, a contemporary of Kgasi, was born near Babanango in Zululand. S. Bourquin, translator and editor of the reminiscences compiled by Filter, suggests that Dlamini was about 67 years old in 1925; thus, she was probably born around 1858, shortly after the arrival of the Hermannsburgers in Natal. Naboth Mokgatle was born in 1911 on the mission station Saron, at Phokeng, in the district of Rustenburg, half a century after their arrival in the Western Transvaal.

1939–1940

Though the country was at war, nothing much seemed to change – no blackouts, no air raid sirens, no conscription. Young white males were signing on for full-time service and, in the countryside, young black men too, but only for non-combatant duty as cooks, stretcher-bearers and drivers.

There were no calls for full-time service of the Citizen Force part-timers, no gas masks, no food rationing. In Johannesburg a white hooligan mob set out on an alcohol-assisted round of ‘patriotic’ mayhem, setting German cars alight in the streets, beating up German civilians and trashing the German Club. Outside the city a retaliatory spate of random assaults on lone soldiers started. A mob of soldiers from the Potchefstroom camp replied in kind by smashing National Party premises. For a short while it seemed that Lenin's idea of turning imperialist into civil war was coming into its own. But the frenzy passed.

Unthinking mob violence gave way to organised violence by secretive armed pro-Nazi groups, one of them led by an ex-prizefighter, Robey Leibbrandt, who had been trained in Nazi Germany and been returned to South Africa by German submarine.

In parallel with the clandestine groups, a quasi-military organisation was organising and drilling militant white republicans. Calling itself the Ossewa Brandwag (OB) and playing on nostalgia for the Boer Republic commandos, it was rejecting parliamentary politics and preparing for a quasi-military confrontation. The Smuts government showed little sign of concern. It appeared to accept that the OB, for all its militarist bluster, was nevertheless part of a fundamental consensus that political power was to remain a white preserve.

Only the Communist Party stood outside that consensus. The black majority, still mainly rural, lacked an organised voice strong enough to influence the course of politics. That too was changing. War was bringing rapid industrial expansion, drawing armies of rural men and women to work in the cities, especially to the Vaal Triangle. In Johannesburg the black population was growing inexorably into a majority. Once impotent and barely visible organisations were growing in confidence. Trade unionism was spreading, as was a new sense of national identity. Urban blacks were starting to flex their muscles and to make their demands with a new-found militancy.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

Many of the unions that came together in 1985 to form Cosatu built their power by means of democratic worker organisation (Maree 1986). The form the democracy took was by means of elected leaders who were accountable to their members. This was particularly the case at the level of the workplace, where workers elected shop stewards regularly and the shop stewards held frequent meetings with their members. The shop stewards were given mandates by their members on issues they had to take up with management, and they had to report back on the outcomes of their negotiations with management.

But this did not happen only at the level of the workplace. It was also happening at higher levels of organisation in the unions. When the Western Province General Workers’ Unions (later the General Workers’ Union) was established in 1978, it was structured in such a way that there was workers’ control of the union. The constitution laid down that a controlling committee, consisting of two elected representatives from each of the organised workplaces, took all the major policy decisions in the union. Officials in the union, including the general secretary, then had to implement policies decided by the controlling committee (Maree 1989: 134–135).

It also happened at the federal level of unions. The Trade Union Advisory and Coordinating Council (TUACC) was the forerunner of the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu) in KwaZulu-Natal. Elected representatives from the unions on the executive council of TUACC were expected to represent the interests of their union members and to report back to their unions. The reasoning behind this was very well explained by Alec Erwin, who was the first general secretary of Fosatu. In an interview in 1979 about the challenge of building democracy in the unions, he said:

Apotropaic magic

The problem of witches and witchcraft has been central to anthropology throughout the twentieth century. The anthropological literature is not about whether witches exist but rather about how to account for their purported existence: a cultural question of belief rather than an ontological question of under what conditions their existence can be taken for granted. These are simply the wrong questions. According to bungoma philosophy, witchcraft, like the healer's craft, is predicated on interpersonal exposure to the ‘power’ or ‘shadow/presence’ (isithunzi) of others (see Werbner 2015: 2–3 on the similar concept of seriti in Sesotho/Setswana). Witchcraft derives from a radical theory of the person as inherently infectious and vulnerable. Person-like agents cause illness, but not all agents of this sort are human, and not all are tangible; thus, their agency cannot be given a ‘social causation’ account in all cases.

From the perspective of the sangoma's patient, if not from that of most contemporary social theory, witches are person-like agents, either tangible or intangible. They are not mere ‘representations’ of what could be interpreted as imagined harm triggered by social distress. To be vulnerable to witchcraft, however, one must understand oneself as an ‘exposed being’, exposed to a range of influences that can damage health or prevent ‘good luck’. These influences include other tangible persons, some of whom may be ‘witches’, but also other intangible persons such as ‘ancestors’ and ‘spirits’. The fundamental premise of healing in the southern African healer's paradigm is that if patients/clients can be given protection through apotropaic magics their ‘natural’ health and luck will be able to continue. The ‘exposed being’ – an existential condition of personhood as ‘patient’ rather than ‘agent’ – is vulnerable unless protected from illness, witchcraft and misfortune. In terms of this concept all persons are assumed to be well unless protection fails.

This approach helps us to understand the pragmatic efficacy of logically incompatible medical beliefs in conditions of medical parallelism.

Paul Slabolepszy is the cartographer of the white male soul facing the abyss. Better than any other South African playwright, he has depicted the dreams, hopes and insecurities, and violences of white male South Africans through the doom-laden days of apartheid's decline. Many of his plays are images of that decline: they convey uniquely the atmosphere of paralysis and paranoia of that time. More recently, in plays like Mooi Street Moves, The Return of Elvis du Pisanie and Pale Natives (1994, not included in this collection), Slabolepszy has depicted the effects of social and political change, his theatre shifting from a social to a psychological focus and, in the process, maturing.

If, as Dan Jacobson said, quoting Olive Schreiner, white South Africans are ‘lower-middle- class philistines’, in Slabolepszy's hands they tend to be depicted as ‘lower-middle- class nihilists’. The Schreiner observation is useful, if only in indicating that the preoccupations of two writers with extensive allegiances to England are not the preoccupations of a Slabolepszy. Slabolepszy is one of a generation of post-colonial writers.

The cumulative effects of time, as well as political and cultural isolation, have made the class and cultural labels which Schreiner used and Jacobson approved seem an historical curiosity, useful only in suggesting the distance between Slabolepszy's world and that of his predecessors.

In Slabolepszy's world, ‘overseas’ is as remote and insubstantial as a TV sitcom, which in fact forms the images of what used to be called in South Africa ‘the outside world’. In Saturday Night at the Palace (1982, not included in this collection), Forsie, who has never been to the sea, insists confidently that ‘everyone knows Jo'burg’. He and Vince imagine overseas as Hollywood.

Throughout Slabolepszy's plays, references to the TV series, Dallas, occur: this, rather than the humane literacy of Bloomsbury, is the characters’ reference point. To Slabolepszy, the implied comparisons which Jacobson and Schreiner make – between here and there, local and foreign, colony and parent country, province and metropolis, along with the class consciousness – are irrelevant. They are not part of his landscape yet Slabolepszy is aware of both the comedy and the pathos in the cultural references of his characters.

The Slabolepszy landscape should be described. Like others of his generation, most of Slabolepszy's life was spent under Nationalist Party rule.

It is late on the following night.

Lights fade up and the office is empty, gloomy but for the moonlight that streams in through the Venetian blinds at the window. The music holds, full volume.

SHANELL enters via the alcove in the half-light. She is barefoot and dressed in revealing summer sleeping gear. She looks vulnerable. She taps away on her smart phone, sending WhatsApps and moving across to the car seat. Some reply she has received to her WhatsApp angers her and she slams her phone down on the makeshift coffee table. Looking at the locker, she moves towards it and then collects the key, which is stuck under her husband's desk, and unlocks the padlock. Quietly opening the locker, she removes the rhino horn as the music fades.

SHANELL carries the rhino horn to the car seat and puts it down, kneeling beside it. She appears mesmerised, transfixed. So focused is she on the horn that it is a good few moments before she becomes aware of the presence of her husband, also barefoot, who has appeared in the alcove, wearing an old T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms.

DWAYNE [still half asleep]: What the hell are you doing?

DWAYNE [quietly]: Maybe he was keeping it for someone.

Having read Memory Against Forgetting, I realise that, quite in error, for many years I thought as a matter of fact that I knew everything I needed to know about many phases of the struggle for the liberation of our country.

This includes much of the period which Rusty Bernstein discusses in this important book.

Thanks to an accident of history I knew and know many of the people he mentions in his account.

I was fortunate that I interacted with some of them in the context of our struggle, as a young cadre involved in that struggle.

In that context it was easy for me casually to address as comrades all these who were, by age and politically, my seniors by a long distance, including Rusty.

When I grew older I came to understand that that political intimacy sometimes served to hide much knowledge about who these people were, who were indeed my comrades.

In these later years I have had direct experience of how some whom I knew attached themselves to the family of those called comrades because this helped them to hide the fact that they were other than comrades.

However, the stories which Rusty tells in this book about himself and his fellow freedom fighters, who, though older, were also my comrades, have greatly assisted me to retreat from my cynicism about the abuse of comrade, the honourable word indicating comradeship.

This is because he writes of himself and these within the context of challenging circumstances which tested their principled loyalty to the struggle as well as comradeship with their comrades.

I speak here of comrades, like Rusty, who stand out today and will, for all time, as legendary figures whose readiness to make all necessary sacrifices brought us the freedom the millions in our country, in Africa, and in the world, continue to celebrate.

Yet it is true that the portraits of these, which Rusty presents with great sensitivity, remain incomplete because they do not and cannot contain the personal details which would complete the composition of the individual as an ordinary human being.

It is in this regard that we are very fortunate that Rusty wrote this book in the way he did.