LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Mda sharpened Lembede’s understanding of philosophical ideas by assuming opposing positions on issues and vigorously debating them with him. Mda was the perfect foil for Lembede because he loved the cut and thrust of debate, and he doggedly defended his positions with as much fervour as Lembede. Mda remembered their exchanges this way:

      I had to defend a certain position while he attacked it … He wanted to gain some clearer understanding of the subject matter he was studying. He used me as a tool to achieve that goal . . .27

      In the same manner, the pair took on the major political questions of the day. There were occasions, though, when Mda and other Youth Leaguers had to curb Lembede’s instinctive bent to take extreme positions. When Lembede was living in the Orange Free State, in order to improve his command of Afrikaans, he began reading Hendrik Verwoerd’s column, “Die Sake van die Dag”, in Die Transvaler, the ultra-nationalist Afrikaans newspaper, and imbibing his ideas. As a result, after Lembede moved to Johannesburg, “Mda found Lembede rather uncritically fascinated with the spirit of determination embodied in fascist ideology, to the point where he saw nothing wrong with quoting certain ideas of Hitler and Mussolini with approval.”28 In the Orange Free State Lembede did not have the benefit of having peers who could scrutinise and refine his thinking, but in Johannesburg, he had Mda and others who challenged him – not always successfully – to rein in some of his extremist ideas. For instance, Mda forced Lembede to rethink his fascination with fascism by pointing out Hitler’s ideas about racial superiority and how they specifically applied to black people. By the close of the Second World War, Lembede was unequivocally rejecting fascism and Nazism in his writings.

      Mda and Lembede found common ground on many political issues. And out of their discussions with each other and with their peers emerged a vision of a rejuvenated African nationalism – centred around the unity of the African people – that could rouse and lead their people to freedom.

      THE FOUNDING OF THE ANC YOUTH LEAGUE, APRIL 1944

      The years of the Second World War saw a quickening of the pace of protest on the Witwatersrand.29 The immediate cause of this ferment was the war itself, as a consequence of which South Africa’s manufacturing and mining sectors dramatically expanded to supply goods and arms for the war effort. The economy boomed, and as white workers were siphoned off into the army, tens of thousands of black men and women, fleeing the stagnation of the rural areas, poured into the urban areas seeking jobs. Between 1936 and 1946 roughly 650 000 people moved into the urban areas. During those same years, Johannesburg’s population leaped from 229 122 to 384 628, almost a seventy-five per cent increase.

      The wartime economy may have opened up employment opportunities for black workers, but at a cost. Prices of basic goods soared, housing shortages grew more acute and municipalities charged higher prices for public transportation. White government and municipal officials did little to alleviate these burdens, and as a result a series of protests – bus boycotts, squatter protests and worker strikes – were triggered off in townships throughout the Witwatersrand.

      By and large, ANC leaders remained aloof from these protests. For the ANC the 1930s had been years of inaction and the All African Convention (AAC) had taken advantage of the ANC’s lethargic leadership by eclipsing it as the pre-eminent vehicle for black opinion during and after the controversy over the Hertzog Bills. By the late 1930s, however, a group of activists, unhappy at a lack of direction and the compromises made by AAC leaders, turned to resurrecting the ANC.

      An important step in the ANC’s revitalisation was the election (by a slim majority of twenty-one to twenty) of Dr A B Xuma as ANC president in 1940. Xuma, who had a flourishing medical practice in Johannesburg, rescued the ANC from its parlous economic condition by raising dues, soliciting donations from private sources and contributing some of his own resources.

      He also pushed through a new constitution in 1943, eliminating an Upper House of Chiefs. He toured throughout South Africa, imposing discipline and shoring up support among provincial ANC congresses. He opened a national office for the ANC in Johannesburg in December 1943. And he put the ANC in a position to respond to day-to-day situations by setting up a small working committee of people who lived within a fifty-mile radius of Johannesburg.30

      There was no question of Xuma’s commitment to equal political rights and the abolition of discriminatory laws, but he remained wedded to bringing about change through constitutional means. Although he was not at heart comfortable with mass protest and he was wary of the ambitions of younger ANC members, he understood that the ANC could not survive unless it brought younger members into its fold.

      The inspiration for forming a Youth League came from several different quarters.31 One influence were the numerous youth and student organisations that had sprung up around the country. For instance, in 1939 Mannasseh Moerane, principal of Umpomula High School, and Jordan Ngubane, a journalist, founded the National Union of African Youth (NUAY) in Durban to promote literacy, economic and business training and political advancement. Without openly declaring it, they also intended to build an organisation capable of breaking A W G Champion’s personal stranglehold over the Natal wing of the ANC.32

      Several future Youth Leaguers – Oliver Tambo, Congress Mbata, Lancelot Gama, William Nkomo, Nelson Mandela, Lionel Majombozi, James Njongwe and V V T Mbobo – also emerged from the mid-1930s at Fort Hare, the university college founded for black, coloured and Indian students in 1916. By the outbreak of the Second World War several hundred students from all over southern Africa were studying for degrees at Fort Hare, and a number of them were intensely engaged in debating the political issues of the day: the abolition of the Cape franchise, the creation of a Natives Representative Council (NRC), the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the contest for global supremacy and its implications for Africans.

      In the early 1940s Fort Hare students also received a bittersweet introduction to protest politics through their involvement in two strikes. The first was touched off in September 1941 after the white supervisor of the dining hall struck a black female employee. Over three quarters of the students showed their sympathy with the worker by boycotting classes for three days. The Fort Hare administration had no sympathy for the strike and the issues raised by the students. They demanded that strikers submit a formal letter of apology for their actions and pay a fine of £1 or be suspended. All but one complied.

      The second strike, in September 1942, came about when Bishop C J Ferguson-Davie, the warden at Beda Hall, the residence for Anglicans, turned down a request by Beda students to play tennis on Sunday. When the majority of Beda students refused to acknowledge Ferguson-Davie’s authority in other forums, such as chapel, he demanded that they sign a formal apology; if they did not they would be suspended from the university. Most of the students refused to sign the apology, and forty-five of the sixty-four Beda students, including Ntsu Mokhehle and Oliver Tambo, were suspended for varying periods of time.33

      Another route to the Youth League was through the aggressive campaign of the Transvaal African Teachers’ Association to improve the paltry wages and poor working conditions of black teachers. Teachers like A P Mda and David Bopape played prominent roles in educating and mobilising their communities behind the teachers’ grievances. A high point of the teachers’ protest was a march through downtown Johannesburg in May 1944 that reinforced a belief among its participants that militant resistance to the government could produce positive results. Teachers were to form a significant constituency in the Youth League.

      A final factor that produced the Youth League was the challenge posed to the ANC by the newly formed African Democratic Party (ADP), which featured two dynamic young leaders, Paul Mosaka and Self Mampuru. Mampuru had sought support from ANC youth when he considered standing for the presidency of the Transvaal ANC in 1943, but he had suddenly jumped to the ADP. Fearing the ADP would siphon off younger ANC members, Xuma cultivated relationships with youth leaders. And he responded positively when they proposed establishing a Youth League within the ANC.

      Whatever their backgrounds, the common denominator for young ANC activists was their impatience with the unwillingness of the ANC “Old Guard” to adopt militant tactics to contest white rule. In the latter half of 1943 they began holding meetings to discuss forming a youth wing in the ANC. A formal proposal to found a Youth League was put forward at the December 1943 meeting of

Скачать книгу