LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      The roots of civilization are deep in the soil of Africa. Egypt is the cradle of civilization not only in the sciences but even in the matter of sharing. Hannibal, conqueror and polygamist, had three black African wives; Moses married an African; neither Europe nor Asia is devoid of African blood. Christ himself, at a young age, found protection in Africa. On His way to Calvary his support came from Africa.50

      Lembede had no tolerance for anyone who presented a contrary view of Africans and their history. Reviewing B W Vilakazi’s novel Nje-Nempula, situated during the Bambatha rebellion, Lembede reproached Vilakazi for casting Malambule, a collaborator in Lembede’s eyes, as a lead character because it might “sew [sic] the seed of a defeatist mentality or an inferiority complex in the minds of our children.”

      We should not tell our children that we were routed, humiliated and cowed by white people, we should merely tell them that in the face of superior force and weapons, we were compelled to lay down arms … The motto of a National hero should be “My people, right or wrong.”51

      Lembede also called on Africans to break their reliance on European leaders by building up their own organisations. In South Africa this meant making the ANC and black leadership central to the national struggle. In this regard, Lembede did not operate in a world of political ambiguity. He spurned appeals to ethnicity, he promoted African national unity over class identities and he rejected Africans merging their cause with other “non-European” groups and sympathetic whites.

      For instance, he dismissed the prospect of “Non-European unity” – combining black, coloured and Indian political organisations into one movement – as “a fantastic dream” because they were split along the lines of national origin, religion and culture as well as by their relative positions in the pecking order of segregation.52

      Lembede took a rigid and narrow view of Indians: they were merchants who fought “only for their rights to trade and extract as much wealth as possible from Africa.” His analysis was a gross simplification of the Indian community’s class composition. Although leaders of Indian political movements were professionals, who came from better-off families, most Indians were industrial workers and farm labourers.

      Lembede’s stance towards coloureds was more flexible. He recognised that South Africa’s coloured communities were an arbitrarily defined group with many divergent attitudes and positions. Therefore, he welcomed into the African national movement coloureds who “identified themselves and assimilated into African society”, but he excluded those who classified themselves as a separate nation or as Europeans and those who shared the racist attitudes of Europeans towards black South Africans.

      Lembede also argued that, in the hierarchy of segregation, Indians and coloureds benefitted from an “inequality of oppression” that accorded them slight privileges that were closed off to blacks. If Indian and coloured leaders were put in a position to advance their own political and economic interests, blacks could not realistically expect them to side with black causes.

      One of the likely sources for Lembede’s attitude was the events surrounding Hertzog’s Representation of Natives Act (1936), which abolished the Cape franchise. Although coloured and Indian leaders had joined blacks in founding the All African Convention in 1935, to protest the law, a perception developed among some that the commitment of coloured and Indian political leaders had significantly diminished once the threat to their own status had eased.53

      Despite Lembede’s reservations about non-European unity, he recognised that there were grievances such as voting rights on which blacks, coloured and Indian political movements could find common ground. In those cases, he urged political movements to confer with each other and arrive at joint strategies for addressing issues. Thus, after being brought onto the ANC executive in 1946, he supported moves towards closer cooperation between the ANC and the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses.

      Another Lembede tenet was that since blacks were discriminated against because they were black, preserving their national unity overrode any class division within the black community. Therefore, the handful of blacks who had acquired wealth were not excluded from the national struggle because they had not been co-opted “into the ranks of and society of white capitalists.”

      A corollary was that black workers should align their struggles with the ANC rather than pursuing an elusive class unity with workers from other racial or ethnic groups. Black workers were opposed not as workers, but as a race, by an alliance of white capitalists and a white parliament which had legislated a labour aristocracy for Europeans (and Indians and coloureds to a lesser degree) who profited from higher wages and access to better jobs.54

      Lembede viewed the struggles of black workers as legitimate in their own right and a vital component of ANC activities. The “ANC without a workers’ organisation (like the ICU [Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union]),” he conceded, “is a motionless cripple.” He backed the efforts of black workers to join trade unions and fight for higher wages and improved working conditions. However, he believed the aspirations of both black trade unions and the ANC were best served by forging a joint strategy, with trade unions dealing with economic issues and the ANC concentrating on political matters. His reference in the above quote to the ICU is significant because of the lesson he drew from the destructive rivalry between the ANC and the ICU in the 1920s – that their competition had led to the ICU’s dramatic collapse and the precipitous decline of the ANC until its revitalisation during the Second World War.55

      Throughout his career, Lembede was consistently hostile to the Communist Party on religious and racial grounds. As a devout Christian, he rejected communism’s materialist ideas as alien to the African experience. He had studied some of the classic works of Marxism while writing his MA thesis and took issue with the materialist arguments that advances in modern science and knowledge were antithetical to religious beliefs. Moreover, he questioned the materialist contention that Christianity lulled Africans into political passivity. Instead, he pointed to Christian ministers who had been fixtures in the ANC’s leadership since its inception and he maintained that Christianity could be a spur to political action. Anticipating the liberation theologians, he interpreted the Christian message – especially the symbolism of Christ’s crucifixion – as a revolutionary creed capable of mobilising people to action. “The essence of Christianity,” he maintained, “is Calvary; or the Cross – the ready willingness to offer and sacrifice one’s life at the altar of one’s own convictions, for the benefit of one’s followers.”56

      As an African nationalist, Lembede was alarmed by the growing prominence of communists in the ANC and other organisations. Like the ANC, the Communist Party had resurrected itself in the late 1930s and had rapidly expanded its membership by aligning itself with popular struggles in the black community, especially in the urban areas, organising trade unions, launching a national anti-pass campaign and actively involving itself in ANC affairs.

      By 1945 the ANC national executive had three communists on it. That same year, Lembede and the Youth League pressed the Transvaal ANC to adopt a resolution stating that members of the ANC executives could not belong to other political organisations.57 The resolution, directed specifically at communists on the ANC national executive, was aimed at forcing them to declare their allegiance to the ANC or the Communist Party. The resolution passed thirty-one to twenty-one. But when it was considered by the national body, it was rejected. This was because Dr Xuma and other senior ANC leaders viewed the ANC as an umbrella group composed of many different constituencies and they objected to an ideological litmus test for ANC membership.58

      Lembede was wary of black communists, but he was particularly suspicious of the motives of white communists assuming leadership roles in black organisations, especially trade unions, because he believed their presence undermined black leaders and fragmented black unity. In 1945, Lembede’s Transvaal Youth League turned down an invitation to affiliate with the Progressive Youth Council (linked to the Communist Party). Writing to Ruth First, the Council’s secretary, the Youth League declared that it could not subordinate itself to any other youth organisation, especially when there was “a yawning gulf between your policy or philosophic outlook and ours.”59

      Lembede was certainly an uncompromising foe of the Communist Party, but was he categorically opposed

Скачать книгу