1946–1947

Adjusting to Johannesburg was not easy. Italy had been moving to the left, but here there had been a drift to the right which seemed to concern no one except the Springbok Legion.

In the days after the war's end the National Party had staged a march through the city streets to a public meeting in the City Hall. It had been intended as a show of strength in a traditionally anti-Nationalist city. There had been great protests about it so soon after the war, and the legion had called for the lease of the City Hall to be cancelled. The council had refused. The legion had tried to bar the streets to the Nationalist marchers by organising a counter-demonstration in which hundreds of white citizens, including many soldiers and ex-servicemen, took part. There had been pitched battles in attempts to bar the parade through the streets leading to the City Hall, but the Nationalists had fought their way through, abetted by the police, and held a triumphant ‘victory rally’.

The legion viewed the event as a major setback for the anti-fascist cause, though they seemed to me to be exaggerating its importance. The Nationalists were far short of a parliamentary majority, but they had given clear warning that they had come through the war years with enhanced strength and confidence.

White attitudes towards them were altering as uniforms were exchanged for civilian garb and war-time anti-fascism for peacetime conservatism and political apathy. As soldiers became civilians the legion was struggling to adapt. Its quasi trade union activities were declining and political campaigning was moving to the forefront of its agenda.

In a fortuitous symmetry with the Nationalist march to the City Hall there had been a far bigger, predominantly black march through the city's streets to celebrate VE Day. That had passed off peacefully. It, too, had been a show of strength, but by a coalition of liberation movements, trade unions and the Communist Party, which had brought thousands of people out to claim the freedom of the streets and, more significantly, to demand for themselves the freedoms so eloquently promised in the Allied nations’ Atlantic Charter but so completely denied them by the state at home.