1940–1943

The Communist Party was functioning in a non-racial enclave of its own. Inside the party there was a total black-white equality which could be found nowhere else. But we were not Utopians seeking to create a perfect place of our own, shut off from the world. We were trying to engage with that world, challenge its fundamental mores and customs and ultimately change them.

There was, however, a paradox. The more we involved ourselves in that wider world, the greater became its pressure on us to conform to its practices. Inside the party and its committees, conferences and members’ meetings there was no colour differentiation. But the more we moved out of our own closed circles into the social and political mainstream the more we were driven to divide into black and white streams – fraternal, nominally equal, but separate.

There was no way for us to grow outwards and avoid the great racial divide. Society imposed its racial division on our organisational forms and on our political activities. Our residentially based branches were inevitably either predominantly black or predominantly white, according to the race pattern of the area. Trade unions we belonged to were either ‘white’ or ‘black’ to accord with industrial laws. Election campaigns were restricted by law to white candidates and voters only, or to black. The languages used at meetings had to be either English or Afrikaans in a white area, or Zulu or Sotho in a black. Society locked us into its established racial net. We had either to conform or cease to function at all.

I was seconded to assist the party branch in Vrededorp, a racially-mixed slum area with close-packed cottages where single rooms were rented out by absentee landlords. The branch members were all new recruits, black, mainly middle-aged men, with no prior party experience. The only member with a place big enough to hold ten or twelve people was a very large and forceful woman who had two back rooms and a kitchen. She was known as a ‘shebeen queen’, that is to say, she kept an unlicensed drinking place with a stock of hard liquor and sold home-brewed beer stored in old petrol drums buried in the yard. Illegal activities, including brewing of beer and the sale of alcohol to blacks, went on in her kitchen.