1951–1955

It was slow work, but not as difficult as we had imagined. We had a legacy of ready-made policies and styles of work, as well as a pool of past members to draw on.

Secrecy was the key. If word leaked out we would all be prime suspects for our past records alone. We adopted two rigid rules: to keep totally silent about the existence of the party and to require a unanimous committee vote before anyone was approached to join. We developed new ways of meeting surreptitiously in unlikely places such as borrowed homes and offices, moving cars, country picnic sites and even night clubs by day.

We persuaded the two embryo party groups to integrate their unattached members into the more representative body we were forming and started systematic recruiting of activists in all provinces from those known to us from their political past. Before long there was a thin network across the country of groups with not more than four members each, unknown to each other and without any contact between them.30 The committee still had no formal authority and no real political programme. The members had accepted the rules of secrecy, but had to take the party's political policy and a faceless, self-appointed leadership core on trust. By 1952 the organisation seemed stable enough to hold a formal founding conference where these things could be rectified democratically. Bringing together delegates from every group would be unwieldy and threaten security. Somehow groups which did not know each other would have to be combined to select one delegate.

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. We devised a procedure. Each group would propose one of its own members as a putative delegate then add the names of others it guessed might be members. The committee would trim the list of nominations to eliminate wrong guesses and provide a final list, balanced to reflect the racial, gender and geographic character of the membership. Not quite Westminster-style democracy, but as close as we dared go.