The Guardian of Liberty - Nemzetőr, 1980 (3. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)

1980-07-01 / 4. szám

A Helping Hand for Apartheid’s Founding Fathers If is clear from a recently re-published * book, Forced Labour in Colonial Africa, that an arbitrary act of foreign interference a little over half a century ago was one of the main factors which strengthened the hand of South Africa’s white authorities and so helped pave the way for the introduction of apartheid in 1948. In 1929 the South African police violently broke up a Dingaan’s Day demonstration or­ganised by the multi-racial League of African Rights (LAR), whose limited objectives up till then were the achievement of particular „natio­nal rights" for Africans, including freedom of speech and of association and retention of the Cape franchise. The LAR, which attracted support from a broad section of liberal and left-wing opinion, reacted to this police brutality by launching an all-out campaign against racialism. Then came the unexpected. The Soviet-conlrolled Communist International (Comintern), which operated from 1919 to 1943, sent a cable from Moscow ordering the LAR to disband. Njoroge Dseagu in reviewing the book in West Africa, the London magazine says that this „foolish and blatant piece of dictation by Moscow was manifestly disasterous for the move­ment. It showed the League as a mere tool in the hands of Moscow ... and it cost the Af­ricans (and the militant whites) the crucial op­portunity to form a national spearhead to oppose a burgeoning de jure apartheid sys­tem ..." Moscow’s interference also encouraged the South African Government to intensify its re­pressive measures against all reformist move­ments. The most influential position in the leader­ship of the LAR seems to have been held by Albert Nuzla, one of the three authors of Forced Labour in Colonial Africa. In 1929, when he was on'y 24 years old, he became the first African General Secretary of the hitherto white­­led South African Communist Party (SACP). Nzula (alias Tom Jackson and Conan Doyle Modiaknotla) died in Moscow in 1934, aged 29. The last 30 months of his life were spent in Russia. According to an account circulated some while after the event, he developed a taste for vodka and died of pneumonia after collapsing one freezing night in a Moscow street, where he lay for several hours before being taken to hosoital. However, C. L. R. James, the distinguished West Indian historian, and other Pan-Africanist n'oneers who lived in or visited Moscow during earlv. nro-Soviet periods of their careers, have been auoted as saying that they believed Nzula was killed by the Soviet security police . The other two authors of Forced Labour in Colonial Africa are Professor I. I. Potekhin and A. Z. Zusmanovich. For some years until his death in 1964, Potekhin was the first director of the Africa Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Zusmanovich was another Soviet political ideologist specialising in African af­fairs. The 218-page book is published by the left­­wing Zed Press in London. The original version appeared in 1933 under the title of The Work­ing Class Movement and Forced Labour in Negro Africa. tThe South African Communist Party, the * oldest Marxist-Leninist organisation in Africa, has been strongly pro-Soviet since its formation in July, 1921. All its original execu­tive members were whites, as were all the de­legates to its inaugural conference. Until a dra­matic change of policy in 1928, the SACP advo­cated that white people should have the best­­paid and most skilled jobs. The party backed a white miners’ strike which began in January, 1922, when, after a drop in the world price of gold, the mining companies decided io cut white miners’ wages or fill their jobs with lower-paid Africans. In March, about 20,000 of the strikers, calling themselves „Red Guards", the name given to armed Communsits in Russia’s October Revo'u­­tion, stormed several mines which were still operating. Fights with police ensued, and the strikers savagely assaulted many Africans who were thought, rightly or wrongly, to be taking white men’s jobs. On March 12, the „Red Guards" rampaged into the centre of Johannesburg but were stop­ped by a large detachment of heavily-armed troops. Shortly afterwards, hundreds of the strikers and their supporters were tried on charges including murder and assault. Many were convicted and three were sentenced to death. They sang the „Red Flag" as they were led to the gallows. Red Revolt, a communist pamphlet published in 1922, claims that „repeal of the colour bar regulation will not benefit the native workers, rather the reverse". In the next few years this tailor-made com­munist policy for South Africa, so pleasing to extremists in that country’s white work-force, was beginning to impede Moscow’s attempts to popularise Soviet political ideology world­wide. In 1928, therefore, the constantly pro- Soviet SACP incorporated into its action pro­gramme a new Comintern slogan on the need for racial equality in South Africa. However, this policy about-turn - inconsistent with the Comintern's demand for the disband­ment of the LAR - was made too late to help the Africans. After the 1924 general election the South African Government had approved „job reservation" for whites. So by 1928 South Af­rica was already sliding down the slippery slope towards the formal establishment of apartheid in 1948. Soviet Russia has shown interest in southern African affairs at least since the early 1920s. However, that area’s potential strategic impor­tance was realised even by Tsarist authorities. In 1904 representatives of the Tsarist Go­vernment had secret talks in Lisbon and Paris with General Joubert-Pienaar, an influential South African. The general, whose travelling expenses were paid for by the Russians, was seeking Tsarist military and financial assistance to back his plan to defeat the British victors of the recently ended South African War. If the planned military action had been un­dertaken and been successful, Tsar Nicholas II would have been declared „Suzerain of South and Central Africa". In the event, the Tsar broke off the negotiations because of pressing problems within Russia, including widesrpead popular unrest which led to him almost losing his throne in 1905. 12 THE GUARDIAN OF LIBERTY KTI (NEMZETŐR) flsîH tmymm bo» *» »tgM t» IrnOm wK—«*«— mi t tí^m Ai*ck '8, Uwwl D»d«rqHon ot H*»oo fcgbfc Edited: by the Editorial Board Herausgeber (Publisher) und Eigentümer (Owner): TIBOR KECSKÉSI TOLLAS Ferchenbachstraße 88, D-8000 München 50 GERMAN FEDERAL REPUBLIC Verantwortlicher Redakteur (Editor): MIKLÓS VARY Ferchenbachstraße 88, D-8000 München 50 Druck (print): DANUBIA DRUCKEREI GMBH Ferchenbachstraße 88, D-8000 München 50 AFRICA REPRESENTATIVES & SALE CAMEROON: L. T. JOHNSON, Divisional Inspectorate of Education, BAMENDA-MEZAM, Div., North West Province. EAST AFRICA: (1.50 Sh, by air) (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania): General-Representative : Swahili Literature Distributors, P.O. Box 1146, Nakuru/KENYA NIGERIA (1.50 Sh): Yemi OYENEYE, P. M. B. 101, Agege, Lagos. 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POP SINGER ARRESTED Karel Soukup, a 29-year-old Czechoslo­vak pop singer, has been arrested in Pra­ha, for singing at a friend’s wedding according to information that reached Vienna early in July. He has been charg­ed with disturbing the peace and sing­ing some of the songs of the Plastic Peo­ple of the Universe, a pop group for long disapproved of by the Soviet military occupation authorities in Czechoslovakia and by the Moscow-aligned government of President Husak. Soukup is a former member of the Plastic People. JULY-AUGUST, 1980

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