race class and power by steven friedman

8/9/2019 Race Class and Power by Steven Friedman

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Race, Class and Power Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid

Steven Friedman


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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

INTRODUCTION Seeing the world through another lens 1

CHAPTER 1 The man and the movement: Harold Wolpeand the fght against apartheid 27

CHAPTER 2 Class struggle in the classroom: Wolpe andthe battle of ideas 46

CHAPTER 3 Voice in the wilderness? Harold Wolpe, theSACP and the ANC 68

CHAPTER 4 The Marxism of the middle class? Theacademic radicalism of the 1970s 95

CHAPTER 5 Class tells: Wolpes critique of liberal andnationalist orthodoxy 116

CHAPTER 6 Critique of pure reason: The cheap labourthesiss critics 135

CHAPTER 7 Recognising racial reality: Race and class inWolpes later work 176

CHAPTER 8 Real people, real politics: Seeing a strategicopening in apartheids retreat 200

CHAPTER 9 Beyond them and us: Politics of division,

politics of possibility 223


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CHAPTER 10 Schooled in reality: Wolpe, education and the

politics of reform 243CHAPTER 11 A few small areas in the vicinity of Beijing:

Harold Wolpe and post-apartheid South Africa 260

CHAPTER 12 Questions, not answers: Transcending theMarxist tradition 276

Notes 292Bibliography 339Index 359


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THE MAN AND THE MOVEMENT 27

27

CHAPTER 1

The man and the movement Harold Wolpe and the fght against apartheid

IT IS A MINOR irony that Wolpe, whose scholarship nudged youngscholars towards activism, was an activist who became a scholar.The irony is perhaps enhanced by the fact that he was born into the Jewish community which, for complicated reasons, produced morescholars per head than any other section of the white population inSouth Africa.

Out of Zion? The origins of the Jewish leftWolpe was born in Johannesburg on 14 January 1926 to Jewishparents who had emigrated from Lithuania.1 He attended AthloneBoys High School and, in 1944, became a student at the University ofthe Witwatersrand, then Johannesburgs only university. Intervieweeswho knew him in the ANC and the SACP insist that he showedno interest in his Jewishness and that it had no impact on him. But

Wolpe acknowledged towards the end of his life that his ethnicity hadan important in uence, even if this was not always direct.

The Jewish community, which elsewhere was often on thereceiving end of race discrimination, was regarded in South Africa aswhite, and thus Wolpe, like other Jews of his generation, was borninto the group privileged by minority rule. But Jews were far moreused to being dominated than to being part of a dominant group. TheSouth African Jewish community, which had initially consisted of

English and German Jews, was by then as it is today primarily of


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28 RACE, CLASS AND POWER

Lithuanian origin; Wolpes family was thus part of the new Jewish

majority. It included some who had lived in tsarist Russia, where most Jews experienced great poverty; this impelled many to join radicalmovements. Jews perception that their existence in the dominantsociety was precarious, enhanced by the growth of an Afrikanernationalism which was often overtly anti-Jewish, made radical ideasmore prevalent among South African Jews than among other whitegroups.2

Most members of the community in which Wolpe grew up

found three ways of coping with their new surroundings. The rstwas to embrace separateness, whether out of religious conviction orethnic identi cation. South African Jews, unlike their counterparts inliberal democracies, were not assimilated into the dominant society.They were classi ed white, but Afrikaner nationalism was not eagerto absorb them: many of its leaders sympathised with the Nazis inWorld War Two, and when the NP defeated Smutss United Party in1948, many Jews believed the new government would exclude them

from citizenship or worse. Because absorption was largely blocked,ethnic identi cation remained high and intermarriage with otherfaiths and cultures very low. The South African Jewish communitymost closely resembles that of Mexico: there, too, Jews are largelyintegrated into the dominant group but there are strong pressuresagainst assimilation.3

The second strain of Jewish life in the world in which Wolpegrew into adulthood was Zionism, support for an ethnic Jewish state

in Palestine. Organised Zionism in South Africa began just after thestart of the twentieth century and Zionist sympathies are very strongin the Jewish mainstream.4 Most young Jews gravitated to Zionistyouth movements which helped shape their world view. Of these,only one, the left-wing HaShomer HaTzair (the Youthful Guard),supported a binational state shared by Jews and Palestinians. In somecases, Zionism reinforced existing desires for separateness; in others,it gave secular Jews, who rejected or were indifferent to religion, a

reason to express their Jewishness. While today left-wing Zionism is


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in disarray, at the time Wolpe was growing up, it was the strongest

branch of the Zionist movement. Young idealists who valued their Jewish identity saw no con ict between support for left-wing valuesand the quest to establish an ethnic state on Palestinian lands, andso Zionism provided an outlet for Jewish left-wingers as well as forthose to whom ethnicity was a prime concern. Mike Morris notesthat many Jewish left-wingers in South Africa were rst exposed tosocialism in the Zionist left, and then took it to its logical conclusionby abandoning Zionisms nationalism.5

Third, the South African Jewish community contained a strongleft-wing tradition. During apartheid, the organised community wasembarrassed by its left wing, which was airbrushed out of of cial Jewish histories,6 its memory kept alive only by academic histories ofthe Jewish left.7 (From 1990, mainstream Jewish leadership embraced Jewish ANC activists who were shunned before the 1990s, in thehope of winning favour with the new order.) Forming the core of thissection of the Jewish community were the Bundists, sympathisersof the Yiddische Bund (Jewish association) which worked with theRussian left under tsarism. The Jewish Workers Club, a Bundistassociation in Johannesburgs Doornfontein, not far from whereWolpe grew up, mixed cultural activities in the Yiddish languagewith heated debates between differing shades of left-wing opinion.8 Morris recalls reading about a 1907 strike in Cape Town in whichthe pamphlets were translated into Yiddish, the Eastern European Jewish vernacular. At that time the entire Woodstock branch ofthe Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was Jewish and only

the secretary spoke English.9 Although many in the Jewish leftwere absorbed into mainstream white society as the communitysaf uence grew, some contributed to attempts to form trade unions,while others gravitated towards the CPSA and, later, the ANC. (Upuntil 1967, only black Africans were allowed to join the ANC, andthe movements supporters in the racial minorities cooperated withit through racially separate organisations.10 ) This tradition partlyexplains the very high level of participation (as a percentage of

population) by Jews in the ght against apartheid. While Jews who


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made this choice were rejected by mainstream communal leadership,

their political commitment drew partly on their Jewish experience.As noted above, several interviewees claim that Wolpe appeared

to show no interest in his Jewish roots.11 The only evidence of hisethnicity, they insist, was that he and his friend Joe Slovo latergeneral secretary of the SACP and the post-apartheid governments

rst minister of housing shared a sense of humour which struckmany who knew them as clearly Jewish. Shula Marks recalls thatWolpe had a large store of jokes in Yiddish although Pallo Jordan

probably had an even better store of Yiddish jokes.12

While lack ofinterest in Jewishness might seem a universal attribute of Jews in thestruggle they were, after all, Marxists who were meant to rejectreligion and ethnic identi cation it seems that total rejection of Jewish tradition was not at all universal. Jordan, who has a livelyinterest in Jewishness, notes that some Jews in the movementcelebrated Jewish holidays (although they might observe Christmastoo), and that in some cases the cultural dimension of family lifemight be very Jewish.13 Wolpes claimed rejection of Jewish identity(rather than religion) was not as complete as some interviewees recall.

His recollections show that the Jewish milieu in which he grewup was pivotal. Dan OMeara, who was for a time closest to himprofessionally and politically, recalls that being Jewish was a bigdeal for Harold, culturally. He wasnt religious or observant, wasviolently anti-Zionist, but he was Jewish and came from that Jewishworking-class left tradition.14 Dennis Davis, who was later activein Jewish communal affairs, felt an ethnic bond with Wolpe when

they met in 1984: Harold was friendly. He acted a bit like a Jewishuncle would and was like Joe [Slovo] in that way ethnically Jewish.Harold cooked a meal for us, and we discussed and debated. I havevery warm feelings towards him; we had good one-to-one meetings.He was Jewish in a culturally strong way he talked that language.15

This is hardly surprising. Because the community in which he grewup was not fully assimilated into the society, as a schoolboy Wolpeprobably mixed largely or solely with other Jews. Elaine Unterhalter,

who worked with Wolpe in Britain, and whose father was a close


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friend of Wolpe and his brother (Harold Wolpe was best man at

Unterhalter seniors wedding), recalls the Wolpes as a fairly typical Johannesburg Jewish family of the time and suggests that HaroldsMarxism may have been quite a shock to them.16 Like many Jewson the left, he married a Jewish partner, AnnMarie Kantor. In the lastyears of Wolpes life, while living in Cape Town, he and his wife hada distinctly Jewish circle of friends, although this seemed far moreimportant to AnnMarie than Harold. 17 Jewish identity did matter toAnnMarie Wolpe if only in a negative sense. She later told Hilda

Bernstein that she resented being called names by black feministsbecause she too had suffered discrimination: I know what it is like tobe marginalised because I am Jewish. I know jobs I didnt get becauseI was Jewish.18 Many other Jews insisted that Jewishness enabledthem to understand discrimination and its hurts. While the claimthat Jews, because they have experienced racism, identify with othervictims is an obvious generalisation, for some Jews the experienceof discrimination does create an empathy with others who suffer asimilar experience.

According to Wolpe, it was largely the Zionist in uence with,perhaps, a more generalised Jewish experience of being on thewrong end of the exercise of power which shaped his politicaldevelopment. Asked how he came to be associated with the liberationmovement, he told Hilda Bernstein in 1990 that his Lithuanianfather was an in uence: He was kind of . . . anti-British imperialistbecause of the Balfour Declaration.19 This reference is not clear: theBalfour Declaration, the 1917 British statement supporting a Jewish

national home in Palestine, was hailed by Zionists. Either Wolpesenior was not a Zionist or he did not feel the declaration went farenough. In any case, Wolpe insisted that his father, while conformingto white South African attitudes on race, always expressed hishatred for British imperialism.20 It was not uncommon at that timefor Jewish South Africans to ercely dislike the NP, given its anti- Jewish leanings, but to share its prejudices against black people. Thissometimes helped propel their children towards radicalism. Both

Wolpe and his older brother, Joseph, who seems also to have joined


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the CPSA before it was banned in 1950 and whom Wolpe cited as a

key political in uence, were surely receptive to leftist ideas partlybecause of this upbringing. Joseph Wolpe became an internationallyrenowned behavioural psychologist who appeared on the cover ofTime magazine.21 It was his younger brother who lived out their earlypolitical commitment.

Wolpe brie y joined the Zionist socialist movement. Hementioned teaching Zionist socialist literacy classes for Africans inDiagonal Street and that he tried the Zionist socialist HaShomer

HaTzair, the most left-wing of the Zionist youth movements. The Jewish secular left also played its role. Athlone Boys High School,Wolpe noted, was situated in the heart of the area dominated by the Jewish Workers Club . . . 29 out of every 30 pupils were the sonsand daughters of immigrants from Lithuania . . . and [their parents]discussed on the street corners of Doornfontein the politics of theBund . . . The kids were very uncomformist, there was a resistance toany kind of regime. Athlone also conformed to the Jewish stereotypeof the time: It was a very intellectual school, it excelled at chessand debating and music and wasnt so wonderful at sports. Wolpesaid Athlone was quite famous as a source of left-wing people.22 Interestingly, he does not seem to have been one of them during hisschool days: I remember very clearly kind of mocking the left whenthey said anything but defending it from a position of total ignorancewhen they were attacked.23

This background gives some sense of why being Jewish maderadical politics an option both for the young Wolpe and for others.

Jews were disproportionately represented in the ANC and the SACP,fuelling the worst suspicions of Afrikaner nationalism. Cronin recallsthat when he was detained and interrogated by the notorious securitypoliceman Spyker van Wyk, his very rst question was, Are you Jewish? To my credit, I said yes, even though Im not. I was clearlypolitically deviant and they needed some operational explanation forit. But he acknowledges that this explanation was often con rmedby the evidence.24 Marks notes a study by James Campbell which

found that 40 per cent of whites who joined the ANC were Jewish.25


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Although the South African Jewish community probably numbered

only about 120 000 at its zenith in the 1970s,26 it made a signi cantimpact on the ght against minority rule. A Jewish law rm allowedthe young Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo to serve their legalarticles when other white rms would not entertain black candidatelawyers. And the Jewish Workers Club and the Zionist youthmovements provided the bulk of white participation in the struggleagainst apartheid. It is important to note that the mainstream Jewishcommunity was as conservative as other whites. Marks points out

that Jewish ANC members were a tiny portion of the communityand mainstream Jewish organisations disowned them for fear ofbeing associated with communists.27 Nevertheless, their prominencerequires an explanation.

The standard analysis maintains that Jewish religious teaching andexperience makes more likely identi cation with the dominated. BenTurok, a Jewish ANC activist, observes: The Jewish tradition is ahumanitarian one. Most of us grew up very conscious of the injusticesof race, having been discriminated against and conscious of beingdifferent. A sense of justice was very strong it drove me and othersinto the movement.28 Jews had not been part of the ruling groupin any society for centuries they never had reason to feel entirelycomfortable with power arrangements anywhere. Atheist Jewishnesscould also inspire radical politics. Morris recalls that Isaac Deutschersbook The Non-Jewish Jew,29 which, while rejecting religion and Jewishnationalism, insisted that Jews ought to identify with those who weredominated and oppressed, was a major in uence on him and other

young Jewish radicals.30 Most Jews were not left-wing. But leftist ideas were part of

the intellectual currency in a way they would not have been in acommunity which felt it had a clear stake in the prevailing distributionof power. While other whites might need to make an effort todiscover leftist politics, Jews in the area of the Jewish Workers Clubneeded to make an effort to avoid it. Early training in the Jewishreligion may also have helped shape Jews who were later to become

Marxists. The activist and academic Raymond Suttner reports that


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Joe Matthews, an ANC and SACP activist before joining the Inkatha

Freedom Party (IFP), recalled that in the communist night schools,the Jewish contribution was very important because the Jews fromEastern Europe came with rabbinical traditions of examining texts.31

Another dimension of the Jewish condition may be relevant.The historian Yuri Slezkine has argued that for much of theirhistory Jews, like some other groups such as Armenians, Parsisand Overseas Chinese and Indians, have been service nomads:permanent strangers who performed tasks that the natives were

unable or unwilling to perform.32

They were nonprimary producersspecialising in the delivery of goods and services to the surroundingagricultural . . . populations.33 Service nomads are essential tothe societies they serve but are never fully part of them. Thus thepermanent strangers lead a precarious existence in which the threatof violence or expulsion or both are ever present. This may explaintheir intellectual overachievement. Because they have no links to theland, they must live literally by their wits: survival depends on usingmental faculties rather than muscle. Non-manual skills were whatmade them useful to their host society; they were also an insurancebecause these skills were portable if they were forced to leave. Servicenomads must be strangers if they are to play their required role, sothey are less likely to be invested in the existing order than groups

rmly rooted in their societies.Service nomads became bankers and professionals. But they could

equally well become revolutionaries, both because they had no stakein the existing order and because it made sense to dream of a world in

which divisions between people would end and everyone, includingnomads, would belong. Both liberal democracy, with its stress on theuniversality of human rights, and socialisms search for economic andsocial equality met those requirements. Almost by de nition, Jewsenjoyed full legal equality in liberal democracies since the state whichdenied them this status would no longer be liberal. In Russia and inthe largely Lithuanian Jewish community in South Africa, socialismalso appeared as a valid contender for liberation from the uncertainty

and fragility of service nomadism. As Wolpes early political life


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shows, even Zionism whose aim was to end Jews status as service

nomads by rooting them in a land which belonged to others and thussaw Jewish salvation not in making sure that everyone was rootedbut in ensuring that only Jews were included, until the reality of lifeas a coloniser intruded, strongly universalist overtones by combiningethnic nationalism with socialism.

From Zionist to communistIf the secular Jewish left held Wolpes attention for a time, it was to

lose it forever when he enrolled at university. It was there that hemade the same transition as did a small but signi cant number ofother young Jews of his generation from the ethnic left to a broadermovement for change.

Whether Wolpe was even interested enough in society when hearrived at university to want to study it, let alone change it, is notclear. According to Peter Alexander, a sociologist who devoted hisinaugural professorial lecture to Wolpes life and work, he enrolledas a student in the natural sciences in 1944, changing after his rstyear to a BA in social work which included some sociology andstatistics during which course he met his future wife, AnnMarie.34 Wolpe recalled starting off studying for a BA in social studies. Hecon rmed that there had been a years delay but this, he said, wasprompted by his language choice he wanted to study Zulu ratherthan Afrikaans.35 Whatever Wolpe may have felt about the left atschool, he preferred to study the most widely spoken language of theblack majority rather than one of the two white of cial languages.

Wolpe shed his reservations about the left soon after arriving atuniversity. He later described being profoundly in uenced, in his rstyear, by a book by the British communist Emile Burns whose title heremembered asWhat is Communism? but which is surely Burnss 1939booklet What is Marxism? 36 Wolpe recalled poring over this slightvolume (63 pages) on the tram to Diagonal Street, where he taughtliteracy for the Zionist socialist movement. He was stunned by thissystem of thought and credits the book with his adoption of Marxism.

He could never bear to return to it because it was written during the


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Stalinist period by a senior of cial of the Communist Party and the

Marxism was extremely crude. But at the time he found it absolutelyelectrifying.37 Its in uence was complemented by meeting left-wingstudents, in particular Ruth First and her future husband, Slovo, whobecame Wolpes close friend at Wits after serving in World War Two;they remained friends for the rest of their lives.38 By the end of his rstyear, he had joined the Young Communist League, and the next yearthe Communist Party: It was a combination of . . . an [intellectual]sense of looking for something and family and school background.39

He never returned to Zionism Ernesto Laclau said they shared ananti-Zionist perspective.40 He was also a very good friend of RalphMiliband, a leading British Marxist intellectual whose son Ed todayleads the Labour Party; Miliband was de nitely anti-Israel. SACPactivist Essop Pahad, a minister in post-1994 governments, believesWolpe was interested in the occupation of Palestinian land, theoppressive approach of the state of Israel.41 Wolpes son Nicholassays: He saw Israel as similar to South Africa in some respects.42

For Wolpe, as for some other left-wing whites of his time, hisembrace of communism would be a lifetime commitment whichrequired personal sacri ce and unquestioning public loyalty tothe former Soviet Union. For some this was admirable even if itwent with total obedience to a party line. Bill Freund recalls: Thecommunists ideas about international affairs were in some ways verycrude. Moscow was always good, any democracy movement was verysuspect, it probably contained all kinds of reactionary elements. Butthey were so dedicated. They could all have had comfortable lives

here, they didnt need to do this at all.43 Wolpes life was to entailmore questioning and less material sacri ce than the norm. But it didlargely conform to the pattern described here.

He became an activist working in the university branches of theCommunist Party (one of which was composed of manual workersat the university44 ) and in the student movement. He was electedpresident of the SRC (despite the fact that students knew he was acommunist), where he did battle with Michael ODowd and his liberal

supporters. Wolpe described being befriended during his student


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days by Nelson Mandela. He also became friendly with ANC Youth

League leader Walter Sisulu. In his autobiography Mandela recalledthat discussions with Wolpe and other leftist students helped themall to re ne their political positions.45 It was a sign of the depth ofEnglish-speaking alienation from the newly elected NP governmentthat the left won the vast majority of SRC seats the disputes betweenthe left and the liberals seemed to centre more on how strong astand to take on non-racialism than on how the economy should bestructured. Segregation in university sport was an important issue.

Evidence that the left was not socialist was the presence in its ranksof Phillip Tobias, who was later responsible for pioneering researchon human evolution: he was a committed liberal. George Bizos, latera distinguished human rights lawyer, recalls a speech in which hedeclared: If wanting equality for our fellow students makes me aleftist, then Im proud to be one.46

Student politics in the 1940s seems to have resembled that of the1970s, when Wolpes ideas in uenced another generation of students:the divide among the minority of students engaged in politics wasbetween the left and liberals. But while the radicals who read Wolpealmost thirty years later had to express themselves largely in codebecause a battery of laws suppressed free speech, before the CPSA wasbanned in 1950 leftist ideas could be expressed openly. Wolpe recalledthat Lionel Forman, a CPSA activist, became editor of the studentnewspaper Wits Student and turned it from a sort of sporty socialnewspaper into a very political paper. It contained articles on the splitbetween Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and on Eurocommunism,

the idea that communist parties in Europe could contest electionsand accept liberal democratic rules.47 While this was couched as adiscussion of debates within international student movements, it wassurely not the fare most middle-class students expected. In the 1970s,Wits Student again became a vehicle for political discussion which themainstream press avoided.48

It was at university that Wolpes academic interests were aroused at Wits, he said, his main interest was in sociology. He tutored

students and became a junior lecturer before graduating because of


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staff shortages.49 Pahad remembers him offering classes in Marxism:

His pedagogical approach was helpful. We felt part of somethingimportant, not just rote learning as in the more normal Witsclasses.50 But he decided against an academic career. He took a lawdegree which he completed in 1952,51 by which time the CommunistParty was banned. Wolpe is remembered as an effective lawyer.But he insisted he was never enthusiastic: I started studying law,which I didnt particularly like, except the more sociological andpolitical stuff like constitutional law and jurisprudence.52 Alexander

says his law practice was something that paid the bills rather thana vocation.53 Wolpe said that he made this choice because I didntwant to leave the country and I couldnt see any way of making aliving other than as some kind of professional. But the suppression ofthe CPSA convinced him that a career in sociology was not possible:I decided it was dif cult getting a job as a lecturer given the politicaldevelopments.54

The reluctant choice did enable him to play a political role: hebecame one of the few lawyers willing to take up political cases. Acolleague, the British Marxist Henry Bernstein, suggests that Wolpeslegal training had more of an in uence on him than he imagined, asit shaped his academic work: His intellectual style was in uenced bythe focus and procedures of a lawyer.55 Martin Legassick too believesWolpes sociology was formalistic, like much writing by lawyers.56 What many saw as Wolpes overly theoretical approach may havestemmed from applying legal reasoning to the study of society.

After the banning of the CPSA in 1950, Wolpe joined the Peace

Movement, which provided an outlet for communists, and theCongress of Democrats, the small, whites-only ally of the ANCwhich gave whites an opportunity to participate in the ght againstminority rule and was a political home for former party members.Wolpe recalled being banned in 1954.57 By an order served on themwithout any recourse to the courts, banned people were forbiddenfrom participating in politics. They could not attend gatherings,de ned as any group of people larger than two (banned people were

to be arrested for playing bridge with three friends); nor could they


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belong to political organisations or be quoted.58 Unusually, Wolpes

banning order seems not to have barred him from practising law,which he continued to do until his arrest in 1963.

The ban on social activity must have been dif cult. Bizos recallsthat the Wolpes were known for their non-racial social occasionsat which Wolpe and the writer Lewis Nkosi would tell jokes withracist overtones. Bizos explains: If youre liberated and are amongpeople you believe to be liberated, you can make jokes about it.59 So joking about race became a way of celebrating commitment to non-

racialism. Twenty years later, when left-wing students were readingWolpes work, avenues for interracial socialising had narrowed, butwhen they did appear, jokes were again used in the same way.

Wolpe rst became known not for his scholarship but for his partin an escape from prison, which made far more impact on the publicthan any of his academic work.

Goldreich and Wolpe: Lilliesleaf, Marshall Square and acts ofderring-doThe banning of the ANC and the PAC after the Sharpeville massacrein March 1960 forced the resistance movement, Wolpe included,underground.

He did not play a leadership role but assisted with some logisticaltasks. He did join Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of theunderground ANC, on whose behalf he undertook a tiny actionwhose nature he did not specify.60 Dennis Goldberg, a Rivonia Trialist,says Wolpe was an intelligence of cer for MK high command.61

His most important role was helping to establish an undergroundheadquarters for the high command at Lilliesleaf Farm in Rivonia,then a peri-urban area just outside Johannesburg. Legally, the farmcould be owned only by whites. Wolpe and an architect, ArthurGoldreich, bought it in 1961,62 although, in Wolpes recollection, histask was purely to act as a lawyer ensuring the smooth transfer of theproperty. 63 Goldreich was the frontman for the purchase. He alsolived conspicuously on the property because he was not an object

of police interest.64

(Rivonia Trialist Ahmed Kathrada says Lilliesleaf


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was owned by the SACP, which had more experience of operating in

secret. The ANC was meant to use it only temporarily. 65 )Until 11 July 1963, when a police raid ended Lilliesleafs role as

the centre of military resistance to apartheid, it housed Mandela andother members of MK high command. Besides helping to buy theproperty, Wolpes job was to service the Roneo machine, a duplicatingdevice operated by typing documents onto a stencil, through whichink was forced. The Roneo was a favourite of pamphlet-makers andWolpes job was to keep it in good working order. He seems to have

achieved this more through luck than skill he said he would take themachine apart and reassemble it always with one or two extra screwsat the end, which I didnt know what to do with, but it worked. 66 More importantly, he remembered, he drafted a Code of Disciplinefor MK which, while it was never adopted, was one of the documentsused by the prosecution at the Rivonia Trial. Since the code was inWolpes handwriting, it established a connection between him andMK.

Wolpe had enough to do with Lilliesleaf to ensure that when thepolice raided it, I was told that I ought to leave the country because Iwas going to be clearly connected.67 He was in legal practice with hisbrother-in-law Jimmy Kantor, who was not politically active and wasknown as a connoisseur of the good life. Wolpe told AnnMarie andKantor that he would have to leave the country and tried to escapeby crossing the border north of Rustenburg, today in Northwestprovince.68 Using family connections, he cooperated in a plan whichwould have him picnic next to a river on the Botswana border and

then escape. Much of this depended on a relative of AnnMaries who,while highly conservative, was expected to place kinship ahead ofpolitics. But he claimed to have forgotten where the picnic site wasand insisted on asking directions from two whites, one of whomwas the sergeant in charge of the local police station. The sergeantasked for identi cation, and when Wolpe could not produce any,he was arrested and driven to Marshall Square, the Johannesburgpolice headquarters which was also used as a prison. There he found

Goldreich, along with Mosie Moolla, Laloo Chiba and Abdullai


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Charlie Jassat, who had been responsible for acts of sabotage (which

adhered strictly to MKs policy then of not endangering human life).Wolpe said it took him another twenty years to realise, with the aidof a lm which featured a scene similar to that which had led to hisarrest, that the relative had led him into a trap. Family ties, it appears,were less binding than white solidarity.

It was in Marshall Square that Goldreich and Wolpe gained theirniche in the history of the ght against apartheid by escaping with Jassat and Moolla. (Chiba had been released but, ironically, was soon

to be rearrested and to serve eighteen years on Robben Island.69

)After considering several means of escape, including a plan to sawthrough their bars (AnnMarie Wolpe smuggled into the prisonhacksaw blades in food she brought Wolpe70 ), the detainees persuadeda warder, Johan Greeff, to let them escape in exchange for R4 000( 2 000), with which he wanted to buy a Studebaker car. Accordingto Wolpe, the detainees told Greeff that we wanted two Africans,two Indians and two whites. But he . . . would only allow the twoIndians and two of us.71 Greeff assisted in the escape early on themorning of 11 August but did not receive his money. Accounts ofwhy he was not paid differ, but most agree that an attempt to pay himwas thwarted.72 Greeffs role in the escape was quickly discovered andhe was imprisoned.

After the escape, the white and Indian detainees went theirseparate ways because they agreed that a racially mixed group wouldexcite suspicion. All of them ed the country. Goldreich and Wolperemained in hiding in Johannesburg for about a week and a half

before being driven in the boot of a car to Swaziland, where VernonBerrang, an anti-apartheid lawyer, chartered a plane for them.Disguised as priests, they ew to Botswana, where they made contactwith ANC activists including the former Speaker of Parliament, MaxSisulu, but went into kind of hiding because they feared capture.Although the British police (Botswana was still Bechuanaland,under British rule) did not attempt to arrest them, an East AfricanAirways plane which was to take them and other ANC members to

Tanzania was blown up the night before the ight by South African


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agents, according to the British district commissioner.73 But the NBC

broadcasting network agreed to pay for a chartered ight in exchangefor an interview, and Wolpe and Goldreich were own to Dar esSalaam, where they were met by a huge press conference, and laterto London. They were initially declared prohibited immigrants, butafter the intervention of the then opposition Labour Party, the twowere allowed into Britain in September 1963.74

The escape was a morale boost to a beleaguered ANC seeking toadjust to the banning of 1960. Moolla and Jassat were in some ways

the escape plans architects. But their white colleagues attracted theattention of local and international media and the apartheid state.Albie Sachs, former ANC activist and Constitutional Court judge,observes that the escape catapulted [Wolpe] to world attention.75 Thethen minister of justice John Vorster made no secret of his chagrin.There can be no doubt, he said, that two of the big sh have gotaway. A political trial without them would be like Hamlet withoutthe Prince, but the show will go on just the same. An account of the

time observes: The successful escape of Goldreich and Wolpe was aserious embarrassment to the South African government, at a timewhen . . . ministers and police generals were boasting about how theyhad smashed all subversive elements.76 In English-speaking suburbs,the names Goldreich and Wolpe evoked instant recognition foryears the others were barely remembered. That they were Jewishmade their escape a cause for celebration among some Jews who stilldistrusted the NP. Davis recalls his excitement when he met Wolpe in

1984: I told him that he was one of my rst political memories: the1963 escape. I was eleven at the time. My parents were delighted thathed escaped. He was Jewish and the Jews had beaten the Nats. Thiswas my rst political moment, having this explained to me.77

But their escape was important to the ANC too because it seemedto signal that the apartheid state was not invincible. Mandela observedthat it was an embarrassment to the government and a boost toour morale.78 The escape, Chiba says, also made an impact in the

townships: It dented the image of the Special Branch, and the morale


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of the people, for a short while, was raised quite high. Cinemas in

Indian areas and possibly black townships, he says, screenedThe Great Escape , which starred Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. The lmbecame very popular and audiences shouted Viva! when the escapeoccurred. But the political police were determined to restore theirbruised images and egos and became even more vicious.79 One signof the governments embarrassment and anger, Bizos believes, wasKantors arrest. He says police knew Kantor was not politically active:It was a revenge arrest because of Harold.80 Kantor paid a heavy

price for this apparent t of pique. His arrest cost him his law practiceand marriage and he left South Africa as soon as he could.81 For sometime after they arrived in London, Wolpe and Goldreich were full-time symbols of resistance to apartheid. Wolpe recalled travelling onbehalf of the movement trying to exploit our notoriety,82 using theattention which the media had focused on them to publicise the ghtagainst apartheid.

But this period in the limelight also ended Wolpes career asan activist. While he attended ANC and SACP branch meetingsthroughout his almost thirty years in Britain, he never againparticipated in activism. Possibly his only public appearance on theANCs behalf was when he was included, in 1987, in the group whichmet white Afrikaners in Senegal one of the encounters which builtmomentum for a negotiated settlement. Once he settled in London,Wolpes contribution to the lefts ght against apartheid wasintellectual a contribution which the ANC and the SACP seemedto nd of little value.

From deeds to words: The activist as academic Adjustment to life in Britain was dif cult for Wolpe and his family. Theenvironment was forbidding and his shift to an academic career strewnwith obstacles. Unterhalter recalls exile life in London as frequentlyso complicated so many people seemed to be psychologically fallingapart. It was often really dif cult and uncomfortable.83 But they didsettle into a comfortable life, later augmented by trips to a holiday

home in France.84

Their lifestyle seems to have been no different


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from that of other British academics, but some of Wolpes critics

contrasted its comfort with the far more dif cult circumstances underwhich Jack Simons lived in the ANC camps. Nico Cloete, who laterworked with Wolpe on education, recalls that when they rst met inEngland, Wolpes opening line was, Is life still good for whites livingin SA? Cloete says he replied, Yes, but not as good as for the whitesliving in the UK. Wolpe, he says, was offended by this.85

Soon after arriving in Britain, Wolpe decided to work his wayinto an academic career; he relied on contacts sympathetic to the ght

against apartheid to secure a scholarship. Despite a hostile referencefrom a Wits professor who saw him as a dangerous communist, hespent a year at the London School of Economics (LSE) reading thesociology he had been cut off from during his time as an activist andlawyer. He had almost to start from scratch. Wolpe recalled that aSouth African migr sociology professor, Percy Cohen, set him onhis way. Cohen pointed him towards ten books and told him, Hereare the books you must read if you want to know whats happenedin the last decade. The reading was supplemented by attendinglectures and seminars given by Miliband. It is a sign of how academiclife has changed that after only a year reading and listening at LSE,Wolpe hoped to teach sociology. Today, a candidate for even a junioracademic post would need substantial postgraduate training. Wolpebelieved that his Wits degree and a year reading in London wouldbe enough for an academic post. It wasnt, at rst. He applied forlectureships and was repeatedly turned down. His toehold came whenhe landed a job at Oxford in extramural studies adult education

because they were interested in people with odd histories. SeveralBritish Marxists had been given jobs in the programme. After a year,his political loyalties landed him his rst academic job. Sheila Allen,a senior lecturer in sociology at Bradford University, who latermarried the prominent British Marxist Vic Allen, offered Wolpe a job because she was looking for radical sociologists.86 The post wasfollowed by lectureships at North West London Polytechnic and,from 1975, at Essex University, where he spent the rest of his British

academic career.87


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Sachs describes an intellectually magical weekend visiting Wolpe

in Bradford:

From being an intelligent but unremarkable legal larva hehad metamorphosed into an extraordinary ying creature ofideas! His earlier legal mode of thinking and writing had beenbased on nding authority for every proposition . . . relyingon incontestable empirical evidence to justify an assertionof fact. Everything was footnoted, particular and concrete.

He had cleansed himself of footnotes, and entered a realmof pure ideas held together by logical coherence . . . It washeady, unnerving, to try to keep ones intellectual balance . . .without the crutches of political dogma, scripture or empiricalevidence!88

Laclau recalled that Wolpes career at Essex faced resistance: Henever got a full professorship. His political sympathies seem to haveplayed a role in this, but so did the fact that his publication recordwas rather thin. He wrote only one book, but such a slim book.This was partly a consequence of the fact that he became an academiclate in life.89 Wolpes lack of formal academic training did hamperhis career. That he was employed on a campus was an achievementin itself, but the route to academic seniority would always be largelybarred to him.

On this tenuous foundation was built an academic career whichhad a signi cant impact on the thinking of radical South Africans.

race class and power by steven friedman

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