I was a fresh-faced 16-year-old when I started my studies in 1950 at the University of Cape Town. In the long summer holiday between school and university I worked on a fruit farm some 85 miles from Cape Town near the town of Ceres. The hard physical work in the hot sun made me fit and strong – and, for the first time right up front, I witnessed the conditions of farm workers, and the profits of the white farmers. The farmer who took me on had been an accountant with one of the big corporations and rose to the rank of captain in the South African Air Force during World War Two. He served in North Africa and Italy and on being demobilised, was given a small grant which, with an investment from his brother- in-law, was sufficient to buy a derelict fruit farm. The export market had collapsed during the war and these new owners set about rehabilitating the farm. Modern insecticide sprays cleared the orchard of the destructive codling moths and other pests more quickly than on the farms of the older farmers who stuck to the traditional arsenical sprays.
In addition, my farmer and his partner paid their labourers wages that were minutely better than the going rate in those years of unemployment, so they had the pick of the workers and they worked much harder. They also drew the enmity of the other farmers, and the old Boer-Brit, Afrikaans-English antagonisms re-surfaced. Our farmers picked the fruit more carefully as it matured instead of stripping it, regardless of size, in one day. Larger fruit gained a higher price, so their profits were higher. This also lengthened the growing time for each variety, thus getting more fruit from each tree. On their small investment they made profits of £13 000 in their first year and by the time I went to work on the farm the season had yielded a profit of more than £30 000. The farmer in particular had great organisational and entrepreneurial skills. As a newcomer to fruit farming he quickly learnt all he could from books and experts. Yet the rewards were exorbitant in relation to what the farm workers were being paid. Well-off people in Britain were paying £1 for a single pear, when a worker would have been paid in shillings for a whole day’s work.
I marvelled at the dexterity of the women fruit-packers who wrapped each pear in a square of coloured tissue paper with a few deft movements of their fingers and placed each one nestled in straw in a wooden box so that there would not be any bruising during the road journey to the railway station, or the unloading and loading on to a train, or in the pre-cooling and freezing sheds at Cape Town harbour where the seasonal export of fruits was a major industrial activity, and then the 14-day sea journey to Britain, the offloading and train journey to London and elsewhere. All in all an astonishingly complex set of activities, with special reefer (refrigerated) ships built for this trade.
I tried to wrap fruit but my fingers never did learn to fold the paper so that it looked neat and clean. My wrappers were crumpled. If I’d had to earn my living I would have starved. What I could do was make up the wooden boxes from the shooks, or planks and cleats, pre-cut at a saw mill and transported to the farm where on a simple jig they would be assembled and nailed together. One smart blow of the hammer and the nails would be driven straight in. I discovered that even such hand work - always described as “unskilled” - needed training and experience to work fast enough to satisfy the farmer. What I could do was fill in the reams of forms to go with each consignment of fruit. So I learnt about scientific farming and the organisation of work. And I learned about the need to get up early to refill the fuel tanks of the engines driving the water pumps and how tired one gets. As a 16-year-old even the loudest alarm clock would not waken me in the morning. Farmers get surprisingly angry when you neglect your duty.
My cousin Gerry and I worked together and were able to borrow the pickup truck to go swimming and visiting other people because we were friends of the family of the white farmer. It was a great holiday and learning experience. Simultaneously, all that I had heard from my family and read about the exploitation of workers and the role of race in apartheid I saw to be absolutely true. I also discovered that kissing and fondling the farmer’s daughter was great fun too. Our farmer friend retired after about ten years and went to live in the United States, where one winter he slipped on an icy sidewalk, banged his head and died from a brain haemorrhage, a relatively young man in his 50s.
Action for unity
When I started my studies in March 1950 at the University of Cape Town I was still like a young schoolboy among self-assured young men and women. I felt socially very ill at ease. I played rugby in the under-19D team. That was the lowest one could get, but it gave me the opportunity to kick the hell out of the ball and get rid of my frustrations that way. I did later play for the A team and even for the third senior team and on occasion for the second team as I got older and stronger. I was always the smallest and my bigger team-mates protected me as much as they could. I still have a sore shoulder, the result of a vicious deliberate kick and other lesions, but at the time you don’t think of the future, just the exhilaration of competing. The four-year degree in civil engineering was considered to be one of the most difficult to get through in the designated time. I managed to do something most unusual, failing applied mathematics, which was usually considered easy, and passing pure maths, which was considered to be more difficult. That happened in both my first and second years. The first time it happened I looked again and again at the exam results on the notice board but my name was missing. I felt ill.
One of my professors, standing nearby and seeing my distress, casually told me about the possibility, offered only to engineering students, of writing supplementary exams year by year, which I managed. There were fewer than 30 of us out of about 200 who started who could finish the four-year degree in that time. I was one of them, but having passed my final exams I made a design error in a structure in my undergraduate thesis. If it will fall down, so do you. My dream of being a graduate engineer before I was 21 was not realised. Not one black student studied engineering at the so-called “open” University of Cape Town in my time. Black students were discouraged from taking engineering. I believe the first student of colour was admitted to the engineering faculty only in 1959.
Whatever my initial result, the fact that Dad was able, completely, to finance my studies was something very special for me. It was such a matter of pride for him to have a son at university. Eventually he was able to introduce me to his friends and acquaintances with the words: “Meet my son, the engineer”. In a contradictory way, he glowed with modesty. My generation was the first in our extended family to get tertiary education and I have South African cousins who are doctors and business studies graduates. Yet I cannot forget how, every year, I would get a letter from the university saying I could not write my exams until my fees had been paid. The outstanding amount was £40 at a time when the total cost of upkeep, books, fees and so on was about £300 a year, if one was on a very tight budget, living at home as I did. Dad would give the university three post-dated cheques to cover the small outstanding amount and eventually the dreaded deficits would be met. It always made me conscious of how privileged I was that, because we were white, Dad could have a bank account while the majority of the people could not because they could not own property and could not earn a wage for which the banks would want to provide a service.
Indeed, access to university, besides being controlled through access to funds, was affected by the severe inequalities in facilities at primary and secondary schools. About half the number of black children could not go to school because there were no places for all of them, and the amount spent on them by the state was about one tenth of that spent on white children in government schools. Until 1955 the apartheid state took no responsibility for African education other than to pay teachers’ salaries. Buildings and maintenance had to be borne by communities and churches. In 1955 the state took control of all schools, introducing a second-rate system of “Bantu education”, against which school-goers rose up in 1976.
I knew all about the inequalities, but the pressure of my studies meant I was not active in student politics. I would sometimes attend mass meetings convened by the Students Representative Council when they put up some form of protest about the increasing racial segregation of students at university. It was shaming to see civil engineering students being the main disrupters of such meetings. Their attitude, when we did talk about these things, was crude: “either whites would rule over blacks or blacks would rule over whites, and so it better be us whites”. As government was the biggest source of funds for the work of civil engineers, that’s who they supported. Why black and white skins had social significance was a question they could not answer, nor did they want to understand the inhumanity of our situation and our responsibility for it. It wasn’t easy being always in the minority, often a minority of one, in the groups in which I was involved. My classmates could not see that, as engineers, there would be so much more work for us if only we could build for all our people. The prejudices absorbed in their childhood were so deeply ingrained they could not see past them. If I hadn’t been a rugby player I would probably have been ostracised completely.
Towards the end of my final year, in August 1953, I met Esmé, who later became my wife. Though she wasn’t a student she was hitchhiking outside the university, as did many students because there was no bus service. We got a lift in the same car. I found her very attractive and the hormones were racing. Later, and totally unconnected to that chance encounter in the car, she came to see my mother. Esmé was the daughter of a Johannesburg political activist, Minnie Bodenstein, a quite famous fund-raiser for the Communist Party, for Umzebenzi (The Worker), the Guardian and other left-wing publications and causes, and worked with Tillie First, mother of Ruth First. I recognised Esmé as the young woman I had met when we shared a lift. She came to see my mother to borrow some blankets because she’d just moved to Cape Town. She said she was a physiotherapist and noticed that I could hardly move my injured right shoulder. She massaged it and it really did help, so I kissed her to say thank you. Esmé was at that time engaged to be married but was going through a bad time with her fiancé. She had become quite ill. I nursed her and gave her moral support. She fell in love with her nurse! We decided to share her blankets for the month of September 1953 before she went off to get married. In the end, she broke off the engagement.
Esmé cooked the most wonderful roast lamb with cloves of garlic nestled into the meat and served with roast potatoes and green peas. Mum would never have used such exotic things as garlic. It was the year I should have graduated but didn’t. My mother, till the end of her life, blamed my new girlfriend for distracting me. I graduated later, after we had married and Esmé had given birth to our daughter Hilary in January 1955. Our son David was born in November 1957. Esmé was a committee member in the Modern Youth Society and I accompanied her to meetings and soon became active too. The MYS was a bit strange because it was a non-racial organisation when the Congress Alliance was a multi-racial group of organisations. That was the language of the time, multi-racial. The African National Congress was exclusively for Africans; the Indian Congress was founded in 1924; the Coloured People’s Congress was formed in 1953, and the Congress of Democrats was formed in 1952 for whites who allied themselves with the African National Congress, which led the Congress Alliance. There were intense debates and heated arguments about the national question. What constituted a nation, or a national group? The South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) when it was formed in 1955 was also non-racial but because of the need for workers’ unity SACTU was accepted within the Congress structure.
I never had any problem with that structuring of our movement because it seemed to me obvious that all Africans in South Africa were subjected as a group throughout the country to the same denial of political and other rights, social and economic, and therefore had to lead us to freedom for themselves and all of our population. In the colonies of the powerful European countries there was no embarrassment about discussing such matters. The League of Nations and the UN charters assert the right of self-determination of nations. So we had to deal with these matters. We argued about a nation being a continuous piece of territory with people who considered themselves a nation because of a common language and a common culture, a single economy and an accepted political system. In South Africa there were the whites, who came from many countries but considered themselves to be a group with shared interests and all the other characteristics. There were the African people who, even though they came from different tribes in recent times, had through political organisation and the oppression that all experienced under the racist laws become a group that covered the whole of the territory. However they did not accept the political system and were both included in in the economy as workers and excluded from the economy as owners of capital, land and wealth. They were therefore not quite a nation but a national group. The Indians, who had been imported into South Africa as workers, remained as a minority and fairly homogeneous national group; and the Coloured people were always caught between being black African and white - and their politics swung in the wind. The apartheid system treated them as a group.
They sometimes accepted this and at other times did not. Our Freedom Charter and our democratic constitution say that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. The issue is how to overcome the historic deprivation of most of the groups and the population, while respecting the rights of all, including the former oppressors. In other words, how do we now transcend the necessary emphasis on national groups during the freedom struggle? Though the Modern Youth Society general membership was out of keeping with the Congress movement at the time, we fully supported Congress. This non-racial youth group was founded by left-wing students at the University of Cape Town who wanted to meet with working class youth. Since the university did not permit political organisations of non-students on the campus, the Modern World Society was set up as an off-campus organisation. I joined them when they were already established.
Our activities were many and designed to draw in young people. We had a meeting just about every Friday night and eventually we rented our own little hall in a building in Cape Town. We could barely finance it. We had political discussions about apartheid and how to resist it. The Freedom Charter covered an entire wall. We also showed films which raised social issues. We were able to get films from the consulate of the Czechoslovak Republic. The films were often about the resistance to Nazi occupation in World War II. Already then we knew about the need to be able to resist in more active ways than holding a placard or a banner. When the oppression gets too great, you have to fight. We also found films about Africa. We looked for films about people’s struggles that would lead to debate and discussion. One of those who joined us was Andimba Ja Toivo
Andimba Toivo ja Toivo, a friend from Namibia
I met Hermann ja Toivo, as he was known in colonial times (now Andimba Toivo ja Toivo) through the Modern Youth Society in 1953. Esmé and I tried to open our home to all our friends to overcome the issues of institutionalised racism that so dominated our lives. Andimba was one of the people who used to visit us in Garfield Road, Claremont, on the edge of Lansdowne in Cape Town. That was on the border between white and Coloured residential areas declared under the Group Areas Act.
He came with friends and we enjoyed each other’s company in a political hothouse atmosphere of debate that was possible because Andimba was particularly close to us. Among those who came were Emil Appollus and Jariretundu Kozonguizi. Esmé and I came from families who were not drinkers, but there was always cold milk in tall pilsner glasses with a frosting of water drops on the outside. Our friends found this an inviting luxury. It is sad that such a minor detail sticks in my mind. There were intense discussions between Andimba, Emil Appollus and me about the nature of freedom. Was freedom simply the right to be employed in big corporations like Consolidated Diamond Mines or De Beers Corporation or Anglo-American? Emil asserted very vigorously that he would be free if he could be a top executive in Anglo-American, and for a socialist like me that didn’t sound like freedom. It sounded like wanting to be part of the repression and exploitation. The reality of South Africa and Namibia today is that what has been achieved is what Emil was talking about. The economic oppression remains. Globalisation, the intensification of the monopolistic trends of powerful multi-national and now trans-national corporations, makes national economic development even more difficult.
Andimba was a tall, quiet, self-effacing working man who was a messenger in the Dominion Furnishing Company in Lower Main Road in Observatory. He delivered furniture and went to the factories that supplied the shop. Esmé told me that she once bumped into him outside the service station where she was taking our car. They embraced as they always did and, of course, in the 1950s it was a great shock to white South Africans to see a white woman and a black man embracing. The African workers in the service station also saw it and our car was thereafter always beautifully cleaned and serviced. That such a minor snippet of memory has stuck in my mind for over 50 years highlights the craziness of apartheid South Africa. I wasn’t drawn to Emil Appollus as I was to Andimba. I believed revolutionaries shouldn’t get drunk. I had this romantic puritanical view of what it was to be a revolutionary. I found his concept of freedom inadequate because it would simply change the faces and skin colour of the exploiters. I did not yet understand the intensity of the desire for national liberation. I was already looking beyond it because I realised that unless working people were freed from economic exploitation they would still be oppressed. Now I can express it as: national oppression was and is the expression of class conflict in the particular context of South African colonial history.
Namibia was not a big issue for us in the Modern Youth Society or for the Congress Alliance in the 1959s and 60s. South Africa was our issue and Namibia was its colony. How do you cope with that contradiction? Our issue was clear: how were we to achieve power in South Africa? Namibia’s problems would be solved by the seizure of that power. It was a lack of understanding on the part of some of us, though Jack and Ray Simons understood the link: we had to attack imperialism through challenging South Africa’s occupation of Namibia and the protection of the interests of DeBeers and Anglo-American through Consolidated Diamond Mines and other interests like the copper mines owned by the US Newmont Mining Corporation at Tsumeb in the north of Namibia. This was clearly understood but we were interested in building opposition to apartheid. It was only later that we began to understand how complete the polarisation between the white state and African political aspirations had become. Therefore the struggle in South West Africa/Namibia became more important as time went on as part of a common struggle against apartheid. More especially as apartheid South Africa used Namibia as a testing ground for various aspects of apartheid legislation. When we met Andimba he was looking for a political and ideological home. How do you deal with being an Ovambo and Namibian person being oppressed by South Africa? Is Namibia going to continue to be a province of South Africa? Is it going to become an independent country?
Andimba was one of the founders of the Ovambo Peoples Congress in Cape Town. I was not directly involved. My memory is that there were considerable differences between those who formed the Ovambo People’s Congress and later the Ovamboland Peoples’ Organisation and South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) on the one hand, and those who formed the South West African National Union (SWANU), which was essentially an Herero-based organisation. But the differences were not only due to ethnicity. My recollection is that members of SWANU were less progressive, because they were more pro-capitalist. They would be politically allied to the chiefs and the conservatism of a system in which the apartheid system used the chiefs as part of their administrative structure. SWAPO members on the other hand were going to be much more revolutionary in their approach. The authority of the Council of Chiefs was a central issue of the conflict. All agreed on national liberation from South African rule which should have been under United Nations trusteeship (originally a League of Nations mandate) to bring the trust territory to independence. The issue was the attitude of a future Namibian government to ownership of land and resources and to big business. Namibian workers living in Cape Town were not very supportive of intellectuals who wanted privileges for themselves .
The United Nations Special Committee on South West Africa (now Namibia) had called for representations on the situation in that country, and the apartheid South African government instructed the Administrator of SWA to refuse Chief Hosea Kutako permission to go to New York to represent his people. Andimba asked me to help him send a tape-recorded message to the UN committee. Finding a tape recorder in those days - when they were large heavy machines - was not as easy as it is now. We had a Dutch friend, a former prisoner of war of the Nazis, who had emigrated to South Africa who had such a tape recorder. “Ike” Eigenstein, a silk-screen artist by profession, worked with us in campaigns against apartheid. He had fallen in love with a woman across the colour line and that was a criminal offense under the Immorality Act, so he had personal reasons for opposing apartheid. He and his eventual wife left the country to be able to remain together. We were not quite sure how to disguise the big open-reel tape. In Ike’s living room we started off with me making a fictitious tape-recorded letter to a fictitious person in America. I talked about our fictitious families and told him about the wonderful jazz music I had heard. We recorded the music and then Andimba recorded his statement in the middle of the music.
I do not remember the exact wording but he said he was making the statement because Chief Hosea Kutako had been refused permission to go to New York; that this was an outrage and a denial of the rights of the Namibian people under the trusteeship. Among the thoughts I remember were: that the government of South Africa occupied Namibia illegally, that it denied the rights of the people under the mandate, that it refused them representation and it was imposing apartheid policies and laws in Namibia. The people were denied the right to political organisation and assembly, and the mandate was supposed to lead them to
After the end of the Second World War and the defeat of the Nazis, all former German colonies other than South West Africa were put under the control of the United Nations Trusteeship Council. South Africa refused to submit to this for SWA. It agreed only to submit annual reports on the territory to the UN. In 1948 the National Party Government repudiated this agreement and refused to make reports to the UN, and treated it as a province of South Africa. SWA was never under the UN trusteeship Council. The main objectives behind the formation of the Ovamboland Peoples’ Congress were to request the UN to force South Africa to place SWA under the Trusteeship Council and to do away with the contract labour system imposed on the Ovambo people. The idea of Independence emerged with the formation of SWAPO at a time when all the colonies in Africa were demanding independence.
Independence and democracy, but in fact the repression was increasing through the arrests of political activists and the denial of political rights. My recollection is that his statement lasted about five minutes and could have been longer with more detail but it came from the heart and that made it very powerful. We then decided that sending the tape as an ordinary package would make it too easy for the apartheid authorities to seize it. Andimba bought a book, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and cut a pocket in the inner pages to hide the tape inside. Sent by post to New York it ended up in the hands of Mburumba Kerina Getzen who waved it around at the UN Special Committee hearings; the book in one hand and the tape in the other. Once the tape was sent off I was waiting for something to happen. My concern was whether the way the tape was sent to the UN could be kept secret. A photograph of Kerina Getzen waving the book and the tape around at the hearing of the UN Special Committee appeared in the South African press. That blew that method wide open. But in political terms what Andimba and his colleagues did was very valuable because it demonstrated to the entire world the determination of apartheid South Africa to try to hide the reality of its administration of the trust territory as if it were a colony.
Andimba was declared an illegal immigrant and given 72 hours to leave Cape Town. He was taken under guard to Ondangwa in the north of Ovamboland. There he fell under the control of a chief who carried out government instructions to harass him. I was severely criticised, I believe totally unjustifiably, by my older comrade Ray Alexander (Simons), a famous activist, for not getting clearance from a higher political authority. My attitude was that if a comrade came to me to ask me to do something I was not going around behind his back to get clearance. Andimba was a responsible person working with other Namibians in Cape Town, as well as Ray and Professor Simons. Why should I have questioned his bona fides? And I would have thought that he had discussed every move with the comrades with whom he was working. I believed that we were trying to overcome apartheid racism so that people would be empowered. I did not feel that I had the right to question a comrade’s activities. I felt that sometimes black comrades had a feeling that even committed white activists were themselves infected quite unconsciously with attitudes of racial superiority. I think it would have shocked us to hear this but there were advantages of education, facilities like cars and telephones and relative wealth that had to be overcome. That he had not discussed the matter with our comrades Ray and Jack meant that he did not want to be stopped from getting his tape recorded message to the UN.
Ray told me that he had been working with a group who were going to support him in going back to South West Africa where he would have a little shop and then undertake underground organisation. She said that sending the tape destroyed that possibility because now he was being watched so meticulously and his work would be very difficult. As it turned out the fact that he had been ordered to leave Cape Town and placed under rigid restrictions established his credentials as a leader in Namibia by the very authorities who wanted to silence him. He was able to set up his shop. He withstood the pressures and was able to survive – and even under those conditions assisted in the launching of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN). Indeed, a strange twist of history. In 1968, when I was already in prison, I heard that Andimba was on trial for his activities with SWAPO and PLAN. He was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment under South Africa’s security laws that were made retrospectively applicable to actions committed before the law was imposed in Namibia. That was a fundamental breach of democratic legal principle and another example of South Africa’s abuse of its powers. Even more appalling was the way in which Britain and the United States of America protected apartheid South Africa from criticism and international action to terminate its illegal occupation of Namibia. Andimba and I did not meet again for some 35 years when we were reunited in London in early 1985.
When freedom came to Namibia, Andimba, the father of Swapo, was the General Secretary and Minister of Minerals and Energy. He held various ministerial posts thereafter and is now retired.