Race, Class and Power

Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid

Steven Friedman

Contents

Acknowledgements vii
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9

Seeing the world through another lens

The man and the movement: Harold Wolpe

and the fight against apartheid

27

Class struggle in the classroom: Wolpe and

the battle of ideas

46

Voice in the wilderness? Harold Wolpe, the

SACP and the ANC

68

The Marxism of the middle class? The

academic radicalism of the 1970s

95

Class tells: Wolpes critique of liberal and

nationalist orthodoxy

116

Critique of pure reason: The cheap labour

thesiss critics

135

Recognising racial reality: Race and class in

Wolpes later work

176

Real people, real politics: Seeing a strategic

opening in apartheids retreat

200

Beyond them and us: Politics of division,

politics of possibility 223

CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12

Schooled in reality: Wolpe, education and the

politics of reform

243

A few small areas in the vicinity of Beijing:

Harold Wolpe and post-apartheid South Africa

260

Questions, not answers: Transcending the

Marxist tradition

276

Notes
292
Bibliography 339
Index
359

THEMANANDTHEMOVEMENT 27

CHAPTER1

The man and the movement

Harold Wolpe and the fight against apartheid

IT IS A MINOR irony that Wolpe, whose scholarship nudged young

scholars 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 more
scholars per head than any other section of the white population in
South Africa.

Out of Zion? The origins of the Jewish left

Wolpe was born in Johannesburg on 14 January 1926 to Jewish
parents who had emigrated from Lithuania.1 He attended Athlone
Boys High School and, in 1944, became a student at the University of
the Witwatersrand, then Johannesburgs only university. Interviewees
who knew him in the ANC and the SACP insist that he showed
no interest in his Jewishness and that it had no impact on him. But
Wolpe acknowledged towards the end of his life that his ethnicity had
an important influence, even if this was not always direct.
The Jewish community, which elsewhere was often on the
receiving end of race discrimination, was regarded in South Africa as
white, and thus Wolpe, like other Jews of his generation, was born
into the group privileged by minority rule. But Jews were far more
used to being dominated than to being part of a dominant group. The
South African Jewish community, which had initially consisted of
English and German Jews, was by thenas it is todayprimarily of
27

28RACE,CLASSANDPOWER

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 radical
movements. Jews perception that their existence in the dominant
society was precarious, enhanced by the growth of an Afrikaner
nationalism which was often overtly anti-Jewish, made radical ideas
more prevalent among South African Jews than among other white
groups.2
Most members of the community in which Wolpe grew up
found three ways of coping with their new surroundings. The first
was to embrace separateness, whether out of religious conviction or
ethnic identification. South African Jews, unlike their counterparts in
liberal democracies, were not assimilated into the dominant society.
They were classified white, but Afrikaner nationalism was not eager
to absorb them: many of its leaders sympathised with the Nazis in
World War Two, and when the NP defeated Smutss United Party in
1948, many Jews believed the new government would exclude them
from citizenshipor worse. Because absorption was largely blocked,
ethnic identification remained high and intermarriage with other
faiths and cultures very low. The South African Jewish community
most closely resembles that of Mexico: there, too, Jews are largely
integrated into the dominant group but there are strong pressures
against assimilation.3
The second strain of Jewish life in the world in which Wolpe
grew into adulthood was Zionism, support for an ethnic Jewish state
in Palestine. Organised Zionism in South Africa began just after the
start of the twentieth century and Zionist sympathies are very strong
in the Jewish mainstream.4 Most young Jews gravitated to Zionist
youth 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 some
cases, 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

THEMANANDTHEMOVEMENT 29

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 conflict between support for left-wing values
and the quest to establish an ethnic state on Palestinian lands, and
so Zionism provided an outlet for Jewish left-wingers as well as for
those to whom ethnicity was a prime concern. Mike Morris notes
that many Jewish left-wingers in South Africa were first exposed to
socialism in the Zionist left, and then took it to its logical conclusion
by abandoning Zionisms nationalism.5
Third, the South African Jewish community contained a strong
left-wing tradition. During apartheid, the organised community was
embarrassed by its left wing, which was airbrushed out of official
Jewish histories,6 its memory kept alive only by academic histories of
the Jewish left.7 (From 1990, mainstream Jewish leadership embraced
Jewish ANC activists who were shunned before the 1990s, in the
hope of winning favour with the new order.) Forming the core of this
section of the Jewish community were the Bundists, sympathisers
of the Yiddische Bund (Jewish association) which worked with the
Russian left under tsarism. The Jewish Workers Club, a Bundist
association in Johannesburgs Doornfontein, not far from where
Wolpe grew up, mixed cultural activities in the Yiddish language
with heated debates between differing shades of left-wing opinion.8
Morris recalls reading about a 1907 strike in Cape Town in which
the pamphlets were translated into Yiddish, the Eastern European
Jewish vernacular. At that time the entire Woodstock branch of
the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was Jewish and only
the secretary spoke English.9 Although many in the Jewish left
were absorbed into mainstream white society as the communitys
affluence grew, some contributed to attempts to form trade unions,
while others gravitated towards the CPSA and, later, the ANC. (Up
until 1967, only black Africans were allowed to join the ANC, and
the movements supporters in the racial minorities cooperated with
it through racially separate organisations.10) This tradition partly
explains the very high level of participation (as a percentage of
population) by Jews in the fight against apartheid. While Jews who

30RACE,CLASSANDPOWER

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 his
ethnicity, they insist, was that he and his friend Joe Slovolater
general secretary of the SACP and the post-apartheid governments
first minister of housing shared a sense of humour which struck
many who knew them as clearly Jewish. Shula Marks recalls that
Wolpe had a large store of jokes in Yiddish although Pallo Jordan
probably had an even better store of Yiddish jokes.12 While lack of
interest in Jewishness might seem a universal attribute of Jews in the
strugglethey were, after all, Marxists who were meant to reject
religion and ethnic identificationit seems that total rejection of
Jewish tradition was not at all universal. Jordan, who has a lively
interest in Jewishness, notes that some Jews in the movement
celebrated Jewish holidays (although they might observe Christmas
too), and that in some cases the cultural dimension of family life
might 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 grew
up was pivotal. Dan OMeara, who was for a time closest to him
professionally and politically, recalls that being Jewish was a big
deal for Harold, culturally. He wasnt religious or observant, was
violently anti-Zionist, but he was Jewish and came from that Jewish
working-class left tradition.14 Dennis Davis, who was later active
in Jewish communal affairs, felt an ethnic bond with Wolpe when
they met in 1984: Harold was friendly. He acted a bit like a Jewish
uncle would and was like Joe [Slovo] in that wayethnically Jewish.
Harold cooked a meal for us, and we discussed and debated. I have
very warm feelings towards him; we had good one-to-one meetings.
He was Jewish in a culturally strong wayhe talked that language.15
This is hardly surprising. Because the community in which he grew
up was not fully assimilated into the society, as a schoolboy Wolpe
probably mixed largely or solely with other Jews. Elaine Unterhalter,
who worked with Wolpe in Britain, and whose father was a close

THEMANANDTHEMOVEMENT 31

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 Harolds
Marxism may have been quite a shock to them.16 Like many Jews
on the left, he married a Jewish partner, AnnMarie Kantor. In the last
years of Wolpes life, while living in Cape Town, he and his wife had
a distinctly Jewish circle of friends, although this seemed far more
important to AnnMarie than Harold.17 Jewish identity did matter to
AnnMarie Wolpe if only in a negative sense. She later told Hilda
Bernstein that she resented being called names by black feminists
because she too had suffered discrimination: I know what it is like to
be marginalised because I am Jewish. I know jobs I didnt get because
I was Jewish.18 Many other Jews insisted that Jewishness enabled
them to understand discrimination and its hurts. While the claim
that Jews, because they have experienced racism, identify with other
victims is an obvious generalisation, for some Jews the experience
of discrimination does create an empathy with others who suffer a
similar experience.
According to Wolpe, it was largely the Zionist influencewith,
perhaps, a more generalised Jewish experience of being on the
wrong end of the exercise of powerwhich shaped his political
development. Asked how he came to be associated with the liberation
movement, he told Hilda Bernstein in 1990 that his Lithuanian
father was an influence: He was kind of...anti-British imperialist
because of the Balfour Declaration.19 This reference is not clear: the
Balfour Declaration, the 1917 British statement supporting a Jewish
national home in Palestine, was hailed by Zionists. Either Wolpe
senior was not a Zionist or he did not feel the declaration went far
enough. In any case, Wolpe insisted that his father, while conforming
to white South African attitudes on race, always expressed his
hatred for British imperialism.20 It was not uncommon at that time
for Jewish South Africans to fiercely dislike the NP, given its antiJewish leanings, but to share its prejudices against black people. This
sometimes helped propel their children towards radicalism. Both
Wolpe and his older brother, Joseph, who seems also to have joined

32RACE,CLASSANDPOWER

the CPSA before it was banned in 1950 and whom Wolpe cited as a
key political influence, were surely receptive to leftist ideas partly
because of this upbringing. Joseph Wolpe became an internationally
renowned behavioural psychologist who appeared on the cover of
Time magazine.21 It was his younger brother who lived out their early
political commitment.
Wolpe briefly joined the Zionist socialist movement. He
mentioned teaching Zionist socialist literacy classes for Africans in
Diagonal 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 sons
and daughters of immigrants from Lithuania...and [their parents]
discussed on the street corners of Doornfontein the politics of the
Bund . . . The kids were very uncomformist, there was a resistance to
any kind of regime. Athlone also conformed to the Jewish stereotype
of the time: It was a very intellectual school, it excelled at chess
and debating and music and wasnt so wonderful at sports. Wolpe
said Athlone was quite famous as a source of left-wing people.22
Interestingly, he does not seem to have been one of them during his
school days: I remember very clearly kind of mocking the left when
they said anything but defending it from a position of total ignorance
when they were attacked.23
This background gives some sense of why being Jewish made
radical 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 recalls
that when he was detained and interrogated by the notorious security
policeman Spyker van Wyk, his very first question was, Are you
Jewish? To my credit, I said yes, even though Im not. I was clearly
politically deviant and they needed some operational explanation for
it. But he acknowledges that this explanation was often confirmed
by 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

THEMANANDTHEMOVEMENT 33

Although the South African Jewish community probably numbered

only about 120000 at its zenith in the 1970s,26 it made a significant
impact on the fight against minority rule. A Jewish law firm allowed
the young Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo to serve their legal
articles when other white firms would not entertain black candidate
lawyers. And the Jewish Workers Club and the Zionist youth
movements provided the bulk of white participation in the struggle
against apartheid. It is important to note that the mainstream Jewish
community was as conservative as other whites. Marks points out
that Jewish ANC members were a tiny portion of the community
and mainstream Jewish organisations disowned them for fear of
being associated with communists.27 Nevertheless, their prominence
requires an explanation.
The standard analysis maintains that Jewish religious teaching and
experience makes more likely identification with the dominated. Ben
Turok, a Jewish ANC activist, observes: The Jewish tradition is a
humanitarian one. Most of us grew up very conscious of the injustices
of race, having been discriminated against and conscious of being
different. A sense of justice was very strongit drove me and others
into the movement.28 Jews had not been part of the ruling group
in any society for centuriesthey never had reason to feel entirely
comfortable with power arrangements anywhere. Atheist Jewishness
could also inspire radical politics. Morris recalls that Isaac Deutschers
book The Non-Jewish Jew,29 which, while rejecting religion and Jewish
nationalism, insisted that Jews ought to identify with those who were
dominated and oppressed, was a major influence 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 a
community which felt it had a clear stake in the prevailing distribution
of power. While other whites might need to make an effort to
discover leftist politics, Jews in the area of the Jewish Workers Club
needed to make an effort to avoid it. Early training in the Jewish
religion may also have helped shape Jews who were later to become
Marxists. The activist and academic Raymond Suttner reports that

34RACE,CLASSANDPOWER

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 from
Eastern 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 their
history Jews, like some other groups such as Armenians, Parsis
and 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 producers
specialising in the delivery of goods and services to the surrounding
agricultural...populations.33 Service nomads are essential to
the societies they serve but are never fully part of them. Thus the
permanent strangers lead a precarious existence in which the threat
of violence or expulsion or both are ever present. This may explain
their intellectual overachievement. Because they have no links to the
land, they must live literally by their wits: survival depends on using
mental faculties rather than muscle. Non-manual skills were what
made them useful to their host society; they were also an insurance
because these skills were portable if they were forced to leave. Service
nomads must be strangers if they are to play their required role, so
they are less likely to be invested in the existing order than groups
firmly rooted in their societies.
Service nomads became bankers and professionals. But they could
equally well become revolutionaries, both because they had no stake
in the existing order and because it made sense to dream of a world in
which divisions between people would end and everyone, including
nomads, would belong. Both liberal democracy, with its stress on the
universality of human rights, and socialisms search for economic and
social equality met those requirements. Almost by definition, Jews
enjoyed full legal equality in liberal democracies since the state which
denied them this status would no longer be liberal. In Russia and in
the largely Lithuanian Jewish community in South Africa, socialism
also appeared as a valid contender for liberation from the uncertainty
and fragility of service nomadism. As Wolpes early political life

THEMANANDTHEMOVEMENT 35

shows, even Zionismwhose aim was to end Jews status as service

nomads by rooting them in a land which belonged to others and thus
saw Jewish salvation not in making sure that everyone was rooted
but in ensuring that only Jews wereincluded, until the reality of life
as a coloniser intruded, strongly universalist overtones by combining
ethnic nationalism with socialism.
From Zionist to communist
If 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 he
made the same transition as did a small but significant number of
other young Jews of his generationfrom the ethnic left to a broader
movement for change.
Whether Wolpe was even interested enough in society when he
arrived at university to want to study it, let alone change it, is not
clear. According to Peter Alexander, a sociologist who devoted his
inaugural professorial lecture to Wolpes life and work, he enrolled
as a student in the natural sciences in 1944, changing after his first
year to a BA in social work which included some sociology and
statistics during which course he met his future wife, AnnMarie.34
Wolpe recalled starting off studying for a BA in social studies. He
confirmed that there had been a years delay but this, he said, was
prompted by his language choicehe wanted to study Zulu rather
than Afrikaans.35 Whatever Wolpe may have felt about the left at
school, he preferred to study the most widely spoken language of the
black majority rather than one of the two white official languages.
Wolpe shed his reservations about the left soon after arriving at
university. He later described being profoundly influenced, in his first
year, by a book by the British communist Emile Burns whose title he
remembered as What is Communism? but which is surely Burnss 1939
booklet What is Marxism? 36 Wolpe recalled poring over this slight
volume (63 pages) on the tram to Diagonal Street, where he taught
literacy for the Zionist socialist movement. He was stunned by this
system 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

36RACE,CLASSANDPOWER

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

Marxism was extremely crude. But at the time he found it absolutely
electrifying.37 Its influence was complemented by meeting left-wing
students, in particular Ruth First and her future husband, Slovo, who
became 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 first
year, he had joined the Young Communist League, and the next year
the Communist Party: It was a combination of...an [intellectual]
sense of looking for something and family and school background.39
He never returned to ZionismErnesto Laclau said they shared an
anti-Zionist perspective.40 He was also a very good friend of Ralph
Miliband, a leading British Marxist intellectual whose son Ed today
leads the Labour Party; Miliband was definitely anti-Israel. SACP
activist Essop Pahad, a minister in post-1994 governments, believes
Wolpe was interested in the occupation of Palestinian land, the
oppressive approach of the state of Israel.41 Wolpes son Nicholas
says: He saw Israel as similar to South Africa in some respects.42
For Wolpe, as for some other left-wing whites of his time, his
embrace of communism would be a lifetime commitment which
required personal sacrifice and unquestioning public loyalty to
the former Soviet Union. For some this was admirable even if it
went with total obedience to a party line. Bill Freund recalls: The
communists ideas about international affairs were in some ways very
crude. Moscow was always good, any democracy movement was very
suspect, it probably contained all kinds of reactionary elements. But
they were so dedicated. They could all have had comfortable lives
here, they didnt need to do this at all.43 Wolpes life was to entail
more questioning and less material sacrifice than the norm. But it did
largely conform to the pattern described here.
He became an activist working in the university branches of the
Communist Party (one of which was composed of manual workers
at the university44) and in the student movement. He was elected
president of the SRC (despite the fact that students knew he was a
communist), where he did battle with Michael ODowd and his liberal
supporters. Wolpe described being befriended during his student

THEMANANDTHEMOVEMENT 37

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

League leader Walter Sisulu. In his autobiography Mandela recalled
that discussions with Wolpe and other leftist students helped them
all to refine their political positions.45 It was a sign of the depth of
English-speaking alienation from the newly elected NP government
that the left won the vast majority of SRC seatsthe disputes between
the left and the liberals seemed to centre more on how strong a
stand to take on non-racialism than on how the economy should be
structured. Segregation in university sport was an important issue.
Evidence that the left was not socialist was the presence in its ranks
of Phillip Tobias, who was later responsible for pioneering research
on human evolution: he was a committed liberal. George Bizos, later
a distinguished human rights lawyer, recalls a speech in which he
declared: If wanting equality for our fellow students makes me a
leftist, then Im proud to be one.46
Student politics in the 1940s seems to have resembled that of the
1970s, when Wolpes ideas influenced another generation of students:
the divide among the minority of students engaged in politics was
between the left and liberals. But while the radicals who read Wolpe
almost thirty years later had to express themselves largely in code
because a battery of laws suppressed free speech, before the CPSA was
banned in 1950 leftist ideas could be expressed openly. Wolpe recalled
that Lionel Forman, a CPSA activist, became editor of the student
newspaper Wits Student and turned it from a sort of sporty social
newspaper into a very political paper. It contained articles on the split
between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and on Eurocommunism,
the idea that communist parties in Europe could contest elections
and accept liberal democratic rules.47 While this was couched as a
discussion of debates within international student movements, it was
surely not the fare most middle-class students expected. In the 1970s,
Wits Student again became a vehicle for political discussion which the
mainstream 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

38RACE,CLASSANDPOWER

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

His pedagogical approach was helpful. We felt part of something
important, not just rote learning as in the more normal Wits
classes.50 But he decided against an academic career. He took a law
degree which he completed in 1952,51 by which time the Communist
Party 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 and
political stuff like constitutional law and jurisprudence.52 Alexander
says his law practice was something that paid the bills rather than
a vocation.53 Wolpe said that he made this choice because I didnt
want to leave the country and I couldnt see any way of making a
living other than as some kind of professional. But the suppression of
the CPSA convinced him that a career in sociology was not possible:
I decided it was difficult getting a job as a lecturer given the political
developments.54
The reluctant choice did enable him to play a political role: he
became one of the few lawyers willing to take up political cases. A
colleague, the British Marxist Henry Bernstein, suggests that Wolpes
legal training had more of an influence on him than he imagined, as
it shaped his academic work: His intellectual style was influenced by
the focus and procedures of a lawyer.55 Martin Legassick too believes
Wolpes sociology was formalistic, like much writing by lawyers.56
What many saw as Wolpes overly theoretical approach may have
stemmed 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 the
Congress of Democrats, the small, whites-only ally of the ANC
which gave whites an opportunity to participate in the fight against
minority rule and was a political home for former party members.
Wolpe recalled being banned in 1954.57 By an order served on them
without any recourse to the courts, banned people were forbidden
from participating in politics. They could not attend gatherings,
defined as any group of people larger than two (banned people were
to be arrested for playing bridge with three friends); nor could they

THEMANANDTHEMOVEMENT 39

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 difficult. Bizos recalls
that the Wolpes were known for their non-racial social occasions
at which Wolpe and the writer Lewis Nkosi would tell jokes with
racist overtones. Bizos explains: If youre liberated and are among
people you believe to be liberated, you can make jokes about it.59 So
joking about race became a way of celebrating commitment to nonracialism. Twenty years later, when left-wing students were reading
Wolpes work, avenues for interracial socialising had narrowed, but
when they did appear, jokes were again used in the same way.
Wolpe first became known not for his scholarship but for his part
in an escape from prison, which made far more impact on the public
than any of his academic work.
Goldreich and Wolpe: Lilliesleaf, Marshall Square and acts of
derring-do
The banning of the ANC and the PAC after the Sharpeville massacre
in March 1960 forced the resistance movement, Wolpe included,
underground.
He did not play a leadership role but assisted with some logistical
tasks. He did join Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the
underground ANC, on whose behalf he undertook a tiny action
whose nature he did not specify.60 Dennis Goldberg, a Rivonia Trialist,
says Wolpe was an intelligence officer for MK high command.61
His most important role was helping to establish an underground
headquarters for the high command at Lilliesleaf Farm in Rivonia,
then a peri-urban area just outside Johannesburg. Legally, the farm
could be owned only by whites. Wolpe and an architect, Arthur
Goldreich, bought it in 1961,62 although, in Wolpes recollection, his
task was purely to act as a lawyer ensuring the smooth transfer of the
property.63 Goldreich was the frontman for the purchase. He also
lived conspicuously on the property because he was not an object
of police interest.64 (Rivonia Trialist Ahmed Kathrada says Lilliesleaf

40RACE,CLASSANDPOWER

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 and
other members of MK high command. Besides helping to buy the
property, Wolpes job was to service the Roneo machine, a duplicating
device operated by typing documents onto a stencil, through which
ink was forced. The Roneo was a favourite of pamphlet-makers and
Wolpes job was to keep it in good working order. He seems to have
achieved this more through luck than skillhe said he would take the
machine apart and reassemble it always with one or two extra screws
at the end, which I didnt know what to do with, but it worked.66
More importantly, he remembered, he drafted a Code of Discipline
for MK which, while it was never adopted, was one of the documents
used by the prosecution at the Rivonia Trial. Since the code was in
Wolpes handwriting, it established a connection between him and
MK.
Wolpe had enough to do with Lilliesleaf to ensure that when the
police raided it, I was told that I ought to leave the country because I
was going to be clearly connected.67 He was in legal practice with his
brother-in-law Jimmy Kantor, who was not politically active and was
known as a connoisseur of the good life. Wolpe told AnnMarie and
Kantor that he would have to leave the country and tried to escape
by crossing the border north of Rustenburg, today in Northwest
province.68 Using family connections, he cooperated in a plan which
would 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 of
politics. But he claimed to have forgotten where the picnic site was
and insisted on asking directions from two whites, one of whom
was the sergeant in charge of the local police station. The sergeant
asked for identification, and when Wolpe could not produce any,
he was arrested and driven to Marshall Square, the Johannesburg
police headquarters which was also used as a prison. There he found
Goldreich, along with Mosie Moolla, Laloo Chiba and Abdullai

THEMANANDTHEMOVEMENT 41

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 aid
of a film which featured a scene similar to that which had led to his
arrest, 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 their
niche in the history of the fight 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 saw
through their bars (AnnMarie Wolpe smuggled into the prison
hacksaw blades in food she brought Wolpe70), the detainees persuaded
a warder, Johan Greeff, to let them escape in exchange for R4000
(2000), with which he wanted to buy a Studebaker car. According
to Wolpe, the detainees told Greeff that we wanted two Africans,
two Indians and two whites. But he...would only allow the two
Indians and two of us.71 Greeff assisted in the escape early on the
morning of 11 August but did not receive his money. Accounts of
why he was not paid differ, but most agree that an attempt to pay him
was thwarted.72 Greeffs role in the escape was quickly discovered and
he was imprisoned.
After the escape, the white and Indian detainees went their
separate ways because they agreed that a racially mixed group would
excite suspicion. All of them fled the country. Goldreich and Wolpe
remained in hiding in Johannesburg for about a week and a half
before being driven in the boot of a car to Swaziland, where Vernon
Berrang, an anti-apartheid lawyer, chartered a plane for them.
Disguised as priests, they flew to Botswana, where they made contact
with ANC activists including the former Speaker of Parliament, Max
Sisulu, 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 African
Airways plane which was to take them and other ANC members to
Tanzania was blown up the night before the flightby South African

42RACE,CLASSANDPOWER

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

broadcasting network agreed to pay for a chartered flight in exchange
for an interview, and Wolpe and Goldreich were flown to Dar es
Salaam, where they were met by a huge press conference, and later
to London. They were initially declared prohibited immigrants, but
after the intervention of the then opposition Labour Party, the two
were allowed into Britain in September 1963.74
The escape was a morale boost to a beleaguered ANC seeking to
adjust to the banning of 1960. Moolla and Jassat were in some ways
the escape plans architects. But their white colleagues attracted the
attention of local and international mediaand the apartheid state.
Albie Sachs, former ANC activist and Constitutional Court judge,
observes that the escape catapulted [Wolpe] to world attention.75 The
then minister of justice John Vorster made no secret of his chagrin.
There can be no doubt, he said, that two of the big fish have got
away. A political trial without them would be like Hamlet without
the Prince, but the show will go on just the same. An account of the
time observes: The successful escape of Goldreich and Wolpe was a
serious embarrassment to the South African government, at a time
when...ministers and police generals were boasting about how they
had smashed all subversive elements.76 In English-speaking suburbs,
the names Goldreich and Wolpe evoked instant recognition for
yearsthe others were barely remembered. That they were Jewish
made their escape a cause for celebration among some Jews who still
distrusted the NP. Davis recalls his excitement when he met Wolpe in
1984: I told him that he was one of my first political memories: the
1963 escape. I was eleven at the time. My parents were delighted that
hed escaped. He was Jewish and the Jews had beaten the Nats. This
was my first political moment, having this explained to me.77
But their escape was important to the ANC too because it seemed
to signal that the apartheid state was not invincible. Mandela observed
that it was an embarrassment to the government and a boost to
our morale.78 The escape, Chiba says, also made an impact in the
townships: It dented the image of the Special Branch, and the morale

THEMANANDTHEMOVEMENT 43

of the people, for a short while, was raised quite high. Cinemas in
Indian areas and possibly black townships, he says, screened The Great
Escape, which starred Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. The film
became very popular and audiences shouted Viva! when the escape
occurred. But the political police were determined to restore their
bruised images and egos and became even more vicious.79 One sign
of the governments embarrassment and anger, Bizos believes, was
Kantors 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 fit of pique. His arrest cost him his law practice
and marriage and he left South Africa as soon as he could.81 For some
time after they arrived in London, Wolpe and Goldreich were fulltime symbols of resistance to apartheid. Wolpe recalled travelling on
behalf of the movement trying to exploit our notoriety,82 using the
attention which the media had focused on them to publicise the fight
against apartheid.
But this period in the limelight also ended Wolpes career as
an activist. While he attended ANC and SACP branch meetings
throughout his almost thirty years in Britain, he never again
participated in activism. Possibly his only public appearance on the
ANCs behalf was when he was included, in 1987, in the group which
met white Afrikaners in Senegalone of the encounters which built
momentum for a negotiated settlement. Once he settled in London,
Wolpes contribution to the lefts fight against apartheid was
intellectuala contribution which the ANC and the SACP seemed
to find of little value.
From deeds to words: The activist as academic
Adjustment to life in Britain was difficult for Wolpe and his family. The
environment was forbidding and his shift to an academic career strewn
with obstacles. Unterhalter recalls exile life in London as frequently
so complicatedso many people seemed to be psychologically falling
apart. It was often really difficult and uncomfortable.83 But they did
settle into a comfortable life, later augmented by trips to a holiday
home in France.84 Their lifestyle seems to have been no different

44RACE,CLASSANDPOWER

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

contrasted its comfort with the far more difficult circumstances under
which Jack Simons lived in the ANC camps. Nico Cloete, who later
worked with Wolpe on education, recalls that when they first met in
England, Wolpes opening line was, Is life still good for whites living
in SA? Cloete says he replied, Yes, but not as good as for the whites
living in the UK. Wolpe, he says, was offended by this.85
Soon after arriving in Britain, Wolpe decided to work his way
into an academic career; he relied on contacts sympathetic to the fight
against apartheid to secure a scholarship. Despite a hostile reference
from a Wits professor who saw him as a dangerous communist, he
spent a year at the London School of Economics (LSE) reading the
sociology he had been cut off from during his time as an activist and
lawyer. He had almost to start from scratch. Wolpe recalled that a
South African migr sociology professor, Percy Cohen, set him on
his way. Cohen pointed him towards ten books and told him, Here
are the books you must read if you want to know whats happened
in the last decade. The reading was supplemented by attending
lectures and seminars given by Miliband. It is a sign of how academic
life has changed that after only a year reading and listening at LSE,
Wolpe hoped to teach sociology. Today, a candidate for even a junior
academic post would need substantial postgraduate training. Wolpe
believed that his Wits degree and a year reading in London would
be enough for an academic post. It wasnt, at first. He applied for
lectureships and was repeatedly turned down. His toehold came when
he landed a job at Oxford in extramural studiesadult education
because they were interested in people with odd histories. Several
British Marxists had been given jobs in the programme. After a year,
his political loyalties landed him his first academic job. Sheila Allen,
a senior lecturer in sociology at Bradford University, who later
married the prominent British Marxist Vic Allen, offered Wolpe a
job because she was looking for radical sociologists.86 The post was
followed by lectureships at North West London Polytechnic and,
from 1975, at Essex University, where he spent the rest of his British
academic career.87

THEMANANDTHEMOVEMENT 45

Sachs describes an intellectually magical weekend visiting Wolpe

in Bradford:
From being an intelligent but unremarkable legal larva he
had metamorphosed into an extraordinary flying creature of
ideas! His earlier legal mode of thinking and writing had been
based on finding authority for every proposition...relying
on incontestable empirical evidence to justify an assertion
of fact. Everything was footnoted, particular and concrete.
He had cleansed himself of footnotes, and entered a realm
of pure ideas held together by logical coherence...It was
heady, unnerving, to try to keep ones intellectual balance...
without the crutches of political dogma, scripture or empirical
evidence!88
Laclau recalled that Wolpes career at Essex faced resistance: He
never got a full professorship. His political sympathies seem to have
played a role in this, but so did the fact that his publication record
was rather thin. He wrote only one book, but such a slim book.
This was partly a consequence of the fact that he became an academic
late in life.89 Wolpes lack of formal academic training did hamper
his career. That he was employed on a campus was an achievement
in itself, but the route to academic seniority would always be largely
barred to him.
On this tenuous foundation was built an academic career which
had a significant impact on the thinking of radical South Africans.