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118 pages

English

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In 1937 a group of young Capetonians, socialist intellectuals from the Workers’ Party of South Africa and the Non-European Unity Movement, among them Isaac Tabata, Ben Kies, A C Jordan, Phyllis Ntantala and Mda Mda, embarked on a public education and cultural project they called the New Era Fellowship (NEF).

Taking a position of non-collaboration and non-racialism, the NEF played a vital role in challenging society’s responses to events ranging from the problem of taking up arms during the Second World War for an empire intent on stripping black people of their human rights to the Hertzog Bills, which foreshadowed apartheid.

The group included some of the city’s most talented scholar-activists, whose aim was to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises – class and race – on which they were based.

By the 1950s their ideas had spread to a second generation of talented individuals who would disseminate them in the high schools of Cape Town. In time, some would exert their influence on national politics beyond the confines of the Cape.

The Cape Radicals is a testament to the NEF’s position at the forefront of redefining the discourse of racialism and nationalism in South Africa.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 A Battle of Ideas

Chapter 2 Planters of the Seed

Chapter 3 ‘Anything Under the Sun’ – The Formation of the NEF

Chapter 4 Honest, Sincere and Fearless – 1937-1940

Chapter 5 The Road to Emancipation – 1940-1953

Chapter 6 A Cauldron of Conflict

Chapter 7 Legacy

Notes

List of Illustrations

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

HISTORY

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Histoire

África

General officer

History of Africa

General

Africa

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Publié par	WITS University Press
Date de parution	01 juin 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776143498
Langue	English

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THE CAPE RADICALS
THE CAPE RADICALS
Intellectual and Political Thought of the New Era Fellowship, 1930s to 1960s
Crain Soudien
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright Crain Soudien 2019
Published edition Wits University Press 2019
Images Copyright holders
First published 2019
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12019063177
978-1-77614-317-7 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-348-1 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-349-8 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-350-4 (Mobi)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Timeline
Introduction
1 A Battle of Ideas
2 Planters of the Seed
3 Anything under the Sun : The Formation of the New Era Fellowship
4 Honest, Sincere and Fearless , 1937-1940
5 The Road to Emancipation, 1940-1953
6 A Cauldron of Conflict
7 Legacy
Notes
List of Illustrations
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
T his work arose out of a request by Charles Thomas, Usuf Chikte and Dihru Gihwala to write for their organisation, the New Unity Movement, a history of the New Era Fellowship (NEF). A version of this book was produced for the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the NEF. Charles, Usuf and Dihru are important interlocutors for the gestation and production of what has been developed into this book, but they gave me carte blanche. They bear no responsibility for the positions that are taken in it. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity they provided me.
Derek Gripper was central to the research process and assisted in locating and collecting some of the most hard-to-get materials that have been drawn on here. To Derek and his partner Jaqueline Yamey, and Diane Paulse, both of whom assisted Derek, I am sincerely thankful. They found what little there was to be found, and considerably enriched the base off which any work was possible.
And then I would like to thank my wife, Lyn Hanmer, for her willingness to read and reread my efforts at clarity.
Acronyms and Abbreviations AAC All-African Convention ANB African National Bond ANC African National Congress Anti-CAD Anti-Coloured Affairs Department APDUSA African People s Democratic Union of Southern Africa APO African People s Organisation CAC Coloured Advisory Council CAD Coloured Affairs Department CAFEF Cape Flats Educational Fellowship CATA Cape African Teachers Association CI Communist International CLSA Communist League of South Africa CPSA Communist Party of South Africa CPSU Cape Peninsula Students Union CST colonialism of a special type FIOSA Fourth International of South Africa ICU Industrial and Commercial Workers Union NEF New Era Fellowship NEUF Non-European United Front NEUM Non-European Unity Movement NLL National Liberation League NRC Natives Representative Council NUM New Unity Movement PF Progressive Forum SAIC South African Indian Congress SOYA Society of Young Africa SPEF South Peninsula Education Fellowship TLSA Teachers League of South Africa UCT University of Cape Town WIL Workers International League WPSA Workers Party of South Africa
Timeline
Introduction
I n 1937 a small group of young Cape Town intellectual-activists made the decision to establish a cultural society for the purpose of, as they put it in their constitution, spreading enlightenment . They called the society the New Era Fellowship (NEF). And so began an ambitious process of public education with the ordinary people of Cape Town. Their aim was to bring into being an organisation that would disrupt prevailing ruling-class thinking, which said that some people were naturally superior and others inferior. Integral to this disruption was making available to people the best thinking and opinions on a range of issues and subjects. We will discuss anything under the sun, they announced to the people of Cape Town in 1937. 1
A variety of forums were put in place: study circles, debating societies and cultural initiatives. These in turn were catalysts for new political formations, civic organisations and formative social organisations. Over a period of about 25 years the NEF introduced into the cultural life of Cape Town not only a sense of entitlement to dignity but also an awareness of new human possibility. In the process they made important contributions to the city on a local level. In rejecting out of hand the customs and practices of colonialism, a distinctive set of Cape cultural and political traditions, many of which live on into the present, were developed.
As innovative as the NEF was at the local level, on a much higher level it was groundbreaking. Its members were the first in South Africa s political history to locate the wider global discussions about race and class in a larger discourse about the nature of domination. They arrived at the understanding - and this constituted the core of their global contribution - that the primary framing upon which the modern world was constructed, namely, race, was false. They developed a programmatic understanding of how hegemony - which is the complete domination of one group or power over another - can be constituted as a political and ideological project. They showed how the idea of race can be deployed to capture the cognitive and sense-making faculties of oppressed people, resulting in mental slavery. Not only did they seek to bring an end to mental slavery, they also committed themselves to building a new society in which all people could live with dignity. The means of effecting this, they came to understand, was education. As the ruling class used education to constitute the subjected subject, it would be necessary to use the same powerful tool to produce new liberated human beings. This was their new era vision.
Ultimately, the NEF did not become the mass movement its founders envisaged or hoped it would be. It did not produce the cultural revolution that would make every home, every school, every social and religious gathering, and every institution of the people a site and an opportunity for the formation of the new man (they had not yet come to the realisation that the term man was problematic). It did not succeed in bringing the reproducers of hegemony - the institutions of the family, sites of learning, the ideological apparatuses of the courts, the police and the army, and places of worship - over to its side. But it was not for lack of trying. For some time, especially during the late 1940s and the 1950s, the NEF offered the people of Cape Town a vision of the ideal modern citizen. Leading by example, its leaders endeavoured to demonstrate the values, dispositions and attributes of a good citizen. A good citizen embodied core values: consideration for the marginalised and the oppressed, modesty and sensibility in tastes and manners, a deep desire for learning and an awareness of the need for self-effacement. In taking this path, the NEF influenced, and in some cases defined, how one entered and became a member of the professions.
Firstly, and importantly, they looked to the teaching profession. It was teachers, they believed, who carried the responsibility of role-modelling the new liberated people. Teachers were always to be available to the people but, simultaneously, they were to be the example of what it meant to be a citizen of a wider cosmopolitan world - humble, dignified, able to connect on a personal level, but never without a sense of their responsibility for breaking the shackles of oppression.
These imperatives carried over to all the professions. Few as there may have been, the NEF leaders worked hard to help those among them who were lawyers or doctors understand the attributes they should display. Interestingly, the ministers of religion and the imams in their midst were held to similar standards. The point is that they put in the minds of their followers the belief that a new way into the future was possible. They laid down the standards of comportment and personal responsibility to be emulated both within and outside of the professions. The impact was profound, and can still be seen today. Significant numbers of people, from generation to generation, adopted the behaviour and subscribed to these standards. They carried these forward in their lives.
As might be expected, it wasn t long before their public education work garnered the NEF much attention. With its members standing out in the places where they worked, the communities in which they lived and the public spaces where they began to appear, the efforts of the organisation stimulated admiration, respect and, sometimes, not a little envy. But there were also those who were less appreciative of the NEF s efforts to effect change and even some who regarded them with contempt. Despite noble intentions, over time and as conditions and circumstances changed, on both the local and the international stage, the organisation s ability to thrive faltered and its influence declined.
Many explanations have been proffered for why the NEF was unable to develop into a large cultural-political movement. One of them is the organisation s very reason for existing. It