Communists, Nationalists, and hallucinogens
The previous government, as this column observed last week citing a remark by James Myburgh, was not "hallucinogenic" about communist penetration of the African National Congress (ANC).
Nor, contrary to what some people are saying, were liberals under any illusions, as Myburgh also noted. Although some liberals became fellow travellers, prominent liberals in the South African Institute of Race Relations, the Liberal Party, and the Progressive Party were especially alert to the machinations of the South African Communist Party (SACP). Many liberals suspected from the outset that the "Congress of the People" was controlled by communists. We at the Institute were well aware of the age-old communist technique of "entryism".
But where liberals and the then National Party (NP) government differed, fundamentally, was on how to deal with communism. The government might not have been hallucinogenic about communist influence, but its response was deluded. And it played into the hands of the SACP, despite warnings by liberals against this.
In the first place, the NP thought it could destroy communism by banning the then communist party in 1950. The party reincarnated itself underground. Secondly, the NP government thought it could destroy the ANC by banning it in 1960. The effect was to strengthen the argument that peaceful change was impossible. This suited the SACP's revolutionary agenda perfectly. Less than a decade after being slapped with its banning order, the ANC at its Morogoro conference had endorsed the SACP's plans for a National Democratic Revolution (NDR).
Back in South Africa, the NP sabotaged alternatives to the ANC/SACP/Umkhonto we Sizwe. In 1968 it forced the multiracial Liberal Party to dissolve itself, and the Progressive Party to expel its black members. Nearly ten years later it banned a dozen and a half black consciousness organisations, among them organisations worried about the influence of white communists in the ANC, just as some of the leaders of the Pan-Africanist Congress had been. That organisation, of course, had been banned in 1960.