South African liberals are currently being subjected to one of the periodic bouts of liberal-bashing that have been unleashed over the course of our political history by racial nationalists and communists.

The life history of Peter Brown, the leader of the Liberal Party in the 1950s and 60s, shows that many of the tools used to bash liberals are blunt instruments.

The SACP general secretary, Blade Nzimande, recently accused liberals of launching "a huge...offensive against our democracy", and he singled out the press as the "biggest perpetrator of this liberal thinking".

Nzimande's deputy, Jeremy Cronin (who has written his own defence of the government's attempts to muzzle the media) also believes that liberals are out to sabotage democracy. He has complained about the "anti-democratic phobia of our liberals".

At heart, the attack on media freedom is really just another battleground in a longstanding war of ideas between an unlikely alliance of communists and nationalists on the one hand, and liberals (not all of whom would identify themselves politically or ideologically as such) on the other.

Yet the supreme irony in all of this is that the founding compact of our democracy, the Constitution, is underpinned by liberal ideas - not the ideas of Marx or Lenin or of black or white nationalists.

Liberal ideas paved the way for our democracy and, far from sabotaging our democracy, they are the best guarantor of its future.

Yet there has been very little real understanding and appreciation, both in the past and the present, of the nature and importance of the part played by liberals like Peter Brown in opposing apartheid and forging non-racial democracy.

The reasons for Brown's relative obscurity are partly personal, partly ideological and partly political.

Brown was a modest man. Born in 1924 into a Natal family of Scottish descent, country traders on his father's side and farmers on his mother's, he had a natural Scots reserve, a diffidence that was occasionally pierced by his teasing, dry wit, which made Brown entirely indifferent to matters of reputation and veneration.

Even so, personal reticence alone does not explain why Brown's contribution to democracy has gone largely unheeded. Too often, those writing about South African history have vilified liberalism as a mere adjunct of imperial conquest, racial segregation and capitalist exploitation.

And in post-apartheid South Africa, the ANC has inevitably sought to remember its own heroes.

Under apartheid, the word ‘liberal' was a term of abuse, employed with equal venom by opponents on the left and the right. To the Nationalist government, when prefaced with the word ‘white', liberalism meant race treachery. To those in the ANC, which had its own liberal tradition, increasingly from the 1960s, liberalism meant holding onto white privilege, submitting to white trusteeship and paternalism, and stunting the revolution.

Ideological mistrust of liberalism has persisted in post-apartheid South Africa, fuelled by opposition to so-called ‘neo-liberal' economic policies (which the ANC accuses the official opposition of advocating, and which, ironically, the ANC's own alliance partners charge the government with pursuing).

Brown defies many of the stereotypes of white liberals: that they waged a destructive cold war against the ANC's alliance partner, the SACP; that they were sanctimonious about the ANC's recourse to violence; and that they were only interested in protecting white privilege.

Brown had a pragmatic approach to communism. He wrote in 1959 that communists had "been in the forefront of those who have put up the most spirited defence there has been of fundamental democratic rights', and pleaded for liberals and communists to sink "our ideological differences for the moment and get on with the job of disposing of the devil we know".

Although Brown abhorred violence, he never judged those, both in his own party and in the ANC, who turned to arms. He believed that violence was ‘forced on reluctant people by the failures of the past'. In this way, he was quite unlike his friend and mentor, Alan Paton, whose writings on violence did indeed have an air of self-righteousness.

Through his leadership of the Liberal Party, Brown played an early and crucial part in articulating an alternative vision to the racial exclusiveness of apartheid: this was at a time when other anti-apartheid organisations in South Africa, such as those that formed the Congress Alliance, were racially compartmentalised.

In some ways, the Liberal Party marks a rupture in the history of South African liberalism. In style and substance, there are important discontinuities between the Liberal Party and the political tradition associated with nineteenth-century Cape liberals that preceded and nourished it.

There were significant differences between the activist extra-parliamentary liberalism of the LP and the parliamentary liberalism of the Progressive Party in the 1960s.

The Liberals launched as a non-racial party, whereas the formation of the Progressives in 1959, Brown noted, ‘was an all-white launching and the policy decisions were all-white decisions'.

The Progressive Party only reopened its membership to blacks, in defiance of the Prohibition of Political Interference Act, in 1984.

While the Liberals advocated universal suffrage from 1960, the Progressives continued to support a qualified franchise until 1978.

Where the Progressives rigidly adhered to ‘constitutional' means of protest, the Liberals advocated boycotts and sit-ins. And, as the Progressives focused on civil rights, the Liberals campaigned for socio-economic rights, proposing various forms of regulation and redistribution to deracialise the economy. Compared to the Liberal Party, the Progressives' brand of liberalism in the 1960s was hidebound.

While the Liberals actively worked for the common society through extra-parliamentary campaigns against sham "self-rule" in the Transkei and "black spot" removals in Natal, for example, the Progressives focused on the Sisyphean task of converting the white electorate to non-racialism through the ballot box.

This is not to undermine the Progressives. They achieved something the Liberals did not: they bequeathed an enduring and sustainable institutional legacy for liberalism.

But the Liberal Party also achieved something very important in the fifteen years of its existence, and Brown made a significant contribution to that achievement.

The Party championed the principles and values that, decades later, would constitute the foundations of non-racial, democratic, post-apartheid South African society: universal suffrage, the rule of law, and the legal protection of basic civil liberties alongside a commitment to social justice and equity. In the 1960s, it was the only party in the electoral arena to do so.

While the LP failed in its quest to win a seat in the whites-only parliament, it succeeded in attracting a substantial black membership. The majority of delegates at its 1961 conference were black.

The LP was not anti-majoritarian. It was not beholden to big capital. And it understood that liberalism isn't just about formal equality alone.

Very few people on all sides of the political spectrum understood and appreciated what the LP was attempting to do in the 1960s.

Very few people on all sides of the political spectrum understand and appreciate what liberals are attempting to do now.

Of course, liberals must take on board informed criticism. But they should reject with contempt the suggestion that they are engaged in an offensive against our democracy. The exact opposite is true.

The biggest challenge for liberals in our plural and unequal society is to find ways of accommodating diversity and addressing poverty while gaining the momentum of political support.

This task requires liberals to meet majority aspirations and quell minority fears, which seem at odds with one another, but which needs to be done if the liberal project is to succeed.

What did Brown think of the prospects for South African liberalism before he died? Interviewed in 1996, he predicted:

"There may come a time when the ANC starts to disintegrate or to produce factions ... and ... perhaps as the economy improves and so on ... there will be an opportunity to form a fully non-racial Liberal Party again. Something which will absorb the DP [now the Democratic Alliance] and elements from other political organisations ..."

Time will tell if he is proved right.

This is an edited extract of a speech given by Michael Cardo at the launch this week of his biography, Opening Men's Eyes: Peter Brown and the Liberal Struggle for South Africa, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2010, ISBN: 9781868423927

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