"George, for God's sake don't come."
These words were sent by telegram by the first black general secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa, Albert Nzula, to George Padmore, subsequently the most prominent thinker of the pan-Africanist movement, in 1933. The telegram was sent by Nzula from the Soviet Union, and was smuggled out via Latvia (then not yet a Soviet satrapy).
It saved Padmore's life, almost certainly. Nzula's message meant: do not come back to the Soviet Union.
He and Padmore had been among the first black students to come to study in the Soviet Union, along with Jomo Kenyatta and Edwin Mofutsanyana, a veteran leader of the CPSA: the first of many still to come.
Padmore (who was born in Trinidad, his birth name Malcolm Nurse) had joined the Communist Party of the United States as a young man in the late 1920s, and had become an official of the Soviet-controlled Communist International, or Comintern. Summoned to study in Moscow, and appointed a deputy of the Moscow Soviet, he became a leading spokesman of the Communist International on the oppressed status of black people internationally: and, effectively, one of Stalin's functionaries. In 1933, however, following six months in prison in Nazi Germany, he developed a sharp criticism of the Comintern for its recent adaptation - after Hitler's Machtergreifung - to the colonial powers of Britain, France and the United States . He was then summoned back to Moscow . Thus Nzula's telegram.
Padmore himself gave this account in London in 1935 to a South African Trotskyist, Charlie van Gelderen. A fuller discussion appears in my article, "The death of Albert Nzula and the silence of George Padmore", in Searchlight South Africa No.1 (September 1988), published in London but banned in South Africa, though now available on the website of the Aluka Archive (see here).
Alcoholic, and disillusioned by the reality of the Soviet Union, Nzula died in the snows of Moscow in January 1934, not long after his life-saving warning to Padmore. Little more than a year later, Padmore told the story to van Gelderen, who published a report of the conversation in a review in 1981 in a British magazine, Critique, of Nzula's book, The Working Class Movement and Forced Labour in Negro Africa (Moscow , 1933).
Nearly half a century after Nzula's death, Edwin Mofutsanyana told Bob Edgar in a taped interview in Lesotho that Nzula had experienced a "growing disillusionment with the Soviet system". What Mofutsanyana remembered most "was Nzula's questioning of Stalin's leadership.
"He recollected that one time Nzula reminded him of a meeting in Sophiatown, in which Dr A.B. Xuma, a conservative African National Congress figure, had spoken. Xuma had launched an attack on the Soviet government, charging that in the USSR all cars were owned not by the workers, but by Stalin. Nzula had taken on Xuma at the meeting, but now that he had lived in the USSR he was regretting his former stance". He spoke openly of his disillusionment with the Communist system, especially when drunk.
According to Mofutsanyana, Nzula was called before the International Committee of the Comintern "for disciplining". He was told that "he would not be allowed to return to South Africa to infect Party members there with his Trotskyite ideas". Before the Comintern could take further action against him, he died.
This poignant, even tragic story has a more than elegiac significance, however, since the Communist Party in South Africa is now driving ahead to replicate the political-economic system that drove Nzula to send his warning to his friend and comrade (for a fuller discussion see Stanley Uys here).
Nzula's telegram is his warning to South Africa.
In this sense, I respond with Nzula in mind to the generous, open-hearted comments by Jeremy Gordin on my recently-published book, Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Jacana, 2009). In this essay, Gordin appears to question the significance of the SACP in past and current South African political life (see here).
My sense is: the route to Quatro from the state so feared by Nzula was no great leap, and from Quatro to a future government in South Africa in the hands of the SACP would be no great leap either.
As I argued in an essay, "The professor and the police minister" (see here), it is not difficult to think that South Africa is historically hard-wired, or deep-structured, for dictatorial government of one kind or another rather than for democracy, of which it has only a short experience.
The problem about the SACP is that it is the only party in South Africa that has the word "DICTATORSHIP" inscribed across its forehead, as the result of its own conscious choice. No other party in South Africa has such a long history of preparation and such a prepared theoretical programme for the imposition of dictatorship. In this sense, Marxism is the curse of the Western intellectuals who brought this programme to South Africa.
One sees this by contrasting the younger with the older Marx, as the founder of this theory and programme of dictatorship.
As a young man in Germany in the period of the revolutions of 1848 which swept across Europe , Marx fought with colossal energy against the reactionary state systems of the divided country in which he was born and grew up. In the newspaper which he edited at that time, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (12 November 1848), he castigated the "despotic" character of the "counter-revolution" and the "coup d'etat" in which the reactionary classes of the Prussian monarchy, aristocracy and bureaucracy crushed the life out of the National Assembly, which represented the still weak bourgeoisie, by transferring its seat from urban Berlin to the small provincial town of Brandenburg: the home of militarist reaction.
What this meant, as Marx wrote, was:
"The guard-room in the Assembly, the Assembly in the guard-room! That is to say: Brandenburg in the Assembly, the Assembly in Brandenburg!"
- in Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848 (Pelican Marx Library, London, 1973. pp.177-180).
In other words, the parliamentary institution was just a scrap of paper.
Nearly 30 years later, following the crushing by the bourgeois state of the Paris Commune of the workers and urban poor in 1871 - accompanied by executions - Marx elaborated a countervailing programme of dictatorship. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, written in 1875 as a response to what he saw as flaws in the draft programme of a united workers' party in the now united Germany , Marx bluntly spelt out his meaning:
"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat".
- in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (Progress Publishers, Moscow/Lawrence and Wishart, London , 1968. p.331).
The result, as we know, is that when a dictatorship of the proletariat was in fact set up in Russia in 1917, Marx's prescription from 1848 from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung also reigned supreme: "The guard-room in the Assembly, the Assembly in the guard-room! Brandenburg in the Assembly, the Assembly in Brandenburg!" The main difference was that Brandenburg was now the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and the guard-room was the KGB (in its various name-changes). Its equivalent in South Africa would be: Quatro in Parliament, and Parliament in Quatro!
In this way, Marx's unashamed and totally explicit programme of dictatorship passed from the hands of Lenin and Trotsky, and its further elaboration by Joseph Stalin, into the hands of...Adolf Hitler. From 1933 until the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago this month, Brandenburg and the famous Brandenburg Gate in Berlin passed through nearly sixty years of dictatorship unimaginable in Marx's time.
Gordin complains that my book is "annoying" because I sound "like a neighbourhood dog that barks at 3am every day and won't stop." But isn't that what a dog is for, when danger is inside the gate?
It is time for South Africans to read again those classic investigations of totalitarianism: George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938), Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (published 1949), Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940), Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Czselaw Milosz's The Captive Mind (1953) - all written while Comrade Stalin was alive, the idolatrous subject of the adulation of the CPSA/SACP.
Homage to Albert Nzula. "George, don't come back...."
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