TRANSCRIPT: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
People ask you at school, you’re nearing your matric, ‘Well, Albie, what are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’ ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’ ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ ‘I’m going to be a lawyer.’ ‘Oh that’s nice.’
I don’t know why I changed. But there was a broad sense that being a lawyer would enable me to be useful – a kind of vague idea of social justice was definitely there.
University of Cape Town – I was a bit disappointed. I thought school was pretty ordinary, it’s okay. But it wasn’t special. But wait ‘til I get to university. And I get to university, and I find it’s different from school; you’re more on your own. But those glittering ideas and the debates and the to and fro, I didn’t find it there. Some lecturers better than others. I would copy down; I would get good marks. In those days I got firsts, I got scholarships.
We had some wonderful professors, very erudite and at that stage, the whole issue of coloured voters, a few coloured men were on the voter’s roll together with whites. The apartheid government wanted to get rid of them. It became a big issue. The Torch Commando was marching in Cape Town, hundreds of thousands of people at night with torches led by ex-servicemen who’d been fighting Hitler. It was the last challenge, if you like, to Afrikaner domination by English speaking whites. I never got involved in that. It seemed kind of a bit remote. I listened to the professors and then I would go down to the township areas at night and I’d be asked to conduct study classes. And you’d be in a little shanty…candles. You’d just see the whites of people’s eyes, the mouth, the teeth but so passionate, so interested. And the professors are speaking about the law, and the glories of the law and the rule of law, and justice and equality and fairness. But they wouldn’t give their lives for justice, they would teach about it, doing a good job. The people in the shacks, they hated the law. The law was the police chasing them, locking them up, throwing them into jail, not having their passes, moving them from their homes. So, the law was the enemy. But justice, they’d give their lives for justice. And what a contradiction it was.
But also, the contradiction – I’ve got my white skin, all the privileges that go with it. I could go to the beaches, I could go to the cinemas, I could sit anywhere I wanted in the City Hall. I loved music. If I wanted to see a film, I would go to a whites-only cinema.
I would go to watch the rugby. I loved watching the rugby. And then I couldn’t bear it anymore. The only joy I got out of watching rugby was when there would be a team from say the All Blacks playing and the black people, spectators, pushed into the stands behind the posts would cheer every time the All Blacks scored. And then we had a team called Police playing in the first division on Saturday afternoons. And every time a Policeman was heavily tackled, there’d be a huge cheer. But it was a kind of very negative joy that I got. So, I just stopped going.
We had big debates at UCT then. We would pack Jameson Hall, a thousand students and more. And the issue was whether or not the 10% quota of black students at University of Cape Town could participate in social events. The official position of the university was, you can study, you can pass exams, you’ll get your degrees equal to everybody else but please, no tennis, no swimming, no cricket teams. And we were arguing in favour of at least in principle accepting the principle of equality. I made my first public speech. Going up, my heart is racing. I speak. The words are pouring out; it’s a passionate speech, and there are a thousand students. And I’m getting some applause from some of them and saying, you know, if we believe in equality, it has to be across the board, we’re all equal and so on. And I sit down. And my friend said, ‘Albie, that’s just what we wanted, a nice quiet speech.’ And I discovered I don’t even know how I sound to others. And we lost that debate. But we got maybe 800 votes to 1200 votes in favour of academic non-segregation, social segregation. But we were fighting on the campus.
But then I have the question, girls, I want to meet girls. I want to go to the dance, the dance is segregated, what do I do? And I ask the black students and I’m saying, ‘You know, it’s maybe important that I go to the dance because if we’re going to be politically active you got to be seen and mingle with the people and all the rest. What should I do?’ ‘Albie, it’s up to you.’ They weren’t going to help me. And it was tough. If I dated girls who had dark skins, Immorality Act, we go to jail. We couldn’t develop a relationship openly and publicly. We couldn’t love each other! If I go to the dance, it’s whites only at the university. All the time you had challenges like that. But you live your life.
And then I’m with the Modern Youth Society. And now that’s a much more real world for me than the university world. Not very large in numbers but a very, very left wing and totally anti-racist. I think we were the only public non-racial organisation in the whole of South Africa, in the middle 1950s. Many of us, white intellectuals. And there were other people from the coloured community, Africans who joined in. There was Joseph Morolong from the ANC Youth League. We had people from Namibia, from Malawi, from other parts of Africa. I still remember the one guy, he actually became a freedom fighter against Banda in Malawi, they called him General China afterwards. And we used to climb Table Mountain every Sunday. So, he thought it was your revolutionary duty to climb Table Mountain. We put on our rucksacks; we climb up to the top. We cook our fire; we have our coffee and he’s waiting for something to happen. And then we come down again. He couldn’t quite understand what this was all about.
The mores of cultural public life were so intense then. Boys were expected to behave in a certain way, girls in another way. Dating was like the centre of everything. Careers like everything. And we were just quite different. To this day I’ve never learnt how to date properly. We did everything as a group. And then occasionally people would pair up. But the women were strong, independent spirited, and that was different from the rest of our communities. We would have all night parties. And it was very exciting to be alive and to be different and to feel you were part and parcel of a worldwide revolutionary social transformation. And it was real because you were defying the apartheid, the segregation, the separation in South Africa. We were non-racial in our conduct but very much affected by racism in our daily lives.
The internationalism was very important for us. And we learnt songs from the Spanish Civil War [singing in Spanish]. We learnt songs from Pete Seeger from the United States. ‘Which side are you on, which side are you on? My daddy was a miner and I’m a miner’s son. I’m sticking to the union ‘til every battle’s won. Which side are you on…’ [singing]. And then Paul Robeson was our huge, huge hero. And I had quite a deep voice, so I got quite a lot of kudos in the Modern Youth Society. Joe Hill: ‘I dreamt I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you or me. Says I, but Joe you’re ten years dead. I never died says he. I never died says he…’ [singing]. ‘And then standing there as large life a smile upon his eyes says Joe what they forgot to kill went on to organise from San Diego up to Maine.’
We felt part of an international struggle. And that’s where we also learnt the partisan songs from Italy from World War Two. We were inspired by now independence movements, India is independent, giving us a lot of support in our struggle. Indonesia under Sukarno, Bandung, China and India coming together. We’re very excited by these events. And we’re seeing our struggle in South Africa as part of an African struggle but part of a worldwide struggle against oppression.
We secretly wanted to study Marxism. And it was dangerous. Marxist study class, they’d catch you with the books, you can go to jail for ten years. So, we started, I remember, with the pre-Socratics. Wow, this is interesting stuff. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. And by then we’re losing our enthusiasm. The idea was to gradually reach Marx. We never even got that far. But we did develop a love of philosophy, a love of ideas. Ideas mattered. Ideas were important. They weren’t just a fashion. Ideas told you about the world and how the world was structured and organised. And we liked to feel we were part of that whole international tradition of ideas and of thinking. And the whole emancipatory thrust, I like to feel, has been with me to this day – even if many of the forms that our Marxist theory took have been belied by history. We felt we were understanding history and explaining history. History hasn’t followed the way it ought to have gone.
But a lot of what we learnt then has turned out to be true and it seemed impossible then in the early ‘50s to imagine a decolonised world. To imagine independent Africa, to imagine women having equal rights with men. All of that seemed to be impossible. And that’s what we got in the Modern Youth Society. The theme of equality for women was very strong in our ranks. And certainly the theme of decolonisation. Anti-racism was very, very powerful. And the rights of workers and ordinary people matter and internationalism, all of these things came to me quite spontaneously and naturally in my youth and took an organised form through the Modern Youth society.
But the thing is we were willing to share and to give everything for the struggle. And if you judge a youth movement by the number of years its members spent in jail, we were spectacular. Denis Goldberg 23 years, Ben Turok was the first person to be charged, I think the Sabotage Act was just coming in. His wife Mary went to jail, I went to jail, Amy Thornton went to jail, George Peake went to jail for five years. Joseph Morolong went to jail for five years. Almost all of us went to jail. And we knew that was in the offing. That was part and parcel of the project of joining in the struggle.
