It was another world

Forty years ago, against the background of the exhilaration of the 1960s youth and student revolts, and the growing opposition to the catastrophe that was the American war against Vietnam, a few dozen young British communists and socialist students made a series of clandestine trips to apartheid South Africa over five years. Their actions, described forty-five years later for the first time in London Recruits, were a significant contribution to the ending of apartheid and the democratic elections of 1994, which brought Nelson Mandela from political prisoner to president.

The London recruits’ importance was in their contribution to the reigniting of popular struggle inside the country during the darkest period of the African National Congress’s history in the mid-1960s. The ANC was almost broken, with its leaders in exile, dead, or sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia trial of 1964, and the remaining underground smashed by repression.

The recruits’ stories from that period, told by people who had the discipline and lack of self-promotional instinct to keep their secrets over decades, and the emergence in public meetings of some of them today, prompt new thoughts, about solidarity, 1960s youth, the British Communist party, South Africa, then and now. In Britain today, where a million people on the streets against the Iraq war had no impact on western policy, where visible consumerism flourishes and youth is increasingly deprived of a voice or a job or an education, where racism is not acknowledged, this history is unknown.

Some of the great leaders of the South African Communist Party (SACP), such as Yusuf Dadoo, Joe Slovo and Jack Hodgson, were in exile in London in the late 1960s. The latter two were also legendary trainers in both military and underground skills, and leaders of the fledgling military resistance. Training was going on in the Soviet Union, rear bases were being set up in Zambia and Tanzania, the ANC cadre fought in what was then Rhodesia, but few knew much about all this. The great preoccupation of the moment for these leaders was how they were to speak to their people inside South Africa.

A special four-man SACP/ANC unit in London, including their younger colleague, Ronnie Kasrils, began cautiously to recruit white British people with no previous known interest in South Africa to go into the country and distribute quantities of ANC propaganda leaflets showing how far from defeat the anti-apartheid struggle was. Kasrils was on a United Nations scholarship studying sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE), after avoiding arrest for successful and ambitious sabotage actions, and making a daring escape from South Africa. ¹

As stories in London Recruits reveal, Kasrils, known in the LSE as ‘a Stalinist’, cheerfully recruited individual young British Trotskyists from the International Socialist group, and non-aligned American anti-Vietnam campaigners, all of whom were inspired by him to take covert action against apartheid. But the backbone of the operation lay in the Communist party, in particular the Young Communist League (YCL), and among the communists in the Seamen’s Union and the dock workers. In 1967 Kasrils met George Bridges, YCL London secretary, and then he and Joe Slovo met the leadership of the Communist party of Great Britain who agreed to organise recruitment through Bridges.

Reading these stories now is to enter a vanished world of certainties, loyalties, morality, of young men and some women from communist family backgrounds, where the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 was a family reference, uncles and neighbours had been in the anti-fascist International Brigade in Spain in the 1930s, internationalism was automatic, and support for the Vietnamese struggle against the US was a given. They often came from struggle backgrounds too – in Ireland, Greece, Scotland – and saw apartheid South Africa as an extension of their ancestry. Many had become communists in their early teens. As Bob Allen, the London YCL secretary from 1969 to 1974, wrote in the book, ‘We seemed to inhabit a parallel universe, with a determined “can-do” mentality.’ He was somewhat surprised when he found on taking over from George Bridges that there was a part of the YCL secretary job description he had not been told about, but he was unfazed and set about recruiting. ‘Are you ready to do something illegal for the YCL’, had been Bridges’ no-nonsense approach to Ken Keable, the book’s editor. The answer was yes, after Keable had sat his exams as an electrical engineer.

The recruits were approached individually, by the YCL, as Kasrils had individually approached LSE Socialist Society members, and few took more than a few minutes to decide to go – the clarity of the moral issue, plus a sense of adventure, spoke to them. They had jobs as teachers, electricians, in insurance, most had never been on a plane, but they had what Sean Hosey described as ‘the absolute certainty of youth’. Once they met ‘Ronnie’ (whose surname they were not told), friendly, funny, worldly, and the epitome of ‘can-do’, they were hooked. ‘Ronnie was the most impressive person I have ever met’, wrote Ken Keable. There were a lot of Graham Greene-like meetings in streets, then in dowdy rooms in central London as he began to train them for a few weeks.

They learned to use suitcases with false bottoms, made by Jack Hodgson, to use timers to set off small explosive charges in a bucket bomb, which would shower leaflets for yards around or a banner, to set a microphone on a hotel balcony or a chained bicycle to broadcast an ANC speech, to buy hundreds of stamps in various post offices and post letters in many different areas, to paint their fingers with nail varnish to avoid leaving finger prints. Above all they were drilled to blend in, not to draw attention to themselves in apartheid South Africa.

But, they were young and they were amateurs. They made mistakes once they were in South Africa that their trainers could not have foreseen, and that were only funny afterwards when the danger had passed: the Bell brothers took a pair of girls out to dinner, not realising they were classed as Coloured and could have got the four of them arrested; Danny Schechter told the staff in the hotel not to call him baas, and insisted on mopping up his overflowing bath himself, and then just took off to Chief Luthuli’s funeral; George Paizis recruited his Greek uncle living in Johannesburg to set off a leaflet bomb and to dispose of various suitcases; Graeme Whyte – who had never stayed in a hotel before and did not know that chambermaids had keys to bedrooms – was surprised mid-afternoon with hundreds of ANC leaflets, soldering equipment and half-assembled bucket bombs spread out in full view of an astonished black maid. Fortunately she supported the ANC and kept the secret.

The enormity of what they were risking was strongly put to them in their training sessions, but as Hosey, one of the two in the book to be arrested and imprisoned, told me, ‘nothing can prepare you for interrogations, solitary confinement, and the psychological difficulty of life without any road map of the future, or the knowledge of whether your family even know where you are or if you are alive’.

Hosey was arrested in a trap after the man he was due to meet was tortured into writing a letter to the ANC dictated by the security service with a request for material from London. For Kasrils the arrest was ‘a deeply, deeply depressing time of life’. For Hosey’s parents it was a stunning shock when the CP leadership told them. It meant plunging into a new life of campaigning around the world for his release, carrying ANC banners, besieging the Irish and South African embassies and, for his father, going to South Africa for his son’s trial. Hosey was just twenty-two when he spent fifteen months alone before the trial and got an eight-year sentence. He was then in prison in the company of white South African political prisoners such as Bram Fischer and Denis Goldberg, and another of the recruits, Alex Moumbaris, who, in desperation, tried to kill himself, but then was part of an extraordinary escape. Suicide never crossed Hosey’s mind. ‘It would have been a victory for them’, he told me. His memories of Fischer, the greatest lawyer of his age, were of his kindness to the young Irishman, wonderful discussions, tennis matches in the prison yard where Fischer, despite his heavy limp, still had the skills and guile to win – ‘he could beat the pants off us’. Hosey, like the other prisoners, watched sadly as Fischer’s health declined until morphine could barely control his acute pain. The others would sometimes hear him fall off the narrow cell bed. They requested one of them be allowed to sleep in his cell to help him back up, but the prison refused. Just a month before Fischer died he was allowed to go home. After his cremation, the prison demanded his ashes be returned to their custody. ² That was the character of the apartheid regime that Hosey saw so close up.

After Hosey’s release, he returned to Britain to be welcomed personally by the general secretary of the Communist party, John Gollan. A press photograph shows a slightly stunned-looking young man. In those days the strength and organising capacity of the party and its wider links meant a place was ready for him at Warwick University to do a Master’s degree – a breathing space while he made the major readjustment to ordinary life after a prison experience of great intensity. Fortunately, his Irish roots had supplied him with anti-authoritarian and anti-imperialist attitudes and an ability to see South Africa as an extension of his ancestry – reinforced when the prosecution told him that MI6 had informed them that his father was a Republican.

In any event, his life did not become what might be called ordinary for a while. In the first year, he was invited to Cuba, where he was privileged to spend time with Oliver Tambo, the ANC’s gentle, modest president. Hosey then went on to the UN to speak about South Africa. In New York, the young man was hosted by another ANC legendary leader, Johnny Makatini, whom he remembers fondly costing him the loss of an overcoat on a late night outing. Makatini, besides being an indefatigable story-teller and fun-creator, was a member of the ANC National Executive Committee and had been ANC representative in Algeria in the vibrant years when that country was the centre and guiding force of Third World politics. Makatini knew everyone, and after his UN years became the ANC’s effective foreign minister. With him Hosey saw a very different South Africa.

But despite those hectic months of public speaking he was encouraged to do, Hosey slipped easily back into silence about his experiences. ‘Once in that mode of keeping to yourself it was hard to get out of it … besides, there was always that sense that somehow the regime might use something against others.’

By the mid/late 1970s, after the defeat of Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique, the South African resistance was growing strong again inside the country, although at a terrible price. The ANC had military camps in Angola and Mozambique, and young men and women came out of the townships determined to join them.

For most of the London recruits their usefulness to South Africa was over, and they were glad to bury the huge emotions (side-effect of their efforts) over both the successes and the tragic failures. Many of them have written here how the whole experience of their one or two missions to South Africa changed their lives forever. Perhaps they mean changed their idea of themselves and their capacities and further solidified their political beliefs. Some were CP officials for a number of years, but for the most part they went back into modest family lives in Britain, working in local government or their own businesses, never mentioning, even to those they had shared missions with, what they had once been part of together. No one ever knew who else had gone on other missions. In one case, two women shared an office for ten years without having any idea of what they had once had in common.

Meanwhile, as Denis Walshe put it, ‘Vietnam and Chile became just words for holiday destinations’, and ‘Blair caught us by surprise with his rapid turn to the right and the crunch on the trade union movement’. For some the end of the Soviet Union and the implosion of the Communist party in Britain ended the key political phase of their lives, and there is still nostalgia for the hardworking days and nights when urgent leaflets were written, printed and distributed in response to world events.

Ken Keable’s decision on his sixtieth birthday to write his South African story, and then his dogged research work to find some of the others and get their stories, and the encouragement of Ronnie Kasrils to get a book of history from them all, has sparked an unexpected revival of old interests and old politics. Some have described it as therapeutic to speak for the first time about the events they have written about, and meetings have turned tearful. Several of them went to South Africa for the book’s launch, and were stunned to find themselves feted, invited to Thabo Mbeki’s modest seventieth birthday event, and seated with old men who had spent decades in prison. Denis Walshe listened to Ronnie Kasrils – who had by then resigned from government – give the speech of ‘a militant ANC dissident, among the champagne and cake’.

Walshe spoke to me about the mining bosses in the wake of the Marikana killings and how much he’d like to tell them what he thought of them, while Hosey said he still gets angry thinking about the four ANC guerrillas, newly returned to the country, who were put on trial with him and Alex Moumbaris, and how they got fifteen-year sentences and much worse treatment than his. Today’s ANC world of bitter factions, £1 million spending on a wedding, and many other extravagances, strikes him as disgraceful. ‘ANC sort yourself out. This is not what people sacrificed for.’ The fire has not gone out in Hosey, and national trade union demonstrations find him bringing teenagers from the Woodcraft Folk to join protests on UK national economic and social issues. He is teaching the next generation the values of justice and confidence in the possibility of change.

Hosey is not the only one of these men, and a few women, wondering whether solidarity ever ends, and what their responsibilities are for what they once cared about so much. The London recruits have never been a group, though some of them think that, since the book, perhaps they could be. In 2012 Ken Keable, as editor of the book, and two other recruits, signed a statement presented at the opening of the ANC’s third International Solidarity Conference, by former Dutch anti-apartheid activist, Adri Nieuwhof, on behalf of over 150 former international anti-apartheid activists (from more than nineteen countries and belonging to over thirty-five organisations). The statement called on the ANC, South Africa’s ruling party, to support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Kasrils, the recruits’ mentor in decades past, had become one of the best-known international spokespeople for Palestinian rights and justice in the years since he left South Africa’s government.

Under the impetus of visits by Kasrils to London, the recruits have come several times from across Britain to meet and discuss the past. Ken Keable and several others have travelled to many cities speaking about the book, and about how important it was then to fight apartheid, not least because of the impact the struggle had against racism in Britain. They tell the stories of what ordinary young people forty years ago chose to do to change the world. In today’s world of discredited political leaderships of every hue, when solidarity with the oppressed is a much more confused concept, and young people often make individual choices to express ‘solidarity’, including the use of violent jihad under that heading, the London recruits’ bravery, discipline and modesty could be an inspiration.