South Africa’s Communists Were Crucial to the Fight Against Apartheid
From its foundation in the 1920s, the South African Communist Party took up the fight against racism as a central part of its political vision. The party’s heroic record in the anti-apartheid movement has now received the historical treatment it deserves.
South African Communist Party supporters marching in favor of a “Yes” for a referendum on ending apartheid on March 18, 1992 in Johannesburg, South Africa. (AFP via Getty Images)
Moses Kotane was the longest-serving leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and an iconic figure in South African politics who helped forge the party’s long-standing alliance with the African National Congress (ANC). In 1938, he explained what had drawn him toward communism: “I am first an African and then a Communist. I came to the Communist Party because I saw in it the way out and the salvation for the African people.”
The contested relationship between class, African nationhood, and the character of revolutionary politics in South Africa has been a defining theme throughout the SACP’s century-long history. Tom Lodge’s Red Road to Freedom, the first complete account of the SACP from its origins to the present, explores these themes in depth, expertly reconstructing the multigenerational political, social, and intellectual lives of South Africa’s Communists.
Writing Communist History
Lodge is a veteran historian of the South African left, and his book is the product of almost forty years of research. While composing his landmark study, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (1983), Lodge recalls that he had realized the importance of Communists in the history of “the great set pieces of anti-apartheid struggle of the 1950s.” In spite of this, they were virtually absent from the existing scholarship.
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