Everyday Communists in South Africa's Liberation Struggle: The Lives of Ivan and Lesley Schermbrucker

Alan Kirkaldy has written a lively account of the careers of two Communist activists in twentieth-century Eastern Cape, South Africa: the labor organizers and movement fund-raisers Ivan and Lesley Schermbrucker. He was granted full access to the family and incorporated a partial manuscript biography of Ivan by Lesley. An experienced historian, Kirkaldy has crafted a tribute with depth and genuine surprises.Black African workers organized by the Communist Party (CP) successfully struck on the gold mines in 1946, and Africans fought against deferred payment, racist grain markets, rural labor abuse, and restrictions on residential rights in a massive political union, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union. The Communist Party had been oriented mostly toward white workers before the war, incorporating some Black men (and a few women) from the 1920s on, vying with anarchists and socialists in meetings on the Witwatersrand. The Schermbruckers were working-class Jews. Ivan, born in 1921 in Ngqeleni, a small town in the Eastern Cape, spoke isiXhosa as a boy with his friends. He left school for the military in part because his parents could not afford university fees and went to North Africa and Italy during World War II. Fred Carneson, later of Cape Town's Communist Central Committee, recruited Ivan when he, Wolfie Kodesh, and Ivan were serving in Tunisia—with Brian Bunting, also later a Central Committee member, stationed "nearby." The three men worked together in the Italian port of Ancona in contact with partisans and the Italian CP (51).A difficulty Kirkaldy faces is providing a context. "Everyday Communists" is a double-entendre title meaning "full time" and "middle rank." Still, the Schermbruckers were white, as were most of their intimate colleagues (Bram Fischer, Winnie Kramer, Arnold Selby, etc.), and as such were privileged. There were some Africans and South Asian South Africans, and so on, in the party, but there were also many whites, and the vast bulk of the working class in South Africa in the twentieth century was Black under white union-member supervision. Ivan worked for a while for the Department of Native Affairs, the government organ devoted to administering Africans under apartheid, but he quit during the general replacement of liberals by apartheid officials.The chronology jumps around a bit, but the solution is to use Ivan's and Lesley's life (or lives together) as the context(s) for national and local political events, rather than vice versa. Ivan and Lesley met in 1946, and by all accounts had a great marriage, and this book chronicles their professional work as active organizers against apartheid, zooming back and forth a bit. In places, their ordinariness suggests a different vision of reform from that espoused by their revolutionary colleagues. As the state closed in on the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) inside South Africa in the early 1960s—the now-illegal party was renamed the South African Communist Party—African nationalists carried the day within and outside the SACP and organized violence on a larger scale. Thousands of PAC (and Poqo) members were arrested on the verge of their plan for violence, and then Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) stepped up recruitment of scores of new members for their ranks. Nelson Mandela's vanguard force, MK people, were funneled out via the border post at Lobatse to be trained and sent back in with arms—another venture that the state destroyed in embryo.The tight-knit connections between and among top Communists, including future apartheid state's witnesses like Piet Beyleveld, constitute a hidden theme in the book. Kirkaldy is aware that the interactions, texts, and even photographs in the Schermbrucker family allow him to speak more freely about those who intersected with them, people woven together in heritage, military service, social and Communist Party connections, and marriage. There he shines a bright light. The generous biographies lodged in the endnotes (another unusual structural decision) mostly focus on White comrades, via the Schermbruckers' documented associations, but not entirely. That the Schermbruckers went on holiday to Plettenberg in 1960–63, as they did every other year, more than their race, emblematizes their distance from the vanguard. The catastrophic defeat of MK in '63 is elided into exile and prison. True, life went on for organizers and soldiers, in and out of prison, or squalid MK camps, or London hotels.The ordinary Communists of various backgrounds did not always agree with each other in or out of prison. The Schermbruckers later said they confronted the reality of Stalinism, and so focused most on the local (South African) mobilization against apartheid and the National Party, and not the international proletarian dimension. Joe Slovo and others in the party failed to make this recalculation so clearly but also supported the ANC's embrace of revolutionary violence: it became entirely symbolic after 1963, until the 1980s. The union movement, its organizers cannibalized by MK, did not recover from the '60s collapse until the early 1970s, in Durban.Episodic evocations of the Schermbruckers' quiet work in passing funds through their "Arnold's Christmas Hamper" club, along with their efforts at the Guardian, and discussions of the way they mixed with, as Lesley said, "all peoples of every color and background" and of their job in facilitating Bram Fischer (Communist Party chairman) during his brief underground period, all are quite interesting (110).No one was spared when the arrests came in the 1960s, and Ivan (after being tortured by the "statue" method) went to jail for a long time, while others suffered exile, house arrest, "banning" (from public associations with political groups, etc.)—and hanging. With Ivan in jail, authority was taken up by women, such as Jean Middleton (Strachan), and Lesley, including for MK. As the active efforts went into an eclipse, in jail, Ivan became a kind of parental figure to other prisoners, both political and common cons; he was laid back but tough. As Hugh Lewin put it, he was "Ivan fucking Schermbrucker, especially to himself" (287).One notes that Canon Collins of the Anglican Church (who often worked with Tambo) directed MK and party representatives on a committee he worked with to merge with an existing Johannesburg underground committee known only by Collins, in order to receive all world Protestant church monies—including the Quakers'—in one place. The committee pledged to use the funds only to support detainees' families. One notes that the committee was composed of active MK people: Gertrude Shope (wife of Mark Shope, MK), Tshintshing Caroline Mashaba (wife of Andrew Mashaba, MK), James Ngwenya, and two others, including one pastor; and that Tambo later admitted he had at times taken funds earmarked for civilian actions in South Africa and used the money to support the ANC's MK soldiery in Tanzania and Angola (261).Multiple personal relationships, not all of them amicable, are set into the urban and international scope of the party. In this way, Kirkaldy draws the picture of "Everyday Communists" responding to the singular problem of South Africa in a quotidian manner, more like social democrats than Bolsheviks. Still, though, in pursuing those aims unwaveringly, they gave their lives and offer their legacies now.