Fiercely Non-Racial? Discourses and Politics of Race in the Non-European Unity Movement, 1943–70

The Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), founded in Bloemfontein in December 1943 as an organisation for national liberation by activists within the ‘Trotskyist’ tradition of the South African left, has built up a formidable reputation for its uncompromising stand on non-racism. Its puritanical insistence on the principle of non-racism has become one of the hallmarks of its discourse and political philosophy. The current literature accepts this non-racism as given and typically describes the NEUM as always having been ‘fiercely non-racial’ or having had an ‘abiding commitment to non-racialism’. By contrast, this article argues that non-racism had not always been a central tenet of the organisation but that it became much more self-conscious and politically correct about its discourse around issues of race only from the early 1960s onwards. Generalised assertions that the NEUM was non-racist reflect neither the intricacies of its ideology and political strategy nor changes in its priorities. They ignore the very considerable concessions the organisation made to various forms of racial thinking and racial identities within its constituency and disregard its own lapses into racial thinking in unguarded moments. By scrutinising the ideological and political, as well as the day-to-day, discourses within the NEUM and tracing its elevation of non-racism to a matter of high principle, this article demonstrates that attitudes toward race within the organisation, especially towards Coloured identity, were far more complex and pragmatic than hitherto suggested by commentators.