Research on Soviet and Eastern European support for African liberation movements has focused on material assistance and training in military techniques and organisational methods.Footnote 1 Archival evidence has supplied fresh insights into how partnerships between Eastern bloc agencies and African groups and governments underpinned security in Afro-Marxist regimes.Footnote 2 The emphasis in this article is different. Certainly, interactions between Czechoslovak Communists and their South African allies featured transfers of hardware and technical knowledge, but as important was the ideological effect of such contacts. Here the focus will be on four areas in which contacts between the South Africans and the Czechoslovaks were influential or illuminating. First, Czechoslovakia would supply a source of strategic inspiration especially at a time when the South African Communist Party (SACP) was becoming embedded in its alliance with African nationalism. Second, Czechoslovak ‘people's democracy’ would constitute an inspirational model for the South Africans for how a socialist-oriented society might be constructed in the aftermath of national liberation. Third, in a key period, during the 1960s Czech support helped to confirm and refine South African liberation movements’ commitment to a distinct conception of armed struggle. Considerable numbers of black and white South Africans visited and lived in Czechoslovakia between 1946 and 1989 and, on the whole, these experiences were rewarding and formative. Finally, exploring Czech encounters with South Africans illuminates wider concerns that prompted Eastern European countries’ African engagements and the extent to which these were driven either by pragmatic or material concerns or by strategic or doctrinal preoccupations. South African Communists would sometimes find themselves in awkward positions: they were privileged by their membership in a global revolutionary fraternity but compelled to act in a setting in which African ‘national democratic’ regimes embodied limits on political imagination.
LEARNING FROM PEOPLE'S DEMOCRACY
The earliest South African Communists to visit Prague were Ruth First and Harold Wolpe, in 1946 both students at Wits University. In December, they attended a meeting of the International Union of Students (IUS) at its Prague headquarters. First subsequently toured Yugoslavia, where her meetings with former partisan commanders appeared to have made a deeper impression on her than her Czech experiences.Footnote 3 Still, Wolpe and First were among the small minority of South African Communists later critical of the Soviet suppression of the ‘Prague Spring’. The IUS soon drew another South African visitor, Lionel Forman, whose experiences during his stay were more formative.
In 1950 Forman was a law student at Wits. Like First and Wolpe, he was the South African-born child of Baltic Jewish emigrants. As a teenager he joined the Communist Party, then enjoying a wartime resurgence and beginning to establish a following on the main English-language university campuses. Forman edited Wits Student, opposing anti-communist calls for the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) to disaffiliate from the IUS. By 1950 the IUS had clearly aligned itself with the Soviet Union-led ‘peace’ camp. Forman attended IUS's conference in Warsaw in 1951, after which he took up a position as a NUSAS delegate at the IUC's secretariat in Prague. He remained there for two years, joined by his wife, Sadie, whom he married in Prague's town hall. The couple lived in a student hostel in Smíchov and befriended local people. Forman worked hard to learn Czech and, though never a fluent speaker, could follow radio broadcasts.
On his return to South Africa, Forman joined the now-clandestine SACP. As the editor of a party-controlled newspaper, Advance, Forman became a key figure in rationalising the SACP's partnership with the African National Congress (ANC). Central to such justifications was the idea of a transitional stage towards socialism, a ‘national’ or ‘people's’ democracy. Here party strategists took their cues from Soviet theorists who by the mid-1950s were suggesting that anti-colonial national bourgeoisies might act progressively, not necessarily deferring to imperialism. In former colonies, a ‘non-capitalist road’ to socialism would feature multi-party democracy and nationalisation of foreign ‘monopoly’ enterprises in a state-owned sector while allowing local private enterprise. In this venture, workers and indigenous businessmen might have convergent interests.
In the early 1950s, most recent models for socialist transition were not former colonial societies but rather the countries of Eastern Europe. Rowley Arenstein, active in the SACP in this period, has suggested that countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia represented models of national democracy for his comrades.Footnote 4 Certainly pre-Second World War and wartime Eastern European Communist experience supplied heroic inspiration. In this respect Julius Fučik's Notes from the Gallows was a canonical text for SACP leaders.Footnote 5 In the years following Forman's return, a procession of South African Communists would tour the new people's democracies. Advocate Harry Bloom, a close friend of Bram Fischer though probably not a party member, lived in Czechoslovakia at the time of the Communist takeover in 1948. He and his wife Beryl wrote a vigorous defence of the Czech Communists’ accession. Their aim was to ‘pose simple truths’ against the ‘barrage of hatred and distortion against the Czechoslovak people’ and ‘the absurd and violent slanders’ despatched by American and British pressmen.Footnote 6 Working as journalists, the Blooms bought a small cottage in Zalov, a commuter village outside Prague, and learned to speak a little Czech. They joined the village Brigade, in which city workers undertook voluntary weekend work on farms. Keenly sympathetic observers, they ‘followed the statistics of the two-year plan as if they were football scores’.Footnote 7
Ahmed Kathrada visited Czechoslovakia and Poland before staying in Budapest for several months. Molly Fischer toured East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union before travelling to China in 1954.Footnote 8 Paul Joseph encountered Fučik's widow Gustava on a tram journey; excited that he had read Notes from the Gallows, she invited him home to meet her friends. On a second visit, Joseph was ‘taken around’ by a group of trade unionists. He had the temerity to ask them about the Slansky trial; they ‘seemed surprised’ he had heard about it.Footnote 9 Leslie Massina, first general secretary of SACTU, visited Czechoslovakia for a short training course on trade unionism in 1954, organised by the Prague-based World Federation of Trade Unions.Footnote 10
It is likely that people returning from such excursions brought back more than fresh skills and techniques. Of course, there was the emotional impact of the hospitality and courtesy they received, especially empowering for people normally subjected to humiliating subordination in their home society. As the trade unionist Elizabeth Mafeking recalled after visiting Czechoslovakia in 1955 to attend a Youth Festival, the warmth of her reception enabled her to ‘really forget she was black’.Footnote 11 But thinkers like Forman who experienced people's democracy for longer would have returned to South Africa with more qualified reactions. Shortly after his stay in Prague, he wrote an autobiography. It was turned down for publication by Harry Pollit of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) because of its criticisms of a ‘brother party’. Forman recalled his impressions from Prague in the Party's newspaper New Age where he wrote about the ‘lessons from Hungary’. In Prague he often encountered among Czech colleagues ‘cynicism towards the things about us that was a nagging worry to every one of us’. How could it be, he asked, ‘that years after the war one of Europe's great cities should suffer the humiliation of a real black-out for lack of generating plant?’ His concerns were not simply limited to inefficiencies. In the same article he criticized his own failure three years earlier to recognise ‘the alarmingly large number of ordinary citizens’ who opposed the government, and he concluded that ‘the sacrifices called for were too great’ and ‘the limitations on freedom out of all proportion to the need’.Footnote 12 The manuscript Pollit read probably contained more detailed recollections but unfortunately the only surviving fragments are not about Prague. However, Sadie Forman wrote a memoir about her husband. In Prague he was, she remembered, very disturbed by the Slansky show-trial, listening closely to live broadcasts of the proceedings and finding them ‘frightful, disappointing and largely incomprehensible, making a mockery of communism’.Footnote 13 When Stalin died, the Formans sensed among their local friends a ‘veil of anxiety lifted’.Footnote 14
Forman remained a loyal Communist. Indeed in 1956 he convinced himself that across the socialist bloc the ‘lessons of Hungary’ had been learned and that ‘a new future [had] dawn[ed] for the world’. Moreover, when living in ‘one of the most advanced of the people's democracies’, even among anti-government people he spoke to, not ‘a single one … wanted to return to the days of capitalism’.Footnote 15 Forman's stay in Prague coincided with the harshest phase of the Party's rule, with a series of political trials convicting thousands of supposed class enemies. One month before Forman's departure, a steep monetary devaluation effectively nullified peoples’ savings, which in turn engendered widespread riots.Footnote 16 The Formans were taken aback by the ‘chaos’ that resulted from the devaluation.Footnote 17
But for those observers who wanted to see it, there was also evidence of regime support: apparently ‘joyous’ crowds of young people assembling in May Day parades and the solemn procession of 200,000 mourners at Klement Gottwald's funeral. Reacting to an earlier phase, before the Communists’ takeover, the Blooms were impressed by what they perceived to be ‘the real mood of the Czechoslovak people, the feeling of confidence, optimism and verve, the spirit of liberation’.Footnote 18 Visitors familiar with the austerities of postwar Britain, including Forman, may have been untroubled by consumer shortages resulting from the authorities’ strategic emphasis on heavy industry. Meanwhile, the Czechoslovak welfare state could point to genuine accomplishments in the provision of sophisticated and free health care as well as an expanding network of well-equipped nursery facilities. In the two years they stayed in Czechoslovakia, the Formans ‘did not come across any sign of poverty’ and, like the Blooms, they were impressed by what seemed to them very obvious social equality.Footnote 19 Forman's reservations about the repressive political climate were also tempered by the gratitude he felt to Czech doctors who had been able to treat a serious heart illness complaint that had stymied British specialists. As Sadie Forman remembered, ‘life in Prague was gratifying at a basic level’.Footnote 20
Forman's conviction that the Hungarian experience offered ‘lessons’ was not widely shared within the Party. He had been in a small minority among Cape Town's Communists who readily accepted the disclosures supplied by Khrushchev at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's (CPSU) Twentieth Congress. Most of the Cape Town group rejected the reports as untrue, mere CIA fabrications. Forman's editorial on Khrushchev's speech earned him a harsh reprimand from Govan Mbeki. Albie Sachs was exceptional in taking Forman's side. Sachs had visited Czechoslovakia in 1954. In Prague he encountered Jaroslav Bartošek, a diplomat posted to Cape Town; Sachs had taught Mrs. Bartošek English and had made friends with the couple. A visit to Cape Town by the Jánaček String Quartet had also enthralled Sachs, prompting his lifelong passion for chamber music. He joined the multiracial audiences at all their concerts and became familiar with each of the players as well as their managerial escort. The latter functionary seemed superfluous, Sachs later recalled, for the musicians were not predisposed to defect: ‘they were very comfortable, they wanted to go back to Czechoslovakia, as far as I could see’. In Prague, though, the Bartošeks were unhappy. He had been sidelined in the foreign service and he offered his young visitor an exasperated commentary about a party hierarchy riven with rivalries and nepotism. Sachs himself was taken aback by what he saw in Prague — not the bright socialist metropolis he was expecting but a shabby ‘run-down city’.Footnote 21 For younger Communists like Forman and Sachs, then, Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalinism represented fresh grounds for hope.
Prompted by their activism within the Congress Alliance, South African Communists were thinking about how a transition to socialism could happen incrementally, constructed ‘from above’ after a socially emancipatory national liberation. For example, in 1956 Lionel Forman made the case for non-revolutionary roads to socialism.Footnote 22 Forman proposed that the national liberation movement had the potential to become a true people's movement, ‘one that will not allow a mere transfer from national oppression … but will push forward to people's democracy’.Footnote 23 In using such language South African Communists could take their cues from the Czech version of such a ‘push forward’. There after all was a national setting in which a Communist Party with significant popular support (38 per cent of the vote in 1946) found its way to power through an all-party National Front, the basis for a coalition government. A ‘national and democratic revolution’, as Klement Gottwald called this phase. Communist power within this coalition was expressed in major nationalisations as well as radical land reform, achievements which, Bloom claimed, ‘won them the respect of most of the people’.Footnote 24 The Czech Party's seizure of power in 1948, enabled by its control of the police and defence ministries, was accompanied by impressive expressions of public acclamation — indeed public support was the distinguishing feature of the Czech transition, a key ingredient in the subsequent regime's revolutionary credentials.Footnote 25 What followed was a regime that could be extremely repressive but nevertheless retained substantial legitimacy. In restricted localised contexts, officials sometimes tolerated non-confrontational challenges to government policy. Not quite totalitarian, Czech politics was a ‘participatory dictatorship’ in which Communists could make strong claims about delivering social justice.Footnote 26
Just what a South African people's democracy might embody was spelled out in 1954 by Moses Kotane in the pamphlet South Africa's Way Forward. A people's democracy, Kotane proposed, would be a more egalitarian version of parliamentary democracy. Land would be shared ‘among its rightful owners’, big companies would become the property of the people, and there would be good wages, social security, and housing for the homeless.Footnote 27 At this stage the terminology of people's or national democracy was used interchangeably. The notion of national democracy was in general usage within the SACP by 1955.Footnote 28 Significantly, among the papers the police confiscated from Rusty Bernstein in 1956 was a file containing Czech reports and press releases. Its contents would have suggested a much more uncompromising and radical transitional ‘people's democratic state’ than the order of national democracy envisaged in the Freedom Charter, the programme Bernstein drafted for the ANC.Footnote 29 Bernstein probably obtained this material when visiting the Czech consulate in Cape Town.
CZECHOSLOVAK ENGAGEMENTS: FROM TRADE TO SOLIDARITY
During the 1950s, left-wing South Africans’ contacts with Czechoslovakia were not the consequence of any official Czech interest in their concerns. South African visitors were hosted by the various international bodies that based their headquarters in Prague. As African countries became independent, though, Czech foreign policy became more engaged with Africa. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs created its own African department in 1959, starting an ambitious programme of aid, trade, and training. Next to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia was the biggest provider of aid to Africa from Communist governments in the 1960s.Footnote 30 The Czechoslovaks focused especially on West Africa. The Guinean leader of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), Sekou Toure, studied in Prague, and links with the Prague-based World Federation of Trade Unions helped to sustain a labour movement that reinforced the RDA's peasant base.Footnote 31 When Guinea opted to reject the proposed francophone community, Czechoslovaks played a crucial enabling role in establishing the new state. In Conakry, one official at the Czechoslovak embassy made friends with a visiting Oliver Tambo. In February 1962, Tambo and Nelson Mandela were able to exchange a suitcase of ‘worthless’ Guinean banknotes they had been given by the Foreign Ministry for ‘convertible currency’.Footnote 32 Czech moves coincided with shifts in Soviet policy and were encouraged by such developments, for the Czechs had a history of African engagement that set them apart from their Eastern bloc allies. The Czechoslovaks’ African development aid programme also represented to political leadership an important source of domestic political legitimacy.Footnote 33 In November 1960, delegates from 81 Communist parties assembled in Moscow. They reaffirmed the possibility of ‘domestic non-revolutionary paths to socialism’ by Third World anti-imperialist administrations — an assumption that had guided Soviet policy since 1955 and, as we have seen, influenced South Africans as well. Significantly for the South African delegate attending the meeting, Michael Harmel, the meeting's decisions included a reference to support for ‘just wars’ of national liberation, albeit within the limits needed to contain Cold War tensions.Footnote 34
In Prague in 1961, a dedicated college was set up to provide tertiary education for Third World students, the University of November 17, named after the student demonstration against the German invasion in 1939.. However in South Africa, where the Czechs had sustained a consular mission since 1926, the main Czech preoccupation was trade. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, Czech exports to South Africa were an important source of hard currency. Between 1950 and 1960, Czech exports to South Africa quadrupled.Footnote 35 The Czechs exhibited their products annually at the Rand Show. After the closure of the Soviet Union's embassy in 1956, the Czech consulate in Cape Town was the sole diplomatic representation in South Africa for the Communist world.Footnote 36
Archival evidence confirms that Czechoslovak diplomats held back from fostering local political connections, including those with South African Communists. When the Czechoslovaks moved their consular office from Cape Town to Johannesburg in 1958, they explained to the South African authorities that the move was ‘guided by the endeavour for a further improvement in our trade relations’.Footnote 37 This was just before the arrival of a new consul, Tomáš Lahoda, who was not an Africa expert. His freshness may have explained the passivity of the Czechoslovak reaction to the Sharpeville massacre — the Czechoslovaks refrained from even the mildest expression of concern. Officials at the Foreign Affairs ministry advised that ‘protests to the government of the Union’ at that point ‘would not be appropriate’. As Pretoria was already considering ending links, they counselled, there was no need to supply a ‘pretext’ to justify such action, and it would not be right to put the existence of the consulate at risk. At the same time, because there had already been street demonstrations in Prague, the Czechoslovaks should send a ‘message of sympathy’ to the secretariat of the All-African People's Conference in Accra, but without informing the South Africans. This calibrated position seems to have prevailed.Footnote 38 At this juncture, the Soviet Union favoured the continuation of Czech–South African relations because of their practical benefits. For example, Czech officials could arrange docking facilities for the Soviet Antarctic exploratory vessels in Cape Town.Footnote 39 Relations with the South African authorities remained friendly, for it seems that at the end of 1961 the South Africans began exploring with Lahoda the possibility of sending a trade mission to Prague. The Politburo viewed this as a step too far and instructed Lahoda to postpone any further planning of such a venture, though trade should continue.Footnote 40
South African Communists only began to question these dealings in 1962. This was despite reports about sales of Czechoslovak weapons in South Africa appearing in 1959 in Contact, a weekly paper published by Liberal Party members.Footnote 41 In January 1962, Moses Kotane visited Prague at the invitation of the Czechoslovak Party leadership. Kotane raised the issue of Czechoslovak diplomatic and commercial ties with South Africa, but after listening to a pragmatic rationale for their continuation, he decided not to complain. A more tense exchange at the Johannesburg consulate occurred when Lahoda met the SACP's Joe Slovo. It was Lahoda's only meeting with any South African Communist. Slovo's purpose in visiting the consulate was to demand its closure and to request Czech compliance with the United Nations’ boycott. Lahoda was unimpressed, explaining to Slovo ‘that the existence of a general consulate as the only point of contact was immensely important’. As he recalled forty years later, ‘I told him that while the Consulate could not do much for them, it was the only means through which the socialist countries could obtain day to day information about South Africa’. The proposal that Czech diplomats should leave South Africa ‘was short-sighted and dogmatic’, Lahoda insisted.Footnote 42 Yet pressures on the Czechs to alter their position accumulated throughout 1962. The British Communist Party had close contact with the South Africans through Vella Pillay, who belonged to both the British and South African Communist Parties. John Gollan spoke to Czech President Antonín Novotný about the Czech breach of the boycott during his visit to Prague that year.Footnote 43 In June 1963, Pillay wrote to the Czechoslovak Politburo. In his letter, according to affronted Czechoslovak officials, he used ‘wording unusual between fraternal parties’ warning about ‘unfortunate consequences that might arise as an effect of the continuation of relations between the CSSR and RSA’.Footnote 44
The Czechoslovaks were taken aback. They felt that Pillay had disregarded their earlier explanations for the trade links they had offered to Kotane. In any case the Politburo had already made a decision: the consul-general would be withdrawn and the office reduced to a trade mission, export of weaponry to South Africa would stop immediately, and other kinds of commerce would be reduced as soon as comparatively advantageous markets could be found. It was well short of a complete boycott but, officials felt, a sufficient response. Czechoslovak party leaders were being asked by Soviet officials to sort out their differences with the SACP.Footnote 45 Kotane was informed about the ending of the consular office's status during his visit to Prague in May that year, though to this good news the Czechs added an expression of displeasure about the tone of Pillay's letter to the Politburo.Footnote 46 In fact trade would continue and indeed increased through 1963. Only a year later, after disclosures about the details of Czech exports to South Africa in the Algerian press caused serious embarrassment, was the decision made to end all trade. Most trade had ended by 1965. Apparently, the determining consideration prompting this development was an April 1964 meeting in Prague of specialists from foreign communist parties’ international departments to discuss African affairs. At this occasion, Soviet delegates had insisted on a ‘total political and economic boycott’ of South Africa.Footnote 47
As far as South African party leaders were concerned, by the end of 1963 the Czechs were fully compliant with the boycott, as Yusuf Dadoo made clear when he wrote to Novotný thanking the Czechs for hosting a meeting of the SACP's Central Committee. In ending trade and consular relations, he noted, the Czechs had ‘shown the world that there is no boundary between words and actions’ among socialists.Footnote 48 By this stage, the Czechs were offering more substantive help. In May 1962, a seven-person ANC delegation had visited Prague for a one-day ‘study visit’. The visit was secret, organised at the behest of the Czech party secretariat. Subsequently, ANC representatives visited the London embassy to request a hundred scholarships. Before passing on the request, Czechoslovak diplomats sought the advice of ‘local friends’, that is, the SACP's London-based leadership. They told the Czechoslovaks they could ‘not guarantee the reliability of students nominated by this organisation’.Footnote 49 Clearly at this juncture, party leaders in London were taking a territorial approach, viewing the ANC's independent contacts with the Czechoslovaks as an infringement on their domain. In Prague, officials recommended the award of two scholarships to South Africans so they could attend the University of November 17.
Throughout 1963, the SACP made its own requests for Czech support independently of the ANC. Arthur Goldreich and Pillay called in at the embassy in London in February. Goldreich was one of the key planners from the SACP's internal leadership in South Africa, living at Rivonia farm, the Party's headquarters as well as the command centre for Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Pillay and Goldreich's purpose in meeting the Czechoslovaks was to request weaponry. Their list included three tons of plastic explosives, 500 heavy machine guns, and 2,000 automatic rifles. Raymond Mhlaba also requested plastic explosives during his visit to Prague in April 1963.Footnote 50 Moses Kotane, during a subsequent visit in July, submitted another list: lorries, motorcycles, bicycles, binoculars, and field radio sets. The Czechoslovaks agreed to most of these requests, including the plastic explosives.Footnote 51 They eventually despatched weaponry and logistical equipment worth Kcs 2.5 million to Dar es Salaam, a quantity more than sufficient to equip the 600-strong fledgling army-in-exile that ANC leaders had established at Kongwa, their upcountry military base.
The plastic explosives were supposed to be sent directly to South Africa. Goldreich and Pillay proposed the explosives should be imported into the country stuffed inside thousands of children's teddy bears, which they suggested could be done through German import-export agencies. This was ruled out as impractical; instead, the Czechs resolved to explore other possibilities to ensure that ‘the possibility of violation of Czechoslovak interests [was] excluded’.Footnote 52 Just what sorts of possibilities Czechoslovak officials had in mind remains unclear, for one month after these discussions, the South African police raided Rivonia and arrested MK's commanders, including Goldreich.
All these supply arrangements were coordinated with ‘Soviet Comrades’. In contrast to Soviet assistance, Czech material support for the South Africans did not include cash transfers; their diplomats’ generosity in Conakry in exchanging Mandela's Guinean banknotes was exceptional. As the Czechs warned Pillay when he requested their hospitality in 1963 for a Central Committee meeting, they would provide only for local expenses and not for anything such as air tickets that needed payment in dollars. Even costs in Prague would be limited by quite a frugal budget, ‘not in excess of Kcs 6,000’.Footnote 53 Even so, the overall scale of the Czech help was generous: though much of the military equipment could be taken from surplus stock in the army's depot, the Department of Foreign Affairs was expected to pay the Kcs 667,000 bill for shipping costs.Footnote 54
What was the significance of this support? When it was offered, it was comparatively generous — not as much as what the Soviet Union supplied, but more than any other official donations the ANC and the SACP were receiving. But its real impact was strategic, for it helped maintain the ANC's and SACP's commitment to a guerrilla warfare dependent on external lines of communication and supplies from socialist allies — a strategy very different from the defensive violence that ANC President Albert Luthuli had sanctioned in 1962.Footnote 55 It was not a strategic vision that all SACP leaders shared, as Saul Dubow has noted recently, so the kind of support the Czechs were offering lent it credibility, boosting the exile community's morale and helping to maintain the confidence of its leaders.Footnote 56 How much of the material the Czechs promised actually reached the ANC in Tanzania is unclear. Kotane raised the issue of the delivery of the trucks when he was again in Prague for a second SACP Central Committee meeting the Czechs hosted in June 1965. Novotný explained that they were still trying to persuade the Tanzanians to exempt the ‘transport equipment’ from import duties. The Czechoslovaks were also ‘in a difficult situation today because [they had] new requirements from Vietnamese for this kind of goods’.Footnote 57
In 1963, the Czechoslovaks also offered to supply military training, for ‘ten specialists from the South African national liberation movement’.Footnote 58 The training would be supplied by the Czech army and was intended to include the kinds of preparation needed by soldiers operating behind enemy lines. The Antonín Zápotocký Military Academy had recent experience in instructing Angolan insurgents, and the first South African students arrived in mid-March 1963.
Karel Sieber and Petr Zídek have documented from military records the South African recruits’ progress through their programme. The evidence they consulted suggests an undertaking that was ultimately discouraging for the Czechs. The training began promisingly enough with the introduction of the first two students, Amin Cajee and Omar Moosa, both recruited by Joseph (who by then was the main Party organiser in Fordsburg, a predominantly ‘Indian’ neighbourhood in Johannesburg). After spending a couple of weeks in their company in a Prague hotel, their host ‘Comrade Rudolf’ concluded they were authentic activists, already experienced in illegal work and equipped with a ‘progressive and focused Marxist orientation’. In fact neither Cajee nor Moosa were Communists, but both had received tutorials in Marxist dialectics from Ahmed Kathrada, a preparatory procedure before the clandestine SACP recruited its members. The two students continued to find favour with their instructors as they followed their curriculum of weapon handling, pyrotechnics, and more academic subjects. Indeed, with respect to working with explosives — perceived to be the most important part of their tactical training — the students were especially proficient, ‘calm, working without the slightest sign of fear’.Footnote 59
The remaining students arrived over the course of the year. Two senior South African leaders, Moses Kotane and an unnamed ANC official, who travelled to Prague to negotiate details of armaments shipments also wanted to learn how to handle guns and explosives.Footnote 60 They underwent a specially designed crash course. Then in his early sixties, Kotane was far too old for combat and apparently still had reservations about ‘the debacle of the turn to violence’, but in an increasingly militarised movement, martial expertise was becoming a source of authority.Footnote 61 Meanwhile, the next two trainees arrived on 27 May: Kotane's son Joseph Cotton and Zelani Mkhonzo. They were joined after a month by Gerald Lockman, a nephew and adopted son of Walter Sisulu, who had been delayed after contracting malaria. The after-effects may have affected his own morale. He told his instructors that he had been misled about the purpose of his journey to Czechoslovakia: he didn't want to become a soldier. The Czechs decided to treat him gently; they were aware of his family connections.Footnote 62
A further setback occurred in February 1964 when Cajee and Bhamjee tried to return to South Africa via London. They were returned to Czechoslovakia after British officials refused them entry. The Czechoslovaks had left their South African passports unstamped to facilitate their safe return home, but the British, puzzled by the absence of Czechoslovak exit visas, were sufficiently alarmed that they brought in a South African diplomat to question the two men.Footnote 63 In the second half of June, the remaining trainees arrived. The Czechoslovaks were disconcerted by the evident prevalence of ‘Indians’ among the final five arrivals: Hussain Jacobs, James April, Basil February, Abdul Tayob, and Amin Kajee.Footnote 64 April and February were in fact ‘mixed race’ or ‘Coloured’ South Africans. The ethnic make-up of the group of ten in fact reflected the de-facto division of responsibilities between the then racially exclusive ‘African’ ANC headquartered in Dar es Salaam and the mainly white and Indian SACP leaders grouped in London. The Czechoslovak training was organised by the London group, not the Dar-based ANC and African SACP leadership. When Cajee and Moosa arrived in Tanganyika after leaving South Africa, ANC officials were nonplussed, for they knew nothing about any prospective Czech training programme. They kept them waiting for six weeks before despatching them to London.Footnote 65
From the point of view of the Czechs who engaged with them, the quality of the recruits to the programme had deteriorated. On his return from London, Moosa lost interest, apparently declaring at one point that ‘he no longer wanted to fight’.Footnote 66 April and February provoked anxiety among their hosts because they expressed views that appeared to be ultra-leftist. In fact, both were Communist Party members. Meanwhile, the Czechs felt Jacobs was ‘aggressively fractious’. They thought he had an especially damaging influence on Kajee and Tayob, both of whom had volunteered without any prior political experience. In Johannesburg, Tayob's purpose in seeking out someone who could send him abroad had been to escape a forced marriage; Kajee, his best friend, had agreed to accompany him. After Jacobs declared that he was only interested in Marxism so that he could fight communism, he was transported back to Tanzania. The other trainees completed their courses, while Cajee and Moosa underwent advanced training and were sent to Dar es Salaam in October 1964. The Czechoslovaks provided no further military instruction for South Africans. Their own evaluation of the exercise was that it had not been a success.
The Czechoslovaks were also doubtful that the skills they had provided would be put to any practical usage, given the destruction of MK's networks inside South Africa. Czech resources were taken up in supporting insurgencies in other countries, as Novotný reminded Kotane when they met in June 1965 and Kotane asked for a second consignment of lorries. Kotane was present in Prague because the Czechs had again agreed to provide accommodation and other facilities to enable the SACP to hold a Central Committee meeting under safe conditions, the second such meeting they had hosted. Increasingly, Czechoslovak support for South African Communists would be limited to such courtesies, which were important because they accorded status to what the Czechoslovaks acknowledged to be ‘the only Communist Party in Sub-Saharan Africa in the traditional sense’ but came at low cost. This latter consideration was increasingly significant in a setting in which the Czechoslovak economy was stalling and African trade partners were failing to repay their loans.Footnote 67
The Czechs’ evaluation of their training programme was overly critical if we consider the experience from the perspective offered by Amin Cajee, one of the first two South Africans to arrive in Brno. His memoir includes vivid recollections of his Czech experiences. The academic training supplied grounding in basic socialism, relying on the Marxist canon, which was already familiar material for Cajee. The students’ later experiences of mild racism in their off-duty encounters with Czech civilians prompted Cajee and the others to ask about ‘the level of politics taught in Czech educational institutions’. The apologetic response they received was that this was the effect of lingering influences of reactionary groups.Footnote 68 The South Africans were unconvinced: all too often they encountered a ‘decided lack of enthusiasm for socialist and communist ideology’ amongst the young people they made friends with.Footnote 69 They also became conscious of the minor privileges that were enjoyed by party members — the ability to bypass queues in restaurants and cinemas, for example — that as guests they often shared. At the same time Cajee noted that ‘we had to admit there were a number of very positive aspects to their system’: free health services, universal employment, and social care.Footnote 70 Cajee enjoyed his military training, as his hosts had recognised, but was sceptical about its initial stress on the skills needed in regular mechanised warfare. It was after learning to drive T54 tanks that the students requested better preparation for the experiences likely to arise in guerrilla operations. To their credit, Comrade Rudolf and his colleagues agreed, bringing in veterans from the wartime Slovak uprising. The South Africans then learned how to manufacture their own explosives using commercially available ingredients. They discussed infiltration: ‘A lot of emphasis was placed … on the need to befriend local people and know the languages spoken in order to establish bases and build up caches of military and other supplies’. They studied South African maps to consider which areas might meet ‘the criteria for rural warfare’. Presciently, their tutors concluded that any South African irregular warfare would probably be chiefly urban-based.Footnote 71
As the graduates of the Czech programme discovered when they returned to Africa and joined the ANC's army at Kongwa, their training compared favourably with the courses undertaken by people who had attended programmes in the Soviet Union. According to Cajee, Soviet trainees at Kongwa demonstrated no evidence of intensive preparation for guerrilla warfare, but received only basic grounding in weapons handling and conventional military manoeuvres. In fact, Soviet courses did include at least theoretical instruction in guerrilla warfare. Chris Hani, for example, who was trained in Odessa, thought ‘it was well suited to their needs’.Footnote 72 Be that as it may, the ‘Czech group’ at Kongwa became heavily critical of the prevalent strategic line maintained by the MK command. Commander-in-Chief Joe Modise favoured a militarist approach: large formations and sophisticated weaponry. The Czech-trained group began to propose a more protracted kind of struggle in which small-scale infiltration and political preparation of host communities would precede any ambitious military operation. They won over Hani to their point of view, Cajee claimed, and the training offered in Kongwa camp shifted away from basic drill and weapons handling.
While we must take Cajee's word for all this, there is another more definite indication of the Czech training's effectiveness. Of the nine men who completed their training, three played key roles in MK's Rhodesian operations. Basil February and Zeleni Mkhonzo were killed by Rhodesian security forces. James April participated in successive Rhodesian expeditions and managed to reach South Africa in 1970 before being arrested and imprisoned, one of a tiny number of MK soldiers before 1976 to succeed in returning home. Cajee himself left Kongwa in early 1967 and became a refugee after being accused of treason by Modise. The charges were spurious; he was accused of siding with a pro-Chinese faction to overthrow the existing leadership. More probably Cajee and other members of the Czech group had offended the top military echelon with their strategic criticisms, especially when their views began to be echoed by other people. Cajee may have been perceived by Modise as especially insubordinate. Modise and Raymond Mhlaba had visited Cajee and Moosa shortly after their arrival in Brno in 1963. Modise had asked Cajee to polish his (Modise's) boots and was especially put out when Mhlaba supported Cajee in his refusal to perform this menial task.Footnote 73 Cajee finally succeeded in securing refugee status in London and became a British resident, marrying and finding work with the Inner London Education Authority.
South African Communists’ contacts with Prague seem to have halted during the second half of the 1960s, a period during which the Czechs were narrowing the scope of their engagement with the African continent. In 1968 the SACP and the ANC both published statements on the invasion of Czechoslovakia, justifying it with reference to ‘reactionary, anti-socialist forces in the country, based on remnants of the former exploiting classes’. The Party's Central Committee in fact published two declarations on the subject, the first of which appeared three weeks before the invasion, praising the internationalism of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact leaders. It was ‘false and slanderous’, the Central Committee maintained, ‘to paint the situation as if the Soviet Union were resisting the process of “democratisation” in Czechoslovakia’.Footnote 74 The ANC's statement was signed by Duma Nokwe, the ANC's secretary general but also a senior Communist.
Nokwe was then based at the ANC's headquarters in Dar es Salaam, and the ANC's assertiveness on the issue was all the more surprising in a local setting in which the Tanzanian government condemned the invasion, encouraged students to demonstrate outside the Czech embassy, and subsequently suspended diplomatic relations. Oliver Tambo expressed polite disquiet about the ANC's support for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He did not sanction the ANC's statement and, as he told Sobizana Mngqikana at the time, felt personally that ‘the ANC ought not to meddle in Cold War inter-state conflicts’.Footnote 75 By 1968, though, the ANC's relationships with the Tanzanians were deteriorating. For the SACP, finance from the Soviet Party was a lifeline, but the South Africans’ support for the suppression of the Czech reform movement reflected deep convictions, not just pragmatism. Michael Harmel explained the Party's position in a contribution to African Communist, the SACP's theoretical journal. The democratisation underway in the Prague Spring would have destroyed socialism, Harmel insisted. The kind of democracy that Communists should fight for was not a capitalist democracy: ‘democracy is not merely a formal question of allowing many parties to function’. Any socialist society of necessity would be a dictatorship as long as it required ‘the forcible suppression of exploiters as a class’.Footnote 76 In the case of South Africa, after all, the SACP's own programme since 1962 had proposed that a national democracy while guaranteeing civil liberties would also maintain ‘a vigorous dictatorship … by the people against former dominating and exploiting classes’.Footnote 77 This suggests a rather different kind of political order from the parliamentary democracy cited by Kotane in his pamphlet in 1954.
These views were probably shared quite widely within the SACP's few hundred members. Joe Slovo and Ruth First disagreed about the events of 1968 and apparently had lengthy arguments about it, though these never surfaced in public. Hilda Bernstein objected to the invasion, again, like First, arguing with her husband, Rusty. She resigned from the Party.Footnote 78 For Albie Sachs, the invasion was ‘an extremely bitter moment’. The spectacle of ‘a Socialist country attacking another socialist country’ could not be rationalised away. Albie's father, Solly, who was expelled from the Party nearly four decades before, was unsympathetic: ‘Albie’, he said, ‘you'll never be a Bolshevik’.Footnote 79 But for the older Lenin school-trained veterans, such as Solly Sachs, Kotane, or J. B. Marks, the Warsaw Pact's suppression of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ was no occasion for soul searching. Ronnie Kasrils in his autobiography recalled disagreements between South African Communists on the topic: ‘In the debates that took place I found all the older comrades, as well as my peers, disappointingly closed-minded about the developments’. He allowed himself to be persuaded finally that ‘the Soviet Union had no option’, a judgement that later he ‘came to regret’.Footnote 80
SOUTH AFRICANS IN PRAGUE AFTER HUSAK'S ‘NORMALISATION’
Several South African Communists spent time in Czechoslovakia during Gustav Husak's presidency, between 1969 and 1989. Michael Harmel worked for a year in Prague at the World Marxist Review before his death in June 1974. A conventional Marxist-Leninist, Harmel was the chief architect of the SACP's vision of national democracy. As one of his friends noted, he ‘never deviated’ and certainly ‘was never deceived by Czechoslovakia and Hungary’.Footnote 81 Indeed, Yusuf Dadoo observed in his funeral oration that Harmel was ‘steadfast in his support for the Czechoslovak people during the 1968 crisis’.Footnote 82 Harmel was sent to Prague partly because of his authority as a theorist, though it was also a compassionate decision by the SACP leadership, for by that time Harmel was seriously unwell. It was not his first visit to Prague. In July 1963 he had met with the chair of the Czechoslovak Parliament's International Affairs Committee. Harmel's main purpose was to object to the Czechoslovaks’ maintenance of trade and diplomatic links with South Africa, but he also wanted to know if he, Slovo, and Moses Mabhida might undergo plastic surgery so that they could return undetected to South Africa.Footnote 83
Harmel's surviving correspondence from Prague includes approving references to Czech high culture and praise for what he believed to be decent housing and efficient public services.Footnote 84 The Czechs, he believed, had made a ‘brilliant recovery’ from the ‘ruined economy’ brought about by ‘revisionist leadership and downright subversion’ in 1968.Footnote 85 Aside from his work at the Review, he seems to have been chiefly active within the still substantial African student community, though he mentions a few Czech friends. Harmel was succeeded briefly by Alan Brooks. Brooks did not ‘fit in’, apparently, and was replaced by Essop Pahad who worked in Prague between 1975 and 1985. Pahad enjoyed his Czech sojourn; indeed, he found life in Prague more comfortable than in London. As he told an interviewer in 1991: ‘I didn't buy anything in England for the ten years I lived in Czechoslovakia, and I was going to England two or three times a year’. His duties were not simply confined to the Review, which was just as well, as he noted the workload there was minimal. He was also expected to offer briefings on African events to Central Committee members. For this purpose he had regular contact with a Mr. Drabek, who looked after Southern African concerns in the Czech Party's international department, and they became friendly. Pahad relished the intellectual atmosphere at the Review's offices and he had little time for any local political disaffection. For example, he ended contact with an acquaintance who began to associate with Vaclav Havel and other human rights advocates in the Charter 77 group, for he felt he had ‘sharp differences’ with such people, whom he saw as overly hostile to the Party.Footnote 86 Essop's wife Meg did meet Charter 77 activists. She was sufficiently sympathetic that she was sometimes asked to take samizdat materials to London, but would always gently refuse, explaining that this would be an abuse of the official hospitality she and Essop were receiving. Though the Pahads like Michael Harmel were inclined to accept the official line on the of Dubcek's reform movement, the Prague Spring of 1968 — that it had supplied opportunities for imperialist interference — they were also sharply aware of local hostility to the Soviet Union. Essop recalled ‘something lacking in the way the Czech party was functioning’ and Meg was often told by her Czech friends that she and Essop were ‘real communists’ unlike the local party officials, who were widely perceived as careerists.Footnote 87 But the most frequent source of day to day discontent they encountered was not so much ideological disaffection but rather the effect of geographical confinement. Many of the people they met socially simply had a craving for travel — ‘they were obsessed by it’. The Pahads made Czech friendships mainly through encountering other parents at the creches and nursery schools their children attended.
As with the Review, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) also supplied livelihoods for a succession of South Africans appointed as representatives of its South African affiliate at the Federation's Prague office. From 1963, they included Wilton Mkwayi, Mark Shope, Moses Mabhida, Eric ‘Comrade Stalin’ Mtshali, and Joe Molokeng. Excepting Molokeng, a former student activist, each of these men were well-known veteran unionists and SACP members. Their work seems to have been focused mainly on support for African unions across the continent, and they mostly seem to have left no record of their lives in Czechoslovakia. Mtshali helped to set up the first unions in Ethiopia working from his WFTU office, he recalled later.Footnote 88 Shope's daughter Lyndal and his wife Gertrude accompanied him during his five-year posting between 1963 and 1969. Lyndal attended primary school in Prague, where she was told stories about Prague's liberation by the Red Army. She won a Czech national flag as a prize on one occasion, a poignant award as she, as a black South African, had no flag for her own country.Footnote 89 Gertrude Shope reminisced about her time in Prague for a commemorative WFTU publication; it was an unusually happy period in her life, the only time in her long exile when she and her husband and children could live together as a family.Footnote 90 She was shocked and bewildered by the public suicide of Jan Palach, who set himself alight in protest against the suppression of the Czech reform movement in January 1969 (one of the few political events in Prague she recalled when interviewed in 2015), but she could offer no firm views about the Soviet invasion. As guests, the South Africans at the WFTU believed they should hold back from any local political engagement.Footnote 91 This may have been true of Shope's immediate circle, but in fact the WFTU's secretariat condemned the invasion by seven votes to one, responding to an appeal from Czechoslovak trade unions.Footnote 92 Peter Waterman, a British Communist attached to the WFTU at the time, recalled later that during the preceding ‘Spring’ his Czech colleagues, at least the ‘younger and more open’ among them, ‘had not abandoned … hope’ after witnessing ‘Czechoslovak society gradually coming to life again’.Footnote 93 Waterman worked in Prague with African trade unionists and was himself an enthusiastic supporter of the Czech reform movement and a critic of its suppression.
During the 1970s and 1980s, official Czechoslovak contact with South Africans increasingly focused on the ANC rather than the SACP. In its support for African political movements, Czech policy closely mirrored Soviet practice. At the beginning of the 1970s, Soviet policy towards Africa tended to favour ‘progressive’ non-capitalist regimes even if these were at odds with local Communist Parties, as was the case in Sudan where the ‘national democratic’ Nimeiri regime suppressed the Communist Party. In an exceptional expression of interest in African events, Vasil Bil'ak, at that time the Czech party leader influential in determining Czech foreign policy, condemned Sudanese Communists as irresponsible after their 1971 attempt to seize power from Nimeiri through a trade union-supported military coup.Footnote 94 For South African Communists, their Sudanese counterparts were familiar personalities; the two parties were on friendly terms.Footnote 95 But the implications of the Sudanese events were clear enough: when it came to the broader strategy of the international Communist movement in Africa, this was the era in which Communists should work within national democratic movements, not against them. Global great power rivalries tended to predispose the Soviet Union to support allied Third World governments even when they persecuted local Communists.
In 1978 Bil'ak commissioned an assessment of South African anti-apartheid organisations. The report included warm commentary about the SACP's ideological role, both in ‘setting the line’ within the ANC and shaping people's beliefs more widely. Among black workers, ‘the ideas of Marxism-Leninism [were] spreading’.Footnote 96 But Bil'ak's presentation to his colleagues suggested that neither the Party nor the ANC had been able to build an effective organisational presence throughout the country. This was a reasonable assessment; at that stage, the Czechs were well-informed by their own Africa-based intelligence officials.Footnote 97 The Soweto uprising had prompted the Czechs to resume assistance for the ANC. In 1977 the Czechs supplied weaponry, including Scorpion machine pistols, for ‘2000 combatants’ despite the Department of Defence's objections that Scorpion exports were an important source of hard currency.Footnote 98 Participants at the 1978 Politburo meeting were less generously disposed. Aid to the ANC would be limited to scholarships and medical treatment, they decided, while the SACP would receive two places at spa resorts every year.Footnote 99 The Politburo also decided to host an ANC delegation. As might be expected, in 1979 Oliver Tambo brought with him a list of items that the South Africans hoped the Czechs could donate, mostly materials in short supply or items that ‘could not be tropicalized’. The Czechs did despatch consignments of non-military supplies worth Kcs 1.5 million: tinned food, toiletries, cigarettes, wrist watches, and 2,000 bags of cement for the construction of the ANC's secondary school in Tanzania.Footnote 100
The Czechs’ parsimony reflected an order of priorities, for at that time Czech military support for African liberation movements was focused on the Namibians. A significant community of Namibian children were settled in Bartosovice, attending school and learning Czech. As with Lyndal Shope, their experience was a generally happy one, and interviews conducted in Namibia forty years later suggest that the children felt ‘loved, cherished and secure’.Footnote 101 The comparative standing of the South Africans was rather evident when the SACP once again requested Czech hospitality for a plenary meeting in 1983: they would be made welcome, but as the Czechs told them previously, they couldn't pay for the tickets.Footnote 102 Waning Czechoslovak interest in Southern Africa in the 1980s reflected a growing scepticism among Soviet strategists about prospects for successful revolutionary insurgencies in the region. There were sharp exchanges on this topic at the World Marxist Review offices in 1987, when visitors from Moscow's Social Science Institute presented the new line: there was no place for armed force in class struggle. Among the critics of the new line was Essop Pahad, no longer resident in Prague but visiting as an editorial board member, who observed that even the World Council of Churches supported MK's campaign.Footnote 103 Party-to-party relations remained cordial, though. In 1986 Joe Slovo was afforded to opportunity to brief President Husak, and on this occasion all his expenses would be paid. During his visit he received the Friendship Order, a courtesy proposed by Bil'ak, who suggested rather optimistically that the award might ‘strengthen the Communist position in the South African liberation movement’.Footnote 104 One year later Oliver Tambo was invited to Prague to receive the same medal.
CONCLUSION
Czech scholars have paid attention to this narrative because it illustrates Czech efforts to establish themselves as a middle-level power through their African engagements. As with similar undertakings by the East Germans, it also suggests ways in which supposed Soviet satellites could demonstrate autonomy and ambition in their respective foreign policies. These Czech-South African interactions have been virtually ignored in the South African historiography of liberation politics. Yet their story yields useful insights from the South African perspective.
The experiences of South African Communists who visited Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s helped to consolidate a particular understanding of processes through which socialism might be reached in South Africa — through united front-like alliances that would eventually enable a lateral accession to state power, rather than attaining state power through autonomous class struggle: at best a passive revolution. As we have seen, amongst SACP intellectuals such as Michael Harmel and Essop Pahad, Czechoslovakia continued to embody a persuasive socialist model during the 1970s and even the 1980s. Arguably, this continuing faith in ‘real’ socialism left the Party especially unprepared for the challenges it would confront after 1990 in developing policies it could promote in a liberal democracy. Second, for black South African actvists especially, the courtesy, hospitality, and shelter experienced in countries like Czechoslovakia represented important sources of recognition and morale-boosting encouragement. That veteran South African trade unionists decades afterwards could still remember their lives in ‘actually existing’ socialist settings with affection and continuing admiration is not so surprising. And such experiences surely helped to reinforce beliefs in South Africa's future as a non-racial society. Third, Czech military aid provided through the Party not only fostered more effective field leadership for MK, but also helped to vindicate its leadership's strategic orientation. Finally, the SACP's interactions with Czech civil servants and party functionaries were double-edged in their implications. Certainly, in the mid-1960s, at a time when the SACP was compelled to locate itself mainly in London, the various facilities it negotiated independently with the Czechs probably helped to enhance its status and leverage as the ANC's ally. The Czechs, against their own inclinations, were persuaded to end their trading and diplomatic ties with South Africa, partly because of the perceived authority of the SACP within the wider Communist movement. On the other hand, in the various exchanges over the boycott issue, for the SACP there were disconcerting signals of their relative inconsequentiality. As the Czechs emphasized their solidarity with African liberation movements after 1970, South African Communists were reminded of their subordinate status as auxiliaries and junior partners in a struggle for national democracy.
