Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

And that was on 26th August? — confirmed. Along with more than fifty other people, black, white, Indian and coloured, many of whom were Communists (and of whom only the few names unforgotten, Bram Fischer, Dr Dadoo, Moses Kotane, would get a mention in the biography) the couple were charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act with having aided an illegal strike and also with having offended against something called War Measure 145. The biographer offered the information that he had looked up War Measure 145: it outlawed strikes by Africans and exposed black strikers to a minimum penalty of £300 or three years. The trial was the most representative, in the country’s history, of the different ideologies, skin colours, class interests in opposition to the white regime; it was the first in which her mother and father were indicted together. It was also, in its scope, a shadow cast before the Treason Trial, coming in 1957; the only other, and last trial in which the Burger couple would stand accused together. The trial of her parents before she was born — like the one that was to take place when she would be a child old enough to retain impressions, surely, that could be remembered and recounted? — both ended without Lionel Burger or his wife being convicted.

But two months after they were married, following a new wave of raids on the homes of radicals in all the large towns, Lionel Burger was re-arrested. He and his fellow members of the Central Executive of the Communist Party in Cape Town were charged with sedition as a result of that miners’ strike which had postponed but failed to disrupt his marriage plans.

With this observation the biographer provoked a slow wide smile from the daughter of the marriage. For a few moments the list of raids, arrests and trials was the family album: the couple had only just dumped their belongings in their Johannesburg flat when the raid came; there was Lionel Burger’s often-heard story of how the police, instructed to search the contents of cupboards and drawers, found these empty, and had to do the unpacking of the suitcases and crates of books instead. He and his new bride simply hung up cups and arranged plates and pots and pans as the police squatted among newspaper and straw, doing the dirty work.

An additional charge against the accused was to do with the Official Secrets Act; again the biographer had consulted the Statute Books, and the supposed breach was a legal technicality relating to a ‘Hands off Java’ campaign, with a call for boycott of ships passing by way of South African ports while carrying cargo across the Indian Ocean to troops in Indonesia after the Japanese occupation had been ended. But both the biographer and Rosa Burger were too young for campaigns of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War to have much meaning for them.

Cathy Burger née Jansen was not charged in this case, although she and not her husband was a trade union organizer; she was only twenty-six years old and perhaps not prominent enough to have been a member of the Central Executive. The prosecutor accused the Party of having engineered the strike as part of a wider plot to overthrow the government; the accused were cross-examined about Party policy, the role of Communists in trade unions and their attitude to strikes. The biographer had been studying old court records and what had been said by the accused was fresh to him as if it had been spoken in his hearing, and yesterday. Lionel Burger told the court the Communist Party stood for the unity of workers regardless of colour. Communists were required by the Party’s policy to be active in unions for which they were eligible. A good Communist must win workers’ confidence by proving himself a good unionist. Communists had served the workers’ cause by organizing unskilled and semi-skilled Africans, coloureds and Indians, the largest and most neglected sector of the labour force, and through this achievement the Communist Party had made a unique contribution to racial harmony in a country constantly threatened by racial unrest. The strike was 76,000 black miners’ genuine and justifiable protest against exploitation and contemptuous disregard of the needs, as workers and human beings, of the 400,000 black men in the industry.

Etc., etc. This rhetoric delivered by her father produced no reaction from his daughter outside the degree of attention that she apparently had decided to apportion the whole interview. It had been spoken in a courtroom in January 1947 before she was born; no doubt her mother was there to hear it. She herself could add nothing about that time, except that as her mother’s work was in the unions — a passionate interest, even when banned from labour movement activity and with a child old enough to be aware of evidence of her parents’ preoccupations — the double involvement, personal and professional, in that trial must have been intense.

At one point the prosecutor had to withdraw charges because of some irregularity in the prosecution — the biographer didn’t want to waste the opportunity to talk to Burger’s daughter by going into factual details he could verify elsewhere. Anyway, the accused, including Burger, were re-arrested once again, committed on sedition, and stood trial. The African Mineworkers’ Union, led by the black man who was her parents’ close friend and first choice as best man for their wedding, was accused of being a concealed wing of the Communist Party of South Africa. The strike of 1946 was alleged to have been engineered by the Johannesburg District Committee of the Communist Party, on which Lionel Burger sat. The Central Executive of the Party, of which he was a member, was accused of having conspired to initiate a strike that resulted in the use of violence against state authority.

Documentation available put beyond doubt of anyone studying it in retrospect that the Communist Party had been and was at the time of the strike closely involved with the miners’ union. Since the inception of the Party and its affiliation to the Third Communist International in 1921 (Lionel Burger 16, a schoolboy in Johannesburg), acceptance of Lenin’s thesis on the national and colonial question and the consequent task of ‘educating and organizing the peasantry and broad mass of the exploited’ in addition to ‘raising the class consciousness of the proletariat’ had been compulsory for the Party. The fact that the organized proletariat of the mines — the basic industry in the country — was white and remained participant in the privileges of the oppressing class, while the black miners, at once peasants and proletariat, were rejected by the white miners’ unions, was an adverse reflection on the Party’s effectiveness. From time to time there was criticism from the Communist International. The Party had succeeded neither in educating the white proletariat to identify with the black proletariat, nor in organizing the indentured black peasants in their industrialized role as proletarians. For example, the Praesidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International advised the South African Communist Party to organize revolutionary trade unions of workers. But the Party had no members in the mines, in spite of attempts dating from July 1930 to form a black mineworkers’ union, a League of African Rights, and its successor with an African name, Ikaka Labasebenzi — The Workers’ Shield. This pioneering was the initiative of Thebedi and Bunting (the latter one of the founders of the Party and stated once by Lionel Burger to have been his early mentor, although records showed that Burger voted for Bunting’s expulsion in 1931). Then in 1940 the Party’s national conference deputed to the Johannesburg district the specific duty of organizing black miners, whose overwhelming numbers would then benefit the trade union movement and ultimately national liberation, the first phase (bourgeois-democratic/national-revolutionary, varying according to the dissenting views within the Party) of the two-stage revolution to terminate in the attainment of socialism — again in accordance with Lenin’s thesis of 1920. (Burger, probably taking along the girl who was to be his first wife, attended the Sixth International in Moscow in 1928, at which the aim of an ‘independent Native Republic’ had officially replaced the classic Marxist bourgeois-democratic revolution as a first stage for South Africa.) In the trial arising out of the’46 strike, the prosecution’s case for a causal link between the Communist Party and the strike relied heavily on the fact that J. B. Marks, chairman of the African Mineworkers’ Union, was both a member of the Communist Party and a member of the national council created in 1941 by the black political movement, the African National Congress, for the purpose of organizing black miners.