R.W. Johnson

Kas Maine sharecropped on the marginal farmland of Willem Nieman, a staunch Afrikaner, chairman of the local National Party branch and hater of the English and the Jews. When Kas’s first son was born in 1921, he and his family celebrated in Sotho fashion. Kas then picked his way across the stubbled fields to Nieman’s house to enact his part in one of the seigneurial rituals of the Western Transvaal. Sixty years later, among the thousands of hours he spent recalling his life for Charles van Onselen – Kas was blessed with a memory from which nothing faded – he described how the ritual went:’

Political parties need a tradition, a line of descent – in a word, heroes. In this respect the Labour Party has always had some difficulty. The obvious candidate would have been the first man to lead Labour to power, but Ramsay MacDonald put himself beyond the pale: indeed, the psychological wound he left as ‘the lost leader’ was of more lasting significance than anything he achieved in power. Oswald Mosley, the most impressive of the Young Turks to contest MacDonald, lurched into even deeper disgrace, while Arthur Henderson and George Lansbury were simply not memorable. Clement Attlee, the leader for twenty years and the man who led Labour to the new Jerusalem of 1945, was, in the event, the most serviceable hero, but he was never beatified, let alone canonised. Not only did he lack charisma but, as a former army major educated at Haileybury, he was always something of an oddity within the Party, and despite many attempts to suggest the contrary, a dry stick. An old trade-union hack whom Attlee sacked from the Government pleaded his case with passion: ‘Why, Clem, for God’s sake why?’ ‘Not up to it,’ came the cheerful reply. Throughout his premiership Attlee read only the Times, partly for its cricket coverage but also, he said, because knowing its bitterly anti-Labour views in advance, he always found reading it ‘restful’. Attitudes of this sort did not sit well with a party which has always seen itself as a crusading organisation.’

South Africa’s first democratic government is midway through its first term, an obvious moment at which to take stock of the transition. The rhetoric of ‘nation-building’ which predominated in 1994, and which is now more or less dampened, except among the political élite, projected three key policies: first, there was to be a huge push towards national development; second, there was to be much increased welfare for the disadvantaged majority, fully incorporating them within the nation for the first time; finally, there was to be a multi-faceted drive for racial reconciliation (which the President himself took as his main task), to be effected by the transformation of institutions (schools, the media, universities, the Army etc) with the aim of moulding a single, common South Africanism.

When Joe Slovo died in 1995 his body was carried on an army gun carriage through Soweto in post-apartheid South Africa’s first state funeral. Forty thousand people sat through the long tributes in Orlando Stadium, the ANC high-ups arriving in Nyala armoured cars. Impala jets – developed by sanctions-struck South Africa to fight the likes of Slovo – flew overhead in salute. Apart from this ceremonial flummery there was much genuine grieving, for in the last five years of his life Slovo had won an enormous army of admirers. In many ways he was an even more important figure than Mandela in South Africa’s transition. He was the man who made the key constitutional deals, who set the election date and who effectively removed socialism from the ANC’s agenda, thus making possible the symbiosis between white capitalism and the rising black middle class which is the central reality of the ANC’s ‘revolution’. It was an ironic achievement for a Communist.’