SACP. Govan explains that, while sympathetic to the aims of the Party and friendly with individual members, he differed with them as to where the primary focus of their organisational efforts should be:
My view was, look, if we want to make an impact on the government let us organise around labour. And we cannot organise on the mines. We must go and organise in the rural areas . . . That was my approach. Let’s go and organise in the Transkei, let’s go and organise in Zululand so that when they come to Joburg they are already reached – we are able to guide them to take certain actions.
During his vacations in the Fort Hare years, Govan Mbeki worked in a branch of the Central News Agency, in Johannesburg. He set about trying to organise his co-workers there into a trade union – and was promptly fired by the Irish manager of the branch. This was his first dismissal on political grounds. A series of such sackings, mainly from teaching posts, peppered his employment history.
He graduated from Fort Hare in 1937. Almost immediately the three main strands from which his working life was woven became visible. These were teaching, journalism, and political organisations. The first teaching appointment was at Taylor Street Secondary School in Durban, and from there Govan moved to teach at Adams College, near Amanzimtoti, under Edgar Brookes. While at Adams, in 1938, he received a telegram from Clarkebury Institution – a teachers’ training college in the Transkei – and he jumped at the chance to live and work there. In addition to teaching educational psychology and economics at Clarkebury, Govan also became increasingly politically active – especially in meetings of the Transkeian African Voters’ Association. Towards the end of 1939, he was dismissed from Clarkebury.
By then, he had just published Transkei in the Making, a book he had drafted as a series of articles in 1937. Dedicated “To the youth of my race”, it was written partly as a rebuttal of a 1933 booklet, Transkei Enquiry, written by the Quaker and liberal, Howard Pim. Mbeki criticised the form of local government – indirect rule – operating in the Transkei, and examined economic conditions in the reserve. Introducing themes which his later writings would revisit and amplify, he identified the way in which migrant labour and peasant farming on tiny plots generated rural poverty so that the majority of the territory’s population were “wallowing in a permanent slough of debt”. Although the argument is couched for the most part in measured tones, there is a decidedly radical edge to a passage warning against cattle culling imposed from above:
It should really be an unfortunate state of affairs if the rigours and vices of a capitalist society will be deliberately imported into the African territories – any attempt to destroy the people’s cattle is no less than a declaration of that most iniquitous system which enables a chosen few to be possessors of all the means of production in the Transkei to the entire exclusion of the masses . . .4
He was now approached by the African printers of Transkei in the Making, who invited him to edit a newspaper that they were launching in the Transkei, the Territorial Magazine. While he was still editor, the publication was renamed Inkundla ya Bantu, a more overtly political newspaper. In 1943 or 1944, Inkundla fell into financial difficulties, and a new board decided that Govan’s opinions were too radical, and replaced him as editor. Another important journalistic connection was his appointment in 1940 as one of the directors of the Guardian, a left-wing weekly close to the Communist Party.
Another major event in Govan’s life during these years was his marriage. He first met Epainette Moerane in Durban when they both taught at the Taylor Street School. She came from an essentially similar background to his own. Her parents, Sotho-speakers, lived in Mount Fletcher district near the border between Lesotho and the Transkei. Her father was a lay preacher and a prosperous peasant farmer. Her parents saw to it that Epainette and her six siblings received the best available education. All three of her brothers were university graduates; she had obtained the Cape Senior Certificate. She remembers Govan as an unostentatious, rather lonely young man: “particular about how he dresses, particular about how he speaks”.5
When they spoke together, it was frequently about politics. Together, they moved in circles close to the Communist Party in Durban: Epainette had been impressed initially by Betty du Toit, an Afrikaner woman and Party member, who came to Natal to organise workers in the sugar industry. She became a member of the Party in the late 1930s – and must have been one of only a handful of African women in its entire membership. When Govan departed Natal for Clarkebury, she spent a year in the Orange Free State, and the pair saw each other during school holidays. They married in January 1940 – and had four children (Linda, Thabo, Moeletsi and Jama) between 1941 and 1948.
They lived in Idutywa district, a few kilometres south of the town of the same name. Govan’s journalism did not bring much money into the home, and they supplemented this income in various ways: they ran some livestock; Epainette baked scones and cakes for a coffee shop; and, especially after Govan left Inkundla, they relied upon the small shop run from their home. This venture sprang initially from a political enthusiasm of Govan’s: an interest in cooperatives. He had read about them while studying privately for his B.Comm., and also read Father Bernard Huss’s pamphlets urging cooperative self-help. In 1946 Govan published a booklet, Let’s Do It Together, in a series edited by Eddie Roux. He identified existing collective practices amongst African peasants, in ploughing land or building huts, and argued that greater cooperation could lessen dependence on white traders for credit. The cooperative aspect of the store dwindled as the other partners fell away, and it became a Mbeki family concern.
The 1940s have won considerable scholarly attention for their watershed quality in the history of organised black resistance in South Africa: Tom Lodge, in particular, has chronicled the reorganisation of the ANC under Dr Xuma and the radicalising influence of the Youth League; the growth of war-time trade unionism amongst black workers; the volcanic underclass pressures exerted by township residents and squatters; the exemplary effect of campaigns against the pass laws and against the Pegging Act; the emergence of new left-wing political groupings like the Non-European Unity Movement – and so on. In all these elements, this phenomenon is almost an urban one. There is another, parallel history that has not yet been adequately researched or written: an account of how politics in rural areas – the reserves in particular – was also radicalised.
The process was patchy and uneven. Peasant politics, in South Africa as elsewhere, tends to be parochial, atomised and defensive: rural producers are conscious of their weakness relative to other classes and to the state. But during the 1940s, in a number of areas, the scale and intensity of rural resistance broadened significantly. The Transkei was one such area; and Govan Mbeki was not only caught up in the process, but also helped shape it.
He became increasingly active in Transkeian politics, on a number of fronts. He was elected secretary of the Transkeian African Voters’ Association in 1941; served for a session in the Bunga as councillor for Idutywa; and in 1943 was a founder member of the Transkeian Organised Bodies. The TOB linked a number of disparate organisations: Vigiliance Association, the Chiefs’ and People’s Association, welfare societies, women’s groupings, and so on. It also exemplified the changing tone and content of politics in the Transkei. It shifted from an emphasis upon specific reforms in favour of educated Transkeians to distinctly tougher and more radical public utterances. At its 1946 conference, the TOB called for “full citizenship rights for all the people”; supported a cash collection for victims of the miners’ strike on the Witwatersrand; and pledged its support for a boycott of the Natives Representative Council.
Govan corresponded with the ANC head office in Johannesburg a number of times during this decade: requesting Xuma’s help in launching Congress in the Transkei; suggesting that the ANC take over Inkundla as an official publication; urging that the national movement should provide a clear lead to its potential followers in the reserves. In 1941 he described the Transkei as “to be frank, politically in midnight slumber”; but due in no small measure to his own efforts, an awakening of
