paper in response to Harris by Vella Pillay, dated 9 October 1989 and penned in London, also addresses these issues. Pillay’s paper distinguishes between the long-term goals of the Freedom Charter and short-term interventions that appear to be left social democratic in nature. The latter include ‘enough food, shelter, social security, medical facilities, unemployment benefits, free and equal education and an improvement in the working conditions and power of workers’. He favoured anti-monopoly and anti-trust policies in respect of the powerful local conglomerates, being fully cognisant of the power of the conglomerates to undermine a democratic state. At the Lusaka in-house seminar, Rob Davies’ paper set out an economic vision of a mixed economy in which there will be a ‘considerable role for private capital’; he also set out a list of immediate goals, such as meeting basic needs and improvements in the conditions of working people (Oliver Tambo Papers, Box 039, Folder 0354). Though these are not policies but ideas put forwarded by qualified and trusted comrades, they do represent core aspects of a left social democratic programme rather than either African nationalism or Soviet-type socialism.
Phineas Malinga informs us that despite some scepticism the ‘question of economic policy had [indeed] received the attention of the broad liberation movement’ (1990: 21). He reminds us that the ANC’s Constitutional Guidelines commissioned by Tambo and approved by the NEC in August 1988 contained a section on the economy. It argued for a state that would ensure ‘that the entire economy serves the interests and well-being of all sections of the population … the economy shall be a mixed one … co-operative forms of economic enterprise, village industries and small-scale family activities shall be supported by the state …’ (Malinga 1990: 22). Yet, Malinga concedes that the Guidelines are ‘more cautious than the Charter about the role of the state in the economy’ (1990: 22), given the very changed economic circumstances all over the world, including in the management of the Soviet economy.
Gerhart and Glaser express this same position, as follows: ‘Without repudiating anything in the 1955 Freedom Charter, the [Constitutional] Guidelines positioned the ANC as a social democratic party strongly protective of individual rights while also committed to “corrective action which guarantees a rapid and irreversible redistribution of wealth and opening up of facilities to all”’ (2010: 181).
It is worth remembering this in the context of the discussion that we have had in chapter 2 over AB Xuma and Albert Luthuli, both ANC presidents, and in what follows in chapter 4, especially the position articulated by Alan Hirsch to explain shifts and changes in the 1990s. Clearly, there were many positions in the spectrum between Soviet-style socialism and petty bourgeois African nationalism that were held by leadership figures in the Congress Alliance over the period of our study. To focus on any one view as representative of that of the ANC as a whole would be a serious mistake, in our judgement.
In July 1989, 115 representatives of the Five Freedoms Forum4 travelled to Lusaka to meet and hold talks with senior ANC leaders. A conference was held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Lusaka from 29 June to 2 July 1989, where a number of important exchanges about the post-apartheid economy took place. The issue of nationalisation and the meaning of a ‘mixed economy’ were among the matters under discussion. There was agreement across the floor about the need for a mixed economy with private-sector and public-sector ownership and control (see chapter 5 on the role of business for more on this). While holding the Freedom Charter line on nationalisation, ANC delegates accepted that under some conditions ‘a premature nationalisation can result in impeding social control by the destruction or downgrading of industry’. The case of Mozambique was cited by the ANC as an example of such ‘premature nationalisation’. Towards the end of the conference, a South African business person, Ronnie Bethlehem, asked if the ANC had a policy position on the floating of the rand and whether the rand would be linked to gold or any specific international currency. It is hard to say if he was being serious or just trying to embarrass the ANC. The ANC responded that it was not able to answer this question because it had to be recognised that ‘a struggle for liberation did not necessarily guarantee experience in issues such as economics’ (Louw 1989: 86). This speaks to the issue of experience, which we raise at various times in this book.
The leadership of the Economics Unit and the DEP in Lusaka may have been involved in many important events and exchanges over policy and strategy during the 1980s, but they were also drawn into some totally mundane and bureaucratic issues that may well have detracted from their core work. Some of the things that senior ANC and DEP members had to deal with were nothing short of mind-boggling. Jordan speaks of these matters as ‘absurd bureaucratic controls’ (Jordan interview, 4 August 2017). Here is one of many examples we unearthed at the University of Fort Hare archives. Late in 1989, a DEP staffer wrote to Henry Makgothi, assistant secretary general of the ANC, requesting leave and support to travel to Harare to marry his fiancée. He was asked by Makgothi to get a written recommendation from his head, Max Sisulu. Sisulu then wrote (somewhat tongue in cheek) to Makgothi as follows:
Since Cde Mandla Tshabalala is an adult he does not need the permission of the Department to get married, but our department, however, wishes to vouch for his good character and honourable intentions. And request the movement to give him and his fiancée every possible support and assistance. The DEP for its part will give Cde Mandla a leave of one month in December, to give him time to prepare for and enjoy his marriage and new status.
In the year of Mass Action for People’s Power!!!
Amandla! Maatla!
(ANC Lusaka Mission Archives, Box 84, Folder 9)
IN EXILE: VELLA PILLAY, ECONOMIC RESEARCH AND THE LONDON COMRADES
Yes, the empire was collapsing: Ghana had become free; Malaysia and [Tanzania] were getting independence. In London there were people from all over the world, little groupings supporting the liberation struggles in their different countries: Nigerians, Kenyans, Tanganyikans, Burmese, Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Indians, South Americans, West Indians, Irish. It was a very cosmopolitan environment, and we were bound by a unity we felt when we met one another. There was a commonality in our struggles, so I didn’t feel lonely, in spite of the insularity of the British (Maharaj in O’Malley 2007: 82–83).5
In a recently published paper, Vishnu Padayachee and John Sender (2018) deal at length with the role that radical economist Vella Pillay played for over half a century in economic policy analysis, both in exile and on his temporary return to South Africa in the early 1990s. While we draw significantly from that paper, we try here to provide a glimpse of policy debates in the years of exile by focusing on developments in London, building the story around the key figure of Pillay. Even his detractors – of which there were many, including in the SACP in the 1960s and some of the ‘neo-liberals’ in the ANC and in academia in the 1990s – would not be able to contest the claim that Pillay was the foremost ANC economist in London from the late 1940s until his return to South Africa in 1991. There were very few, if any, in the movement more qualified and experienced in economic analysis and policy than Pillay. His story is inextricably bound into the narrative of ANC exile politics and economics in the British capital for all those long and difficult decades. In fact, we would contend that to the extent that any significant discussion of economic matters and economic policy for South Africa occurred over this period within exiled ANC circles, Pillay likely would have been central to it.
Pillay was without any doubt a figure of very significant influence in the ANC–SACP in exile. When Oliver Tambo left South Africa in March 1960, he found a house in Muswell Hill, North London, close to the home of Vella and Patsy Pillay, and they struck up a political and family connection that lasted until Tambo’s passing in South Africa in 1993. By that time, Vella had returned to Johannesburg with Patsy to head up the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG) project (see
