4). As Ellis notes, ‘Vella Pillay, although rarely mentioned in ANC histories, was one of the main intermediaries between the SACP and Moscow …’ (2015: 40, emphasis added). In the 1950s and early 1960s, Vella and Max Joffe were the leading SACP figures in exile. There may have been a reason for this ‘omission’ as we will see soon. This may, however, be a necessary moment to draw attention to and make a small contribution to correcting this egregious Stalinist-style side-lining from history of such a significant intellectual and senior policy thinker of the South African liberation movement.
The front cover of Ellis’s book on the ANC in exile features a photograph of three key figures sitting around a low table covered in documents and deep in discussion. The occasion is the first visit by South African communists to an official meeting of communist and workers’ parties in Moscow on 3 November 1960. They were Yusuf Dadoo, the chairperson of the SACP since 1972, Mao Zedong, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, and Vella Pillay, the SACP representative in London at that time (Ellis 2015: 12–13, fn. 43). In 1962, Pillay accompanied Arthur Goldreich to a four-hour meeting with Deng Xiaoping in Peking (Frankel 2016: 77). But his story begins long before these early 1960s experiences.
Pillay was born in Johannesburg on 8 October 1923. After matriculation, he attended the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) where he studied part-time and graduated with a BCom degree. Like many others of his generation, he became politicised at university. He joined the Federation of Progressive Students at Wits and became deeply involved in the activities of the Transvaal Indian Congress. He soon joined the Communist Party of South Africa. In the mid-1940s, he became involved in resistance to the Pegging Act – a forerunner to later apartheid legislation, such as the Group Areas Act, which attempted to segregate and discriminate against Indians on matters of land, property, trade and residence. In June 1948, he married Patsy, another activist, in the Cape where racially mixed marriages were then still legal. But the looming National Party plans for stricter policing of racial boundaries and his acceptance by the London School of Economics (LSE) to study there for an Honours degree in international economics led the couple to move to the UK in January 1949. While studying at the LSE, again part-time, he relied on Patsy to keep them going financially; she had found a job as the secretary to Krishna Menon, the world-renowned first Indian high commissioner in London after independence.
Vella found a job as a research officer at the State Bank of China in London. There he remained a loyal member of staff for the rest of his working life, rising to the position of assistant general manager (the second in charge) by retirement. He remained an active member of the ANC in exile, writing for, distributing and smuggling copies of the African Communist and International Bulletin (which he helped to produce) into South Africa, ably supported by Patsy.
Soon after Mac Maharaj arrived in London in 1957, Pillay set about the task of building a cell of the SACP. Maharaj found this strange as he had thought that the Party had long ceased to function or even exist (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016). The unit consisted of Vella, Patsy and Mac. A few years later, Vella became the SACP Central Committee representative in the UK (O’Malley 2007: 82). He became the key link between the SACP in South Africa and the rest of Europe. When he visited London in May 1962, Mandela visited Pillay and Dadoo as the leaders of the SACP there, and laid out the view that the ANC had to be given greater pre-eminence on the international stage: ‘Mandela later met Yusuf Dadoo and Vella Pillay and informed them that the ANC had to project itself as an independent force, represented by Africans at international conferences. Firmly, he told Dadoo, this was not a departure from ANC policy, rather, an unbundling of being stuck in a nebulous image that appeared to represent everyone, in effect a break with recent ANC policy – and cross-Congress cooperation’ (Benneyworth 2011: 90).
Aside from such ethnic politics at play in exile, Pillay soon became a victim of both personal infighting and rivalries within the Party, which had little to do with ideology and was to some extent a result of the growing Sino–Soviet tensions in the early 1960s. It is not easy to untangle these. The SACP, arguably the Communist Party most steeped internationally in the repressive political practices historically associated with Stalinism, regarded Pillay’s employment at the State Bank of China with some suspicion. He had to be a Maoist, they believed, to work there. There was no small irony in their conclusion, given that the Chinese Communist Party, in fact, broke with the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 in a Sino–Soviet split. This came after the public revelations of Nikita Khrushchev condemning Stalinism, to the practices of which the SACP (and the Chinese Communist Party) remained slavishly committed throughout, and notwithstanding the formal distancing of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party from such political practices. But this was not all, far from it. For all of the 1950s, Pillay, as the SACP representative in Europe, was the key that unlocked ANC–SACP access to both Moscow and Beijing. However, when the generation of Dadoo’s communists (including Michael Harmel) arrived in London in around 1960, they resented this influence and apparently set about undermining Pillay. Maharaj recalls that in 1960 or 1961, on a boat on a Moscow river, Harmel or someone of that seniority in the Party presented Vella with a choice: either remain with the State Bank of China or face expulsion from the SACP. We know from Irina Filatova (2012: 528) that Pillay, Dadoo, Harmel and Joe Matthews were all in Moscow in late 1960, the second visit by Pillay and Dadoo in that year.
Vella refused to quit the Bank of China even when he was offered a ‘sweetener’ in the form of a job at an equivalent proposed Russian state bank in London. These key developments are captured by Maharaj as follows:
… the party had been dominated by white members and there was a need for many white members to stand down. But within that context all sorts of personal issues arose and I think that therefore what I am saying about Vella is that the conflict that opened up, and according to him … he described to me the occasion where on a boat in Moscow, while they were having a meeting in Moscow, on the boat trip he was approached. He didn’t tell me who; I don’t know if it was Michael Harmel, who put the issue to him that he had to choose between working at the Bank of China and his representing the party. He thought this was an unreasonable proposition and he thought it was a cruel proposition but already there was enough unhappiness in his relationship with many of them. It was one thing for comrades that had gone to London fleeing from post-Rivonia … it was another thing for [people like] Vella who had family and everything settled in London to start to say I will give up my job. Where do you go? I know that before that the Soviets were courting Vella to come to help set up a Russian Bank, the equivalent of the State Bank of China, and therefore approached Vella and offered him a higher formal position than what he occupied at the Bank of China. And his response was to say to the Soviets, after he thought it through, to say, no, look chaps, I will stay with the Bank of China … I know my position, I know they will not take a Chinese and replace me. So my future is more secure with the Bank of China. That had little to do at that stage with any ideological issue (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).
Pillay’s widow, Patsy, also a former Party member and friend of Ruth First, now in her early nineties, recalls that Joe Slovo visited Vella and her at their London flat. It was there (after asking Patsy to leave the room) that he informed Vella that he could not continue to serve as the party representative in Europe or on the Central Committee as long as he continued to work at the State Bank of China (Patsy Pillay to John Sender, email correspondence with Padayachee, 29 June 2017).
As Vella observed to his friend and comrade Ronald Segal: ‘The SACP then decided to side-line me, and since then I ceased to have any connection with them. But my relations with Oliver Tambo and the ANC remained close and undisturbed’ (Segal’s biographical notes on Vella, in Vella Pillay private archives).6
With growing calls for sanctions against South Africa at the United Nations after Sharpeville and in the wake of the UN arms embargo in 1962, Pillay became deeply involved in the campaign to boycott South African exports to the UK. He spoke on the same platform as Julius Nyerere (then president of the Tanganyika African National Union), Trevor Huddlestone and others on 26 June 1959 when the campaign to launch the Boycott South African Goods campaign was launched in Holborn Hall in London. This
