of the global Anti-Apartheid Movement (Gurney 2000: 123). Pillay would serve with great distinction as its treasurer and then vice chairperson for many years. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 2003, then President Thabo Mbeki sent Pillay a message, which read in part: ‘Your outstanding contribution to the liberation of our people will always be remembered with fondness, particularly your role in establishing one of the greatest solidarity movements of our times – the British Anti-Apartheid Movement.’ In his tribute to Pillay on that occasion, Ahmed Kathrada observed, ‘Many of us knew you as a brilliant economist and a dedicated freedom fighter.’ Kader Asmal, whom Pillay had taken under his wing and mentored, noted that ‘the only honour that Vella would want is a commitment from all of us to ensure that we consolidate and deepen the democratic gains which so many freedom-loving South Africans fought and died for’ (Letters in Vella Pillay private archives). While involved in all this South African struggle work, Pillay was invited by Ken Livingstone to join the Greater London Enterprise Board, with the special task of assisting the Greater London Council to promote the local economy and enhance opportunities for blacks in London. All this while he remained an employee of the State Bank of China.
After he arrived in London, Maharaj quickly joined up with Pillay in the boycott campaign, including via the Africa Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Gurney 2000: 133). Maharaj recalls that Pillay was the SACP contact person in London, a representative of the Central Committee, and the underground conduit for New Age, the banned ANC-supporting South African newspaper. ‘Exiled students from South Africa – Kader Asmal, Steve Naidoo, Manna Chetty, Essop and Aziz Pahad, Thabo Mbeki – found the Pillay household [in Muswell Hill] a home away from home’ (O’Malley 2007: 80). Maharaj recalls a meeting of the Africa Committee at the Marx Memorial Library, at which the agrarian question in Africa was debated. Jack Woddiss, one of the participants, questioned the view that the transfer of land to the state (on behalf of the people) under socialism would automatically raise productivity, a view that Maharaj had until that time taken for granted. It was one of the few real debates over economic and development policy that Maharaj had witnessed at that time.
By 1978, Pillay had completed his MSc in economics at Birkbeck College, University of London, obtaining First Class marks for his quantitative and econometric work and a Merit pass overall. There were very few South African Congress Movement activists who received comparably rigorous training in economics, although a few were trained in the rigidly orthodox economics of the former Soviet bloc (Padayachee and Sender 2018).
Pillay researched and published widely on the South African economy and related subjects throughout the 40 or so years he lived and worked in London. He often used the pseudonym ‘P. Tlale’, especially when he wrote for the African Communist. In the January–March 1964 edition, he wrote ‘Sanctions against Apartheid’ under that pseudonym; in the July–September issue of that same year he wrote ‘The Apartheid Economy Today’, and in the September–December 1965 edition he wrote ‘The Imperialist State in Apartheid’. ‘The Apartheid Economy Today’ was written well before the revisionists Harold Wolpe and Martin Legassick published their seminal work in around 1972; it placed a Marxist imprint on South African economic historiography, and demonstrated a sharp appreciation of the complex interrelationships between race, class and the apartheid state in South African capitalist accumulation. He understood clearly that the much-celebrated ‘economic boom’ that South Africa was experiencing at the time was based on class exploitation and racial oppression and that it would not be sustained because of that fact alone. In fact, he predicted that the repressive state controls needed to keep it going would prove to be its ultimate undoing:
Subjected to intense exchange controls and attracted by the demands created through the growing volume of overseas investment as well as of the war economy, South Africa’s ruling capitalists have again joined with the Verwoerd regime to intensify the rate of African exploitation with all its explosive political and other consequences. But not even the employment of Hitler’s techniques of economic control and organization can stop the explosion of the South African crisis. On the contrary, it will hasten it (Pillay 1964: 59).
Pillay wrote many monographs for the Anti-Apartheid Movement, for the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid (where he was good friends with Enuga S Reddy, the renowned head of the Centre). For the latter organisation and in his capacity as vice chairman of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, he wrote ‘The Role of Transnational Corporations in Apartheid South Africa’ (August 1981) and ‘The Role of Gold in the Economy of Apartheid South Africa’ (March 1981). Demonstrating his close familiarity with European economic affairs, he published articles in Africa South, including ‘The Belgian Treasury’ (1960) and ‘The European Economic Community and Africa’ (1958).
In the early 1980s, Pillay joined with sympathetic Marxist economist and activist Laurence Harris and later with Ben Fine in establishing an economic research capacity for the ANC in London. Harris had a long-standing and active engagement with the ANC, which is respected in South Africa to this day, and he had been closely associated with the ANC–SACP’s armed wing, MK. He is reported as assisting in running guns and other weapons for MK along the Botswana border (Keable 2012), and as being involved in an attempt to travel by boat down the eastern coast of Africa from Mombasa to the Transkei coast on an MK assignment (Jordan interview, 4 August 2017). Together with members of the Research Unit of the ANC’s Department of Information (and from the late 1980s with the DEP), Harris formed a research consortium called Economic Research on South Africa. EROSA was set up on the model already established by the Research on Education for South Africa (RESA) project, organised by another South African exile academic and activist, Harold Wolpe, famous for his work on the articulation of modes of production and colonialism of a special type (Fine 2010: 26). An unswerving commitment to the struggle against the heinous system of apartheid primarily drove these British economists. Working with the ANC they made it their task to study and better understand the complexities of the racialised South African economy and how it could be transformed equitably and democratically. Fine recalls that his first task for the ANC through EROSA was to assess the prospects of South African mining, based principally on his knowledge of coal mining in Britain rather than of South Africa (2010: 26). EROSA produced a number of papers on the South African economy, which (according to Ngoasheng 1992: 121) went beyond a critique into areas of policy recommendations. This included work on the minerals-energy complex, the savings-investment constraint and the nature of the South African financial system. The group related to the ANC in exile through Pillay, Sisulu and Jordan (IDRC 1991: 7).
At the ANC economic policy conference in Harare in April–May 1990, Pillay presented a detailed paper on the essential steps in economic policy immediately upon the seizure of state power. He recommended a day-to-day agenda of the key steps that needed to be taken upon assumption of power. He was a strong opponent of the idea of granting the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) independence from the new government, arguing that this would seriously compromise the democratic state’s power to influence and shape a co-ordinated policy response to the economic legacy of apartheid.
In a letter to his friend and comrade Lionel (Rusty) Bernstein, Pillay expressed grave concerns about the way the debate over economic policy was proceeding (we develop this point in chapter 4). He predicted that if the movement allowed itself to be seduced by South African and international capital to compromise on its economic policies, it would pay a high price one day. This long quote from that letter is worth setting out in full:
What I find outrageous is the invidious position in which poor Nelson [Mandela] has been placed (by some of his colleagues) in having to frequently shift the movement’s economic goal posts. I know who is responsible for this: it found its most telling expression in Nelson’s unfortunate speech to businessmen on May 23 [1990]. I also feel that our friend JS [Joe Slovo] is perhaps showing a willingness to skate on very thin ice on these matters. I fear that the people in the townships, the rural areas and the unemployed – all of them may at some point react pretty strongly to what appear as deliberate ambiguities in the movement’s economic policies and programme. This is a serious worry for
