At a Glance
Sydney Bunting's Son: Inheritance, Formation, and the Tradition of the South African Left
To understand Brian Bunting it is necessary, as with Archie Gumede, to begin with the father — because Sydney Bunting's place in the history of the South African Communist Party is itself significant, and because the political tradition he represented was one that Brian inherited, deepened, and sustained across eight decades of political life. Sydney Percival Bunting had come to South Africa from England, had practised as a lawyer, had been radicalised by the conditions of Black working-class life in the Rand's mining economy, and had become one of the founding members and early theorists of the Communist Party of South Africa when it was established in 1921 from the preceding International Socialist League.
What distinguished Sydney Bunting from many of his white contemporaries in the South African left was his insistence that the liberation of the Black working class had to be the central project of South African communism — that a communist party in South Africa that focused primarily on the white working class while treating Black workers as secondary was not merely strategically mistaken but morally inconsistent with the internationalism that communism claimed to represent. This position put him in conflict with sections of the party and with the Comintern's shifting positions on the "native question," and it contributed to his eventual marginalisation within the SACP. But it was also, in retrospect, the position that proved correct: the SACP's subsequent history — its alliance with the ANC, its role in the Congress Alliance, its commitment to non-racial liberation politics — followed the direction that Sydney Bunting had indicated in the party's first decade.
Brian grew up in this household, absorbing the combination of theoretical rigour and practical commitment to the liberation of Black South Africans that his father represented. He came of age in the 1930s and 1940s as the SACP was rebuilding itself after the disruptions of the early years, as the ANC's Youth League was beginning the transformation that would make the Congress Alliance possible, and as the Guardian — the Cape Town newspaper that would become the central project of his professional life — was establishing itself as the most important left-wing publication in South Africa. He entered journalism as a vocation that was inseparable from his political commitments, treating the work of informing and politicising readers as a direct contribution to the liberation struggle.
The Guardian: Journalism as Political Action
The Guardian was founded in Cape Town in 1937 by Betty Radford, a white South African communist, and it operated from the beginning as an explicitly political newspaper — one committed to covering the labour movement, the Congress Alliance, and the conditions of Black working-class life in ways that the mainstream English-language press consistently refused to do. The mainstream press — the Rand Daily Mail, the Cape Times, the Natal Mercury and their peers — were commercial operations serving primarily white readerships, and their coverage of Black political life was at best paternalistic and at worst actively hostile to the liberation movement's goals. The Guardian filled a gap that nothing else in South African journalism was filling, and its readership reflected that: it circulated not only among the white left but among Black readers across the country who found in its pages reporting that took their political situation seriously.
Bunting became the paper's editor and was the driving force behind both its journalism and its political direction. He covered the Congress Alliance's activities with a thoroughness and a political sympathy that the mainstream press withheld, reported on the conditions of labour in the mines and factories with a directness that challenged the apartheid state's preferred narrative of racial capitalism as a system that benefited everyone, and maintained through the paper a public record of the liberation movement's ideas and activities that the apartheid government was determined to suppress.
The government's response was to ban the paper — using the powers available under the Suppression of Communism Act and subsequent legislation to declare the Guardian a communist publication and prohibit its continued publication. The first banning came in 1952. Bunting and his colleagues relaunched the paper almost immediately as the Clarion, which was banned within weeks. Then as Advance, which survived longer before being banned in 1954. Then as New Age, which operated until 1962 before being banned again. Then briefly as Spark in 1962 and 1963, before the government moved to shut down the entire operation permanently. The sequence — banning, relaunch, banning, relaunch — was a prolonged contest of political wills between a state with enormous coercive power and a group of journalists who believed that the work of keeping information in circulation was worth the cost of constant legal harassment and institutional disruption.
Parliament, the Coloured Franchise, and the Refusal
In 1952, Bunting was elected to Parliament for the Cape Western constituency in a by-election — representing one of the constituencies where the Coloured vote, which the Cape had retained on the common roll since Union, could elect MPs who were genuinely responsive to the community's interests rather than to the white nationalist electorate that dominated most constituencies. His election was a significant political act: it demonstrated that the Coloured community's franchise, long treated as a theoretical right that produced no practical results, could under the right conditions produce MPs genuinely committed to the community's liberation.
The National Party government had been working since its election in 1948 to remove Coloured voters from the common roll — a project that encountered constitutional obstacles because the Coloured franchise was entrenched in the South Africa Act and required a two-thirds majority in a joint session of Parliament to change. The Separate Representation of Voters Act, eventually pushed through after the government packed the Senate and the Appeals Court to overcome the constitutional obstacles, achieved this goal by the mid-1950s. Part of the legislation required MPs who had been elected on the Coloured vote to sign a declaration disavowing communism, a provision clearly aimed at Bunting and others like him.
He refused to sign. The refusal was not defiant in the theatrical sense — it was simply a statement of the obvious, that he was a communist, that he had always been a communist, and that he was not prepared to lie about his political commitments in order to retain a parliamentary seat. His seat was vacated. He became, in a small way, one of the last witnesses to the Coloured franchise before it was extinguished — a franchise that would not be restored in any meaningful form until the democratic elections of 1994.
Banning, The Rise of the South African Reich, and Exile
The progressive restriction of Bunting's public activities through the 1950s and into the 1960s — banning orders that prohibited him from attending gatherings, from being quoted, from associating with other banned persons — were the standard tools that the apartheid state used against political opponents it could not silence through legal prosecution alone. He continued his work within the constraints the banning imposed, maintaining the Guardian's successors and contributing to the SACP's organisational work, until the combination of the paper's permanent banning and the post-Rivonia crackdown on the left made continued functioning inside South Africa untenable.
Before going into exile he completed The Rise of the South African Reich — published in 1964 and one of the most important analytical documents of the apartheid era. The book drew the explicit parallel between the apartheid state and European fascism: between the National Party government's racial ideology and the racial ideology of Nazism, between the apartheid state's methods of political repression and those of the totalitarian systems that the world had just fought a war to destroy. The comparison was not merely rhetorical; Bunting documented it carefully, drawing on the ideological writings of the National Party's founding figures, the structure of the apartheid legal system, and the methods of the security police to argue that the world was watching a fascist state develop in southern Africa and that the international community's failure to respond was morally comparable to its failure to respond to European fascism in the 1930s.
The book circulated internationally through the anti-apartheid movement and contributed to the theoretical framework through which the global campaign against apartheid was conducted. It remained one of the standard references for understanding the apartheid state's ideological character throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and its argument — that apartheid was not a form of racial prejudice that could be reformed through dialogue but a system of racial domination that had to be abolished — helped sustain the international movement's commitment to sanctions and isolation rather than engagement.
In exile in London, Bunting continued the work he had been doing in South Africa — journalism, political writing, and publishing in the service of the SACP and the ANC's external mission. He wrote Moses Kotane: South African Revolutionary in 1975, a biography of the SACP's general secretary and ANC national treasurer that remains one of the significant documents of the liberation movement's history and that demonstrated his capacity to combine political commitment with genuine historical scholarship. He maintained contact with the liberation movement's exile structures and contributed to the ongoing work of keeping the movement's ideas in circulation in the international arena.
Return, the Democratic Transition, and the Final Years
The unbanning of the ANC in February 1990 allowed Bunting to return to South Africa after decades of exile — a return that had the bittersweet quality that all such returns carry, the simultaneous joy of being home and the grief of what had been lost in the years away. He returned to a South Africa in the final years of apartheid's legal existence, to a political environment transformed almost beyond recognition from the one he had left, and to a liberation movement that was navigating the transition from underground and exile existence to the demands of electoral and parliamentary politics.
He continued to write and comment on South African politics in his final years, bringing to post-apartheid debates the perspective of a man who had been involved in the liberation struggle since the 1940s and who had no illusions about either the achievements of the democratic transition or its limitations. His death in 2008 was mourned by the SACP and the ANC, both of which recognised in him the tradition of communist journalism and political commitment that had sustained the left through the dark decades of apartheid's apparently immovable dominance.
Legacy
Brian Bunting's legacy is the legacy of the left press in South Africa — the tradition of journalism as political commitment, of treating the work of informing and politicising readers as inseparable from the work of building the liberation movement. The Guardian and its successors reached readers across racial lines at a time when most South African media served racially segregated audiences with racially differentiated politics, and the ideas that circulated through those papers — about the Congress Alliance's vision of a non-racial democratic South Africa, about the connection between racial oppression and economic exploitation, about the international context of apartheid and the possibilities of solidarity — shaped the political consciousness of the generation that built the liberation movement's internal structures in the 1970s and 1980s.
He inherited from his father a tradition of communist politics that centred the liberation of Black South Africans rather than treating it as secondary to the interests of the white working class, and he transmitted that tradition through his journalism, his books, and his organisational work across eight decades. The South African left's intellectual history cannot be written without him, and the tradition of committed political journalism that he represented is one that South African democratic culture continues to need. His refusal to disavow communism when Parliament demanded it was a small act in legal terms and an enormous one in moral terms — the kind of act that defines a life.