At a Glance
The Eastern Cape Formation and the Johannesburg Years
Robert Resha was born in the Eastern Cape in 1920 — in the province that was simultaneously the heartland of ANC organisational tradition, the home of Lovedale and Fort Hare and the intellectual culture that shaped the liberation movement's political formation, and one of the most important sources of the migrant labour that sustained Johannesburg's mines and industries. He came to Johannesburg as part of the stream of Eastern Cape migrants whose labour the Witwatersrand economy required and whose presence in the city created the working-class African communities that the Congress Alliance would eventually organise into a mass movement.
In Johannesburg he worked as a journalist — contributing to the African press that was one of the primary vehicles for Black political opinion and political organisation in the apartheid era. The newspapers and magazines of the African press — Drum, the Bantu World, the African Lodestar, and others — were the media through which the political traditions of the liberation movement circulated in Black communities, through which political ideas were debated, and through which the events of the Congress Alliance's campaigns were reported and analysed. A journalist in this tradition was simultaneously a reporter, a political advocate, and a community voice, and Resha's combination of journalistic skill and political commitment gave him both an audience and a platform.
He also worked as a trade union organiser — combining the two vocations through which many working-class intellectuals of his generation engaged with the liberation movement. The trade union movement provided both the organisational infrastructure of working-class politics and the direct connection to the workers whose liberation the movement claimed to be pursuing. Resha's union work gave him the credibility with working-class audiences that was essential for the kind of grassroots organising that the ANC's transformation into a mass movement required.
The Transvaal Townships and the Mass Movement
The Transvaal townships of the 1950s — Soweto, Alexandra, the East Rand townships, the communities along the mining belt — were the most important political terrain in South Africa. They contained the greatest concentration of African workers in the country, they were the primary constituency of the ANC's mass movement, and they were the communities where the Congress Alliance's campaigns — the Defiance Campaign, the Congress of the People, the Women's March, the anti-pass campaigns — had their greatest impact and found their most enthusiastic support.
Organising in these communities required more than political programme. It required the ability to communicate the liberation movement's message in terms that connected to the daily experience of people who were navigating the pass laws, the migrant labour system, the poorly paid and insecure employment of the apartheid economy, and the daily humiliations of a system that treated them as instruments of production rather than as citizens. Robert Resha's combination of working-class background, journalistic skill, and oratorical ability gave him the tools to make these connections — to translate the Congress Alliance's political programme into the language and the terms of the communities he was organising in.
The township meeting was the primary vehicle for this communication in the 1950s — the public gathering at which the Congress Alliance's campaigns were announced, discussed, and endorsed by the communities that would implement them. The best speakers at these meetings were able to transform political argument into something that felt personal and urgent, that connected the abstract principles of the Freedom Charter or the anti-pass campaign to the specific experiences of the specific people in the specific hall or open field where the meeting was being held. Resha was regarded as one of the best speakers in the Transvaal ANC for precisely this reason, and his effectiveness at township meetings contributed directly to the mass mobilisation that the Defiance Campaign, the Women's March, and the other campaigns of the decade achieved.
The Treason Trial: Five Years in the Courts
Robert Resha was among the 156 people arrested in December 1956 on charges of high treason — the apartheid government's attempt to destroy the Congress Alliance's leadership through the judicial system. The Treason Trial that followed was one of the most significant political-legal events in the history of the South African liberation movement: a marathon proceeding that lasted more than four years, that tied up the Congress Alliance's most effective leaders in legal proceedings during a critical period, and that ended in the acquittal of all remaining accused when the state's case collapsed in 1961.
For Resha, as for the other Treason Trial accused, the years of the trial were years of significant disruption — of bail conditions and court appearances and the difficulty of maintaining full political activity while simultaneously managing an open-ended legal proceeding. The organisational energy that might have been directed toward building the mass movement was partially consumed by the management of the legal case, and this was precisely the outcome the apartheid government sought when it launched the prosecution: not necessarily conviction, but disruption and neutralisation.
The acquittals of March 1961 were a vindication of the accused and a legal embarrassment for the government, but they came at the moment when the ANC was being banned following Sharpeville and when the decision for armed struggle was being made. The legal victory was immediately superseded by the political crisis that required the formation of uMkhonto we Sizwe, and Resha moved from the courtroom to the underground in the space of months.
MK and the Exit from South Africa
Robert Resha's involvement in the founding of uMkhonto we Sizwe in late 1961 placed him at the centre of the most consequential strategic decision the South African liberation movement made in the early 1960s. The decision to form an armed wing — to add sabotage and eventually guerrilla warfare to the movement's repertoire after the government had demonstrated through Sharpeville that it was willing to use lethal force against peaceful protest — was not taken easily or unanimously within the ANC, and the seriousness with which individual leaders committed to it was a measure of their assessment of what the political situation required.
Resha's subsequent departure from South Africa — exiling himself to London and then to Dar es Salaam to contribute to the ANC's external mission — reflected the same calculation that drove many senior ANC figures out of the country in the early 1960s: that the security apparatus's campaign to destroy the ANC's internal structures made continued presence inside South Africa untenable for people the state had identified as significant targets, and that the external mission's work of building international solidarity and maintaining the ANC's organisational coherence in exile was important enough to justify the cost of departure.
The external mission that Resha joined in London was a small, resource-limited operation in the early 1960s — Oliver Tambo had only recently arrived and was in the process of building from almost nothing the international solidarity network that would eventually become one of the liberation movement's most important assets. Resha contributed to this work from London and from Dar es Salaam, bringing the Transvaal organising experience and the platform skills that had made him effective inside South Africa to the different but related challenge of building international support for the liberation movement.
London and the Long Distance of Exile
Robert Resha died in London on 23 March 1973, at the age of fifty-three. He had been in exile for more than a decade. He died without having returned to South Africa, without having seen the democratic transition, without having seen the ANC unbanned or the Rivonia prisoners released or the elections of 1994. He died in the middle of the struggle, in the period when the apartheid state was at the height of its repressive confidence and when the liberation movement's prospects must have seemed, to anyone measuring the immediate balance of forces, genuinely uncertain.
His death in London placed him in the company of the liberation movement's generation of exiles who died in the middle of the struggle — alongside JB Marks, who died in Moscow in 1972, the year before Resha; alongside Michael Harmel, who died in Prague in 1974; alongside the larger group of ANC and SACP figures whose lives were spent in exile, whose deaths came before the outcome that gave their lives their meaning, and whose contributions were made at a distance from the country they were working to liberate.
Legacy: The Grassroots Organiser's Place in History
Robert Resha's legacy is the legacy of the grassroots organiser — the person who did the foundational work of building the Congress Alliance's mass base in the Transvaal townships, who developed the working-class constituency whose commitment to the liberation movement gave it the social weight that eventually made the apartheid state's position untenable. This work is less visible in the historical record than the work of the lawyers and the strategists and the prisoners whose names appear more frequently in accounts of the liberation struggle. But it is not less important.
The ANC's transformation from a relatively small educated elite organisation into a mass movement in the 1950s was the product of specific organisational work in specific communities by specific people — people who went to the township meetings, who spoke at them, who built the branch structures, who recruited the members, who maintained the organisations through the difficulties of operating under official harassment and legal constraint. Robert Resha was one of those people in the Transvaal, and the mass character that the ANC had developed by the time of the Sharpeville massacre and the subsequent banning was in part the product of his work.
He died at fifty-three in a city that was not his, in an exile that the apartheid state had forced on him, working for a liberation that he did not live to see. His contribution was real. His sacrifice was complete. His name belongs in the record of the South African liberation movement alongside those whose contributions were more celebrated and whose stories were more frequently told.