Still fighting for freedom
Z. Pallo Jordan asks whether Marion Grammer’s claims about the role played by Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) in South Africa’s liberation are ‘not a little extravagant?’
In 1935 Cape Town celebrated one hundred years of emancipation from slavery and twenty-five years of George V's reign. Gomas was sentenced to six months' hard labour and Minnie Gool to one month's for distributing an anti-imperialist pamphlet, which, the court ruled, impaired the monarch's dignity.
Gomas issued another pamphlet on behalf of the party, drawing attention to the sham of the centenary. Far from bringing freedom, emancipation made possible a form of servitude many times more subtle and deadly than slavery. The coloured man knew only the freedom to starve; his women were exploited economically by day and sexually by night; his children, reared in slums, grew old and died before their time. 'Without land, bread and equality of opportunity, there can be no freedom. After a century, the non-European must still fight for that freedom which should rightly have been his since 1834.
The gist of this appeared in the preamble to a draft programme of the National Liberation League, founded in December 1935 with Cissie Gool as the president and La Guma as secretary. It was probably the most emphatic and detailed claim yet made to complete equality before the law.
The twenty-three specified aims included demands for equal voting rights and parliamentary representation; no bars to employment in public services or private enterprise; an end to discrimination in school, games, the army and social services; and the removal of bans on sex or marriage which 'legalise the fiction of race inferiority'. Radical in terms of orthodox liberalism, the programme showed no trace of socialist thinking apart from a homily addressed to white workers on 'wage slavery.
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