The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

struggles over municipal controls during the war had been spearheaded by local tenant
organisations, Vigilance Associations and the Communist Party. During the 1950s, the
ANC had inherited much of the “character and style” displayed by the Party in the
previous decade. 91 Central to Sapire’s research on the radicalisation of African political
responses to the state’s emerging ‘native policy’ in Brakpan was the life history of local
Communist Party and ANC activist, and popular schoolteacher, David Wilcox Bopape.
Sapire argued that
although Bopape was an exceptional figure, he also
exemplified a new style of urban grassroots politicians on the
Witwatersrand. Roused by the democratic ideals espoused in
the war and by the spontaneous ferment within the locations,
mines and squatter camps, these ‘new men’ championed local
causes to ‘further the struggle’. 92
In Sekhukhuneland in the 1950s, a local organisation, Sebatakgomo, which had close
links to the Communist Party and the ANC played a “pivotal part” in the rural revolts of
1958. Rooted in migrant worker networks, this organisation drew on a lineage of rural
mobilisation associated with the Zoutpansberg Balemi Association (ZBA) in the 1940s.
According to Delius, it was migrant worker members rather than ideologues of the Party
who “grasped the organisational opportunities” and it was their styles and political
strategies that determined the success of rural mobilisation. Delius suggested that the
history of Sebatakgomo showed that national political movements, like the ANC and the
Communist Party, might not have been as remote from rural struggles as previously
claimed and that the radicalising impact of the Communist Party on the ANC in the
91 Hilary Sapire, ‘African Political Organisations in Brakpan’, in Philip Bonner et al (eds),
Apartheidʹs Genesis, p 256.
92 Hilary Sapire, ‘Apartheid’s ʺTesting Groundʺ: Urban ʺNative Policyʺ and African Politics in
Brakpan, South Africa, 1943‐1948’, Journal of African History, 35, 1994, p 122. See also Hilary Sapire,
‘The Stay‐away of the Brakpan Location, 1944’, in Belinda Bozzoli (ed), Class, Community and
Conflict. Sapire’s work examined the making of state policy on the administration of urban African
communities at the local level and the increasing persistence of local African responses through
intersections between the life history of Bopape and that of Afrikaner anthropologist and
Brakpan’s manager of Non‐European Affairs, Dr F J Language. These erupted around Language’s
dismissal of Bopape from his post at the Brakpan Amalgamated Mission School in 1944, and a
public brawl between the two local notables on the streets of the Brakpan African location. The
biographies of the two men became ‘microcosms’ for the workings of state policy at the local level,
and African popular discontent and activism.
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