The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

1940s and 1950s had been underestimated. Once again, as with Sapire’s research, the life
history of a local activist, the migrant worker and Communist Party member, Alpheus
Malivha was at the centre of this narrative of rural mobilisation. 93
It is the historical analyses of Tom Lodge 94 which was probably at the forefront of
studies of organised political resistance which sought to locate political movements in
their “economic and social matrixes” 95 and which tried to relate local forms of protest,
ideology and culture to national political activity. According to Lodge, in the course of
the 1950s, as it tried to incorporate escalating urban and rural protest, the ANC had been
significantly transformed and its leadership radicalised. During the 1940s, the rapid
growth in the urban African working class as a result of rural socio‐ecological crisis and
wartime economic conditions had given rise to a large new political constituency in the
city. The shortage of housing and an escalating cost of living, with increases in food and
transport prices gave rise to relatively spontaneous forms of subsistence struggles in the
form of transport boycotts, rent strikes and squatters movements. It was these
conditions, according to Lodge, constituting pressure ‘from below’, which pushed the
ANC in a radical direction through “a fresh assertive nationalism”. 96
The urban campaigns of Congress and the mass mobilisation in the 1950s in the Defiance
Campaign, the Congress of the People, the protests against the Bantu Education Act and
the campaigns against passes drew on these new social forces. Lodge went on to show
93 Peter Delius, ‘Sebatakgomo and the Zoutpansberg Balemi Association: The ANC, the Communist Party
and Rural Organisation, 1939‐1955’, Journal of African History, 34, 1993, pp 293‐313 and A Lion Amongst
the Cattle, ch 5. For an account which challenges Delius’ account of mobilisation and the ZBA as well as
the beginnings of Malivha’s life history of local rural political activism as constructed by Delius, see
Thiathu Nemutanzhela, ‘“Pulling Out Sticks and Removing White Stones from the Fields”: Memory of
Resistance to Betterment in the Zoutpansberg’, Paper presented to the History Workshop Conference,
Democracy: Popular Precedents Practice Culture, University of the Witwatersrand, 13‐15 July 1994.
94 Lodge’s foremost work in the 1980s was his book, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945, Johannesburg:
Ravan Press, 1983. See also his published articles, ‘Political Organisations in Pretoria’s African
Townships, 1940‐1963’, in Belinda Bozzoli (ed), Class, Community and Conflict and ‘Political Mobilisation
in the 1950s: An East London Case Study’, in Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (eds), The Politics of Race,
Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa.
95 Hilary Sapire, ‘African Political Organisation in Brakpan in the 1950s’, p 253.
96 Tom Lodge, Black Politics, p viii.
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