The Socio-Political Context, Finding Communism and Ivan and Lesley’s Early Years

Abstract

Unlike many of their (white) contemporaries in the CPSA/SACP, Ivan and Lesley were not the children of trade unionists or socialists. Both had politically conservative parents and grew up on trading stations-he in the Transkei and she in Zululand. As it turned out, their early childhood experiences helped them to develop an appreciation of the plight of the dispossessed and disenfranchised masses in South Africa, and sympathy for local cultures. This was nevertheless not a foregone conclusion-like the majority of their contemporaries, they could just as easily (if not more so) have become supporters of the apartheid system.Born in 1921 and 1926, respectively, Ivan and Lesley's personal biographies overlapped with the formation and subsequent development of the CPSA/SACP. Ivan's radicalisation during the war years-the catalyst for his joining the Party-was not an isolated example. The Second World War, and reactions to it, proved to be a watershed in its growth and development. In addition, Ivan and Lesley had to negotiate the changing directions in party policy, its blind loyalty to Stalinism and the Soviet Union, its linkages with other liberatory movements, transnationalism, the internal and external wings of struggle, the move to armed struggle and the tensions and fractures that all of this brought. The changing patterns of their lives were intricately bound to the history of the Party until the end of the 1960s at least. They could, and did, take issue with some of these developments.