South Africa, the H-Bomb and the Summit

De Gaulle has now exploded his second A-bomb. At the same time as the pall of smoke was rising over the Sahara another explosion of a different kind took place in South Africa. Following the Sharpeville massacre, 30,000 Africans marched on Capetown. Throughout the Union, Africans began to fight back against the apartheid policies of the Verwoerd government.

There can be no doubt, that as the smooth-tongued statesmen sit down to the summit conference, the echoes of these two explosions will still be ringing in their ears.

For premier Macmillan, the crisis-ridden African continent, with its massive accumulation of British investments and its large expanses of British territory, will be very much a matter of concern. As the head of a Tory government, which stands for the protection of capitalist interests in Africa, he will seek during the secret discussions at the summit conference, guarantees and agreements that will help him to keep Africa safe for British capitalism.

When Macmillan left London recently to visit America for pre-summit discussions, the question of Africa was high on the agenda. On the day he left London Airport he was given a send off by Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament banners wishing him: 'God speed and good luck' in bringing back a 'ban the bomb agreement.' This turn towards Macmillan by the CND, with its implicit encouragement of the belief that he and his fellow Tories can bring peace and end the threat of nuclear war, registers a failure by CND to see any connection between the explosion of the French bomb and the explosion of the African Revolution.

British capitalism in South Africa

In South Africa, 11 million coloured people are struggling against the domination of three million whites. In order to safeguard the investments of the City of London in diamonds and gold and in order to protect the concerns like Unilever, ICI, English Electric, Vickers, Stewarts and Lloyds, Tube Investments, African Explosives and Chemicals and Barclays Bank, the African people are subjected to the most ruthless oppression, exploitation and degradation.

The whole African population lives on 12 per cent. of the country's land, only 40 per cent. of their children go to school. Apartheid is made official government policy in order to supply cheap labour for British and South African capitalism.

These are the reasons why Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd says he is opposed to 'outside interference' in South Africa's affairs and why Alport, the Secretary for Commonwealth Relations, says that British governments, 'help other Commonwealth governments to meet their armament requirements.'

The Tories know full well the dangers of the South African revolution. In neighbouring Rhodesia, African mineworkers sweat and toil for an average wage of £80 per year. Railway workers receive £20 a month in comparison to the minimum rate paid to Europeans of £60 a month.

In Central Africa, firms such as Imperial Tobacco, Rhodesian Anglo-American, Rhodesian Selection Trust and British South Africa, all dominated by British capital, control all the copper, coal, lead and zinc mining and tobacco processing, besides owning forests, ranches, merchant banks and newspapers. The fight now being waged by the African people in South Africa acts as an inspiration to the native people of Central Africa, and places in jeopardy the future of British investments and capital there.

As well as being bound up with these firms, and their protectors like Verwoerd and Welensky, Macmillan is also intimately connected through the NATO alliance with other stalwart defenders of freedom such as De Gaulle, Adenauer and Franco. The highest military expression of this alliance is, of course, the H-Bomb; the French nuclear explosion is the practical demonstration of the intentions of this alliance.

Reform by persuasion

The job of NATO, SEATO and 'the Commonwealth', is to protect the interests of international capitalism. No serious struggle can be made against the H-Bomb unless that struggle is directed against these organizations and the capitalist governments who have brought them into being.

Little wonder that Macmillan in April 5's parliamentary debate argued for what he called caution in any action concerning South Africa. This, claimed Macmillan, 'if foolishly carried out, might jeopardize the whole structure of our Commonwealth proceedings in their formal character.' Naturally, Mr. Gaitskell had no intention of doing anything so serious as damaging the Commonwealth, and contented himself with a plea to the Tory Premier to, 'express his regret' over the latest wave of arrests and beatings.

The martyrs of Sharpeville, the imprisoned Kgosane, the jailed Kenyatta and Algeria's 'House of Birds' bear sombre and gruesome testimony to the futility of reasoned appeals to Macmillan and international capitalism.

From all over the world verbal protests have poured forth over Verwoerd's apartheid policies. By nine votes UNO's Security Council rebuked apartheid. Even the Vatican has condemned the Sharpeville shootings—although its paper, L'Osservatore Romano, considers tear gas and fire hoses more civilized than rifles. The British Labour Party leaders, in their own peculiarly well-mannered and inoffensive way, have also lodged their protest.

Still the arrests continue. Ill-treatment and beatings increase. On April 4, South Africa's civilized white police shot seven-year-old Grace Mbubu. Colonel Reay, acting deputy commissioner of Cape Town's police, says this was done to 'protect Africans who wanted to go to work.'

If such polite and persuasive protests are unable to divert Verwoerd from pursuing the interest of his class, similar methods will certainly have little success in convincing the imperialists to renounce their ultimate and most powerful class weapon—the H-bomb.

This dependence on Macmillan exacts its own terrible price in the struggle against war. From the northernmost corner of Algeria, to the Cape Peninsula in the south, the African continent is ablaze with revolt against imperialism.

African revolt—a blow for peace

A success for the Algerian revolution would immediately put an end to French tests in the Sahara. In Kenya, Tom Mboya has declared that when Kenya gains its independence, the Kenyan people will not permit the British to maintain any military bases in that country. The overthrow of Verwoerd and his white supremacist government in South Africa, would weaken the military as well as the social domination of the African continent by imperialism.

The great African revolution steps forward as the most powerful ally of those who are fighting against nuclear war. In the early 1950s it was the sacrifice and heroism of the north Korean people that prevented American imperialism crossing over into the Chinese People's Republic and thereby commencing the third world war. In 1958 the overthrow of the Nuri-es-Said regime in Iraq disrupted and blew to smithereens the Baghdad Pact, striking a devastating blow to imperialism's war plans in the Middle East. Today, it is the Africans who are the spearhead of the fight against war.

Unfortunately, there appears to be a conception held in certain quarters of the British political movement, that as the summit comes closer it would be wiser not to embarrass Macmillan too much over the South African question. This is of course an opinion with which Macmillan heartily agrees.

On Sunday, March 27, thousands of white and coloured people marched to Trafalgar Square to demonstrate their solidarity with the fight against apartheid. Since then a silence has descended over the protest movement.

For ten days not one picket has appeared outside South Africa House, except those sent by the Socialist Labour League and a number of individual members from the Boycott Movement. All last week and into this week the repressions against the Africans have continued. But neither the Boycott Movement, the Communist Party, the Labour Party nor the Movement for Colonial Freedom have called a mass protest meeting, march or demonstration.

Solidarity action

On Sunday, April 3, the Socialist Labour League held a well-attended meeting in Trafalgar Square, addressed by Linden Burnham and League speakers, to protest at the jailing of the political prisoners in South Africa. Although we extended invitations to the Boycott Movement, the Communist Party and the Movement for Colonial Freedom, all declined to send a speaker. One must assume that the Communist Party, besides endorsing Khrushchev's statement that the 'people's of the Middle East are not yet ready for communism,' also considers that the African Revolution embarrasses the struggle for peace.

At its meeting on Tuesday, April 5, the Executive Committee of the South Wales Miners carried a resolution calling on 'all dockers and seamen, to whatever union they may belong, to refuse to handle goods destined for South Africa.' The Daily Worker of April 6, in reporting the decision of the executive, placed this important decision third paragraph down in its report, headlined 'Call matches off—Miners.'

This referred to another decision of the executive, asking for a cancellation of all sporting events by British rugby and cricket teams against South African touring teams. The Daily Worker leader on South Africa, of the same day, made no mention of this call for industrial action.

The CND must unhesitatingly give its full support to the African people, and that implies an alliance with the anti-Verwoerd, anti-Tory campaign here in Britain. If the fight against apartheid remains in the backwaters of petitions and pleas to Verwoerd, this will give the South African racialists time to violently suppress and behead the African movement. In that case, world imperialism would be strengthened and the dangers of war brought closer.

Now is the time when CND, the Boycott Movement, the Communist Party, the Socialist Labour League and the Left wing of the Labour Party should be joining together in a united campaign against nuclear war and in support of the African revolution. This means to fight for the withdrawal of Britain from NATO—the extension of the boycott on all South African goods to an embargo on all imports and exports—demanding immediate independence for the colonies and the withdrawal of all British troops from Africa, the nationalization of the arms industry and the resignation of the Tory Government.