If you’ve never heard of David Kitson and you’re not a Marxist nerd, I’ll attempt to express my loss in the language of contemporary popular culture: Yoda just died.
But I won’t make myself out to be a communist Jedi. I was never more than an activist in a solidarity organization called the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group. City AA, as we called it, was like a fan club and the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK for short), was the band. And, to strain a lame analogy even further, if MK was The Beatles, David Kitson was John Lennon. Let me gather my painful recollections and I’ll try to explain what David Kitson means to me.
I was recruited to City AA by David’s son Steven, in the fall of 1986, shortly after dawn, on the wide sidewalk in front of the South African Embassy on Trafalgar Square. I’d been up all night (the first of many) with City AA’s non-stop picket for the release of Nelson Mandela but Steven wanted me to stay on through the day as a “legal steward” for the scheduled mass demonstration.
That was when Steven first told me his father had served 19 years and five months in a South African prison for his leading role in MK. I didn’t know Steven and his mother Norma had both been detained and tortured by the Apartheid regime and, somehow, I’d missed the UK television coverage of David’s release and arrival in England. So I picked up the details on the street, the same day I learned the words of my first South African freedom song, which was all about a train leaving for Zimbabwe.
David could quite easily have avoided arrest if he had simply fled to London, as so many of his comrades had chosen to do. On trial for treason, he had stood in the dock and explained, “I could have run or I could have stood. So I stood.”
As a white South African with a solid career in engineering, David could have enjoyed a very privileged lifestyle on the backs of the disenfranchised majority, but he was an old-school Leninist and a member of the illegal South African Communist Party.
Even the SACP was too racist for David. But, within the constraints of Party discipline, he opposed the doctrine known as Colonization of a Special Type (CST) as the SACP drafted the program, published in 1962, as The Road to South African Freedom. The Party sidelined his theoretical intervention by simply not inviting him to a key meeting. They cited tactical considerations: it was too dangerous for him to attend. He was a key figure in the armed resistance and there was too much risk his presence would be betrayed to the South African authorities.
How convenient! Such are the machinations of that ambiguous world of bureaucrats and informers, where the dialectic of legal and illegal action meet the dialectic of theory and practice. This was in the early 1960s and while communists were shadowy marginalized figures in South Africa they were a significant force in the UK where David’s powerful labor union TASS was led by his esteemed comrade Ken Gill.
When David began his prison sentence, he received word from Gill that, when he was eventually released, the union would give him a “job for life” on the faculty of Ruskin College in Oxford, England. To this end, David developed his academic qualifications while in prison and took three more degrees.
He did this in the appalling conditions of Pretoria Local prison’s death row, where the extreme cold made him seriously ill. By then, Norma and the kids had relocated to London where they mounted a day-and-night picket in front of the South African Embassy, for 86 days, demanding that David be moved to a warmer cell. When they eventually moved him, the prison guards intimated to David that his wife, in London, was responsible for this. I always think of that anecdote when somebody tries to tell me political demonstrations never achieve anything.
Norma’s 86-day picket had enjoyed massive support from Britain’s left-wing establishment including cabinet members, labor leaders and the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, whose bureaucratic leadership suggested Norma’s picketers should form their own AAM branch, which became City of London Anti-Apartheid Group (City AA).
But there was a big problem when the AAM leadership attempted to impose its sectarian policies. City AA contended that solidarity organizations outside South Africa have no right to tell the African people who their leaders ought to be, and continued to extend their support to the PAC, SWANU and any other organization that was fighting Apartheid.
So, when David was finally released from prison, the dead hand of Stalinism visited him again and the ANC's London representatives demanded he denounce City AA and his wife or be suspended from the ANC. He refused. After all, City AA had saved his life. In reprisal, the Stalinist bureaucrats took away all the promised benefits: David doesn’t get his job at Ruskin College, his daughter Amandla doesn’t go to university in East Germany and there’s no place in the ANC choir for Steven. This was all communicated to David and Norma in a letter from the ANC's Solly Smith who, it turned out, much later, was a spy for the South African government all along.
So, by 1986, when first I ever saw David, I was helping to organize the picket for the release of Nelson Mandela. David, the revered sage, would appear on special occasions to make a speech.
For a long time, I wasn’t even allowed to know where City AA’s office was. Some committee members were wary of my alleged military background and they suspected me of being a government spy. Eventually, I joined the committee as picket organizer and then, when the office organizer was expelled for misappropriating correspondence, I was co-opted as City AA’s office organizer. On my first day at the secret office, David knocked on the door and, with disarming humility, said, “Tell me what I can do to help out.”
I was lost for words. I stammered something about feeling I should be the one helping him. I didn’t even know how to address him. If I were a communist, I should call him comrade. But my instinct was to call him sir, which seemed somehow inappropriate.
I had a lot more contact with Steven and Norma. Steven was City AA’s treasurer and Norma was deputy convener. I was embarrassingly deficient in terms of Marxist theory but did what I could to make up for this with hard work and my own defiant brand of pragmatism.
I worked closely with the Revolutionary Communist Group, which had played a leadership role in City AA since its inception. Its leader once told those of us who did not belong to a political organization we should go ahead and join one and then draw its support to the Mandela picket as part of a non-sectarian alliance. I attended a small meeting of the Humanist Party which, as it turned out, organized through a decentralized cellular structure across national boundaries. When City AA planned a march for Mandela to Trafalgar Square from north London, the only way I could mobilize Humanist Party support was to give a bundle of leaflets to a Humanist delegate who was attending a party conference in Paris.
It worked. I happened to be standing on a sidewalk with Norma and David as hundreds of Humanist Party members marched past, some with enormous homemade Mandela banners. David turned to me and asked, “Are these your people?” I can hardly remember a prouder moment.
If that was the high, then my low came in 1989 when I resigned from the committee over a disagreement with a high ranking RCG member. I wrote my resignation in the form of a spoof newsletter which somebody chose to circulate publicly on the picket. At the next City AA meeting, I was expelled from City AA and banned from the Non-Stop Picket.
Shunned by my former comrades, I began reading a monthly newspaper called The Leninist, chiefly because I’d heard David Kitson subscribed to it. Sometimes, they printed his letters. I think I was trying to catch up on the Marxist education I had so sadly lacked while in the anti-apartheid struggle.
Membership of the Leninist group was banned within the Communist Party of Great Britain and, when the CPGB finally disbanded, the Leninists took the CPGB name and attempt to reforge the party along more principled lines. This appealed to me and I was drawn into the newly relaunched Daily Worker. Imagine my surprise when, in two short years, I found myself marginalized in an ideological debate with the Provisional Central Committee and then, at the same time, facing a possible prison sentence on a charge of conspiracy.
As Marx himself put it, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce.” If David was the tragic hero, I seemed to be in danger of being the comic relief. My editor and I had pretty much decided to leave The Daily Worker, but we had qualms. No matter what your ideological differences with a Communist organization might be, to actually leave is to open yourself up to accusations of desertion, betrayal and collusion with the forces of oppression.
This should have been water off a duck’s back to me, by now. But my comrade had been a communist since his working-class boyhood in the Welsh valleys. The only way we could go through with this was if we talked it over with David Kitson, and the opportunity presented itself at a Justice for Kitson meeting in one of those big fancy houses in north London. It might have been Camden or Kentish Town. I remember a bust of Lenin on a grand piano.
I must have been the only person there under 65 and I didn’t know any of these people other than David himself. At the first opportunity, I just blurted out that I needed to talk to him in private. We stepped into a small room and he asked me what was up. I told him our sad story. He stopped me in mid stream and warned me, “You know I’m fairly close with your National Organizer. What if I repeat this conversation to him?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. He listened patiently until I’d explained how the leadership had suckered me into open debate and then stitched me up with disciplinary procedures, the protocols, the dialectics…“
“How many people in the organization?” he asked.
“About 15,” I said.
“Go ahead and leave,” he said.
And I never saw him again.
RELATED LINKS:
David Kitson's obituary [FRFI]
David Kitson's obituary
Steven Kitson: photo
Steven Kitson
Pie in the sky
Norma’s Obituary [FRFI]
Norma’s Obituary [Guardian]
Norma Kitson [Photo]
Where Sixpence Lives
Umkhonto we SizweColonization of a Special Type
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