By Chris Barron, South Africa Sunday Times
David Kitson, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 91, was a senior member of the SA Communist Party and a commissar of the national high command of MK, the armed wing of the ANC.
He was appointed after the arrest of ANC leaders at Lilliesleaf farm in Rivonia in 1963.
He and his wife, Norma, helped key members of the underground escape SA before they themselves were captured in 1964.
Together with Mac Maharaj and three others, he was charged with sabotage and being a member of the high command of MK, and jailed for 20 years.
Norma, who died in Harare in 2002 at the age of 68, went into exile in England in 1967. There she initiated a round-the-clock picket of South Africa House in Trafalgar Square, which, until the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, was the most effective engine of publicity for the struggle against apartheid and particularly the plight of political prisoners in SA.
She also became the driving force of the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group, which was bitterly opposed by the ANC/SA Communist Party establishment in London, which thought the Anti-Apartheid Movement, firmly under their control, should be the only show in town.
When Kitson was released in 1984, he joined his wife and two children in London. He was the most senior resistance fighter and longest-serving political prisoner to be released from SA and was feted by the British media. But the ANC promptly suspended both him and Norma.
He was told he would be reinstated and allowed to take up his union-funded position at Ruskin College, Oxford, where he had spent two years as a research fellow before joining the struggle — but only if he publicly denounced his wife and the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group. He regarded the ANC/SACP proposal as political blackmail and rejected it.
As a result, the SACP leaned on his union to withhold its funding and he found himself without a job or source of income. He remarked later that the withdrawal of income was “a standard technique within the liberation movement for bringing people to heel”.
When Mandela and Walter Sisulu were released in 1990, they insisted that he and Norma be reinstated, but that never happened. They were not invited to Mandela’s inauguration.
Complaining that the ANC/SACP had frozen them out of any role in the new SA, Kitson and his wife went to live in Harare. He returned to SA after her death.
No reasons for their suspension were ever given, and it has remained a subject of fierce speculation. One view is that his return to London after his imprisonment constituted an embarrassment and a reproach to members of the SACP, including Joe Slovo, who had fled SA in 1963 in defiance of a central committee directive that they should stay. Kitson obeyed the directive and paid heavily for it. He and Slovo had ideological differences, and it has been argued that Slovo had much to lose if Kitson was restored to his old seniority in the movement.
Ironically, the head of the ANC in London who informed Kitson, by post, of his suspension was Solly Smith, later unmasked as an SA police spy.
Kitson is survived by his daughter, Amandla. His son, Steven, died in the 1990s.
© Sunday Times of South Africa
RELATED LINKS:
David Kitson's obituary [FRFI]
David Kitson's obituary [Guardian]
David Kitson and me
Steven Kitson: photo
Steven Kitson
Pie in the sky
Norma’s Obituary [FRFI]
Norma’s Obituary [Guardian]
Norma Kitson [Photo]
Where Sixpence Lives
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