/ 20 June 2008

Struggle stalwart laid to rest

Brian Bunting died in the garden of his Rondebosch home on Tuesday evening, June 17. He was born in Johannesburg in 1920. His father, SP Bunting, was a founder, indeed the key early architect, of the Communist Party of South Africa.

Before I met Brian, I already associated him with words such as ‘stalwart” and ‘staunchness”. The stolidity they might suggest needs to be qualified: Bunting had a strong sense of an inexorable world-historical process, but also a sense of irony.

On graduating from Wits University in 1939, he worked as a journalist at the Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Times. During World War II he served in North Africa. He was assistant secretary of the Springbok Legion — an anti-fascist organisation of ex-servicemen — and he edited its journal, Fighting Talk.

In 1952 Bunting was elected to Parliament as a ‘Native” representative, but was not allowed to take up his seat.

Through the Fifties, with Ruth First, Govan Mbeki and others, he played a leading role in establishing a bold South African tradition of investigative, activist journalism. Bunting edited The Guardian and, when it was banned, Advance. As one title was proscribed, another popped up. Clarion succeeded Advance, followed by People’s World, New Age and Spark.

Banned, house-arrested and detained, Bunting finally left for exile in 1963. In London with his late wife Sonia, he was active in exiled movement and anti-apartheid solidarity work. He edited the African Communist for over a decade and returned to South Africa in the early Nineties.

The Soviet-era oppositionist, Solzhenitsyn, has written a novella entitled For the Good of the Cause. As the plot unfolds, it reveals the horrors caused by blind loyalty to a party. Bunting certainly believed in the good of the cause.

It was a belief that led to silences about grave abuses and Bunting was aware of at least some of these. His own father had been expelled from the party he launched and led.

But he always insisted these paled in comparison to the crimes of capitalism and its offspring — fascism and apartheid.

In 1994 Bunting was elected as an ANC MP, returning to the corridors from which he had been evicted 41 years before. He began his maiden speech: ‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted —” — Jeremy Cronin.

Jeremy Cronin is SACP deputy general secretary and an ANC MP