If this book does not pull in prizes, there is something wrong with those who judge book awards. Such a blunt statement demands an explanation, no doubt. My best explanation is: read the book.
What we have here is at one level the story of a Scottish-born South African radical, but on another level a stunning mix of traditional biography, social, literary and cultural history.
James Thompson Bain, born in Dundee in 1860, has become a forgotten figure in South African history, yet his life highlights the paradoxes of what might be called the “colonial left”.
Joining the British army to escape poverty, Bain fought in the Anglo-Zulu War before returning to Scotland, where he became part of a working-class intellectual and industrial left.
He later returned to Southern Africa as part of a worldwide expanse of Scottish workers who brought both skills and socialist ideas to places as far afield as the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the old Transvaal Republic.
In the Transvaal, Bain worked in various jobs on the mines around Johannesburg, and was a trade union organiser among white immigrant labour.
In 1892 he helped found the first major union on the Rand, the Witwatersrand Mine Employees and Mechanics Union, campaigning for workers rights as well as promoting the cause of pro-Transvaal white immigrants (uitlanders) franchise.
He was also for a while a journalist and editor of a socialist newspaper, and even served as a spy for president Paul Kruger’s intelligence service.
Bain was a nationalist and no friend of the “English Queen” Victoria and her successors. When war broke out in 1899, he took up arms on the Boer side.
He was captured by the British in 1900 and imprisoned in the Fort prison in Johannesburg. At first the British considered executing him as a traitor but they decided to send him with other Boer prisoners to Ceylon. At the end of the war he was repatriated to Southern Africa.
Trade union activity, in the form of being one of the leaders of the 1913 miners’ strike, got him a second spell in the Fort. The strike was crushed and he was deported to Britain. He returned to Southern Africa a year later.
During World War I, the socialist movement in South Africa was split between those for and against the war. Bain had opposed the war at its outbreak. He was frustrated to see how the issue divided the South African Labour Party, leading to a fragmentation between its left (which became the International Socialist League, later a key constituent of the Communist Party of South Africa) and its right (which would win the 1924 pact election with the National Party).
Bain went left, continuing to write, speak out and organise. For a brief period after the war, in 1919 the left — inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution — took virtual control of Johannesburg. Soon, however, deals were made, the strike ended, and the brief vision of a “Johannesburg soviet” faded. Bain died soon afterwards.
The narrative of Bain’s life alone justifies reading this book, dramatic and enlightening as it is of the early South African left. Yet into this narrative the author has woven a range of themes and movements, ideas and events. For Jonathan Hyslop sets Bain in a widening circle of intellectual and cultural movements, each of them interlinking, that creates a powerful sense of a person within a kind of 19th-century globalism — of both capital and resistance. Bain was not simply a “turbulent syndicalist” — he was rather a product and reflection of a culture of self-taught working-class intellectuals who drew for their inspiration from radical thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle and William Morris.
Hyslop shows how far Bain developed his thinking from these now almost forgotten intellectuals, made the necessary connections with his experience, and acted upon them.
Similarly, Hyslop shows — without the high-minded condescension one all too often finds when dealing with historians — the gaps in Bain’s thinking: Bain was for the most part indifferent or unaware of the problems of black labour on the Rand.
Socialism for him, as for most socialists of the 19th-century European working class diaspora, was a distinctly white socialism.
This idea of diaspora is also central to Hyslop’s study. The diaspora worked both ways. Skilled workers moved to the colonies — and moved back, often drawing on their experiences to organise in the metropolis. Perhaps even some activists were “made in the Transvaal” (or Canada or Australia, for that matter) and returned home to continue the struggle. Similarly, socialists in Britain regularly visited their comrades in South Africa, while Australian and American skilled workers actually settled in Southern Africa. The early South African labour movement was thus truly an “internationale”.
Hyslop has done a remarkable job piecing together the life of Bain. He has also brilliantly integrated literary studies, history of the British empire and a range of other related disciplines to create a rich, finely textured work.
In addition he is a marvellous writer: witty, elegant, with the right mix of the tragic and comic. He presents Bain as a very human, complex yet ultimately heroic figure of the left and of his times. This is perhaps one of the best works of South African history in the past 10 years.