South African Communist Party (SACP) stalwart and former journalist Brian Bunting died at his home in Rondebosch, Cape Town, on June 18 at the age of 88, the party said on Thursday.
Bunting worked as a journalist at the Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Times after he graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1939.
”Bunting belonged to a generation that bequeathed to our country a major tradition of investigative and radical journalism,” party spokesperson Malesela Maleka said.
Maleka described Bunting as a person with a gentle personality, a lucid thinker and deeply loyal to his fellow comrades and organisations.
After serving in North Africa during World War II, Bunting became assistant editor and later chief editor of the Guardian, and, after it was banned, its successor publications, Advance, Clarion, Peoples World and New Age.
In 1949, Bunting was arrested following the African mineworkers’ strike, but charges were later dropped, Maleka said.
Bunting was elected Native’s Representative in the House of Assembly in the Cape Western District between November 1952 and October 1953, Maleka said.
”He was expelled from Parliament because of his SACP affiliations. He was banned in 1952 and was detained in 1960. Bunting was placed under house arrest in 1963. Shortly afterwards he went into exile.”
He returned to South Africa in the early 1990s and was elected African National Congress MP in 1994.
Maleka said: ”He returned to the very corridors from which he had been unceremoniously expelled by the apartheid regime some 40 years earlier.”
Throughout the 1990s Bunting remained active in the SACP until his health deteriorated in mid-2007.
”Bunting embodied the best non-racial traditions of our struggle. It is with pride that the SACP dips it banner in honour of this outstanding South African communist,” Maleka added.
The ANC in the Western Cape expressed their deepest condolences to the Bunting family.
”He was a revolutionary intellectual who never failed to also get into the trenches as an activist. His contribution to our liberation struggle as an author, editor, writer, activist and leader are immeasurable,” said provincial secretary Mcebisi Skwatsha. — Sapa