SIDNEY P. BUNTING

Entry into the Communist Party [Sidney Percival Bunting]

by

Bernard Sachs

What impressed me most of all was the manner in which one of the leaders of the International Socialist League, a certain Sidney Bunting, the son of an English knight, had completely merged with his band of humble men and women. What finer illustration of the magnetic force of this ideal of Socialism that was sweeping the world? When I addressed Sidney Bunting---and I chose every pretext for doing so---I felt that in the words “comrade Bunting”, my own world of poverty, slums and gloom was dissolving, and that I had grown in stature.

From 1923 onwards I not only attended the socials and lectures of the Communist Party, but became organisationally linked to it. On closer contact with this political body, I was to discover that Sidney Bunting was still its most arresting personality.

Sidney Bunting was a truly remarkable figure. In circumstances  more propitious for the display of his unusual talents, he could have risen to great heights. For he was unmistakably a Lenin prototype---scrupulously moral in his every move, courageous beyond compare, and filled with burning love for humanity that unalterably fixed the course and purpose of his life. He came from a leading liberal family imbued with the true spirit of British humanism---the tradition of Milton and Browning.

Percy William Bunting, the father of Sidney, was the founder of the well-known English monthly Contemporary Review, and he was knighted in 1908 for his services to the Liberal Party. The buntings were not just academic liberals, but spent much time working among the poor in London. Their home was a rendezvous for political refugees of every sort. Through it had passed a steady flow of emigres---Russians, Armenians, Poles, Italians, Koreans, Indians and many more.  It was this background that doubtless influenced Sidney in the direction of an extreme radicalism in later life.

After a brilliant scholastic career at Oxford, where in 1897 he won the Chancellor’s Prize, he came to South Africa in 1900 to fight in the Boer War. For Bunting this was not an imperialist war, but part of a civilising mission to free the country from the control of that “medieval oligarchy”, as Lord Milner had called the Boers. After the conclusion of the Boer War Bunting settled in South Africa, and it was hardly surprising that he should have found himself in marked discordance with that illiberalism which is the spirit of South Africa and is openly proclaimed from the housetops.

Bunting soon discovered that in South Africa the fight for democratic rights was a revolutionary fight, and that against its feudal spirit it was largely purposeless to declaim the enduring value of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. He accepted the realities of the position with that courage and devotion that even his opponents respected. And from that moment also, his road became jagged and hard. But he never faltered or flinched; and to the end he remained loyal to a cause that eventually toppled about his ears and in the process inflicted wounds that were to prove fatal. But that belongs to a later part of this narrative.

In the course of an address at a Pushkin Memorial gathering, Dostoevsky said that to understand the Protestants of the Reformation it was necessary to walk with them, weep with them and sing hymns with them. It was in this spirit that Sidney Bunting approached the Native problem. He was well above the heads of the masses, in whom he strove night and day to instill the spirit of revolt. His articles in the Party paper were replete with those esoteric quotations from Robert Browning which would have baffled people considerably more erudite than his readers, mostly semi-literate. A favourite quotation of his was from “Asolando” of Browning:

          One whom never turned his back but marched breast
                    forward,
          Never doubted clouds would break,
          Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong
                      would triumph,
          Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
          Sleep to wake.

Not a little incongruous was the manner in which Bunting with his Oxford accent taught at the Party night school, where primitive adult Natives came after work with their slates to acquire the rudiments of the English language. And yet even these primitives in the Party, without ever understanding Bunting, knew instinctively that here was a man who felt deeply for them, and they worshipped him.

Bunting’s physical appearance was conspicuous for its awkwardness and angularity. Looking at him, there immediately came to mind the Ironsides of Cromwell who fought at Naseby and Marston Moor. His fingers were abnormally wide, and he was forced to give up the violin and take the more easily negotiable viola. He was an accomplished player and the leading musical authority in the country on top of his other accomplishments. The heroic mould of Beethoven was for him musically, what Browning was poetically.

The other outstanding personality at the International Socialist League was William Andrews. Unlike Bunting, he came from the British working class and was himself a fitter and turner. I have seldom come across a more supremely dignified appearance in a man. Of the working class, Auden writes in his “The Orators”:

              Our proletariat . . . Their minds as pathic as a boxer’s face
              Ashamed, uninteresting, and hopeless race.

It is a description that is not altogether inapt. How came it then that Andrews was so generously endowed by nature? His appearance alone singled him out as a leader of men. As his mind kept pace with his appearance---his writing and speeches were always perfectly composed and a model of clarity and dignity. Both in manner and ability he was qualified to be the editor of the London Times. And nobody on the London Times would have suspected that he was a fitter and turner.

I have seen working class leaders in South Africa with extremely interesting faces and of outstanding ability. There was the Irishman Harry Haynes, a Jimmy Larkin type and a magnificent orator, but his features were interesting in a mobile and dynamic way, as were also his speeches and articles. This was after all to be expected from a class fighting its way to power. But I have never encountered the marmoreal dignity and solidity of Willian Andrews. And curiously enough, it in no way estranged him from the masses, with whom he mingled easily as “Bill” Andrews. One somehow felt that a class which could produce an Andrews was a class fit to rule. But there are too many of this class who are as Auden saw them. And that seems also to explain why this class has failed to take charge of civilisation’s destiny, even though it was historically inevitable, according to Marx. If Bunting was the middle class, humanitarian Jaures of the South African Socialist movement, Andrews was the working class Bebel.

                   *                      *                  *                 *                *

With his disdain for theory, Bunting would have carried on in the same old way without quibbling over a theoretical slogan, which to him was of little importance when measured against personal effort and sacrifice. If he decided to oppose himself to the Comintern resolution, this was because the new bureaucratic wind that issued from the east was so chilling. One-time comrades of his were writing secret letters to Moscow in the hope of ousting him from the leadership. This decay of the comradely spirit that had sustained us all through difficult times seemed to harden him. 

In 1928 he was called to Moscow to state his case. Years later he related how different the atmosphere was from 1922, when he had last been to Moscow. The genuine all-pervasive and uplifting comradeship had departed for ever. Instead he came face to face in the Colonial Department of the Comintern with a bunch od time-servers and hucksters who were not at all burdened with any moral principles. As high-power salesmen they did their best to ingratiate themselves with the big bosses who had a new commodity on the go and required local representatives to push it for all it was worth. Before Bunting had even stated his case, he was being shunned everywhere and treated with utter contempt. To him this was not fair play, and he fought back. It was not for this tinsel thing that he had stepped irrevocably out of his class which had much to offer in the ay of comfort and advancement. It was not for this that he had faced murderous mobs, and all the other hardships that go with being a Communist in a feudal ridden semi-colony.

And I can also see that the bosses in the Comintern were themselves no longer concerned overmuch with theoretical principles. A regime was coming into being that required implicit obedience. Such is the essence of a bureaucratic hierarchy. What irked them most about Bunting was his independence of thought and will. The administrators who were placing their hands on the Russian industrial machine turned the Comintern into a political machine where orders are given and obeyed by the strata below. The official is merely a cam or a gear through which power is transmitted, and kinks or resistances of any kind must be removed. The mechanical was gradually becoming equated with the political, and there was not much place for human feeling in this kind of set-up.

Cast as he was in the heroic mould, Bunting thought that he would show his true revolutionary courage through some prodigious act of sacrifice, and in this way establish himself once again in the Party as a loyal fighter for the cause. The Cape was the only province in South Africa where a certain number of non-Europeans with formidable property qualifications had the vote, though even there only Whites were allowed as candidates. There were only two constituencies where non-Europeans formed as much as half the electorate---Cape Flats, a suburb of Cape Town; and Tembuland. Bunting took upon himself the arduous task of fighting Tembuland. He hired a motor-van and together with his wife, an interpreter and a native driver they entered the wilds of the Transkei to fight the Tembuland seat in the 1929 general election.

It was not only a major test of endurance geographically---caravan life in the wild wastes of Africa with no roads nor other amenities can be very hazardous---but it was even more of an epic politically. For the Whites in the Transkei were naturally disturbed at this projected agitation among the Natives in a territory where they were hopelessly outnumbered. It was like going into the heart of the Southern States of America to preach Colour equality. For three months Bunting conducted a campaign in this Native territory with a population of over a million Blacks and only some 20,000 Whites. It extends nearly two hundred miles from north to south. This was the “Eroica” period in Bunting’s life. The gloom of political slander within the Party was descending on him ominously, in the way that deafness overtook Beethoven, and he decided to thrust himself in the face of destiny.

Of this odyssey in this Native territory, we can learn most from a letter he wrote to a friend. Its spirit strangely resembles the epistles of St. Paul during his journeyings:

             “On entering these ‘sacred territories,’ the police began their
               attention at once, no doubt on advice from Durban or ‘higher
               up.’ Wherever we made a halt they scrutinized our Natives’
             passes and our car licence, and at Umtata, the capital, they
             threatened us all with prosecution, and have actually arrested
             our driver for entering the Transkei without a permit,
             although he was born here.

             “The case timed to hamper our movements and is still
              pending. Our slightest move is watched and reported by the
              police from place to place. Moreover, the chief magistrate on
              our arrival informed us that our campaign was
              discountenanced by the authorities, who would refuse us any
              facilities or any information beyond what we were legally
              entitled to. The Native chiefs have been told to take no active
              part in the election campaign---and their salaries are at stake!
              Of course we knew that before, but it is more unblushing
              than we expected.

             “The European population, generally, too, with one or two
             exceptions (not communists but at least professing some sort
             of liberalism or labourism) are more vulgarly hostile than I for
             one quite realized they would be: they have not so far offered
             us violence, but they have already repeatedly threatened to
             shoot us. The Christian parsons appear among the most
             reactionary of all.

            “As for the Native people, whose own reserve we supposed
             this to be, our general impression so far is that they are more
             held down here than anywhere else in South Africa. By a long
             regime of ‘segregation’ and congestion, all the stuffing seems
             to have been knocked out of them---so at least the authorities
             probably flatter themselves: perhaps we should rather say it is
             bottled up, with a very heavy official hand on the cork.

             “There is no Native organization except official bodies like
             advisory boards, and, especially, the ‘Transkeian General
             Council’ or ‘Bhunga,’ a Native mock parliament controlled by
             white officials, which seems mainly concerned in praying the
             Government to make petty reforms which the Bhunga has no
             power to make itself . . .

             “The Native voters consist mostly of lawyers’ clerks, teachers,
              recruiting clerks, et., and perhaps tend to consider themselves  
              a superior caste, but we have already urged on them the duty
              of using their ‘privilege’ in trust for the whole of their people,             
              and this we hope most of them will do, secretly, though
              openly they may have to kow-tow to their bosses. As for the
              mass of the Natives, they are already ours wherever we
              establish contact.

              “We held our first meeting on the 6th on the market square,
               Umtata, the two halls having been refused to us. Amid a
               running fire of white shopkeepers’ jeers, the big Native
               audience heard us gladly---never had they heard such a
               gospel, least of all from a White man. Our speeches became
               the talk of the whole district, and we propose, though
               everywhere the Whites beseech us to depart from their
               coasts, to go from village to village delivering a like message.
               The police for their part will do their damnedest to shut us
               up.

               “More than ever we can see how completely these territories,
                with all their officials and paraphernalia, are today mere
                 appurtenances of the Chamber of Mines. The people have
                 just so little land per family, and are taxed just so much,
                 that they can only subsist by sending their men to the
                 mines. And the whites simply batten on the couple of
                 pounds brought home by each mineworker after his dreary
                 contract had expired.”

Bunting was arrested on one charge after another, and other Native voters were subjected to every form of intimidation. For all that he polled very well in the election, considering that it was virgin soil that he was trying to plough up. On his return to Johannesburg, Bunting was evidently under the impression that he had proved his worth as a fighter in the ranks and that the differences of the immediate past would be forgotten. But he did not know that a whole overturn in the world of Communism was taking place. The Right and the Left were being expelled from the Party in every country. South Africa had to do its part too.

Bunting more or less recanted his anti-Party stand on the Black Republic slogan, but that did not satisfy those who were gunning for him in the hope of taking over. The attacks on him continued ceaselessly. Most vicious of all his enemies was one Douglas Wolton, who becoming a Communist had embarked on a walk from Cape Town to Cairo, to the accompaniment of the flamboyant publicity that is a feature of such undertakings. It was pitiful to see how Bunting was remorselessly trod upon by his erstwhile comrades. The mobs who had frog-marched him through the streets because of his Communist activity did know where to stop. But this schism within the Party seemed to suck out an endless flood of bitterness and venom. Stalin and Hitler may or may not have chosen opposite goals, but it is certain that the same primeval drives were employed by both of them to get there.

There was quite a majesty in its own way about the torrent of abuse that was suddenly unleashed at Bunting from every corner, with the women providing the treble hysterical note. Twenty years have not erased from my mind a certain Party meeting---a veritable Witches’ Sabbath---with everybody shouting Bunting down and calling him “Lord” Bunting as he tried to make himself heard. . An elderly woman, whom Bunting had befriended over the years, turned her posterior towards him with her dress lifted high.

One quails at describing what appears as ordinary billingsgate. If I do so, it is that the very same thing was happening on a much grander scale at the very summit of the Bolshevik movement, that at one time gave promise of ushering in a new age. In the highest court of the Soviet State, Vyshinsky told Bukharin that he was a cross-breed between a sow and a bull. And yet it is this old woman who is more baffling to me than Vyshinsky. For she was only one of our strays, actuated by no motives of self-advancement as was the case with many of the others. But somehow she caught the infection and it dehumanized her. My own sympathies were at the time with Trotsky, as Bunting’s were not, but to me ideology had ceased to count against this flood of ribald inhumanity which marked the rise of the apparatus men and the exit of the idealists. It was a night of many dramatic moments. There still rings in my ears the cry of a Native member of the Party: “Bunting is my God. Leave Bunting alone. He is my God, I say.”

Bunting died a few years later of a broken heart---all the time trying to regain an entry into the Party and proclaiming his loyalty to it.

From: Multitudes of Dreams: A Semi-Autobiographical Study, Kayor Publishing House, Johannesburg, 1949, pp. 134-137, 160-165.