A Pretoria boy: The story of South Africa’s “Public Enemy Number 1”
Peter Hain
Jonathan Ball, 2021
Peter Hain is widely known for his role in disrupting the South African rugby tour and stopping the South African cricket tour to England in 1969–1970, a role he played when he was barely 19. He wrote a book about it: Don’t play with apartheid: The background to the Stop the Seventy Tour campaign (1971).
He is a prolific writer, not a year going by without the publication of a political pamphlet; books are fewer, but not far between. In the 1980s, there was Political trials in Britain (1984), then A Putney plot (1987). Then a book break, followed by a flurry of publications. Outside in (2012) is a memoir of his 12 years as a Labour government minister, Ad & Wal (2014) is about his parents, Back to the future of socialism (2015) is his contribution to Labour political philosophy, Mandela: His essential life (2018) is about leadership, and The rhino conspiracy (2020) is a novel about the illegal rhino trade in South Africa.
In contrast, Pretoria boy (2021) is an origin narrative about how his youth in South Africa – he left for England in 1966 as a 15-year-old – determined much of his subsequent political career. He calls it an anecdotal memoir. He writes books that people can read in an afternoon or on a plane. “I wanted to write a book,” he said, talking about his essential Mandela book, https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/news/2018-07-28-peter-hain-the-making-of-a-traitor/, “that you could just pick up and read over a weekend, on a long plane journey or in a relaxed way, rather than thinking you really have to work at it.”
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How did a Pretoria childhood shape Peter Hain? His parents were British-South Africans (his mother of 1820 settler stock). His mother came from a family of Christian Scientists, sent him to a Christian Science Sunday school and taught him to overcome childhood pain and suffering through prayer. His father was “informal and friendly, though strict and severe” when required, while his mother was hyperactive, selfless and “devoted to her family and her husband”. His father had a university education, but his mother did not.
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How did a Pretoria childhood shape Peter Hain? His parents were British-South Africans (his mother of 1820 settler stock). His mother came from a family of Christian Scientists, sent him to a Christian Science Sunday school and taught him to overcome childhood pain and suffering through prayer. His father was “informal and friendly, though strict and severe” when required, while his mother was hyperactive, selfless and “devoted to her family and her husband”. His father had a university education, but his mother did not.
Growing up, he lived in rented houses, poor cousins to his mother’s side of the family, his staunch Christian Science uncle, the founder of the Stocks and Stocks construction company, but nonetheless he remembers a traditional white middle-class life.
He learned to loathe the apartheid government from his parents. Both his parents were moral or humanitarian liberals, and they became members of the Liberal Party soon after it was formed in 1953. Both were activists, harassed by police, a harassment that left a deep imprint on teenage Hain. He appears to have had a stronger emotional bond with his mother than his father. He learned activism from his mother and sport from his father.
He was the firstborn of four siblings and head prefect at Hatfield Primary, but did not stay long enough at Pretoria High to become head boy. There, his family’s notoriety led him to be bullied and shamed as a communist. The apartheid government seldom distinguished between liberals and communists, both of whose activities threatened to undermine or overthrow the state. It’s easy to forget that as many liberals were banned under the Suppression of Communism Act as communists.
Hain was a schoolboy in 1960 when the Sharpeville massacre took place, following which both radical liberals and radical communists decided it was time to give up nonviolent opposition to apartheid and turn to violent opposition to an illegitimate state.
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Hain was a schoolboy in 1960 when the Sharpeville massacre took place, following which both radical liberals and radical communists decided it was time to give up nonviolent opposition to apartheid and turn to violent opposition to an illegitimate state.
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Radical liberals chose symbolic or protest sabotage. Their aim was to shock white voters by blowing up installations but never endangering people. Radical communists also chose sabotage, not as an end in itself, but rather as a prelude to insurrection. Cloaked in secrecy, communists decided to pursue an armed struggle through guerrilla warfare in the countryside, with the aim of instigating an insurrection against the apartheid state. While the communists’ campaign had little success, and leading radical communists were arrested at the Rivonia farm in June 1963 and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1964, the radical liberal campaign came to a horrific and tragic end that in turn did much to destroy the Liberal Party.
Hain’s parents were not radical liberals, and they remained committed to nonviolence. Still, they were activists, running the Pretoria party machine and helping members who had run into trouble with the law; the authorities banned first his mother and then his father, locking them under house arrest and taking away their incomes. His father was an architect who specialised in hospital laboratory design. Their involvement in politics also put immense pressure on Hain’s siblings, who were required to grow up early and fend for themselves.
On top of this, teenage Hain was drawn into a tragic event at this time. John Harris, a 27-year-old radical liberal, placed a bomb on the Johannesburg railway station concourse. His aim was to show white voters that there was active opposition to an illegitimate regime that had authorised the massacre of 69 black protestors at Sharpeville, a crime in which, in his view, white citizens were complicit. The bomb he planted killed a woman, maimed a child for life and seriously injured 23 people. Harris was caught, tried, sentenced to death and hanged. He was the only white anti-apartheid activist executed in South Africa.
Hain’s parents knew John Harris and his wife, Ann, well. In fact, beginning in September 1964, when the Harris trial began, Ann Harris moved in with the Hains with her six-week-old child and stayed for 18 months. She became part of the Hain family. Never condoning what John Harris did, the Hains stuck by her. “I was overwhelmed by a sort of blank helplessness and deep anger,” Hain writes. “Like my parents, I condemned what John had done. But under any civilised system, he would have continued to devote his life to teaching children and would never have been involved in the act that ended his life so grotesquely.” Because his father was banned, it fell to 15-year-old Hain to read out the funeral address for Harris, an atheist, in the crematorium chapel.
After planting the bomb, Harris phoned a warning to the station police and to two national newspapers half an hour before it was timed to explode, but no warning was relayed to station commuters on the concourse. It has been suggested that this failure to clear the area was an act rather than an omission and, in fact, was authorised by BJ Vorster, then Minister of Justice, so as to inflict maximum political damage on the Liberal Party and to unleash a backlash in the white electorate against liberals and communists. It’s a belief that Hain repeats in his book, but it is significant that Hugh Lewin, a radical liberal who served seven years in jail for his part in the “protest sabotage” campaign, does not endorse this view in his beautifully written memoir, Stones against the mirror (2011). Hain’s endorsement serves to show how evil the apartheid regime was, as well as his belief in the reach of ministerial power. This is hardly surprising, given his receipt in London of a letter bomb in 1972 that did not explode and his framing for a bank robbery in 1974 by Special Branch operatives.
It comes as no surprise, then, to read about the role Hain played in the assassination of Jonas Savimbi, the leader of a rebel force destabilising the government in Angola. Having left South Africa for England in 1966, and having joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement, agitated against apartheid sport, served an apprenticeship in the Union Movement, become a Labour member of parliament for a seat in Wales, and then a minister of state in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Hain found himself able to shape British foreign policy in Africa. “I issued instructions for Britain to help identify Savimbi’s whereabouts, and to pass this information on to the Angolan authorities,” he writes. “As a direct result, in February 2002 Savimbi was trapped and killed by Angolan forces in remote eastern Angola.”
Less surprising than this public admission is Hain’s account of how Thabo Mbeki tried to dissuade him from acting against Savimbi:
“Thabo Mbeki had taken me aside at a summit meeting in 2000 in Cairo and sought to persuade me to back off.
“Whatever his activities, Savimbi is an African,” Thabo told me. “The MPLA are mestiços” – meaning of mixed African and Portuguese blood.
“But Savimbi was sponsored by apartheid and he has been destroying Angola for years,” I retorted.
“Yes, of course. But you must understand, Savimbi represents an important African majority in Angola,” he said.
Hain is magisterial in his contempt: “Thabo’s spurious attempts at Africanism cut no ice against Savimbi’s primitive fascism.”
Hain is a Mandela fan. Mandela set high standards after the deep corruption of the apartheid regime. His reputation as an icon of moral probity and soaring political leadership remained intact long after he gave up the presidency in 1999. Hain continued to take his calls and to engage with his frustrations long into his retirement. Hain takes comfort from the fact that Mandela was as “contemptuous” of Mugabe as he was. “Mandela remained tormented by the havoc and terror unleashed by ZANU–PF.” In Hain’s eyes, Mugabe “prostituted the ideals of the freedom struggle”. He held Mbeki “equally culpable” through his do-nothing “constructive engagement” with Mugabe.
By this time, Hain’s liberalism had morphed with the times into social democracy and social justice ideology. The old ideological warfare between liberals and communists of the 1960s was long gone: the communists were no longer a proxy for Russian insurgency (as was evident in a number of African countries).
Now, he sees neoliberalism as the biggest obstacle to social justice policies worldwide. “Under the choking universal fog of global neoliberalism,” he writes, “implementing policies for greater equality and social justice is extremely difficult.”
Nonetheless, he holds communists responsible for facilitating corruption in South Africa on a grand scale. “[T]he SACP also has questions to answer about its culpability in both South Africa’s and the ANC’s degeneration under Jacob Zuma,” he writes. “It backed his capture of power in 2007 and continued to stick by him until 2017, when it switched to supporting Cyril Ramaphosa. But, as the only communist party across the world to be part of a government in a parliamentary democracy, it has yet to reconcile offering an independent position with sharing responsibility for office and standing for good governance.”
He finds little promise among contemporary liberals. “Admittedly, the DA lost its way once Ramaphosa became president in early 2018,” he writes, “and its neoliberal economic agenda will never answer South Africa’s needs or win majority support. Aside from its flawed and confused leadership and lack of clarity about what it really stands for, the DA’s economic policy will ultimately prove to be an epitaph unless it presents something credible to voters.”
And the ANC under Ramaphosa continues its anti-business and anti-imperial policies; Hain finds this puzzling. “For all the good intentions of President Ramaphosa, South Africa’s government has been gripped by a frustrating sclerosis,” he writes. “For example, in May 2019 I introduced to its authorities a proposal to recover looted funds from the Gupta family and their enablers, including international banks and companies, on a no-win-no-fee basis. It seemed a no-brainer.” No action was taken.
Overall, this is how Hain assesses the impact of his Pretoria childhood on his personality and politics:
In retrospect, my Pretoria boyhood was formative, cementing values, deepening commitment, moulding character and inserting steel. Despite the harassment, despite the hanging trauma, despite the jailing and banning, despite life under Special Branch siege, those were halcyon days of wonderful parents and close siblings, witnessing and experiencing comradeship, bravery, selflessness, sacrifice, duty, excitement, passion: the best of humanity – and of course, the outdoor life of sport, fun and play in the sun. I look back on those Pretoria days less as ones of darkness and threat, more of inspiration from special people during a special time.
- The historian Rob Turrell is the author of White mercy: A study of the death penalty in South Africa (2005).
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