Between Empire and Revolution: A Life of Sidney Bunting, 1873–1937
By Allison Drew. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007; pp. 294. £60.00 (hb). ISBN 13:9781851968930. Reviewed by Richard Rathbone, University of Aberystwyth. ©Richard Rathbone, 2008.
Sidney Bunting was the privileged child of successful, conscientious Methodist parents. Throughout his childhood they rubbed shoulders with the literally great and good the most distinguished of whom was W.E. Gladstone. It was a home dominated by good works and high culture. Sidney, a clever and musical boy, was expensively educated at St. Pauls School and Magdalen College Oxford. By late 19th century standards his background was liberal even radical.
Like many of his class, the young Sidney was an enthusiast for liberal empire if that is not entirely oxymoronic. Shortly after the outbreak of the Anglo‐Boer War he sailed for the Cape and volunteered to fight. After the Peace of Vereeniging he stayed on in South Africa where some of his ancestors had established mission stations in the early 19th century and where there remained a family‐owned estate. As he had begun to practise as a solicitor in London before the war, he recommenced his legal career in Johannesburg. He conformed to the expectations of a white professional man in that rich, rough mining town. He joined racially segregated clubs and mixed with the right, white people. While there is no real attempt here to explain this, from the end of the first decade of the 20th century he began to sympathise with the plight of labour, albeit white labour; one suspects that this owed something to the social conscience which surrounded him in childhood. He threw in his lot with the Labour Party, a soi disant socialist organisation which perversely preached job and pay discrimination.
The imminent outbreak of war appears to have prodded him leftwards. He took an increasingly unpopular anti‐war stand and this brought him into contact with activists like Philip Roux. The author tells us virtually nothing about the emotional and intellectual navigation which took Bunting from a South African own‐brand racialist faux socialism towards the real thing. But by 1915 he was using the language of the far left, linking up with local activists and beginning to argue that the emancipation of the South African working class required an immediate ending to discriminatory measures such as pass laws, residential discrimination and oppressive labour contracts; he was arguing that the South African workers of all colours were oppressed and must fight that oppression together. He began to work with, and not just condescendingly for, African workers. And by 1915 he is clearly reading Marx and regarding that canon as more than merely instructive.
Revolutionary ideas and an identification with the struggles of black people began to isolate him from many of his old friends, from many of the organised white working class and importantly from the state. He began to be harassed -dogged by detectives and not infrequently taken to court and even imprisoned. The inspiration of the Russian revolution and the Comintern's direction led to a merger of South Africa's few and small far left organisations and Bunting became a founder member of the Communist Party of South Africa in October 1920. In the following 16 years of his life he and his wife were to be deeply involved with the CPSA, an involvement that involved visiting Weimar Germany and then Moscow for Comintern meetings. But prominent as he was, the last part of his life was spent unrewardingly running uphill. What had been in legal terms for whites at least a relatively liberal state which had tended to tolerate radicals as cranks rather than subversives became increasingly coercive with the reforms introduced by Oswald Pirow; it became more and more dangerous to participate in radical multi‐racial politics. But even more damaging was the self‐indulgent fraternal infighting which hamstrung radical opposition in the inter‐war period; that infighting could descend to the worst depths of personal defamation, racist slander and cruel exclusions. Bunting was a victim of this and although the Party staged a show funeral, a ‘Red Funeral’, for him, those who professed grief at his graveside included many who had stabbed him in the back.
Sidney Bunting was a fascinating man but much of what made him into a figure straight out of an Ibsen play remains unexplained and even un‐interrogated in this biography. There is far too much stodgy and frankly uninteresting detail in the first 60 pages of this book and far too little of the kinds of exploration of a life that one expects from a biographer. Each of the step‐changes in his life, and they were huge, remains a mystery; for example was Philip Roux, Eddie Roux's remarkable father, his mentor? When did Bunting first encounter Marx's writing? How important to his intellectual development was his wife, Becky Notlewitz a refugee from Tsarist anti‐Semitism who had spent time in London's Whitechapel, a radical hot‐spot, before embarking for South Africa in 1914 where she joined the International Socialist League? And what should we make of a man, a passionate advocate of labour struggle, who maintained an active paid involvement as a director of the family estate in Natal, which was clearly NOT a workers’ paradise, until as late as 1923 and continued to bank dividends from that concern until his death? And above all why does the book end so abruptly with his death? There is no attempt to evaluate Bunting's longer‐term contribution to the evolution of not only the CPSA but also the ANC and given the author's earlier scholarship, this is a real loss.