Shadow of Liberation. Vishnu Padayachee
what I am saying about Vella is that the conflict that opened up, and according to him … he described to me the occasion where on a boat in Moscow, while they were having a meeting in Moscow, on the boat trip he was approached. He didn’t tell me who; I don’t know if it was Michael Harmel, who put the issue to him that he had to choose between working at the Bank of China and his representing the party. He thought this was an unreasonable proposition and he thought it was a cruel proposition but already there was enough unhappiness in his relationship with many of them. It was one thing for comrades that had gone to London fleeing from post-Rivonia … it was another thing for [people like] Vella who had family and everything settled in London to start to say I will give up my job. Where do you go? I know that before that the Soviets were courting Vella to come to help set up a Russian Bank, the equivalent of the State Bank of China, and therefore approached Vella and offered him a higher formal position than what he occupied at the Bank of China. And his response was to say to the Soviets, after he thought it through, to say, no, look chaps, I will stay with the Bank of China … I know my position, I know they will not take a Chinese and replace me. So my future is more secure with the Bank of China. That had little to do at that stage with any ideological issue (Maharaj interview, 16 August 2016).
Pillay’s widow, Patsy, also a former Party member and friend of Ruth First, now in her early nineties, recalls that Joe Slovo visited Vella and her at their London flat. It was there (after asking Patsy to leave the room) that he informed Vella that he could not continue to serve as the party representative in Europe or on the Central Committee as long as he continued to work at the State Bank of China (Patsy Pillay to John Sender, email correspondence with Padayachee, 29 June 2017).
As Vella observed to his friend and comrade Ronald Segal: ‘The SACP then decided to side-line me, and since then I ceased to have any connection with them. But my relations with Oliver Tambo and the ANC remained close and undisturbed’ (Segal’s biographical notes on Vella, in Vella Pillay private archives).6
With growing calls for sanctions against South Africa at the United Nations after Sharpeville and in the wake of the UN arms embargo in 1962, Pillay became deeply involved in the campaign to boycott South African exports to the UK. He spoke on the same platform as Julius Nyerere (then president of the Tanganyika African National Union), Trevor Huddlestone and others on 26 June 1959 when the campaign to launch the Boycott South African Goods campaign was launched in Holborn Hall in London. This was a campaign that led to the formation to the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, a key branch of the global Anti-Apartheid Movement (Gurney 2000: 123). Pillay would serve with great distinction as its treasurer and then vice chairperson for many years. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 2003, then President Thabo Mbeki sent Pillay a message, which read in part: ‘Your outstanding contribution to the liberation of our people will always be remembered with fondness, particularly your role in establishing one of the greatest solidarity movements of our times – the British Anti-Apartheid Movement.’ In his tribute to Pillay on that occasion, Ahmed Kathrada observed, ‘Many of us knew you as a brilliant economist and a dedicated freedom fighter.’ Kader Asmal, whom Pillay had taken under his wing and mentored, noted that ‘the only honour that Vella would want is a commitment from all of us to ensure that we consolidate and deepen the democratic gains which so many freedom-loving South Africans fought and died for’ (Letters in Vella Pillay private archives). While involved in all this South African struggle work, Pillay was invited by Ken Livingstone to join the Greater London Enterprise Board, with the special task of assisting the Greater London Council to promote the local economy and enhance opportunities for blacks in London. All this while he remained an employee of the State Bank of China.
After he arrived in London, Maharaj quickly joined up with Pillay in the boycott campaign, including via the Africa Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Gurney 2000: 133). Maharaj recalls that Pillay was the SACP contact person in London, a representative of the Central Committee, and the underground conduit for New Age, the banned ANC-supporting South African newspaper. ‘Exiled students from South Africa – Kader Asmal, Steve Naidoo, Manna Chetty, Essop and Aziz Pahad, Thabo Mbeki – found the Pillay household [in Muswell Hill] a home away from home’ (O’Malley 2007: 80). Maharaj recalls a meeting of the Africa Committee at the Marx Memorial Library, at which the agrarian question in Africa was debated. Jack Woddiss, one of the participants, questioned the view that the transfer of land to the state (on behalf of the people) under socialism would automatically raise productivity, a view that Maharaj had until that time taken for granted. It was one of the few real debates over economic and development policy that Maharaj had witnessed at that time.
By 1978, Pillay had completed his MSc in economics at Birkbeck College, University of London, obtaining First Class marks for his quantitative and econometric work and a Merit pass overall. There were very few South African Congress Movement activists who received comparably rigorous training in economics, although a few were trained in the rigidly orthodox economics of the former Soviet bloc (Padayachee and Sender 2018).
Pillay researched and published widely on the South African economy and related subjects throughout the 40 or so years he lived and worked in London. He often used the pseudonym ‘P. Tlale’, especially when he wrote for the African Communist. In the January–March 1964 edition, he wrote ‘Sanctions against Apartheid’ under that pseudonym; in the July–September issue of that same year he wrote ‘The Apartheid Economy Today’, and in the September–December 1965 edition he wrote ‘The Imperialist State in Apartheid’. ‘The Apartheid Economy Today’ was written well before the revisionists Harold Wolpe and Martin Legassick published their seminal work in around 1972; it placed a Marxist imprint on South African economic historiography, and demonstrated a sharp appreciation of the complex interrelationships between race, class and the apartheid state in South African capitalist accumulation. He understood clearly that the much-celebrated ‘economic boom’ that South Africa was experiencing at the time was based on class exploitation and racial oppression and that it would not be sustained because of that fact alone. In fact, he predicted that the repressive state controls needed to keep it going would prove to be its ultimate undoing:
Subjected to intense exchange controls and attracted by the demands created through the growing volume of overseas investment as well as of the war economy, South Africa’s ruling capitalists have again joined with the Verwoerd regime to intensify the rate of African exploitation with all its explosive political and other consequences. But not even the employment of Hitler’s techniques of economic control and organization can stop the explosion of the South African crisis. On the contrary, it will hasten it (Pillay 1964: 59).
Pillay wrote many monographs for the Anti-Apartheid Movement, for the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid (where he was good friends with Enuga S Reddy, the renowned head of the Centre). For the latter organisation and in his capacity as vice chairman of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, he wrote ‘The Role of Transnational Corporations in Apartheid South Africa’ (August 1981) and ‘The Role of Gold in the Economy of Apartheid South Africa’ (March 1981). Demonstrating his close familiarity with European economic affairs, he published articles in Africa South, including ‘The Belgian Treasury’ (1960) and ‘The European Economic Community and Africa’ (1958).
In the early 1980s, Pillay joined with sympathetic Marxist economist and activist Laurence Harris and later with Ben Fine in establishing an economic research capacity for the ANC in London. Harris had a long-standing and active engagement with the ANC, which is respected in South Africa to this day, and he had been closely associated with the ANC–SACP’s armed wing, MK. He is reported as assisting in running guns and other weapons for MK along the Botswana border (Keable 2012), and as being involved in an attempt to travel by boat down the eastern coast of Africa from Mombasa to the Transkei coast on an MK assignment (Jordan interview, 4 August 2017). Together with members of the Research Unit of the ANC’s Department of Information (and from the late 1980s with the DEP), Harris formed a research consortium called Economic Research on South Africa. EROSA was set up on the model already established by the Research on Education for South Africa (RESA) project, organised by another South African exile academic and activist, Harold Wolpe, famous for his work on the articulation of modes of production and colonialism of a special type (Fine 2010: 26). An unswerving commitment to the struggle against the heinous system of apartheid primarily drove these