1. Bill Sutherland
2. George Houser
3. E. S. Reddy
4. Charlene Mitchell
5. Mary Jane Patterson
6. Ben Magubane
7. Robert Van Lierop
8. Prexy Nesbitt
9. Jennifer Davis
10. Geri Augusto
11. Sylvia Hill, 2003
12. Edgar Lockwood
13. Cherri Waters
14. Dumisani Kumalo
15. Frank Beeman
16. Sylvia Hill, 2004

No Easy Victories Interview: Ben Magubane

Ben Magubane, then a student at UCLA, leads a protest march in Los Angeles after Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu were sentenced to life in prison in 1964. Photo courtesy of Ben Magubane.

The following text is the transcript of one of the interviews that was part of the reseearch for the book No Easy Victories. With the assistance of Aluka (aluka.org), sixteen of the interviews were transcribed and prepared for presentation on the web. Each transcript was reviewed by the interviewee, and a short introduction prepared by one of the No Easy Victories editors.

Ben Magubane

" When Mandela and Sisulu were finally sentenced to life in prison, it really was a terrible moment for me and other South Africans who were overseas. We [Ben Magubane and Martin Legassick] decided we should do something, and the only thing we could do was demonstrate in front of a bank [on Beverly Boulevard]."

-Ben Magubane

Introduction

Dr. Bernard Magubane, known to friends and colleagues as Ben, is one of the distinguished elders among South African social scientists. He now directs the South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET) in Pretoria, which is engaged in an ambitious effort to document four decades of the South African freedom struggle, from 1960 through the first democratic elections in 1994 (see http://www.sadet.co.za). He is also among the many South Africans who spent decades of this period in exile, part of a diaspora of struggle that played key roles in making South African freedom an issue engaging activists around the world.

Magubane was one of the first to come to the United States, arriving for graduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) at the end of 1961. After completing his doctorate, he spent three years teaching in Zambia. He returned to the United States in 1970 and took up a post in anthropology at the University of Connecticut, where he spent the next 28 years. Among his books, The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa, published in 1979 by Monthly Review Press, was particularly influential among activists and progressive scholars in providing a politically engaged Marxist interpretation of the South African struggle.

Throughout his time outside South Africa, Magubane continued his previous engagement as an active member of the African National Congress (ANC). With fellow South African graduate student Martin Legassick, he helped launch a solidarity group in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. Later he retained a close connection to activist students and scholars connected to the UCLA journal Ufahamu, founded in 1970. During his time in Zambia he established close ties with the ANC exile leadership based there, and he traveled widely to speak on the South African liberation struggle throughout almost three decades of teaching at the University of Connecticut.

Magubane's doctoral dissertation The Ties that Bind, completed in 1967 but not published until two decades later, focused on African American consciousness of Africa. More generally, his work always included a strong emphasis on the broader historical and international context of South Africa within the history of British imperialism and global racism. Trained in sociology, Magubane was one of the research assistants for Leo Kuper's classic study of An African Bourgeoisie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). Influenced particularly by ANC colleagues in Zambia such as Jack Simons, he was among the leading progressive African scholars critical of the assumptions and biases of mainstream Western scholarship about Africa.

Magubane's academic career is well reflected in his own publications. SADET is publishing a multivolume collection entitled The Road to Democracy, organized by decades, which includes chapters on the overseas presence of the liberation movements. Papers of the overseas missions of the African National Congress are included in the listings of archives at the University of Fort Hare ( http://www.ufh.ac.za/collections/). The New York mission of the ANC was opened in 1972 by Thami Mhlambiso and was headed by Johnny Makatini from 1977 to 1983.

The interview below focuses on Magubane's background and his early years in the United States. It provides a glimpse of a broader network of South African exiles that extended across race and party lines and around the country, long before the upsurge of anti-apartheid organizing in the late 1970s and the 1980s. For instance, a January 1969 gathering in Raleigh, North Carolina-the Kennedy-King Memorial Forum of the Chief Albert Luthuli Memorial Fund-was organized by ANC supporter Rev. Gladstone Ntlabati, then working out of Atlanta. Included among others on the program were Magubane's UCLA colleagues Martin Legassick and Anthony Ngubo; Rev. Chris Nteta and Rev. Ken Carstens from Boston, two South Africans who were stalwarts of the anti-apartheid cause in New England over the years; as well as musician Jonas Gwangwa and Pan Africanist Congress supporter Peter Molotsi.[1] Magubane's academic advisor who preceded him to California was a prominent member of South Africa's Liberal Party, and Magubane also refers to his close ties with Dr. A. C. Jordan, a prominent member of the Unity Movement.

The United States was never the center of gravity for the African National Congress or other South African liberation organizations, which more easily garnered support in Africa, the Soviet bloc, and Western Europe, dealing either with governments or with more centralized solidarity groups with links to established political parties. From the late 1970s, official representatives to the United Nations, such as David Sibeko of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and Johnny Makatini of the ANC, were active in reaching out to groups around the country. Nevertheless, it was less official representatives than exiles such as those mentioned above and others in different sectors-musicians such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, and writer-activists such as Ezekiel Mphahlele and Dennis Brutus, to name only a few of the better known-that made apartheid real to tens of thousands of Americans.

William Minter
September 2004

Transcript

Interviewee: Ben Magubane
Interviewer: William Minter
Location: Pretoria, South Africa
Date: March 15, 2004

Q: Ben Magubane on March 15, 2004. Go ahead.

MAGUBANE: I left South Africa December 21, 1961 to go to UCLA. But on my way to UCLA I stopped in New York, to spend Christmas with a friend and some people that I had met when I was a graduate student at University of Natal.

Q: Do you remember particular names of -were they Americans or South Africans?

MAGUBANE: Yeah, I mean there was Anthony Ngubo.

And then, in a strange way, during the summer of '61, a group of American students and a Crossroads Africa[2]-remember that?

Q: Yes.

MAGUBANE: -organization had gone to Ghana, I think to build a school. And then after building the school, staying in Ghana for six weeks, they decided to travel around Africa.

Q: Summer '61.

MAGUBANE: Yeah. And then one of them, or a couple of them, came to Natal and visited the university. This guy was the son of Plimpton,[3] who was the chancellor at Amherst, and a brother to deputy ambassador to the U.N., deputy to Stevenson. So we really had a good time, and drank, went to the beachfront, in an area that was a no-man's-land. There were a mixed group of people. And then, when he left, he gave me his address and said, if ever you come to the United States, please give me a call.

And then in '59 or '60, somebody from the American Information Service-I don't remember his name-had come to talk to " non-European students" at the university and one of the questions was, why is it that non-Europeans never, ever apply for scholarships to the United States? Was it just because we know that we didn't really get travel papers? And he said, are any of you interested? And I was just finishing my master's at the time. I said I would be finishing my master's and I would be interested.

Q: Were you in economics or history?

MAGUBANE: No, in sociology.

Q: Oh, you were in sociology.

MAGUBANE: Yeah. So I said, okay, give me your address. I'll send you the application form. I send him; in three months he wrote back. I think that was about February or so. And he said that I'd been given an international education fellowship with IT -

Q: Institute for International Education, IIE?

MAGUBANE: Yes, IIE, yeah. I should then start applying for papers. Well, Kuper,[4] who was my professor, helped me to get the application.

Q: So he was the professor in Natal?

MAGUBANE: Yeah.

Q: He had not-He later went to-

MAGUBANE: That's why I went to UCLA.

Q: You went at the same time.

MAGUBANE: No, to follow him.

Q: To follow him, right.

MAGUBANE: So my passport never came, until Alan Paton [5] had to intervene. How he intervened, I guess he called the American ambassador in Pretoria and tell him about my story, and from the story that I have from him, the American ambassador said that, if they don't give him the passport, we are going to review scholarship exchange with white universities. And the beneficiaries, of course, were Africans because there were those that were going for their sciences at MIT and other places, through the institute.

So my passport came just before the first explosion in 1961, the December 16 explosion. And it became quite obvious that I may not be able to leave, because they were arresting a lot of people who were at university.

Q: Can I step back a bit? Were you already involved in the ANC at the time?

MAGUBANE: Oh, yeah. Yes, yeah. But even though I was in a strange situation, I was already married, and already had my three kids by then. I started to prepare for university entrance the same year that I got married, 1953.

Q: 1953. And at that time you were already involved, in '53.

MAGUBANE: Remotely.

Q: Remotely. So you were aware of the Defiance Campaign?[6]

MAGUBANE: Oh, yes, very much so. I used to attend the meetings. So I said to my mother, well, best thing for me is to leave with my passport, and go and stay with Peter,[7] my cousin, in Johannesburg. You can then send my clothes to him. That was very lucky for me, because the following day after I had left, the Special Branch [security police] came to the house. Somehow my mother heard they had asked somewhere where my house was, and some kids had run over to say to say that the Special Branch has gone to your house. So my mother took all my New Age and all my pamphlets and literally made a bonfire of them. I've never regretted it, but that was it.

So I stayed with Peter Magubane. And then on the 21st, of course I went to the airport, and just at the check-in, there the Special Branch was. They went through everything that I had, through every pamphlet that I was going to take with me to the United States. The plane was delayed by almost three hours whilst they were talking to Home Affairs in Pretoria whether I should be detained or not but they eventually let me. My passport, which I still have, was only valid for a year, and when I tried to renew it, they refused. I think I still have the correspondence, maybe here or still in the States because we still have the house in the States.

So here I'm living one of the most exciting periods in South African resistance history, the bomb that had exploded, we had gone to Pietermaritzburg to listen to Mandela when he emerged from the underground. It was very, very exciting. So my heart was really not in the States. And it was worse when I visited Harlem, where I saw how black folks also lived there. The houses may have been better, but conditions were just as bad in Harlem. So I met David Plimpton, in fact, I spent Christmas at his house. This is a student. And, yeah, we spend Christmas Eve at his uncle's place in Long Island estate, the ambassador. It was this huge house -here is this someone who comes from a three-room home, and [laughter].

So I got introduced, and because the Plimptons were very rich, they lived in this huge, really, mansion, in an estate, with I think-I don't know if they had horses or not, but it was that kind. And then the older son of the ambassador, he edited a magazine eventually. You remember him?

Q: I don't.

MAGUBANE: Francis Plimpton, but [the son] not Francis Plimpton the ambassador. He edited a magazine, a sort of a literary magazine. He had gone to Harvard

Q: And David, the one that you met?

MAGUBANE: He was going to Yale for school at the time. And the son of Francis Plimpton, the ambassador, had done his graduate work at Harvard, and he had this friend from Virginia who was visiting, very rich. And when we were drinking, this guy started pouring his heart out about racism in Virginia, that if I were-no way he could admit me to his house in Virginia, because of the father and racism and so forth.

So then after New Year's, I left New York to fly over to Los Angeles. Well, I already had a master's, but at UCLA they wanted me to do another master's to prove myself, and if I did well in my master's, they would advance me to candidacy for the Ph.D. And then, in '63, I was advanced to candidacy with a very good grade, in fact.

And then Thompson, Leonard Thompson[8] came to UCLA. I had met him at University of Natal, where he was interviewing African students on his way to the United States. And then Martin [Legassick][9] followed Thompson, to study history at Oxford, where he was studying physics, and had done very well. So Martin and I became very, very good friends. And when Mandela and Sisulu were finally sentenced to life in prison, it really was a terrible moment, especially when they were arrested, for me and other South Africans who were overseas. We decided we should do something, and the only thing we could do was demonstrate in front of a bank that was selling Krugerrands [the South African gold coins].

Q: And you were aware of the Krugerrand from newspapers, or-

MAGUBANE: From newspapers.

Q: -people told you, or were you in touch with any organization other than ANC, like American Committee on Africa, or any other that was in New York, or-

MAGUBANE: Well, you know, there was Mary Louise Hooper,[10] remember her?

Q: I remember the name.

MAGUBANE: The name, okay.

Q: And she was at the American Committee on Africa.

MAGUBANE: And she was friends with the Kupers. And then-I met her at the Kupers' and we became friends. She was quite a wealthy woman.

Q: But did she live in Los Angeles? She lived in New York.

MAGUBANE: No, she lived in New York, but also in San Francisco. And in San Francisco she was a good friend of a woman who was secretary to W. E. B. Du Bois. So one time Hilda Kuper and I were invited by Mary Louise to go and give talks, and talk in San Francisco. So we went for lunch at this woman's house. In fact, she gave me an autographed copy of her Du Bois thesis, which was published as, you know, the Atlantic Slave Trade. It is a book that I cherish very much.

Q: Do you remember her name?

MAGUBANE: I don't remember the name but I can check it, but my book is still in the States.

Q: Just thinking about the historical connections, when you came there from your reading and political education and study in Natal, were you already very well aware of W. E. B. Du Bois and other-

MAGUBANE: Not really, no.

Q: No. So it was once you came that-

MAGUBANE: I was introduced, and I read him ferociously, and I still read him ever since. So Martin and I then demonstrated in front of this bank on Beverly Boulevard. The area is an extremely affluent stretch of West Los Angeles.

Q: And it was just the two of you?

MAGUBANE: No, a group.

Q: And a group from the university.

MAGUBANE: From the university

Q: About how many?

MAGUBANE: The story is in the L.A. Times. It has my picture there, which I think would fit very validly in your book, where I am carrying a placard.

Q: If later you can identify the date, we might be able to-

MAGUBANE: Well, Martin might be able to give you the date, but it was in the L.A. Times. But I had two stories inthe L.A. Times, the other was one summer when I was working for the American Friends Service Committee.

Q: Which summer was that?

MAGUBANE: Either '64 or '65.

Q: Did they have an office in L.A., or was it Pasadena.

MAGUBANE: Pasadena. It was in Pasadena. We had done some research for them, on the unemployed youth, and what the American Friends could do for them.

Q: In L.A.?

MAGUBANE: In L.A. I think that's when I met Bill Sutherland.[11] Because I did meet him in the States, but I think it must have been there. So really, I consider ourselves to have been among the first to organize an anti- apartheid movement.

And then we started a drive to collect clothing for the ANC fellows who were in Tanzania. It really was a very, very successful drive. Now, I don't remember whether it was the American Committee [on Africa] that helped us ship the clothing. Probably it was. Because then I had met-what's his name? A reverend gentleman who started the American Committee.

Q: George Houser.

MAGUBANE: George Houser somehow was-he was known to Mary Louise Hooper.

Q: I think she was actually on the staff of ACOA for some period.

MAGUBANE: I think it was Mary Louise Hooper who invited-introduced me to George Houser. But for me, being at UCLA was that I left my family in South Africa. After December '61, I didn't see them until 1965.

Q: They didn't come to the States during your first time.

MAGUBANE: They did-

Q: Oh, but only in '65.

MAGUBANE: -'65, yeah, for a year.

Q: And you already had three children then.

MAGUBANE: I had already three children. So I had to try and raise money for them. My scholarship, International Institute of Education scholarship, only paid my stipend for the active semester, but I have nothing for the summer. So I had to fend for myself. It was very, very difficult. I had to work in a car wash on Sunset Boulevard, where we were washing the cars of movie stars and other celebrities.

And then I also-a professor who was a friend of Kuper, in fact I met the professor at Kuper. He had a room in the back of his house way out in Malibu, and-well, he said, since I didn't have any money to pay for rent, he could give that room to me, provided I woke up in the morning to clean the yard and water the plants. So for me, that was wonderful. So I lived behind and worked in the garden, and then at eight I would take a bus to this car wash.

But then, through the Foreign Student Office at UCLA, families used to ask for Thanksgiving that they should be given names of students so that they could invite them. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of this family, but one Thanksgiving, I think about like in '62 or '63, they invited me to their house, and have turkey. But also introduced me to a medical doctor who was head of the Kaiser Foundation Hospital. And so we got a job there, unregistered, because we're working from 3:30 to 11:30 at night. But we had to drive to Hollywood, to the hospital. What we were doing, we were working in the basement, pulling out what were called dead files, people who where no longer patients. And that paid us a minimum wage. I don't know what the minimum wage was at the time. Was it $1.50?

Q: I don't know.

MAGUBANE: But it was very, very low. I figure probably made about $50 a week. And from that, I had to save as much as I can, so that I could pay the fare for my wife and for my kids. But I really just couldn't do it.

And in a very strange way-I don't remember who it was. I had given out to some people that I was coming to the United States. They introduced me to this guy who had interest in-he was a professor of medicine at University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Scott. And his father was a curator of the Harvard-museum where you keep skeletons and stones and fossils-Very nice old man. When I was at the University of Natal, Alan Paton's son, Jonathan, was also a graduate student in English, so I had come to know Alan Paton quite well, and a lot of Americans used to visit Alan Paton. I think it was probably through Alan Paton and visiting his house that my name had been given to Dr. Scott, that happened, I was going to be coming to the United States, etc. etc. And I remember that he wrote to me and I wrote back, and he sent me two books, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, and that famous book about Americans abroad, The Ugly American.

So he sent me those two books, just to familiarize me on what United States was like. So just before I left, in fact I took them with me back to the United States. I don't know what ultimately become of them. Maybe I still have them among my books. So those are the books that I was reading.

And I was in the United States-There were a lot of students from the Congo there, who were brought after Lumumba's assassination.[12] Lot of Nigerian students. Lot of Kenyan students, and some Tanzanian students at UCLA.

Q: Just go back for a minute. When Lumumba was assassinated, how aware of that were people in South Africa?

MAGUBANE: Oh, very much.

Q: Very much. It was-

MAGUBANE: Yeah, even a demonstration at the United Nations by African Americans.

Q: That was covered in South Africa.

MAGUBANE: In the South African press. But more in New Age.

Q: So New Age-

MAGUBANE: I used to read New Age like a bible, every Friday, Saturday it came out. So I can remember that one time this man-he was a friend of Nana Mahomo,[13] was an African-American, was a labor organizer. I'm sure he was working for the CIA, in fact.

Q: Yes, I'm sure he would have been.

MAGUBANE: He's a well-known name. He came to UCLA, and he was organizing a conference in Virginia, in fact. I was among the students that were invited. Now, we had become very suspicious of the CIA at the University of Natal. So I went to this conference. I watched students from the Congo, Nigeria-

Q: This was an African students' conference?

MAGUBANE: Yes.

Q: Do you know when, or-

MAGUBANE: Either '63-it should be '63 or '62. I don't remember. And then there was one student of Jewish extraction, was very friendly to the African students, but later it came out that in fact he was CIA.

Q: You don't remember his name?

MAGUBANE: I don't remember his name. But I became very suspicious at that meeting that maybe they were trying to recruit me, well, they knew my association. But I [had a] very hard time. And Coleman, for instance, remember Coleman?

Q: Yes, who did the studies on Nigeria.

MAGUBANE: James Coleman.[14] He sat on funds from Rockefeller, and he favored mostly Nigerian students. And one of them was a very good friend of mine named Tony Asika, who ultimately became the first governor of the East after secession. Besides his fees and books being paid by the Rockefeller scholarship, had a stipend of $350 a month at that time.

Q: Which was a lot at that time.

MAGUBANE: Oh, it was. It was more than a lot. So Tony drank cognac, and so forth, but we became friends. And then he rented a house at the corner of San Vicente and Beverly Boulevard, on the way to Santa Monica. And then it had a little room that could be a basement, but this had a toilet and a kitchen, and the owner asked me to pay $45 a month, which I was able to raise from working at the car wash and working at Kaiser Permanente.

MAGUBANE: And then someone organized a conference on South Africa in Washington, DC. They paid my fare, and Martin was able-Legassick was able to raise money to go to this conference. But then he didn't have the money to come back [laughter]. So it was really a very good anti-apartheid movement. Martin-here was a white South African who identified with ANC, and who also had gone to Ghana as a NUSAS [National Union of South African Students]representative, and then gone to Tanzania. And South Africa had withdrawn his passport. But it did happen that Martin's father was English, and had gone to the South African navy base-

Q: Simonstown.

MAGUBANE: Simonstown, where he was teaching, and during the Second World War he was-Martin's father was a commander of a ship where Thompson had served.

Q: Oh, where Leonard Thompson had served, right, okay.

MAGUBANE: Leonard was very fond of Martin. He had been able to give him quite a sizable scholarship. But by this time-We went to DC, and then took a train to-

Q: Was this organized by American Committee on Africa?

MAGUBANE: I think so.

Q: Because at that time, that would have been the only group to do it.

MAGUBANE: And then took a train to New York. And Martin really didn't have the money, but I had my ticket, and we are to go and get cash for it from the airline that had issued it.

And then there used to be these people who would leave their cars, fly over to L.A., and then you could drive the car. Someone told us we could do that, and then we had my airfare that was refunded for cash. So we got that car.

Q: Do you remember what year that was?

MAGUBANE: Martin might remember.

Q: Okay, but in any case, so you traveled across the country.

MAGUBANE: We traveled across the country. We left New York exactly at five o'clock on a Friday, and I knew that I had an exam on Monday afternoon at two o'clock. So we drove whole night Friday, whole day and night Saturday, whole day and night Sunday.

Q: And just to put in context, what was your and Martin-your particular awareness of the U.S. civil rights struggle, at that point?

MAGUBANE: Very much.

Q: And racism, and-did you drive through the South, or-

MAGUBANE: No, no, route 66. We passed south of Chicago.

And then a South African couple, Afrikaner fellow had married an American woman, and they had decided to go back to Africa. And this woman had heard about us. She lived in Hollywood. She joined our anti-apartheid group.

Q: What was her name? She was white American?

MAGUBANE: Yeah, white. Her husband was Afrikaner. I'm sure Martin would remember. So we used to meet quite often, once a month and so forth, to discuss about South Africa, but our main activity at the time was really to organize supplies for Umkhonto[15]-used clothing.

Q: Did the group have a name?

MAGUBANE: South Africa Anti-Apartheid.

Q: South Africa Anti-Apartheid-

MAGUBANE: Yeah, Group, or something of the sort. And then, of course, this was a period of great activity in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, for instance, came to address student at UCLA. Malcolm X came to Watts. We went to listen to him, and in fact, Ron Karenga-he was a student at UCLA at the time. But he is the one who took us to Watts, took us to the back of the church where Malcolm X was speaking and he introduced him to us. We shook his hand. He was a wonderful man, and his speech was absolutely dynamite. It must have been in '64, '63, when he was still a minister in good standing.

We went to a mosque, where we heard him speak. And then, of course, the antiwar movement had also begun. And then there was the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Now, all those things were of tremendous interest. But it really was the antiwar movement which would make us to drive all the way to Berkeley [laughter]. So we drove there a few times, to go to listen to the speeches. What was the fellow was organizing the antiwar movement, Mario-

Q: Savio.

MAGUBANE: Savio, and James Petras, and others. Now, at UCLA, we had a very good sociologist. He had training at Wisconsin, John Horton. You know, he was gay, but very progressive, and I think it was Erich Fromm who had just translated Marx's more philosophical manuscript.

And we were reading the philosophical manuscripts with John Horton, and alienation in United States during that time was a favorite topic for students. Where you are trying to see how you can explain, in fact, the high " criminal rate" among African Americans, how-we're using a book called The Call Girl in one of the classes, on deviant behavior, and he was using Marx's Philosophical Manuscripts as a theoretical point of departure, and so forth. And then I had qualified for the PhD in '63, and then I embarked on my dissertation.

Q: And your dissertation was-

MAGUBANE: " African-American Consciousness of Africa."

Q: So that's what eventually became The Ties that Bind.[16]

MAGUBANE: The Ties that Bind. It was my dissertation, yes. I had to argue with my committee. They wanted me to go and do fieldwork in Africa. I said, the only place in the world I want to do fieldwork is South Africa, but I can't go to South Africa. Then how are you going to do this thing? I said it was going to be library research. Plus it was an answer to a lot of books that were coming out at the time about differences between black Americans and Africans.

Q: Do you remember some of the books you were reacting to?

MAGUBANE: I was reacting to Essien-Udom's on the black Muslims in America, and Silberman, on the black and white.[17]

I was responding to that because there are a lot of Israeli students who hated American Jews, but nobody talked about the hostility that existed between Jewish Americans and Israelis, and one of them [Israelis] was in my class. He really used to look condescendingly at these rich American Jews who have lost consciousness of being Jewish, etc. etc. etc. So my point was that, yes, an individual African can hate an individual African American, but that there was something much more fundamental, the type of ties between African American and African. And then, of course, went back to the formation of the AME,[18] to the rise of the Garvey movement, and to the racist conference in Versailles where Du Bois introduced the whole issue of South Africa, and criticized this.

Q: And looking back in retrospect, this is a good place to point back. You grew up in Natal, right?

MAGUBANE: Yes.

Q: In Durban itself, or-

MAGUBANE: In Durban itself.

Q: In Durban itself. Well, let's step back, since we didn't do it at the beginning. Your growth in political consciousness there, and the extent you were aware at that time of-

MAGUBANE: Well, my grandmother was a traditional woman. She died never having worn European clothes. And my father was a squatter on a white farm. Barely had-in fact had no education. Only my mother had gone to primary school as far as grade three. So those things, just in my consciousness, didn't exist.

Q: Didn't exist.

MAGUBANE: No.

Q: So how did you manage to go to school and-

MAGUBANE: That was when my father left the farm, where at the age of 16 I would have started working, six months. And then my older uncle had died, and then he had two sons who were staying with us, and the farmer wanted them to come and work, and my father wouldn't take them. So he decided that he was going to abscond, and then come to Durban.

Q: So you moved to Durban what year and at what age?

MAGUBANE: Either 1937 or '38. I was born in 1930. And then I think I started school at Mt. Carmel, I think it was in 1939, first year. I was already nine. But that didn't last long, because we then had to move to where Chesterville is now, and my schooling therefore really started in 1940, from the first grade. And there used to be this first grade, pre-standard one two years, then go to standard one. But fortunately I got promoted, until I caught up with my age group. And then I passed standard seven in '46, which is a major hurdle. My older sister had gone to train after standard seven for what they call the fourth-class teacher's certificate at Marianhill. And my parents wanted me also to be a teacher, but we couldn't be at college at the same time, so I went to standard eight and nine. In 1947 I was standard eight, and then in 1948 I was standard nine. I passed, did very well, passed with a second class, and I was the only one who passed math that year. And then I had to go to Marianhill for a third-class teacher's certificate in 1949.

Q: And Marianhill was what kind of college?

MAGUBANE: Catholic. It is a teachers' training college, and also for matric [secondary school matriculation exams].

Q: Was your family Catholic, or-

MAGUBANE: Is by accident [laughter]. My father wanted to attend night school, and the only night schools are the Catholic, but he had to convert to-

Q: To attend.

MAGUBANE: Which was very fortunate for us. Catholic schools were the best. So I went to Marianhill 1949 and '50 for the first-class teacher's certificate. So I started teaching in 1951, went back to my alma mater, where I had done my high school, to teach there.

Now, this was a very interesting period, because it was . The ANC had adopted the program of action and a fellow that I had gone to school with, Edward Dlamini, had gone to Adams College. It was a school that was established by American Board of Missions, and students there were allowed to read all kinds of books. But he also came from an educated family, and his uncle was a schoolteacher who had joined the Communist Party, and had left teaching to go and organize trade unions in Durban. But he's the one who introduced me to the Guardian, the predecessor to New Age. And he was very political. So when the Defiance Campaign started, Edward and myself used to go to the rallies in Durban.

MAGUBANE:-and then [the regime decided to] introduce Bantu education, and the bill passed Parliament exactly in 1953. But, at the time, the South African Teachers' Association was organizing meetings to oppose the bill, and the president of the South African Teachers' Association, Mr. Moerane, came to our schools to talk about the evils of this new system of education. And Johnny Makatini, [19] Agrippa Cebekhulu, Fred Dube, Maziszi Kunene [20] were all friends. One time we met-we used to meet in the afternoon at the bus terminal-

Q: They weren't all your fellow teachers, they-

MAGUBANE: No, they were scattered.

Q: Scattered, right.

MAGUBANE: I was a schoolteacher, Johnny Makatini was a schoolteacher. Fred was a social worker. Agrippa was a schoolteacher. Mazizi was doing his master's degree at University of Natal, his masters' andhis PhD. And Johnny raised the question, says, well, are we going to be party to Bantu education or not? We all said, no, we can't. So we had to find an alternative. I passed the junior certificate and then had gone to a teacher training college. So there were not many options. The other option was to go back to school to try and do matric, but matric was now out of question, really. But you could do a national certificate, either by correspondence or through night school.

Fortunately for me at the time, Sastri College, which was an Indian college, had decided to open a night school where Africans were admitted. That's in Durban. Very famous Indian school that produced a lot of Indian doctors, and people passed matric, to go to Wits [University of the Witwatersrand] and University of Natal.

So they had started this night school where Africans, coloreds, and Indians could take classes so they could pass the national certificate. I decided to gamble-I was getting married in 1953, and a child was coming. I decided to do all six subjects, which was absolutely-I've never really worked so hard. I was teaching full-time from eight o'clock to three o'clock, and then at three-thirty I went to Sastri to begin my classes. And then came January-and I wrote the exam in November. Came January, the results were out. I received three As and three Bs. And Mazizi had gotten hold of the Daily News with the results. I hadn't seen them. I knew that either that day or-

Q: They were published in the paper?

MAGUBANE: Yeah, they were published in the paper. So Mazizi says, have you seen the paper? I said no. He said, you passed. You did very well. So he took me to the non- European section at University of Natal in 1954, and Mrs. Palmer, who was the head of the non-European section, look at my results, gave me 50 pounds in fellowship, so I registered as a part-time student at the University of Natal.

Q: So Natal at that time had non-European students-

MAGUBANE: In a segregated university. So our classes began after three o'clock.

Q: Oh, so it was totally separate classes.

MAGUBANE: Yeah.

Q: Same buildings, same professors, but-

MAGUBANE: Not really the same buildings, because it was-we couldn't go to Howard College. So there was a section of the university in Durban that we could attend.

Q: So separate buildings.

MAGUBANE: Yeah. Same building, but not at the main campus. At a branch.

So I started in '54. Now, again, I gambled-took, instead of two subjects, took three. You had to have about 12-if you did Sociology 1, Sociology 2, Sociology 3, History 1, History 2, History 3, English 1, etc., etc. And to my greatest surprise, I did better than I thought I could. So I finish in '57 in my BA, which was in three years. And people used to take up to six, eight, yearsdoing it part-time.

And then I decided to do an honors degree in 1958, and I passed it with merit, and then I joined sociology for my master's. I'd left teaching in '58, and I was a research assistant to Kuper. And I was very fond of football, or soccer as they call it in America. And I registered for an MA, and my thesis was " Sports and Politics in Durban."

Q: Let me ask a question going back a little bit. During that period that you were studying so intensively, and you were already reading papers like the Guardian, right?

MAGUBANE: Oh, yeah. And I used to attend rallies that were addressed by Chief Luthuli and others almost every Sunday.

Q: What was the coverage and the level of awareness of things in the United States? For example, did the killing of Emmett Till, was that-

MAGUBANE: Yeah, it was-

Q: It was meaningful?

MAGUBANE: Well, the New Age was very good telling stories. In fact, you can see them here. One was becoming very-In fact, one had become conscious of the United States during the Second World War, because American sailors, black and white, used to walk about in the streets of Durban. It was a major port of call where American ships were being repaired. And Ebony was also available.

Q: So the American soldiers that visited then, you say they walked about, black and white. Were they together, or separated-

MAGUBANE: Sometimes there would be two together. But even more than that I was very fond of jazz, and probably had one of the best collections of jazz records. Duke Ellington, Louis Satchmo, Jordan, Nat King Cole. We just had a whole lot of collection of American jazz records, and we'd go and see American movies, especially if there were black actors, even though they played the buffoon most of the time. And the American fashion-African American-was very popular.

Q: What was the awareness of civil rights leaders at that time? Was King visible to you?

MAGUBANE: No, not yet.

Q: Not yet, not-

MAGUBANE: Not in the '40s.

Q: In the '50s?

MAGUBANE: Well, but-yeah, in the '50s, yes. People used to talk a lot about what was-Especially New Age used to write a lot about what was happening to the Negro in the United States, and the lynch mobs, etc. etc. and so forth.

So I finished-that's when I got the IIE fellowship to go to the United States, in this very critical period. Now, besides that one demonstration that we had, the anti- apartheid movement really was made up of requests to the United Nations.

Q: Request to the United Nations?

MAGUBANE: To the United Nations, by ANC leaders who would come address the U.N.

Q: Oh, right, you're talking about the ANC officials. But in L.A. you weren't involved directly in that.

MAGUBANE: No, no. But we heard about that. We heard about it. But by 1966, really I'd gotten very fed up of the United States. Fortunately for me, there were two students from Zambia-Siteke Mwali at one time became the foreign minister, and then Arthur Wina. He was the minister of finance or something when Zambia became independent in 1964. Arthur Wina was called back to be cabinet minister, and then Siteke followed. And we kept in touch, and I remember Siteke saying that, once you finish your PhD, since you can't go back to South Africa why don't you come and teach at the University of Zambia. So when the university was started, and the Department of Sociology was created, he send me an advertisement through the post, and then I apply. Fortunately, the first head was Frankenberg,[21] who was a member of the British Communist Party, and a very good anthropologist who had been turned back when he was trying to go to Jamaica to do fieldwork. And he was very glad to give me a job. So I left in March to go to Zambia.

Q: In '66?

MAGUBANE: '67. Yeah, because I finished in October my dissertation, and then I handed it in, and it was accepted by the end of November. So then I really didn't have anything to do after that, except to wait for this appointment.

Q: So you were going to Zambia in the period already after UDI.[22]

MAGUBANE: Yeah.

Q: And already when ANC was working with ZAPU?[23]

MAGUBANE: In '67. Now that was-for me, that was the best move. I always say that I was always at the right place at the right time. Because I was feeling very alienated in the United States, and my kids were now growing up, and-

Q: You were feeling alienated? Was that primarily racism, or economy?

MAGUBANE: Everything.

Q: Everything.

MAGUBANE: Yeah. I was missing-

Q: Homesickness, and-

MAGUBANE: The struggle was going on in South Africa, and I wanted to be in a place that was not very far.

Q: That was closest to it.

MAGUBANE: Yeah.

Q: Your committee there in Los Angeles, did it continue?

MAGUBANE: It continued. In fact, it received recognition from the ANC, and we started getting letters from them congratulating us for what we had done.

Q: And your committee was basically-

MAGUBANE: Martin Legassick, Tony Ngubo, Madoda Hlatshwayo, who had come-

Q: Madoda-didn't he just recently die?

MAGUBANE: He died, yeah. And then there were other students-

Q: Many Americans?

MAGUBANE: A few, that were conscious about apartheid.

Q: Was it both black and white?

MAGUBANE: Yeah, yeah. There were a few. And so I went to-and got into Zambia just at the right time, because then, that summer, the Wankie campaign began.[24] And then my kids came later, in 1968, because I'd left them in Los Angeles to finish school, because the school was finishing and the term was finishing in June, but I left in March, so they came.

Q: And your wife?

MAGUBANE: Yeah, my wife followed.

Q: She stayed with the kids.

MAGUBANE: Yeah, she stayed in Los Angeles with the kids, and then at the end of the term, in June, then they flew in July to Zambia.

Then, of course, there was a large South African community, MK [Umkhonto we Sizwe] [, the leadership, and everybody else.

Q: And you were in Lusaka?

MAGUBANE: Yeah, at the university. Jack Simons[25] was teaching political science at the university, which was very fortunate for me, because he was really a wonderful man, and a wonderful scholar. We used to meet at his house every Sunday to discuss South Africa. In fact, almost everything that I had learned for my PhD I had to unlearn from the lectures he gave. Simons, who wrote the book, Class and Colour.[26]

And I learned a lot of things from him. That's when I became interested in the political economy of race, and that's when I really started taking notes for the book, which I would work on when I went back to the United States in 1970. Because I had a three-year contract, which came to an end in 1970. I was supposed to go on home leave and come back. But then, in a strange way-

Q: What kind of documents were you able to be traveling on? You said earlier, your-

MAGUBANE: I was traveling on a U.N. document.

Q: A U.N. refugee document-

MAGUBANE: Yeah. I still have those. In fact, Johnny, who had become ANC representative in Algeria, had also gotten the family Algerian passports. But we didn't ever use them, because it would have been very awkward not knowing a word of French [laughter]. But I still have them as a memento.

Now, Zambia was really one of the-it was the best of times. But it was also very difficult for the people who were in the liberation movement. But my political consciousness nonetheless developed quite a lot, especially contacts with people. O. R. [27] stayed at the house to do his notes and everything. He called me, approached me in 1968 to see if, whilst we are all at work, O. R. could use one of the bedrooms as an office if he wanted to and then the office became-

Q: A place to sleep.

MAGUBANE: Yes, a place to sleep, and he stayed with us until we left Zambia. And then to go back to the States.

Q: And you went back?

MAGUBANE: To UCLA.

Q: Oh, back to UCLA.

MAGUBANE: Yeah. And then, at UCLA, there was now a new group of students who had started Ufahamu.

Q: OK, when was Ufahamu started? While you were gone?

MAGUBANE: No, it started when I was there. I think I still have-I have most of the issues from the first, because I did a review of Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth . I did a review for Ufahamu, and they did a long interview with me at the time. I think it was published in one of the issues of Ufahamu, if I remember.

Bob Cummings[28] was one of the founders of Ufahamu. I don't whether the name came up with him or someone else, but he was very critical. We used to call him the Protestant Ethic on Wheels [laughter].

Q: The Protestant Ethic on Wheels! [laughter] Okay, I'll have to interview him and ask him about that. But that was before you went to Zambia?

MAGUBANE: No, I'd come from Zambia now. My contract wasn't renewed, so we were stranded in Zambia for almost six months after the end of my contract. Fortunately, Kuper was able to arrange a visiting fellowship so I could enter back to the United States. After that we stayed for the next 28 years.

Q: But moving to Connecticut-

MAGUBANE: Well, moving to Connecticut is really very interesting, because, since I was only traveling on U.N. document, there was a conference in Uganda in 1968. Yeah, '68, I think. And I'd written a paper on the political economy of migrant labor, and because I couldn't go and give it myself, I sent it in, and James Faris[29] read it for me. James was at Cambridge, but he was doing his field work in the Sudan.

Q: In the Sudan. And you knew him from-

MAGUBANE: No, I didn't. He just happened to be the person to read the paper. And then he wrote me and said, listen, I've just received a job at McGill, and if you ever get back to the States, I would like to invite you to come and give a talk. And then, just before we left, he wrote me another note, said, no, I just got a job in Connecticut. So I told him that I am planning to go to UCLA, but I'm still waiting for the entry visa, which was really very difficult at the time. But because I now had this visiting lectureship at UCLA, was able to go in. And then I wrote to Jim, saying I am going to the United States. And then they were looking for an Africanist in the department.

Q: In anthropology?

MAGUBANE: In anthropology, and though my degree is in sociology, my publication, my first publications were in anthropology journals, because I was dealing with the subjects in Zambia that were dealt with by anthropologists. And I had written a paper called " Crisis in African Sociology" which appeared in the East African Journal. It's the first essay in my collection of essays. And it had received a tremendous amount of-it evoked a lot of responses from white anthropologists, very hostile, but from African all nothing but praise. And unfortunately I lost those later, but I used to value them quite a lot. It put my name on the map, in a strange way. And then I had written another paper, a critique of the theory of social pluralism, which appeared in the journal African Review, which was published by the Rhodes- Livingston Institute in Zambia. That even caused more controversy, because I stepped on the toes of my professor Kuper, who was a pluralist, and Pierre van den Berghe.[30]

Q: Where was van den Berghe at that time?

MAGUBANE: He was at Seattle, University of Washington in Seattle. He was so angry that we've never really talked after that [laughter]. But Kuper was a forgiving man, and he liked some parts of my criticism, but of course he was not . He had been, I think, a member of the CP, but he had turned his back on it. You know how-

Q: Right, but he had-and there are various ways of turning one's back. One can become totally hostile, or one can just withdraw.

MAGUBANE: Yeah, just withdraw, yeah.

Q: And he was more of the just withdraw type, right.

MAGUBANE: And then his brother, older brother, was a judge, had been shot, was doing his Jewish prayers, and that had really caused him a tremendous amount of depression.

So I went back to UCLA. Another very, very interesting time. Now, when I went back-and then, of course, I went to Connecticut that summer, 1970, that's when I started in Connecticut. And then I think it was-the African Studies Conference was in Denver that year, or in '71. Dick Sklar[31] was there, Coleman was there, and Dick Sklar was with me at University of Zambia. And Richard Gibson had produced a book on the liberation movement in Southern Africa.[32] You remember that horrible book?

Q: Right.

MAGUBANE: Which I had reviewed-I probably had reviewed it for Ufahamu, I don't know if it was published or not. So everybody was holding this book, and dismissing the liberation movement in '71 and '72. The meeting was in Denver, and I was shocked by the position which was taken by Dick Sklar towards the liberation movement. And I said to these people, very angrily-and that was really my last attendance of those meetings, because all that they were doing was just to bash the liberation movement without understanding the difficulties with which they were working

Q: And within the African Studies Association at that time, were there progressive scholars contesting Sklar's position?

MAGUBANE: There were a few, yeah. There were others who were contesting it. I even used a very ugly word, that you know-the word that these people were treating the leadership of the liberation movement was as if they were people who wet their beds at night [laughter]. But these were men of integrity who were faced with reality, with difficult problems. And I also read a lot on guerrilla movements, you know, The Work of the Flea, you remember that book?[33] Che Guevara, and so forth. That it is the nature of guerrilla warfare that you are fighting a much superior enemy.

Q: And apart from Dick Sklar, who were the other people-

MAGUBANE: Coleman. And then this guy Obichere, he was a historian at UCLA.

Q: Boniface Obichere.

MAGUBANE: And then there was this other guy who became the head of the African Studies Association? Jewish American fellow. Had done his work on Tanzania, Zanzibar. And that whole group who had started at Princeton, and-what's his name, that professor-on modernization.[34] The modernization school. In the meantime, I had really steeped myself in Marxist literature. I used Engels' Condition of the Working Class in one of my classes. And then I plowed through the first volume of Kapital. I believe the civil war in France and England and Napoleon Bonaparte-and I mean-sort of steeped myself in Marxist literature. And Jack Simons in that-there was also Rob Molteno,[35] a friend of Jack Simons.

Q: He was in Zambia at the time you were?

MAGUBANE: At the time, yeah. He came from a rather aristocratic British family, and then went to South Africa. That's when, really-now we're building the anti-apartheid movement. Then Martin came back, after finishing his degree, and going to England for a short time, to teach at Santa Barbara. The whole anti-apartheid movement really was now building up.

Q: Martin must have gone back while you were still in Zambia.

MAGUBANE: Yes.

Q: I think, because some of those demonstrations, first demonstrations at Santa Barbara happened when you were in Zambia.

MAGUBANE: Yes. And then, A. C. Jordan[36] had gone to Wisconsin, and I had visited him in Wisconsin, because he had become a father to me when I arrived at UCLA.

Q: Ah, because he had been at UCLA earlier. And Phyllis was there?

MAGUBANE: Phyllis was there. They came later with their daughter and their son. They came just when A. C. was moving to Wisconsin. And he had belonged to the Non-European Unity Movement, and he had exposed me to a lot of that literature. We became very, very close. Just before he died he came over to Zambia, and we just had a wonderful time, and then when he got back to the States.

Q: So the divisions between that and ANC didn't block personal ties?

MAGUBANE: Yeah, he appreciated the ANC, but he came from a Trotskyite-but it really didn't affect our relationship.

And then, in the meantime, Johnny Makatini had replaced Thami Mhlambiso at the U.N., and Johnny was a wonderful organizer in the United States. I don't know if you remember him.

Q: I've met him a few times, during that period.

MAGUBANE: He was really a wonderful organizer, especially among-He sort of mobilized the entire New York through the church in Riverside. [37] And he had been to Algeria, so he spoke French, and when he spoke to African delegates from the Francophone countries, because he spoke French, he became one of them, so he could do really literally anything. And Johnny liked to delegate work. He was unlike some people. For instance, he couldn't go to Jamaica, so he sent me to go and represent the ANC.

Q: When did you go to Jamaica?

MAGUBANE: Jamaica, '70-in the first half of the '70s. Then, just before Bishop was overthrown in Grenada, during their anniversary, I think it was the fourth or fifth anniversary, I also went to represent the ANC.

Q: So you went to Grenada.

MAGUBANE: And then he also couldn't go to Venezuela, where Mandela-the University of Valencia was giving Mandela an honorary degree, so I went to Venezuela to receive it.

Q: So you were able to do that while in your academic position?

MAGUBANE: Well, O. R. had said to us when we left, he said, by all means, try to get the American passport. So I got my green card, and I applied for my American passport, which came right about 1977. So I was really able to do quite a lot of things after that, and to go to a lot of places. I've been to Guyana to represent the ANC after Forbes Burnham had died, and this other guy Hoyte had replaced him. And I also was able to go to UNESCO, to represent the ANC. And now I was completely identified, of course, with the ANC.

And then, of course, my book The Political Economy of Race and Class came out in 1979, and it did very well, because now people had an alternative perspective, rather than the neo-Marxist South African perspective, which was apolitical.

Q: Are you referring to your friend Martin?

MAGUBANE: No, not Martin. That whole school of van Onselen-

Q: Oh, that side.

MAGUBANE: That whole school of what were called neo-Marxist South African that was based at Wits and so forth. But then, of course, now I became friendly to Sylvia Hill and that group in Washington, DC.[38] I used to be invited-I mean, I went to various colleges to speak about apartheid, especially after my book came out. And when Johnny was replaced by Neo Mnumzana-I don't know if you-

Q: Yes, I knew him.

MAGUBANE: Yeah, in fact he came while Joseph Jonah was there, and he was a very good speaker on the platform. He never used to prepare anything, but when he stood on the platform, he was just excellent.

Q: I remember.

MAGUBANE: Oh, he was just absolutely excellent. We went-I don't know where, to University of California in San Bernardino, to various places, to Wisconsin, to Minnesota, invited by Isaacman.[39] And now, besides my teaching, my other preoccupation was doing this lecturing, and then writing.

Q: Well, you said you had until three o'clock. We've gone beyond that.

MAGUBANE: Yes.

Q: Shall we stop for now?

[1] See program for the event in Southern Africa, December 1968.

[2] Operation Crossroads Africa was established in 1957 by New York Presbyterian minister Rev. James H. Robinson, at the Church of the Master in Harlem, as a cross-cultural exchange program based on work camps in African countries involving African and American youth. See http://operationcrossroadsafrica.org. The program is said to have been the inspiration for the Peace Corps.

[3] Calvin Plimpton was president of Amherst College from 1960 to 1971. New York lawyer Francis Plimpton (1900-83) was deputy U.S. ambassador to the U.N. from 1961 to 1965.

[4] Leo Kuper (1908-94) taught at the University of Natal from 1952 to 1961 and at UCLA from 1961 to 1976. His papers are available on microfilm through the Cooperative Africana Microform Project (CAMP). See http://www.crl.edu/areastudies/CAMP/collections/kuper.htm. They include notes for his research that led to the book The African Bourgeoisie (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), for which Anthony Ngubo and Ben Magubane served as the two research assistants.

[5] Alan Paton was author of Cry, the Beloved Country (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948) and a leading figure in South Africa's Liberal Party.

[6] The Defiance Campaign against Unjust Laws was launched by the African National Congress in June 1952 and was suspended in April 1953. See http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/struggles/defiance.html.

[7] Peter Magubane was a leading South African photographer, whose work portraying the apartheid system was widely distributed. See http://www.international.ucla.edu/africa/article.asp?parentid=2993.

[8] Leonard Thompson was a leading liberal South African historian and a professor at Yale University.

[9] Martin Legassick, now at the University of Western Cape, was a leading figure in the radical critique of liberal historiography of South Africa. See Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past (Cape Town: David Philip, 1988), chap. 16. Available online at http://www.international.ucla.edu/africa/article.asp?parentid=2993.

[10] Mary Louise Hooper was an American from California who had served as secretary to Chief Albert Luthuli in the 1950s.

[11] See the interview with Bill Sutherland in this archive.

[12] Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo, was assassinated in January 1961.

[13] Nana Mahomo was a leader of the Pan Africanist Congress and director of the film Last Grave at Dimbaza (1974).

[14] James S. Coleman was professor of political science at UCLA and author of Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), among other works.

[15] Umkhonto we Sizwe was the armed wing of the African National Congress. See http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mk.

[16] Bernard Magubane, The Ties that Bind (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1987).

[17] Essien Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Charles E. Silberman, Crisis in Black and White (New York: Random House, 1964).

[18] The African Methodist Episcopal church is one of the leading African American church denominations.

[19] Johnny Makatini later became ANC representative to the United Nations. See http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/people/jmmakatini.html.

[20] Maziszi Kunene, a poet, was author of Emperor Shaka the Great (London: Heinemann, 1979) and other works.

[21] Social anthropologist Ronald Frankenberg was later professor at Manchester and Keele.

[22] Unilateral declaration of independence by white southern Rhodesia, November 11, 1965.

[23] Zimbabwe African People's Union.

[24] The Wankie campaign, July-September 1967, was the first major armed campaign by Umkhonto we Sizwe, in conjunction with ZAPU.

[25] For an interview with Jack Simons, see http://www.sacp.org.za/biographies/rjsimon.html.

[26] H. J. and R.E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa (London: Penguin Books, 1969).

[27] O. R. Tambo was leader of the ANC in exile. See http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/or.

[28] Bob Cummings was later professor and chair of the African Studies Program at Howard University in Washington, DC.

[29] James Faris was professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut.

[30] Anthropologist who wrote widely on race and ethnicity.

[31] Richard L. Sklar is the author of, among other works, Corporate Power in an African State: The Political Impact of Multinational Mining Companies in Zambia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

[32] Richard Gibson, African Liberation Movements: Contemporary Struggles against White Minority Rule (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

[33] Robert Taber, The War of the Flea: A Study of Guerrilla Warfare Theory and Practice (New York: L. Stuart, 1965).

[34] David E. Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

[35] Later, in 1977, Rob Molteno became one of the founders of Zed Books ( http://www.zedbooks.co.uk).

[36] See http://www.ufh.ac.za/collections/NAHECS/Cultural%20Heritage/acjordan1.htmfor a short biography of A. C. Jordan. He was at the University of Wisconsin from 1963 until his death in 1968. His wife Phyllis Jordan stayed in the United States after his death. The A. C. Jordan papers are housed at the University of Fort Hare.

[37] Riverside Church, on the upper West Side of Manhattan.

[38] See interviews with Sylvia Hill in this archive.

[39] Allen Isaacman began teaching at the University of Minnesota in 1970. He is now professor of history and director of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change/MacArthur Program at the university.