Lionel Forman's trumpet: national communism in South Africa, 1953–59

Abstract

Lionel Forman has long been acknowledged as a key influence on socialist and nationalist thinking in South African political circles since the Second World War. Yet, to date, his published writing is surprisingly ephemeral; apart from a book about the 1956-61 Treason Trial, it is mostly scattered in political journals and pamphlets. Much of his most interesting work remains unpublished. One reason for this surprising neglect of an imaginative, creative and industrious thinker by a movement which normally celebrates its intellectual achievements is clear from a new anthology of Forman's prose. For notwithstanding his loyal affiliation to what is often perceived to have been one of the most dogmatically doctrinaire communist parties outside eastern Europe, Lionel Forman was an intellectually adventurous man. He was outstanding among his comrades in his capacity to raise awkward questions, questions which continue to haunt South African liberation politics to this day. Lionel Forman was born in 1927, into a Lithuanian immigrant household in Johannesburg. His partner ran a shop in Rosettenville and the family lived on the premises. At the age of 5 he contracted rheumatic fever, which left him with leaking heart valves, a complaint which affected his health all his life and which eventually killed him. As a teenager he joined a left-wing Jewish youth club, Hashomir Hatzair, where he first encountered socialist and Marxist ideas. At the age of 15, bored with the Israeli orientation of the Hashomir's programme, Forman moved over to the Young Communist League, in which he soon made friends with Ruth First. He became a full party member when he was 18, one year after enrolling at the University of Cape Town. In 1949 he returned to Johannesburg to take a law degree at Wits university; here he renewed his friendship with Ruth First and together with her and Harold Wolpe became prominent in student politics. As Director of Research for the National Union of South African Students he was sent to Prague in 1952 as a South African delegate in the press office of the International Union of Students. In Prague he played a decisive role in arranging a unity meeting which prevented Western students from seceding from the IUS; he married his wife, Sadie, and he experienced a significant improvement in his health after treatment by Czech heart specialists. When their two-year term with the IUS ended, the Formans rented a seaside cottage in Britain. After four months a telegram summoned them back to South Africa so that Forman could temporarily replace Brian Bunting as the editor of Advance, in effect the party paper. On Bunting's return, Forman completed