Originally published in Inqaba Ya Basebenzi No.16/17 (January-June 1985)

On 8 January 1985, Lawrence Jongintaba Notha, activist and Marxist for many years, passed away in Serowe, Botswana at the young age of 57.

Born in Mount Ayliff in the Cape, he completed his formal education, in which he had excelled throughout, by obtaining a B.Sc. at Fort Hare. After teaching in high schools for several years, he was fired by the apartheid regime for his opposition to Bantu Education.

With the defeat of the workers’ movement in the early 1960s, LJ, like many others, fell victim to repeated harassment and detention by the state. Early in 1965 he went into exile in Botswana, where he taught at Swaneng Hill School, retiring in 1976 due to ill-health.

In his student days he became a leader of the Society of Young Africa (SOYA), and later joined the African Peoples Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA). Both these organisations were Unity Movement affiliates.

Through his work amongst the migrant workers, LJ early drew the conclusion that apartheid existed essentially to defend capitalism and the cheap labour system on which it is based – enforced through the migrant labour system.

The task of overthrowing apartheid, he realised, was inextricably bound up with that of overthrowing capitalism itself. Only the working class was equipped to lead this struggle.

Conflict Over Conception of the Revolution

This brought him into conflict with the conception of the nature and tasks of the SA revolution held by the middle class leadership of the Unity Movement. LJ rejected their characterisation of the migrant workers as peasants, their call for solving the land question by capitalist methods, and their failure to put forward a class position of non-racial workers unity.

He also argued that the programme put forward by the Unity Movement leadership (the so-called ‘minimum programme’) failed to link the struggle against apartheid with the struggle against capitalism.

Such a programme, tailored round the utopian dreams of black middle class leaders for a place in SA’s capitalist sun, did not prepare the working class for its necessary leading role in the struggle both for democracy and socialism – and also did not explain to the mass of the middle class that the solution to their problems lies in the unity of all the oppressed behind the working class.

However, the UM leadership refused to change their position and suppressed debate on it. This convinced Lawrence that the Unity Movement could not serve as a vehicle for the liberation of the working class.

Long Isolation Ended

LJ’s years of isolation in exile as one of a handful of activists with an unshakeable faith in the working class came to an end when he established contact with labour movement activists in Europe who had continued in the genuine traditions of Marxism, and when he helped to found Inqaba ya Basebenzi.

His understanding of the tasks posed for the liberation struggle was reflected in its first editorial:

The coming period will see the ANC transformed into a mass organisation of workers and youth. All comrades should be clear that once the workers’ movement reaches the stage of moving into the ANC, no-one will be able to avoid assisting the process because failure to do so will make them obstacles to liberation.

The ANC like all other organisations faces immediately the task of bringing its policies into line with the work of preparing the working class for rule. The method, perspectives and programme of Marxism, developed by the working class movement internationally, over many generations of struggle, will provide the indispensable guidelines for carrying this task into practice.

Contribution to Marxist ideas

As sad as his premature death was the fact that Lawrence withdrew from political activity in the last years of his life.

Nevertheless Inqaba wishes to place on record the contribution he made to the struggle and the ideas of Marxism in the Southern African revolution.

Those who struggled with him and with whom he shared his knowledge and ideas will carry forward the work begun together with him.

We will remember him also by the slogan which he proposed, and which appears on the last page of South Africa’s Impending Socialist Revolution – Perspectives of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the African National Congress:

Ngesandla sakho, msebenzi, elilizwe lakhekhile!

© Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2020).