africa

Sidney Percival Bunting

1873 - 1936

Biography

S.P. Bunting was a founder member and principal architect of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). Bunting was born in London in 1873, the great grandson of Jabez Bunting, the Wesleyan leader, and the son of Percy Bunting, who was the first editor of the Contemporary Review. His mother did social work among London’s poor. Bunting graduated from Oxford and came to South Africa in 1900 with British forces in the Boer War. He decided to remain and take up legal studies, eventually establishing a law practice in Johannesburg.

By 1910 he had become sympathetic to the views of the Labour Party, and in March 1914 he was elected to the Transvaal provincial council on its ticket. He subsequently broke with the party on the issue of participation in the war, and together with W.H. Andrews and others he split away to form the anti-war International Socialist League (ISL). By the time the CPSA was formed in 1921, Bunting had broken completely with the labour movement, though he continued to believe that the white workers would eventually see the need to unite on class lines with workers of other races.

In 1922 Bunting went to Moscow to attend the fourth Congress of the Communist International. On his return he took over a secretary ship of the CPSA from Andrews, and in 1924 he was elected party chairman. The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Clements Kadalie was then becoming a force to be reckoned with, and Bunting’s belief in the potential for trade unionism among blacks no longer seemed as far-fetched as it once had to some in the ISL. Under his leadership the CPSA turned seriously to the recruitment of Africans. When support from white socialists proved inadequate, Bunting paid party expenses from his own pocket. Through his legal defence of political radicals, he won much African goodwill.

The 1928 Comintern decision that South African communists were to advocate a “Native Republic” came as a shock to Bunting, who rightly foresaw that the slogan would decimate the party. With Edward Roux, Bunting and his wife Rebecca went to Moscow to the sixth Comintern congress in 1928 to argue against the new doctrine. They were unsuccessful, however, and Bunting found himself castigated as a white chauvinist and right-wing deviationist. He reluctantly accepted the Comintern directive and returned to South Africa to make the most of the new policy. In the 1929 election year, Bunting ran as a Communist candidate in Tembuland in the Transkei, where almost half the electorate was black. Police harassment was intense, and he polled only 289 votes. Following the campaign, Bunting and Roux began an abortive effort to organize the League of African Rights, which they hoped would become a socialist-oriented mass movement for Africans, but Moscow ordered the league dissolved.

Being an empiricist more than a philosopher, according to his biographer Edwards Roux, Bunting was always vulnerable to the charge that he was deficient in Communist theory. Acknowledging this deficiency, he remained loyal to the Communist cause and to Soviet leadership even when his own judgement put him in conflict with Comintern policy. When Douglas Wolton returned to South Africa to South Africa in 1930 with instructions to eliminate “chauvinists” and “social democrats” from the party leadership, Bunting came under fierce attack and was expelled in September 1931. Drained financially and, for health reasons, unable to carry on with his law practise, his took a job as a viola player in a Johannesburg orchestra. Later when a stroke had partially paralyzed his fingers, he found employment as a building superintendent. A prolific writer to the end, he produced a pamphlet in 1933, An African Prospect and Appeal to Young Africa, East, West, Central, South calling for the establishment of a socialist order on a continental scale.

Unlike Andrews, Bunting did not live to win readmission to the CPSA following the ultra-left period of the 1930’s. He died of a stroke in1936. A group of his friends subscribed an annual scholarship in his name at Fort Hare University, and Edwards Roux wrote an account of his life, S. P Bunting: A political Biography, which appeared on 1944.

Source: Karis, T.G. & Gerhart, G.M.. From Protest Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, Vol. 4: Political Profiles.

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