Martin Legassick (1940–2016)

The first article in the first issue of JSAS was by Martin Legassick.¹ This choice by the editors accurately reflected Legassick’s standing in South African studies at the time. He was, judged Chris Saunders, ‘the single most important figure in the radical challenge of the early 1970s’.²

Looking back, Martin’s impact on South African history was all the more remarkable when one considers his unlikely intellectual journey to such influence. He led ‘a very insulated life’ in Gordon’s Bay³ (his parents emigrated to South Africa from Scotland when Martin was 7), went to school in Cape Town, and earned a BSc at the University of Cape Town (UCT) – where he joined the United Party youth! – before proceeding to Oxford in 1960 on a Rhodes Scholarship to study theoretical physics. Once at Balliol, he also embarked upon a ferocious independent course of reading in history and politics, and from 1962 worked closely with Mazisi Kunene, who represented the African National Congress (ANC) in Europe. After graduating (with a first) in mid 1963, Martin moved to Ghana to work with Thomas Hodgkin, and to celebrate life in a newly independent African state. A year later, he moved to Los Angeles, registered for doctoral work under Leonard Thompson at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and wrote a thesis on interactions between the Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and missionaries between the 1780s and 1840s (doctorate awarded in 1969). If his California years saw him serve an apprenticeship as historian, they also deepened his radicalism. Martin was active in protests against the war in Vietnam, arrived by chance in Atlanta the day Martin Luther King was shot, and on the following day was ‘perhaps the only white on a huge march’;⁴ he was caught up in almost every strand of the US student movement, and, with Ben Magubane and others, threw himself into solidarity work and a sanctions campaign on behalf of the ANC.

In 1970 he returned to the UK and taught for a year at Sussex. He was awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship ‘to do research both on political economy and on the intellectual history of liberalism’,⁵ and from 1974 taught in the Sociology department at Warwick. It was during the 1970s that Legassick produced a series of shimmering articles, chapters and unpublished papers. He always acknowledged the encouragement and stimulation he received from Shula Marks, Stanley Trapido, Rick Johnstone, Harold Wolpe and others, but it was the originality, clarity and rigour of his writings that established him as an electric presence in that radical/revisionist decade. It is impossible here to convey the breadth and depth of these interventions: they interrogated standard explanations of the Boer frontier as the source of contemporary racism; explored the links between liberalism and segregationist practice and policy; established (with Wolpe and others) the mineral revolution as the decisive moment in South African history; and recalibrated 20th-century political shifts according to their materialist underpinnings.

In 1979, Legassick was a founding member of the Marxist Workers Tendency (MWT) of the ANC, working initially within ANC and South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) exiled structures, and from the 1980s in the internal liberation movements. The MWT decried the reluctance of the ANC and SACTU to make links with worker militants within South Africa; it was highly critical of the form of armed struggle based on a notional guerrilla army; and mounted a sustained critique of the ‘Stalinism’ of the South Africa Communist Party (SACP) and its allies in the liberation movement. For this, Martin and three of his comrades were expelled from the ANC in 1985. By 1981, Legassick had decided that it was no longer possible to reconcile his political activism with an academic position. He resigned from Warwick and for the next decade devoted himself to an unsparing regime of full-time activism, writing copiously under various pseudonyms for the MWT publications Inqaba yaBasebenzi and Congress Militant. Martin in these years was conspicuously careless of his health, drinking and smoking too much, but fuelled by high-octane political commitment.

In the early 1990s, Martin returned to South Africa – and, with some trepidation, to academic life. Once in South Africa, he recalled ruefully that ‘I’d have to get a job, and it was virtually the only job that I knew’. He was appointed to a chair in History at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in 1992. It was not an easy return, he told Ciraj Rassool: ‘I felt a bit like a dinosaur’; he had no desire to become involved in the discipline’s ‘conflictual debates’, but ‘worked myself back into the academy through teaching’.⁶ It proved a strikingly successful re-entry, to an extent that surprised many. If Legassick in the 1970s had blazed through academic life like a meteor, for a decade and a half at UWC he enjoyed a remarkable period as a late-setting star. He published Skeletons in the Cupboard: South African Museums and the Trade in Human Remains (jointly with Rassool, 2000); he co-wrote two chapters in the multi-volume South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET) Road to Democracy project, before falling out with Ben Magubane and Sifiso Ndlovu. His UCLA thesis was belatedly published as The Politics of a South African Frontier (2010); his co-authored chapter in the new Cambridge History of South Africa was reworked as The Struggle for the Eastern Cape (2011); and in 2007 he produced his massive Towards Socialist Democracy, which ranges over Marxist theory, South African history and political economy, the nature of Chinese and Soviet communism, and current struggles in South Africa for national and social liberation.

Alongside more conventional scholarly work, Martin also devoted himself to what he called ‘applied history’: scholarly enquiry wielded in support of political or social outcomes. Legassick’s decision to carry out research on Upington, in the northern Cape, was influenced by the political struggles there; and it led in turn to his research on land alienation and claims for restitution in the arid northern Cape. From this flowed work for the Land Commission on District Six and on evictions from Windermere and Retreat, and his collaboration with Ciraj Rassool on the role of museums in trafficking human remains, which included his role as a member of the Human Remains Repatriation Task Team, securing the return from Vienna and re-interment in South Africa of the Khoisan couple Klaas and Trooi Pienaar in 2012.

But the other great benefit of Martin’s UWC years was that he was able to accommodate his academic work with his political activism. In addition to his continued commitment to the struggle for socialism, calling for the building of a ‘mass workers’ party’, he also became directly involved in protest politics in the Western Cape and beyond. When anti-eviction struggles exploded on the Cape Flats, he gave freely of time and effort to the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, Abahlalibase Mjondolo (Western Cape) and the Mandela Park Backyarders. Evenings and weekends were dedicated to meetings and political education classes. His two public letters to the then Minister of Housing, Lindiwe Sisulu, about the forced removal of the Joe Slovo squatter camp, should be carefully preserved; few other activists will match Legassick’s icy rationality and political heat. During this time he collaborated with activists to produce two major publications on the housing crisis in Cape Town’s townships. After the Marikana massacre, he immediately travelled to the platinum mines to show solidarity and join the movement emerging there. From 2008 he also dedicated time and effort to rebuilding the socialist left, especially in the form of the Democratic Left Front, and was hopeful that the United Front and a new trade union movement would galvanise the working class in co-ordinated struggles against poverty, inequality and racism.

The co-authors of this obituary both have intense and lasting memories of Legassick, at different periods of his life. Colin first heard his name at a National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) seminar in 1964, when Jonty Driver reported Martin’s view that NUSAS as ‘a white-dominated and white-led organization’ was an anachronism, and that to become a significant anti-apartheid force NUSAS should become ‘a wing of the liberation movement’. In the early 1970s, Colin was one of those enthralled by Martin’s presentations at Shula’s seminars and elsewhere, worked with him in the Anti-Apartheid Movement (Martin in the Coventry branch, Colin in Manchester) to involve British trade unions more directly in the struggle, and in 1978 stood in for Martin in a teaching stint at Stanford. At UWC, he was involved in Martin’s academic appointment – fiercely contested in committee and on the floor of Senate – and subsequently triumphantly vindicated.

Noor first encountered Martin in the 1980s, when he was an activist in the schools boycott movement in the Western Cape, poring over alternative texts circulated on a samizdat circuit, and captivated by the historical perspectives provided by Legassick. In 1985 he was one of a handful of youth leaders recruited by the MWT – Zackie Achmat and Mike Abrahams were others – and in 1986 Noor travelled to London and met a typically dishevelled, frenetic and committedly activist Martin. They subsequently became comrades, colleagues and friends after Legassick returned to South Africa.

Politically, Martin will be remembered for the intensity of his commitment over half a century. Academically and intellectually, he has left an indelible imprint on how South African history is written and read. As activist and as academic, his key legacy may be the indivisibility of his theory and practices as a radical.

Colin Bundy and Noor Nieftagodien

Notes

¹ Martin Legassick, ‘Legislation, Ideology and Economy in post-1984 South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 1, 1 (October 1974), pp. 3–35.

² Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past (Cape Town, David Philip, 1988), p. 172.

³ Martin Legassick (interviewed by Alex Lichtenstein), ‘The Past and Present of Marxist Historiography in South Africa’, Radical History Review, 82 (2002), p. 113.

⁴ Martin Legassick, ‘By Way of Introduction’, in Towards Socialist Democracy (Pietermaritzburg, UKZN Press, 2007), p. 7.

⁵ Ciraj Rassool, ‘History Anchored in Politics: Interview with Martin Legassick’, South African Historical Journal, 56 (2006), p. 30.

⁶ Legassick, ‘Past and Present of Marxist Historiography’, p. 119; ‘History Anchored in Politics’, p. 35.