Old S. African Radical : ‘Banning’: Kafkaesque Punishment

For 33 years, Rowley Arenstein lived in a world that Kafka might have created. Declared a threat to the state, he became practically a non-person.

A lawyer who specialized in labor law and political cases, Arenstein was barred by government decree from all political and union activities and then prohibited from practicing law.

Under South Africa’s system of “banning,” a unique form of political ostracism that has been codified into law, he could meet with only one person at a time. He was under house arrest for years, allowed out only at specified times of the day and permitted no visitors.

When he did go out, he was barred from schools, printing shops, publishing houses and factories. He could not enter segregated black, Asian or mixed-race areas and could not go beyond the city limits of Durban, his home area. He was required to report daily to the police.

Could Speak to Wife

Arenstein could legally speak to his wife only by ministerial dispensation from regulations barring communication with any other person under restrictions similar to his. He needed a magistrate’s permission to talk to his sister and to his law partner. He could teach his two daughters, but not his six grandchildren.

And nothing he said could be repeated.

The banning system in which Arenstein was caught is a punishment imposed by the South African white-minority government on its opponents without specific charges or trial. The targets are almost always enemies of the apartheid racial laws.

“They did their best to try and ‘erase’ me out of existence--as it were--to make it as if I wasn’t here, had never been here and would never return,” Arenstein said in a recent interview. “But they failed. Although they have the power to make all the rules and to change them at will, they still failed.”

Justification Ordered

Arenstein, whose time under banning orders covers nearly half his 67 years, making him the longest banned anti-apartheid activist in the country, was among those freed from their restrictions after two recent South African court decisions requiring Law and Order Minister Louis le Grange to provide specific reasons justifying banning or preventive detention orders.

“The minister may now think up some reasons that would stand up against a court challenge,” Arenstein said, “or the government may finally abandon a system that, in simple fact, failed to silence its critics and to end opposition to apartheid.”

Arenstein--who as a “listed person” still may not be quoted here--does not hide his active and intense opposition to apartheid, the system of racial separation, nor his long membership in the since-outlawed South African Communist Party.

“The point about the practice of banning the government’s opponents is that it is punishment without trial, without the opportunity to hear the charges against you and to offer a defense, and without any appeal,” Arenstein said. “The minister simply orders you banned.”

Hundreds of anti-apartheid activists were banned as Arenstein has been over the last three decades--some as Communists, some as members of the African National Congress, also outlawed, and some simply for “endangering the maintenance of law and order.”

“For many, it was a living death, and quite a few left the country after being banned,” Arenstein said. “The banning orders made you your own jailer, in effect, and some people found this even harder to take than prison.”

Trevor Manuel, 30, a leader of the United Democratic Front, a broad coalition of anti-apartheid groups, was banned earlier this year. He describes the impact of the order virtually confining him to his Cape Town home as “devastating, demoralizing.”

“That order, which I didn’t expect at all and which would have lasted for five years, drained away the whole sap of my existence,” Manuel said. “For me, life is people and the (anti-apartheid) struggle. I am not sure I would have survived five years with only myself to talk to and household chores to keep me busy.”

Although the government had banned fewer of its opponents in recent years, 12 people--among them Winnie Mandela, wife of African National Congress patriarch Nelson Mandela--were still under banning orders at the time of the South African courts’ precedent-setting decisions.

Most of those banning orders have now been lifted by the courts or withdrawn by administrative authorities. However, the government contends that the order against Winnie Mandela remains in force pending further judicial review.

When Arenstein was first barred from political activities in 1953, he was very active in organizing opposition to the new laws enforcing apartheid and in establishing labor unions in Durban, an Indian Ocean port city.

A Communist Party member since 1938, Arenstein says that when the party was outlawed, it “was not fighting for socialism or communism--these were not on our agenda in the ‘50s--but for a democratic South Africa, an end to discriminatory laws, to racial segregation, to apartheid.”

“Communists were in leading positions in the African National Congress, in the trade unions, in the Indian Congress and many other organizations,” he recalled.

“The Communist Party was the only integrated party--even the churches were segregated then--and to the government at least, anyone who called for racial integration was quite obviously a Communist.”

South Africa’s Suppression of Communism Act in 1950, one of the first security laws enacted by the ruling National Party after coming to power in 1948, was aimed at “people fighting to end apartheid, not to establish communism,” Arenstein said.

“This is where it all began--the bannings, the detentions, all the practices that set us apart from other countries in the West where civil liberties are treasured and protected.”

Yet, such repressive practices as banning have not suppressed anti-apartheid critics, Arenstein went on.

“What they have never understood,” he said, “is that the detention of the leaders, their imprisonment and banning, has had the effect of creating more leaders. So, far from suppressing the struggle against apartheid, the security laws have ultimately strengthened it.”

Banning, said Arenstein, “cannot succeed if you don’t let it.” Over the last three decades, he has continued to find ways around the increasing restrictions that the government has imposed on him.

When he was first barred in 1953 from direct participation in anti-apartheid groups and labor unions, he became their attorney and continued his involvement.

When prohibited from talking with people beyond his immediate family, he got permission to discuss legal work with his law partner during office hours. He promptly defined “legal work” to include anything they might discuss and stretched office hours to encompass the whole day.

When placed under house arrest and forbidden to receive visitors, they came instead to see his wife, Jacqueline, whose restrictions were less severe, although she too has been banned and placed under house arrest as a Communist.

When Arenstein could no longer practice law himself because he was a convicted Communist, he worked as a researcher for a lawyer whom he had trained. And when he was forbidden even to enter a law office, he became a “financial consultant,” advising on estate planning, insurance and similar matters but actually dealing with the legal aspects of the anti-apartheid struggle that have become his specialty.

In this way, Arenstein helped to revive the Natal Indian Congress 15 years ago and make it one of the strongest anti-apartheid groups in South Africa. He then helped to rebuild black labor unions in Durban in the 1970s. And he is now the legal adviser to Inkatha, the mainstream Zulu political movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.

Over the years, Arenstein’s politics have changed significantly. Although still an avowed Communist, he broke with the South African party nearly 25 years ago on two issues--its decision to use violence to fight apartheid and its support for Moscow in the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s.

In the Sino-Soviet quarrel, Arenstein decided that the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung was right, and Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev wrong, on the issue of each national party’s right to decide its own course and develop whatever form of communism seemed suited to conditions in its own country.

“I grew up in an atmosphere of a Communist Party where all could express their opinions freely, and no one was expelled for disagreeing with the leadership,” Arenstein said. “I have never hesitated to disagree, but about 1960 it became harder and harder to state one’s views freely.”

The son of Jewish immigrants from what is now part of the Soviet Union, Arenstein became a Marxist while a student in Johannesburg in the 1930s and joined the Communist Party there.

‘Saving the World’

“We saw the Soviet Union saving the world,” he recalled, “and even though the Soviet leadership made mistakes, we felt that Communists have proved their worth fighting fascism.”

Arenstein, still a political maverick, today opposes the one-man, one-vote political system sought by the African National Congress and instead supports a federal system, also accepted by Buthelezi, that “would give whites the safeguards they need to abandon apartheid.”

After China’s Cultural Revolution ended with the death of Mao in 1976, Arenstein began to reassess his own views and concluded that economic development would be the key factor in ending apartheid and in laying the foundation for a Marxist system later.

“I still try to look at things from a Marxist point of view, but it is quite clear that you cannot build socialism on a backward economy,” he said. “In South Africa, we have to go through the free-enterprise stage first to make political and economic progress. Destroying the economy, say through disinvestment or other anti-apartheid actions, will not bring liberation. Similarly, we have to acknowledge that socialism does not come in great leaps.”