Amapasi Asiwafuni! / To hell with pass laws! Class, race and gender identities in the anti-pass laws cartoons published in Umsebenzi / South African Worker, 1933-1936.
Abstract
The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was founded in 1921 and dissolved in 1950 in anticipation of being banned under the Suppression of Communism Act. It was relaunched as an underground party in 1953, renamed the South African Communist Party (SACP) and eventually unbanned in 1990. The important role played by the Communist Party in the liberation struggle of South Africa is generally acknowledged. Despite this role, and the fact that the Party had used printed propaganda since its inception, the printed graphic propaganda of the CPSA has not yet received critical attention. Propaganda was important to the CPSA, and a sizeable volume of printed material produced by the Party survives in archives locally and abroad.
This article focuses on a narrow slice of CPSA printed graphic propaganda, namely the anti-pass laws cartoons5 published in the official CPSA newspaper Umsebenzi / South African Worker (hereafter referred to as Umsebenzi) between 1933 and 1936, with the aim of examining the construction of class, race and gender identities in these cartoons.