19 June 2008
SACP stalwart, Comrade Brian Bunting died at his home in Rondebosch, Cape Town yesterday morning. Born in Johannesburg in 1920, Brian was the son of Sidney Percival Bunting, a founder and key architect of the Communist Party in South Africa.
Brian Bunting graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1939. He worked as a journalist on the Rand Daily Mail and the Sunday Times. He served in North Africa during World War II and then became assistant editor and later chief editor of The Guardian, and, after it was banned, its successor publications, Advance, Clarion, Peoples’ World and New Age. As one publication was banned by the apartheid regime, so a new one was launched. Bunting was also assistant national secretary of the Springbok Legion and editor of its journal, Fighting Talk.
Bunting was a life-long communist party member. As a newly elected member of the party’s Johannesburg district committee he was arrested in 1946 following the African mine workers strike, but charges were later dropped.
From November 1952 to October 1953 he was elected as a Natives’ representative in the House of Assembly from the Cape Western district. But he was expelled from Parliament because of his Communist Party affiliations. He was banned in 1952, detained in 1960, and placed under house arrest in 1963. Shortly afterwards he went into exile.
Based in London together with his late wife Sonia, Brian played a leading role in the regrouping of the exiled movement and in building anti-apartheid international solidarity. For many years he edited the SACP’s official organ, The African Communist. The Buntings returned to South Africa in the early 1990s and Brian had the pleasure of being elected as an ANC MP in 1994, returning to the very corridors from which he had been unceremoniously expelled by the apartheid regime some forty years earlier.
Brian remained active in his local SACP branch throughout the 1990s and into the last years and he also served on the SACP’s central committee until mid-2007 when travelling became increasingly difficult. Bunting’s publications include The Rise of the South African Reich, and Moses Kotane, South African Revolutionary.
Along with other outstanding freedom figures like Govan Mbeki and Ruth First, Brian Bunting belonged to a generation that bequeathed to our country a major tradition of investigative and radical journalism. A gentle personality, a lucid thinker, deeply loyal to his fellow comrades and organisations, Brian Bunting embodied the best non-racial traditions of our struggle. It is with pride that the SACP dips it banner in honour of this outstanding South African communist.
Hamba kahle, cde Brian Bunting!
Issued by the SACP
For more information contact:
Malesela Maleka
SACP Spokesperson – 082 226 1802