Person

Wolpe, Harold

1926-1996

Harold Wolpe was born in 1926, and as a young man was one of Johannesburg’s busiest radical lawyers, after the firm of Mandela and Tambo had been destroyed by prison and exile. It was he who handled the purchase of the famous Rivonia farm. After the police raid on the farm, he tried to flee the country but was arrested, in 1963, on the border of British Bechuanaland (now Botswana), brought back to South Africa and imprisoned. He escaped and arrived in London in 1964. From then until 1991 he worked as a sociologist and teacher, first in London and then at Essex University. It was during this period - from 1977 to his death, that he became deeply involved in various ANC education policy for a, leading to his formation of the Education Policy Unit, which produced an Education Policy for a Democratic South Africa. After 1991 he was employed by the University of the Western Cape, where he was Director of an educational planning unit. Harold Wolpe was a long standing member of the African National Congress Party. However, he was neither militant not saboteur. He was a great theorist, but also a practitioner. He believed that change in South Africa could only be achieved through organized political action. Harold’s wife, Anne-Marie said at his memorial service in St George’s Cathedral, Cape Town, that he saw it as his duty to be a part of that organized movement, but never toed the party line if he thought it was wrong. Harold Wolpe was one of the key figures in the struggle for a more open political practice, and more democratized political discourse within the ANC. He insisted on democratic debate, despite there being powerful forces in the movement which worked hard to stifle debate. HW was what became known as a “revisionist” or “Neo-Marxist”, and played a significant role in the early phase of the evolution of this new school (1969-71). “The main preoccupation was to demonstrate the centrality of capitalism and capitalist interests to the evolution of racial policy – if capitalism was complicit in the construction of segregation and apartheid then the struggle against apartheid necessarily involved a struggle against capitalism – the dismantling of apartheid involved more than simply dismantling political and social apartheid, it implied the need to dismantle the capitalism economic system which underlay and sustained apartheid.” Of his many writings, Dan O’Meara said, “Harold Wolpe’s Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power article is probably the most influential and widely cited theoretical text ever written on South Africa. Every sociology and politics student working on South Africa has been required to read this article.” Dan O’Meara called Harold Wolpe the most important South African social scientist since 1945, a man of penetrating intelligence, combined with a generosity of spirit, who was mentor to many people as well as being one of the architects of the new South Africa.

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