Brief Biography on Harold Wolpe

The Trust was established in 1996 shortly after Harold Wolpe´s untimely and unexpected death. The first major activity was an international conference and since then ongoing forum meetings have been and are being held in Cape Town, in which politicians, academics, and NGO members participate. Following a large grant, the Trust has and continues to extend the scope of its work.

Harold Wolpe graduated from the Witwatersrand University with a B.A. Social Science and then an LL.B. Whilst at University he was active in student politics and at that stage joined the Communist party. He practised as a barrister and then at the Side Bar where he was one of the very few lawyers who represented political activists such as Mandela, Sisulu, Duma Nokwe and many others. He was arrested during 1960 following the Sharpeville massacre. This did not deter his political involvement. But when the Rivonia arrests occurred at Lilliesleaf Farm in 1963 where the top echelons of the underground movement were caught, he tried to flee the country, only to be arrested at the border. He escaped from jail several weeks later together with three other comrades. He was cited as a co-conspirator during the Rivonia Trial that saw the leadership of the resistance movement incarcerated in jail for nearly three decades. Had he not escaped, he would undoubtedly have been convicted and served a long prison sentence.

In exile in the United Kingdom, Harold Wolpe continued his political work in the African National Congress (ANC) and in the Communist Party. He gave up law and, following a Nuffield Scholarship that enabled him to resume his studies in Sociology, he became an academic. He taught at Bradford University, the Polytechnic of North London, and then until his return to South Africa in 1991, Essex University. It was only with the granting of amnesty to former political activists and named’ and banned’ people that Harold Wolpe was able to return to South Africa with his wife.

His work was firmly located in theoretical analyses based on Marxist analyses. Yet he was by no means a dogmatic Marxist as his extensive writings illustrate. In 1972, Economy and Society, a well known English journal of which he was a founding member, published his article Capitalism and cheap labour power in South Africa from Segregation to Apartheid’. This was, as set out in Ronald Segal´s obituary, an original view of the difference between traditional segregationist policies and the specific systems of exploiting cheap labour, in response to the requirements of capital, rather than racism, which went under the name of apartheid’. The theoretical rigour of the article changed the direction of the argument then being voiced by black consciousness movement and other voices against the apartheid regime, to a new level of theoretical sophistication.

This article had an extraordinary impact on the resistance movement at the time as it was founded on an intellectual argument that sited the struggle firmly in a concrete materialist base. This is not to deny the existence and the devastating effect of racism, but demonstrated that using racism as a means to account for power and control does not provide a satisfactory answer.

While in England he set up the project known as Research on Education in South Africa, which brought together scholars including many South Africans. On his return to South Africa he founded the Education Policy Unit at the University of the Western Cape. Under his direction, the unit established an unrivalled reputation for policy in higher education.

It conducted a number of studies for the ANC, the new government, and other clients. For further information on the EPU go to Contacts. His theoretical framework was obvious in the nature of the empirical work conducted. He published extensively during the less than 5 years back in the country, and details of some of his work are to be found in the archives held at the University of Cape Town (click here for the archival list) as well as at the Education Policy Unit.

It is Harold Wolpe´s sharp analytical method and his ability to synthesise the material and apply it to the practical socio-economic issues that informs the aims of the Trust. And it is within this framework that the Trust sets out to stimulate intellectual debate beyond the confines of academia and into the broader sphere of the political, amongst NGOs and members of civil society.