Dougie Oakes, Senior Writer
DISTRICT Six, 1937 – and Zainunnisa “Cissie” Gool rises to launch her election campaign for a seat on the City Council. Having risen to prominence as an outspoken supporter of left-wing causes, Gool’s decision to seek a seat in City Hall has been sharply criticised by fellow “radicals” such as her brother-in-law Goolam Gool, his sister Jane and her husband IB Tabata.
But, at this meeting, Gool’s main opposition is about to come from a different source – her father, the doyen of “coloured” politics in the Western Cape, Abdullah Abdurahman. In many ways a product of his time, Abdurahman’s opposition to his daughter’s participation in municipal politics has little to do with whether she has the expertise to be a councillor.
It centres more on an attitude, prevalent among many men at that time, that a woman should be a housewife.
Abdurahman believes that Gool should be at home, seeing to the needs of her husband and children – and so he brings a group of supporters with him to the meeting, and they begin heckling her.
But Gool proves to be no pushover.
In her book The Truth is on the Walls, Gool’s niece, Naz Gool-Ebrahim, outlines how Gool responds to the hecklers: “You can do whatever you want to do,” she tells them, “but I’ll come back to you again and again and again. If not now, then some other time.”
And, true to her word, she holds firm – even though she loses this election.
The relationship between Gool and Abdurahman had not always been as testy as this.
It could be said that both she and her older sister, Waradia, were born with silver spoons in their mouths.
Their father, the grandson of freed slaves, was the first Muslim to attend the South African College. In 1888, Abdullah enrolled for a medical degree at the University of Glasgow, qualifying in 1893.
While doing post-graduate work in London, he married Helen James, whom he had met and courted while both were students in Glasgow.
Abdurahman had impeccable connections, and Cissie and Waradia grew up in their Mount Road, District Six, home in the company of such prominent visitors as the author, Olive Schreiner, as well as the political activist, the great Mahatma, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
As young girls (and in the absence of suitable schools to send them to in Cape Town), both girls were educated by governesses.
It was only after the continuous prompting of Abdurahman had resulted in the building of Trafalgar High, with Harold Cressy as its first principal, that the girls could attend school in Cape Town (although Cissie matriculated at London University).
On her return to Cape Town, she enrolled at the University of Cape Town for a BA degree, but interrupted her studies to marry Abdul Hamid (AH) Gool, a man 11 years her senior. It was through AH’s brother, Goolam, that her interest in politics began to grow.
Formal politics in the black communities during the 1930s – and even earlier – was not always as respectable as some might have made it out to be.
Among the more outspoken activists were Johnny Gomas and Jimmy la Guma, both of whom were members of the Communist Party of South Africa (SACP), the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (until its leader, Clements Kadalie, began purging communists in the union), and the Western Cape ANC.
Both Gomas and La Guma began mentoring a new group of coloured activists – including Cissie Gool.
Like Gool, most of these “radicals” emerged from the elite sections of the coloured communities in the Western Cape, especially Cape Town.
A typical member of this grouping would have come from a home in which their parents were members of Abdurahman’s African Political Organisation (APO) or the Teacher’s League of South Africa. This was especially true of Gool.
She and Gomas developed a close relationship, politically, and he, in fact, became her lifelong friend.
It was inevitable perhaps that, with segregation measures becoming ever harsher after Union, that the new “radicals” of Cape Town would seek to form themselves into a political body – and that Cissie Gool would play a leadership role.
In 1935, Gool, Gomas and other key players such as Jane Gool, La Guma, Sam Khan, Tabata and Benny Kies formed the National Liberation League (NLL).
The prognosis for survival of the new grouping was in doubt from the beginning.
The new body almost immediately split into two factions – the one led by Cissie Gool and the other by her brother-in-law Goolam Gool. Nevertheless, it was Cissie who became its first president.
It was while she was at the head of the NLL, and encouraged by Gomas, that she also took up a position on the political bureau of the SACP.
It was from here, too, that she pushed the notion of a “United Working-Class Front”.
Gool, who had made her political debut in politics in April 1931 at an APO meeting, where she railed against the Women’s Enfranchisement Act – which would only have given the vote to white women – still respected her father’s organisation at that point.
So, with blood still being thicker than water, it was not surprising that she would once more try to forge some type of unity with the APO.
This, however, quickly proved to be an exercise in futility. The APO was locked in a time warp. They were determined to continue with their conservative strategies of lobbying white politicians for tiny tidbits.
The politically aware youth of the 1930s were not prepared to be humiliated in the same way they believed their parents were being humiliated.
They increasingly questioned – and rejected – the control that whites were beginning to assume over their lives. They began making it abundantly clear that they were not prepared to “engage” with sympathetic white politicians in order to retain (let alone win) the few rights they had. In their minds, the imperatives of a new order were black unity and working-class alliances.
The Goolam Gool faction of the NLL believed strongly in policies of non-collaboration with white parliamentary structures, including prime minister JBM Hertzog’s plan to replace Cape African franchise rights with an advisory Natives’ Representative Council, and for whites to be elected as Natives’ representatives in Parliament.
Cissie Gool, however, was prepared to be much more pragmatic in the type of politics that she practised.
She still sought to use the best of the APO’s policies and, unlike her brother-in-law and his supporters, was prepared to work with white communists.
And working with the lawyer, Harry Snitcher, and the trade unionist, Sam Kahn, she became involved in a number of anti-fascism activities, which were springing up all over the place in the 1930s.
And then, to the dismay of many of her left-wing supporters, she decided to run for a seat on the City Council.
After losing at her first attempt in 1937, she had another opportunity to run in 1938. And, this time, having put together a formidable team of helpers, she triumphed in Ward 7, which included the run-down community of District Six.
Although she had been frequently criticised for her forays into politics, when many traditionalists felt her time should have been better spent as a housewife, she always believed any decisions in this regard were hers alone to make.
The same applied to her relationships.
In 1938, she left her husband, AH Gool, for Sam Kahn, a young Jewish lawyer, trade unionist and parliamentarian, 14 years her junior.
They lived together for 15 years as a “mixed” couple.
Gool died on July 1, 1963, after suffering a massive stroke.