The Communist Party and the Germiston By-election, 1932

The Communist Party's participation in the Germiston by-election of 1932 is an episode which for the Party's own historians has acquired a mythological status. But is it myth in another sense, that is fictional propaganda, as is claimed in recent revisionist treatment of the Party's history? In fact a range of contemporary sources confirm the details of activist recollections of the event. It was an occasion when Communists succeeded in bringing together and even supplying leadership to two significant courses of communal and class protest.