By Thubelihle Mathonsi
Prof Emeritus Alan Kirkaldy walked into the Eden Grove Blue Lecture Theatre, almost packed to capacity with family, friends, colleagues and students this week. There were also attendees on Zoom. They had come to hear Kirkaldy discuss the book that won him this year’s Vice-Chancellor’s Book Award, Everyday Communists in South Africa’s Liberation Struggle: The Lives of Ivan and Lesley Shermbrucker. Also in the room were the couple’s daughter and daughter-in-law.
“This was not part of the script, but I am very emotional today, not only because I’m nervous,” Kirkaldy began. He talked about having received a brown envelope that contained a small bag that Lesley Shermbrucker had made when she was in prison for two years. The room was silent as people listened intently.
“Apologies to all my colleagues who have won awards, but I think this is the most prestigious award,” he said as the crowd joined him in laughter. This award comes at the end of his academic career, but he said, “I hope that’s not the only reason I’m getting the award.”
Having a Marxist background, Kirkaldy was deeply sceptical of biographies. “We would describe it as a form of bourgeois subjectivism,” he said. He probably would not have written the book, he admitted, save for his interest in social history methodology and microhistory that details the life histories of individuals. Realising that individual lives were just as important to him as grand histories, Kirkaldy has found microhistories influential not just for stories but as a lens into individuals’ lives and historical trends.
Originally, because so little is written about the ordinary, the book was going to be titled Very Ordinary Communists before he settled on Everyday Communists in South Africa. “I had to reluctantly concede it was better,” he said, explaining that it was about the everyday people who were assisting the revolution, collecting funds and smuggling out activists for their safety — people who grew up like other South Africans and were just ordinary, committed people.
Ivan and Lesley Shermbrucker met in 1946 at a dance, both already members of the Communist Party.
Kirkaldy referred to their union as one of the most enduring marriages. “If you read the book, you will see.” Draconian apartheid laws suppressed the Communist Party, and both Shermbruckers experienced prison time. Later, their activism was sustained in part by Lesley’s exercise class, which she continued until the COVID-19 pandemic.
In closing, he read a letter written by Ivan expressing anger at those who had run away, and ended with photographs of the Shermbruckers that captured their lives even in their youth, including a picture of Ivan when he was a student at Umtatha.
Everyday Communists in South Africa’s Liberation Struggle: The Lives of Ivan and Lesley Shermbrucker is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
