Harold Wolpe - An Obituary
                                                                    John Pampallis
     Harold Wolpe, who died of a heart attack on Thursday 18 January 1996, was
 one of South Africa's most influential intellectuals and a leading political activist
 over more than four decades.
      He joined the Communist Party in the 1940s and in the 1950s became a
 member of the Congress of Democrats. As a lawyer he worked on a number of
political cases while continuing his work as an activist. In 1963 he was arrested
 for being part of a group of ANC leaders, most of whom were arrested at Rivonia.
His subsequent escape from prison, described by his wife AnneMarie in her book
The Long Way Home, resulted in him leaving the country and eventually settling
in England.
      There he studied further and pursued an academic career as a sociologist.
Here he made his mark on South African studies, especially with his seminal
 1972 article, "Capitalism and cheap labour power, from segregation to apartheid*
(Economy and Society,l(4)) which partially explained South Africa's shift from
its pre-1949 segregation policy to the establishment of apartheid by the need for
the state to increase and systematise repression in order to accentuate capital
accumulation. This would occur through elaborate controls on migrant labour as
the ability of the reserves to supplement workers wages with subsistence farming
decreased. This article, together with some other contemporaneous writings
(notably by Martin Legassick, Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido) helped to shape
the intellectual thought of a whole generation of South African sociologists and
revisionist historians.
     He later worked on the theory of the South African state, attempting to revise
and update the theory of Colonialism of a Special Type and to deepen its class
analysis. He wrote a number of articles on this topic as well as the book. Race,
Class and the Apartheid State, published jointly by UNESCO, the OAU and
James Curry in 1988.
      His work was banned in South Africa during the pre-1990 period but
clandestine copies of his writing circulated amongst academics and activists
among whom his name became well known even though he had been out of the
country for over two decades.


      In the wake of the Soweto uprising in the late-1970s the ANC established
educational structures in exile. One of their main tasks was to ensure that school
policy and curriculum were developed for the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom
College (SOMAFCO) in Tanzania. Wolpe became a key member of the ANC's
London Education Committee and of the ANC National Education Council. In
this capacity, he participated in debates, often heated, on what the role of the
school should be. He argued that the school should be used to meet the needs of
the liberation movement for specific skills rather than to act as an "ordinary'
secondary school preparing students for higher education as was proposed by the
school's teachers, including myself.
     In the late-1980s, seeing the need to start developing education policy for a
post-apartheid South Africa, he established the Research on Education in South
Africa (RES A) project, attached to the University of Essex where he was a Reader
in Sociology. In 1991 RESA merged with a similar project at the University of
the Western Cape to form the Education Policy Unit (EPU) and Wolpe returned
to South Africa to become its Director. He also became chairperson of the EPU
Directors' Forum which coordinated and facilitated the work of the five EPUs
in South Africa.
     In the past five years he has built up an effective and successful research unit
and participated in most of the the major policy development initiatives of the
democratic movement - for example, The National Education Policy Initiative
(NEPI), the ANC's Policy Framework for Education and Training, and the
pre-election Implementation Plan for Education and Training. As the director of
the country's only policy research unit specialising in higher education, he felt
disappointed - even slighted - at not being appointed to the National Commission
for Higher Education. Nevertheless he agreed to be the Convenor of the largest
of the Task Groups: on Programme, Qualification and Institutional Framework.
He put the finishing touches on the report only hours before he suffered his heart
attack.
    He was a warm person with a gentle sense of humour and always stimulating
to talk to. He loved to debate and seemed genuinely surprised when people took
his sometimes sharp attacks on their arguments and ideas personally. He would
often engage in a fierce intellectual disagreement with someone, and, after it was
over, speak to them on various topics with no rancour whatsoever. He will be
sorely missed by his colleagues, especially those in the education policy
community, as well as by his many friends.