ABSTRACT
Almost no scholarly attention has been paid to the community of intellectuals who worked in political, social, and educational circles in Cape Town, South Africa, outside of the academy, in the last hundred years. From about the middle of the 1930s, a steady stream of intellectuals emerged in Cape Town, working in left -wing political and cultural structures. Th ey brought to the assemblies in which they moved a fi erce commitment to social analysis buttressed by a concentrated interest in political theory. Th is commitment was expressed in activist work, in polemics in debating circles, and also in writing sometimes reproduced in formal journals, newspapers, and books, but, much more oft en, in polemical tracts. Th ese tracts and pamphlets constituted the grist of the intellectual work holding up the particular outlooks and perspectives emerging in those parts of the Western Cape that were not White. Th ey contained what came to be the characteristic postures of the Unity Movement, the Fourth International of South Africa, the Teachers’ League of South Africa (TLSA), and a whole range of Trotskyist and Leninist movements (Jaff ee, 1988; Kies, 1953; Saunders, 1988; Wieder, 2008).
