Cissie gool biography of abraham

She was arrested and charged for her involvement in the Passive Resistance campaign, but this did not deter her from her political activities. She was later banned under the Suppression of Communism Act ineffectively halting her above-ground political activities. She passed away from a stroke in Cape Town inand was buried at the Muslim cemetery next to her father in Observatory.

This was the first and only time that the slavery roots of the people of Cape Town was used in a significant manner and it was a proud moment in that this was one of the most important formations in South African history.

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Twenty years later the second largest treason trial occurred in our history, and activists were put on trial. The symbolism of the NLL in drawing on liberation from slavery and giving it greater meaning in the broader liberation struggle was powerful. Cissie Gool was instrumental in the NLL foundation and she was elected as president of the National Liberation League for the cause of land, equality and freedom.

The NLL was a clear break with the moderate liberal traditional framework which until then had dominated resistance politics in the Cape. This changed the political paradigm of resistance politics in the Western Cape and eclipsed the ICU and APO as the previous dominant forces which were now in rapid decline. The National Liberation League, although with a strong communist party leadership, was a broadly left organisation which included left liberals, individual social democrats, Garveyists, Trotskyites of the Workers Party of South Africa led by Goolam Gool, and anyone dedicated to the cause of land, equality and freedom.

The emphasis, it was argued, should be on class struggle rather than black liberation. On these matters even the leading communist party members were also divided and up to this point there were serious schisms within the CPSA leading to expulsions and even collapse in some regions. Cissie Gool had her work cut out for her in trying to hold all of the different tendencies and complex relationships together in the United Front around the three key focus issues — land, equality and freedom.

Cissie gool biography of abraham: Gool in. Cape Town.

Organisations like the APO and the ICU, which had recently ejected communists and other left orientated members from its ranks, were now being eclipsed by the NLL and the new industrial unions and its umbrella body thestrong Council of Non-European Trades Unions. The petitioning and softly-softly approach to resistance was transformed fundamentally by the NLL platform which first introduced the political notion of a national liberation movement onto the South African scene, as different to the reform movement which had dominated the political terrain until this point.

This was a major turning point in South African history and Cissie Gool was at the helm. It would set the path for the next 60 years of the national liberation struggle. These unfolding events deeply influenced the CPSA across the country and it impacted on the African National Congress whose Youth League in radically transformed the organisation.

The united front concept arose in the Spanish resistance and more sharply in Nazi Germany and the European countries most threatened by German expansion and found its clearest articulation through the ideas of Georgi Dimitriov. At the 7th Comintern in Moscow in Dimitriov expounded on the need for a global united anti-fascist front and this became official party policy.

This concept would play a major role in the s and again in the s and would remain a dominant feature in South African politics right into the 21st century. InCissy Gool was elected as president of the Non-European United Front, formed to coordinate organisations into an anti-imperialist liberation front that brought a range of organisations together.

The CAD was a hated apartheid government department.

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Cissie Gool, despite the criticism from some on the right and from those on the WPSA left, worked tirelessly as the president of the United Front to hold the different forces together and to focus on action. In the mid s there was a strong focus against the Hertzog Bills which was a concerted effort to remove even the very small vestiges of political rights of black South Africans.

These bills established the first foundations of the Apartheid system which was introduced in after the National Party came to power. Cissie and many of her comrades across the left could see that the South African state was following the same path as fascist Spain, Italy and Germany.

Cissie gool biography of abraham: 'Cissie' Gool, – The Political

While Cissie Gool also played an executive leadership role in the Anti-CAD, she and many others were opposed to the factional approach by Trotskyites in the organisation which had a narrow ideological view towards organisation of opposition voices. Even later, the trend emerged again in the s as the Workers Organisation for Socialist action with a similar platform to the WPSA fifty years earlier.

But the NEUM story is a story in its own right. There had never before been such a successful mobilisation of a cross- section of South African society on a broad anti-government political platform. Cissie Gool, the tactician, was dismayed at the immaturity in the NEUM and its failure to see their attacks as playing into the hands of a government that had just banned and isolated communists and that now had the ANC, the trades unions and allied organisational formations in its sites.

The lessons of the defeat of the left republic by the fascists in Spain and the rise of the Nazis had not been grasped as Trotskyites and Anarchists in South Africa acted out the same disastrous path as their European counterparts. For Reg, theirs was pretty much an import of discredited and failed European political ideas embraced as a trendy radicalism among middle class intellectual elements.

The hard work put into the broad united front campaign of FRAC had fizzled out by and this type of broad front would only reappear again in the s in the form of the United Democratic Front and the Mass Democratic movement. Gool and her sister, Rosie, attended the Trafalgar High School in District Six in Cape Town which had been founded by her father, an advocate of equality in public education.

The head of the school was Harold Cressy who was championed by her father. She finished her secondary school education by a correspondence course at London University. With this qualification, Gool enrolled to become the first coloured woman to receive a master's degree from the University of Cape Town and inshe became the first coloured female law graduate in South Africa and the first to be called to the Cape Bar.