ANDREWS, WILLIAM HENRY
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William Henry Andrews (1870-1950), was the first general secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa and a lifelong Communist party activist. He was born in England in Leiston, Suffolk, in 1870, into a working-class family.
PHOTO CAPTION: William Henry Andrews. SOURCE: EA Library.
In 1893, he immigrated to South Africa where he worked at first in the mines, and later on the railways as a turner. In 1902, he was one of the founders of the Trades and Labour Council. In 1909, he became the first chairman of the South Africa Labour Party. In 1912, he was elected to Parliament with substantial trade union and worker support.
Andrews, like Sidney Percival Bunting, was opposed to Africa’s involvement in World War I and broke with the Labour Party on this issue. In 1915, he was defeated in a re-election bid for Parliament. In 1921, he helped to found the Communist Party of South Africa and became its first general secretary and editor of The International.
For most of 1923, he was in Moscow as a member of the Communist International and in 1924 he was elected first general secretary of the South African Association of Employees’ Organisations which was later to become the South African Trade Union Congress.
Andrews withdrew from the Communist Party in 1925, although he retained his Party membership; though he saw the need to have African trade unions, he did not believe that these should be the primary activities of the Communist Party. In the 1930s, Andrews was officially expelled from the party but was readmitted in 1938 and for most of the 1940s, he was chairman of the party general committee. In 1943, he was nominated as “leader” of the party. He died in October 1950.
PATRICK O’MEARA
