I've been interested in the history discussed here, as I too, even on the other side of the world, remember the 'Stokely Carmichael' quote well.

It's been my experience that, in hindsight, we expect all radicals to have embraced all the 'right' ideas from the outset - whereas in truth, many people start out with a beef about one particular right (eg, integration in the States) and this, over time, and if they are thoughtful people, forces them to extend the logic to other areas of oppression, too. For example, the Communist Party in South Africa's first well-known slogan was, embarrassingly, "Workers unite and fight for a white South Africa!" (see quote below from Wikipedia, which gives a potted outline).

It's been quite a disappointment in South Africa to come out of all those years of struggle, only to find that (in spite of all the good stuff said in our Consitution and excellent female representation in the corridors of power) we still have to fight the feminist fight. But why would you expect oppressed men to give up the one area where they feel powerful? The white miners in SA were oppressed, in their view, by the capitalist overlords and government, but until they were forced to see different, they reveled in their little bit of power over black miners.

Sexism, in my view, is one of the most deeply entrenched attitudes of them all. We've been fighting it for how long now, and yet it persists, even in the heartland of academia - as someone pointed out, would Larry Summers have been half as comfortable about saying Black students have innate inabilities as he was about saying that re women?

Mandi

The Communist Party of South Africa first came to prominence during the armed Rand Rebellion by white mineworkers in 1922. The large mining concerns, facing labour shortages and wage pressures, had announced their intention of liberalizing the rigid colour bar within the mines and elevate some blacks to minor supervisory positions. (The vast majority of white miners mainly held supervisory positions over the laboring black miners.) Despite having nominaly opposed racialism from its inception, the CPSA supported the white miners in their call to preserve wages and the colour bar with the slogan "Workers of the world, unite and fight for a white South Africa!". With the failure of the rising, in part due to black workers failing to strike, the Communist Party was forced by Comintern to adopt the Native Republic thesis which stipulated that South Africa was a country belonging to the Natives, that is, the Blacks. The Party thus reoriented itself at its 1924 Party Congress towards organising black workers and "Africanising" the party.