Vella Pillay

Vella Pillay (8 October 1923 – 29 July 2004) was a South African international economist and a founding member of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement.

He was a member of the South African Communist Party and coordinated the party's overseas activities from London when it was banned by the South African government.

As a chairman of the editorial committee of Anti-Apartheid News, he wrote extensively on the South African economy under the apartheid regime.

Pillay studied at the University of the Witwatersrand before receiving graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and University of London.

Vella Pillay was born on 8 October 1923 in Johannesburg into a family with six children and a low income.

During the 1940s Pillay joined the resistance to the Pegging Act, 1943, later to be incorporated in apartheid legislation, which included the Group Areas Act that discriminated against Indians.

He campaigned against the act, which limited the ability of Indians to hold residence and own property outside of designated regions, and led a protest against the South African pass laws that restricted movement of black and coloured South Africans.

In 1948, Pillay was awarded a bachelor of commerce degree from the University of the Witwatersrand.

He was enrolled as a part-time student while working as a bookkeeper for an Indian company.

He moved to London in 1949 and enrolled in the London School of Economics (LSE) for an international economics honors degree.

During this time, he worked with Bank of China as a research officer.

While studying part-time at the LSE, Pillay relied on his wife for financial support.

At the LSE, Pillay was supervised by Nobel laureate James Meade, who had been a director at the Cabinet Office Economic Section and a contributor to Keynes' General Theory of Employment.

He visited the People's Republic of China several times and met Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and other leaders.

During Pillay's time at the University of the Witwatersrand, he was a member of the Federation of Progressive Students and was a participant in the Transvaal Indian Congress.

Early on, he led a protest of municipal tenants to the Johannesburg City Council, when their water supply was disconnected because of their inability to pay the required fees.

His protest resulted in the restoration of the water supply to the municipal tenants.

He was a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and became involved with the leadership of the South African Indian Congress.

At the SACP he met influential African leaders including Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and the then President of the African National Congress, Alfred Bitini Xuma.

Pillay was of Tamil descent and later classified as an Indian by the South African Population Registration Act, 1950.

In his early childhood, he went to a racially segregated school that was designated for Indians and Coloureds.

During this time, he would help his mother sell vegetables to meet their financial needs.

Operating out of London, Pillay was involved in the South African Communist Party's overseas operations, even after the South African government banned the SACP in 1950.

He was the fund manager of the party, and a part of the team that produced the party's periodical, African Communist.

He supervised arrangements for the party's operatives to receive military training in China and the Soviet Union.

During this time, Pillay's house in North London was also a place for students and other South Africans moving to Britain to meet and discuss the applicability of Marxist ideas to the freedom struggle in South Africa.

As a result of the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, Pillay's position at the Bank of China was viewed with suspicion by the SACP, which remained loyal to the Soviet Communist Party.

In 1960 or 1961, Pillay was confronted by a representative of the SACP (possibly Michael Alan Harmel (1915–1974), a political mentor and friend of Mandela) on a boat on a river in Moscow and told to leave the Bank of China or face expulsion from the SACP.

Pillay refused and was side-lined by the SACP.

He had declined an offer of an equivalent position at a proposed Soviet bank thinking his job with the Chinese was more secure.

In 1960, Pillay was the founding member of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, after organising a boycott of South African goods in 1959, and worked closely with the British Communist Party.

In 1978, Pillay was awarded an MSc in economics by the University of London.

During his time in London, Pillay published widely on South African economics, and often used the pseudonym "P. Tlale" when writing for the African Communist.

He was the organisation's vice-chairman between 1980 and 1986, and had served as the treasurer of the organisation.

As the chairman of the editorial committee of the Anti-Apartheid News, he wrote extensively on the economy under the apartheid regime, labour and trade policies, and operations of the South African administration.

Pillay was inducted into the Greater London Enterprise Board of Ken Livingstone's Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981.

The board was tasked with driving investments from GLC into the local economy, and drive employment and opportunities for minorities including black people.

He returned to South Africa in 1992 before the first non-racial elections in 1994 and coordinated with other economists as a part of the African National Congress's (ANC) Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG) to produce a forward looking framework for South Africa's macroeconomic policies.

The report, Making Democracy Work: A Framework for Macroeconomic Policy in South Africa (1993), however, was rejected by the African National Congress.

He served in several roles within the organisation up until 1994.