‘Personifying the coloured community’: Sonny Leon and the ambiguities of the politics of co-option and resistance in the apartheid state

In the 1970s Sonny Leon, leader of the Labour Par ty of South Africa (LP), was a prominent and controversial coloured politician, seen by the apar the id government and by most whi tes as a dangerous subversive. To many in his own communi ty he was a hero, al though there were some who rejected him as a puppet of the apartheid state. In the new South Africa he is forgotten and ignored, at most a footnote in our turbulent history. He is equally marginalised in studies of politics in the coloured community. In Roy du Pr~'s book, Separate but unequal: the 'coloured' people a political history (1994), he is only mentioned three times as the leader of a par ty that had sold out to apartheid. In Richard van der Ross ' s The rise and decline of apartheid: a s tudy of political movements among the coloured people of South Africa 1880-1985 (1986), he is no more than a name. Even Gavin Lewis in his outs tanding Between the wire and the wall: a history of South African "Coloured' politics (1987) mentions him in passing. This is a pity as his life deserves attention. He personifies the ordeals that the down-trodden, humiliated, belittled and ignored coloured communi ty had to endure in the apartheid state. This article will investigate why Leon held the opinions he did, became the person he was, behaved in the way he did, and what he achieved. Lionel Samuel Leon, always known as Sonny, was born in a mining camp in Ferreirastown, Johannesburg, on 29 November 1911. His father was an Anglo-Asian cabinet-maker with his own business, and his mother was of Javanese descent. He was born into a racially stratified society dominated by a white minori ty with blacks and coloureds t rapped at the bot tom of the social scale. The Leons were