Cissie_gool_biography_of_christopher_walken
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The symbolism of the NLL in drawing on liberation from slavery and giving it greater meaning in the broader liberation struggle was powerful. Abdul Rahman returned to Cape Town to settle in Wellington and he married Khadija Dollie and had five children. When one looks at the CPSA documents which came out of the Political Bureau at this time, one sees a qualitative change and Cissie’s united front against fascism and for land, equality and freedom shines through strongly.
Communist Allies
In 1935 Cissie Gool worked closely with a group of communists including two who had what can be called an ‘early black consciousness’ orientation – Johnny Gomas and James la Guma.
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.
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 the 158,000 strong Council of Non-European Trades Unions.
Zainunnisa ‘Cissie’ Gool
The Jewel of District Six (1896 - 1963)
Cissie Gool was a woman of action who walked the talk in taking up the struggle.
The Gools formally divorced in 1942.
District Six – A Political Hotbed
While they were married, the Gool’s house in Searle Street, District Six, hosted weekly meetings of left politicos and trades union activists and fellow travelers.
He was expelled from his seat in Parliament in 1952. 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 NEUM formed in 1943 as a federal body with a ten-point programme and was closely associated with one faction within the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department organisation, the All-African Convention and the Anti-Segregation Council.
These unfolding events deeply influenced the CPSA across the country and it impacted on the African National Congress whose Youth League in 1949 radically transformed the organisation.
A second turning point in South African politics that has already been raised and which also had Cissie Gool at its centre as a driving force, was the introduction of the political concept of an ‘Alliance’ or ‘United Front’.
We shall resist.” From her childhood she had been exposed to politics and she was not one to back down from a fight, especially if it was in the cause of justice.
Zainunnisa ‘Cissie’ Gool’s early introduction to politics was through her mother Nellie James, a Scottish socialist as well as her father, Dr Abdullah Abdurahman who was born in Wellington in the Cape.
Cissie was chairing the meeting to which Alexander had been brought by Johnny Gomas and was so impressed with the young woman that she invited Ray Alexander to join her on the platform and later at her home.
Nellie Abdurahman allowed young Ray Alexander to use her home for meetings and to put up many a comrade who was ‘just passing through’, engaged in union or party work.
A powerful alliance of like- minded organisations, rather than a ‘Front’, was able to come together in 1955 as the Congress of the People, and the Freedom Charter was adopted.
City Councilor
The CPSA reconstituted as the underground South African Communist Party in 1953 but decided not to make any public statements and rather work through other formations and fronts.
She first had to throw off the powerful Abdurahman brand of her father and effectively moved on when she married Dr Gool. Within two years of Nellie Abdurahman starting the APO Women’s Guild in her home, it grew to have over 70 branches. Nellie was also highly active in the women’s suffrage movement, with Olive Schreiner. Abdullah studied first at the Dutch Reformed Mission Church School, the Pauw Gedenkskool in Wellington, then at Marist Brothers, a private Roman Catholic School.
Gool attended Trafalgar High School and later earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Cape Town, then in 1962 a law degree which she had pursued part-time over years. He went on to matriculate at the prestigious South African College School (SACS), which was the origins of the University of Cape Town.
When Cissie’s father went to Glasgow and graduated as a doctor in 1893 and returned to Cape Town in 1895 he set up a medical practice which continued until 1930.