Michael “Mick” Harmel: A Revolutionary Thinker, Writer and Strategist
On 18 June 1974, a revolutionary South African anti-imperialist activist, journalist and South African Communist Party (SACP) member Michael “Mick” Harmel died in Prague, in the then Czechoslovakia, while he was working for the “World Marxist Review” journal. Known by his pen name “A. Lerumo”, he was a founding member of the SACP, after the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was banned, and a key historical figure in the country’s liberation struggle.
Michael “Mick” Alan Harmel was a prominent South African anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist activist, journalist, and intellectual who served as the leading theoretician of the South African Communist Party (SACP). He was born in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, on 7 February 1915, and grew up in Johannesburg, where he later became a close political ally and friend of Nelson Mandela. His father was Arthur Aaron Harmel (born 1884), an Irish-born socialist of Russian-Jewish descent, who trained as a pharmacist in Dublin before emigrating to South Africa in 1910. He was highly anti-imperialist and deeply influenced Michael’s early political worldview.
His mother, Sarah Landau, belonged to the Irish-Jewish community and was born to Polish-Jewish parents. She married Arthur in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), but tragically died of the Spanish flu in 1918, when Michael was only three years old. Michael was raised primar
