| Liberation struggle's page | |
| Home page | SOUTH
AFRICA'S LIBERATION: REFLECTIONS ON THE ANTI-APARTHEID STRUGGLE & AND
THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
Sue Heher, Charge
d'Affairs, INTRODUCTION
Other South Africans colleagues who have visited Palestine recently have typically said that they felt the situation here to be worse than that of apartheid South Africa. And they give two reasons: the very different role of the international community is playing in this struggle; and the scale and sophistication of the ongoing occupation - which exceeds the hideously brutal but nevertheless undeniably crass oppression that was apartheid. I cannot presume to advise what parallels or lessons Palestinians might draw from South Africa's struggle and liberation. But I do presume to carry a message of hope: hope that justice will always triumph, hope that because freedom is indivisible, Palestine too will be free - for our common humanity demands it. Popular awareness of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa probably dates to about the time of the 1964 Rivonia Treason trial of Nelson Mandela and other senior ANC leaders. But even by the 1960s, the struggle in South Africa was some fifty years old. I will trace the origin and development of the struggle, tracking its rise - and fall - and ultimate success. I will conclude with some observations about the role of the international community. I will not, of course, be doing justice to the breadth and depth of the anti-apartheid struggle. So I hope to raise as many questions as I answer.
The ANC was founded in 1912, before formal "grand apartheid" was designed by the National Party post its 1948 election victory. For its first four decades the ANC focused on a constitutional struggle for equal rights for non-white South Africans: it petitioned the government, sent delegations to present the African case and organised peaceful protests. As the white government remained obdurate, so the credibility of this form of protest started to wane and with the emergence of a new generation of younger activists after the creation of the ANC Youth League in 1944, the ANC started to change tactics towards mass action and civil disobedience, although still staying within the bounds of legality and carefully adhering to a policy of non-violence. With the accession to power by the National Party in 1948, the struggle entered a new phase of militancy, driven by the increasingly violent repression of black South Africans by the apartheid government. As the government expanded the police power of the state and used increasingly harsh racist legislation to curb African political organisations and activities through bannings, arrests, trials and imprisonment, so it forced a stronger and more militant African response. As the very constitutional and legal structure of South Africa was intended to maintain white supremacy, resistance had, by definition, to be para-constitutional. The 1950s, therefore, was a decade of major anti-apartheid activities. In June 1952 the ANC launched the Defiance Campaign: based on the principles of passive resistance, it consisted of large-scale demonstrations, strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience, and a growing level of cooperation across the different parties in the anti-apartheid front. Eight thousand trained volunteers were arrested for staging sit-ins in facilities reserved for whites only. Although the Campaign did not bring about any change in the policy of the Government, it did mark a turning point in mass-mobilisation and forced the government into the unaccustomed position of reacting to an African political initiative. In the words of Mandela: "Defiance…released strong social forces… [and]… was an effective way of getting the masses to function politically. It was one of the best ways of exerting pressure on the government and extremely dangerous to the stability and security of the state. It inspired and aroused our people from a conquered and servile community of yes-men to a militant and uncompromising band of comrades-in-arms". As one way to weaken and deflect growing opposition, both internally and externally from the international community, the government set up a system of semi-autonomous homelands - or Bantustans as they came to be called - revising the semantics of apartheid slightly to accommodate the concept of "separate development" . By holding out the promise of full political control of their "own areas" (less than 13% of the land of South Africa and what in reality were huge rural slums incapable of existing independently from greater South Africa), the government hoped to dilute and fracture African and international opposition to apartheid. Although there were of course some black leaders who, for the own personal gain, were coopted into the system, the overwhelming majority of black South Africans rejected the creation of the homelands as the farce they were. 1960-1964 The upswing in the struggle that started in the late 1940s culminated in the tragedy of Sharpeville in 1960. On 21 March there was a large demonstration against the passes (permits) that Africans were required to carry at all times, which regulated their movement in South Africa and which had thus become a symbol of their oppression. Police fired on an unarmed African crowd, killing 69 people. Shock waves ran throughout the country, but after a brief hesitation the government banned the ANC and other political parties and declared a state of emergency. Anti-apartheid forces mounted one last major effort at non-violent protest, but the government responded with an even greater show of police force. Suddenly an illegal organization, the ANC was compelled to reorient its methods of operation radically. It had to set up an underground resistance movement and develop an organization in exile. Banned and blocked from open and peaceful protest, and in the face of brutal and determined violent suppression of African protest, the ANC also concluded in 1961 that mass public protest of a non-violent nature could not produce a change of government policy. Futhermore, the ANC knew that the government would meet any violent mass protest with full-scale violence of its own. Experience had taught the ANC that "rebellion would offer the government limitless opportunities for the indiscriminate slaughter" of Africans and given that the population as a whole was unprepared for such an open violent struggle, it could only spell disaster. The ANC concluded that it therefore had no choice but to adopt violence in response to the government's escalating use of force and violence. It was a difficult decision, as the ANC had a long and proud history of peaceful and constitutional efforts to fight for equality and democracy. In adopting the armed struggle the ANC consistently stated that the armed struggle was subordinate to and a complement of the political struggle - which remained primary in the effort to topple apartheid. Saying that the "time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight; that time has come now to South Africa" , the ANC created a new underground military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) in 1961. At the time the ANC defined four possible forms of violence: sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism and open revolution. To keep the possibility of negotiations open and to avoid irrevocable confrontation, MK started with a campaign of selective sabotage against railways, power lines and other strategic government targets. In the next two and half years, MK carried out some 200 such sabotage attacks. However, the activities of ANC and MK were always kept distinct: the ANC remained a mass political body focussing on non-violent protest, MK remained a small organisation recruiting from across the spectrum, with its one particular objectives In 1964, eight senior members of the ANC, including Mandela, were arrested, tried for treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mandela used the occasion of his last public appearance to set forth a clear definition of the anti-apartheid struggle. Defining it as an African struggle, he spelled out that the cause of violence was white oppression. "As a result of government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalise and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism…[As]all lawful modes of expressing opposition had been closed by legislation…we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority or to defy the government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against and when the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decided to answer violence with violence. The hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation and fewer and fewer rights…[this lead] to the inevitable growth among the Africans of the belief that violence was the only way out - it showed that a government which used force to maintain its rule teaches the oppressed to use force to oppose it." Mandela expressed his and the ANC's fears that if the ANC did not take the lead, small, splinter groups would adopt terrorism against blacks and whites - leading to general civil strife that would engulf the whole country in nothing but bitterness and loss of life. Civil war or an inter-racial war would have meant the destruction of everything the ANC stood for. At the Rivonia trial, Mandela gave the rationale for sabotage as follows: "We believed that South Africa depended to a large extend on foreign capital and foreign trade. We felt that planned destruction of power plants, and interference with rail and telephone communications would tend to scare away capital from the country, make it more difficult for goods from industrial areas to reach the seaports on schedule and would in the long run be a very heavy drain on the economic life of the country, thus compelling the voters of the country to reconsider their position" (Incidentally, in his testimony, Mandela also stated that MK drew on the experiences of the Jewish national underground Irgun Zvai Leumi). He detailed how, at the same time, MK also started to train a nucleus of men who would be able to provide leadership if guerrilla warfare started. In his statement, Mandela also dealt with the fundamental issues that caused him to be on trial for his life: "Our fight is against real and not imaginary hardships…we fight against poverty and the lack of human dignity…and the laws which are made by whites are designed to preserve this situation" . On his release in February 1990, Mandela concluded his speech with the same words he used at the treason trial. Banned and with most of its senior leadership in prison or in exile, the ANC seemed defeated. It appeared, by 1964 that the apartheid government had thoroughly routed and silenced the anti-apartheid movement. 1964-1990 By the mid-1960s, then, the ANC was largely invisible in South Africa and the apartheid government appeared self-assured, relentlessly implementing separate development inside the country and embarking on a new diplomatic initiatives outside of it. This enforced quiescence was broken in the early 1970s by a new assertiveness among the growing black urban working class. Waves of spontaneous strikes erupted in 1973 and this surge of activity in the face of government opposition was buttressed by the growing awareness and sophistication of an urban population. When the government decreed in 1976 that Afrikaans would become the mandatory language of instruction in African secondary schools, the South African Student Movement called for protest demonstrations on June 16. Many of you will have seen the famous photograph of Hector Petersen, shot dead in the protest demonstrations. Protests quickly spread across the major urban centres of the country and elicited widespread support, despite massive police presence. Although the demonstrations never threatened government control, their extent, the degree to which they rallied popular support and the sustained fearlessness of the demonstrators in the face of overwhelming state military supremacy conveyed to all South Africans that a new era of political activism had commenced. A new generation of youth activists proved themselves ready to confront armed white power, even with little prospect of success. The demonstrations showed that a powerful wellspring of direct defiance could be tapped among blacks from all population groups, generations and economic groupings. Soweto started a process of questioning the invincibility of white power and considering how black power might be organised and accommodated. There is little evidence, however, that the ANC was initially directly involved in the uprising. But as the young Soweto militants fled the country to avoid capture, they feed to the ANC in exile and by the late 1970s, the ANC was again able to undertake an expanding sabotage campaign. The ANC seemed to riding a rising tide of revolutionary change and with the initiation of the "Free Mandela" campaign in 1980, the ANC once again become a focal point for political mobilisation across a broad spectrum of anti-apartheid opposition, within and without South Africa. At the same time, black trade unionism started to emerge on a national scale and township residents started to create alternative local government structures to replace the apartheid-state created local councils. Townships residents refused to pay rent to the local councils and boycotted white merchants. This assertive upswing in the unions and in the townships was complemented by increasingly articulate opposition to apartheid by black Christians - evidenced most dramatically by the election of Bishop Desmond Tutu as secretary to the South African Council of Churches and, under the leadership of Dr Allan Boesak, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared apartheid a heresy. The government's response to this rise in militant protest was typical: more detentions without trial, more banning of meetings, more restrictions on activists, yet greater use of physical and mental intimidation and torture etc. But the government too sensed that the situation was irrevocably changing. On the one hand, then, it instituted a "reform programme", relaxing some of the pettier aspects of grand apartheid (e.g. movement control regulations). And on the other hand, it strengthened its defence and security capabilities, and embarked on an expanding regional campaign of destabilisation as it sought to attack ANC bases in neighbouring countries (also called the Frontline States). The government's reform programme culminated in a new Constitution in 1983, which gave limited representation to Indians and Coloureds in central government. Black opposition mobilised against the new constitution and the result was the emergence of the first large-scale nationally organised anti-apartheid movement since 1960, headed by the United Democratic Front (UDF) and linked to the student organisations, trade unions and community-based organisations. Never before had so many blacks been so directly and visibly involved in active opposition. It was a fulfilment of the ANC's strategy: the combination of mass politicisation with the armed struggle. During 1984 and 1985 resistance and protest deepened and expanded across the country: stay-at-homes, demonstrations and attacks on the businesses, houses and persons of perceived collaborators became routinised. In late 1984, for the first time in 1960, the apartheid government deployed the military in the townships to augment the over-extended police. The security forces increasingly resorted to live ammunition and as the toll of dead mounted, funerals became ever more the rallying points for anti-government protests. It did seem that the townships were becoming ungovernable. Getting more desperate, the government declared a state of emergency (the first since 1960) and expanded police powers and ferociously muzzled the press. Still the uprising raged and South Africa started to lose international credibility rapidly. The government was in a quandary and so initiated secret discussions with Mandela in prison and other back-channels with the ANC. The then President, P W Botha, offered Mandela his freedom if he would renounced violence. Mandela rejected the offer, arguing that "Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts". Mandela demanded that the government renounce violence, release all political prisoners and end the ban on the ANC. The government refused and then nullified attempts by the Commonwealth to mediate when it attacked ANC bases in the Frontline states. As the government continued to move to decapitate the resistance leadership, restricting the UDF and other organisations from any political activity, so Archbishop Tutu and other church leaders stepped to the fore to continue to lead and advocate boycotts and defiance while opposition regrouped into the amorphous Mass Democratic Movement (MDM). As ANC/UDF/MDM leaders met officially for the first time with the American and British officials in 1989, the government continued to explore secret contacts with the ANC. The ANC endorsed the principle of negotiations, but laid out six preconditions for negotiations to start: lifting the state of emergency, ending restrictions on political activity, releasing detainees held without trial, legalising all political organisations, releasing political prisoners and offering clemency to those on death row. The renunciation of violence, whether by the ANC or by the government, was not listed as a precondition to negotiations: it was envisaged as the result of negotiations. This policy, set on in the Harare declaration of June 1989, became the focal point of discussion at the NAM meeting in September, the Commonwealth meeting in October and the UNGA special meeting in December. But it was only with the coming to power of F W de Klerk that the contacts with the ANC finally bore fruit and within less than six months of de Klerk coming to power all the conditions were met or on the way to being fulfilled. After the unbanning of the ANC and release of Mandela in early 1990, the ANC had the necessary strength, support (both internationally and internally), experience and clarity of vision for it to compel the apartheid government to negotiate with the ANC on the ANC's terms. The armed struggle, ongoing mass mobilisation and the call for ongoing sanctions against South Africa were only dropped some-time after negotiations had already commenced and once the ANC's conditions about the release of prisoners had been met.
The tremendous support from the international community for the anti-apartheid struggle was slow in appearing, and it was only in the wake of the Defiance Campaign of 1952, that the UNGA first started to prioritise the issue. From the 1950s, the anti-apartheid resolutions and votes came up annually in the United Nations General Assembly, but Western powers, and in particular the UK and US, did not join the 1962 UN GA vote endorsing economic and diplomatic sanctions against South Africa. On the country, American and UK firms continued to invest in South Africa, strengthening the apartheid system. For much of its history the question of external support was not particularly important to the ANC. It was not until it was forced underground and into exile in 1960 that it had to shift to concentrating on securing foreign support in order to survive. First and foremost the ANC forged links with key independent African states - these were the countries that would host the ANC in exile and provide it with political, and where possible financial support. Next in line were the other non-aligned states, the Soviet Union and some Eastern-bloc countries and smaller Western European States (most notably the Scandinavian countries). As regards the major Western powers, the ANC focussed on developing and working with the anti-apartheid groups, as the government were not sympathetic to the ANC, to mobilise locally based foreign anti-apartheid sentiment to persuade Western European and North American government to pressure the South African government. The US and UK in particular remained reluctant until late in the struggle to talk with the ANC and actively opposed ANC efforts to isolate the South African government through diplomacy and sanctions. The UK and US positions were one of "constructive engagement" i.e., they were premised on the basis that it would be easier to persuade South Africa to moderate its policies by persuasion rather than by sanction. The ANC's response was that since the 1930s, the international community had sought to cajole South African into being a well-behaved member of the community but the South African Government had demonstrated repeatedly that it was becoming more and more insensitive to international denunciation and condemnation. Margaret Thatcher is famous for having declared that if anyone thought there would be black majority rule in South Africa, they were "living in cloud cuckoo land". Until the 1980s then, the ANC saw that it was more in the interests of the US and UK governments to tolerate the apartheid government than to challenge it. Indeed, it saw the US as the new colonial power on the African continent, conspiring to keep corrupt African regimes in power and repressing legitimate African protest. After the 1976 Soweto uprising - which lead to a sustained crisis in South Africa all through the 1980s - the ANC was able to broaden its access and credibility internationally to include the major Western governments. By the mid-1980s the ANC established dialogue with the US and Western European governments and businesses and popular American sentiment culminated in the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, which Congress passed by overriding President Reagan's veto. A few words about sanctions, which by the 1970s and 1980s came to be the main focus of the ANC's drive to build and consolidate international isolation of apartheid South Africa. The ANC's call for sanctions should not be looked at in isolation but as part of its overall strategy. By the 1970s and 1980s, the armed struggle was the central strategy of the ANC, but it saw that sanctions would play an important subsidiary role in helping to alter the tactical balance of forces involved in the struggle, depriving the regime of the underpinning that international trade and investment gave it. The ANC stated that its call for sanctions was to aid the peaceful resolution of the problem in South Africa. It envisaged that sanctions would help the limit the process of transition through struggle, thus saving lives and limiting the scale of the conflict. Sanction were aimed at limiting the escalation and the need to use force and violence, by weakening the system and making it less capable of resisting the struggle and thus encouraging an early solution. Sanctions then were a complement to, not a substitute for, the ANC's political and armed struggle. Sanctions took many forms over the years, and increased both quantitatively and qualitatively as the SAG refused to initiate real reform and continued to repress ruthlessly any opposition to its policies. Sanctions were implemented unevenly by governments and were largely ineffective until such time as South Africa's major trading and economic partners came on board. In the US and UK popularly implemented sanctions (like the cultural boycott) preceded government imposed sanctions. The mildest forms of sanctions were cultural, sporting and travel. These gave South Africa a sense of isolation but did not directly harm the economy. Then there were diplomatic (South Africa could no longer belong to any international organisations), trade and military sanctions. These started to hurt, but it was always possible to work with other pariah and rogue states to break trade sanctions and buy weapons and military technology. It was really disinvestments, followed by financial sanctions that ultimately crippled the economy. Starved of investment, unable to roll-over loans or obtain new loans, with an exodus of a capital, the South African economy quickly faced bankruptcy in the late 1980s when comprehensive financial sanctions were finally imposed. STRUGGLE FOR LIBERATION IN SOUTH AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITYA Selection of Papers Published by the United Nations Centre against ApartheidEdited by E.
S. Reddy,
INTRODUCTIONOne of the essential contributions of the United Nations in the international campaign against apartheid in South Africa has been the preparation and dissemination of objective information on the inhumanity of apartheid, the long struggle of the oppressed people for their legitimate rights and the development of the international campaign against apartheid. For this purpose, the United Nations established a Unit on Apartheid in 1967, renamed Centre against Apartheid in 1976. I have had the privilege of directing the Unit and the Centre until my retirement from the United Nations Secretariat at the beginning of 1985. The Unit on Apartheid and the Centre against Apartheid obtained papers from leaders of the liberation movement and scholars, as well as eminent public figures associated with the international anti-apartheid movements. A selection of these papers are reproduced in this volume, especially those dealing with episodes in the struggle for liberation; the role of women, students, churches and the anti-apartheid movements in the resistance to racism; and the wider significance of the struggle in South Africa. I hope that these papers will be of value to scholars interested in the history of the liberation movement in South Africa and the evolution of United Nations as a force against racism. The papers were prepared at various times, mostly by leaders and active participants in the struggle, and should be seen in their context. For instance, the papers on students were prepared before the Soweto massacre of 1976 and the nation-wide upsurge of the students; those on churches before they defined apartheid as heresy and defied the apartheid regime; and the paper on anti-apartheid movements before they grew into mass movements forcing reluctant governments in the West to impose sanctions against apartheid. They reflect and describe the long effort required to develop resistance and solidarity. The struggle for freedom in South Africa was waged under enormous difficulties and assumed great significance nationally and internationally. The papers show how, under a wise leadership, the national liberation movement was able to avert a race conflict and, indeed, unite people of all racial origins in a common struggle against racist tyranny. By its sacrifice, statesmanship and commitment to non-racialism, this leadership was able to attract the sympathy and support of governments, organisations and eminent public figures around the world. World public opinion was inspired by the movement and played a crucial role in ensuring effective international action to force the racist authorities to abandon their inhuman policy and seek negotiations on the future of the country. While we look forward to reconciliation and peaceful settlement in South Africa, and the emergence of a non-racial democratic society, we dare not forget the past - the barbarity of racism, the heroism of the freedom fighters and the spirit of human solidarity which prevailed. Or we will fail to draw the lessons and prevent a recurrence. I am grateful to the United Nations Secretariat for giving me permission to edit and publish these papers, and the Centre against Apartheid for its cooperation. E. S. Reddy
Page compiled by Nonjabulo Mayise, Department of Library and Information Studies, M.L. Sultan Technikon. September, 2001. |