It’s the Politics, Stupid!

Civil Resistance and Violent Flanks – The Case of South Africans’ Struggle against Apartheid

Howard Barrell

Southern Africa, 1984

Ronnie Kasrils

ANGOLA

ANC military training camps

Main ANC military infiltration route

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Civil resistance, South Africa, 1912-1960

• Gandhian tradition• ANC develops base • Freedom Charter• Defiance Campaign• Treason trial• Sharpeville massacre • Resort to arms, 1961• MK Manifesto

Early ANC thinking on armed struggle

• Ambiguous:– Defensive– (Guevarist) offensive

• Key issue: relationship between

political and military forms of struggle• Other choices in its new strategic discourse:

– Trotsky-Lenin Insurrectionist model– Mao’s protracted people’s war model

• ANC disregards political struggle by

political means• 1969: ANC says armed struggle “only” way

open to it• 1965-1976: No armed struggle inside SA• Black Consciousness Movement & Trade Unions

The Soweto Uprising, June 16 1976

1976 uprisings: military frustrations…

• Thousands of youths leave country;

put in ANC military training camps;• Armed struggle stays at very low

level of intensity;• Politico-military commission;• Vietnamese response: must revisit

issue of relationship between

political and military struggle.

…but political advances…

• Militants inside South Africa

organise politically across almost

every imaginable form.

…as ANC leadership argues

Exiled ANC leadership arguments continue, people form united front

• Chronic arguments in ANC leadership over relationship

between political and military and shape of operational

structures• But ANC leadership agrees role of political mobilisation

is ultimately to serve military campaign.• Anti-Republic campaign, 1981.• Formation of UDF, 1983• Character of UDF

– Umbrella– Strong local pre-existing and new organisations– Organisation around concrete issues– Provincial leaderships– Small, mobile national leadership– National political focus

Perpetual mass action,1985-1990

• Forms:– Demos, local + general strikes– Rent and service boycotts– Students’, womens’, other protests– Mass rallies, leafletting, etc., etc.

• Iconography of violence at UDF

rallies (see right)• Economic, diplomatic and security • costs of CR for state: defections• States of emergency declared• UDF outlawed, UDM formed• SA intelligence calculates options• ANC leaders recalculate options• ‘Signals’ become talks• ANC unbanned, 1990

It’s the politics, stupid!Paradoxes:

1. The ANC’s obsession with armed struggle from 1960s to 1979 undermined its ability to mount not only civil resistance; it also subverted the ANC’s ability to mount armed struggle itself!

2. Civil resistance in South Africa displaced and supplanted an armed struggle of which, powerful political forces intended, that civil resistance should be a mere tributary.

3. An iconography of violence did, at a particular point in the South African liberation struggle – between about 1983 and 1989 – help advance the struggle being waged by non-violent means.

4. It is possible for an organisation that has exhibited at some point an unrivalled will to struggle against an unjust opponent, such as the ANC did, eventually to win power on the back of energies, organisations and forms of resistance it had only a tangential role in generating.