Popular Struggles Then and Now - First Panel (27 March 2015)

Artistic ‘Freedom’ in the 80s and Now

Jane Duncan, The Con

The 1980s was a heady time in South Africa’s cultural history. Apartheid repression was at its height, but so was mass resistance. The independent label Shifty Records brought together a courageous, outspoken and rebellious group of artists who captured in their music the despair and hope of that turbulent period. It is this legacy that is being celebrated in Shifty September, and rightly so, as the label gave South Africa some of the most important contemporary local music ever made.

The UDF was not simply a creature of the ANC

Ken Good, Perspectives

At the end of his critique of the Democratic Alliance (April 1), RW Johnson offered some observations on the United Democratic Front: that it was ‘a pawn of the ANC', as was supposedly ‘demonstrated by the way in which the movement simply folded itself into the ANC without a murmur after 1990.'

He also asserted that the Front ‘largely accepted the ANC's "struggle narrative". These hackneyed claims go to the heart of the big events preceding the ANC's accession in 1994. They are all false, and their import is with the country still in many forms.

Two big processes were going on together through the 1980s: an externally generated armed struggle was nearing an end, and a domestic democratisation movement was increasing in size and in its theoretical understanding of politics and society. The former was led by the ANC, and it acquired large national and international support.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the ghosts of crimes past

by Ken Good, Politics Web

News reports suggest that investigations into the fate of certain young men linked to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela may be re-opened. There is a great deal of published evidence of her complicity in gross human rights violations. Since the mid-1980s the gap between the public appearance of this lady and her household, personal behaviour has been huge. A thorough examination of this record is long over due.

Towards a People's Democracy: The UDF View

By Murphy Morobe, 1987

When we speak of majority rule, we do not mean that black faces must simply replace white faces in parliament. A democratic solution in South Africa involves all South Africans, and in particular the working class, having control over all areas of daily existence - from national policy to housing, from schooling to working conditions, from transport to consumption of food. This for us is the essence of democracy. When we say that the people shall govern, we mean at all levels and in all spheres, and we demand that there be real, effective control on a daily basis.

From people's politics to state politics: aspects of national liberation in South Africa 1984-1994

by Michael Neocosmos, 1994 (Published in Politea in 1996)

The 1980s in South Africa witnessed an explosion of popular-democratic struggles championed by a host of autonomous civil society organisations whose activities became central in the campaign against the apartheid system and the quest for the creation of a democratic state. By the 1990s, however, especially in the lead up to and after the election of the ANC into office, South African politics appears increasingly to be subjected to the same broad logic of statism that was experienced in other parts of Africa at the dawn of independence from colonial rule. At the heart of this statism is the defeat of the popular movements which, in South Africa, as in the rest of Africa, were so vital in the struggle for political change, being the oppositional forces with the popular democratic tradition and agenda that offered the best chance for the emergence of a democratic state. Increasingly depoliticised, the role of the popular movements has been emptied of the vitality that can ensure that `the people' are able to generate and make autonomous democratic prescriptions on the state. The politicisation of civil society and the democratisation of the state are projects in the South African transition which will have to be revived if the authoritarianism that inheres in statism is to be defeated. This is the challenge before the democratic forces of opposition and change in contemporary South Africa.

Decentralized people power: what OWS can learn from South Africa’s United Democratic Front

by Grace Davie, Waging Non-Violence, January 2012

At an Occupy Wall Street meeting in midtown Manhattan on December 20th, a debate broke out about the general assemblies (hereafter, GAs)—the core decision-making forums of the movement and its most visible embodiment of direct democracy. The meeting was the second of its kind devoted to exploring the idea of a city-wide general assembly. About 80 people attended, including members of several OWS working groups and GAs across the city, of which there are now about a dozen. While some people seemed dissatisfied with the GAs, and perhaps even ready to dispense with them, others appeared intent on popularizing them even more. The discussion reminded me that this movement is growing and deepening its ties with local neighborhoods—yet as it does, it is encountering the challenge of how to accommodate new communities and support existing organizations that share its goals. While this challenge is still fairly new for OWS, it is one that has been faced and overcome by other movements before.

Allan Boesak at UDF West Coast Launch in 1983

Rev. Frank Chikane gives keynote address at United Democratic Front launch in Mitchells Plain (near Cape Town), South Africa on 20 August 1983

Rev. Frank Chikane gives keynote address at United Democratic Front launch event in Mitchells Plain (near Cape Town), South Africa on 20 August 1983. Historic footage courtesy of the Community Video Education Trust. www.cvet.org.za

The Capacities of the People Versus a Predominant, Militarist, Ethno-Nationalist Elite: Democratisation in South Africa c. 1973-1997

UDF Poster

by Ken Good

In January 1983, Allan Boesak called for the formation of a front to oppose specific apartheid constitutional changes, and after a series of regional conferences, the United Democratic Front was launched in Cape Town in August. Boesak says that fifteen hundred people were present, representing 500 organisations and all sectors of society. The listing of the Front’s eventual affiliates included trade unions, youth and student movements, women’s and religious groups, civic associations, political parties and a range of support and professional groups. Within the next few years, the Front embraced almost 1,000 affiliated groups. Because of the UDF’s capacity to provide national political and ideological coordination to these affiliates, radical political action ‘assumed an increasingly organised form’, says Swilling, ‘enhancing its power and effectiveness.’ As previously with the BCM, the arrival of the UDF was not welcomed by the ANC.

"Beyond Our Wildest Dreams": The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa

Ineke van Kessel. "Beyond Our Wildest Dreams": The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. ISBN 978-0-8139-1861-7. 

Reviewed by Jeremy Seekings (Departments of Political Studies and Sociology, University of Cape Town)

Published on H-SAfrica (December, 2000)

Local Struggles and National Liberation in South Africa

The title of van Kessel's new book is taken from an interview with the former national treasurer of the United Democratic Front (UDF), Azhar Cachalia. 'When we founded the UDF', Cachalia told van Kessel, 'we had never in our wildest dreams expected that events would take off in the way they did. What happened was beyond everybody's expectations.'

“For sure you are going to die!”: Political participation and the comrade movement in Inanda, Kwazulu‐Natal

by David Hemson, 1996

The study of Inanda comrades is one of a movement forcibly excluded from the official society of late apartheid and from political participation in the institutions of power: as an insurrectionary grouping the movement was dedicated to initiating and expanding resistance and seizing on the national strivings for power to force an entry into the political realm. By such compelling interference in the politics of apartheid they attempted to destroy it. The movement provides an indication of political participation of an entirely different order from that of voting and conventional politics; in being prepared to sacrifice their lives, the comrades created a local political culture themselves.

The Making of the 'Comrades' Movement in Natal, 1985-91

by Ari Sitas, 1992

Sociologists have largely discussed 'comrades' or 'amaqabane' within the parameters of two broad social indicators: black youth unemployment and 'anomic' behaviour. The first indicator, unemployment, has destroyed the life-chances and aspirations of the majority of youths. Studies like those of the Inkatha Institute emphasise how unemployment led to frustration and how that turned into aggression and violence. The second indicator is that of 'normlessness', the breakdown of values, the breakdown of a communal social solidarity and the anti- social actions that follow. The 'normlessness' school is much favoured by sociologists. Elements of a Durkheimean conception of 'anomie' based on the breakdown of social solidarity, norms, and the family are presented as definitive of black youth behaviour. In what follows I will argue against both indicators.

Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid

by Belinda Bozzoli, Wits University Press, 2004

This is a compelling study of the origins and trajectory of a legendary black uprising against Apartheid – the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986. Using insights from literature on collective action and social movements, it delves deep into the rebellion’s inner workings. It examines how residents of Alexandra – a poverty-stricken, segregated township in Johannesburg – manipulated and overturned the meanings of space, time and power in their sequestered world; how they used political theatre to convey, stage and dramatise their struggle; and how young and old residents generated differing ideologies and tactics, giving rise to a distinct form of generational politics.

The UDF, a history of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983-1991

Jeremy Seekings. The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983-1991. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0-8214-1336-4. 

Reviewed by Ineke van Kessel (African Studies Centre, Leiden, Netherlands)

Published on H-SAfrica (December, 2000)

An Organizational History of the United Democratic Front

 

When the National Executive Committee of the United Democratic Front held its final meeting on 14 August 1991 to wrap up the process of disbanding the organisation, the last decision on the agenda was to commission a book on the history of the UDF, to be 'rigorously researched'. Thanks to this foresighted decision, inspired by an awareness of the historical significance of events in the 1980s, we now have Jeremy Seekings's book on the UDF. 

The United Democratic Front and Township Revolt

by Mark Swilling, Paper Presented to the Wits History Workshop, 1987

Recent years have witnessed the revival of organised mass opposition to Apartheid. Fighting in the townships, labour unrest, classroom revolts, rent strikes, consumer boycotts, worker stayaways and guerilla warfare - all these have become familiar features of South Africa's political landscape since 1976. From the inception of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983, though, radical black opposition has assumed an increasingly organised form thus enhancing its power and effectiveness.

The UDF Period and its Meaning for Contemporary South Africa

by Raymond Suttner, Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 30, Number 3, September 2004

Any retrospective discussion of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the 21st century inevitably also relates to an assessment of post-apartheid South Africa and the character of the democracy that has been established or is in the process of being established in South Africa. In fact, most writers who intervened publicly on the UDF's twentieth anniversary last year consciously sought to counterpose the supposed qualities of the Front to those attributed to the African National Congress-dominated post-apartheid society.' There is a case to be made for such a comparison, provided we move away from the common tendency to romanticise the 1980s inside South Africa and demonise all that happened in exile.

Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the (im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa today

by Michael Neocosmos, Interface, Vol. 1., No. 2. 2010

The contemporary critique of neo-liberalism has concentrated overwhelmingly on its economic theory and socio-economic effects. Very little has been written so far on its political conceptions, particularly of the limited thinking which it imposes on political thought and practice. This work makes a contribution to the latter endeavour by making a case for thinking an emancipatory politics in contemporary Africa. It shows that civil society - the expression of the freedom of the citizen in neo-liberal discourse - must be understood, not as organised society, but as a domain of politics where the hegemony of a liberal, state mode of politics prevails. Politics also exists beyond, or at the margin of civil society. Neo-liberal politics predominantly produces passivity or rarely a politics of petitioning the state. This political passivity must be countered by an active citizenship which often exists beyond the domain of state politics including civil society itself. But this active citizenship - political agency - is not necessarily conducive to a politics of emancipation; it merely enables the possibility of the envisaging of alternative modes of thought and political ‘possibles’. To initiate a discussion of the theorisation of emancipatory politics in Africa, this work briefly outlines the philosophy of change of Alain Badiou, and the anthropology of Sylvain Lazarus. In particular it concentrates on the latter’s understanding of subjective ‘modes of politics’ and political ‘prescriptions’.