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.
The latter was represented by the UDF, in association after
1985 with COSATU, and its achievements were mostly unrecognised and
misunderstood. The relationship between the Front and the ANC was highly
asymmetrical in terms of power and morality, and the differences became
critical as the ANC neared state power and democracy was concretised in a
conventional representative form.
From the late 1970s, a ramifying range of community groups
had arisen, probably first in Soweto and the Eastern Cape, and then
nation-wide, campaigning around issues such as housing, rents, and education.
These struggles, said Swilling, strengthened a new political culture
emphasising principles of non-collaboration with government institutions,
non-racialism and, he noted, ‘democracy and mass-based direct action aimed at
transforming urban living conditions.'
In January 1983, Allan Boesak called for a front to oppose
specific apartheid changes, and after a series of regional conferences, the UDF
was launched in Cape Town in August. Boesak says that fifteen hundred people
were present, representing 500 organisations and all sectors of society. The
Front's eventual affiliates included trade unions, youth and students, women's
and religious groups, civic associations and political parties. Within a few
years, it embraced almost 1,000 affiliated groups.[1]
As had previously been the case with the Black Consciousness
Movement, the arrival of the UDF was not welcomed by the ANC. It ‘came as a
shock to Thabo and the rest of the ANC leadership, note Hadland and Rantao, and
they quote Mac Maharaj adding, ‘they didn't believe it would happen.' The
well-informed Shubin agreed, and recalled an ANC friend telling him soon after:
‘If some of our people say that the UDF was made by us, don't believe them.'[2]
The distortion was supplemented significantly by the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission, which simply assumed, without presenting
supporting evidence, that the ANC ‘played a direct role' in their establishment.[3]
Experienced commentators like Allister Sparks helped to spread the confusion
that the Front was merely the ANC's predecessor and internal surrogate.
But the UDF did not look, sound or act like the highly
centralised, secretive ANC. It had three levels of levels of leadership,
national, regional and local, with much or most action concentrated in the
lowest tier. Van Kessel noted that local affiliates ‘maintained their
autonomy'.[4] Boesak, became the Front's elected patron, and believed that it was
the spirit of the new group which provided its distinctiveness.
‘Spontaneity was one of the strong points of the UDF', and
this would ‘time and again catch the government, and by the same token, the
ANC, off guard.' From the beginning, ‘the UDF knew (and the ANC feared) that
much action...was perforce going to be spontaneous', unplanned and
uncontrolled. It was also ‘the UDF's hallmark of authenticity, and it was
unavoidable in a truly people-driven movement.' The Front coordinated its
affiliates, brought them under a reasonably strong national umbrella, and
provided a platform. Small associations gained access to funding, some of which
came through the Foundation for Peace and Justice which Boesak headed.[5]
Above all, he states, there was ‘the power of the UDF to
inspire.' Within a year, the UDF became a formidable organisation with support
at levels and among people that no organisation in South Africa had achieved
before. By 1985, the Front had created ‘the beginnings of strong working
relationships between community organisations, student movements and the trade
unions.'[6]
Mkhuseli Jack was the son of a farm labourer and a domestic
worker, and soon became a prominent community activist and UDF leader. In 1983
he was elected to the executive of the Port Elizabeth Civic Organisation
(PEBCO). As a spokesman for the consumer boycott movement in the city, the 28
year old Jack ‘strode about as though he were mayor'. He was said to have an
instinct for what ordinary people wanted and the burdens they could bear, and
he negotiated pragmatically between white businesspeople, on one hand, and the
UDF's national leaders, on the other. Matthew Goniwe was another outstanding
activist. He founded the Craddock Residents' Association (CRADORA) in 1983.
If the Association called a meeting at four in the
afternoon, it was said, the entire township could be assembled by six. His
legacy was to create over six months a string of tightly coordinated small-town
movements. Such deep organisations helped to make the UDF a formidable force
across the Karoo. The other half of his legacy was his understanding of the
means-ends process and the role and responsibilities of leadership therein.
Shortly before his death at the hands of apartheid he wrote: "If we are
instruments of change, we must epitomise the society we want to bring about.
People see in us the society we want to bring about."[7]
What was happening in CRADORA and other local groups
appeared to be well understood at the Front's national level: its theoretical
journal Isizwe stated that the call ‘the people shall govern', enshrined in the
Freedom Charter, was ‘beginning to happen in the course of our struggle. It is
not for us to sit back and merely dream of the day that the people shall
govern. It is our task to realise that goal now.'[8]
By 1987 the UDF's understanding of democracy involved
participatory forms being built dynamically in the here and now. In the words
of Murphy Morobe, democracy was ‘one of the aims or goals of our struggle' and
also ‘the means by which we conduct the struggle...By developing active,
mass-based democratic organisations and democratic practices within these
organisations, we are laying the basis for a future democratic South Africa.'
In what was called the ‘basic principles of our organisational
democracy' the UDF laid out creative measures for combating elitism within its
own ranks and other purportedly democratic organisations: 1. Elected leadership
at all levels, periodically re-elected and recallable; 2. Collective
leadership, experience and knowledge must ve spread not hoarded; 3. Mandates
and Accountability; 4. Reporting and Reporting Back (by leaders to the
membership); and 5. Criticism and Self-Criticism of and by elites. ‘We do not
believe that any of our members are beyond criticism, neither are organisations
and strategies beyond reproach'. These principles were ‘fundamental weapons of
our struggle'.[9] Their importance endures.
Under worsening circumstances the Front strove to uphold its
norms. Pressures built up as state violence escalated, children as young as six
were killed by police, and youthful activists resorted to cruel punishments
against informers real and imagined. Boesak recalls his shock at the speed of
events as ‘our own brutalisation' began. For him, the principle of non-violence
ranked with spontaneity and inspiration within the means and ends relationship
in the making of a democratic society.
Others took a different view, and he quotes Cheryl Carolus
saying that ‘those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.' Violent
struggle had been authoritatively endorsed by the ANC at its Kabwe Conference
in Zambia in June 1985, when Joe Slovo, then chief of staff of Umkhonto we
Sizwe (MK), affirmed that there was ‘No Middle Road', and the only acceptable
strategy was the revolutionary overthrow of apartheid.[10] The UDF and the
democratisation movement was seemingly on notice.
Through Operation Vula, the ANC intended to terminate the
UDF and the broad and deep democratisation it encouraged. Vula (open the way)
was a clandestine military-political operation with dual aims. Devised and
largely implemented by a small and highly secretive elite, it aimed to implant
the armed struggle inside South Africa, and as Maharaj and his comrades liked
to say, ‘to move towards a people's war'.
Simultaneously, senior ANC leaders would ‘take overall
charge of the struggle'. (251)[11] President Oliver Tambo in Lusaka was in
overall command, assisted by Slovo. The latter along with Chris Hani agreed
fully about the need and feasibility of ‘people's war'.
By early 1987, Tambo and Slovo had selected Maharaj to go
back into the country and establish a sophisticated communications
infrastructure, carry out the caching of arms, and what was termed ‘on the spot
military recruitment and training' (the untrained recruits were referred to
merely as ‘the risen masses'). Hani was also selected, along with Jacob Zuma
(of Mbokodo), as a third NEC (and SACP) member. Shubin was brought into the
loop by Tambo and Slovo as ‘our key link on the Soviet side'. (245-253)
‘Taking overall charge' meant in fact that Vula ‘infiltrated
the Mass Democratic Movement' (as the UDF had then become). It intended to
‘seduce MDM leaders', to ‘hijack their revolution in the making', and allow the
ANC leadership in exile to return with ease and simply appropriate the organs
of democratisation. What Boesak understood as the militarisation of the UDF and
the stifling of democracy was well underway. (247-8)
From around late 1988, Maharaj was in close contact with
leaders of the MDM, particularly, he says, with Jay Naidoo, Cyril Ramaphosa,
Valli Moosa, Frank Chikane, Sydney Mufamadi and Morobe. These were told not to
disclose they were working with him. Naidoo reports that he was invited to a
surprise meeting with the Vula leader in Durban, and found him "highly
secretive and manipulative". Vula's trademark he said was "conspiracy
and intrigue".
Maharaj's "sense of political self-importance ignored
much of the home-grown strategic capability within COSATU". Naidoo
stressed he says that he remained willing to work with the ANC, but "would
never take orders from him or anyone else outside the [trade union]
constituency."[12]
Deepening the clandestine activities further was Operation
Bible, whose role supplemented or duplicated Mbokodo's in aiming to ‘identify
apartheid agents within the upper echelons of the movement'. Bible reported to
Zuma both before and after he became deputy director of the stone that
crushes--Gordin adds that ‘it had fallen under Zuma in 1988-89.'[13]
Vula-Bible's espionage necessarily embraced crime.
Stockpiling large quantities of arms, for example, required financing, and the
skills associated with white-collar crime. An important role was played here by
the Shaik family of Durban, Schabir, Mo and Yunis. They arranged financial
procedures, and ‘reported to Jacob Zuma' in the inter-twined Vula-Bible. This
was in fact the start of ‘a close and enduring relationship' between the
Shaiks, Zuma and Mac Maharaj.[14] The trio ‘cultivated police informers and set
up front companies and dummy bank accounts.'[15]
People's War was given its last bloody expression in Bisho
on 7 September 1992. The Ciskei government of Brigadier Oupa Gqozo was deeply
unpopular and supposedly ripe for toppling. Ronnie Kasrils, a leading Vula
operative, along with Hani, Steve Tshwete and Ramaphosa, led around 80,000
unarmed marchers against awaiting Ciskei troops, ‘to drive the pig from the
barn'. The leaders narrowly escaped injury, but 29 other demonstrators were
killed and more than 200 injured, some seriously, in sustained gunfire.[16]
De Klerk's inclusion of MK and the SACP among the unbanned
organisations in February 1990, and the absence of stiff conditionalities,
‘came as [yet another] surprise' to Maharaj. Other events, national and
international, brought further problems. Tambo's stroke in the previous August
produced a leadership vacuum in the ANC, when decisiveness was pre-eminent.
Vula was uncovered by the police in July 1990, to the
embarrassment of a disarrayed ANC: it signed the Pretoria Minute formally
suspending its armed struggle in August. Over scarcely a year to mid-1990,
seismic change proceeded in Europe and Southern Africa, and ‘suddenly', in
Maharaj's consistently belated perceptions, people's war seemed like an archaic
conception.
The closing down of the UDF by the ANC went remorselessly
ahead. According to Seekings, the options facing the Front had narrowed to two between
the end of 1990 and March 1991. One was to disband entirely as its very
existence was held by the party to detract from the ANC's predominance. The
other was to become a coordinator for organisations concerned with development.
‘Molefe and other national leaders', he says, ‘clearly favoured the second
option.' Many others were being drawn into attractive positions in the ANC
government-in-waiting.
When Molefe addressed the Front's National General Council
in March 1991, he acknowledged that they could no longer operate on the basis
of sufficient mandates and accountability. But the probably biggest causal
factor is referred to only obliquely by Seekings, the UDF's unsympathetic
historian: the remnants of the leadership faced a ‘burden of resentment and
hostility', and the advocates of transformation floundered.
Seekings nowhere explains the actual cause and content of
the ANC's hostility. The inescapable conclusion is that it lay in what
distinguished the UDF over much of its short eight years, its openness,
spontaneity, accountability and most of all in its advanced ideas and practise
of democratisation.
Maharaj was a featured speaker at the disbandment of the
Front. He began with the words, "I am a soldier", and he extolled the
external armed struggle throughout his speech. It seemed to indicate that no
mere appropriation of the UDF was occurring. that an erasure of their values
and achievements was taking place. Criticism and self-criticism was at issue,
as ANC president Nelson Mandela clarified in a four hour address at the party's
50th national conference in Mafikeng in December 1997.
Certain elements which were assumed to be part of our
movement, he said, "had set themselves up as critics of the same
movement." They had wished to establish "an NGO movement separate
from and critical of the ANC", and "we all arrived at the
decision...that it was necessary to close down the UDF."[17]
The differences in political values between the ANC and the
UDF were indeed large, they focussed on democracy and its accompaniments like
criticism, accountability and openness, and the proponents of such concerns
were unacceptable to the ruling party. But closing down a movement was one
thing, and erasing its values was another, as the ferment within the trade
unions today seems to indicate. The ‘principles of our organisational
democracy', dealing with elitism and non-accountability within popular
organisations, have currency beyond the 1990s. Spontaneity and that capacity to
inspire could be relevant too.
