The success of the African National Congress in ending white
minority rule in South Africa nine years ago is one of the epic
stories of our time. It is known as the "South African miracle" not
only because of the fact of it but because it was achieved
relatively peacefully. Negotiations between whites and blacks
brought agreement for a democratic and nonracial country.
The negotiations came about only after brutal conflict and
centuries of discrimination against blacks. The government grew
increasingly violent as it tried to maintain white domination -
shooting demonstrators, using detention without trial on a mass
scale, plus torture and assassination. The ANC was the leader in
the battle against apartheid. Armed struggle was one of the methods
it used. The South African government branded it a "terrorist
organization" and threw the full weight of repressive laws against
it.
Meeting Johnny Makatini
At the height of apartheid, and while on a visit to New York, I
interviewed Johnstone "Johnny" Makatini, recently appointed as the
African National Congress-in-exile representative at the UN.
For privacy, we met in the plush room of my 5th Avenue hotel - a
surreal setting for the bitter and violent emotions that poured out
of him. For two hours he raged against South Africa's whites and
especially the Afrikaners who had developed the policy of racial
apartheid (separateness). Whites were cruel, despicable, he said;
they deserved no mercy; force was all they knew and understood; if
they would not yield power, they had to be killed or driven into
the sea.
The strength of Makatini's feeling was relevant to the time at
which we met, late in 1976. On June 16 that year, a peaceful march
by schoolchildren in Soweto, the ghetto township for blacks outside
Johannesburg, to protest against the greater imposition of the
hated Afrikaans language for their lessons, had ended with the
police opening fire and killing one of them, Hector Pietersen. That
set off a countrywide mass challenge to government authority by
black schoolchildren. It became known as the "children's
rebellion." They paid a heavy price from the guns of the police and
army. During the next six months, the official death count was 500
to 600. In fact, it was perhaps twice as many or more. To this day,
the exact figure is not known.
Hopes and Policy
I knew Makatini and he did not usually talk in such harsh,
unforgiving terms. It shook me, and left me drained and depressed
about the prospects for South Africa's future. Let's go and have a
drink, I said when I could take no more. We went downstairs to the
bar and, drinks in hand, continued talking. After a few minutes,
Makatini looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was near,
leaned close to me and said softly: "Listen man, don't you think
that when the chips are really down, the Afrikaners will accept us
and there will be peace in our country?"
That was not only Makatini the human-being speaking from the heart,
expressing his deepest hopes, but he was also articulating the
policy of the African National Congress. For nearly 50 years since
its creation in 1912, the ANC had adhered to non-violence, asking
and begging the ruling white minority for equality for the black
majority. The government consistently rejected the pleas and
violently suppressed protests. Then came the Sharpeville massacre
in March 1960 - precipitated by protest action by the ANC's rival,
the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) led by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe:
The police killed 68 blacks taking part in a peaceful
demonstration. The biggest protests in the country's history
followed, and the government banned both the ANC and PAC.
Fourteen months later, the underground ANC, led by Nelson Mandela,
took the fateful decision that nonviolence had been tried and had
failed and there was no alternative but to turn to armed struggle.
On December 16, 1961, its new military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe
(Spear of the Nation), set off the first bombs.
Violence Against Property, Not People
The armed struggle was founded on two fundamental principles:
First, violence should not be directed against civilians but
against property and military targets. This derived from the ANC's
history of non-violent protest, and its belief in the principle of
non-violent political action to effect change as preached and
practised by Mahatma Gandhi in fighting British rule in India.
(Gandhi was an admired figure: He had lived in South Africa early
in the century and led nonviolent protests against racial
discrimination; his precepts were carried forward by an ANC ally,
the South African Indian Congress).
Second, not killing whites was a pragmatic strategy aimed at
keeping the door open for them to change. The argument was that
violent and indiscriminate attacks would so frighten whites about
their future that their determination to resist change would be
deepened. Giving this approach even greater depth was the fact that
whites were members of the ANC, and some occupied high leadership
positions, alongside black, colored and Asian South Africans.
Religion was an added dimension. Christianity was strongly rooted
among many blacks. Oliver Tambo, the ANC's president in exile, was
a devout Christian and nonviolence was part of his creed. Dr. Tom
Karis, the eminent American authority on South African political
history, has described it thus1: "The ANC was fundamentally opposed
to any form of terrorism because such action would subvert its
popular appeal among all racial groups and its legitimacy in a
future government. In particular, the ANC's policy on racial
cooperation placed a high priority on facilitating the growth of
white groups within South Africa that would be prepared to
cooperate with it. It was genuinely anxious not to exacerbate
racial bitterness, thus jeopardizing the goal of a nonracial
society. Furthermore, counteracting the "terrorist" image
propagated by the South African government was important for the
ANC's standing in many Western countries. It also recognized the
need for whites to stay if South Africa's advanced economy was to
be maintained."
Mandela at his Trial
Karis quoted Mandela as saying during his trial in 1964, in which
he was sentenced to life imprisonment: "We believed that, as a
result of government policy, violence by the African people had
become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given
to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be
outbreaks of terrorism, which would produce an intensity of
bitterness and hostility between the various races of the country
which is not produced even by war."
Mandela also explained that the ANC had adopted sabotage as a
policy because it, "did not involve loss of life, and it offered
the best hope for future race relations." Umkhonto members, he
noted, were given, "strict instructions ... that on no account were
they to injure or kill people."
So deep did this outlook go that the ANC became the first
liberation movement to sign the protocol of the Geneva Convention
on the "humanitarian conduct of war."
During the succeeding years, Umkhonto carried out many acts of
sabotage: Some were spectacular in attacking government plants and
electricity installations but overall they did only limited damage
to the economy. "Armed struggle" was really no more than "armed
propaganda."
Nonviolence did not extend to what the ANC viewed as legitimate
targets - armed or uniformed combatants, police officers, perceived
informers and collaborators, and white farmers in border areas who
formed part of military structures. But even this was limited:
According to police statistics of the time, from 1976 to 1986, in a
population of 30 to 35 million, about 130 people were killed by
"terrorists." Of these, about 30 were members of government
security forces and 100 were civilians, of whom, in turn, 40 were
whites and 60 were blacks.
Intense Internal Debate
Within the ANC, there was intense debate about the nature of the
struggle: Should the priority be guerrilla warfare by soldiers
trained in African and other countries (and by the PLO, too) and
sent back into South Africa? Or should the focus be on political
mass action inside South Africa?
The issue, noted Karis, was resolved in the late 1970s after a
visit by Tambo and others to Vietnam to study its revolutionary
experience. Henceforth, the "armed struggle" was considered
"secondary" and the "main task" was "to concentrate on political
mobilization and organization." That, through the 1980s, was
achieved through alliance with new organizations at home that
worked in the open - the United Democratic Front and the Congress
of South African Trade Unions.
Equal Truth and Reconciliation
In due course, after the end of apartheid, the Truth and
Reconciliation Committee investigated not only the human rights
abuses perpetrated by the white minority government but also the
ANC's behaviour. Some thought this rankly unfair in that it could
constitute a moral equivalence between the evils done in the name
of apartheid and the ANC's struggle for freedom. But the TRC did
investigate the ANC and where actions directed at legitimate
targets had resulted also in civilian deaths and injury, these were
held to be gross violations of human rights for which the ANC bore
responsibility.
The worst bomb attack perpetrated by the ANC was outside a military
headquarters in the capital, Pretoria, in 1983. The bomb exploded
downtown during the afternoon rush hour, killing 21 people and
injuring 217. The ANC explained that the bomb had gone off
"prematurely." When a bomb intended for a military convoy in the
eastern coastal city of Durban caused civilian casualties, Oliver
Tambo said the bombers had been "inexcusably careless." At one
stage, the ANC laid anti-tank mines in rural areas near the
country's northern and eastern borders. The mines were aimed at
army patrols but also caused the death of civilians, including
black laborers. The ANC abandoned the mining campaign.
Never Perfect
Yet the commitment not to harm civilians was never perfect or
wholly consistent. In the mid-1980s, as the struggle against the
government spread, the black townships experienced the horrific
phenomenon of "necklacing" - killing alleged collaborators and
suspected enemies by using gasoline-filled tire tubes to burn them
to death. There was, admittedly, a blurring of the division between
people using this tactic who identified themselves with the ANC and
disciplined ANC members. The ANC leadership in exile seemed
uncertain how to deal with the atrocities and was slow to condemn
them. When it did, necklacing came to a halt.
Worse was to come. As apartheid crumbled the government lashed out
ferociously. Violence was endemic. The ANC became locked in a power
struggle with Inkatha, the Zulu nationalist party led by Chief
Gatsha Buthelezi. It had begun as a movement cooperating with the
ANC in seeking freedom for blacks but its aims narrowed to build
power for the Zulus, the country's biggest single tribal group.
Government security forces not only continued killing but also
stoked the fires by working as agents provocateurs, setting one
group against the other. Inkatha was in secret cahoots with the
government and received training for hit squads. The last three
years of apartheid rule saw the murder of an estimated 12,000
people, virtually all of them blacks.
Non-Violence Worked
In the first democratic elections, in 1994, the African National
Congress proved its popularity by winning nearly two-thirds of the
seats in the new parliament. Holding the elections was only
possible because the white minority agreed to yield their
tyrannical rule. That followed negotiations over several years:
Secret discussions with Mandela, while still a prisoner, began as
early as 1985. Whites were persuaded to concede because they
accepted that the ANC, speaking for the black majority, did not
harbor ideas of revenge for the past and wanted whites to play
their role in a new South Africa. The adherence to nonviolence paid
off.
Johnny Makatini did not live to enjoy the fruits of his tireless
work for freedom. After representing the ANC at the UN for about
eight years, he became head of the ANC's department of
international affairs. He died in Zambia in 1988.
1) Memorandum on the African National Congress by Thomas G. Karis,
New York, May 22, 2002
