By Norm Dixon
Extreme racial oppression in South Africa was a product of its brutal colonisation beginning in the mid-1600s, and this became the basis of the growth of South African capitalism.
Apartheid is much more than a system of intense racial discrimination; it is a system of economic, social and political relations designed to produce a cheap and controlled labour force and so generate high profits.
The super-profits derived from this system over the decades have pushed South Africa into the league of advanced capitalist countries. The overwhelming majority of the black population — Africans, so-called Coloureds, Indians — are working class.
White settlement rested on the expropriation of the indigenous inhabitants' land, mass murder and the enslavement of the survivors. A strong racist ideology to justify this had to be developed.
In the oppression, dispossession and exploitation of the non-whites, the English-speaking mine-owning capitalists and the dominant Afrikaner-speaking landowners found common ground. This was basis for the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, giving the South African ruling class political independence from Britain; needless to say, the black majority was not consulted.
Dominating the all-white parliament, the representatives of the wealthy Boer farmers and the mine owners joined to maximise the supply of cheap black labour and swell their profits. The Land Act of 1913 ended African land ownership or tenancy except in the tiny, arid reserves, which later formed the basis of the bantustans.
By the 1920s all the essential ingredients were in place of the apartheid system, as the institutionalised racism became officially known with the election of the Nationalist Party in 1948,
Founding of ANC
The African National Congress was formed in 1912 as a direct response to establishment of the Union of South Africa. The organisation's first members were professionals and clergy, several of whom had studied in the US. The founders of the ANC, known as the South Africa Native National Congress until 1923, saw the need to unite the different ethnic or tribal groups so that the African people could fight for their rights together.
Its early aims were limited to being a pressure group to promote the interests of Africans using strictly constitutional methods — petitions, deputations and public statements. Its leaders opposed mass-based or radical campaigns. This changed in the 1940s. The development of a mass, militant working-class movement during the second world war pushed the leaders of the ANC to take more radical positions.
A new democratic constitution was adopted in 1943, together with the ANC's comprehensive political program. This demanded a redistribution of the land and "full political rights" — the first time the ANC had demanded a universal, non-racial franchise. The ANC also began to work with the Communist Party, with African Communists gaining some leadership posts.
Around this time, a new generation of young members resolved that the ANC should become a more dynamic and militant organisation. In 1943, the Congress Youth League was formed within the ANC, its most prominent members being Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo.
In 1949, the Youth League program was adopted as the ANC program. It emphasised "African nationalism" and set out a policy of boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience. Members of the Youth League won seats on the ANC National Executive, with Walter Sisulu being elected secretary-general.
This program was eventually implemented in the 1952 "Defiance Campaign against unjust laws". The aim was to clog the jails, bring the administration of unjust laws to a halt and demonstrate to the people the effectiveness of mass, non-violent action. Though the campaign was broken by harsh state repression, it held many political lessons. Within a few months, ANC membership jumped from a mere 7000 to nearly 100,000.
The campaign also brought the exuberant young African nationalists to face the reality that all the oppressed must be united in the fight against the racist state. Even prior to the Defiance Campaign, a rethinking had begun. A catalyst was the terrible riots in Durban in January 1949 when, under government agent instigation, Africans attacked Indians. The military intervened and 130 people died.
The Indians had just waged a very successful passive resistance campaign against apartheid, and had brought the white regime's racism into world focus at the United Nations, where the Indian government representatives denounced South Africa.
The ANC leaders appealed to the African people "not to allow themselves to be used by other people who desire to further their own political ends at the expense of the African by fostering race hatred". The ANC blamed the state "policy of differential and discriminatory treatment of various racial groups as the fundamental contributing cause of racial friction and antagonisms".
Multi-racial liberation
The national executives of the ANC and the Natal Indian Congress established a joint council to improve relations between the communities. Even the Youth League, by 1948, had rejected its earlier extreme Africanism, expressed in the slogan: "Africa for the Africans", and the call to expel all whites.
It conceded that the different racial groups had come to stay and the Indians were an oppressed group who had not come to South Africa "as conquerors and exploiters".
The enthusiastic response of the Indian and Coloured people to the Defiance campaign had a profound effect on the new ANC leadership. They now realised that, while the struggle would be led by Africans — because Africans were the most oppressed and the most numerous — non-Africans would play an indispensable part in the liberation of South Africa. The future lay in the achievement of a non-racial democracy which would be won through a multi-racial liberation movement.
Their distrust of "foreigners" — Communists, whites, Indians and coloureds — subsided, soon to disappear. In 1952, Mandela, Sisulu and Tambo became non-racial revolutionary democrats.
This changed perspective paved the way for the Congress Alliance. This brought together the ANC; the South Africa Indian Congress; the Coloured Peoples Congress; the Congress of Democrats, an organisation of democratic whites; and the South African Congress of Trade Unions.
The Congress Alliance in 1955 convened the historic "Congress of the People", which drafted what has become the basic document of the South African struggle, the Freedom Charter. Three thousand delegates from all regions adopted this charter as the basic demands of the people of South Africa.
As a mass, popular organisation, the ANC now possessed a comprehensive program for a non-racial democratic society that would be won through mass mobilisation.
The growing ability of the ANC to mobilise hundreds of thousands of South Africans and the recognition that the demands of the Freedom Charter, if achieved, would endanger the underpinning of white capitalist rule, led to savage state repression.
The 1950 Suppression of Communism Act was directed not just at the Communist Party, but at any mass opposition to the state. Police raided the Congress of the People on its second day; the Freedom Charter was used as the basis of a charge of treason against 156 leaders of the Congress Alliance.
Banning
In April 1960, at the height of an ANC-led anti-pass campaign, and in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre a few days previously, the ANC was banned. In response, the ANC went underground and in 1961 launched the armed struggle.
The political developments inside the ANC during the '50s all provoked fierce struggle within the organisation.
A minority faction calling themselves "Africanists" accused the ANC leadership of abandoning the principles of the 1949 program and becoming the "tools of the white communists". They were violently opposed to the formation of the Congress Alliance, alleging that whites and Indians had taken over the direction of the struggle.
They accused these "aliens" of wanting to prevent the indigenous African majority gaining their rightful control of Azania. They rejected the Freedom Charter because of its provision that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white", as well as what they called its "leftist" economic clauses which called for "the mineral wealth ... the banks and monopoly industry [to be] transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole".
The Africanists walked out of the ANC in 1959 to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). The PAC's founding president, Robert Sobukwe, spelled out the PAC's differences with the ANC soon after: "To us the struggle is a national struggle. Those in the ANC who are its active policy makers, maintain that it is a class struggle ... We claim Africa for the Africans; the ANC claims South Africa for all". The PAC continued to uphold the ANC's 1949 Program of Action and later adopted the 1928 "Black republic" program of the Communist Party.
After refusing an ANC invitation to join the national anti-pass campaign on March 30, 1960, the PAC announced its own campaign for March 21. Police opened fire on the PAC demonstration at Sharpeville, killing 69 people. Most PAC leaders were arrested when they handed their passes to the police. In April 1960, together with the ANC, the PAC was banned. The PAC launched its own armed struggle in 1963.
In July 1963, the ANC's underground network and its guerilla army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), were severely disrupted when police captured virtually the entire leadership in a raid on its headquarters at Rivonia. In the ensuing trial, many of the ANC's top leaders, including Nelson Mandela, then commander-in-chief of Umkhonto, and Walter Sisulu, were sentenced to life imprisonment.
'70s upsurge
The early '70s brought another upsurge in the struggle. Black workers became more militant and organised. There was also a growth of largely student-based black consciousness organisations, filling the vacuum created by the banning of the ANC and PAC.
The ideology developed as a response to black students' resentment at their inferior education and isolation in ethnic schools. Strongly influenced by black power ideas in the US, these organisations focused on the psychological liberation of the disenfranchised — black pride. The most prominent figure in this movement was Steve Biko, murdered by the regime in 1977.
In the mid-'70s a number of black consciousness formations organised university and high school students, workers, teachers and women's professional groups. Black theology revolutionised the Christian churches' approach to liberation. The church, formerly reluctant to involve itself in the struggle against apartheid, began to take radicalised positions in the '70s, and by the mid-'80s was an important force in the struggle.
The Soweto youth uprising in 1976, the brutality of the state — hundreds of students were shot dead by police in daily clashes — and continuing repression forced many thousands of young militants into exile, where the vast majority joined the ANC.
Many others made contact with the underground ANC and SACP networks inside the country and embraced the Freedom Charter. The ANC was rapidly reinvigorated, setting the stage for the upsurge of the ANC-led movement in the '80s. A small minority retained their earlier black consciousness ideologies and formed the Azanian People's Organisation, Azapo.
SACP
Under the impact of the Russian Revolution, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), later to change its name to the South African Communist Party (SACP), was formed in July 1921, bringing together several Marxist groups.
The new CP, while paying lip service to the fact that black workers were the overwhelming majority of the working class, did little to organise them, and believed the white working class would lead the socialist revolution. Its first program defined its immediate goal "as the overthrow of the capitalist system".
The question of racist oppression was a diversion from the class struggle, it argued. Racism would be solved under the dictatorship of the proletariat, which would free all South Africans from the oppression and exploitation of the bosses. The CP characterised the ANC and other organisations as "bourgeois" and reformist. Needless to say, no Africans were members at this time.
Barely one year old, the CP was confronted with the weakness of its position in 1922. The whole white work force went on strike when the mine bosses, in order to cut costs and boost profits, attempted to increase the number of black workers in the mines. Rather than fight for equal pay for all and organise the black workers, the white trade unions organised to defend their monopoly of skilled work and raised the now infamous slogan, "Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa". The CP, despite trying desperately to shift the workers' sentiments away from racism, supported the reactionary strike.
Following this 1922 "Rand Revolt", the party reassessed its role and concluded it had erred in not giving adequate attention to the demands of African workers. It began seriously to address racial oppression.
In 1924 the South African Labour Party and the National Party formed a coalition government. This represented the formal partnership between the labour bureaucracy of the white working class and the capitalist class against the interests of the black majority. This shattered the CP's hope that white workers could ever be the vanguard of the South African revolution.
The CP began a campaign to Africanise the party. By 1928, 1600 of the party's 1750 members were African. The party also became heavily involved in building black trade unions.
In 1929, the CPSA reoriented itself to put the democratic struggles of the black majority to the fore of its work. The CP also committed itself to work within the ANC and other organisations of the oppressed. It identified the black working class as the leading force of the revolution.
During the '40s, CP members were elected to the ANC National Executive, and in 1946, under Communist leadership, 100,000 African miners went on strike. This upsurge helped encourage a turn to the masses by the ANC. By the '50s, the ANC and the SACP had formed a strong alliance that continues to this day.
Negotiations
The '70s and '80s were a period which seriously weakened the apartheid regime: the revolutionary anti-colonial victories in Angola and Mozambique, growing working-class militancy and organisation beginning in the early '70s, followed by the Soweto youth uprising of 1975, the overturning of white minority rule in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).
In an attempt to crush the upsurge, South Africa launched harsh military repression at home and military attacks on the front-line states. But these measures only united and radicalised the black majority during the '80s. In 1983 the United Democratic Front was formed which united a myriad of grassroots organisations and signalled a new upsurge against apartheid. In 1985 the powerful trade union movement COSATU came into being and organised the black working class into a key force.
Despite continued repression and banning, and inspired by the defeat of the South African Defence Forces by combined Angolan, Cuban and SWAPO forces in Angola, the banned UDF and COSATU launched a defiance campaign in 1989 that caused many petty apartheid rules to crumble and a mass explosion of anti-apartheid activity. ANC and SACP flags were flown at every demonstration.
With the powerful struggle of the oppressed pressing in on one side and the South African economy increasingly in crisis due to the effect of international sanctions on the other, South African president F.W. de Klerk was forced to act. In February 1990 he unbanned all liberation organisations and announced that ANC leader Nelson Mandela would be released. He announced a willingness to enter negotiations with the ANC to bring an end to apartheid.
CODESA — Convention for a Democratic South Africa — was born and met first on December 20 and 21. The centrepiece of CODESA 1 was the signing of a Declaration of Intent, consisting largely of vague statements of good will and designed primarily to avoid possibilities for disagreement; it committed participants to an undivided South Africa, peaceful change, a multiparty democracy with universal suffrage, and a bill of rights.
The further use of mass action, particularly in response to the Baipatong and Bisho massacres, forced key concessions from the regime.
On September 26, 1992, the regime agreed to release the remaining political prisoners and finally agreed to an elected Constituent Assembly within a "fixed time frame".
The huge disciplined mobilisations that followed the assassination of Chris Hani forced the regime to agree to the setting of the April 27 election date, the establishment of the Transitional Executive Council and joint control of the security forces.