For decades the Republic of South Africa had a reputation as being a republic only for its privileged white minority (except for radical dissidents) – but for being a super-racist, fascistic police state for its large black majority. The ideology and policy of racial separation – actually domination – was known as apartheid. The momentous and relatively peaceful overturn of South Africa’s apartheid regime in the twilight of the 20th century, in the same historical moment as the collapse, one after the other, of Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, utterly contradicted most knowledgeable observers’ expectations of violence. Perhaps we can only comprehend what happened through an application of materialist dialectics – the analytical methodology of change-through-contradictory-interpenetrations.
Apartheid posited a racial hierarchy in which European “whites” (12.8%) were seen as supreme, under whom Asians (Indians, Malays, Chinese —2.6%) and mixed-race “coloreds” (8.5%) were viewed as being superior only to the “black” majority of South Africa’s people (76%). This majority group was, presumably, fragmented into distinct tribal categories – which have included such disparate ethnic and cultural groupings as the Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi, Sotho, Bapedi, Tswanga, Shangan-Tsonga, Venda, Lemba, etc. According to apartheid partisans, each of these is a very distinct “people” whose nationality should be kept distinct (both excluded from and subordinated to the government of “racially-superior” whites). The fact that perhaps as many as one-third of the whites may have had some percentage of colored/black genetic material somewhere in their biological makeup was – of course – not even acknowledged. [1]
For many years it seemed as if this incredibly repressive system could never be brought down – and then suddenly, dramatically, it was. The South African transformation was qualitatively different from the collapsing USSR in regard to the question of revolutionary vanguard. South Africa was richer in vanguard organizations than any other case-study examined in this chapter. We find a thick alphabet soup of interactive elements: the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), South African Students Organization (SASO), the Azanian Peoples Organization (AZAPO), the United Democratic Front (UDF), the Workers Organization for Socialist Action (WOSA), the National Forum (NF), the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM), and more.
The fluctuating fortunes of these interrelated and often contentious vanguard elements can only be understood within the framework of broader interpenetrating binaries — capitalism/apartheid and race/class. We must also look at the mutual influence of internal, regional, and global factors. There are the complex relationships, as well, between violence and non-violence and between the patient work of organization and the explosions of spontaneous upsurge. Not to mention the wobbling and shifting balance of idealism and pragmatism.
From European Invasion to Apartheid
South Africa’s apartheid regime came to power in 1948, deeply rooted in almost three centuries of white racist colonization. This first involved Dutch settlers (calling themselves Afrikaners), then the English (who imported a significant number of Indian and other Asian laborers), then the English fighting and dominating the more numerous Afrikaners — and both progressively taking land from, demanding labor from, and systematically subjugating and degrading the majority black populations. Apartheid’s triumph was part of a post-World War II Afrikan resurgence at the polls (from which non-whites had historically been barred) under the recently formed National Party. Although sectors of the English had a reputation (particularly in the Cape Town area) for greater racial tolerance, racist policy and ideology had been a central and consistent component of English colonialism from the very beginning, and it had permeated government personnel, businessmen, the intelligentsia, farmers and workers of both British and Dutch origin, with few exceptions. [2]
The forging of modern South Africa was an outcome of dynamically developing world capitalist system. Rosa Luxemburg gave one of the earliest Marxist accounts in her classic The Accumulation of Capital (1913), describing – especially after the discovery of diamonds and gold – the three-way conflict between the Dutch Boers (simple commodity production farmers), the “primitive communistic” black African tribes, and modern capitalist British imperialism. By the early 20th century, in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), a Union of South Africa had been firmly secured within the British imperial project and fully opened to a modernizing industrial capitalism. “There is no doubt that segregation was the product of South Africa’s industrial revolution,” comments historian Nigel Worden, and he goes on to summarize recent scholarship tracing the growth of aggressive Afrikaner business interests that combined with populist concerns of white workers and farmers to create the basis for a new “Afrikaner nationalism.” (Afrikaners constituted well over half of white South Africans, with the English-speakers being not much more than one-third.) This dynamic ideology rallied its constituents around a white racist vision designed to create a prosperous modern economy, soaring capitalist profits, and across-the-board rising white living standards, at the expense of black labor. [3]
When Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan – touring colonial areas that were being transformed into independent nations — warned against maintaining anti-black racism as “winds of change” swept Africa in the late 1950s, the apartheid regime detached the Republic of South Africa from the British Commonwealth. This was accomplished without in any way slowing the forward surge of its industrializing economy. As Marxist analyst Harold Wolpe asserted, “the consequence of this is to integrate race relations with capitalist relations of production to such a degree that the challenge to the one becomes of necessity a challenge to the other.” This came to be a common perception on the Left. “While the national oppression of Blacks has favored a rapid accumulation of capital in South Africa, the development and growth of the country’s capitalist economy has in turn led to a strengthening of white supremacy,” wrote Ernest Harsch in the mid-1980s. “The two elements – national oppression and capitalism – are inseparably intertwined and mutually reinforcing.” [4]
Apartheid, no less than the earlier colonial racist policies from which it flowed, cannot be grasped if seen as an effort simply to keep the races separate. “The major components of South Africa’s racial system – the Bantustans, pass laws, labor bureaus, residency rules – were instituted, not primarily to keep blacks and whites separate,” analyst Kevin Danaher pointed out in the mid-1980s, “but to secure white control over black workers.” Despite myths perpetuated by the ideologists of apartheid, historic economic development and migration patterns throughout the 19th and 20th century were forging a more or less integrated black working class. Apartheid ideology and policy allowed for the exploitation of black labor in urban and industrial areas while restricting as many blacks as possible to artificial “homelands” – which consequently placed 80% of all South African land in white hands. The industrialization and urbanization processes that had crystallized modern Afrikaner nationalism had, as Allister Sparks has pointed out, “ripped apart the fabric of black tribal life, turning a landless peasantry into an urban proletariat, and awakening a political consciousness that eventually demanded its own national liberation from white mastery just as Afrikaners had demanded theirs from the British.” [5]
This was the context in which we can understand the development and interrelationship of what turned out to be the two dominant forces in the anti-apartheid struggle: the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.
African National Congress and South African Communist Party
Founded in 1912, the early ANC was led by “those aspirant members of the African proto-middle classes – doctors, lawyers, ministers, landowners and traders – who stood to lose most” from the Anglo-Boer unity around a white supremacist Union of South Africa. With “modernizing ambitions” and “social conservatism,” they were, as historian Saul Dubrow puts it, “informed by Christian and liberal conceptions of justice and humanity,” and “while proud of their African identity, they eagerly embraced the universal qualities of Western civilization in the belief that its principles were color-blind and potentially of value to all.” While initially seeking equal rights for blacks as loyal subjects of the British Empire, as time went on the ANC became committed to the end of colonialism altogether. Fluctuations of moderation and radicalism in the ANC, as well as competing personalities, impacted the organization’s fortunes over the next few decades. Among the ideological influences were some emanating from the United States — the racial coexistence and self-help approach of Booker T. Washington, the Pan-Africanism and left-liberal elitism of the young W.E.B. Du Bois, and the militant black nationalism of Marcus Garvey. Overall, however, ANC perspectives tended to envision an independent South Africa that would include all races. [6]
A powerful new ideological influence impacting on the ANC, however, was the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of the Communist movement. It was out of the white working class (both Afrikaner and British-origined, with a smattering of others – not least being Eastern European and Jewish immigrants) that South African Communism first arose. While it was rooted in a tradition of class struggle in which “white capital and white labor quarreled over the division of profits largely obtained from black labor,” as an early Communist, Edward Roux, later put it, by the early-to-mid-1920s some of the most perceptive Communist leaders were “trying to persuade an almost exclusively white party that its main task was to organize the non-whites for revolution.” The earlier influence of prominent British socialists who toured South Africa, Keir Hardie and Tom Mann, had helped to challenge racist assumptions of some South African labor socialists, whose left wing (led by future Communists David Ivor Jones and Sidney Percival Bunting) predicted that the black workers of South Africa would soon take their places among “the iron battalions of the proletariat” in a global struggle against capitalism. [7]
It took some time for the South African Communists to find their way. Some “radical” white workers – during a militant strike wave of 1922 supported by the Communists – had carried a banner proclaiming “Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa!” By 1928, however, 1600 of South Africa’s 1750 Communists were black. Not all of these early black Communists were by any means well-versed in Marxist theory. More knowledgeable than many was Albert Nzula, a teacher at an A.M.E. Mission School, and later the first black African to hold the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party, who declared: “I have come to the conclusion that every right-minded person ought to be a Communist.” In particular, he cited the works of neither Marx nor Lenin, but instead the book Communism and Christianism by defrocked Episcopal Bishop William H. Brown from the United States, who blended the teachings of Jesus, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Within a few years, however, James La Guma, a “colored” trade unionist and Party leader, was able to play a decisive role in developing (in consultation with Nikolai Bukharin and others in the Communist International) the slogan of “an independent Native republic, as a stage towards a workers’ and peasants’ government,” and winning the SACP to the notion that the way forward to socialism was through African majority rule. [8]
In the same period, ANC President Josiah Gumede had concluded that “of all political parties, the Communist Party is the only one that honestly and sincerely fights for the oppressed people.” Yet the radical perspective represented by Gumede was soon shunted aside by more moderate elements in the ANC, whose disinclination to engage in serious struggle resulted in the organization’s precipitous decline. At the same time, more authoritarian, rigid and sectarian forces in the Communist International, largely through the influence of Stalinism, resulted in “a harshly intolerant, ultra-left period … which cost the Party untold damage in membership and influence,” according to CP historian Michael Harmel. Throughout the 1930s, therefore, neither the ANC nor the Communist Party were able to provide central leadership in the liberation struggle. [9]
By the 1940s, however, and into the early 1950s, both organizations recovered – and the ANC, under a succession of more activist-oriented presidents (Alfred Xuma, James Moroka, Albert Luthuli), opened its ranks to members the Communist Party. A number of militant youth leaders influenced by a Pan-Africanist black nationalism – the most famous being Nelson Mandela – initially opposed this opening to the Communists. Mandela soon changed his mind, however, and has graphically described the evolution of his own ideological perspective:
I acquired the complete works of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and others and probed into the philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism. I had little time to study these works properly. While I was stimulated by the Communist Manifesto, I was exhausted by Das Kapital. But I found myself strongly drawn to the idea of a classless society, which, to my mind, was similar to traditional African culture where life was shared and communal. I subscribed to Marx’s basic dictum, which has the simplicity and generosity of the Golden Rule: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.”
Dialectical Materialism seemed to offer both a searchlight illuminating the dark night of racial oppression and a tool that could be used to end it. It helped me to see the situation other than through the prism of black and white relations, for if our struggle was to succeed, we had to transcend black and white. I was attracted to the scientific underpinnings of dialectical materialism, for I am always inclined to trust what I can verify. Its materialistic analysis of economics rang true to me. The idea that the value of goods was based on the amount of labor that went into them seemed particularly appropriate for South Africa. The ruling class paid African labor a subsistence wage and then added value to the cost of the goods, which they retained for themselves.
Marxism’s call to revolutionary action was music to the ears of a freedom fighter. The idea that history progresses through struggle and change occurs in revolutionary jumps was similarly appealing. In my reading of Marxist works I found a great deal of information that bore on the type of problems that face a practical politician. Marxists gave serious attention to national liberation movements and the Soviet Union in particular supported the national struggles of many colonial peoples. This was another reason why I amended my view of Communists and accepted the ANC position of welcoming Marxists into its ranks. [10]
The closely allied ANC and SACP were united with other groups in which Communists played a role: the South African Indian Congress, the Colored People’s Congress, and the white anti-racist Congress of Democrats, as well as with largely black trade unions (which had mobilized strikes of bus drivers, mine workers, and others in the 1940s). In addition to mass strikes that were savagely repressed by the government, there were defiance campaigns and boycotts that targeted the increasingly repressive policies of segregation and apartheid. According to Edward Roux, such protests were commonly the result of “a spontaneous mass movement, unprepared and owing little or nothing to political leadership.” [11]
Yet the Communist-influenced organizations, nonetheless, played a central role in channeling and giving focus to such spontaneous upsurges. This political focus was shaped by theoretical and strategic perspectives that had developed, within the world Communist movement during the latter phases of the Stalinist period from the mid-1930s, through the Second World War, into the early 1950s, and perpetuated long afterward. This was the “popular front” orientation, which held that the struggle for capitalist democracy – in the face of fascism and colonialism — must be won before there could be any thought of socialist revolution. This called for a broad alliance of workers, farmers, shopkeepers, liberal business interests, and others. In the South African context, this meant that the ANC, as well as the SACP, were struggling for the victory of a “national democratic revolution” (with the goal of a democratic republic based on a capitalist economy) – socialism being, for the SACP, the goal of a later stage of the struggle. [12]
This approach is consistent with the point emphasized by Nelson Mandela in 1964, that (despite Marxism’s influence on his own thinking) “the ANC has never at any period of its history advocated a revolutionary change in the economic structure of the country, nor has it, to the best of my recollection, ever condemned capitalist society,” and that far from emphasizing class distinctions, “the ANC seeks to harmonize them.” Another ANC activist, Albertina Sisulu (wife of the organization’s imprisoned secretary general Walter Sisulu), put it this way: “We have never objected to the idea of a ruling class. We just want a government which has the interest of all South Africans at heart.” Far from creating a barrier either to support from South African Communists or to substantial material aid from the Soviet Union, this perspective dovetailed with the self-conception of the government of the Soviet Union. Beginning with the triumph of the Stalin dictatorship, it was committed to creating “socialism in one country” (the USSR), with its primary foreign policy goal, therefore, being to seek “progressive” capitalist allies to help establish a “peaceful co-existence” beneficial to the USSR. Loyal comrades in the mainstream of the world Communist movement were expected to shape political strategies in their own countries to dovetail with considerations “dictated by the ever-changing tactics of Soviet foreign policy,” in the bitter words of George Padmore, one-time architect of Communist policy in Africa, later a theorist of Pan-Africanism. [13]
Some analysts see all of this reflected in what became the central document of the ANC and its allies, the 1955 Freedom Charter, which Communists played an important role in helping to draft. Historian Saul Dubow notes that the democratic and humanistic affirmations of the Freedom Charter were “relatively uncontroversial” but that two of its provisions – couched in ambiguous formulations – were “rather more problematic.” Writing from Ghana, George Padmore dismissed the whole thing as “a Stalinist maneuver.” South African sociologist Thomas Ranuga would later describe it as being permeated by “the philosophy of liberal-reformism.” [14] Dubow explains that controversy arose around
two studiedly ambiguous provisions: the statement that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white,” and the provisions to transfer into common ownership the country’s mineral wealth, banks and monopoly industries. The Africanist element within the ANC resented the implication that Africans did not have prior and superior rights to the country (though this was often dressed up in a confusing discourse about the difference between multi-racialism and non-racism); on the question of economic nationalization, liberals and Marxists and Africanists engaged in extended polemics as to whether the wealth clause amounted to a pseudo-communist manifesto. [15]
Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness
The “Africanists” were particularly influenced by the radicalism of George Padmore, who explained in 1956 that “Pan-Africanism sets out to fulfill the socio-economic mission of Communism under a libertarian political system,” and independently of the USSR, elaborating:
Politically, Pan-Africanism seeks the attainment of the government of Africans by Africans, with respect for racial and religious minorities who desire to live in Africa on a basis of equality with the black majority. Economically and socially, Pan-Africanism subscribes to the fundamental objectives of Democratic Socialism, with state control of the basic means of production and distribution. It stands for the liberty of the subject within the law and condones the Fundamental Declaration of Human Rights, with emphasis upon the Four Freedoms. [16]
Under the leadership of Robert Sobukwe, a number of ANC dissidents influenced by Padmore’s Pan-Africanism and critical of white political influence in the organization, broke away to form the Pan-Africanist Congress in 1959. The PAC immediately launched a militant campaign of non-violent action aimed at breaking the passbook system through massive disobedience, mass demonstrations, and mass arrests that would clog the jails and overturn apartheid. On March 21, 1960 10,000 men, women and children surrounded a police station in Sharpeville near Johannesburg, proclaiming that they were proudly in violation of apartheid laws and demanding to be arrested. The police opened fire on the peaceful crowd, resulting in 69 demonstrators killed and 186 wounded. Violence also flared in Langa near Cape Town. More than a quarter of a century afterward, this bloody day remained a central reference point in the consciousness of South African freedom fighters. [17] Dennis Brutus poetically expressed this:
As the seasons turn
And Summer droops to Autumn
The dyings continue
And resistance grows:
There are still those willing to give their lives:
Sharpeville, Langa
You are sacred names:
In the center of our brains
The flame of desire for freedom
Fiercely burns. [18]
The government banned the PAC as well as the ANC. Both of the outlawed organizations decided to abandon non-violence and initiate armed struggle. What was wiped out, however, was not the apartheid regime but the existence of both the ANC and PAC inside of South Africa, with dramatic arrests of both Mandala and Sobukwe, along with many of their comrades, who ended up with life sentences on the notorious Robben Island. Those not arrested were driven either deep underground or into exile.
Yet by the 1970s the oppressiveness of the regime seemed to have generated even deeper resistance than ever before. A radical student leader, Steve Biko, influenced not only by Pan-Africanism, but also by the ideas of Frantz Fanon, as well as the Black Power currents in the U.S. civil rights movement, helped to propel the all-black South African Students Organization into the national limelight, which helped to generate organization in the townships of the broad-based Black Consciousness Movement. Biko insisted on the necessity of black South Africans overcoming the “inferiority and superiority complexes” built into the South African reality and into the psychology of blacks and whites alike. This required building a black liberation struggle independently of whites – both the apartheid oppressors and the well-meaning white liberals and leftists who sought to influence and control the black struggle. “The call for Back Consciousness,” he explained, “is more than just a reactionary rejection of whites by blacks. The quintessence of it is the realization by the blacks that, in order to feature well in this game of power politics, they have to use the concept of group power and to build a strong foundation for this.” For Biko and his followers, this orientation had increasingly radical implications:
It will not be long before the blacks relate their poverty to their blackness in concrete terms. Because of the tradition forced onto the country, the poor people shall always be black people. It is not surprising, therefore, that the blacks should wish to rid themselves of a system that locks up thee wealth of the country in the hands of a few. No doubt Rick Turner was thinking of this when he declared that “any black government is likely to be socialist.” …
The Black Consciousness movement does not want to accept the dilemma of capitalism versus communism. It opts for a socialist solution that is an authentic expression of black communalism. … In our writings we at times speak of collective enterprises because we reject the individualistic and capitalist type of enterprises. But we are not taking over the Russian models. [20]
In both urban and rural areas, the Black Consciousness Movement sought to organize at the grassroots level to establish “health clinics, publishing ventures, cooperative building schemes, political prisoner relief funds and leadership training programs” as well as programs concerned with “welfare, culture, black theology, education, literacy, black arts, self-help and other relevant projects.” The goals of such efforts were 1) “to help the black community become aware of its own identity,” and 2) “to help the black community to create a sense of its own power.” [20]
All of this reflected a ferment within – and also impacted upon – the black townships, particularly among the youth. The culmination was an uprising in Soweto near Johannesburg on June 16, 1976. Independently of all existing anti-apartheid organizations, a crowd of more than 15,000 black students, aged 12 to 20 years old, gathered in what has been termed a “jovial” mood to protest against being forced to learn Africaans in school. “Afrikaans Is the Oppressors’ Language” read one of the placards. Another asserted “Viva Azania!” (Azania being the name that many Pan-Africanists gave to South Africa), singing the anthem “Nkosi Sikele’ iAfrica,” and shouting “Amandla!” (power) with clenched fist salutes. Ten police vans arrived, with units sporting batons, tear gas, semiautomatic rifles, submachine guns. The use of tear gas resulted in stones being thrown from the crowd – and then the shooting began. Street battles and attacks on symbols of apartheid were met with extreme violence by security forces. “When evening arrived,” Ernest Harsch recounts, “workers returning from their jobs in Johannesburg joined their children in the streets. By nightfall the township was ablaze.” The protests spread to other townships and neighborhoods, with some white students joining in – and facing police brutality as well. By June 19 the official death toll was put at 109, although some estimates put it as high as 700. Strikes, marches, and rallies continued over the next several months, but they were more than matched by violent repression and mass arrests. The uprising “was not a revolutionary movement,” comments historian Nigel Worden. “it lacked clear organization and leadership. Despite some contact with workers, the students had no formal links with worker organizations. As some writers have stressed in this regard, the events of 1976 were a missed opportunity.” Yet Soweto shook both South Africa and the world, becoming yet another powerful symbol of resistance. [21]
In the following year, Steve Biko was beaten to death while in police custody. The Black Consciousness Movement did not have the means to withstand the intense wave of repression, nor did the PAC succeed in building a significant organization capable of capitalizing on the upsurge. AZAPO — a new organization blending Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist ideology – proved similarly unable to build itself into an organization to continue to lead the struggle. Many young activists involved in the Soweto uprising fled the country, a significant number ending up under the banner of the ANC. The fact that the ANC and SACP were primary beneficiaries of the Soweto aftermath – enabling them to play the central role of revolutionary vanguard in the 1980s and early 1990s – can be related to several factors.
“Scrambled Egg”
The relatively durable combination of the two organizations created a powerful dynamic. Nationalist Party leader F.W. de Klerk, scoffing at the assertion that there was an alliance between the ANC and SACP, once quipped, “it is not an alliance, it is a scrambled egg.” There is truth to this. By the early 1990s, knowledgeable U.S. scholar Martin J. Murray observed that the 20,000 members of the SACP were “as a matter of strict policy” all members of the ANC (whose membership by then was at the 500,000 level). Not only was the SACP the strongest organized political current within the ANC, but SACP members held more than 25 seats on the ANC’s 90-person National Executive Committee, and held 10 out of 25 positions on the National Working Committee which oversaw the daily functioning of the ANC. [22]
The interweaving of the ANC and SACP could be understood in quite different ways. Nathaniel Weyl, a U.S. apologist for the South African apartheid regime, explained to his readers that the ANC was a “Communist-controlled organization” which quite simply served “as the Communist Party’s main instrumentality among the Negroes.” Weyl and his sources in the apartheid regime asserted that the key moment occurred in 1950, when the Communist Party was banned by the government and, “under such highly intelligent Communist leaders as Joe Slovo and his wife, Ruth First, the Johannesburg Party made an effective adjustment to the new conditions,” covertly reorganizing itself within the ANC. [23]
But the truth was even more complex and interesting than this – the development of a symbiotic relationship in which the larger group was definitely not digested by the smaller, but through which each was transformed. The Communist Party dissolved in 1950, and it was up to local handfuls of Communists to cautiously regroup – which they did by gravitating to and cautiously rebuilding within the ANC. “In the hour of [Communist Party] dissolution,” according to SACP historians Jack and Ray Simons, “the class struggle had merged with the struggle for national liberation.” Another prominent Communist, Brian Bunting, remembered many years later that the banning of the Party “did more than anything to bring the ANC closer to the Communists: it transformed it from a hole-in-corner body [in the 1950s the CP had perhaps 2500 members] to a national organization.” Particularly important was the current of young ANC Pan-Africanists gathered around Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu – contributing, according to CP member Rusty Bernstein, to South African Communists “an understanding of race and nationalism which Communists did not have in other countries. … The unique gift the party brought to the struggle was its multiracialism and internationalism.” Important aspects of this internationalism involved substantial solidarity from the world Communist movement and its allies, as well as valuable material aid from the USSR. [24]
Particularly in light of post-apartheid developments, one could speculate that perhaps the non-Communist component this “scrambled egg” was predominant. The fortunes of the South African Communists seemed absolutely dependent on the fortunes of the ANC, and their prestige inseparable from that of the ANC (a point Mandela was to emphasize in the late 1990s). As the SACP reorganized itself in the 1950s, it remained true to its respectful and loyal relationship with the ANC. By the 1960s, according to Rusty Bernstein, “I found it hard to tell who was in the Party and who was not.” [25]
Yet its militants had earned immense respect within the ANC. “For many decades Communists were the only political group who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and their equals; who were prepared to eat with us, talk with us, live with us and work with us,” Mandela told the judge at his 1964 trial. In his memoirs, Mandela recalled that in the 1940s a Communist friend had “invited me to a number of parties where there was a mixture of whites, Africans, Indians, and Coloreds. The get-togethers were arranged by the [Communist] party, and most of the guests were party members.” [26]
Indeed, the diversity was clearly reflected in the CP’s impressive leadership. Moses Kotane, who fought against a left-sectarian affliction in the early 1930s, stressed that “the party must become more Africanized, pay special attention to South Africa, study the conditions in this country and concretize the demands of the toiling masses from first hand experience.” He not only helped forge close relations with the ANC, but also assumed a prominent position in that organization. The charismatic African trade union leader J.B. Marks, also for a number of years the Communist Party’s chairperson, used to tell his comrades: “Leaders come and go, but the masses are always there.” After Marks’s death, the chairmanship was passed to tall, pipe-smoking scholar Dr. Yusuf M. Dadoo, who had led the South African Indian Congress, and “whose role as a fighter for human rights,” in Mandela’s words, “had made him a hero to all groups.” Militant activist Alex La Guma (son of “colored” CP pioneer James La Guma) wrote novels “with the sharp realism characteristic of most black fiction,” according to South African scholar Robert Ross. There was the brilliant lawyer Bram Fischer, who came from a well-to-do Afrikaner family, and who led the party’s underground apparatus before his capture and life imprisonment. Rachel (Ray) Alexander, a young immigrant from Latvia, became well-known during the 1930s in union organizing efforts among multi-racial constituencies – and in 1954, after the Communist Party was banned, she successfully ran for Parliament, which she was barred from entering by government security forces. She later married another prominent South African Communist, Jack Simons, a Professor of African Law and Administration at Cape Town University. [27]
Among the younger layer of Communist leaders were such figures as Joe Slovo (an “open-minded and flexible thinker” who became “a theoretical and strategic trailblazer,” according to his comrade Ronnie Kasrils), Slovo’s journalist wife Ruth First (“a striking figure, with her dark hair and flashing eyes,” a woman “particularly critically minded,” especially in regard to “the conventional wisdom of our Movement, such as the uncritical view of the Soviet Union”), and Chris Hani (“an inspirational force, an extremely warm and caring human being with … an infectious sense of humor” who “cherished the opportunity for reflection and to put views about complex problems under the microscope,” particularly concerned about overcoming “a culture of intolerance” that had developed among ANC and Communist leaders in the military wing of the movement). First was assassinated in 1982 by South African security forces with a letter bomb in Mozambique. Hani was killed in South Africa by a right-wing assassin in 1993, Many non-Communist freedom fighters, such as the poet Dennis Brutus, could not help but honor such Communists, with such words as he offered in his poem to Ruth First:
They would come again
You wrote
You knew
But what they did not know
Was that your spirit would live on
In thousands willing to fight for freedom
In thousands willing to die for freedom
That you might be gone
But that you would come again
They would come again
You wrote
Because you knew
They could not rest
And would not lest you rest
—dear restless spirit—
until, finally, shattered
in a bomb-wrecked office in Maputo
your bloodied corpse rested. [25]
Bishop Desmond Tutu would later celebrate what for him was the Christ-like meaning of Hani’s life at the Communist leader’s funeral:
Chris Hani died on the most sacred weekend of the Christian calendar. Christ died between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Let us recall that God extracted out of the death of Jesus Christ a great victory, the victory of life over death, that God showed in the victory of Jesus that goodness is stronger than evil, that light is stronger than darkness, that life is stronger than death, that love is stronger than hate. God is telling us the same message in the horrible death of Chris Hani. His death is not a defeat. His death is our victory. His death is the victory of truth, the truth of liberation, that liberation is stronger than the lie of apartheid, that liberation is stronger than the injustice of apartheid, of its oppression and exploitation.… [29]
Working Class, Resistance, Insurgency
The working-class focus of the Communist Party gave it special relevance as time went on. Author Ernest Harsch observed: “Black workers are everywhere: hanging on scaffoldings at Johannesburg construction sites, digging drainage ditches in Cape Town, hauling cargo on Durban’s docks, harvesting Natal’s sugar cane, drilling and breaking up rock in Witwatersrand gold mines, assembling auto engines in Port Elizabeth.” He observed that, as of 1977, “there were more than 8 million Black workers in South Africa – 7 million Africans, 1 million Coloreds, and 221,000 Asians,” adding that “Black workers and their families constitute the overwhelming majority of the Black population.” [30]
In the late 1970s “highly capitalized manufacturing industry now dominated the economy, using complex technology and requiring semi-skilled permanent workers rather than unskilled migrant laborers. In these circumstances, segregation and apartheid, so crucial to the earlier development and growth of industry, were no longer appropriate to the needs of South African capitalism.” Economic shifts also were fragmenting “the cross-class Afrikaner nationalist alliance,” while “the labor and urban resistance of 1973-7 had caught the government unprepared.” Added to this was “the unfavorable international response and the threat of sanctions in the aftermath of Soweto,” as well as the victory of left-wing anti-colonial revolutions on bordering countries (Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe). [31] Allister Sparks dramatically captures some of the social-cultural impact of this economic transformation:
When the year 1978 saw the black tide fail to turn as predicted, it offered a glimpse of a future trend that would not only sweep apartheid away but sweep in its alternative. The cities that were supposed to become white are becoming black instead. “White” South Africa is being Africanized. Instead of the townships withering away, they are colonizing the suburbs; the black tide is flowing more strongly every day, washing away the Group Areas Act, the Separate Amenities Act, and all the other sand castles of white delusion. It is washing away the bitter-almond hedge itself, sluicing great gaps in it and throwing people together in a convergence of mutual discovery that is both traumatic and formative and that will change South Africa forever. [32]
Sparks provides a vivid sense of the powerful upsurge mass struggle the developed within this context, focusing on the United Democratic Front, which was created and sustained by the ANC and SACP:
A wider range of groups were brought together than ever before. Soweto ’76 was a children’s revolution, but this time the UDF spanned the generation gap. The generations of the old Defiance Campaign, of Sharpeville, of Soweto ’76, and the angry new generation of the day came together with trade unionists and liberation theologists, educators and students as well as politicians – from exiled ANC leaders to former Black Consciousness leaders now incorporated into the UDF. And more than ever before white liberals and radicals were involved, substantial numbers of whom identified with the UDF. Several predominantly white organizations, including the National Union of South African students, for many years the main students’ organization on the English campuses, became affiliates.
The 1984 insurrection was more intense and lasted longer than any previous one. For three years it raged, resulting in more than three thousand deaths, thirty thousand detentions, and untold damage to property and the national economy. The government had to mobilize the army and declare two states of emergency to bring it under control, and even then it was only partially repressed.
It also had more strategic shape and revolutionary thrust than any previous uprising. The participation of politically experienced adults and of a national organization of affiliates deeply rooted in the communities meant that militant young “comrades,” the shock troops of the uprising, were subject to some measure of direction and discipline. Although events developed a momentum of their own, impromptu actions taken in one area could be evaluated and, if successful, repeated elsewhere. The result was that a variety of strategies were employed: consumer and rent boycotts, school boycotts, strikes and stayaways, rallies, protest demonstrations, and an intermix of street confrontation and public and private negotiation. [33]
A significant element in the anti-apartheid vanguard, however, gathered around a competing formation that crystallized in 1983 — the National Forum. “Both the NF and the UDF were loosely knit confederations of community, youth and trade union organizations that had proliferated across the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s,” writes Nigel Worden. Yet behind the UDF were the ANC and SACP, while National Forum involved a polyglot of Black Consciousness and AZAPO militants, dissident Marxists and Trotskyist–influenced radicals. One of the most prominent spokesmen was the noted educator Neville Alexander, a founder of the Workers Organization for Socialist Action, who emphasized: “The immediate goal of the national liberation movement now being waged in South Africa is the destruction of the system of racial capitalism. Apartheid is simply a particular socio-political expression of this system. Our opposition to apartheid is therefore only a starting point for our struggle against the structures and interests which are the real basis of apartheid.” The National Forum therefore called for the “establishment of a democratic, anti-racist worker Republic in Azania where the interests of the workers shall be paramount through worker control of the means of production and exchange.” It emphasized that “the working-class struggle against capitalist exploitation and the national struggle against racial oppression have become one struggle under the general control and direction of the Black working class.” [34]
The UDF called, with much vaguer formulations, for “the creation of a true democracy in which all South Africans will participate in the government of the country,” which would be “a single non-racial, unfragmented South Africa” that would eventually end “all forms of oppression and exploitation.” UDF publicity secretary Patrick Lekota went further:
The UDF is not a class organization. It doesn’t claim to work in the interests of the working class, the capitalist class, or the peasantry. It is an alliance of these classes. All those who don’t have political rights and who are willing to do battle, have a home in the Front. We have never claimed to be led by the working class. [35]
“Put loosely,” Martin Murray commented in 1987, “the UDF resembles a multi-class popular front and the National Forum resembles a working-class dominated united front.” Much of the National Forum’s orientation resonated among poor, working-class, and radicalized South Africans, of whom there were many, but the NF was no match organizationally for the UDF. While it is true that both boasted “of followings of working-class people who were incorporated through community-based civic associations, sport/cultural clubs, student and youth groups, and so forth,” the ANC/SACP connection, with the attendant organizational apparatus and resources, enabled the UDF to surpass its rival in most of South Africa. This was guaranteed particularly when the militant and radical Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) – whose 14 affiliates rose from 450,000 to 1.3 million members between its founding in1985 and 1994 – formed an alliance with the UDF in 1989, the Mass Democratic Movement. [36]
Victory and Defeat
Under a complex of immense international and domestic pressures, and through a set of rather complicated permutations and maneuvers, the dominant force of South African, the National Party, chose to seek an alternative to revolution and civil war, which it would inevitably lose, and which could result in the ascendancy of the more radical elements in the liberation movement. The path of negotiated resolution – facilitated by the freeing of Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid fighters, and the legalization of anti-apartheid organizations (including the ANC and SACP) – was designed to bring about a South African transition that would preserve the capitalist system. One Anglo-American business executive warned the ANC: “We dare not allow the baby of free enterprise to be thrown out with the bathwater of apartheid.” This warning was entirely in harmony, however, with the traditional ANC program of not calling for socialism, and also with the old SACP “popular front” position of favoring only a national democratic revolution, with socialism being on the agenda only at some point in the (more or less) distant future. Marxist analyst John Saul concluded: “There can be little doubt that, in the end, the relative ease of the political transition was principally guaranteed by the ANC’s withdrawal from any form of genuine class struggles in the socioeconomic realm and the abandonment of any economic strategy that might have been expected directly to service the immediate material requirements of the vast mass of desperately impoverished South Africans. “ [37]
Mandela and other ANC and SACP leaders carried out complex negotiations that dismantled apartheid power and paved the way for free elections allowing for a form of black majority rule – with the ANC being swept into power under the charismatic leadership of President Nelson Mandel. Mandela’s retirement in 1999 brought former SACP militant Thabo Mbeki into the leadership of the ANC and the country. “In partnership with the SACP and COSATU,” writes Saul Dubow, “the ANC was the leading element in a tripartite alliance which encompassed long-standing traditions of non-racialism, African nationalism and socialism.” Yet despite the old radical rhetoric, there was to be no socialism. While the electoral strategy of the ANC succeeded in marginalizing political forces to its right, its policies also succeeded in side-lining forces to its left. “Is this what people have sacrificed their lives for?” asked former Robben Island prisoner Dennis Brutus upon his return after decades in exile. “If we are supposed to have won, how is it that those who are supposed to have lost seem not to have lost anything?” [38]
ANC policy director Michael Sachs emphasized another key element – the collapse of the USSR and the Communist Bloc and the creation of a “unipolar world.” This had certainly been a factor in the thinking of the National Party, as well as in the thinking of U.S., British, and other foreign policy-makers, in accepting the ANC coming to power – that a “radicalization” of an ANC regime would be unlikely. “You can’t just go and redistribute things in this era,” the ANC spokesman argued. “Maybe if we had a Soviet Union to defend us we could do that but, frankly, you’ve got to play the game, you’ve got to ensure that you don’t go on some adventure. You know you will be defeated. They were defeated in Chile [in 1973], they were defeated in Nicaragua.” Sachs added: “Should we be out there condemning imperialism? If you do those things, how long will you last? There is no organizational alternative, no real policy alternative to what we’re doing.” As a South African banker commented, “the ANC are not fools. They know where the balance of economic power lies.” John Saul noted: “Too smart to be ineffectual lefties, they expected to play the only game in town (capitalism) successfully.” In fact, according to Saul, “many of the most rightwing figures in the ANC government are senior SACP leaders.” [39]
Dale T. McKinley, a prominent activist forced out of the SACP in 2000, explains:
Since coming to power in 1994, the ANC has dutifully followed the liberal bourgeois democratic formula of institutionalizing (through a constitutional dispensation) the combination of individual rights and capitalists market economics. … Now combined with the more recent global offensive of internationalized corporate and finance capital (otherwise known as neo-liberalism), liberal bourgeois democracy has taken on the mantle of a necessary and natural product of an equally necessary and natural economic order. Under such a scenario, democracy itself becomes synonymous with the capitalist “free market,” and everything else is merely about degrees and emphases. …
As Neville Alexander has cogently argued, such a “liberal, free-market approach is “unlikely to satisfy the material needs of the oppressed and impoverished majorities” in places like South Africa, “even though the gains in political space and in (individual) freedoms and rights are by no means unimportant.” South Africa’s experience since 1994 bears this out. In relation to the stated programs and constituent interests of its Alliance allies, the ANC’s pursuit of elite-led, liberal democratic and deracialized capitalism has created a breeding ground for serious ideological opposition, organizational/class confrontation and more general political debate and dissent inside its own ranks and those of its Alliance partners.
In multiple ways, however, the ANC leadership (as well as some elements in both the SACP and COSATU) can be seen as seeking to close off debate and intimidate dissidents inside and outside Tripartite Alliance ranks. The “National Democratic Alliance” has functioned “to preserve and advance the personal careers and political futures of leaders across the Alliance spectrum,” McKinley tells us. [40]
“The ending of segregation opened the way for the rapid growth of South Africa’s hitherto small black middle class in business and the professions, and the professions, encouraged by affirmative action policies,” Nigel Worden has pointed out. “But granting everybody the vote could not remove apartheid’s legacy of profound economic and social deprivation.” Others have made similar observations. “In mining, publishing and electronic media, black South Africans are increasingly prominent,” observes the South Africa volume put out by Insight Guides and the Discovery Channel. “A small but growing number of companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange are now controlled by black investors.” At the same time, the Insight Guides writers note that “the unemployment rate is 37 percent, making this by far the most important source of poverty and inequality.” [41]
Despite the “de-racialization” of South African capitalism with the fall of apartheid, “worsening class division and social segregation appear to be the inexorable outcome of South Africa’s elite transition,” according to Patrick Bond. Given the fact that the great majority of blacks were stuck on the bottom with previous racial set-up, this has meant that – with the ANC government’s neo-liberal policies – certain aspects of the old apartheid reality have even gotten worse. For example, the average black household income declined 19% from 1995 to 2000, while the average white household income went up 15%. Between 1995 and 2000 the poorest half of the South African population’s share of the national income fell from 11.4% to 9.7%, while the country’s richest 20% enjoyed 65% of the national income. COSATU reported in 2003: “Far from us turning the corner, in 2003 the nightmare of unemployment and poverty got steadily worse … [with] at least 22 million people suffering in desperate poverty and 5.3 million South African children suffering from hunger.” Not being able to pay for the costs of electricity and even of the increasingly privatized water supplies, roughly 10 million South Africans have had these essential utilities cut off. [42]
Chris Hani had warned that “having failed to smash the ANC-led movement, big capital would seek to undermine and transform our liberation movement, through corruption, influence and class accommodation with a new elite.” Joe Slovo had emphasized that there was “no Chinese Wall between the national democratic revolution and socialism.” The SACP leadership stressed in early 1995 that such views of its recently deceased leaders were “surely more relevant than ever before.” Prominent Party theorist Jeremy Cronin, viewing the SACP as the embodiment of revolutionary principles, observed that “the neo-liberal economic agenda poses a grave threat to the prospects of consolidating democracy and of beginning to address the social and economic crisis in which the majority of our people find themselves,” and asserted that “we need to unleash a major effort at economic restructuring and democratization.” Cronin emphasized “the critical need to wage class struggle for effective redistribution, and for the reconstruction and democratization of the economy.” [43]
Remaining true to such perspectives would have required a separation from the ANC “scrambled egg” – which didn’t happen. It is estimated that SACP membership was 20,000 in 1991, more than doubled in 1994 – then suffered a remarkable decline. Far from dominating the ANC, the SACP now seemed ineffectual in its self-proclaimed role as “praetorian guard of ideological correctness within the ANC,” and “its activists had no clear sense of what to do as party members” that they could not do as members of the ANC, COSATU, or other mass organizations. “In response to the government’s economic policies, Communist politicians left the SACP in droves, to become staunch capitalists,” observes Leonard Thompson. “SACP documents revealed that its membership declined from 80,000 a few years earlier to a mere 13,803 in 2000.” [44]
What Will the Future Bring?
Not all of the old fighters have abandoned the struggle, however. In the left wing of the SACP and COSATU, dissident voices could be heard. There are some, like the leading ANC militant Trevor Ngawne, who have openly broken with and organized against the neo-liberal policies of the ANC government. He has been prominent in anti-privatization campaigns and other struggles based in communities and workplaces, as well as anti-imperialist and anti-war movements. Ngwane says of the other activists with whom he works that “these are ordinary people, like millions of other ordinary working people in South Africa. They have rescued a word which is disappearing into history or being lost in books and discussions of a few people from the middle class: socialism.” [45]
Arundhati Roy, has aptly commented on the dynamics of de-radicalization (hardly unique to South Africa) in eloquent remarks to the 2004 World Social Forum:
No individual nation can stand up to the project of corporate globalization on its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes to the neo-liberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in the opposition, when they seize power and become heads of state, are rendered powerless on the global stage. I’m thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last year. This year he’s busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers’ Party. I’m thinking also of the former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a massive program of privatization and structural adjustment that has left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity.
Why does this happen? There’s little point in beating our breasts and feeling betrayed. Lula and Mandela are, by any reckoning, magnificent men. But the moment they cross the floor from the opposition into government they become hostage to a spectrum of threats — most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader’s personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will dent the corporate cartel is to have no understanding of how capitalism works or, for that matter, how power works. Radical change cannot be negotiated by governments, it can only be enforced by people. [46]
Some South African analysts have described the neo-liberal globalization as global apartheid – “an international system of minority rule whose attributes include differential access to basic human rights, wealth and power.” According to Patrick Bond, “if gender, race and class all contributed to apartheid’s super-profits, then these factors are also crucial to global apartheid’s uneven prosperity.” Bond then draws our attention to “key insights into an earlier version of global apartheid – simply called ‘imperialism’ – [that] came from the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.” He notes that “Luxemburg considered polarization between the developed and developing worlds to be functional, not irrational, just as apartheid polarization between white cities and black rural areas was functional to South African capitalism.” This — plus the fact that Luxemburg was a revolutionary struggling against the bureaucratic de-radicalization of the powerful German socialist movement, which was accommodating to imperialism and engaging in class-collaboration – has generated growing interest in Luxemburg among South African activists. [47]
The revolutionary dynamic of the ANC/SACP vanguard formation – which had been so heroic in leading the anti-apartheid struggle – seemed to have exhausted itself by the end of the 20th century. A vanguard social layer, capable of leading the working class and its allies in an effective struggle against the pernicious economic residues of apartheid and the “normal” tyranny of de-radicalized capitalism, had yet to find organizational expression in post-apartheid South Africa.
Notes
1. Melissa de Villiers et al, South Africa (London: Insight Guides, 2004), 21-23, 52; John Hoffman and Nxumalo, “’Non-Historic Nations’: A South African Perspective,” Science and Society, Vol. 54, No. 4, Winter 1990-1991, 408-426; Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), 121.
2. In addition to Worden’s useful synthesis, see Robert Ross, A Concise History of South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
3. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 411-416; Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa, Third Edition (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000), 86, 98-106.
4. Harold Wolpe, “Capitalism and Cheap Labor Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid,” in William Beinart and Saul Dubow, eds., Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995), 88; Ernest Harsch, South Africa: White Rule, Black Revolt, Second Edition (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1983), 14.
5. Kevin Danaher, In Whose Interest? A Guide to U.S.-South Africa Relations (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1985), 45;
6. Saul Dubow, The African National Congress (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2000), 3, 4, 9, 11.
7. Edward Roux, Time Longer Than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa, Second Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), ix, 125, 126, 129.
8. Roux, 198-217. A. Lerumo [Michael Harmel], Fifty Fighting Years: The Communist Party of South Africa 1921-1971 (London: Inkululenko Publications, 1971), 63; Thomas K. Ranuga, The New South Africa and the Socialist Vision: Positions and Perspectives Toward a Post-Apartheid Society (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 23, 23.
9. Lerumo, 63, 67, 72; Dubow, 12-19; Ranuga, 25-31.
10. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1995), 120-121.
11. Lerumo, 98-102; Roux, 319.
12. Roux, 308; Lerumo, 159; Martin J. Murray, Revolution Deferred: The Painful Birth of Post-Apartheid South Africa (London: Verso, 2000),126; Dubow, 31; Steven Mufson, Fighting Years: Black Resistance and the Struggle for a New South Africa (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 223; Stephan Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba, Comrades Against Apartheid: The ANC and the South African Communist Party in Exile (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 22, 37; George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 126.
13. Nelson Mandela, The Struggle Is My Life (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1986), 173, 174; Mufson, 142; Padmore, 268; Ranuga, 55-62.
14. Mandela, The Struggle Is My Life, 50-54; Dubow, 50-52; Ellis and Sechaba, 28; Mufson, 224; Ranuga, 46-52; Padmore, 339-340.
15. Dubow, 51.
16. Padmore, xix. The Four Freedoms are 1) freedom of thought and religion; 2) freedom of speech and expression; 3) freedom from fear; 4) freedom from want.
17. Ranuga, 77-87; Roux, 402-414.
18. Dennis Brutus, “March 21, 1987,” Airs and Tributes, ed. by Gil Ott (Camden, NJ: Whirlwind Press, 1990), 2
19. Donald Woods, Biko, Revised Edition (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1987), 57, 59, 122.
20. Black Communiities Programs document, quoted in Ranuga, 98.
21. John Kane-Berman, South Africa: The Method in the Madness (London: Pluto Press, 1979); Mufsan, 13-19; Ellis and Sechaba, 80-86; Ranuga, 103-107; Harsch, 281-284; Worden, 135.
22. Murray, Revolution Deferred, 119, 124, 125.
23. Nathaniel Weyl, Traitors’ End: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Movement in Southern Africa (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1970), 89, 131.
24. Anthony Sampson, Mandela, The Authorized Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 64; Sebastian Mallaby, After Apartheid: The Future of South Africa (New York: Random House, 1993), 233; Ellis and Sechaba, 24, 25; Ranuga, 55-56.
25. Sampson, 136, 564-565.
26. Mallaby, 233; Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 74-75.
27. Ronnie Kasrils, “Armed and Dangerous”: My Undercover Struggle Against Apartheid (Cambridge, UK: Heinemann, 1994), 368; Ross, A Concise History of South Africa, 184-185; Lerumo, 133; Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 102, 120; Ellis and Sechaba, 21; Roux, 330, 383.
28. Brutus, “For Ruth First” Airs and Tributes, 13
29. Desmond Tutu, The Rainbow People of God, ed. by John Allen (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 253.
30. Harsch 13, 80.
31. Worden, 138.
32. Sparks, 373.
33. Sparks, 337.
34. Worden, 145; Martin Murray, South Africa: Time of Agony, Time of Destiny (London: Verso, 1987), 221, 229-230.
35. Murray, South Africa, 229; Worden, 154.
36. Dubow, 106; Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1000), 225, 236; Murray, Revolution Deferred, 121-122, 128, 143-146.
37. John S. Saul, “Cry for the Beloved Country: The Post-Apartheid Denouement,” Monthly Review, January 2001, 12, 14.
38. Dubow, 109 Murray, Revolution Deferred, 5.
39. Patrick Bond, Talk Left, Walk Right: South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms (Scottsville, SA: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2004), 180; Saul, 28, 29, 43.
40. Dale T. McKinley, “Debate and Opposition Within the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance Since 1994,” Links, #16, September-December 2000, 55, 56, 71. Also see Bond, 179-190.
41. Worden, 164; de Villiers et al, South Africa , 71, 73;
42. Bond, 14, 15.
43. “The 9th SACP Congress – a Key Strategic Challenge,” and Jeremy Cronin, “Challenging the Neo-Liberal Agenda in South Africa,” The South African Communist, First Quarter, 1995, 3, 38, 49.
44. Thompson, 290; Murray, Revolution Deferred, 124, 128;
45. Bond, 231.
46. Roy quoted in Paul Le Blanc, “Another World Is Possible: Mumbai 2004,” Against the Current, March/April, 2004.
47. Bond, 4, 192; “Report of the Anti-War Coalition/Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Seminar, 20-22 May 2004, at the Workers’ Library and Museum, Newtown Precinct, Johannesburg,” Rosa Luxemburg Foundation 2004.