In the absence of mass mobilisation, MK was doomed to play the role of a propaganda tool, writes Dale McKinley.
In April 1969, in Morogoro, Tanzania, the ANC held its Third Consultative Congress. The conference lasted for seven days and most of the delegates were members of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK).
The meeting adopted a new revolutionary programme, commonly known as the “Strategy and Tactics” document.
Since the 1955 Freedom Charter, the ANC had not produced a written policy document that took into account the completely new situation of being an exiled liberation movement conducting an armed struggle. The “Strategy and Tactics”, in placing the question of the seizure of power firmly at the strategic centre, argued that “it is surely a question of whether, in the given concrete situation, the course or policy advocated will aid or impede the prospects of the conquest of power”.
It then went into detail about the history of the armed struggle and the “special” circumstances of South Africa that made guerrilla warfare both appropriate and necessary.
Assessing the “strength and weakness” of the enemy, the “Strategy and Tactics” document followed the classic guerrilla warfare scenario of weaker forces conducting a war of attrition against superior enemy forces, reminiscent of a Cuban-style struggle.On the ground, however, the practical pursuit of this armed struggle had not been proceeding according to the theory.
Besides the Wankie Campaign in 1967, a brave but unsuccessful attempt to infiltrate two groups of MK guerrillas into South Africa through the then-Rhodesia (alongside units of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army), there were several partially successful attempts to infiltrate MK cadres through the Botswana border, the explosion of leaflet “bombs” in some major South African cities and at least one ill-fated plan to land guerrillas on the South African coast.
It was a far cry from the revolutionary guerrilla onslaught called for at Morogoro.
Inside South Africa, it was the newly formed Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) along with new labour formations that came to represent the main focus of internal struggle during the early to mid-1970s.
Although the newly combative mood of the youthful BCM and a revived workers movement, combined with the 1975 independence of neighbouring Mozambique, opened up new spaces for MK, the exiled ANC’s preoccupation with its own external problems and plans resulted in little practical movement on the armed struggle front.
However, there was some rebuilding of underground structures that took place under the guidance of ANC members who had been recently released from Robben Island (for example, Joe Gqabi), and initial steps were taken to build underground structures by an MK detachment based in Lesotho and led by Chris Hani.
The 1976 student uprisings in Soweto, which galvanised internal resistance to the apartheid state, took place with little serious involvement of formal ANC/MK structures and leadership. Regardless, it presented the ANC, and MK in particular, with both opportunities and challenges.
Thousands of young students crossed over the borders, the vast majority of whom wanted to join the armed struggle. Despite the political, organisational and military weaknesses and problems of the ANC and its armed wing, they represented the only viable home for the young guerrillas-in-waiting.
With new blood in its ranks and high expectations of intensified MK activity inside the country, the ANC’s main strategic focus for the armed struggle was faced with a major test.
In response, the ANC formed the Operations Unit (OU), which was designed to enhance the overall strategic, tactical and logistical co-ordination of MK so that the armed struggle could become more intensive and influential. This hastily convened unit was, however, to create further problems for MK.
There already existed the Revolutionary Council (RC), responsible for the overall prosecution of armed struggle; the Politico-Military Strategy Commission (PMSC), responsible for reviewing ANC strategy and tactics; and another sub-body, the Internal Reconstruction and Development Unit (IRD), responsible for political work.
With the formation of the OU, it appeared that one hand didn’t necessarily know what the other was doing, and there arose serious problems in carrying out joint military and political work.
A 1978 meeting of the RC and the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) emphasised the need to combine armed activity with legal and semi-legal internal activity in order to spur “general mass uprisings”. However, it took the ANC four years before its armed struggle registered substantially increased activity.
Between 1977 and 1980, guerrilla activity inside the country totalled 82 incidents, and from 1981-84 there was a total of 194 incidents. Much of the armed activity mirrored the sabotage campaign of the early 1960s, with small units attacking military and administrative targets.
Despite their overall, limited military threat to the apartheid state, MK did manage to pull off a few spectacular attacks that contributed to the apartheid state’s fears of a revolutionary onslaught and raised the ANC’s symbolic appeal among the masses.
Between 1980 and 1982, MK launched mine and rocket attacks on the Sasolburg coal-to-oil refinery, the SADF’s Voortrekkerhoogte headquarters, and the Koeberg nuclear power station.
Under the direction of MK’s Special Operations Unit, these attacks no doubt provided then apartheid president PW Botha with the excuse to launch his own raids and destabilisation campaigns in neighbouring Mozambique and Angola where MK was now based.
The apartheid offensive was, of course, also directed at undermining the capacity of the ANC to carry forward its armed struggle. Mozambique had been the only secure base from which MK could directly infiltrate South Africa, and what successes MK had managed were in no small part due to the use of Mozambique as a forward base of operations.
All that changed when Mozambique signed the Nkomati Accord with the apartheid state in 1984. This stated that, in return for barring MK from its turf, Mozambique would receive Botha’s assurance that South Africa would end its support of Renamo. The accord turned out to be a chimera. MK lost its forward base but Renamo was kept well-oiled by the clandestine efforts of the apartheid military.
For all its plans and activities, MK’s prosecution of an armed struggle remained a victim of the ANC’s own misdirected strategies. Still clinging to the centrality of a guerrilla strategy designed to ignite mass resistance and seize power from the apartheid regime, the organisation appeared blinded to the realities of its failure.
The international and internal changes that the ANC saw as strengthening their strategy were, if anything, confirmation that an externalised guerrilla strategy could be little more than what it had become - armed propaganda.
The apartheid state was nowhere close to being militarily threatened, the geo-political obstacles remained formidable and the internal conditions necessary for successful guerrilla-type operations were tenuous at best.
As one commentator said: “It remains the fundamental tenet of revolutionary armed activity that its success depends on political mobilisation of the populace at large. It depends not merely on popular support, but popular involvement.”
* Dale T McKinley is an independent writer and activist. This is an extract from a paper he is presenting at the Armed Struggle Conference held at the University of the Witwatersrand from Wednesday.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus