Our country narrowly avoided becoming another war-torn Syria, writes Wilmot James.
South Africa is not Syria, but we could easily have arrived at a similar place. Much like South Africa in the 1980s, Syria’s conflict began as popular protests against the regime, but, unlike South Africa, Bashar al-Assad’s intransigence took Syria into a brutal civil war that has killed more than 300 000 individuals, including 10 000 children, and displaced more than half of Syria’s 22 million people, causing a refugee catastrophe.
In South Africa 20 000 precious lives were lost, mostly in KwaZulu-Natal, between the end of formal apartheid in 1990 and the start of democratic government in 1994. But we did not descend into a civil war that resulted in the displacement of millions of citizens, destroyed infrastructure and wrecked havoc with economy and society.
FW de Klerk, who became president in 1989, averted catastrophe by seizing the opportunity presented by the fall of the Soviet Union, the ANC’s most important supporter, to lead the nation into a negotiated settlement.
He broke the logjam that history bequeathed, where black advancement was seen to come at the cost of white security and prosperity. De Klerk’s generals told him that the defence establishment could contain the sporadic efforts of the ANC’s liberation military units.
But neither the army nor the police, they also said, could contain the political surge of the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) despite multiple states of emergency.
The solution, they said, was not a military, but a political one. De Klerk had the option that Syria’s Assad chose, to hang on to power, use the defence, police and intelligence services to crush the domestic revolt, destroy the infrastructure and lay the country to waste.
But he did not. Instead, he chose to negotiate with an adversary that was weak militarily, but strong in the organisation of the popular revolt.
The rise of the MDM is an important story to tell in the light of revisionist efforts to portray the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) as South Africa’s saviours. They were not.
The story of the MDM begins in Vietnam in October 1978.
Alarmed by the prospect of irrelevance as a result of the stunning power of the revolt of Soweto in 1976, a delegation led by Oliver Tambo (that included Thabo Mbeki) went to ask the legendary Vietcong General Vo Nguyen Giap what could be done?
Giap, who kept the French (1946-1954) and the mighty US Army (1960-1975) at bay, declared with hard-earned military authority that MK was no match for the South African Defence Force, which everyone except the romantics knew well enough and made the crucial point in what became known as the Green Book (www.anc.org.za) that it would be unwise for the ANC to invest further in a militarily strategy to defeat the enemy.
Instead, Giap recommended that a popular, mass-based and loosely organised movement be created that used peaceful, but pointed means to fight for the idea that the defeat of apartheid was possible.
As South Africa’s fourth president Kgalema Motlanthle put it when he visited Vietnam: “The Green Book emphasised the importance of mobilising the masses to confront the apartheid government in a Peoples’ War.” Five years after Giap’s counsel, in 1983, thousands attended the launch of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in Mitchells Plain.
The moral clarity of the democratic cause backed by the popular force of the MDM, in a global context in which sanctions and disinvestment programmes were escalating, could not be contained by the various states of emergency declared in the mid-to-late 1980s by De Klerk’s bellicose predecessor PW Botha.
It broke apartheid. De Klerk’s actions opened the door for a negotiated solution.
It was a solution that could not have been pursued without the leadership of Nelson Mandela.
Fortified by 27 breathtakingly long years of imprisonment, Mandela was the only person with the force of character and unrivalled moral authority to mould the ANC into a cohesive force.
The UDF was dismantled. Cosatu, the only body with durable networks and disciplined cadres in every part of the country, became the ANC’s electoral machinery to bring out the vote.
But there were, for Mandela, big headaches to solve.
A raging civil war in KwaZulu-Natal involving some powerful – and murderous – warlords on either side of the battle, had to be brought to an end.
Mandela’s peacemaker in the region became Jacob Zuma, who had redeemed himself after he (Mandela) apparently refused to meet when he returned from exile, presumably because of the atrocities committed at the ANC camps on Zuma’s watch (he was head of MK intelligence).
Mandela faced a fractious adversary. He excoriated De Klerk for being “economical with the truth” regarding the operation of a “third force”. Mandela claimed was driving the violence.
Some generals consorted with Eugène Terre’blanche’s brazenly racist efforts to seize the Bophuthatswana homeland, rapidly backing away from the abortive disaster that it became.
How Mandela dealt with the generals is beautifully captured by Njabulo Ndebele when he wrote, in South Africa’s Nobel Laureates: “If you go to war” he (Mandela) told the generals, “I must be honest and admit that we cannot stand up to you on the battlefield. We don’t have the resources.
“It will be a long and bitter struggle, many people will die and the country may be reduced to ashes. But you must remember two things. You cannot win because of our numbers: you cannot kill us all.
“And you cannot win because of the international community. They will rally to our support and they will stand with us.”
General Constand Viljoen was forced to agree. The two men looked at each other and faced the truth of their mutual dependency. Mandela had to deal with the assassination on April 10, 1993, of the charismatic and widely respected secretary-general of the SACP, Chris Hani.
The popular and widespread outrage had the potential of igniting a firestorm of such power that it could easily derail the path of negotiations and democratic progress.
If there was any doubt of Mandela’s compelling moral authority, he went on television and united the nation in a grieving moment of civic calmness. Don’t punish an entire group for the act of an individual, Mandela basically said.
A white man pulled the trigger. But an Afrikaner woman immediately reported the outrage.
In Dispatches from the War Room, Stanley Greenberg wrote in 2009 that Mandela did not take the ANC electoral success for granted. He wanted to turn the ANC from a liberation movement into a modern political party.
He sent Marcel Golding to Little Rock to learn from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Greenberg provided the polling and helped frame a forward-looking ANC strategy with the slogan “A better life for all”.
Thabo Mbeki had many flaws, but he had a vision for an African renaissance fuelled by a growing economy and led by a transformed upper class.
But Jacob Zuma took the ANC back to the point where it has no political purpose beyond simply staying in power.
* James is a DA MP. This is an extract from a lecture given to the visiting executive MBA class of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Weekend Argus