The contest for power in South Africa after 1960 is a remarkable part of international guerrilla history. And for us, the slogan Amandla Ngawethu; Matla kea Rona expressed the demand that political power be transferred to our people, write Z Pallo Jordan and Mac Maharaj.
The launch of the armed struggle by Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) took place at an awkward moment. In October 1961, the Norwegian authorities announced that the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to Chief Albert Luthuli, the president-general of the ANC.
Luthuli received the award on December 10, 1961. On December 16, a day after his return, South Africans woke to the reverberations of home-made bombs exploding at electric power stations and government offices in Joburg, Port Elizabeth and Durban.
Thousands of leaflets announced the birth of MK. Ripples of excitement surged through the black populations while white South Africans were jolted.
Several examples of armed struggles fired the imagination of nationalist-revolutionary forces.
In the aftermath of World War II, Zionist guerrilla forces under the banner of the Haganah and Irgun engaged in an armed struggle, including some of the most devastating acts of terrorism against British rule over Palestine.
This culminated in the proclamation of the separate Jewish state of Israel in 1948.
In 1949, there was the victory of the People’s Liberation Army over the Guomindang regime in China; the humiliating defeat of the French forces at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954; the stunning victory of the Cuban revolution (1953-1959); and of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962).
But there were also experiences of failed guerrilla wars.
After World War II, British forces had suppressed the insurgents in Malaya and Burma; the Land and Freedom Army, whom the British psych-ops specialists dubbed “Mau Mau”, led a peasant nationalist uprising in Kenya from 1952-56, that was ruthlessly crushed; in 1956-1961, the French had crushed an armed struggle for independence in Cameroon, and a similar fate befell the rebellion led by the Hukbalahap during 1949-1954 in the Philippines.
However, there was an overwhelming tendency that seemed to view the armed struggle as guaranteed of success.
This tendency was to be found among members of the Liberal Party and the nationalist-revolutionary circles such as the ANC and the PAC, and those from the SACP as well as the far left Unity Movement.
The massacres at Sharpeville and Nyanga, the banning of the ANC and the PAC, the declaration of the State of Emergency and the detention of over 2 000 activists brought urgency to the debates.
The Sharpeville and Langa shootings precipitated a political crisis of unprecedented proportions. From the third week in March, African workers in major cities had gone into action against the pass laws.
The response to Luthuli’s call for a day of mourning on March 28 had been overwhelming, and marches and demonstrations in centres like Durban, Joburg, East London and Port Elizabeth had demonstrated the latent power of the urban working class.
All political players regarded March 21 as a watershed moment. Though the pre-dawn arrests that began on March 31 disorganised most liberation formations, a sufficient number of political activists managed to evade the police and survived underground.
The experience of the post-war years and its implications for the struggle were subjected to critical examination among detainees and those in the underground.
The decade of the 1950s had ended on a high note. Despite the banning orders, the trial of leaders and the blanket ban on gatherings of more than 10 people that was being enforced in the Eastern Cape, the masses had moved into the offensive.
The international political landscape was also changing. The anti-colonial revolution gained fresh impetus with the 1955 Bandung Conference that gave form and content to Afro-Asian solidarity and the Non-Aligned Movement. The Soviet-led bloc had become a strong counterweight to the untrammelled dictates of colonialism and imperialism.
Ghana’s independence in 1957 inaugurated the reclaiming of African independence as countries threw off the colonial yoke. The crisis over control of the Suez Canal exploded into war in 1956.
On October 29, Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula; on November 2, British and French forces carried out an airborne invasion of Egypt. Resistance by the Egyptian forces combined with overwhelming pressure from the UN brought an end to the tripartite invasion and Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser successfully led Egypt to take full control of the canal.
Seventeen former colonies in Africa were scheduled to become independent states in 1960. Former British prime minister Harold Macmillan, visiting South Africa in February 1960, addressed the white Parliament in Cape Town warning of the “wind of change” blowing through Africa.
Freedom in South Africa appeared to be around the corner.
Decision to embrace armed struggle
By the time of the whites-only referendum in October 1960, not a single black person had the franchise. During the October 1961 general elections, the National Party demonstrated that it had at last won a majority of white votes. All the liberals who contested those elections, except for Helen Suzman, were defeated. White South Africa had emphatically endorsed apartheid as its chosen path.
During the 1960 State of Emergency, strategy dominated the debate and forms of struggle featured prominently.
Most noteworthy among the societal developments was the exponential growth of the African urban working class.
They were now at the sinews of the industrial economy and virtually every white family was dependent on black domestic workers. They had demonstrated their capacity since the 1946 African Mineworkers’ Strike; and economic growth since then had enhanced their position.
A tactical challenge arose because Hendrik Verwoerd (prime minister from 1958 to 1966) had announced his intention to hold a whites-only referendum to break South Africa’s nominal ties with Britain by declaring the country a republic.
The ANC opposed this development on principle because the interests of the white minority alone were considered.
Verwoerd announced he would proclaim South Africa a republic on May 31, 1961.
In December 1960, 36 African leaders met for a consultative conference in Orlando. They decided to convene an All-In African Conference which would demand a new constitutional convention involving all South Africans irrespective of race.
The conference elected a committee with Nelson Mandela as secretary.
“At first,” says writer Anthony Sampson, “they worked together with some Liberals, and also with the PAC, encouraged by the formation of a United Front’ of the ANC and PAC abroad. But the collaboration soon broke up: the Liberals accused the ANC and communists of taking control; while the PAC decided they should crush the conference, partly because they suspected plans were afoot to build up Mandela as a hero in opposition to Sobukwe’.”
The all-in conference held on March 22, 1961 in Pietermaritzburg was remarkable for the support the ANC was able to muster a year after it had been banned. About 1 400 delegates representing 145 different groups from all over attended.
The conference called on the government to convene a national convention to determine a new constitution replacing the one of 1909, failing which they would organise South Africans from all sectors and race groups to stage stay-at-home protests beginning on May 31 - the day South Africa was due to become a republic.
On the first day of the strike, the press and radio downplayed the response. The organisers, all of whom had gone underground, had little opportunity to make a direct assessment of the response of the people. Whatever little first-hand evidence they received suggested positive responses.
The 1961 anti-republic campaign was deficient in two respects.
While the movement was quite correctly contesting the regime and the white minority’s right to change the constitution unilaterally, with no reference to the oppressed black majority, focusing on that issue suggested that there was something worth defending in the existing constitution.
For many activists, it also betrayed a residual hope that an anti-NP front might yet materialise, in spite of the demonstrable indifference of all the white anti-NP political formations.
The upshot was that while black workers in a number of centres responded to the strike call, whites went to work as usual and, in a number of instances, took on the menial jobs usually performed by blacks as scabs.
The idea of a national convention did not generate any deep emotional response from most black workers.
The movement was compelled to pose the issue differently, as the contest for power. Consequently, from among the masses themselves, the slogan “Amandla Ngawethu; Matla kea Rona” spontaneously arose, with a raised clenched fist, expressing the demand that political power be transferred to the people.
* Pallo Jordan and Mac Maharaj are ANC veterans. This is an extract from their paper, “South Africa and the turn to Armed Resistance”, being presented at the conference on The Politics of Armed Struggle in Southern Africa, currently being held at Wits.
Hosted by the Wits History Workshop, the Mapungubwe Institute and South African History Online, the conference, which ends on Friday, includes public dialogues, roundtable discussions, paper presentations, film screenings and cultural events. See more at www.sahistory.org.za
The Star