THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION

Press, 10 August 1985, Page 19

THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION

The violence that has swept through the black townships since September, with the loss of hundreds of lives, has made South Africa look ungovernable. The state of emergency ordered by President Botha has served only to intensify international pressure against apartheid. ALLISTER SPARKS, of the London “Observer,” reports from Johannesburg on the escalation towards revolution.

On a sunny day last summer, Pieter W. Botha sat down to lunch at Chequers with Margaret Thatcher, the first South African leader to pay an official visit to a British Prime Minister since the halcyon days of Jan Smuts. It was the high point of what looked like a comeback trail for the world’s number one pariah State. Botha had just signed a “good neighbours” treaty with radical Mozambique that seemed likely to put an end to the threat of internal guerrilla war by the African National Congress, which was operating out of Mozambique. He had just won an overwhelming electoral victory to endorse a new national Constitution, which breached the political colour bar and looked as though it would put an end to the threat from the Afrikaner Rightwing.

With the United States committed to a policy of unprecedentd warmth, President Botha was touring Europe to present South Africa’s case for reacceptance into the community of respectable nations. He went on to be received by the Pope, before returning home to a hero’s welcome.

Now, just one year later, South Africa has swung from the highest point in its recent history to the lowest. It is facing its worst crisis ever, both internally and internationally. It is racked by racial unrest approaching the proportions of a revolution. Parts of the country are now regarded as ungovernable, causing the Government to declare a state of emergency despite the sweeping Security powers it already has in statutory law.

Mass arrests have been made, as police with lists of names moved through the African townships knocking on doors at dead of night. Many people have vanished, perhaps into secret detention, perhaps into exile. Scenes of terrible violence, white on black and black on black, have appeared on television screens around the world.

The United States Congress is getting ready to enact sanctions legislation, and the snowballing American campaign crossed the Atlantic as France announced an investment freeze and the withdrawal of its ambassador. The shock caused gold and other South African share prices to plummet, taking the rand down with them. What went wrong?

The short answer is that President Botha’s vaunted reforms had within them the seeds of their own destruction. They are, in fact, not so much reforms, as. an attempt to reformulate apartheid, modernising a system that had become antiquated and largely unworkable. It is a shift from the politics of pure racial domination to a more subtle one of co-opting allies into a

new middle-class alliance which the whites, and specifically the Afrikaner National Party, will continue to dominate. That at any rate is how blacks see it. Botha supporters explain it differently, arguing that it was intended as a process of gradual adaptation that would take South Africa step by step away from apartheid. There could be no dramatic abandoning of the old system, because the party had to take its deeply conservative white supporters with it. “It was a problem of differing perceptions,” says Willie Breytenbach, until last month the Government’s Director of Constitutional Planning and now a professor of politics at Stellenbosch University. “If I were black, I would probably also perceive the reforms as part of grand apartheid,” Breytenbach admits. “As a civil servant, I saw them as an important move away from that structure. We went as fast as was politically possible and, when I look back, I am proud of what we achieved.” The unrest erupted, Breytenbach thinks, because the introduction of the reforms raised black expctations, but the changes actually made, as blacks perceived them, fell short of their hopes. “That is an explosive gap,” he says. Others would say there was more to it than that. The new Constitution was devised by a Government-dominated council and was submitted for approval to a white referendum only. Black leaders were not consulted, nor were black communities given any opportunity to pass judgment on the new deal. In the only test of non-white opinion, at the Coloured and Indian elections last August, it was rejected overwhelmingly. The Government implemented the Constitution nonetheless. It was racial arrogance at its worst. Blacks saw it as an attempt to foist a new and more sinister

system of oppression on them, deluding the world as it did so that apartheid was being abandoned. They determined to attack the new system and render it unworkable.

Those blacks who were seen to have been co-opted, the new Coloured and Indian M.P.S and the black town councillors, became targets of this attack. They were labelled collaborators and, as the unrest intensified, they suffered a terrible retribution.

From the outset, the Government over-reacted to the demonstrations. There is something in the Afrikaner mentality that makes it impossible to grant concessions in the face of pressure, for fear that this will be taken as a sign of weakness. Law and order must be restored first; then, perhaps, a concession or two can be considered.

The heavy-handed police action fuelled black anger, inflaming the resistance instead of crushing it. As the violence grew worse, the prospect of the Government trying to end it with some concessionary gesture became more and more remote. When residents of black townships in the Vaal triangle, south of Johannesburg, demonstrated against a big rent increase, the Government put on a show of force by calling out the Army to surround the townships, while police went from door to door searching house-holds and arresting hundreds of people. The infuriated residents pressurised their newly formed trade unions into taking protest action. The unions, which until then had tried to avoid political involvement at this early stage of their develop-

ment, joined a call for a three-day protest strike. The Government retaliated by detaining the leaders of the country’s two biggest union federations. Though they were released soon afterwards this irrevocably politicised the black union movement.

With each new twist, the Government stepped up its repression. In response, the township rebellion became more violent and more purposeful. Last March, in the eastern Cape Province, orders were given that riot police should stop carrying teargas or rubberbullet guns. They were issued with lethal weapons only. This led to the killing of 20 people in Uitenhage’s Langa township on the twenty-fifty anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre. In the outraged aftermath, there were further demonstrations, boycotts and protest strikes. Now the

Army is being used routinely to patrol dozens of black ghettos, making them look like towns under military occupation. For their part, the African nationalists are waging open war against the black councillors and others seen as collaborators in what is called “the system.”

Some 120 councillors have been attacked, and-five have been killed, including a mayor and two deputy mayors. Seventy-five have had their homes burnt down and 147, including the entire councils of seven townships, have resigned. No one can be found to stand for reelection. A Johannesburg newspaper reported that of the 38 councils given the highest level of autonomy under the new system, only two’ are still functioning. The attacks have also been aimed at black policemen living in the townships and, even more venomously, at the hated security police informers. More than 50 black policemen have been killed, often by having hand-grenades lobbed into their homes.

There have been acts of appalling mob violence against those perceived to be collaborators, as television viewers around the world saw when a young girl suspected of being an informer was beaten and burned to death before the cameras at a funeral in Duduza township. The deputy Mayor of Sharpeville, Sam Dlamini, was hacked to death with machetes on his doorstep, and his body was flung in the family car and set on fire.

In Uitenhage’s Kwanobuhle township, rioters attacked the home of Mayor Tamsanga Kinikini. As the family cowered in the house, they saw the eldest son, who ran for help, grabbed by the mob and dismembered in the street. As the mob burst into the house, Kinikini shot his younger son in the head to save him from a similar fate, before he was himself

overwhelmed and killed. Their bodies were burned and the mob danced on the ashes. These attacks have wrecked “the system” of administration in the townships, and gone a long way towards answering the A.N.C.’s call to make the townships ungovernable and “no go” areas for police and officials. But they have appalled many supporters of the black cause, particularly Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Tutu is a hero to the young blacks, who admire him for his courage and forthrightness. But there is a distinct coolness when he appeals, as he has done several times, for an end to the violent retribution. His words are lost on the wind. Revolutions are not won that way, mutter his angry young listeners. While such violence has been a daily feature of life in the black townships for nearly a year, white South Africans are uninvolved in it. The townships are set apart, out of sight, and events there are scantily reported and do not impinge upon the tranquillity of white suburbia. To drive home to Johannesburg from the fevered atmosphere of a township funeral is like crossing an invisible frontier into another country. Until two weeks ago, Soweto itself had been curiously untouched by the unrest. Though it is by far the biggest and most highly politicised of all the black townships, it had remained an island of relative calm, while smaller townships to the south and east of it burned.

But on July 17, this suddenly changed. A hundred people charged with attending an illegal gathering were due to appear in a Sowetc court that morning. With the strange unanimity that characterises these events, crowds began flocking to the court. Schools empitied as pupils poured out into the streets and began making their

way to the trial. Some hijacked buses and drove themselves there. Within hours, the township was wild with unrest, and the police had to rescue a busload of foreign tourists on a guided tour.

For three days, the rioting continued, during which Soweto’s mayor, Edward Kunene, had his house set on fire, and the trouble showed signs of spilling over into some of Johannesburg’s white suburbs. It was this that decided the Government to declare an emergency.

Will it, in fact, restore law and order? Perhaps, for a time. The current wave of unrest will be more difficult to suppress than those of 1960 and 1976. Then it was relatively easy to ban a few highly visible organisations and slap their leaders in detention. Now the authorities face a more amorphous body of activists.

The United Democratic Front, formed to co-ordinate opposition to the new Constitution, is the standard bearer of the resistance. But the U.D.F. itself is only an umbrella, little more than an identifying idea. The real activists are in more than 700 affiliated organisations, trade unions, sports and student bodies, church, community and miscellaneous other organisations, all of which broadly subscribe to a declaration of nonracial ideals called the “Freedom Charter,” drafted by a “Congress of the People,” which the A.N.C. convened in 1955. The alliance’s looseness is its strength. Over the past eight months, the security police have arrested 36 of the’ U.D.F.’s top leadership and charged them with treason, thus putting them out of

action as they become involved in their long trials. This has had no effect. It is in the hundreds of grassroots bodies around the country that the action is being organised.

That is why the Government needed to declare a state of emergency: to legitimise the thousands of arrests that will be necessary if these grassroots organisations are to be neutralised. That is why the police have been moving through the townships with their long lists of suspects. Often it is a case of arrest by hearsay, and often there are other leaders waiting in the wings to take over. Still, such operations do disrupt even the most determined of activist movements.

A lull is likely. There was a 16year lull after Sharpeville, and an 8-year lull after Soweto. But each new uprising has been bigger and more protracted than the last. That pattern is likely to continue, until there is continuous endemic trouble with periodic peaks of crisis — a stage which may be drawing close.

Could the Government break this ominous pattern by introducing effective reforms?

Theoretically, yes. But that would require releasing Nelson Mandela from prison, ending the ban on the A.N.C., and beginning serious negotiations with it for a new Constitution, something which the Government shows no sign of being ready even to contemplate. There is too much ideological baggage in the way, and there are too many obsessions about Communists in the background intent on destroying the Afrikaner and establishing a godless Socialist State.

If the Government continues to deal only with its own black nominees, through its own institutional structures, it will simply put the mark of Cain upon them. Then the pattern of staggered escalation will continue to its ultimate climax some time in the 19905.

Activists among the grassroots