Era of mass mobilisation remembered Michael Morris
The UDF launch 34 years ago today hastened the swing of apartheid politics away from Parliament to the people, writes
AMONG the more fanciful news items on August 20, 1983 was a notional scheme by hotel magnate Sol Kerzner to launch “floating casinos” off the coast to beat the country’s anti-gambling law, and bring in the boodle, not least “millions in foreign exchange”.
But there was no mistaking the dominant news of the day: “5 000 pack UDF rally”.
The resumption of popular defiance through the 1980s was largely under the banner of the United Democratic Front, which brought the country to the critical stalemate that was the precursor to the transition of 1990-94.
In his memorable speech at the Rocklands Civic Centre in Mitchells Plain in August 1983, activist cleric Allan Boesak summed up the “historic moment” as follows: “We have brought together under the aegis of the United Democratic Front the broadest and most significant coalition of groups and organisations struggling against apartheid, racism and injustice since the early 1950s.”
It was a moment the government itself had hoped would be historic for a different reason: it was about to embark, if tentatively, on the dismantling of white rule, having announced plans for a “tricameral” or three-chamber Parliament for whites, coloureds and Indians, and – though it stopped short of factoring black MPS into its reformist vision – more powers for black local councils.
“To be sure,” Boesak retorted, “the new proposals will make apartheid less blatant in some ways. It will be modernised and streamlined, and in its new multicoloured cloak it will be less conspicuous and less offensive to some. Nonetheless, it will still be there.”
For some, it was enough to begin with. Not for Boesak, though, and not for the majority represented in the more than 600 organisations that eventually banded together under the UDF mantle, embodying what Boesak called the “politics of refusal”.
It was a politics he encapsulated in “three little words”… all, here and now: “We want all of our rights, we want them here and we want them now. We have been waiting so long, we have been struggling so long. We have pleaded, cried, petitioned too long now. We have been jailed, exiled, killed for too long. Now is the time.”
If 1983 wasn’t it – and there was much jailing and killing still to come, not least at the hands of some anti-apartheid zealots who took revolt to brutal excess – the formation of the UDF acutely narrowed the apartheid state’s options.
When those tricameral elections came round almost exactly a year later, in August 1984, the inaugural MPS of the second-string coloured and Indian chambers could boast only a paltry mandate, a massive voter stayaway having rewarded the UDF’S don’t-vote campaign.
PW Botha’s “Total Strategy” was, as historian Colin Bundy saw it, “confronted and outflanked by two decisive developments within resistance politics – the emergence of localised, radicalised community-based protest and the re-entry by the ANC from the wings of exile to centre-stage domestic politics”. These trends “fused in 1983 with the formation of the UDF”.
The organisation “articulated a ‘culture of liberation’ in which local struggles for the redress of specific grievances were portrayed as the basic components in a nationwide struggle to end white minority rule. The UDF provided a linkage for ongoing local struggles, not only forward to a ‘liberated and democratic’ South Africa, but also backward to the tradition of the multiracial Freedom Charter and the ANC”. Political scientist Tom Lodge noted of this period that the army’s “first deployment in quelling civil unrest since 1960” was “a significant indication of the scope of the challenge to the state’s authority”.
Over the next two years, he wrote, “the UDF presided over a rebellion without historical precedent”.
Activists drew their “tactical repertoire and their emblematic iconography” (including the toyi-toyi) from other sources, particularly the ANC. One of the consequences, from March 1985, was violence that included “necklacing”, the burning to death with petrol-filled tyres of “supposed informers and other renegades, a sadistic purification of the community”.
Historian Ineke van Kessel – the title of whose book Beyond Our Wildest Dreams: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa was taken from former UDF national treasurer Azhar Cachalia’s comment that “we had never in our wildest dreams expected that events would take off in the way they did” – touched on the complexities when she wrote that while “most of the young men and boys who were the most visible actors in the battles of the 1980s were no doubt motivated by anger against the oppressive and humiliating condition of apartheid… they were also contesting patterns of authority within African society, they were in search of adventure and excitement, and they formed competing bands in the battle for control over territory, resources and girlfriends.”
Yet, as scholar and former activist Raymond Suttner observed, “alongside moments of abuse, with ‘kangaroo courts’ and intolerance of diversity” – and, in some cases, “degeneration of popular institutions into vehicles of terror” at the hands of inexperienced youth or even criminal elements – the UDF period “had moments of great creativity and democratic involvement”.
He wrote in 2000: “The 1980s introduced modes of practising politics that previously had never been seen in South Africa, and that continue to condition many people’s expectations today. Notions of ‘popular democracy’, ‘people’s power’, ‘selfempowerment’, ‘the masses driving the process’, ‘democracy from below’, ‘creativity of the masses’ were all introduced as new ideas and practices…
“There were abuses of various kinds in the period of people’s power, but there were nevertheless important reinterpretations and new notions introduced into South African democratic discourse. People’s power constituted, in part, a new meaning and deepening of the interpretation of the Freedom Charter.”
In the course of successive states of emergency and waves of detentions, the UDF was, by 1988, operationally sapped, “beheaded of leadership,” as Bundy described it, “it’s campaign… fragmented, and many of its followers intimidated or demoralised”.
Even so, as Lodge and historian Bill Nasson put it in their book, All Here and Now: Black Politics in South Africa in the 1980s, “the revolt was merely dormant, not extinguished”, with 1989 seeing “a remarkable upswing in the movement’s fortunes”.
That mammoth resurgence under the aegis of the Mass Democratic Movement drew on the vigour and defiance of the UDF.
Bundy concluded that “if the state had managed to reimpose a shaky peace by force majeure, it had suffered as much if not more than the liberation forces.
“Capital flight and sanctions intensified. The currency collapsed, and an international credit squeeze ensued. Elements of the white establishment effectively deserted the government.
“Delegations of big business, Afrikaner intellectuals, church leaders and others made highly publicised trips to Lusaka and Dakar to meet the ANC leadership.
“The NP lost support to its left and right, and splits opened in the cabinet.
“In 1989, these led to the unceremonious dumping of President Botha and his replacement by FW de Klerk”.
The upshot was that the South African state “remained militarily powerful but was becoming politically weak. It could repress but not persuade. The liberation movement led by the ANC remained politically powerful but militarily ineffectual… and both came to a reluctant recognition of this stalemate”.
Suttner wrote: “The selfperception of UDF affiliates… as being under ANC discipline and carrying out its strategies is one of the reasons the UDF did not consider an existence after the unbanning of the ANC and SACP. It had a tendency to see itself as a ‘curtain-raiser’ before the main team arrived.”
It is little wonder, today, that the UDF is commemorated with a wistful nostalgia, not least among some of its most prominent adherents.
A UDF gathering is taking place today at Rocklands Civic Centre in Mitchells Plain at noon. Speakers include Popo Molefe, Ebrahim Rasool, Farid Esak, Roseberry Sonto, Don Gumede and Nomaindia Mfeketo.