4. Civil resistance, South Africa, 1912-1960
•Gandhian tradition
• ANC develops base
• Freedom Charter
• Defiance Campaign
• Treason trial
• Sharpeville massacre
• Resort to arms, 1961
• MK Manifesto
5. Early ANC thinking on armed struggle
• Ambiguous:
– Defensive
– (Guevarist) offensive
• Key issue: relationship between
political and military forms of struggle
• Other choices in its new strategic discourse:
– Trotsky-Lenin Insurrectionist model
– Mao‟s protracted people‟s war model
• ANC disregards political struggle by
political means
• 1969: ANC says armed struggle “only” way
open to it
• 1965-1976: No armed struggle inside SA
• Black Consciousness Movement & Trade Unions
6.
7. 1976 uprisings: military frustrations…
• Thousands of youths leave country;
put in ANC military training camps;
• Armed struggle stays at very low
level of intensity;
• Politico-military commission;
• Vietnamese response: must revisit
issue of relationship between
political and military struggle.
…but political advances…
• Militants inside South Africa
organisepolitically across almost
every imaginable form.
…as ANC leadership argues
8. Exiled ANC leadership arguments
continue, people form united front
• Chronic arguments in ANC leadership over relationship
between political and military and shape of operational
structures
• But ANC leadership agrees role of political mobilisation
is ultimately to serve military campaign.
• Anti-Republic campaign, 1981.
• Formation of UDF, 1983
• Character of UDF
– Umbrella
– Strong local pre-existing and new organisations
– Organisation around concrete issues
– Provincial leaderships
– Small, mobile national leadership
– National political focus
9. Perpetual mass action,
1985-1990
• Forms:
– Demos, local + general strikes
– Rent and service boycotts
– Students‟, womens‟, other protests
– Mass rallies, leafletting, etc., etc.
• Iconography of violence at UDF
rallies (see right)
• Economic, diplomatic and security
• costs of CR for state: defections
• States of emergency declared
• UDF outlawed, UDM formed
• SA intelligence calculates options
• ANC leaders recalculate options
• „Signals‟ become talks
• ANC unbanned, 1990
10. It‟s the politics, stupid!
Paradoxes:
1. The ANC‟s obsession with armed struggle from 1960s to 1979 undermined its
ability to mount not only civil resistance; it also subverted the ANC‟s ability to
mount armed struggle itself!
2. Civil resistance in South Africa displaced and supplanted an armed struggle of
which, powerful political forces intended, that civil resistance should be a mere
tributary.
3. An iconography of violence did, at a particular point in the South African
liberation struggle – between about 1983 and 1989 – help advance the struggle
being waged by non-violent means.
4. It is possible for an organisation that has exhibited at some point an unrivalled
will to struggle against an unjust opponent, such as the ANC did, eventually to
win power on the back of energies, organisations and forms of resistance it had
only a tangential role in generating.
