Introduction
The Pan Africanist Congress of South Africa (later of "Azania") made its appearance as an independent formation in November 1958. Through 40 years of confusion, self-marginalisation, political somersaults and internal leadership wrangles, the one point of consistency has been the PAC's attempt to define itself in opposition to the ANC. In the course of these four decades, the ANC has endured all kinds of slander levelled at us by the PAC. Our policy has generally been to ignore it.
Maintaining a dignified silence has much to recommend it, not least the fact that, in the absence of any other public attention, the PAC thrives on criticism directed against it - any publicity is better than none. Nonetheless, it is important to reflect, from time to time, on organisations like the PAC. Generations of ANC cadres and supporters have had their experience of the PAC. But is the experience being shared? Are the lessons of history being passed on?
The PAC story is also about the lives of hundreds of grass-roots militants, peasants, migrants, young black intellectuals, soldiers who committed themselves to the liberation struggle in good faith and whose genuine patriotism was squandered and abused by the PAC leadership. Many rank-and-file PAC members were sacrificed in poorly planned operations, others had their early militancy turned into the ashes of demoralisation, by a leadership that spent more time in internal factionalist battles than in any serious organisational work. The PAC story is also the story of those who were sacrificed like this, and we owe it to them to tell the story.
While even the PAC's most enduring supporters despair that it will ever get its act together, there are always forces around desperate to breathe life into some alternative to the ANC. We have grown accustomed, every so often, to see the PAC rolled out, pumped up and re-treaded as the "emerging alternative to the ANC". With the 1999 elections approaching, who can doubt that the next re-tread is just around the corner? The levels of opportunism that we can expect, in this regard, may surprise even the most cynical. Consider, for instance, Tony Leon's recent remark that:
"it does not matter whether one votes PAC or DP..." (Financial Mail, February 20, 1998)
...as long as one votes against the ANC!
It is time, once more, to reflect upon the PAC's origins, its track-record, its present performance, and its policies.
Origins
The formal launch of the PAC occurred in November 1958 after a group of dissidents had failed to break up an ANC provincial conference, being held in Orlando under the chairpersonship of Oliver Tambo. In a statement to the chairperson, adopted by a group of self-styled "Africanists", the signatories stated:
"We are launching out on our own as the custodians of ANC policy as formulated in 1912 and pursued up to the time of the Congress Alliance. "
A leading personality in the dissident group was Potlako Leballo. He was a school teacher by profession, dismissed for fraud in the early 1950s. Leballo was active in the ANC Youth League in Orlando. In May 1953 he was expelled by the YL's Transvaal executive, but subsequently reinstated by his branch. In November of that year, Leballo and his group in Orlando began to produce a journal The Africanist. The group remained a small faction within the ANC, with pockets of support in Soweto, Evaton and Alexandra. The group attacked the non-racial positions of the ANC leadership, and they were deeply critical of cooperation between the ANC and the other Congress Alliance formations.
When much of the key leadership of the ANC in the Transvaal was detained in 1956 and charged in the lengthy (1956-1961) Treason Trial, the Leballo grouping saw their chance to challenge for provincial leadership positions.
The group actively and publicly opposed the ANC and Congress Alliance 1958 national stay-at-home, called in protest against the whites-only elections. For this act of treachery they won the warm approval of the white media, they were praised as being "the most responsible native leaders." Following these scabbing activities, Leballo and others were expelled from the ANC.
This was the immediate background to the 1958 PAC break-away.
In later years, the PAC has often sought to present its break from the ANC as a split of "militants", of a "more radical" grouping, dissatisfied with the "moderateness" of an ANC unduly influenced by "non-Africans". It is useful, therefore, to go back and check the historical record. This is how Leballo explained the break at the time:
"The African people in general do not want to be allied with the [white] Congress of Democrats. They know these people to be leftists and when we want to fight for our rights these people weaken us... the Government will not listen to our requests and demands because of their outlook." (Contact, November 1958).
This is the much vaunted militancy of the founding group of the PAC. Their "Africanism" was not radical, but a cringing, "ja-baas" attitude to the struggle. Their objection to co-operation with the Congress of Democrats was not, in essence, that it was white, but that it was "too left-wing", and that co-operation with it would frighten off the apartheid government.
Entirely in character with this attitude, the very first campaign of the PAC, the campaign by which it hoped to announce itself as the true "custodian of ANC policy", was the so-called Status Campaign. This was a campaign designed to elicit courtesy from whites in their interaction with blacks. In the face of white racism and arrogance, Africans were called upon to shame whites with dignity. Robert Sobukwe, an academic who had emerged as the first PAC president, described it in grandiose terms as:
"an all-embracing and multi-frontal unfolding and expanding campaign involving the political, economic and social status of the African."
Another PAC leader and journalist, Matthew Nkoana later explained that the campaign was intended to make "white supremacy mentally untenable to our people" and as a result, somehow, it would become "physically untenable" too. The same Nkoana admits that the Status Campaign:
"deceptively simple in its title raised not a hair in the white supremacists camp when he [Sobukwe] first announced it shortly after the PAC was formed." (Africa and the World, March 1965).
No wonder it failed to raise a hair! A campaign to affirm African dignity and politeness in the face of racial abuse is all very well, but coming towards the end of a decade of unprecedented mass mobilisation (the Defiance Campaign, the Congress of the People, the peasant revolts in Pondoland and Sekhukhuniland, the Alexandra bus boycott, the Women's March, a growing number of economic strikes, the 1958 political strike, and many other heroic struggles), it hardly marked a militant break.
The 1960 anti-Pass Campaign
As the 1950s drew to a close, there was a climate of deepening tension within South Africa. While many other African colonies were moving towards independence, the apartheid regime was showing itself to be more intransigent than ever. The government was threatening to ban the ANC, and apartheid cabinet ministers spoke of battering the ANC with "an ungloved fist". At the ANC's December 1959 annual conference, there was a unanimous vote to launch a massive, countrywide anti-pass campaign. The campaign would start on 31 March 1960 and culminate on 26 June with a great bonfire of passes.
Planning began immediately, ANC organisers and officials toured the country, talking to branches about the campaign. Leaflets, stickers and posters were circulated and posted in buses and trains.
The PAC, fresh from the failure of its Status Campaign, found itself adrift. Reflecting back on that time, Comrade Mandela remembers a PAC that "appeared lost, they were a leadership in search of followers, and they had yet to initiate any action that put them on the political map." (Long Walk to Freedom, p.224)
It was in this context that the PAC suddenly announced that it, too, was launching an anti-pass campaign - but on 21 March, ten days before the launch of the ANC-led campaign. "No conference had been held by them to discuss the date, no organisational work of any significance had been undertaken. It was a blatant case of opportunism. Their actions were motivated more by a desire to eclipse the ANC than to defeat the enemy." (Long Walk to Freedom, p.225)
At the time, Duma Nokwe, in his capacity as Secretary General of the ANC, wrote to the PAC, warning that
"it is treacherous to the liberation movement to embark on a campaign which has not been properly prepared and which has no reasonable prospect of success."
Nevertheless, anxious to be "ahead" of the ANC, the PAC duly launched its campaign on March 21, 1960. On the morning of that day, Robert Sobukwe and his executive walked to the Orlando police station to turn themselves in for arrest. A paltry 200 in Soweto and the greater Johannesburg responded to the PAC call. No demonstrations at all took place in Durban, Port Elizabeth or East London.
But in three centres, despite the amateurish nature of the preparations, there was indeed a significant response. In Evaton several hundred presented themselves at the police station for arrest for being without passes. In Cape Town 30,000 marched from the townships into the city, one of the biggest anti-pass actions ever seen in that city. Two people were killed by the police in Cape Town.
But it was in Sharpeville that the most horrific massacre occurred. On the morning of March 21, several thousand peacefully surrounded the police station. The police force, without warning, opened fire on the crowd. 69 people, men, women and children, were killed, many of them shot in the back as they fled.
The massacre provoked outrage, nationally and internationally. However, the PAC's national leaders were now all in jail, having offered themselves for arrest, with the slogan: "No bail, no defence, no fine". They had not planned beyond the first day of action. This deprived the PAC of any effective capacity to co-ordinate follow-up, protest action. It was left to the ANC and its Congress alliance partners who, recognising that Sharpeville was a national tragedy, announced a nationwide stay-at-home for 28 March. It was to be a day of mourning in protest against the police atrocities. Several hundred thousands, all over South Africa, observed the call.
After the Sharpeville massacre, the PAC was virtually silent. It did, however, make one more brief (and inglorious) appearance on the terrain of mass action in the early 1960s. In May 1961, the ANC and its alliance partners organised a massive three-day strike, turning the regime's "Republic Day" celebrations into a farce. The PAC, emerging from more than a year of public silence, distinguished itself by issuing leaflets calling on workers to ignore the stay-at-home call, and to go to work as usual. Vorster's police were delighted and assisted with the distribution of the pamphlets.
The PAC's "Africanist" ideology
From its origins, one would hunt in vain for a consistent and relatively coherent PAC ideological perspective, let alone political programme. It is true, of course, that the PAC has always tried to identify itself as "Africanist". "Africa for the Africans", was one of its rallying (if not original) slogans. It was on the basis of this "Africanism" that its founders criticised the ANC's non-racialism, and the Freedom Charter vision of a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it.
But on closer examination the PAC's "Africanism" turns out to be a slippery concept. On the one hand it has been used to justify the opportunistic incitement of spontaneous, raw anti-white (and also in many cases anti-Indian) sentiments. Of course, these sentiments exist in our country, and the objective grounds, particularly of a spontaneous anti-white feeling, should be obvious to anyone.
But it is one thing to recognise the existence of these sentiments, and then to work with them, to organise, educate and mobilise the sense of national grievance into a purposeful liberation struggle. It is quite another thing simply to worsen racial tension, as the PAC has often done, and hope this will result in liberation. This latter approach is deeply irresponsible. It has led to tragic consequences, not just for those (like Amy Biehl, to cite a more recent example) who are not indigenous Africans, but also for hundreds of genuine grass-roots patriots, who have been misled into thinking that the reckless venting of anger somehow carries the revolution forward.
When they are accused of reverse racism, however, the more articulate PAC leaders are quick to deny the charge. They quote Robert Sobukwe to the effect that by "African" they mean "everybody who owes loyalty only to Africa". This is a nice, open-ended definition, especially when it comes to external consumption. But its subtleties were hardly ever unpacked and explained, over the decades, to the PAC's actual or intended grass-roots constituency.
In his autobiography, Mandela remembers how PAC members on Robben Island simply refused to believe that the PAC in exile had opened its membership to whites and Indians, and that a white leader of the former South African Liberal Party, Patrick Duncan, had become a PAC executive member. "The PAC members derided this at the time as ANC propaganda". (Long Walk to Freedom, p.427)
On closer scrutiny the PAC's "Africanism" turns out to be a blend of populist demagogy, and the insecurities of a leadership that is not confident of itself. By contrast, the long- standing, historical non-racism of the ANC is the non-racism of an African organisation that has fostered generation upon generation of leaders who, in their overwhelming majority, have been and are indigenous Africans. The non-racism of the ANC is rooted, not just in principles, but also in the confidence of a mass-based organisation and of an African leadership that has no complexes about its own capacities, and no fears of working with others.
Nor is the ANC's non-racism something to be defined in opposition to Africanism (properly understood). A principled, coherent, strategic and ever evolving Africanism is part and parcel of the ANC's traditions and perspectives. The ANC continues to define the strategic objective of our struggle as being the liberation of blacks in general, and Africans in particular. The ANC's Africanist credentials are not just national. While others theorise about pan-Africanism, we are playing an active regional and continental role in seeking to foster an African Renaissance.
It should be added (since this has been another common PAC slander) that the ANC's key allies also have a long tradition of Africanism. In 1924, three years after its formation, the Communist Party of South Africa adopted a firm resolution to Africanise itself. This was not an empty resolution, the Party implemented a pioneering programme of night-schools, and political education that helped to produce thousands of outstanding African cadres and leaders. It was also the Party that pioneered, in 1928, the strategic perspective of a Black Republic.
In the early years of its existence, the PAC's supposed "Africanist" objection to working with progressive formations like the Congress of Democrats, did not prevent it from working with other, often very dubious white institutions and individuals. In particular, key PAC leaders had close ties with the largely white Liberal Party. Among the liberals with whom there was close collaboration, none was more politically controversial than Patrick Duncan, a former British Colonial Office employee. Duncan went on to be a top executive member of the PAC.
At the time of the PAC launch in 1958, Patrick Duncan wrote regular columns in the liberal publication, Contact. Amongst other things he publicised memorials to "the victims of Mau-Mau terrorism" (27 December, 1958); he attacked Egypt's President Nasser for challenging the policy of "peaceful arrangement of affairs with the ex-colonial powers" (13 December, 1958); he supported US military aggression against the Chinese People's Republic; and, most disgusting of all, he lent ideological support and justification to the reactionary forces in the Congo, who went on to murder Patrice Lumumba.
When accused of racism, the PAC has argued, as we have seen, that its definition of an "African" is anyone who owes loyalty to Africa. One wonders which particular pro-African loyalty led to Duncan being admitted into the senior PAC leadership? Or was he a useful conduit for foreign funds, and if so, what was the origin of such funds?
Armed struggle
The PAC's approach to the armed struggle was the same as its approach to mass mobilisation - a lack of preparation and the belief in triggering popular passions with militant rhetoric. While Umkhonto we Sizwe, launched in December 1961, advocated the implementation of a carefully controlled campaign of violence, combined with other forms of political action, the PAC through its loosely organised Poqo movement fostered a vision of a spontaneous and bloody popular uprising.
Poqo's message was simple and direct:
"We are starting again Africans... we die once. Africa will be free on January 1st. The white people shall suffer, the black people will rule. Freedom comes after bloodshed. Poqo has started. It needs a real man. The Youth has weapons so you need not be afraid. The PAC says this ." (from a pamphlet produced in December 1961 and circulated in Nyanga).
It would be highly insensitive, reading lines like these, to sneer at their simplicity or to neglect the pent-up anger (and even sense of despair) that produced them. The ANC will not dishonour those grass-roots militants who felt these passions. But, on the other hand, we cannot forgive a PAC leadership that simply fanned such emotions, without assuming any responsibility for the consequences.
Poqo's most effective base in the early 1960s was to be in the hostels of the Western Cape, among male migrant workers from the Transkei. Feeling cut off from other township dwellers (the sector in which the ANC had a more effective presence at the time), and from the majority of Coloured people in the province, the message of"poqo" (purity) and of a sudden dawning of a more just era, had an appeal to these migrants who had little experience of political and trade union organisation. Using clan and home-town networks to build Poqo cells, the migrants in the Western Cape built cohesive structures that were sometimes able to survive for two or three years in the face of massive police repression. This was to be in sharp contrast to Poqo cells in the Transvaal, built around pockets of known PAC intellectuals and activists, and which were quickly arrested and neutralised by the apartheid police.
At its height in the period 1962-3, PAC/Poqo violence assumed several forms. In Langa and Paarl, Poqo cells executed suspected informers. In some rural towns in the Cape there were more or less random and indiscriminate killings of whites. In the calculations of the PAC leadership, these acts of localised violence would culminate in a countrywide violent insurrection. Preparations for this uprising were in the hands of the Maseru-based exile leadership around Potlako Leballo. The uprising was to take place on 8 April 1963, thereby fulfilling an earlier PAC prophecy of freedom by 1963.
According to the political historian, Tom Lodge:
"Leballo 's conception of the uprising was simple and dramatic. Each branch should immediately begin a programme of mass recruitment (a target figure of 1000 members per branch was proposed) and then on the chosen day there would be simultaneous attacks on strategic points such as police stations or power installations, to be accompanied by the mass slaughter of whites. This was to be completely indiscriminate; in Leballo's speeches the whites were referred to as the 'forces of darkness '". (Black politics in SA since 1945, p 247)
However, Leballo, from the safety of his Maseru refuge, could not resist boasting about the impending uprising. He informed a startled press conference of the forthcoming uprising, two weeks before it was to happen. In the wake of these boasts, the colonial police in Basotuland carried out a raid on the PAC offices in Maseru, and seized lists with 10 000 names of conspirators and their addresses. The Basutoland police appear to have handed these lists over to the South African authorities. With the exception of a petrol bomb attack on a charge office in King William's Town, and an attack on a police patrol in East London, there were no PAC actions whatsoever on 8 April, the day of the would-be mother of all uprisings. Thanks to Leballo's limelight-seeking boastfulness, most of the conspirators were in detention. Others were too demoralised to attempt any actions.
In 1964, while hundreds he had betrayed were in jail Leballo was given free and unmolested passage out through Verwoerd's South African republic, from where he travelled on to Dar es Salaam. There the PAC's new exiled headquarters were to be established.
Exile years
Initially, the PAC was to enjoy some advantages in exile. The horror of the Sharpeville massacre reverberated around the world, and the PAC assiduously presented the massacre as an indication of who was "really leading" the liberation movement in South Africa. The PAC's simple anti-white message was sometimes more readily understood by certain emerging African leaders elsewhere on the continent. PAC delegations were also not shy to slander the ANC and its allies.
In 1962, during his tour of African states, Mandela was to encounter much evidence of the anti-ANC disinformation activities of the PAC in those early years of exile. While attending a Pan-African Freedom Movement conference in Addis Ababa in February 1992, Mandela found that many African states knew of the ANC through the slanders of the PAC. After meeting with the Zambian UNIP party's number two, Simon Kapwepwe, the ANC delegation was told by Kapwepwe that he had been "mightily impressed" by Mandela's input, "and indeed by your entire ANC delegation". Kapwepwe said that if he were to judge on the relative merits of the ANC and PAC based on the speech and delegation, UNIP "would certainly be in your camp". But Kapwepwe was uncertain, "we have heard disturbing reports from the PAC to the effect that Umkhonto we Sizwe is the brainchild of the Communist Party and the Liberal Party, and that the idea of the organisation is merely to use Africans as fodder."
A nonplussed Mandela politely informed the Zambian leader that the Liberal Party and the Communist Party were arch-enemies and could not come together to play a game of cards, let alone set up MK. More importantly, Mandela concluded that "I am here to tell you at the risk of immodesty that I myself was the prime mover behind MK's formation." (Long Walk to Freedom, p.285)
This kind of slanderous disinformation, spread by the PAC against the ANC, was not an isolated incident. Throughout the exile period, the PAC did its best to exploit whatever lack of knowledge there was about the South African struggle in international circles. In the February 1965 issue of Africa and the World, PAC journalist, Matthew Nkoana, told a largely foreign readership, in sneering terms, that Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu had been jailed "for seeking to create bridges between the races". In the April 1965 issue of the same journal, Nkoana's imagination was to surpass itself. He informed his readers of the sensational
"news from Rohben Island ... that Mandela has ordered the close to 200 Umkhonto members jailed on the island to join the PAC when they come out of prison. "
One minute Mandela is being sneered at, the next-moment the same PAC journalist is claiming him as one of their own. Indeed, it was not just non-South Africans who were the targets of this disinformation. The PAC even told its own cadres that Mandela had joined the PAC during his African tour in 1962. In prison on Robben Island, Mandela was surprised to find PAC prisoners (including his own nephew, Nqabeni Menye) who were insistent that Mandela had left the ANC for the PAC! (Long Walk To Freedom, p.334)
Despite this opportunism, the ANC and its allies sought to work with the PAC in the early years of exile. In June 1960, Oliver Tambo, who had left South Africa March that year to help launch the international economic boycott, and Yusuf Dadoo, representing the SA Indian Congress, joined forces with two PAC officials, Nana Mahomo and Peter Molotsi in establishing a South African United Front (SAUF). The SAUF was to last for a bare 18 months. It worked in western Europe and in some newly independent African countries, but it broke up in early 1962 "as the result of internal PAC leaders' hostility to cooperation with the ANC" (Lodge, p.297). This was not to be last time that attempts from the side of the ANC to work with the PAC in a broad patriotic front were to break down as a result of internal PAC tensions.
While seeking to present itself as "more militant" than the ANC to an African audience, the PAC was also not shy to exploit Cold War sentiments in the United States, presenting itself as a "more moderate and responsible", anti-communist national movement, an alternative to the "communist-backed" ANC. In June 1993 Nana Mahomo and Patrick Duncan began a two-month tour of the US. They met with State Department officials and US business circles. Mahomo focussed on the American labour movement, the AFL/CIO, at the time an important component of US cold war strategies.
In this period the PAC also struck up relationships with other US, or western-backed national movements in Southern Africa - Holden Roberto's FNLA in Angola, and the anti-Frelimo formation, Coremo.
Anxious to exploit gaps in international politics, regardless of any ideological consistency, the PAC also sought support from the Peoples Republic of China. This was at the time of heightened Sino-Soviet tensions. Having presented itself as an anti- communist formation in the US, in the PRC they did their best to sing another tune. But, as Tom Lodge notes:
"The expedient character of the PAC 's new pro-Chinese sentiment was confirmed by a rebuke from Nyaose in Dar es Salaam to Leballo in Maseru [this was shortly before his safe passage out of Basutoland] Wherefore your articles attacking communism? ... [you are] prejudicing our support at certain quarters. " (Black Politics in SA, p.310)
The China connection was, however, later to have some ideological influence on parts of the PAC. With the receipt of funding from this quarter, some in the PAC began to adopt, rather mechanically, a "Maoist" outlook on guerrilla struggle in South Africa. Just how mechanical this Maoism was is illustrated by a 1972 PAC publication (Principles of United Front in a People's War), which called for a rural struggle in South Africa aimed first of all at abolishing "feudal relations in the countryside"! (p. 17)
As Lodge aptly notes:
"The PAC 's previous hostility to foreign ideologies made it especially ill-equipped intellectually to respond to the fresh challenges of a foreign environment. Casting around for new sources of support and inspiration, its leaders oscillated wildly between different international political camps. In place of any analysis and discussion there was substituted a sterile and externally derived dogmatism..." (p.3 13)
Exile is not an easy reality for any political movement, but for the PAC, its exile period was a disaster. Its opportunistic alliances with pro-US forces in Mozambique and Angola backfired when Frelimo and MPLA emerged as the dominant progressive forces in their countries. China, having burnt its fingers badly in Angola in the 1970s, lost interest in southern Africa, and the PAC lost another source of funding.
The PAC leadership in exile quickly fragmented into different cliques, often based on individuals' access to different donors. Rank-and-file PAC soldiers were deeply disillusioned, as they were shunted back and forth between different countries, and as the movement failed to deploy them back into South Africa. PAC leaders had a particularly bad track-record of not living with their soldiers, and few of the PAC's leadership in exile ever undertook any military training themselves. Nana Mahomo, with his US contacts, linked up with Holden Roberto's FNLA, based in the Congo. PAC recruits were accommodated at the FNLA's Kinkuzu camp, and Mahomo was reported to be in charge of the Kinkuzu office in December 1963. But by January of 1964 he was back in London.
No wonder that the years of PAC exile were to be a litany of sectarian battles, expulsions and counter-expulsions, and high levels of leadership corruption. Of the original 1958 14-person executive committee, at least eight went into exile in the 1960s. By 1976, of these eight, no fewer than six had been expelled from the organisation - Nana Mahomo, Peter Raboroko, Peter Molotsi, Jacob Nyaose, ZB Molete and Abednego Ngcobo were all ousted as a result of conflicts with the acting president, Potlako Leballo. Other prominent leadership figures expelled in this period were Matthew Nkoana and Tsepo Letlaka. In 1979, Leballo's successor, David Sibeko was shot dead in Dar es Salaam by disgruntled PAC elements.
This sorry tale of internecine struggles, posturing and corruption, and a general failure to mount any effective political or military activity within South Africa extended through the 1970s and 80s. There were always international forces, however, desirous of sustaining the myth of an alternative liberation movement to the ANC. As a result, the PAC was able to maintain a marginal presence in some key international forums - but very little else. This was the PAC that was to be confronted, in 1990, with rapid changes in the political situation within South Africa.
Negotiations
Lacking any experience of practical politics, and motivated by its persistent opposition to the ANC, the PAC predictably positioned itself disastrously within the negotiation process in our country.
By the late 1980s, the ANC understood very clearly that the shifting balance of forces in our region, the Cuito Cuanavale victory in Angola, the independence of Namibia, but also the weakening of the Soviet bloc and the massive destabilisation of the front-line states, were paving the way for a possible negotiations process in South Africa itself. Understanding this, the ANC realised how important it was for our movement to set the strategic agenda of such negotiations, as much as possible.
This process was led by ANC President OR Tambo, who used the example of Zimbabwe in which the liberation movements (ZANU and ZAPU) had found themselves ill-prepared for the Lancaster House negotiations in Britain, which had led to the settlement and elections in Zimbabwe. Comrade Tambo argued that, in our case, we needed, before the negotiations began, to build a clear ANC position on negotiations, and then build, what he called, "an inverted pyramid" of support behind this position. The apex of the pyramid was to be the ANC position, behind it would be the movement, the mass democratic forces within our country, the front-line states, the OAU and, as much as possible, the international community.
One early result of this strategic approach was the OAU Harare Declaration of 1989 - which mapped out the broad outlines of an acceptable negotiated transition. The Harare Declaration proved to be far-sighted, it laid out the strategic framework for the entire negotiated transition that followed. It prevented the apartheid regime's own alternative negotiating strategies from ever gaining ascendancy.
What was the PAC's approach to all of this?
In the months after the Harare Declaration, PAC president, Zeph Mothopeng said:
"Our liberation, the liberation of the African worker, cannot be negotiated, it will be attained. You cannot go to a negotiation table for your liberation. When you go to the negotiating table you must already have won your liberation." (Sowetan, 20 November 1989).
The PAC's abiding inability to understand real politics, as opposed to rhetorical politics, is clearly captured in this empty sloganeering. If you have already won liberation and smashed your opponent, why even bother to go to a negotiating table? Early in 1990, Benny Alexander, PAC secretary general, expressed the same rejectionist view of negotiations:
"there is no way negotiation can be regarded as a panacea for all our social malaise. Therefore it is bound to fail. " (Indicator SA, vol.7, no.3)
Politics is the pursuit of the panacea (the complete solution to everything), anything short of everything is a "sell-out".
But, true to form, the PAC was all over the place. The very same Benny Alexander insisted, more or less at the same time, that:
"We have never said we are against negotiations. We have put our positions, but because it is assumed by the media that these are now easily agreeable by the government, the journalists therefore say we are against negotiations. " (Work in Progress, January, 1990)
Realising that it might be side-lined, and under pressure from other African countries who still provided it some financial support the PAC convened a consultative conference in Harare in March l990, and revised its line on negotiations. It moved towards a "conditional acceptance" of negotiations. The PAC wrote a letter to the OAU, outlining its new position (see Front File, April 1990).
In general, the letter accepted the positions of the ANC-sponsored OAU (the Harare) and UN Declarations on negotiations. But, once more, it showed itself utterly incapable of grasping a real political process. Unlike the ANC, the PAC did not seem to understand the difference between a climate for negotiations, specific pre-conditions and the actual agenda. The PAC letter declared that the return of the land and one-person one-vote constituted for the PAC "our climate, our pre-conditions, our agenda, our everything." Once more, we have the politics of everything all at once, or nothing at all.
Deeply insecure (and with good reason) of its support within our country, the PAC demanded a "neutral venue" outside of South Africa for the negotiations. The ANC, for its part, was absolutely committed to a South African negotiations process, free of outside interference.
Despite the continued zig-zags of the PAC, the ANC did everything to draw the PAC into the negotiations process. In October 1991 the PAC joined the ANC and other organisations in a Patriotic Front conference in Durban. This meeting adopted a set of objectives which were seen as a negotiation position which laid the basis for talks. The PAC endorsed these resolutions, and joined preparatory meetings with the apartheid government to discuss all-party negotiations. But on 29 November the PAC suddenly withdrew from the preparatory meetings because its "neutral venue" demand was not agreed upon.
Over the next two years, the PAC continued to zig-zag on negotiations in this way. In the end it entered the Multi-Party Negotiations very late in the day, and failed to make any significant strategic input whatsoever.
But that is, precisely, the vocation of a flat spare-tyre. While it lies in the boot, leaking stale air, it is happy to go for the ride. While indulging in ongoing criticism of the negotiations, and constantly accusing the ANC and its allies of "selling out", the PAC was very happy to benefit from the results of our engagement. It even boasted of this:
"The PAC maintains... that discussions between the ANC and the government on the removal of obstacles to negotiations did not marginalise it: on the contrary, it was strengthened since its political prisoners were released without any negotiation and its exiles returned without having to fill in 'dehumanising' indemnity forms. ..; nor, notes [Benny] Alexander, did it have to suspend the 'armed struggle ' to secure these gains. He claims that this was anticipated by PAC strategy. " (Johannes Rantete, "Liberation and Negotiation: The PAC in the South African Transition", CPS Transition series, vol.5, no.2, August 1992).
The great majority of South African voters were not taken in by this free-riding opportunism. Before the April 1994 elections, the PAC had boasted that it would turn the tables on the ANC (as ZANU had done to ZAPU in the first Zimbabwean democratic elections). In the end, the PAC obtained a dismal 1% of the vote.
"It's been awful, absolutely awful" - the PAC Track Record
We have been forthright in our criticism of the PAC - but then those in the PAC have often not been any less harsh about their own organisation. In June 1990, for instance, the PAC issued an economic policy document with the long-winded title - The Economic Policy of the PAC: an exploratory, diagnostic and contingency exposition. The document notes how the PAC "excelled in squandering revolutionary opportunities". It argues that reliance on international publicity campaigns and exiled leaders had stunted the emergence of leadership inside the country, which "has always been made to depend on ratification or blessing by and of the leadership in the external missions."
This is a very accurate description of 30 years of PAC exile, and the honesty is to be welcomed. Typically, however, this honest self-criticism is never carried through into a coherent political programme of action. Having noted the propensity to squander opportunities, the document itself then goes on to reject the negotiations process.
Over the course of the 1990s, it has been customary every few months for leading PAC officials and ordinary members to acknowledge the dismal failings of their organisation. Ben Bunsee, who styles himself as the "PAC's parliamentary adviser", recently wrote of "decades of leadership mismanagement" in the organisation. He calls on his own organisation not to "behave like a loose cannon as has been its wont" (Weekly Mail & Guardian, October 18, 1996).
Reviewing the PAC's performance as a parliamentary opposition force in May 1997, the newly elected secretary general, Ngila Muendane said: "It's been awful, absolutely awful. I would give it three out of 10 until the end of last year when we had our conference. Now I would give it between five and eight out of 10." (Weekly Mail & Guardian, "Weighing up a weak opposition", May 23, 1997).
Despite Muendane's claims of a brave new beginning, by the end of 1997 it was the same story all over again. Reviewing the PAC's performance in parliament over 1997, PAC chief whip, Patricia de Lille told her party's annual conference that it had "not been up to standard". "It is no exaggeration, nor an attempt to blame people, to say the PAC did not live up to expectations. We received little or no organisational support, either morally, practically, or materially (from PAC branches)." (The Star, "PAC admits to poor performance in Parliament this year", December 12, 1997)
Recycling leaders
The problems of the organisation are often ascribed to poor leadership, and the PAC has certainly not been blessed with the most inspiring of leaders. As a result there is a constant hunt for new leaders. Most of the "new" leaders turn out to be recycled old leaders. The crisis of PAC leadership has been compounded by the departure of much of its younger leadership - secretary general, Benny Alexander (aka !Khoisan X) stepped down in 1994 as secretary general, and then left politics entirely in 1997. His replacement as secretary general, the articulate Maxwell Nemadzivhanani, lasted a few years, then also quit active party politics. Other bright and relatively young PAC leaders, like Dikgang Moseneke, former PAC deputy president, have also seemingly lost patience with the organisation, and found meaningful careers in other places.
As a result of this attrition, and especially as a result of deep dissatisfaction with the uninspiring leadership of its president Clarence Makwetu, the PAC's December 1996 Thohoyandou national conference saw the election of a "new" leadership.
But on closer inspection the "new" leadership turns out to be retreads. The new president, Dr Stanley Mogoba, was plucked out of political retirement in the Methodist Church. Mogoba clearly has skills and experience that have been sorely lacking in the PAC. But there are also some serious shadows surrounding Mogoba's past. Sentenced to imprisonment on Robben Island in the 1960s, he was released in a matter of years in circumstances that are not entirely clear. More seriously, in 1988 Mogoba appeared as a state witness against APLA commander Enoch Zulu. Mogoba has said that the evidence he gave was information the police already knew, and that he cleared the matter with the PAC leadership before appearing in court. Zulu himself, after at first corroborating this story, later adamantly denied its veracity. Zulu now insists that there was no PAC leadership clearance for Mogoba to give evidence.
Zulu's views might very well be part of internal PAC factionalism - Zulu is close to the ousted Makwetu grouping. But there are still other unresolved issues. While the police may have known that Mogoba sheltered Zulu, the fact that he was prepared to testify to this in an apartheid court meant that, judicially, Zulu could be located in a particular part of the country at a particular time, and thus linked to certain APLA activities.
At the public level, the most unsatisfactory twist to this story is Mogoba's bizarre explanation that: "The police kept on embarrassing me by saying, you know the truth, you don't want to tell the truth and yet you are a minister." (Weekly Mail & Guardian, October 17, 1997). Did Mogoba really feel embarrassment? Did he really feel some "moral obligation" to tell the truth to the apartheid security police? This strange explanation raises more questions than it answers.
The "new" secretary general, Ngila Mike Muendane, and his "new" deputy, Ike Mafole, also turn out to be re-treads. Both, in fact, were expelled from the PAC in the 1980s.
Muendane, who was presented to the media at the time of his 1996 election, as a "prominent businessman", was brought into the leadership of the organisation partly to rectify its disastrous financial situation. The December 1996 Conference heard that the PAC had lost millions of rands from its coffers, and that daily monitoring of all cash-flows was "non-existent". The Conference voted to turn the matter over to the police, who delegates felt would be better able to carry- out a thorough investigation.
Four months after his election, Muendane admitted that the police had still not been called in to investigate the matter. He said that the PAC "had independent auditors working on the case", but he was reported to be "unsure of their name" (Weekly Mail & Guardian, April 11, 1997)
The "new" national organiser, Philip Kgosana, is another political retiree, plucked out of the past. As a 21-year old he had been thrust into the leadership of the PAC's Cape Town march in 1960: Soon after that he disappeared into exile. There, he seems to have focussed largely on pursuing his own academic studies, and later he worked for two UN agencies He was out of the country for over three decades, and, surprisingly for someone now elected as a national organiser, he only bothered to return to South Africa late in 1996, nearly seven years after the PAC had been unbanned.
The only member of the previous Makwetu leadership to retain his position at the 1996 Conference was deputy president, Dr Motsoko Pheko. He is an eccentric and dour intellectual, with a strong, if conservative, Africanist bent. Dr Pheko is best remembered in recent times for his statement, at the time of the tragedy, that "Princess Diana's death reflects the British royalty's lack of family values." The PAC apologised publicly for this remark by its deputy president the following day (Mail & Guardian, September 5, 1997).
A problem of leaders? Or a more deep-seated problem?
Calibre and experience (or their absence) in a political leadership can make an important difference. But all of these desperate attempts to find a "new" leadership, and to recycle old faces, miss the real dilemma of the PAC. That dilemma lies in what the PAC stands for in the first place. "If the ANC fails to deliver there has to be a choice", Kgosana was recently quoted (M&G, December 20, 1996), harping on the age-old dream of the PAC.
The PAC's mission in life is to be a rival to the ANC, an alternative, a spare-tyre. But mere rivalry is never going to be the basis for building an effective organisation around a strategic perspective and a dynamic programme of action. Wanting to be somehow different from the ANC is not the basis for developing and nurturing an effective leadership cadre. The spare-tyre mentality results in a politics of opportunism, and in leadership bankruptcy.
At different times, and often at the same time, the PAC has presented itself as both to the "right" and to the "left" of the ANC; as more pro-west, and as much further in the east; as anti-communist and as Maoist. It claims the ANC is conservative, because of its "overweening concern for reconciliation", and then it upholds conservative traditionalist perspectives - as when it voted in 1994 with the IFP, ACDP and NP in the KwaZulu/Natal legislature for a House of Traditional Leaders.
Sometimes this politics of opportunism is little more than self-differentiation by rhetoric, the changing of signs. Unlike Rhodesia, for instance, the name South Africa is hardly a colonial name, but in its frenzied search to brand itself different, the PAC baptised our country "Azania".
The PAC failed for nearly 30 years to wage an armed struggle. But when in the interests of moving the negotiations forward, the ANC declared a suspension of its armed struggle, the PAC announced an "intensification" of its armed struggle. As Joe Slovo remarked wittily at the time, the PAC had just declared a suspension on its three decades-long suspended armed struggle.
Some of this is amusing, but the politics of rhetoric, of spontaneism and opportunism has also laid the PAC wide open to very serious levels of infiltration. No organisation, including the ANC itself, has been entirely immune to infiltration. But the levels of third force infiltration into the PAC have been extraordinarily high. The full story behind much of the "APLA" violence in the first half of the 1990s is only now beginning to emerge.
Above all else, the spare-tyre mentality of the PAC is at the root of its inability to sustain any consistent effort within a broad front. This has been a longstanding irritant for the ANC and other formations wanting to ensure a broad patriotic front in the face of huge challenges The ANC has long traditions of working in alliances and broad fronts with a range of organisations. Where there are clear lines of both convergence and demarcation - in regard to a constituency (as between the different components of the Congress Alliance in the 1950s, for instance), or in regard to ideological perspectives (as in the case of our 70-year alliance with the Communist Party) or in a sectoral focus (as in our alliance with COSATU) - we have been able to work together. This working together does not mean that there are not disagreements, but disagreements do not have to threaten unity in action around common strategic goals.
Whenever we have tried to work with the PAC, however, there has been a different experience. In the early 1960s in exile, or around the negotiations in 1991, or in terms of serving in the government of national unity, we have found that the PAC is unable to sustain any participation in a common effort. Because it lacks a coherent perspective of its own, because it does not have a real constituency, it quickly becomes paranoid about losing its identity. Each attempt from our side to seek cooperation has seen the same pattern, a brief flirtation from the PAC, followed by a sudden break-away, often on the flimsiest of grounds.
Since 1958 the PAC has dreamt of being the alternative to the ANC. From its beginnings it has failed, however, to give any meaningful content to what makes it an alternative. Nearly forty years later, the PAC is still rattling away in the boot of South African history. It is the rattling of a flat spare-tyre.
* Booklet produced and issued by the ANC Department of Information and Publicity, July 1998.