(published by David Philip, Cape Town, 2000) by Jeremy Seekings
Reviewed by Jeremy Cronin
Conservative forces are tireless in their effort to expropriate the labour and even the aspirations of the poor. If you're not careful, they will mess with your own memory. Over the past decade, there has been a concerted effort from our local neo-conservatives to prevent millions of South Africans taking possession of their own immediate past. Pundits, like the Institute of Race Relations' John Kane-Berman, or the journalist RW Johnson, find it immensely threatening that ordinary people might build confidence in their ability to struggle successfully, to change history.
And so, week after week, MK's history is reduced to Quatro detention camp; the important role of self defence units, in the midst of a bitter apartheid-launched low intensity conflict strategy in the early 1990s, is reduced to a story of "indiscipline"; and the whole of the 1980s is supposed to be summed up in the slogan, "No education before liberation". (A slogan that - just to remind you, in case your memory HAS been messed with -was roundly condemned by both the ANC and the UDF at the time).
History, our own immediate history, is contested.
It's in this context that Jeremy Seekings' substantive, scholarly, sympathetic but not uncritical history of the United Democratic Front should be warmly acclaimed. Writing a history of the UDF, as Seekings is well aware, presents challenges. Contemporary history has the advantage of providing many first-hand sources, but these can also be overwhelming, and over-sensitive.
Then there is the character of the UDF itself. As Seekings writes: "This book provides a critical history of the UDF during the tumultuous years between 1983 and 1991. But what was `it', this UDF? Was it an organisation or a movement? What kind of organisation, or what kind of movement, was it?
What was it a front for or of?"
As he goes on to demonstrate, there are no simple answers. The UDF was launched in August 1983 essentially as a front of community and sectoral social movements to oppose the apartheid regime's attempt to co-opt the Coloured and Indian communities into a tricameral parliamentary dispensation. Initially, the UDF was meant to be little more than the sum of its affiliated parts. But the vacuum of above-board, nation-wide resistance politics in the still repressive early 1980s, quickly propelled the UDF into becoming more than this.
It was, however, always an uneven process. From the very beginning, it was an open secret that the UDF was ANC-aligned. It was a front of affiliates, but it was also a legal and more or less self-conscious front for the banned ANC, standing in, but without claiming to substitute for it. However, not all ANC-supporting structures inside our country joined the UDF, or initially accepted it as a national co-ordinating structure of Charterist forces. This was partly related to the initial campaigning focus of the UDF. While the UDF always acknowledged African -leadership of our struggle, defeating the apartheid regime's tricameral initiative required significant emphasis on the Coloured and Indian communities. Naturally, enough, the UDF also saw this campaign as a contest not just for the radicals in these communities, but for the "middle-ground", and UDF media and statements in the first year were often tailored to the task. This tactical focus was not particularly in synch with the mood of a generation of militant African youth in townships, or with an increasingly socialist-influenced trade union movement.
Following the overwhelming boycott of the 1994 tricameral elections, the UDF's prestige and standing were enhanced. But, mission number one accomplished, its own direction forward now became uncertain. In subsequent interviews by the author with many UDF leadership figures, they readily concede that there were some months of drifting at this point.
Then a new wave of popular struggle, beginning in the Vaal in September 1994, provided fresh challenges. This new popular upsurge began, as it happens, in townships in which the UDF was not, initially, particularly influential. "The UDF's own leadership was taken by surprise by the initial revolt...as its own leaders acknowledged in internal documents, the UDF was at the margins of the revolt. Indeed, the sites of the initial revolt were areas with particularly weak direct links to the UDF: Tumahole, Atteridgeville, the East Rand, the Vaal Triangle, Cradock."
Among the most valuable sections in this book is the chapter dealing with the UDF's eventual response to these township uprisings. It was often local issues - rents, despised councillors, education crises - that detonated these township uprisings. The UDF was not, particularly, an initiator. However, from mid-1985, it was the UDF (backed by the ANC's Radio Freedom) that began to provide an overall strategic and organisational approach to the uprising, by advancing and popularising the perspective of building "people's power". The objective of the struggle was not just ungovernability for its own sake. Making communities ungovernable, created the necessary, semi-liberated space to begin to build alternative power. Matthew Goniwe's work in building street committees in Cradock, or the formation of peoples courts in many places, or the beginning of "people's education" in schools, or the taking up of civic activities like rubbish removal, soup kitchens, and the opening up of "people's parks" were all cited as examples of the forging of local-level popular power.
"Neither the UDF nor the ANC could claim the credit for the formation of street committees and other manifestations of people's power", Seekings writes. "These were primarily a response to conditions on the ground, shaped by deep-rooted traditions of localised self-government and self-help. But the UDF and ANC played a central role in formulating an organisational strategy of people's power, both at a conceptual level and in terms of co-ordination and networking. The UDF provided organisational and conceptual links between disparate localised struggles and the overall struggle for national political change, and thereby greatly boosted local-level development."
All of this is, in my view, an appropriate and accurate assessment. In calling for the building of people's power from the bottom up, the UDF leadership were well aware that they were re-kindling the traditions of popular participation that had been the hall-mark of the Congress of People campaign. (1985 was, of course, the 30th anniversary year of the Freedom Charter.) They were also giving concrete and contemporary meaning to what had seemed like a remote, abstract aspiration: "The People Shall Govern".
Seekings quotes from the theoretical journal of the UDF, Isizwe:
"It is true that the fullest consolidation of people's power is still in the future. It is true that control over central state power is the key to many things...Nevertheless, the building of people's power is something that is already beginning to happen in the course of our struggle. It is not for us to sit back and merely dream of the day that the people shall govern. It is our task to realise that goal now."
Seekings is generous in his praise of this shift in the UDF's strategic thinking. "A discourse of power had conclusively replaced discourses of rights within the UDF. The brilliance of the discourse was that it combined an emphasis on power with a fundamental concern with organisation building. By mid-1986 people's power had taken on an appealing coherence, rescuing both the ANC and UDF from the dilemmas of uncontrolled insurrectionism."
This is fulsome praise. But is there a note of instrumentalism, of pragmatism in the author's approval of this strategic shift? Was the idea of people's power just a smart "discourse" move? Was its principal merit the fact that it "rescued" the UDF and the ANC from a "dilemma"? Or did it describe a real, transformational process? I'll come back to this in a moment.
There is much else that is important and fascinating in the book. For instance, it is helpful to be reminded of some of the demographic and social realities that underpinned the growth of the UDF. Seekings emphasises the rapid urbanisation that had occurred in the preceding decades. "The South Africa of the 1980s was very different from the South Africa of the 1940s or 1950s" - the urban African population was 2,2 million in 1951; 4,4 million in 1970; and 5,6 million in 1980. Most of the UDF's leadership and activist base were drawn from a stratum that was township born-and-bred, unlike their parents who were typically transitional, a generation that had moved in from rural areas. The UDF generation had also experienced a massive expansion in primary and later secondary education.
"In greater Soweto, for example, there were just eight secondary schools up to 1972; by 1976 there were twenty secondary schools, with three times as many students as in 1972. By the end of 1984 there were fifty-five secondary schools."
Or consider comparative statistics for tertiary education:
"In 1960 there were fewer than 800 African students at universities (excluding Unisa...). By 1983 there were about 20,000 African students at universities, with a further 12,700 enrolled in Unisa. Most of this expansion occurred during the 1970s."
Of course, no single book is going to be able to do justice to such a broad and complex theme. Seekings is well aware that there is much more to be told. He has focused on the UDF itself, rather than on its affiliates. Accordingly, his primary sources, a significant number of interviews, are largely former UDF head-office and regional leadership personalities. This is a deliberate choice, and it is fair enough, but, as Seekings is quick to acknowledge, it has its own limitations.
In August 1991, a year and a half after the ANC's unbanning, and with virtually all of the UDF's leading cadre absorbed in various ways into the ANC and its allied structures, the UDF was formally disbanded. But what was the UDF's contribution to the new South Africa? Seekings is generous and, I think, generally fair in his estimation of this. "The lasting impact of the UDF was not confined to the ANC alone. The whole character of the overall post-apartheid political system reflects, in some respects, the influences of the UDF. The legacy of the UDF can be seen in the character of South African democracy, the contours of political society and the chequered emergence of civil society."
However, I think that Seekings, for whatever reason, falls short of his own earlier insights into the key 1985-6 "people's power" period. Perhaps this has something to do with one of the organising paradigms of the book - a tendency to contrast a "discourse of rights", with a "discourse of power". The ANC, and less consistently the UDF, affirmed correctly in the decades before 1994, that our's was a national liberation and not a civil rights struggle. In other words, our struggle was not taking place in an essentially democratic dispensation. Our democratic struggle was, therefore, not for inclusion within the existing order. But this was NOT a "discourse" of power as opposed to a "discourse" of rights. In order to establish democratic rights (of the kind envisaged in the Freedom Charter), we had to transform (revolutionise) power, and not merely transfer (or extend) existing rights. In short, our position involved BOTH a "discourse" of power and a "discourse" of rights, each was the condition for the other.
I am not making an academic point. I think that the struggle to give real content to rights, and the struggle to transform power are deeply interrelated in our present reality. Seekings celebrates the UDF's strategic popularisation of grass-roots-up people's power, but somehow does not recognise the reality and its subsequent legacy in our struggle. In his concluding chapter, he more or less asserts that with the unbanning of the ANC, the negotiations process, and the 1994 electoral victory, people's power was written out of the script.
"The ANC's change of perspective from 1993 is not difficult to understand, whether or not we agree with it. What is harder to understand is the ANC's failure to utilise the strategies and tactics of the 1980s in the transitional period of 1990s-3, when it might have chosen to maintain the pressure on the National Party government."
To be sure, there were varying emphases and important debates within the ANC and its alliance during this period, including around the relevance and character of mass mobilisation. But, especially at critical moments (in the immediate aftermath of comrade Chris Hani's assassination for instance), the negotiations process and the shifting of the balance of power, were decisively influenced by the irruption of popular power.
To be sure, the ANC's overwhelming electoral victory in 1994, and again in 1999, established a new political power configuration, new possibilities, new responsibilities and, no doubt, new confusions. But again, to consign the legacy of "popular power" to a past decade, is quite wrong. These traditions live on, not just as memory, but as essential strategic approaches for any advance, consolidation and defence of our 1994 democratic breakthrough. The UDF tradition (and it's not just a UDF tradition) lives on in community policing forums, in school governing bodies, in the masakhane and letsema campaigns, in ward committees, in government-community izimbizo, and in a burgeoning co-operative movement.
But these are topics for other books. I hope that the 1990s, and our present, are gifted with research as helpful and as competent as Seekings' account of the UDF years.
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