By Mkhuseli Jack and Janet Cherry
It is tempting to idealize the days of struggle, and to remember uncritically our heroes and our organizations; to present MK, for example, as the 'glorious peoples' army' and to forget the frustrations endured and the mistakes made. Similarly, it is tempting to remember the UDF as a militant, mass-based front of organizations which made a decisive contribution to the ending of apartheid and the creation of a democratic society. The moments of terror and intolerance are easily forgotten. And yet, perhaps it is time for us to reflect critically - on this twentieth anniversary of the founding of the UDF - on the lessons we learnt through our experience of organization in the 1980s.
The African townships of the Eastern Cape had already built something of a tradition of close-knit, mass-based structures by the time the UDF was formed in 1983. Some argue that this tradition went back to the late 1950's, early 1960 period, when the 'M-Plan' was implemented in New Brighton to ensure that the ANC survived the banning of public meetings. Others point to the importance of such street-level structures in enabling the ANC to survive after its banning in1960, and during the time of the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe and the first sabotage campaigns, in the 1961-3 period.
However, as with most other parts of the country, by the mid-1970s the apartheid state had succeeded in crushing effective organization and resistance to its rule. The 1976-7 uprising, which involved extensive rebellion and repression in the Eastern Cape, did not leave much of a legacy of tight-knit organization or of democratic participation. It was the late 1970s which saw the emergence of a new style of civic organization in the form of PEBCO, followed in the early 1980s by the emergence of militant and strongly organized youth and student organizations. It was these organizations that were to make up the core of the UDF in the region; and as the UDF grew, so the organizational network expanded until nearly every African community in every small rural town in the Eastern Cape was brought into the resistance movement.
While the UDF was formed as a broad front against the Tricameral Parliament, it really achieved resonance in the Eastern Cape and in African townships in Gauteng when its affiliates took up the campaign against the Black Local Authorities. These powerless institutions were meant to share the burden of administering the black townships, financing themselves through collecting rents, and struggling to deliver services to communities which had been systematically deprived of facilities for decades. Unsurprisingly, the councilors who took up positions in these BLAs became the targets of intense anger from local residents; campaigns against rent hikes or poor housing spilt over into anger against those individuals who were perceived as assisting in the administration of apartheid. As the Black Local Authorities came under pressure, they began to employ increasingly brutal municipal police to maintain their position; even so, community pressure led to the resignation of many councils and the de facto collapse of this system of local government. The employment of the consumer boycott strategy placed enormous pressure on local white-owned businessmen, and led in the case of Port Elizabeth to the head of the Chamber of Commerce taking a remarkably progressive stand in intervening to obtain the release of the leadership so that negotiations could proceed. The situation in the townships deteriorated as thousands of militant youth vented their anger against councilors, policemen, municipal infrastructure, bottlestores, schools and almost all symbols of authority. The ANC astutely assessed the situation and incorporated this collapse into its overall revolutionary strategy of 'protracted peoples war': calling on the militant youth to 'render the country ungovernable and apartheid unworkable', they began to offer military training to select groups of youth.
Where was the UDF while all this was going on? Accused by the security forces as being the 'internal wing of the ANC', the leadership of the UDF and its affiliates became targets of extreme repression. The better organized the UDF was, the more dangerous it was, and the worse the repression. Thus in mid-1985, when the first, partial State of Emergency was declared, the key leaders of UDF affiliates in the Eastern Cape were detained and brutally tortured until the 'Wendy Orr interdict' posed -for a while- some limitations on security police activity. Key leaders of the UDF - notably Matthew Goniwe, the regional organiser - and its affiliates were assassinated by the security forces.
The UDF really did have a 'double agenda' - on the one hand it was, of course, part of a broader ANC-led strategy of national liberation, with key leadership being closely linked to the ANC underground. On the other hand, it was concerned with a genuinely democratic project of building popular organisations, giving ordinary people a voice, and enabling participation by hundreds of thousands of people in townships around the country in political action. Sometimes this action was around very local issues and grievances; sometimes it was linked to national programmes of action. Very often, it involved the establishment of 'grassroots' structures such as street and area committees, which enabled ordinary people to exercise at least some measure of control over decision-making which affected their lives.
This process was particularly successful in many of the townships of the Eastern Cape, where despite the high levels of violence and repression, many residents - including middle-aged and elderly residents - saw these structures as playing a positive role in their lives, in regulating petty crime and anti-social behaviour, facilitating development initiatives (such as the electrification of Kwazakele), and allowing participation in decisions over events such as consumer boycotts.
In addition to this experiment in popular democracy, there is no doubt that the UDF made a significant contribution to the creation of a culture of non-racialism, and the building of a national democratic project. Even though few white democrats participated in the liberation struggle in the Eastern Cape, the UDF created a broad front which welcomed contributions from all sectors - thus sportspeople, church leaders, war resisters and human rights activists were all welcomed into the fold, and the language of tolerance, inclusivity and unity came to predominate over narrow sectarian interests or groups defined by race or ethnicity.
Research conducted some years after the decline of the UDF revealed that many township residents in the Eastern Cape saw this period as one which empowered them and gave them a positive experience of democratic participation. In some cases, efforts were made to transform this experience into participation in the transition and post-transition phases of the 1990s.
However, by the time of the 1998 elections it became clear that there was a real sense of disillusionment with the 'normalisation' of politics: people 'on the ground' feel that the government - whether at local, provincial or national level - had become increasingly remote, inaccessible, and unresponsive to their needs. The decline of local civic organisations has gone hand-in-hand with the decline in participation in ANC branches.
A real challenge faces the ANC now in trying to recapture something of this culture of democratic participation - not only to hold public officials and political office-bearers to account, but also to ensure that people do not relate to government simply as a delivery-mechanism. This involves, of course, a notion of 'strong democracy' - in which a strong state relates in a positive way to a strong civil society; and in which citizens are able to relate to government as active participants, rather than just as passive recipients of policy.
[Contents]