By Revd Frank Chikane
[Former Vice President of the United Democratic Front (UDF), former General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and currently a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the African National Congress (ANC)].
The launch of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in August 1983 came as a direct result of a strategic decision by the liberation movement to intensify the levels of mass resistance inside the country. This was one pillar of a four-prong strategy to finally bring the apartheid regime to its knees, the other pillars being the armed struggle, and sanctions and the mobilization of the international community against the apartheid regime, and the development of the internal political underground.
As the armed struggle was escalated and the international campaign to isolate the regime gathered steam, the need for greater internal resistance became more and more urgent, although any link between the UDF and the ANC had to be publicly denied for security reasons.
The immediate objectives of the UDF were to pressurize the apartheid regime to release the leadership of the people from prison, to unban liberation movements and people's organizations, allow South African exiles to return home, and to start meaningful negotiations to establish a free, non-racial, non-sexist democratic society.
The genesis of the UDF was a call by the ANC in exile (O.R. Tambo) for all South Africans to form a united front to resist the regime which was becoming more repressive and brutal by the day in the run-up to the implementation of a new bogus Tri-cameral Parliament under a new South African constitution. In 1982, cadres of the movement within the country held quiet discussions and made secret preparations. In January 1983 the internal movement made the public call for the formation of a united democratic front to resist the new 1983 apartheid constitution.
Yet the story goes back a little further. While the second wave of bannings of people's organizations in 1977 forced many activists to go underground, it also created new conditions for the development and growth of many grassroots organizations and community groups. The early 1980's also saw the growth of the labour movement, which together with community groups ultimately formed the base of the UDF when it was formed. While women, youth and students organizations formed the larger part of the front, the UDF was positioned so that many professional, religious and business organizations would also feel comfortable within a 'broad family' united around specific aims.
The strategy of the "broad united front" was adopted because of its potential to unite the overwhelming majority of South Africans around the common objective of eliminating the apartheid system, whilst the membership of professional organizations, business associations and religious groupings, afforded the Front a certain level of security for activists to carry out their responsibilities.
After the launch, the UDF grew by leaps and bounds, with community and developmental organizations from far and near heeding the call to unite against the repressive machinery of the apartheid system. Many braved arrests, torture and even death as they joined together to advance the course of liberation. To this day I am amazed at how groups just appeared in UDF T-Shirts to claim membership of the UDF. When questioned, they simply replied that they were responding to the call by OR Tambo or the leadership in the country. Of course this posed a security risk, but this risk was unavoidable in a mass-based organization under the conditions of the day.
At the same time, the exponential growth of the UDF meant that by 1984 the seemingly invincible security police could not effectively monitor activities of the UDF any longer. At its height the vast membership of the UDF meant that meetings were being held every hour of every day throughout the country. Monitoring all these meetings was simply impossible for the security apparatus. This much was pathetically evident in our Treason Trial in Pietermaritzburg in 1985 where the prosecution relied solely on video and tape recordings of meetings rather than intelligence for their evidence. Thus their accusation that twelve of the sixteen UDF trialists were part of the ANC underground could not be substantiated. In the end, the State could simply not make the charges stick and the case collapsed, with all of us walking free!
Brutal repression gave impetus to the establishment of proper operational mechanisms for the organization. The so-called "M Plan" - originally devised by Mandela in the 1940s - took on a new meaning with the creation of street and block committees in townships and suburbs across the country. In many ways this system represents the best expression of participatory democracy and served as the most effective communications mechanism at the time when the repressive machinery of the regime was at its worst.
As the state became more repressive, the churches became a place of refuge for the movement, offering facilities for meetings, places for hiding and care services for the displaced. At other times the church made available secret locations for those who were being hunted by the security police. When the publication of detentions and the naming of detainees were criminalized, the churches used moments of prayer to announce the names of detainees and those who had disappeared. And when calling protest marches was criminalized, the religious sector organized marches at which the leadership of the people were protected by the multitudes surrounding them.
The implementation of the 1983 constitution, designed to consolidate the apartheid system, and imposed against the will of the people in 1984, forced the UDF to move beyond just protest. The masses were mobilized to resist being governed by a regime based on a constitution they had rejected. The black townships terminated their relationship with the local government administrations and all institutions of the state, including Police Stations. They stopped paying rentals and service charges (water, refuse removal and electricity) to the local administrations. Those who had housing bonds with the Black Administration Boards stopped paying their monthly installments. This action spilled over to bonds held with private banks. To some extend, people also stopped paying other national taxes. A rousing slogan at the time was: "no cooperation with the oppressor" reflecting a determination to refuse to be governed by an illegitimate regime.
As the notion of 'ungovernability' took root and the regime lost control of the townships, cadres of the movement worked hard at creating alternative centres of power which further undermined the authority of the regime. Street and block committees and other people's structures like defence committees and 'people's courts' began to assume the roles of an alternative authority to the regime. To a large extent it was these actions which finally proved to the regime the futility of defending apartheid and forced it to the negotiating table.
Looking back, the UDF taught all of us very profound lessons in leadership. In the first instance, the leadership of the UDF always saw themselves as the interim leaders of the movement in the context of the banning of the peoples' organizations and the imprisonment of our leaders. We saw ourselves very much as "holding the fort" for the leadership in jail or in exile. Within the UDF, leaders were collectively deployed to serve in leadership capacities. At the same time, UDF leadership was a consultative process. Extensive consultative meetings were held with those who were not in formal structures before formal leadership meetings were held and decisions were taken on the basis of consensus of the leadership both in and outside the formal structures of the UDF.
When we finally did get an opportunity to interact with the leadership of the movement outside the country, we discovered that the leadership also operated on the basis that it was an interim leadership waiting for the release of our imprisoned leaders. Yet when I finally met Utata UMadiba at Victor Verster Prison on the eve of his release, he in turn talked of the leadership as those outside prison and those in exile!
It is to our credit that the quality of our leaders was such that they deferred to other sectors of leadership of the movement as a whole rather than pursuit sectarian or sectionalist interests.
After the unbanning of the liberation movements and the release of our leaders from prison in 1990 there was therefore no question about the need to re-align our mass organizations and its leadership: the UDF was dissolved and we reverted once again to consolidated leadership under the banner of one revolutionary movement banned in 1960.
The United Democratic Front was indeed a holding operation, albeit a very important one!
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