By Graeme Bloch (UDF and NECC executives in W Cape)
As I think back to another time, the time of the UDF, all sorts of images flood back.
The dull thud-thud of helicopter blades. I have been watching outside the Manenberg police station all morning. The priests and imams, arms linked, lead a march over the bridge into the African township. Another funeral, another young death. Always under the spiky armed guard of the buffels, ratels, armoured cars, crammed with scared young recruits. Now sirens and helicopters. An ambulance. More sirens and shouts. Someone in the crowd has thrown a grenade, and the riot police chief is hit by shrapnel. We see it on TV that night in the crazy whirl as the cameraman dives for cover. The dull thud thud. Teargas, bullets, more deaths.
Being on the run. For three years, Cheryl Carolus and I held the national record, keeping out of their clutches, though my photo as wanted was up in Mowbray Police Station. So the funny stories, like when my brother and girlfriend were surrounded by armed cops at an open air food festival. Wrong G Bloch, but girlfriend didn't stick around to go through that again! Or Hugh, sweating it out as cops searched for me in the house, while his Honours thesis notes about torture were spread out all over his desk. He left soon afterwards, not to return, to evade an army call-up.
Being on the run. When you did meet with comrades, or go to a meeting, they would laugh - thick glasses, bokbaard, Rolf Harris look. People always laugh at you before they say hello -disconcerting, another break in human touch. You never say hello to the neighbour's kids, because you don't want to befriend their parents. Screens and disguise, evasions and deceit. You grow hard and tough. You don't cry easily.
Being on the run. Changing cars, never using the telephone. Quick meetings, and quick escapes if anyone is more than ten minutes late. Comrades getting detained, and young kids being tortured. At least you have resources, you get borrowed cars and change.
But to be young, restless, hunted, the brightest of the youth who could not sit back to take the things they saw. We felt the bravery and incredible courage in their pain and rage. Killed, detained, tortured, sometimes broken, but indomitable. They came back. "We'll eat teargas!" I remember one boy shouting at the cops. They fought back and paid a terrible price.
To be free. The UDF expressed our yearning. We were the '76 generation -since that turning point things would never be the same. Seven years later and the masses were beginning to move. We were all younger than 30. The tide of politics drew us in, and new resistances arose every day. The giant of labour was stirring, and shaking a slowing economy, rigid and out-of-date. In Southern Africa, arms had turned the tide. The piecemeal crumbs of PW's reforms opened more space to fight, to organise and raise demands. We want to speak, for ourselves. We want it all, we want it here, and we want it now!
Somehow, the UDF set us free. Always the people ahead of us, always surprising us with their energy. Their courage and willingness to come forward. Their creativity and new ideas. The networks and resources that they drew, who they knew and how they did things, their spontaneous imagination as they grew and learned.
Actions started to link millions and millions of people across the land in a common yearning, loosening that submerged feeling in our hearts and making us wonder if maybe we were nearly there.
When 13 000 came to Mitchells Plain to launch the UDF, I saw it through the practical frame of the catering crews who I led with Mrs Jaffer from Wynberg. 10 000 boiled and peeled eggs. Apples by the crate from Fariedah Omar at Salt River Market, dropped off in Makie's borrowed bakkie. Soup bowls and giant tubs of breyani, steaming as the delegates arrived, late at night, tired and cold off the bus from the Northern Transvaal and desperate for a meal. Comrades who we'd never seen but had heard of, now were here!
Excited and unsure: the new day dawned. Thousands streamed to the launch, banners, colours and song, a new era of unity and defiance, of speaking out and shouting loud, of marches, demonstrations, pickets, hunger strikes, meetings, talks, executives and AGM's, resolutions, strikes, petitions and pamphlets. Action, comrade, action! Seize the imagination and show the way!
Pamphlets, pamphlets by the thousand. Door to door, one at a time, volunteers gave them out and explained their purpose and our goal. House by house by house, at stations, bus stops, in the streets, we talked and told the people what we could do. We explained and listened. Black and white, we tramped the streets of Guguletu and Lavender Hill, of white Claremont and Coloured Paarl. We linked neighbour to neighbour, one to the other, and a country to itself.
We linked ourselves, across barriers, and got to know, together, all the corners of our land. We learned about each other. We discussed what people said, and absorbed the lessons for our next campaign.
Campaigns didn't always work. A national bus boycott flopped, the call just didn't resonate down here. We kept on trying. We were here to stay, here to lead and show a way.
This was a UDF strength. First, courageous leadership sparked response. There were no privileges to being up front, to showing the way. Then, people organised where they were. Constituencies took charge.
It was the ultimate post-modern movement - there was a slogan, a unifying goal or theme. Then each centre took it up as best it could, expressed in the ways that integrated its own experience and sense of place. Small steps gave rise to more. People learned and stepped some more, grew bold and made the links. Action together sparked more, and action gave rise to reaction. The beast out there eventually had to sink!
It was a myriad of small actions, designed to help people get their courage and show them their strength. A million spontaneous steps, organisation, consolidation, discussion, and new response.
In the white areas, a powerful thrust was made. White democrats came together and worked their own areas. Always a minority, they kept the door open, brought information, gathered resources and provided deep bases for the struggle's resilient strength.
In Claremont Civic Centre, we read messages from Asmal of the Irish Anti Apartheid Movement, we condemned the West's complicity and praised the Bonteheuwel young lions. We won a court order to overturn emergency bans. Zapiro did his first cartoons, the famous 1983 UDF calendar.
We brought to the suburbs first hand accounts from squatter camps, from the tortures in the Bantustans. And even deeper went the wedge, as the End Conscription Campaign mobilised and grew against the war, providing channels for deep choices of conscience by young white recruits who refused to serve.
The white areas, too, mobilised to take democrats into the UDF, and to learn from the strengths and differences of the townships and the ghettoes. Our eyes were opened by the realities of people's lives.
When everything came together, as in the vast marches that culminated the Defiance Campaign in 1989, reveling in the purple rain, our own celebrations to match the collapse of the Berlin Wall, finally when the state realised it could no longer shoot, what glory and confidence there was!
Gareth and I, finally detained, in Pollsmoor. Having survived the defiance and put it all in place, now we jog the courtyard restlessly while protests gather momentum outside. As we jog around the prison yard, we fantasise: "Today's the big march! They'll release us now, we'll get a taxi, we'll rush straight to the front!"
It was not to be. We had to wait again for Chris Giffard to come back from his trial to shout across the yard the latest news of the success. But inside, it was clear, even in the interrogations the security cops were not sure which way to turn, had lost their heart. We'd lost our fear, and they didn't know where to go.
Nor should we ever forget how brutal the state could be. People sat in solitary for 3 years. Brains were blown out and bodies blown up. Pickled hands, monkey's paws, chemical compounds and poison, explosives and assassination told the story of a state that knew few bounds. Nuclear bombs were researched and made and tested.
Our young people had to learn to fight rather than to build. The tragedy of a million opportunities lost.
I joined the ANC in 1987, the middle of the darkest nights of the emergency. Tony Yengeni convinced me the fight could not only stay above ground. I knew the ANC's history, the structures it had built, its morality even in its armed war, the palpable sense of its popular appeal . The annual calls that intermingled with the wider mood. The time of struggle we had reached. They all made my move inevitable. 'Make South Africa Ungovernable!' A profound and complex call, that brought us to the final thrust.
UDF too provided the structures in which we could talk about the new era that dawned after 1990. With the opening of negotiations, a new period had begun. The ANC began its long transformation to an electoral giant, the exiles returned, the talks started up. It was time to move on.
I think there are some enormous things we've gained. Everyday in South Africa, I see a new untroubled youth coming through, that tells me the fruits of our struggles are here to stay.
We learned to look at people's strengths, to take people for what they were. This sense of hegemony, this sense that we were right, did not make us arrogant but encouraged us to draw people in, to win them over and let our deeds show them the way. That we could learn from them. That we were different and did not all contribute in the same way.
That together we could change the world. That together we did, though there are long roads still to go.
And, oh yes. I met my love while on the run, late meetings under the railway bridge and stolen walks on Cape Town beaches; strolls up the berg. Somehow we lasted through the pain and fire; something human always burned. In the midst of struggle, I met my wife and love.
The UDF unites, they said!
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