Mass movement resists the state of emergency FOLLOWING CLASHES between demonstrators and the repressive forces of the regime, a general strike was called in Soweto on September 4. It was a notable suecess, being described as the biggest action of this sort in the township since the student uprising of 1976, which initiated the new upsurge of the Black masses in South Africa.
The Soweto general strike had a major impact on economic activity in Johannesburg, reducing trading activity by 27 per cent and work in the manufacturing industry by 38 per cent. This protest illustrates the reactivation of the anti-apartheid movement and the breadth of the resistance to the repressive measures instituted by the state of emergency. The following article aims to draw an initial balance sheet of the mass movement under the state of emergency. TONY ROUX
SOUTH AFRICA
For example, in East London, the Duncan Village Residents' Association suffered a disruption of its work going all the way down to its street committees, after the arrest of 200 to 300 of its members.
For its part, the commercial workers' union (CCAWUSA), a member of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), had several of its leaders and members questioned and jailed. This went so far that in Pretoria and Johannesburg rank-and-file unionists had to take over the union headquarters directly in order to maintain a centralized functioning of the unions in these two cities.
Despite the severe blow that the Botha government has just dealt it, the mass anti-apartheid movement has not been crushed under the steamroller of the state of emergency. It remains vigorous and active and is reorganizing. In the first place, a part of the leaders and key members of the organizations, with the benefit of the experience of being arrested in the previous state of emergency, managed to escape the police raids and go underground. Second, after an initial disarray and surprise, the activist networks regrouped in forms suited to the new situation.
The union leadership called systematically on its members to take the places of the leaders and shop stewards arrested and to mobilize to maintain the union's work in the plants. COSATU's demands
COSATU put forward several demands to that end, calling for the release of jailed union leaders and activists; for the right to refuse night work, without having to take a cut in wages, if it were considered dangerous because of the curfew; for the right for shop stewards' access to the means of communication (telephones, telex) in the factories for union activity; the right to two hours a week for union meetings during working hours and so on.
COSATU's journal, the first issue of which came out in August, wrote in this connection: "The bosses' leaders from FCI and ASSOCOM [the two major employers' associations] have in general agreed to these demands. Many unions have taken them up and have won some, or all, of the demands." (1)
So, for example, the CCAWUSA workers, who went on strike spon-
1. 'COSATU', issue no. 1, August 1986, p. 2. [For details of the launch of this journal see International Viewpoint' No. 104, September 15, 1986).
3
TONY ROUX
Three months after the establishment of the state of emergency of June 12, it is hard, because of the censorship, to get an exact picture of the extent of the arrests. In mid-August the South African government published a list of 8,500 names of people jailed for at least 30 days.
Nonetheless, this figure does not include people already released or those subsequently arrested, nor those who had not yet served a full month in detention at the time the list was drawn up.
What appear to be the most realistic estimates put the number of people jailed at one time or another since June 12 at between 12,000 and 14,000.
Studies done by independent institutes, even on the basis of incomplete lists, made it possible to get a better idea of the extent of the wave of repression. At the end of July, after seven weeks of the state of emergency, the tempo of arrests had reached one every seven minutes, or 200 a day.
On the basis of a study focused on 4,000 names, a group of researchers at Witwatersrand University showed that a third of these arrests involved people with a known political affiliation. And of those, three quarters belonged to community, political or educational associations that were mainly affiliated to the United Democratic Front.
In all, 139 township community associations have been targeted by the repression. The Transvaal region suffered the worst. An independent study group, the Labour Monitoring Group, put forward the figure in late July of 2,700 trade-union members and 320 trade-union leaders arrested.
Youth account for about 25 per cent of those imprisoned. It is estimated, therefore, that 3,000 people under the age of 16 have been jailed because of the state of emergency. A lot of them are between 12 and 15.
So this time the repression is more sweeping than the one carried out at the time of the state of emergency decreed on July 23, 1985, and suspended on March 7, 1986, which led to the arrest of about 8,000 people. In the first month of the recent state of emergency, the number of people arrested topped the number arrested in the first month of the 1985 crackdown by 60 per cent.
The South African regime has thus in its own way acknowledged the mass movement that has grown considerably over these last years and rooted itself in the workplaces and the townships. In order to make a significant impact on this movement, the repression has to strike still deeper.
Consequently, the wave of arrests reached out to the rank-and-file activists of the civic associations, political organizations and unions, with the objective of striking deep enough into the mass movement to paralyze it.
International Viewpoint 29 September 1986
Street scene in South Africa (DR) ste taneously to protest against the arrest of their leaders, succeeded in winning important partial victories for such objectives. In Johannesburg, one of these workers explained, "We negotiated with our bosses during the strikes and demanded time off to run the union. About 10° companies agreed to give two shop stewards two weeks off to work at the union office. The bosses paid us for one week and the union for the other. After two weeks were up some of us got permission to carry on. Others have joined us later. Next week we have to go back." (2)
The roots and democratic struc ture of the COSATU unions reinforced its capacity to resist the biggest repressive attack it has faced since its founding. In its initial period, COSAT experieneed an important growth in membership. or To cite only a few examples, the metalworkers' union (MAWU) ran a recruiting drive that brought in 14,000 new dues-paying members in the first six months. Today MAWU has 50,000 members. The membership of the National Union of Miners (NUM) also increased by 80,000 in seven months, reaching the figure of 180,000.
COSATU's journal described the present situation of the confederation as follows:
"The police have wide powers to interfere with our organisation. This has meant some breakdown in communication nationally and regionally. But COSATU lives on and grows each day. In all the major industries membership has grown very fast since the formation of COSATU Membership in the metal industry has increased by 30%; in the shops by 50%; in the mines by 80%. Unions in the food and chemical industries have gained over 10,000 members each. And about 18,000 workers
GONE SUCMOLK have paid up in the textile, transport and paper industries. COSATU has grown stronger because our structures are democratic. Because we believe in democratic control. Because we fight for workers' needs." (3)
Of course, there is more to the state of COSATU than numerical membership growth, which is real enough. Major difficulties have shown up in certain regions or industries over the way of applying the founding congress decisions concerning the structuring of the movement and the merging of the unions in each industry. Unity grows with influence
In the Eastern Cape province, the setting up of regional executive bodies of COSATU has already been postponed twice because of differences among the unions over the rules for representation and election of the leaders.
In textiles, there was even a split recently in the National Textile Workers' Union (NUTW), after three of its shop stewards formed a rival union, the TAWU.
These problems are not limited just to peculiarities in various regions or industries, although this aspect has its importance. They are more generally the reflection of debates that run through COSATU. But over and above these particular cases, unity seems to be growing apace with the influence of COSATU.
While they have not destroyed the mass movement, the various restrictions linked to the state of emergency have considerably reduced its opportunities for open work. But it has been precisely public initiatives — demonstrations, mass funerals, rallies - that have been the forms of expression of the anti-apartheid mass mobilization over these last two years. Since June 12, on the other hand, there has been a marked slowing in the tempo of such actions.
Nonetheless, resistance to the state of emergency has been organized in other forms. The work of the civic associations in the townships has often been maintained. This is indicated by a report from Alexandra, a township north of Johannesburg, where the Alexandra Civic Association (ACA) is active.
The opportunities for meetings have, to be sure, been limited to those times when the police are not patrolling the township. A number of ACA leaders are wanted and forced to stay in hiding, often outside the township. But not all the leaders have been arrested, so the ACA is able to maintain a certain activity under the state of emergency. This was attested to by one of its leaders, who said that the police "have picked up many of the youths and some executive members, but not the key people . . One thing is certain, there are a lot of activities. Although organisations operate under great pressures, they are carrying on very, very well." (4)
On the same theme, the publicity secretary of the UDF, Murphy Morobe, now underground, said recently:
"We are still intact and able to hold meetings at national level. But the UDF power base is at the local level, where there is more intimate contact with the community." (5)
For its part, after a series of strikes, sometimes spontaneous, to demand
2. Ibid, p. 3.
3. Ibid, p.10.
4. *Weekly Mail' Johannesburg, August 29, 1986.
5. Weekly Mail', August 22, 1986.
International Viewpoint 29 September 1986
the release of jailed unionists, the union movement seems to have set its sights on more limited objectives, focusing mainly on securing the jobs and wages of jailed activists.
Conflicts occurred for example in the auto sector in Port ElizabethUitenhage between the automobile workers union, NAAWU, which demanded full pay for its jailed members, and the managements of the multinationals. General Motors offered 50 per cent of wages, Volkswagen 60 percent and Ford 60 per cent.
The debate between COSATU and the Federated Chamber of Industries (FCI) on the eve of the one-day strike called by the confederation on July 14 was indicative both of the ambiguous attitude of the bosses toward the state of emergency and of the determination of the trade unionists. The FCI in fact tried to get COSATU to go back on its decision by arguing that it was against apartheid.
Some bosses would have liked to see a veritable common front arise between a section of the bosses and the union movement in the name of combating the government's repressive moves.
Sidney Mafumadi, assistant general secretary of COSATU, responded to the bosses' argument by saying that the confederation considered it high time that employers took an unequivocal stand on the conflict in South Africa. ... If one has listened to the State President when he announced the declaration of the state of emergency, he said its principal aim was to restore business confidence by bringing radicals to book.... We know very well that the state is there to protect private property and that employers could force the state to change if they wanted to." (6)
COSATU's tactic has been to use its capacity to bring pressure to bear on the bosses to win demands that undermine the effects of the state of emergency, or else make the bosses pay economically for their intransigence. In so doing, they exploit the well-known divisions in the bourgeoisie over the future of the apartheid system and the best means of overcoming it. But if the bosses interpret the regime's present repressive offensive in different ways, few voices have been heard from this quarter firmly condemning it.
The Labour Monitoring Group took note of this in concluding a study on the question, stating, "in sharp contrast to the high-sounding claims in support of civil rights in the FCI Business Charter, employers have been largely silent on the state of emergency. " (7)
This study looked at 114 firms employing 45,000 workers in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal (PWV)
region. It produced the following results: 50 per cent of the bosses questioned said that the state of emergency had not modified production relations; 13 per cent even thought that they had been improved. Only 37 per cent thought that it had had a negative effect.
Moreover, the index of business confidence produced by ASSOCOM went up slightly in June 1986. This led Gordon Waddel, a representative of the FCI, to say that "there is a view held, I suppose by the majority of business, that the state of emergency was necessary and desirable to restore law and order." (8)
Many examples could be cited to illustrate the way in which the bosses have taken advantage of the state of emergency and the restrictions it places on trade-union and political activity by the Black masses.
The managers of the national enterprise SASOL recently informed the Chemical Workers' Industrial Union, CWIU, that it intended implementing its wage offer, regardless of whether the unions agreed. At the same time, all meetings of COSATU were banned in the region where the factory is located, thereby reducing the capacity of the union to react. Bosses press home their advantage
A company belonging to the Anglo-American Corporation, the Rand Scrap Iron and Metal (RSI), decided to break off all negotiations with MAWU in reprisal for a go-slow. Chamber of Mines President Clive Knobbs openly recognized that the state of emergency meant additional constraints on the NUM during negotiations.
Thus, the independent Black trade unions face at the same time the restrictions of the state of emergency and offensives by the bosses trying to take advantage of it and change the relationship of forces in the factories. This explains COSATU's insistence on the need to relaunch trade-union activity in the plants.
Despite the growing exasperation of the Black workers goaded by repression, the July 14 strike was only a limited success. The action had an impact mainly in the Port Elizabeth region, and to a lesser degree in the Transvaal.
This outcome no doubt owed to the difficulties of communication among the various trade-union structures arising from the repression and to the limited time left for building the strike.
In fact, the state of the trade-union movement cannot be judged just by this action. As a commentator wrote in the Johannesburg Weekly Mail of July 18:
"In terms of the Congress of South African Trade Unions' strategic goal — a symbolic show of strength to put pressure on employers and the state to release detained unionists and lift the state of emergency - Monday's day of action was a failure.
"However, it will have its most negative effect if it masks the fact that unions have taken effective action during the Emergency and successfully achieved limited targets - such as the release of unionists or agreement by employers to meet certain demands."
While it has slowed the tempo of anti-government protests and muffled them, the state of emergency has not diminished the fighting spirit of the Black masses. Mobilizations are continuing on various themes and in various forms, illustrating the extent of anti-apartheid sentiments in the Black population.
Nonetheless, coordinating and centralizing these actions remains very difficult. However, this situation does leave open the possibility for the appearance of local hot spots in individual. townships or factories, and even the multiplication of such focuses of conflict.
In a general sense, apartheid and its structures objectively unify all of these mobilizations, even if they are far from developing in a coordinated way.
For example, in a series of townships rent boycotts are underway. But they often reflect very disparate levels of commitment. In general, these actions are to protest against higher rents or to denounce the management of the townships by the Black representatives of the councils set up by the regime to run the Black ghettos.
Such rent boycotts have a destabilizing effect on some of the institutions of apartheid, which increases the problems of the Blacks who have agreed to collaborate with the regime.
In all, 38 townships and 300,000 families are affected by rent boycotts, at a cost of 30 million rands a month to the state [one rand equals about 40 US cents]. In these townships, the rent boycotts are about 60 per cent effective.
In the region of Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal (PWV) alone, the rent boycotts have already cost the state 188 million rands. A still more concrete example is that of Soweto, where the council collects no more than 3 million rands for a total of
6. Weekly Mail, July 11, 1986. 7. •Weekly Mail', July 4, 1986. 8. Ibid.
International Viewpoint 29 September 1986
75,000 families, when it should be collecting 9 million rands. (9) This movement has also extended to towns located in the Bantustans, such as Mdantsane in the Ciskei.
The regime has reacted by staging operations to evict tenants who have not payed their rents. This is what led to the confrontations in Soweto on August 26, which resulted in a rapid and renewed rise of tensions in this township.
Seizing this moment to relaunch the mobilization, at the beginning of September the UDF and the union movement called for a 24-hour general strike in this vast ghetto. The action was a notable success, 86 per cent effective, according to the Labour Monitoring Group, which described this strike as "the most significant" of those organized in Soweto over the last ten years. (10)
For some time, moreover, the Botha government has been preoccupied with finding an adequate counter to the rent boycotts in the townships. Given the failure of the policy of using the Black local authorities of the councils as intermediaries, the regime's last card seems very often to be evicting the tenants.
A government document entitled "Strategy for the collection of rental and service charges" to be followed by the regional bodies combining representatives of the bosses, township councils, the police and the army - the Joint Management Centres (JMC) - advocated an intransigent attitude toward the rent boycotts: "No acknowledgement through negotiations must be given to revolutionary groups or organisations." (11)
This situation in the townships, which has already led to the rout of 40 councils, illustrates the isolation of that layer of Blacks that agreed to participate in the regime's institutions.
Just recently, moreover, after the people of his municipality boycotted his stores, the mayor of Tembisa, Lucas Mothiba, resigned. He was also accused of being the local instigator of the conservative Vigilante groups. On relinquishing office, he said:
"I resigned because of the realisation that the Black local authorities were politically and economically nonviable Unless the goverment subsidises 90 per cent of black needs, the whole system will collapse. The government should release Mandela and other imprisoned leaders, unban the people's organisations and negotiate with the authentic leaders of the people, not those at local level. " (12)
Forced to retreat because of the boycott of his stores, the resignation of the mayor of Tembisa reflects the pressure on this layer of Black collaborators from the powerful democratic aspirations of the masses. This 6 illustrates that any "local option" that would involve opening more room for political participation by Blacks in institutions at a municipal or regional level, without breaking fundamentally from the principal of separation of the races at the national level, is doomed in advance.
Resistance to the government's measures also remains firm in educa tion. A month after the re-opening of the schools on July 14, 300,000 pupils - 20 per cent of the total of 1.7 million Black pupils - had not complied with the new formalities of re-registration. The new rules require pupils to have identity cards to enter school premises and permit the government to assign pupils arbitrarily to schools and scholastic levels.
In an attempt to impose these rules, the regime has set up screens around the schools and put security guards at the access points, who can call on the police forces for help. But as a COSATU communique pointed out: "The DET [Department of Education and Training] is turning schools into prison camps to try and contain the anger and resistance, but How becoming a powderse that are that are bomb." (13) Class boycotts
Where schools have been closed as a result of refusal to re-register pupils, parents and teachers have organized to demand their reopening. In other places, pupils formally registered have nonetheless refused to accept the new setup and have protested against the presence of security forces by boycotting classes.
In the Orlando West neighborhood of Soweto, at the Matseke high school, the teachers have protested against the fact that the security forces went to the point of accompanying the boys and girls to the toilets.
This attempt to pacify the high schools has already given rise to sporadic clashes between pupils and police, notably in mid-August in Soweto. Calm is thus far from returning to the high schools, despite the extent of the repression applied to achieve this objective.
Other forms of resistance are persisting as well, such as the boycott of white stores that has been going on in Port Elizabeth for many months now.
But in recent weeks perhaps the most resounding demonstration of the determination and militancy of the Black masses has been the rebuff dealt to the policy of the South African government and its local collaborators in Kwandebele.
Since May 22, the Kwandebele Bantustan has been the scene of a veritable mass uprising against the South African government's decision, endorsed some years ago by the Bantustan's legislative assembly, to set independence for this coming December 10. This meant in fact withdrawing South African citizenship from the 400,000 inhabitants of Kwandebele.
Since the spring, 160 people have died in clashes between the Bantustan's security forces and their auxilliaries, the Mbokhoto vigilantes, on the one hand and the protestors on the other.
After these three months of agitation, the Bantustan authorities find themselves totally isolated in the face of the opposition, which unites traditional chiefs, teachers, civil servants and radical militants.
A few weeks after the Bantustan's minister of the interior and the main leader of the vigilantes, Piet Ntuli was killed when his car exploded, the Kwandebele legislative assembly declared against independence.
The hall in which the deliberations took place was full of oppositionists who came to put pressure on the members of the assembly. This prompted a reporter to write that this presence was not without influence on "the fact that not a single dissenting voice was raised for 'independence' - an idea which had wholehearted support in the Assembly only three months ago." (14)
Finally, also worth noting is the resumption in recent months of armed actions by the African National Congress (ANC). The regime itself has been churning out reports of clashes between the police and army and armed groups of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC.
It is to counter the infiltrations of armed commandos that the regime has armed the white farmers in the border areas. It seems, on the other hand, that the flow of arms to opponents of apartheid within the country has increased. AK 47's have been turning up in the hands of anti-apartheid demonstrators, both in the Crossroads clashes last spring and recently in the August 26 demonstrations in Soweto.
Despite the growing repression it faces, the struggle against apartheid is still displaying dynamism in its various forms of organization and activity. This diversity is one of the factors that complicate the problems
9. 'Weekly Mail', August 15, 1986.
10. 'Weekly Mail", ; September 4, 1986.
11. 'Weekly Mail, August 1, 1986.
12. 'Weekly Mail" ; August 22, 1986.
13. 'Weekly Mail, ; July 25, 1986.
14. 'Weekly Mail', August 15, 1986.
International Viewpoint 29 September 1986
of centralizing the struggles and uniting the forces fighting the regime.
The diversity of the forms of mobilization and organization has no doubt been somewhat accentuated by the repression. But fundamentally, it reflects the social diversity of the camp of the oppressed and exploited, as well as very strong regional peculiarities in South Africa.
For example, the state of emergency has not had the same character everywhere. Among other things, the Natal supreme court has twice stood up to the regime by condemning and rescinding some of its repressive measures. In the Western Cape region, the restrictions on the activity of 119 unions and extra-parliamentary organizations were lifted after COSATU appealed to the courts.
Such peculiarities affect all the opposition forces and, in the last analysis, reflect the unevenesses in the development of the mass movement. In these conditions, achieving unity is no doubt a complex task and more difficult today than before the state of emergency.
Nonetheless, certain circumstances linked to this period of intense repression can enrich the debate on this question in the future. One example is a decision by activists imprisoned at the Diepkloof prison in Johannesburg belonging to rival organizations -the Soweto Students' Congress (SOSCO), linked to the UDF, and the Azanian Students' Movement (AZASM), linked to the Azanian People's Organization (AZAPO). Put in the same cells, these young militants, who on the outside had clashed with each other, sometimes violently, decided to make a tactical alliance for the duration of their imprisonment. In declaring the state of emergency, the Botha government set itself a number of goals at the same time. On the one hand, it sought to stem the decline in the political influence of the National Party over its traditional electoral base. This decline had been reflected by some electoral setbacks and, above all, by the steadily growing impact last spring of initiatives by extreme-right formations. From this standpoint, the firmness of the South African goverment toward the opponents of apartheid is doubtless sufficient to reassure, at least temporarily, those worried about maintaining the status quo. To crown the operation, Botha may even have planned to hold snap elections to consolidate the turnaround in the attitudes of white voters. At least, he recently hinted at that. However, in equipping himself to wage a serious repressive drive against the mass movement, Botha also aimed at bringing the anti-apartheid movement to a standstill and substantially lowering the level of political and social agitation in the townships and factories. He sought to keep the mass movement from getting a second wind and to break the radicalizing momentum that had been building up in it for almost two years.
In this way, Botha expected to gain the means to force both the local employers and the international community to accept his repressive policy. He could dangle before the bosses the economic advantages that they could get from it. And he knew that he could count on an understanding attitude on the part of the main leaders of the Wester powers.
So the state of emergency is not,
GOL therefore, a mere hiccough in an otherwise serene, gradual policy of reforms. However, to get rid of the apartheid rules rendered obsolete by the changing needs of capitalist accumulation and do so at the least political cost -these are still the terms of the government's calculations.
But Pretoria has drawn the lessons of the difficulties it has run into in trying to divide the anti-apartheid movement in a cold way and thereby to give rise to a current of Black moderates representative enough to provide an effective cover for its policy. This is what explains the regime's nervousness today.
Paradoxically, the state of emergency has demonstrated both the undiminished capacities of the regime for repression and its military superiority, on the one hand, and, on the other, the political impasse in which the ruling National Party finds itself. Its "reformist" manoeuvers are failing to defuse the mass anti-apartheid movement, while at the same time arousing discontent among its traditional poor-white electoral base.
The National Party congress reunited the party behind the government but it offered no solution for the crisis of the regime. The government is still unable to get out of its pattern of trying to steer a course, by following its nose, between more and more massive repression and less and less credible proposals for institutional adjustments. • Such contradictions were reflected in the National Party Congress in August. This third congress in the 70-year history of the party confirmed the limitations Botha was to put on "reforming" apartheid in an attempt to balance off the conflicting pressures on his government.
Speaker after speaker got up at the congress to reaffirm their intention to maintain certain central aspects of the apartheid policy, notably in education, housing, assignment of racial groups to their own areas and political representation on racial lines.
One such speaker, Gerrit Viljoen, minister of education and development aid, was to specify: "The whites are not on the point of capitulating to pressure from abroad. Whites have the will and the power to maintain interal security and law and order, while proceeding with essential, acceptable reform through negotiation." (15)
The terms in which this reform policy is put drastically limit its effect. But it was on general agreement was National Party. Given its crisis, this peace not last long.
15. Ibid.
this basis that restored in the the scope of will probably
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CHILE