From: nlns@igc.apc.org (New Liberation News Service)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: NOTES FROM THE "NEW" SOUTH AFRICA
Date: 15 Sep 92 05:53:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1296500350:000:13518
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!nlns    Sep 14 22:53:00 1992


NOTES FROM THE "NEW" SOUTH AFRICA
Tim Hinton, The Thistle

(NLNS)--It is a warm and close day, not unusually so, for winter
in Northern Natal, South Africa.  Our car, a rusty Volkswagen
Golf, is tailing a huge bus through the low sugar cane covered
hills.  The road winds its way upwards; in the distance there are
huts dotted on the hillsides.  There are bored-looking cows to be
seen idly chewing at the sparse grass as we zoom past.  Every now
and again we get close enough to the bus to catch the exuberant
strains of the freedom songs being sung by the people inside.  The
black, green and gold of the ANC flag waves boisterously,
defiantly in the wind.  We stop intermittently to pick up people
who have been waiting for much of the day in the sun.  Today is
the national day of protest against the massacre at Boipatong
township.  The people of South Africa--Azania to some--are again
on the march.
	After a half an hour we arrive at our destination: the
town hall of Eshowe, a white town, a town of honest and true white
South Africans, most of them descendants of the British
conquerors, once humiliated in battle by the masses of Zulu
warriors under Udingane.  They have bumper stickers which present
the Union Jack next to the line 'Natal--The Last Outpost.'  Here,
the peculiar form of South African colonialism is at its most
obvious.  Like their counterparts in the Raj or in
pre-independence Kenya, these people occupy the top side in the
relations of exploitation and domination.  They employ the cane
cutters--often whole families of them--who eke out an existence on
the white owned farms.  The cutters own no land of their own and
their work is seasonal.  The cane they cut is sold in the city
with the profits going to support the lifestyles of the whites:
their Sunday lunches at country clubs and their children at
private schools.
	But today these people look on in fear and awe and
puzzlement for the cane cutters are not cutting cane, they are
dancing in a phalanx of palpitating bodies up the steps of
Eshowe's stolid Town Hall.  "AMANDLA! NGWETHU!!  POWER TO THE
PEOPLE!!" comes the cry.
	I am here with a party of legal observers known in South
Africa as 'unrest monitors.'  There has been a threat from the
local branch of the Inkatha Freedom Party to disrupt today's
protest meeting.  The task of the monitors is to ensure that,
should there be an outbreak of violence, there is someone there to
document who started it and, if it seems reasonable, to intervene
in order to stop it.  Standing in a small cluster near-by, there
is a small and nervous- looking group of South African
police-officers.  I cannot see them without feeling the same fear
I used to feel in the marches I was in when I was a undergraduate
in Johannesburg.  In those days, the police would always
baton-charge unarmed people assembled in the streets; the baton
charge would come after the tear-gas canisters had been fired and
the rubber-bullets had whizzed overhead.  But this is 'the New
South Africa': the police have different, more sinister methods
for dealing with the opposition to the state.  And besides, the
threat to the safety of the protesters gathered today is not from
the white police but from the Inkatha Freedom Party, a
predominantly black organization apparently dedicated to
destroying the ANC and its allies.
	Although there was no violence during the day, that night
two houses were burned down in the township of Esikaweni, the home
of most of the protesters.  At the end of that month, eleven
people were killed in Esikaweni.  Local ANC members testify that
six discrete, well coordinated attacks were carried out during the
night.  The attackers--eight in all--wore similar clothing and
employed identical weaponry: pump action shotguns.  The attacks
occurred in the J1 section of the township, where mainly pro-ANC
people live.  The war between the ANC and Inkatha supporters
continues in part because passions are never allowed to cool.
There are frequent reports of white agents, their faces blackened
to conceal their racial identity, making carefully planned attacks
to ensure that the cycle of death is never broken.
	People frequently ask me what I make of 'the new South
Africa.'  I usually reply that the expression must be set in
quotation marks and always used with a deep sense of irony.  No
one should be fooled into thinking that this phrase refers to a
decisive break with the country's racist past.  The real New South
Africa, the united non-racial and democratic South Africa, is
still struggling to be born, struggling because the canker of the
old--the practices and institutions of the past--must be removed.


MASS ACTION CAMPAIGN

	Some of the changes that have taken place since the 1990
legalization of the ANC must be seen as being extremely positive.
There is a new spirit of defiance afoot among the members of the
oppressed majority, a spirit driven by the sense that liberation
is within reach.  During the last two years, there have been
periods of political quiescence which are unusual for the
traditionally well- organized but disenfranchised black minority.
Nevertheless, the recent mass action campaign has boldly
highlighted the dedication and resilience of the people in the
face of their oppression.
	The international mainstream media showed a great deal
more interest in the white referendum in March than in the mass
action campaign.  This should come as no surprise.  First, the
mass action campaign involved the deployment of forms of political
expression which those who think that politics goes no further
than the ballot box are bound to fear.  There were two days of a
mass strike - a form of protest which working people in many
countries have often used in the struggle for democratic rights.
	In addition, the mainstream media is dominated by a social
perspective which unashamedly caters to the interests of Northern
countries.  Witness, for instance, the gross inequality of concern
exhibited with respect to the plight of the people of Somalia
versus the people of the former Yugoslavia.  It cannot be
plausibly said that neutral concern for human needs motivates the
focus on the plight of Bosnians while ignoring the millions
cruelly starving to death in Africa.  One must conclude that the
welfare of people with black skin counts for less in the pragmatic
political calculations of the rich and the powerful.  This biased
perspective, applied in the South African case, makes for massive
coverage of de Klerk's attempt to win the soul of white South
Africa while all but ignoring the huge success of Mandela's march
on Pretoria.
	The mass action campaign amounted to as large a victory
for Mandela as the referendum had been for de Klerk.  Many
groupings of black people, including the Pan Africanist Congress
(PAC) which broke away from the ANC in the early nineteen sixties,
had called upon people not to support the campaign.  The PAC and
its allies, a small trade union federation and the Azanian
People's Organization, have always opposed negotiations with the
regime.  They argue that the negotiations are sure to play into
the hands of the white minority and ultimately perpetuate the
conditions of racial oppression.  Given this reasoning, the mass
action campaign must have seemed to be a non-starter.  But in fact
it was an enormous success.  The millions of people who stayed
away from work during the general strike and the well-disciplined
behavior of the majority of participants in the marches and
sit-ins made for a powerful expression of popular support for ANC
strategy.

BASIC STRUCTURE REMAINS INTACT

	But, however much South Africa may have changed in the
past two years, the fundamental structure of racial domination is
still as firmly in place as ever.  As the western press never
tires of pointing out, key parts of the system of statutes which
make up Apartheid have been struck from the books.  But the
nightmare of Apartheid is still far from being consigned to the
scrap-heap of history.
	For example, the system of Bantustans - puppet regimes
presided over by black collaborationist dictators - still remains.
When this system was created, most black South Africans were
stripped of their citizenship and became members of these horrible
political communities.  In the Bantustan territories, standards of
living are among the worst in the world, communities ravaged by
disease, abject poverty and brutal political repression.
	In addition, the true reigns of  power, embodied by
Parliament and the security forces, are held by members of the
white minority.  This is often overlooked by people in the West.
The South African government wears two hats in the current period:
not only is it a key party in the constitutional negotiations, but
it also claims to be the sole site of legitimate governmental
authority.
	Third, economic power comprising crucial resources like
land, factories and investment capital is controlled by the white
minority.  To be sure, there are more blacks earning salaries that
put them in the middle class now than there were a few years ago.
But the majority of the worst off, the starving people of the
rural areas and those eking out a meager existence in the
sprawling urban slums are black people.  Their lives continue to
be cheapened by the horrific system of economic exploitation and
racial domination entrenched over a period of centuries and
impossible to eradicate overnight.

ANC WITHDRAWAL FROM NEGOTIATIONS

	It is small wonder that the ANC and its allies decided to
withdraw from the negotiations after the massacre at Boipatong in
June.  There is just not enough evidence of willingness on the
part of the regime to concede to the demands of the majority.
Some observers feel that the ANC's decision to withdraw from the
negotiations after the massacre was ill-conceived.  It is
difficult to know exactly what argument backs up this judgment.
One thought might be that a negotiated settlement is the only
solution to South Africa's problems.  Therefore, withdrawing from
talks amounts to little more than a futile gesture.
	In response to this line of thought, it might be granted
that in the long run, negotiations just simply cannot be dispensed
with.  But the trouble with the argument is that it grossly
underestimates the extent to which the de Klerk regime has dealt
dishonestly with its chief antagonist.  It is not as though the
legalization of the ANC and the release of the political prisoners
can be counted as favors which the regime bestowed from the
goodness of its heart.  These steps were the barest minimum of
what was needed to start the process of democratizing the country.
Those who act unjustly deserve no praise for stopping doing what
they ought never to have done.  But more to the point is the fact
that nothing significant has been done by the government to end
the horrifying spiral of violence in the country.  Indeed, there
is hard evidence to show that parts of the state's massive
repressive machine have been directly responsible for instigating
many of the recent atrocities.
	Of course it is a dangerous oversimplification to say that
all of the violence in the townships comes from the police or from
death squads which function with Police complicity.  Much of it is
part of an engulfing cycle of action and reaction whose agents are
mutually antagonistic groups of people: ANC supporters and members
of the small Inkatha Freedom party, settled urban dwellers and
migrant laborers, criminal elements and ordinary citizens whose
lives have become desperate enough.  The essential point here is
that it is Apartheid which is the root cause of the violence.  The
basic structure of South African society makes black people's
lives so horrendous that to many here, civil war actually seems to
be the lesser evil.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AND FUTURE TRENDS

	Since the breakdown of negotiations, the state has shown
great reluctance to address the real issues lying behind the
stalemate.  The ANC has called for a concrete demonstration of the
government's commitment to democratization.  The most recent
government offers and announcements do not amount to that much.
But the government's overall strategy is surely now at an impasse.
Before the all-white parliament went on recess at mid-year, it
passed a number of laws which dangerously concentrate power in the
hands of the security forces.  These were presented as being anti-
drug laws but the legal immunities which they confer can easily be
employed to crush political opposition.  Part of the strategy is
obviously to keep open the possibility of repressive action, but
it is not clear what will be gained by exercising that option.
The levels of popular mobilization are high enough to make the
imposition of a state of emergency very difficult.  But even more
than this, the ANC and the PAC have become such a part of the
public discourse that the old ideologies used to justify the
repressive state will no longer have a foothold.  Code phrases,
like 'the total communist onslaught,' were used to great effect by
suggesting that all unrest came from Moscow and that most South
Africans would choose Apartheid as their favorite form of
totalitarianism.  Such phrases will sound like a bad joke now that
white South Africa is aware that most black people - together with
a surprising number of whites - are active supporters of the
long-repressed democracy movement.

The Thistle can be reached at 84 Massachucetts Ave., W20-413,
Cambridge MA, 02139. (617) 253-0399.