The struggle for South Africa: a reference guide to movements, organizations and institutions. - book reviews

A REMARKABLE BOOK ON SOUTH AFRICA

Apartheid is not the root of evil in South Africa. But it is the very face of evil. In this time of accelerated state and state-sponsored repression in defense of apartheid, it is extremely useful to have a book which concentrates on the broad spectrum of indigenous organizations--representing diverse interests and points of view--which have joined in the struggle to bring it down.

The Struggle for South Africa was written from a Marxist perspective in the neighboring nation-state of Mozambique during the years 1978-1983, the difficult early years following that country's independence. It is a book which, like the prolonged conflict it describes, suffered inconsolable loss in the making. The project's director, Ruth First, was killed by a letter bomb, allegedly from the South African government, in August, 1982. She had been an African National Congress activist for nearly 40 years.

Struggle was intended to be read by journalists, government officials, political activists, and students. But it has a claim to a larger readership. Anyone interested in the scope of the struggle in South Africa should know it. The book approaches its subject from a specific ideology and with a definite stake in the success of South Africa's liberation movements, yet strives at the same time to be objective and comprehensive--a work of serious scholarship rather than a tract, an encyclopedia rather than a polemical treatise. Itemising in great detail and without sweeping generalizations the separate tendencies and individual groups affecting change in South Africa, it does not, for example, prophesy where or how the struggle will end. It does not emphasize the hegemony of any one group, such as the ANC. Nor is any one specific approach to future action advocated, either for South Africans or for persons outside the country. What it does instead is to present clearly a chronological record of events which are eloquent and damning in and of themselves. And although the conclusions to be drawn may be inevitable, the reader is not being told what to think. The high ground of moral indignation is studiously avoided. Setting out to be uniquely a "reference guide," Struggle remains true to its original intent. That this should have been the genre chosen by First and the authors at Mondlane University as the appropriate one to voice their bitterness and hope in the midst of enormous obstacles is one of the astonishing things about the book. In the end it is a complex work that demands to be read and understood in simple terms, like the struggle which is its subject and whose spirit it seems to embody. In simple terms, as DuBois wrote in his biography of John Brown, "the price of repression is greater than the cost of liberty."

The book is arranged thematically into ten chapters, the first, comprising four essays, is an overview of the historical development and current functioning of the apartheid system; each subsequent chapter contains an introductory essay followed by individual entries for specific organizations or movements. Of the approximately 120 organizations discussed, more than half represent the political parties, business interests, military organizations, etc., allied to the apartheid regime. There are, for example, sections describing each of the eight major domestic private monopolies operating in South Africa (one of which, Anglo American Corporation, became in 1981 the single largest foreign investor in the United States); state corporations such as ARMSCOR, the centerpiece in South Africa's huge independent arms industry; and all of the dozen or so conservative or rightist political parties. The basic laws of apartheid are explained, including those regarding land ownership, movement and settlement of black persons, and those laws excluding blacks from representative institutions. There is a separate subchapter on bantustan administration. The repressive military apparatus are also covered, down to the number of tanks and missiles in their arsenals, beginning with the SADF (South African Defense Force), responsible most recently for the Israeli-style attacks on the front line states and whose budget doubled during Prime Minister Botha's first four years, and the notorious NIS (National Intelligence Service). The clandestine and highly exclusive Afrikaner Broederbond, whose members include virtually every member of the south African cabinet, senior state bureaucrats, military officers, and businessmen is unveiled. And then there are the three Dutch Reformed Churches, which provide apartheid with its "Christian Nationalist" ideology of an organically united and separate volk endowed with a divine calling and destined to develop economic control over South Africa--apartheid's most important publicists and apologists to those Afrikaners seeking a moral and religious basis for their government's policies.

Throughout the book it is emphasized that apartheid is not and never was a coherent "vision," but has always been a changing defensive posture in response to the mass struggle. It may have been with reluctance, then, and a palpable gritting of the teeth, that the first four chapters were given over by the authors to the side with the heaviest artillery, that the chapters describing the physiognomy of apartheid came before those describing the liberation struggle. It seems both paradoxical and impressive that the regime's groupings should command pride of place and such careful attention in a book whose heart says otherwise. It is a point worth pondering, as it asserts that this is not a book of protest but a book beyond protest, one which seeks and achieves a kind of officialdom, in the same way that the ANC, with offices in thirty countries, is something more than a revolutionary organization, if still less than a government in exile.

But hierarchical organization does not dominate: a small and powerfull community group might recieve as many pages of text as a major national party; cross referencing between chapters is abundant. It is almost as if, behind the book's highly idiosyncratic and inclusive structure, there were a strongly felt desire for the reader to know everything, producing a kind of fine tension in Struggle. One effect of this tension is to make reading seem like active participation, which of course it is in the face of the current effort on the part of the South African government to effectively control the facts coming out of the country. By the fifth chapter, it is hard not to feel deep anger, and hard not to fear the staggering array of forces set to defend apartheid.

The democratic trade unions are covered extensively. Although the largest federation of trade unions, COSATU with its half million members, had not been formed yet when the book was written, the conditions which favored the creation of such an organization are identified and given due prominence. The groups described include amont others the South African Congress of Trade Unions, the Federation of South African Trade Unions, the South African Allied Workers Union, the General Workers Union, the Food and Canning Workers Union, the General and Allied Workers Union, and the Council of Unions of South Africa. These large and important democratic trade unions are among the most potent organizations for mass struggle. They have been subject to the widest range of and brutal suppression and their leaders have been systematically banned or arrested.

A thorough and concise section is devoted to the ANC, the leading force of national liberation, which followed a strategy of nonviolent resistance for almost half a century after its formation in 1912 and only developed a military wing after the organization was banned in 1960. The ANC is identified as a broad non-racial movement of all democratic elements pledged to the overthrow of the apartheid state. In the same chapter comparable space is devoted to other important organizations, many of which, however, proved less resilient than the ANC to government suppression. Among these count the South African Communist Party, the Pan Africanist Congress, the Black Consciousness Movement and the three key democratic groups based in the Indian community, with roots dating back to the formation of the Natal Indian Congress by Mahatma Gandhi in 1984.

Important sections describe the numerous groups that grew around local issues such as rent stabilization and self-government, often in direct defiance of the government-imposed "Community Councils," and which proved crucial in the politicizing of the urban areas, including Soweto's Committee of Ten, the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization, and the Cape Areas Housing Action Committee. The student organizations also receive extensive coverage. Very often it has been the students who have known how to risk the most, leading the struggle and bearing the brunt of goverment violence. Women's organizations are treated extensively and separately. The largest, the Federation of South African Women, was formed not only to join in the struggle against apartheid but also in recognition of the need to identify and organize around issues that particularly affect working-class women and to combat sexism within the other popular organizations. The women's anti-pass campaign of the late 1950s was the most important catalyst for the broad anti-pass movement that dominated the mass struggle in the years immediately before and after the Sharpeville massacre.

It is only by reading one after another the records of so many different kinds of groups that the true scale of the struggle becomes apparent.

The importance of the democratic white opposition to apartheid is also carefully examined. The degree to which democratic whites have been integrated into the trade union movement was dramatically highlighted by the mass response of workers to the death in detention of Dr. Neil Aggett in February 1982. Groups like the National Union of South African Students represent the major leftwing forces within English-language universities. COSAWR (the Committee on South African War Resistance) provides practical assistance and advice to war resisters. (Between 1978 and 1982, over 5,000 persons were prosecuted for failing to report for military service.) Black Sash, an organization comprising mainly white women in opposition to apartheid, has built a network of Pass Law Advice Centers to assist African men and women caught in the web of pass law violation. At various times, as when the Congress of Democrats was formed in 1953, groups have also been formed in direst response to a call by the ANC for whites to join a body which would work in close cooperation with liberation movements and recruit white support for ANC policies.

To have conceived of a book on South Africa which presents the lives of organizations and does not concentrate on individual leaders or specific ideologies can be seen as a boldly imaginative act. Reading this book, one finds that its premise grows persuasive, that the political power in South Africa rests in the mass organizations--bodies which cannot be incarcerated or killed.

COPYRIGHT 1987 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group