The ANC Political Underground in the 1970S
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The ANC Political Underground in the 1970s By Gregory Houston and Bernard8 Magubane We knew that the ANC was operating because we could hear that this person was being charged in Durban, in Cape Town, in Grahamstown, and so on. We would always hear from the papers of ANC activity. We heard about the operations in which ANC guerrillas were involved with the fascist police and soldiers in Zimbabwe, as they were trying to go back home to begin the war of liberation in South Africa. From time to time there were ANC pamphlets and journals which we used to get and we saw very little of any underground activity except by the ANC.1 This chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section the focus is on the underground political work of individuals and small groups of people based inside South Africa. We begin by looking at the activities in the early 1970s of internal underground activists in ANC networks that were initiated during the second half of the 1960s, with a focus on the Johannesburg area. This is followed by case studies of individuals who became involved in underground activities by linking up with ANC activists based inside the country or those in exile. We also focus on the activities of a few individuals who decided to take the initiative to become involved in underground political work without linking up with any of the liberation movements. These case studies are based on the life histories of a few selected people in an attempt to demonstrate some of the distinguishing characteristics of participation in internal underground activities. Although the Johannesburg area is our focus, the ANC underground spread its tentacles nationally. We can only examine certain areas, such as Durban and Cape Town, to illustrate a national trend. Finally, a study is made of one of the most significant underground networks, the Soweto-based network led 1 ‘How June 16 Demo was Planned’, interview with Tebello Motapanyane, January 1977, in Sechaba, vol. 11, Second Quarter, 1977, 52. 371 372 The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 2 by John Nkadimeng, Joe Gqabi and others. Other areas of internal underground political activity are dealt with in chapters 10 and 11. In the second section of the chapter we focus on the role of the ANC’s structures in exile in facilitating the development of an internal political underground. We begin by looking at attempts by the External Mission to initiate the development of an ANC political underground inside South Africa by sending individuals and groups into the country in the period from 1970 to 1973. This is followed by an examination of the activities of the ANC from 1973 onwards in the countries bordering on South Africa, in order to develop an internal political underground. A study is also made of the role of propaganda activists, as well as that of ANC activists and groups in the establishment of new political organisations towards the end of the decade. Internal efforts to establish an ANC political underground in the 1970s Some political activists maintain that in the 1970s there was a political ‘vacuum’ and people ‘were cut off from … the history of struggle … before us’, as a result of ‘the banning of people’s organisations in the 60s’.2 Ronnie Kasrils recalls that many of the young people he met in the MK camps in the late 1970s, most of whom were born in the first half of the 1960s, were ‘blank about the history of the struggle, the role of the ANC, of MK in the earlier period’.3 Such statements lead to the mistaken conclusion that the ANC failed to conduct any meaningful underground political work inside the country during the decade. A closer examination, however, of the early 1970s disproves any perception that the ANC had been crushed by the apartheid regime. Despite innumerable difficulties, including extensive repression, a number of efforts were made by people inside the country to revive ANC underground structures, including the establishment of cells and underground networks that carried out a variety of revolutionary tasks. These ranged from the political tasks of organisation, to political education and propaganda, to the military tasks of recruitment for training abroad and to providing military training to recruits. Internal ANC underground activists during the early 1970s The initiatives for internal underground political work during the first half of the decade came mainly from people who remained inside South Africa. Although banned, they remained loyal to the ANC. Joe Matthews put it as follows: [W]e always make a terrible mistake of thinking that the ANC is those who were visible in exile. But we left hundreds of thousands of people, ANC 2 Interview with Murphy Morobe conducted by Julie Frederickse. Cited in Julie Frederickse, The Unbreakable Thread: Non-racialism in South Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 162. 3 University of the Western Cape (hereafter UWC), Robben Island Museum-Mayibuye Centre (hereafter Mayibuye Centre), MCA 12–1308, Interview with Ronnie Kasrils conducted by Howard Barrell, 19 August 1989, Lusaka. The ANC Political Underground in the 1970s 373 members, here in South Africa … [A]nd we forget that all the activists of the movement were basically in the country …. So there were people ready, always, to serve.4 For instance, Joyce Sikakane, who had been active in an ANC underground initiated by Winnie Mandela in Soweto during the 1960s,5 continued working underground on her release from detention in September 1970. One of her immediate tasks was to link up with the leaders of the newly formed South African Students Organisation (SASO). In early 1971 Sikakane was called to a meeting in Durban with Steve Biko, Rick Turner and Griffiths Mxenge to discuss ‘how to take things forward.’ ‘Steve Biko really sought out the ANC activists, plus the leadership,’ she says. She was one of the people working in the ANC underground inside the country who ‘didn’t find it problematic to talk to Steve Biko, Barney Pityana, Harry Nengwekhulu and the others’.6 These contacts were to prove useful later. Sikakane also claims that before she left the country she formed ‘women cells in Soweto’. Although these were not official ANC cells, they comprised people such as Nkosazana Dlamini (now Dlamini-Zuma), Mamphele Ramphele, Brigitte Mabandla and Tabela Nqubeka (now Mangena), and Sikakane used the cells to advocate ‘the ANC cause’. She left the country in 1972 after receiving information from the External Mission to leave the country because ‘we were going to be detained. And they sent a woman to come and tell me this. And they said Steve Biko should be out. This girl went to tell Steve. Steve refused to go. Harry Nengwekhulu had to be out. Barney Pityana had to be out. They resisted, but eventually Barney Pityana left, and Harry Nengwekhulu left. But Steve flatly refused. And I left.’ Because of her earlier contacts with the leaders of SASO, Sikakane was sent to Botswana in early 1974 as part of a reception committee for a delegation of SASO and Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) leaders that was to meet with Thabo Mbeki, Chris Hani and other leaders of the ANC. The day before the meeting was to take place, 1 February 1974, Abraham Tiro, who was part of the SASO delegation, was killed by parcel bomb. The meeting was abandoned. Samson Ndou, Elliot Shabangu, Rita and Lawrence Ndzanga and other members of the network initiated by Winnie Mandela also continued with their underground work after their release from detention. Despite being banned, Ndou recalls that this did not ‘stop us and we continued our underground work’.7 His main task was to recruit people to the ANC underground and provide them with political education, particularly on the Freedom Charter. The emphasis at this stage was on political work to keep the ANC name alive by addressing meetings of youth structures, having discussions with select groups of youth, and recruiting youths for the ANC 4 Interview with Joe Matthews conducted by Bernard Magubane and Gregory Houston, 9 March 2004, Pretoria, SADET Oral History Project. 5 Refer to Gregory Houston, ‘The Post-Rivonia ANC and SACP Underground’, in South African Democracy Education Trust (hereafter SADET) (eds), The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 1 (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2004), 643–59. 6 Interview with Joyce Sikakane conducted by Gregory Houston, 23 April 2002, Pretoria, SADET Oral History Project. 7 Interview with Samson Ndou conducted by Siphamandla Zondi, 21 May 2001, Thoyandou, SADET Oral History Project. 374 The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 2 underground. The arrest of these activists in 1969 and subsequent trials transformed them into community heroes. Ndou recalls: ‘If you are banned, you are restricted … you are a hero within your community.’ Thus, when the Soweto uprising took place, Ndou was one of the members of the community who was able to play a leadership role. He recalls that during the course of the uprising they were widely consulted by the community, ‘who wanted to find a way of controlling the situation’. Ndou felt that the underground needed to ‘channel [the uprising] towards the mainstream of our struggle’. They began to have contact with individual students involved in the struggle, ‘trying to find, you know, that this anger should be channelled into a positive direction. And we were succeeding, you know … And we kept having contacts also, with the students, who were members, individual students, who started towards, you know, the direction [of the ANC].’ This network played a central role in facilitating the departure of young people during the course of the uprising, particularly to Botswana, where they had contact with Isaac Makopo and Keith Mokoape.