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The Turn to Armed Struggle

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The Turn to Armed Struggle 01 CHAP 1, 2 new 28/4/04 4:05 pm Page 53 The turn to armed 2 struggle BERNARD MAGUBANE, PHILIP BONNER, JABULANI SITHOLE, PETER DELIUS, JANET CHERRY, PAT GIBBS AND THOZAMA APRIL Who will deny that 30 years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly, on a closed and barred door? What have been the fruits of many years of modera- tion from the government be it National or United Party? No! On the contrary, the past 30 years have seen the greatest number of laws restricting our rights and progress, until today we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all. ALBERT LUTHULI1 A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no resource but to use the methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire. NELSON MANDELA2 The ANC’s institutional commitment to non-violence was deep-seated and long lasting. For some, this amounted to little more than the pragmatic acknowledgement that resorting to armed struggle under prevailing circum- stances was simply impracticable. For many ANC members, however, non-vio- lence was elevated to the status of a principle. All too often, the two view- points blurred into one, and it took repeated outrage and numerous shocks before the resulting axiomatic non-violent consensus was reached. Among some, it took an equal measure of shock and outrage before a col- lective decision to engage in a still relatively muted and restrained form of armed struggle was taken in the second half of 1961. Pressure to move in that direction had been mounting since the Sharpeville massacre and the banning 1 Gerald J Pillay (ed), Voices of Liberation: Albert Luthuli, Vol 1, Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria, 1993, p 47. 2 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, Little, Brown and Co, Boston, 1994, p 144. 53 01 CHAP 1, 2 new 28/4/04 4:05 pm Page 54 THE ROAD TO DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH AFRICA of the ANC and the PAC in April 1960. In June 1961, the balance was tipped in favour of violent resistance by the bloody repression of ANC-led stay-aways. However, expectations that some form of armed struggle might ultimately be necessary had been gestating in the minds of individual Congress members and some outside its ranks for several years prior to that fateful decision. Wal- ter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela were among the first in the ANC’s top leader- ship to contemplate and privately espouse such an option. According to Sisulu, the M-Plan (which envisaged organising street committees) was devised at the time of the Defiance Campaign in 1952-3, in anticipation of the ANC being driv- en underground. At that early stage, he recalled, alternatives to non-violent measures were being considered. In 1953, Sisulu, Duma Nokwe and Henry Makgothi (also known as Squire) were among those invited to attend the World Federation of Democratic Youth Congress in Bucharest (Romania). From there, they went on to Warsaw, the Soviet Union and China. Before his departure, Sisulu ‘had a conversation with Nelson [on] the question of the revolution starting in South Africa’. Upon arrival in Peking, Sisulu ‘got a very powerful group (of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee) to discuss the question of assistance in anticipa- tion of the revolution’.3 Sisulu was admonished rather than encouraged by his hosts, being told that ‘it’s not a point to play with. You have to do it when the conditions are right. You have to be very careful when you do it’. His initial reaction was: ‘Well, they are reluctant, but thereafter I realised they were right.’ When Sisulu returned to South Africa, he reported back on these exchanges to Mandela. From this point on, for Mandela and Sisulu at least, the issue of armed struggle was not a question of whether, but when. Occasionally, these closet sentiments slipped out into the public sphere, as when Mandela addressed a meeting in Sophiatown, in western Johannesburg, in 1953 – one of many gatherings called in protest of the Sophiatown removals. ‘As I spoke,’ he recalled, ‘I grew more and more indignant ... I stepped across the line: I said that the time for passive resistance had ended. That non-vio- lence was a useless strategy and could never overthrow a white minority regime bent on retaining power.’ Mandela was subsequently reprimanded by the ANC executive for the speech but, as he confided in his autobiography, he had indeed privately crossed the line, and remained firm in the view that ‘the policies of the Nation- alists would soon make non-violence an even more limited and ineffective pol- icy’.4 These sentiments struck a chord among a growing sector of the youth. The crowd’s response to Mandela’s speech, he recorded, was ecstatic. Joe 3 Interview with Walter Sisulu, conducted by Philip Bonner and Barbara Harmel, Shell House, Johannesburg, 21 May 1993, Wits History Workshop. The Bonner/Delius/Harmel interviews were originally undertaken for a study of the same subject as this chapter in the 1991-2 period. 54 4 Mandela, 1994, pp 184-5. 01 CHAP 1, 2 new 28/4/04 4:05 pm Page 55 THE TURN TO ARMED STRUGGLE 2 Matthews likewise recalled ‘the general feeling [after the 1952 Defiance Cam- paign] that sooner or later the organisation would be banned’, and the growing realisation that other methods would have to be used in the face of ‘a steady illegalisation of our activities ... step by step ... banning’. Matthews and others recalled wide circulation of communist guerrilla litera- ture in South African political circles, and ‘the undercurrent of admiration for the Vietnam and Algerian struggle’. He particularly remembered one day in 1954 at a political rally at Veeplaas in Port Elizabeth, when the crowd took up ANC Eastern Cape leader Milner Ntsangane’s chant of ‘Dien Bien Phu’ after the climactic defeat of the French by the Viet Cong in a battle of the same name a short while before.5 Raymond Mhlaba (also of Port Elizabeth) remem- bered reading Mao (Tse Tung) and later Cuba; Sisulu read Mao and Liu and Elias Motsoaledi also absorbed Mao.6 Joe Matthews’ library was packed ‘full of guerrilla literature’ when he was detained in 1960. It was from his collection that Mandela famously copied How to be a Good Communist, the subject of a subsequent court appearance. Matthews made the obvious but easily overlooked point that Communist Party members sympathised with communist-led guerrilla struggles elsewhere in the world. He then offered the remarkable aside that at the first Africa Asia Conference at Bandung in 1955, ANC representatives sided with Algeria on the issue of armed struggle; and that at the All African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958, it again endorsed the same principle, in a motion that Matthews and Sisulu had drafted and which, Matthews claimed, all other African coun- tries opposed.7 From the mid-1950s a steady hardening of attitudes can be discerned in sev- eral leading ANC figures. There were many different individual roads to Dam- ascus. Andrew Mlangeni remembered ‘mounting pressure to move away from the non-violent struggle from the mid-1950s, especially after women’s passes’.8 Sisulu recalled youthful semi-gangster elements, such as Joe Modise, who were involved in opposing the Sophiatown removals, urging armed resistance on the ANC leaders during the Treason Trial that started in 1956.9 Wilton Mkwayi from Port Elizabeth cast his mind back to the same trial: ‘Sometimes when things get hot, that will come, especially among Transvalers, that ele- 5 Interview with Joe Matthews, conducted by Philip Bonner, 120 Plein Street, Cape Town, 18 August 1994, Wits History Workshop. 6 Interview with Raymond Mhlaba, conducted by Philip Bonner and Barbara Harmel, Standard House, Port Elizabeth, 27 October 1993; interview with Walter Sisulu; interview with Elias Motsoaledi, conducted by Peter Delius, Wits History Workshop. 7 Interview with Joe Matthews. See also ‘Chief Albert Luthuli: A Tribute’, The South African Communists Speak, Inkululeko Publications, London, 1981, p 360. 8 Interview with Andrew Mlangeni, conducted by Philip Bonner, Shell House, 2 March 1994, Wits History Workshop. 9 Interview with Walter Sisulu. 55 01 CHAP 1, 2 new 28/4/04 4:05 pm Page 56 THE ROAD TO DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH AFRICA ment of tsotsis. We said, “you can’t do that tsotsi-style”. Patrick Molaoa was the head of it. Modise was hot-headed.’10 Raymond Mhlaba, the Port Elizabeth ANC and Communist Party leader, observed: ‘By 1958 I was one of those advocating armed struggle. Most of the others didn’t agree. The Nationalist Party was becoming ruthless. I know I got a pain in my heart when there was a stay-away in 1958 when they started call- ing on soldiers to kick us out of our homes. [I thought] let us fight it out. I start- ed advocating it in all forums. Even in 1958, the majority of ANC leaders thought I was mad.’11 Rural resistance Urban confrontations were probably less significant than collisions in the countryside in prompting a rethink of attitudes towards violence, but general pressure was mounting that would force many to reassess their positions. Rural resistance, which flickered in the 1940s, flared in the 1950s and culmi- nated in major uprisings in Zeerust, Sekhukhuniland and Mpondoland. Less well known, but no less significant, were struggles in Natal and Zululand and elsewhere.
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