UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND AFRICAN STUDIES INSTITUTE African Studies Seminar Paper to be presented in RW 7003 (7th floor) at 4.00p.m. MONDAY 8th JUNE 1992 Title: The African National Congress Comes Home. by: Tom Lodge No. 317 ...:,.-. :^,v;*.|>,,,,3 The African National Congress Comes Home Tom Lodge Two years of legal existence have enabled the ANC to acquire 900 branches, 500 000 signed-up members, a 20-storey office block in central Johannesburg, a fresh leadership, a democratic constitution, an elaborate administration, and an annual income which in 1990 topped R90-million. Its homecoming is consequently a story of considerable if uneven achievement. In February 1990, the ANC's leaders were suddenly confronted with the challenge of adapting an authoritarian and secretive movement formed by the harsh exigencies of exile to the requirements of a South African environment shaped by the tumultuous politics of the 1980s. Two years later, the process of changing the ANC into a organisation geared to open and democratic forms of popular mobilisation is far from complete. In 1992 the ANC still struggles to absorb and reconcile the experiences of three generations of leadership: the elderly veterans who emerged from decades of confinement on Robben Island; the middle-aged managers of an insurgent bureaucracy; and, finally, the youthful architects of the most sustained and widespread rebellion in South African history. The exile organisation To understand what the ANC has become in 1992, it is essential to know what kind of organisation it was in 1990. One way of doing this is through investigating its institutional structures and internal procedures. This is the approach which characterises most studies of the exile ANC during the 1980s.1 This literature depicts a most intricate and elaborate organisation which can be represented as an embryonic state - a *government-in-waiting1. It resembled a state in several respects. It ordered the lives of members of a 12 000-strong2 exile community and while doing so performed many of the functions of a modern government. For example, on the ANC's 3 400 acre estate in Morogoro, Tanzania, three schools, a cluster of administrative buildings, a hospital, a furniture factory, a farm and suburban rows of ranch houses provided for the needs of 2 500 South Africans, as well as detachments of Cuban doctors, Nigerian and Swedish nurses and Unesco teachers, not to mention 1 500 pigs and a herd of dairy cattle.3 This community existed quite apart from those which neighboured it in this sparsely populated part of Tanzania, subject to its own governance, laws, and financial provisions. In many Third World countries, ANC leaders were treated with the same courtesies as visiting heads of government and its officials were accorded partial or full diplomatic status; indeed by 1990 its 40 "embassies1 reflected a more widespread foreign * representation' than was maintained by the South African government. With its diplomats, its flag, its press, its radio, its army and its autonomy in regulating the lives of its "citizenry1, to many onlookers the ANC appeared a polity in miniature. Researchers who tried to identify the internal dynamics of this polity emphasised its formal structure, decision-making processes, and communications systems. The ANC in the 1980s was an intensely militarised body. The greater proportion of its recruits from 1976 underwent military training and served as guerillas in South Africa or counter-insurgent fighters in Angola. The best-developed parts of the ANC's organisation were those concerned directly with military matters. Between 1976 and 1990 a shifting hierarchy of appointed committees supplied a command structure and lines of communication for Umkhonto weSizwe combatants. A revolutionary council (renamed in 1983 the politico-military council) laid down overall strategy. This was interpreted operationally by Umkhonto's military headquarters. Directives would be communicated to regional command structures in "forward areas' (Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland/Mozambique). These would be translated into tactical objectives by the "machineries1 which controlled the activities of the guerilla units within different areas of South Africa. In 1985 the ANC established regional and area politico-military committees ("senior organs' or PMCs) in an effort to correct a persistent problem - weak co-ordination between guerilla actions and underground political work. In fact the ANC's specifically political network inside South Africa remained poorly developed until the close of the 1980s. It was unable to achieve its strategic aim of promoting a generalised insurrection. This would have required much more precise orchestration of its insurgent warfare with the wider popular opposition led by the United Democratic Front and the trade unions. In any case, the scope of guerilla activity was much too limited for this; peaking at 281 attacks in 1988 and declining thereafter, it never amounted to more than "armed propaganda1, as ANC spokesmen today readily concede.4 In an effort to improve the ANC's political presence within the country as well as to tighten up political/military liaison, a special "president's committee1 was established in 1987. This dispatched a number of senior leaders into the country who for the next three years endeavoured to construct clandestine organisation in Southern Natal and the Transvaal. "Operation Vula', as it was known, was sufficiently extensive for its achievements to have been recorded on 4 500 pages of computer files, if we accept the police claims made when the leading Vula partisans were captured along with their computer in June 1990. Just before its unbanning, journalists were noting the efficiency of the ANC's propaganda dissemination: "speeches delivered by leaders anywhere in the world are freely available in the country in a few days'.5 Siphiwe Nyanda, one of the Vula leaders, claimed later that "the approach was not to differentiate between combat and political work1, but his testimony suggests that the emphasis was on building political structures.6 In Southern Natal, ANC spokesmen attested later, Vula had established "strong propaganda units' in all the townships. In the view of Jabu Sithole, chairman of Vula's Durban network, the literature distributed in 1989 represented a "crucial input... into the defiance campaign1.7 In addition to its operational structure, the ANC developed a compartmentalised bureaucracy with various departments clustered around the three main nodes of authority; the offices of the president, the secretary and the treasurer. A separate security directorate policed all sections of the organisation including Umkhonto camps and the Morogoro educational complex. A parallel political department fielded commissars entrusted with ideological instruction in military and civilian sections of the organisation alike. Diplomats, journalists and teachers each had their own administrative divisions. Compared to its executive departments, the ANC's representative institutions were rudimentary. In 1985 a national executive committee was elected; to its 30 members, a further five were co-opted in subsequent years. Of the 30 elected members, 22 had belonged to the previous executive. Before the Kabwe consultative conference, the most recent leadership elections were held in 1959.8 At Kabwe, the ANC committed itself to summoning a representative conference at least every five years. In addition to whatever democratic procedures were attached to convening such vconsultative conferences', elected "zonal1 and regional "political committees1 began functioning within those sections of the ANC community which lived outside South Africa itself and the * forward areas'.9 These seem to have been best developed in at the ANC's Tanzanian school, Somafco, where apparently *a battery of committees' each day hammered out policy.10 This is the sort of picture which can be assembled from the academic analyses of the ANC, most of which are broadly sympathetic to the organisation. They describe a highly structured and intensely regulated organisation in which internal functions are subject to codified procedures and routinised processes. It is an ideologically monolithic organisation - disagreements and debates occur over strategic and tactical choices rather than long-term aims.11 What unites leaders is essentially more important than anything that may distinguish them from each other; for example, the extent of affiliation to the Communist Party is considered inconsequential.12 Such, accounts are not altogether uncritical, though; for example, they point to the poor communications which result from sa culture of subterfuge1,13 and they are sensitive to the highly centralised and authoritarian character of ANC leadership. On the whole, though, the emphasis is on the organisation's coherence of purpose, moral integrity and disciplined rule-bound functioning. A sharply contrasting picture emerges from a more recent literature which is characterised by its dependence on ANC dissident sources. A series of leaks from a well-informed source within the ANC supplied the essential information for a number of revelatory articles in the London newsletter, Africa Confidential. This material was subsequently incorporated into a book.14 An emigre Trotskyite journal, Southern African Searchlight, supplied further insiders' testimony, this time from a group of former participants in an Umkhonto mutiny. In these sources, power within the ANC is personal rather than