Now is the Time for the World to Know - PART V

International Dimensions and White Discord

The gravest shock to the state and whites during 1985 came not from the ANC or its supporters. Instead, it came as a by-product of the unrest in the form of the international response.

In late July and August, the state suffered a series of bewildering international setbacks. Concerned at instability in South Africa and pressures for disinvestment, Chase Manhattan Bank decided to stop rolling over some US$500-million in loans to South Africa, choosing instead to recall credits as they became due and to freeze all unused lines of credit. A number of Pretoria’s other major commercial lenders, a cluster of whose loans were due for repayment, responded in similar vein. The Commission of the European Economic Community called for economic sanctions against South Africa unless the government rejected apartheid; 10 EEC states withdrew their ambassadors from Pretoria; the French government unilaterally announced a ban on investment in South Africa; and the United States House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favour of sanctions against South Africa.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s response in the last week of July was described as a ‘bloodbath’, as market capitalisation dropped 9.5% and the rand’s international value plunged 12%. The South African government was in a ‘panic’, according to Professor Sampie Terblanche, an academic economist and government advisor at the time.

This sudden deterioration in South Africa’s international position elicited a bellicose response from President Botha, which shocked local commerce and industry. Botha threatened to repatriate 1.5-million migrant workers from neighbouring states and to cut back economic ties with them unless the international community abandoned moves towards sanctions.

Government advisers urged a more measured response and were encouraged in the second week of August when pre-publicity on a speech by Botha suggested he would announce the abandonment of apartheid and ‘cross the Rubicon’ into a new non-racial future. Local and international expectations were high. But, on August 15, Botha delivered a finger-wagging harangue against the international community, the ANC and SACP. Confidence in South Africa on international capital markets plummeted and the rand’s value hitting an all-time low, 21 percent down on its end-July setting. In thoughtful quarters of the government, panic became near despair.

To the ANC’s basically moral arguments for South Africa’s economic isolation had suddenly been added an apparently more compelling imperative: South Africa appeared a poor-risk investment. For Tambo, this dove-tailed with ANC attempts to render South Africa ungovernable and apartheid unworkable.

The Formation of Cosatu

The Transvaal stayaway of November 1984 and the SACP’s re-orientation towards domestic working class organisation prompted an ANC reappraisal of relations with the emergent unions. The ANC and SACP felt that an anomalous situation had developed. There was growing support for the ANC and SACP in Fosatu, and the federation was increasing its involvement in popular political campaigns. Moreover, hardline members of Fosatu’s independent worker tendency doubted that political developments allowed them to isolate themselves any longer from the nationalist movement. Yet the ANC, SACP and Sactu were endorsing only the poorly-organised UDF-affiliated unions. This was needlessly limiting ANC, SACP and Sactu influence as trade union unity talks were on the verge of producing a larger federation from which the UDF-affiliated unions were likely to be excluded.

The SACP moved decisively. Via its trade union arm, Sactu, in late 1984, it endorsed industrial over general workers’ unions. Although this was an endorsement only of the organising strategy of Fosatu and its allies, it seemed to promise a more fundamental shift. This came when, in early 1985, the SACP and Sactu bluntly instructed the UDF unions to make whatever compromises were necessary to ensure they were part of the new super-federation when it was formed.

But some underground members of the ANC, SACP and Sactu were suspicious of this new political line coming from the external mission. These members, believing that the envisaged super-federation threatened Sactu and the entire ANC-led alliance, tried to resuscitate Sactu publicly inside South Africa in early 1985.One of the key movers was Oscar Mpetha, one of the UDF’s three national president’s and a former leader of the Food and Canning Workers’ Unions. Mpetha and most of the rebels were, however, soon faced down. Those who continued to oppose the new line were sidelined from ANC and SACP organisation on the orders of the external mission leadership - however proud the role that some, like Samson Ndou, had played in the past. After the defeat of the rebels, progress towards a new federation including the UDF-affiliated unions was quick. Fosatu was, clearly, its foundation.

Most unions in the Council of Unions of South Africa (Cusa) and the small black consciousness-orientated Azanian Confederation of Trade Unions (Azactu) decided not to join the new federation. The exception was the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), led by Cyril Ramaphosa. The largest union in the country, the NUM broke ranks with Cusa in favour of the super-federation, which was eventually formed in November 1985 as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) with 33 founding unions representing more than 460,000 workers.

Cosatu’s formation represented a considerable advance for the ANC and SACP. Its leadership was dominated by individuals who either were, or shortly became, supporters of the ANC alliance or members of its underground. Moreover, it had the potential to deliver organised working class power for revolutionary objectives on a scale unprecedented in South Africa.

Yet Cosatu, in its turn, also had the potential to influence ANC and SACP strategy profoundly - away from the pursuit of violent and revolutionary outcomes. The important role within Cosatu of the former Fosatu unions meant that a basically ‘participationist’ approach to opposition applied. This was an approach which sought measurable gains, in the first instance through negotiations, very often conducted within state-approved fora; resort to strikes and boycotts appeared some way down the list of tactical options. Herein lay an important challenge to the non-participationist and ‘anti-collaborationist’ instincts so dominant among the ANC and its allies.

The Commonwealth Initiative and Negotiations - 

International responses to the crisis also encouraged the ANC to revise its confrontational instincts. Diplomatic developments obliged the ANC to state formally its criteria and conditions for exploring a negotiated settlement in South Africa.

The Commonwealth summit in Nassau in October established a group of eminent persons to encourage a ‘process of political dialogue’ in South Africa.66 It also laid out a list of demands to the South African government whose content complied substantially with those then being developed by the ANC. The summit demanded that Pretoria declare that it would dismantle apartheid and also that it take meaningful action demonstrating this intent; that it end the state of emergency; that it release all political prisoners; that it legalise outlawed parties and ‘establish political freedom’; and that it initiate, in the context of a suspension of violence by all sides, dialogue to establish a non-racial, representative government.

Increased international interest in South Africa was accompanied by a flurry of rumours in late 1985 that the government would shortly release Nelson Mandela and fly him into exile. In the midst of these rumours, in November 1985, the government and the ANC engaged in their first known exchange of signals since the 1960s. The ANC quickly dispatched Maharaj to Botswana to take charge of, and explore, any communications with Pretoria. The exchange, which originated from the government side, followed talks with Mandela in prison. A South African cabinet minister told a prominent anti-apartheid activist, apparently in the expectation that his statement would reach the ANC external mission, that the government knew it could not resolve the burgeoning crisis alone; that it had decided to release Mandela and other political prisoners but was unable to work out a modality for doing so which would enable it to save face; and that current levels of unrest made the release difficult as there was a danger that Mandela’s freedom might further inflame political emotions. The implication was that, if the ANC softened its position and reined in unrest, Mandela might be released and government-ANC talks of one or other kind might be possible. The intermediary told the external mission that the attitude of Mandela and his colleagues in prison was that they would not be drawn into any deals outside the framework of the ANC and the broad democratic movement.

The external mission’s response, through the intermediary, was to raise the stakes. The ANC signalled that it was waiting for the government to create ‘a climate conducive to talks about talks’. To do so, the government should release all political prisoners, lift the state of emergency, withdraw troops from the townships, release all emergency detainees and immediately terminate current security law trials. The ANC added that it would have to be able to consult with its domestic allies before it could engage in any substantive communications with the government. In effect, the ANC was holding out for safe passage into South Africa of a delegation comprising members of its national executive committee (NEC).

Publication of the exchange of signals enraged the government, which charged it was a fabrication by ‘propaganda experts from behind the Iron Curtain’. The matter of the cabinet minister’s approach was never satisfactorily explained. The best available subsequent explanation was that a ‘small but influential’ lobby for Mandela’s release surrounded the Justice Minister, Kobie Coetsee; that this lobby’s thinking was that Mandela’s release could ease foreign pressures on South Africa and demythologise Mandela; that this group had overplayed its hand in the preceding weeks; that publicity on its activities had infuriated President Botha; and that the pro-release lobby had been ‘stymied’ by a hardline group in the cabinet.