The Insurrectionary Schema, 1986
By 1986 those in the ANC calling loudest for the adoption of an insurrectionary strategy - individuals like Kasrils, Maharaj (though less bluntly) and a group of middle-senior operational officials - predominated in debates over operational strategy. They argued that the notion of ‘people’s war’ as aprotracted phenomenon had been undermined by the intensity of the uprisings, by the growing divisions among whites and by the likelihood (as they saw it) that black members of the state’s security forces must soon defect to the cause of black liberation and the ANC in significant numbers. To the extent that they still talked of ‘people’s war’, they conceived of it as being solely a gathering of forces for national insurrection, in the course of which the vast majority of people were drawn into rebellion against the state, with armed struggle their main form of engagement.
The insurrectionary tendency was alone in attempting to incorporate the new forms of struggle being developed on the ground inside South Africa systematically into a strategic schema in which the ANC might play a directive role. Other identifiable strategic tendencies within the ANC were, each for its own reasons, less concerned about the details of developments inside the country. Slovo was the foremost exponent of a different insurrectionary strain, which seemed to hold that insurrections were, for all intents and purposes, spontaneous phenomena; that no revolutionary movement either had led, or could lead, an insurrection or determine a revolutionary ‘moment’; therefore Kasrils’ and others’ stress on preparing a revolutionary vanguard in order to provide leadership at the moment of insurrection was largely misdirected. Another tendency, identified most closely with MK’s commander, Joe Modise, believed no change was necessary to ANC strategy and its practice. And a fourth tendency was barely concerned with the details of armed or popular struggles. Its thinking seemed based on an assumption that it was no longer possible to formulate a credible revolutionary strategy for South Africa; ostensibly revolutionary developments were important only to the extent that they might induce the state to negotiate with the ANC.
The insurrectionary tendency around individuals like Kasrils ascribed a role in its schema to phenomena like street committees, rent and consumer boycotts and strike action. Kasrils explains:
[T]he people themselves, during the period 1983-1986, were creating their own rudimentary organs of people’s power. They were creating street committees. They were creating people’s courts. They were beginning to create self-defence units. Of course, on perceiving this, we would...give them a lead in our propaganda, would give instruction, would tell them: this is what to do; this is the way forward.
The ANC gave these autonomous creations the legitimacy of its sanction and - often wrongly - the impression that it had originated them. But there was still no indication that the ANC underground could provide a significant level of tactical guidance to the uprisings. The ANC found itself leading - and still having to lead - from behind.
The insurrectionist tendency identified a central role for the street committees (small committees elected to represent the civic interests of residents of a street). The tendency believed a street committee had the potential to be ‘clandestine and semi-clandestine organ[s] for mass participation in insurrectionary tactics’. Street committees offered a form of popular structure within which the underground could reproduce itself and through which the ANC might draw millions into its campaigns. Since street committee members were well known to each other, street committees might also close off opportunities for enemy intelligence penetration. The ANC did not, however, see street committees asANC organs. It was keen that they should reflect a broad range of political opinion to which its underground would provide leadership.
The tendency reasoned that a nationwide system of street committees and their rural equivalent, village committees (elected village representatives), could facilitate simultaneous popular insurrection over a vast area, perhaps making security force containment impossible. Moreover, a sound street committee system with underground leadership might indeed constitute a ‘mass revolutionary base’ or a ‘mass insurrectionary zone’. These zones or bases might mitigate the lack of reliable external bases and provide the ANC with a form of liberated zone where the enemy increasingly finds it difficult to deploy either puppets or agents, where its liberty to move through those areas at least is restricted to daylight hours and moving in force with all the limitations that [this] would place on it... [The townships could be] a form of liberated zone...of great strategic importance...because of their geographic locality...closer to the industrial heartlands than the white cities, the army bases, etc. So it is not like the peasantry, which is very removed - let’s say in the Zimbabwean situation - from the really important strategic targets of the economy in particular.
In this sense, the insurrectionary tendency conceived of street and villages committees not merely as ‘organsof people’s power’ at the local level , but also as organsfor the seizure of people’s power at the national level.
The tendency also re-examined political strike action. It believed political strike action could extend beyond withdrawal of labour to include seizure of factory premises and plant. Whatever historical precedents the insurrectionists found for this, the seed of their thinking was a strike tactic developed by some trade union members from 1985. Calledsiyalala la (or, ‘we sleep here’), the tactic amounted to sleep-in strikes at, or orderly occupation of, factories.
For the workers who originatedsiyalala la, the tactic had a number of advantages. It helped avoid mass dismissals and harassment outside factory gates; it was an obstacle to managements’ attempts to hire alternative work forces; it allowed workers to exercise more control over their situation than a conventional strike; and it fostered greater solidarity among strikers. When originated, the tactic was not intended to facilitate seizures of premises or plant. But, for the ANC’s insurrectionists, this potential was its true significance. Joel Netshitenze, who was running PMC internal propaganda in 1986, recalls how strategy discussions concluded that thesiyalala la phenomenon indicated the existence of a new mood among workers - one of ‘the workers in and the bosses out’... [I]t had the potential for insurrectionary action at a level...never seen before in the struggle, and signified the development of consciousness among workers with the potential to contribute decisively to insurrection.
It seemed, to the insurrectionists, to provide a way in which workers could aggressivelyproject their power beyond security force containment into the industrial zones and ‘white areas’.
Kasrils, had, since early 1986, talked of forming workers’ militias. Among other advantages, militias could help overcome one of MK’s main weaknesses - the fact that it consisted almost entirely of former students or unemployed youth. Apart from the probable greater maturity of their members, workers’ militias might also better project MK activity into the strategically important industrial zones. Kasrils, head of ANC military intelligence at the time, recalls how his thinking on this was influenced by the Bolsheviks’ experience (or by a particular account of it):
Lenin and the Bolsheviks...learned...that what was required for discipline and greater efficacy was to organise factory-based combat forces. Those that emerged from the streets tended...to be led by anarchistic elements... It’s out of the factories, then, that the combat forces of the Bolsheviks grew, of course side by side with the major Bolshevik armed forces which were those within the Czarist army. So, for us, a lesson of 1983-1986 [was] clearly to develop our underground and our combat forces within the factories, within the industrial zones, and not simply [to] confine it to the townships...
In the evolving schema, the domestic underground was to be assigned the main role in developing these forces and tactics, and in combining them. But the underground remained pitifully weak, notwithstanding the ANC’s huge and growing popular support. Still comprising only a few hundred people, the underground remained divided into separate political and military components. Strachan estimates that in late 1986, the underground was no stronger or better able to provide leadership inside the country than it had been before the onset of the uprisings in September 1984.
The Kabwe conference had decided in June 1985 that area-based underground command structures, area political military committees (APMCs), should be established. But, a year later, few, if any, APMCs existed.This meant that externally based regional political military committees (RPMCs) - in Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zimbabwe - were still trying, across heavily policed borders, to oversee almost all political and military operations inside the country. Strachan, secretary of the Zimbabwe RPMC, notes that this was ‘extremely difficult’; lines of communications were long, slow and insecure.
The ideal underground conjured up by the ANC insurrectionist tendency should be able to coordinate all clandestine domestic political, military, ordinance, logistics, communications, security and intelligence work at regional level, as envisaged in the area political committee (APC) document of 1981 (see Figure 4), and eventually at national level as well; and it should also have a presence in, and be able to bring together almost all popular anti-apartheid forces - from political organisations, unions, street and village committees, defence committees, combat units of militants and workers’ militias. In sum, the underground was supposed to oversee development of the forces for, and eventually lead, an insurrectionary assault along the lines dictated by the Military and Combat Work (MCW) doctrine. Kasrils implied this quite clearly in an article in the ANC’s official organ,Sechaba, in May 1986. The approach was, as the interviewer noted and Kasrils conceded, ‘quite a way’ from classical notions of guerilla warfare in peasant societies.
By mid-1986, the insurrectionist, MCW-based schema had achieved ascendancy among ANC operational personnel - if only because of the strategic vacuum bequeathed by the Kabwe conference and the enthusiasm of its advocates. Moreover, against the background of the conspicuous operational failure of the past, the MCW approach had the advantage of a clear organisational framework, compared to the chronicad hoc appearance of most MK attacks in the past.
Leading proponents - such as Kasrils, Maharaj, Pillay and Strachan - were apparently serious about wanting to build the kind of underground that might in some senselead an insurrection. To others in the ANC, insurrection was attractive for the opposite reason: because of the way it seemed to free the exiled ANC leadership from most strategic responsibilities and place the burden for developing the forces and tactics for revolution on to people inside the country, many of whom acted in the ANC’s name. Between these two tendencies and the realisation of insurrection lay not merely a powerful and highly organised enemy but also organisational and strategic habits and assumptions of 25 years, together with a large section of the ANC leadership.
The National Security Management System
As the uprisings continued, the ANC failed to mount a breakthrough. ‘Insurrectionary zones’, which developed mainly under the ANC’s banner in Alexandra township in northern Johannesburg, the Crossroads squatter camp near Cape Town and in the Kangwane bantustan , could not be sustained. In each case, the state was able to isolate, contain and eventually neutralise the local insurrectionary forces.
The state’s decision on June 12 1986, as the 10th anniversary of the Soweto uprising approached, to impose a second state of emergency, this time covering the entire country except the nominally independent bantustans, worsened the ANC’s operational problems. During the emergency, security forces detained an estimated 25,000 people under emergency regulations (with an average 5,000 people in detention on any one day), more than half of them associated with the UDF and its affiliate organisations. A further 2,840 people were detained in South Africa and the nominally independent bantustans under standing security legislation in the course of 1986. These detentions narrowed down the pool of people from whom MK combatants could hope to get shelter and other forms of assistance.
The state also continued to expand a counter-insurgency innovation introduced in late 1984 - a clandestine system of politico-military security management conceived in 1979, the year after P W Botha became prime minister. The national security management system, as it was known, came under the command of the state security council (SSC), the most powerful of four cabinet standing committees, which was chaired by President Botha himself. Serving the SSC were 12 interdepartmental committees covering most areas of civilian administration, whose task it was to ensure that state policy in all civilian areas of government serviced national security imperatives.
The implementation structures of the NSMS comprised a network of joint management centres (JMCs), each responsible for a particular region of South Africa. These JMCs coordinated a total of about 60 sub-JMCs, responsible for smaller designated areas. Each sub-JMCs, in its turn, coordinated a number of mini-JMCs, each responsible for a particular township or local authority area. Each JMC, sub-JMC and mini-JMC had three committees: one dealing with intelligence; on assessing political, economic and social developments in its area; and a third overseeing propaganda and publicity work within its particular region or area. Each brought together local military and police officers, administrators, local government representatives and businessmen. It provided for direct lines of communication between junior officials serving in townships and the highest level of government. Large or small security force deployments could be readily decided by officers serving on sub- or mini-JMCs, or by fairly speedy reference to higher authority.
The NSMS resembled France’s establishment ofSection Administrative Speciale (SAS) from 1955 in its war against the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria. The SAS assumed politico-administrative duties, combined with operational responsibilities, to fill the vacuum created by unrest and war. As with theguerre revolutionaire doctrine, the NSMS tried to integrate political and military command at every level of society to serve the counter-revolutionary objective.
The NSMS was, in a sense, a programme to construct a politico-militarycounter-underground organised on a national and regional basis. It sought to achieved a level of integration (albeit under military predominance) also long sought, but never realised, by the ANC.
Armed Activity
After the declaration of a state of emergency in June 1986, state security forces gradually re-established intelligence penetration into, and basic security control over, areas affected by unrest. The ANC and MK could not spread insurrectionary pressures beyond scattered localities and, so, could not attenuate security forces to any significant degree. As the state rolled back the unrest, MK’s casualty rate rose sharply.
Some MK combatants infiltrated in Operation Zikomo and subsequently had managed to establish links with township and other militants. Security police report an unspecified increase over previous years in the number of people (263) arrested in 1986 on suspicion of being internal MK recruits, members of MK support machineries or of recruiting others for MK. As the high rate of MK infiltration continued in 1986, the number of guerilla attacks underwent a further increase, to a total of 231. A third of these attacks were against police personnel and stations, SA Defence Force personnel and state witnesses in political trials. But, while the total number of attacks for 1986 represented a 70% increase on the total for 1985, the rate of security force neutralisations of guerillas rose even more steeply - to, or a 500% increase on the previous year, as security forces improved their position. MK’s success rate thus dropped from only 3 guerilla neutralisations for every 13 attacks in 1985 back to four guerilla neutralisations for every five attacks.
MK’s ability to deliver ordinance securely to township battle fronts was also limited in 1986. Whereas police reported 76 instances in which hand grenades were detonated, they captured or recovered nearly seven times that many (530). The rate of capture of other ordinance was also high during 1986.
These casualties and losses indicate that, whereas the ANC and MK had been able to exploit a breakdown in security force control between late 1985 and early 1986, they were unable in that period to develop inside South Africa mechanisms of organisation to protect their own personnel and military capacity. There had been noqualitative improvement in the ANC’s capacity to locate an armed presence inside the country.
The emergency measures also appear to have helped reduce the number of incidents of popular political violence, or ‘unrest’, according to police statistics. Whereas in 1985, there had been 16,396 incidents of ‘unrest in which murder or other illegal acts of violence were perpetrated’, the figure dropped to 13,663 (down by 17%) in 1986. By 1987, the street insurrection was, effectively, at an end: the total number of incidents of unrest for the year dropped to 4,140 (down by 75% on 1985, or by 70% on 1986).
Strategic Hiatus and the Genesis of ‘Operation Vula
As 1986 drew towards its close, operationally the ANC was stuck in a profound strategic hiatus, if not crisis. Across the gamut of its operational activities, it showed no sign of a breakthrough, although conditions were more favourable than at any time since the resort to armed struggle in 1961.
Having been unprepared for the uprisings that had broken out in September 1984, two years later the ANC was no closer to being able to give them tactical direction. Its biggest-ever infiltration of military cadres - under Operation Zikomo - had been only a short-term and, ultimately, an illusory success. The ‘grenade squad’ concept, which might have provided a bridge between MK and township militants, had been destroyed through a mixture of mismanagement and security force penetration. The land mine campaign to destabilise the border areas had achieved little more than increased security force deployments and vigilance in these areas and cause neighbouring state’s acute embarrassment. The ANC’s tactical influence over street committees and other rudimentary forms of alternative government which emerged to replace displaced official local government structures was largely rhetorical. And the state was able to concentrate its forces and isolate, contain and re-establish control over areas of unrest with the use of only a fraction of its total capability.
Elsewhere, in basically non-operational areas, the ANC’s efforts were better rewarded. In the realm of popular politics, the UDF, the stayaway in November 1984 and the formation of Cosatu and the activities of its unions embodied real, not merely symbolic, threats to white minority political and economic domination. Moreover, they revealed the considerable potential for the involvement of millions of people in a challenge to state power. Diplomatically, the ANC skilfully addressed different audiences to its own advantage: it persuaded elements in the white South African establishment that it was a serious and mature contender for power; it cemented alliances with a number of other anti-apartheid organisations, broadening its political base and raising its profile in the process; and it harmonised with the tone of international concern over South Africa set by the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group.
Since the mid-1980s, the ANC’s declared intention had been to combine different areas, or ‘pillars’, of struggle - underground political activity, armed struggle, popular campaigning and diplomatic pressure against the Pretoria government. In 1986, the two weakest pillars remained those for which the ANC was most directly responsible: the pillars of operational strategy - the political underground and MK. Indeed, in late 1986, as the most favourable operational conditions the ANC had ever experienced began to recede, neither of these pillars could be said to constitute a credible element of revolutionary strategy. Tacitly, this view was, it seems, quite widespread within the ANC leadership. But a handful set out to challenge this view and confront, or circumvent, and circumvent anybody who might be an obstacle.
After the Kabwe conference, the ANC executive had begun to meet more frequently, about once every two months. The usual form at these meetings was that, at some stage in proceedings, the PMC’s political and military headquarters would report that they had still not made any significant progress in developing internal underground structures. The occasional claim that they had made progress never survived scrutiny. Maharaj recalls he found it a boring thing to have that item [progress in building the underground on the agenda], because all that happens is that, after you show that there is no real progress - whatever the reports that are presented - the discussion shows nothing really dramatic, no qualitative change. The discussion becomes: Well, you had better pull up your socks; ...something’s got to be done; by the next meeting there must be progress. Finish.
No real suggestion is coming forward on how to move forward. Same debate [all the time].
The debates over operational failures invariably ended up considering how best the ANC might remedy the weakness of its underground. Since 1981 and the formulation of the area political committee (APC) concept, there had been a serious body of support in the ANC for the infiltration of senior leadership figures on the grounds that only senior individuals could rebuild the underground. This was particularly relevant to servicing an insurrectionary perspective, which required the combination of many different forms of struggle and, it was thought, hence the exercise of considerable authority. Maharaj believed that, if the ANC had senior leadership inside the country then, whatever the battering the mass organisations took, you had, present there, hidden from the enemy, personnel who were interacting with these forces, who were prepared, even when they were detected, [so that] they could continue to survive and provide leadership. Insurrection cannot be led from afar.
At an NEC meeting in mid-1986, these matters came to a head - but in a way that all but those in on the secret would have found difficult to discern. The ANC leadership had, yet again, been obliged to concede that the PMC had made no substantial operational progress. During a tea break, Maharaj approached a few NEC colleagues. He lobbied them with a proposal. The only way out of the hiatus, he argued, was now to move senior leadership into South Africa to take charge of building the underground as well as of all ANC operations there.
Evidently, Maharaj believed that a senior leadership could be successfully infiltrated into the country and take over the domestic underground only if most members of the NEC were not merely ignorant aboutwhat was happening in their name but unaware thatanything was being done. Security considerations were, formally, one set of reasons for this: how many ANC leaders would ‘need to know’? But it is clear from the way that Maharaj manoeuvred that these security considerations were secondary. They provided a cover behind which Maharaj (and others) could isolate from the envisaged project those in the ANC leadership who they believed were still wedded to old habits: crass militarism, the detonator theory and political-military parallelism.
The challenge before Maharaj, as he lobbied colleagues during the tea break, was to develop an appropriate organisational mechanism to achieve his objectives. This mechanism had to take forward the internal leadership project while isolating most of the ANC leadership from it.
The best way, he concluded, would be the NEC’s establishment of a small subcommittee to oversee the project; the subcommittee should have a completely open mandate and full discretion on which of its activities to report to the NEC, if any, and when to do so. Maharaj considered that ANC president Oliver Tambo, whom he regarded as one of the most creative strategic minds in the ANC, and Joe Slovo, who was beginning to decouple himself from military concerns and involve himself more deeply in the SACP, where he would soon become general secretary, would be the most suitable members of the committee.
Maharaj first took his thinking to Slovo, who was ‘not very impressed’ with the idea. So, according to Maharaj,
I go to Chris [Hani], I go to [Jacob] Zuma. [They say:] ‘Ja, ja, you’ve got a point. I say: ‘It needs a formula to handle this problem.’ So the three of us discuss it. And, when we see that we are in agreement that we should have a small committee made up of the president and probably [Slovo] to take charge of this,...we say: ‘Let’s go and see [Oliver Tambo].’... [Tambo] says: ‘Well, put the proposal to the meeting; let’s see what the meeting says’. So, when we resume, Chris turns up and makes the proposal... Zuma stands up and supports it.
And it is a measure of the NEC that no discussion took place. The meeting just said: ‘Right, agreed’...
The decision is that, in order to send in senior people from NEC level into the country, a special committee, comprising the president [Tambo] and [Slovo] is appointed; their task is to take charge of this type of mission, whether on a short-term or long-term basis; it’s a free hand; they are empowered to conduct this work without reporting to the NEC; they may choose the moment at which they wish to report progress; and they are given a blank cheque...
Apparently dismayed at the inertia of most NEC members response, Tambo intervened to say:
[Y]ou are taking a very serious decision here...[I]t means everybody in this room must be available [to be infiltrated into South Africa]; it means you are giving us those powers.
Maharaj was appalled: Tambo seemed to be insisting upon active NEC participation in the project - precisely what he wanted to avoid. So Maharaj then interjected:
Look, this is a very sensitive task and I think it should be left to volunteers; nobody should feel pressured.
But Tambo was very reluctant to let NEC members get away with their silence. In the end, however, according to Maharaj, the issue of NEC members’ being willing to return to South Africa doesn’t become integral to the resolution... The decision is that [Tambo] and [Slovo] have a blank cheque. They can command; they can choose to call volunteers. It is up to them.
The NEC decision Maharaj describes was the genesis of ‘OperationVul’indlela’, more widely known as ‘OperationVula’.
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