CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 3: REVIEW OF SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
3.3 HISTORY OF DEMOBILISATION OF THE INTERNAL ANTI-APARTHEID MOVEMENT
It is necessary to cast an eye back to the last days of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa in order to understand the roots of present-day protests. In the previous chapter we noted the debate in the field of "transitology" where one side argues that the higher the level of
activation of civil society, the deeper and more wide-ranging the process of democratisation (Cho, 2008). During the build-up to the new order and immediately after its realisation there was a marked lowering of mass action and civil society activation in the country (Ballard, et 01.
2006a, Seekings, 2000). Some key actors during the transitions imply that demobilisation was a conscious political project, associated with Nelson Mandela's reconciliation project, and
implemented to ease in the new order and avert a civil war that threatened to engulf the country then (Naidoo, 2010). The violence that characterised those times is proffered as
corroboration for this thesis (ibid). But this thesis requires some interrogation in the light of the
"transitology" debate on the relationship between the levels of civil society activation and of democratisation.
The argument for the desirability of demobilisation of the anti-apartheid mass movement - to avert violent confrontation - is not convincing. It is worth remembering that the term "black on black violence" was coined by the apartheid state and deployed as propaganda to
undermine the "violent" freedom struggle and project itself as the armed restorer of law and order in the chaotic situation. But subsequent revelations indicate that the apartheid bosses were behind the violence all the time, arming and fomenting violence between the different
"black" groups (Pauw, 1991; Bell and Ntsebenza, 2001). This suggests that the violence was constructed as a mechanism to discourage and suppress high levels of civil society activation (that was pushing for democratic change). Therefore the two phenomena cannot be viewed as identical because in practice one was deployed against the other. The mass democratic movement was largely non-violent, even if one admits of episodic periods and acts of violence (Zunes, et 01. 1999), and its activation of civil society and organisation of mass action should not be evaluated, discouraged and condemned in the same breath as apartheid's state-sponsored violence.
A study of the anti-apartheid movement reveals that "South Africa has ... a heterodox political tradition" including socialist and non-socialist radical democratic ideas that denounced wealth inequality and sought a deeper transformation of society (Beinart and Dawson, 2010, p. 1).
Many of the diverse ideas and organisations that enlivened and informed the anti-apartheid struggle inside the country were however eclipsed or taken over by "the ideological discipline of the ANC. After the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983 and COSATU in 1985, activists increasingly worked within the framework of a national liberation
struggle"(Rosenthal, 2010, p. 12). After successfully securing hegemony over the internal and external anti-apartheid movement, the ANC was well-positioned to wrest political power from
the cornered apartheid regime. But the manner in which this hegemony was secured entailed a tightening of the political opportunity structure and the emergence of a dominant "master frame" making it difficult for certain ideas and practices to thrive. Seekings (2000, p. 290), in his book on the UDF, observes that this organisation "helped to secure the construction of Charterist near-hegemony. Non-Charterist strands of opposition politics were emphatically sidelined." Charterists were supporters of the ANC Freedom Charter or "Congress" line. The civic and labour movements increasingly followed the political lead of the ANC on the good grounds that unity was "essential in negotiating an end to apartheid" (Beinart and Dawson, 2010, p. 12).
The ANC hegemony interrupted a process of growth and development of the mass democratic movement constricting the diverse and expansive goals of the movement into arguably a powerful focus on "freedom and unity" (Beinart and Dawson, 2010, p. 12). Had the process been left alone, on the other hand, it would have continued to slowly and unevenly develop concrete ideas and practices around the social and institutional arrangements that would become key components of the new post-apartheid society. For example, the UDF attempted to develop aspects of a counter-hegemonic project when it initiated its "people's power"
strategic framework and the related "people's education" project (Seekings, 2000). It also developed a vision of participatory democracy that it wanted implemented in post-apartheid society that was based on a rejection of representative democracy because "parliamentary- type representation in itself represents a very limited and narrow idea of democracy" (UDF statement quoted in Seekings, 2000, p. 295). The repression of the 1986 State of Emergency frustrated the UDF's "generative" political initiatives compelling it, for example, to "accept both the ANC's lead in embracing negotiations and the goal, at least initially, of a representative democracy for all South Africans" (Seekings, 2000, p. 296). But "even before its accession to formal power ... the strategies and tactics of the UDF were not adopted by the ANC" (ibid, p.
32). Ultimately this resulted in political outcomes that arguably fundamentally diverged from the vision of some of UDF leader in the mid-80s of "the form of post-apartheid
democracy"(ibid, p~ 295).
By 1990 the movement had been severely weakened or de mobilised leading to the lament that:
"If the formal transition had begun in mid-1986, rather than early in 1990, the impulse towards a more participatory form of democracy would have been far stronger, for better or worse"
(Seekings, 2000, p.296). The contrast between developments in 1986 and 1990 marks, I would argue, the beginning of the de mobilisation process or lull in the latter year. Much later, a trade union leader who became the cabinet minister in charge of the short-lived RDP office, appears to corroborate this view:
In the process of tackling so many challenges, we robbed the country of an enormous contribution that all other sections of society could make. Government would give people jobs, houses, social security, schools and clinics and knew what was right for the citizenry. People who had participated in the fight for change now became passive bystanders" (Naidoo, 2010, p. 240).
It can be argued that the argument above proves less the (physical) demobilisation of the workers' movement than the pruning of its radical ideas and the quashing of the (creative) political ferment that appeared to grip wide sections of the population. If this is indeed true then I am willing to stand by that aspect of my argument that emphasises an ideological shift by the movement away from fundamental (counter-hegemonic) transformation into the present order, an outcome which the burgeoning protest movement suggests is far from satisfactory from the point of view of the majority of people in the country. Jacquin's (1999) study of the political dynamics in relation to the labour movement suggests a similar process whereby this component of the workers' movement had its radical-socialist aspirations and plans severely pruned and scuttled during the democratic transition. There was a decrease in the number of strikes that can be contrasted to the steady increase that began about the year 2000 and rising up to the 2010 pinnacle.