A violent flank that fired a blankCivil resistance and armed insurgency in

the struggle against apartheid

Howard Barrell

Delivered: Fletcher Summer Institute, June 2013

Southern Africa, 1984: ANC military infiltration route

ANGOLA

ANC military training camps

Main ANC military infiltration route

ANGOLA

Ronnie Kasrils

Chris Hani

Along the ANC’s main guerilla infiltration route…

.

…on a hill outside

Manzini, Swaziland,

March 1984

.

.

Civil resistance and political-military relationship 1.

 

Erica Chenoweth, Kurt Shock and Maria Stephan* find:

• surveyed 233 insurrections, of which 106 involved civil resistance and 48 simultaneous campaigns of violence;

• Found nonviolent resistance campaigns more than twice as likely to succeed as violent resistance campaigns;  

* See Chenoweth, E. & Stephan, M. (2011) Why civil resistance works. The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict, Columbia University Press; and Shock, K. & Chenoweth, E., (2011) ‘Radical Flank Effects and the Outcomes of Civil Resistance Movements’, paper delivered at the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict, June 2011. 

Civil resistance and political-military relationship 2.

Moreover, Erica Chenoweth, Kurt Shock and Maria Stephan find that:

• when civil resistance and violence deployed in same struggle,

– violent campaign has no positive effect on outcome of civil

resistance struggle – i.e. no positive violent flank effect;

– instead, simultaneous violence has negative effect on civil resistance, although this is ‘not statistically significant’; and

– their findings suggest power of nonviolent resistance struggles lies ‘in their ability to promote widespread support and mobilisation’ whereas violence ‘is often polarizing and makes all forms of protest riskier’. So, presence of violence ‘decreases likelihood of broad-based mass mobilization’.

Civil resistance, South Africa, 1912-1960

• Gandhian tradition

• ANC develops base

• Defiance campaign • Freedom Charter

• Treason trial

• Sharpeville massacre • Resort to arms, 1961

Early ANC thinking on armed struggle 1.

• Ambiguous:– Defensive– Offensive (Guevarist)– The gist of Guevarist strategy

• Key issue in armed revolutionary struggles:

relationship between political and

military forms of struggle

• Other choices in its new strategic discourse:– Trotsky-Lenin insurrectionary model– Attempts to export insurrectionary model – Led to Mao’s protracted people’s war model– But ANC chose Guevarist model which said

military means could politically organise people

politically.

Early ANC thinking on armed struggle 2.• 1960 et seq ANC

disregards political struggle

by political means

• ANC-SACP smashed inside

country by end-1965: only a

handful of people active.

• 1968-69 Wankie, Sipolilo

campaigns

• 1969: ANC says armed

struggle “only” way

• 1965-1976: No armed

struggle inside SA

• But pol. organisation is possible.

Black Consciousness

Movement, black trade unions

Zambia

‘SWA’

Bona

Sipolilo .

Wankie

Mozam

bique

South Africa

‘Rhodesia’(

)

The Soweto Uprising, June 16 1976

1976 uprisings: military frustrations…

• Thousands of youths leave country;

put in ANC military training camps;• Armed struggle stays at very low

level of intensity;• Politico-military commission;• Vietnamese response: must revisit

issue of relationship between

political and military struggle.

…but political advances…• Militants inside South Africa

organise politically .

…as ANC leadership argues

ANC leadership arguments continueas people form united front

• Chronic arguments in ANC leadership over relationship

between political and military and shape of operational

structures• But ANC leadership agrees role of political mobilisation

is ultimately to serve military campaign.• Anti-Republic campaign, 1981.• Formation of UDF, 1983• Character of UDF

– Umbrella– Strong local organisation– Organisation around concrete issues– Provincial leaderships– Small, mobile national leadership– National political focus

Perpetual mass action,1985-1990

• Forms:– Demos, local + general strikes– Rent and service boycotts– Students’, womens’, other protests– Mass rallies, leafletting, etc., etc.

• Iconography of violence at UDF

rallies (see right)• Enormous economic, diplomatic

and security costs for government• States of emergency declared• UDF outlawed, UDM formed• SA intelligence calculates options• ANC leaders recalculate options:A.S.• ‘Signals’ become talks• ANC unbanned, 1990

Violent flank and civil resistance in SAParadoxes:

1. The ANC’s obsession with armed struggle from 1960s to 1979 undermined its ability to mount not only civil resistance; it also subverted the ANC’s ability to mount armed struggle itself!

2. Civil resistance in South Africa displaced and supplanted an armed struggle of which, powerful political forces intended, that civil resistance should be a mere tributary.

3. An iconography of violence did, at a particular point in the South African liberation struggle – between about 1983 and 1989 – help advance the struggle being waged by non-violent means.

4. It is possible for an organisation that has exhibited at some point an unrivalled will to struggle against an unjust opponent, such as the ANC did, eventually to win power on the back of energies and organisations it had only a tangential role in generating.

North East KwaZulu-Natal