Azanian People's Organization (AZAPO)

Azanian People's Organization

This socialist movement found its intellectual stimulus in the Black Consciousness philosophy. The Soweto Action Committee established it in 1978. It used as its motto ‘One People, One Azania'. Obviously influenced by such thinkers as Lenin and Marx, it saw the capitalist system rather than apartheid as the main oppressing force in South Africa and believed that class divisions had taken place on racial lines. This view was expressed at the 1981 AZAPO conference when a paper was read outlining that South Africa could be divided into classes that included Blacks and Whites. But it contrasted White lower middle class workers, who were the tools of capitalists, with Black lower middle class workers, who were subject to the 'vile rigours of racism' and had joined the struggle for Black liberation. (Khangale Makhado, 'Black Consciousness as a Driving Force', Ikwezi, No 16, March 1981). It maintained that a 10% minority capitalist class owned the means of production and had consolidated itself by means of its military power and a network of laws to keep the Black lower classes in social and economic bondage. It recognised that it would be in the interests of some upper middle class Black workers to collaborate with the authorities. (Letsatsi Mosele, 'The challenge of labour in the 80s', 1981 AZAPO conference paper).

AZAPO directed its activities towards involving Black workers in politics as a class struggle. In this way, it hoped to bring about the transformation of South Africa into a socialist state with all means of production nationalised and centralised in the state. It aimed to abolish private ownership of farms and all rights of inheritance, except that of children over the house of their parents. AZAPO placed great value on the importance of trade unions to bring about an equal distribution of power and saw its work as mobilising workers into industrial armies to cope with the demands of agriculture and industry and other organs of the liberation movement. It advocated free education, sport and health services, maintaining that this would raise living standards and promote the well-being of its citizens.

In spite of its strategies, AZAPO did not succeed in mobilising all the Black workers, although it had some success with bus boycotts, rent protests and campaigning for strikes. In the early 1980s, though support for AZAPO appeared to be strongest in Johannesburg among the Black intelligentsia, and particularly among Black journalists, The Star's 1981 opinion poll rated the African National Congress (ANC) and Inkatha higher in popularity.

By 1983, AZAPO was playing a leading role in the National Forum and appeared to be consolidating the gulf between Black solidarity and 'Charterist' inclined movements. Lybon Mabasa was elected president and Saths Cooper and Muntu Myeza were elected vice-president and general secretary respectively, in February 1983. At this conference AZAPO leaders were contemptuous of negotiated reforms and they rejected the President's Council's constitutional proposals and supported resistance to them. The transformation and growth of political trade unionism appeared to have taken over the thrust of AZAPO's political challenge by 1986. Four years later, a rift had developed between AZAPO and its erstwhile partners, the ANC and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), which led to AZAPO losing its status as a co-convener of the Patriotic Front conference. AZAPO is regarded as heir to the Black consciousness tradition founded by Steve Biko , representing an ideologically rigid and dwindling constituency.

References:

• Howcroft, P. (undated). South Africa Encyclopaedia: Prehistory to the year 2000, unpublished papers with SA History Online.
• AZAPO - Azanian People's Organisation [online] Available at: azapo.org.za [Accessed 20 October 2009]