- The roles and impact of the UDF
- Limits to change: the process, form and outcome of democratisation
- Opportunities
- Organisation and resources
- Leadership
- Strategies and tactics
- The legacy of the UDF bequeathed to the ANC
- The legacy of the UDF bequeathed to post-apartheid politics in general
Turning the Tide
At the UDF's national launch in 1983 Frank Chikane expressed his hope that the day would be recorded in history as an event that would 'bolster the tide of the struggle'. Almost eight years later, Walter Sisulu told the UDF's final national conference that the Front had indeed 'decisively turned the tide against the advances being made by the [National Party] regime'. The metaphor of the tide is apt in the task of understanding the impact of the UDF on South African politics. It conjures up images of the fundamental pressures and forces in a society rather than the more superficial events - even those that are supposed historical 'turning-points'. As the UDF's founders themselves recognised, the struggle for democracy and freedom depended not on single events, however momentous, but on the shifting balance of political power.
The UDF was formed at a time when the balance of power was not irredeemably tilted towards either the apartheid state or its opponents. The state remained immensely powerful in military and economic terms, notwithstanding a long-term decline in profit rates and the more immediate economic downturn since 1981, but underlying processes of social and economic change together with the resurgence of internal resistance since the mid-1970s had undermined the state's ideological and political positions. As key state actors themselves recognised, the political future of the country and of the dominant white minority depended on a successful political strategy: military might and economic power were insufficient. The apartheid state therefore sought to rebuild its ideological and political foundations around a package of major policy reforms. These were intended to draw (or co-opt) Indian and coloured South Africans, together with some sections of the urban African population, into support for a reformed but still racially non-egalitarian system. The reforms were also intended to foster acquiescence among a broader range of the African population. At the same time, a series of deals with the frontline states strengthened the state's position in the southern African region. These changes thus threatened to tilt the balance of power markedly towards the state; as Boesak put it in January 1983, 'apartheid's crisis has become our crisis'. The formation of the UDF, its founders hoped, would help first to forestall this prospective shift, and then perhaps to carry forward the faltering momentum of resistance - to stop the advancing 'tide' of counter-democratic politics, and then turn it round.
With hindsight it is clear that the tide flowed strongly against the state from the end of 1983. Prospective opposition from the newly formed UDF first led the government to discard the idea of referendums among coloured and Indian voters to legitimise the process of constitutional reform. Then the elections to the new coloured and Indian houses of parliament were largely boycotted. This and other protests discredited the government's 'new deal', both within South Africa and internationally. The township revolt from the second half of 1984 forced the state onto the defensive, pushing it to use brutal repression, which served to highlight the moral poverty of even 'reformed apartheid'. The strategic framework of people's power enabled the forces of revolt to be harnessed more effectively, and channelled into a direct and potentially sustainable challenge to the apartheid state. In response the government was able to stem the tide of resistance only by imposing a level of repression that was unprecedented in South Africa, although mild by comparison with many other anti-democratic regimes. But resistance adapted and continued at a level sufficient to render the state's strategy of repression unsustainable. In mid-1988 the first talks were held towards some kind of a negotiated settlement. Amidst a dramatic (if uneven) revival of popular protest during 1989, the move towards a negotiated settlement speeded up, leading to the government's decision to unban the ANC. By the early 1990s, as Lodge writes, the slogan amandla (power) was no longer just an aspiration; it had become an assertion.
Assessing political organisation in periods of change
What role did the UDF play in this turning tide? What impact did the UDF have on the process of democratisation and liberation in South Africa? How can one isolate the roles and impact of an organisation like the UDF from those of other factors -ranging from the international context to the pressures exerted by highly fragmented groups at the local level, from divisions within ruling elites to the broad dynamics of social and economic change? Answers to such questions are, to some extent, only conjecture. They depend on counterfactual scenarios which themselves rest on multiple assumptions and defy easy specification. Presumably in part for this reason, analytical histories of political organisations generally tend to avoid explicit assessment in their concluding chapters.
The role played by political organisation in periods of political change may, however, be too important to circumvent. The importance of organisation is an empirical question, within the limits of the kind of 'empirical' research possible. Certainly, organisation should not be assumed to be a key factor - even when political activists and strategists themselves generally act as if it is. Some actors’ emphasis on organisation no doubt sometimes reflects a concern to strengthen or protect their own power within opposition politics. In other cases, actors' emphasis on organisation may prove to be futile. In the South African case, Barrell shows how the ANC's interminable restructuring never led to the adoption of an effective strategy and appropriate organisation.
One context where one might expect that political organisation would play an especially important role is during periods of political transition. As O'Donnell and Schmitter, Huntington and others have argued, liberalisation and democratisation are typically uncertain and indeterminate processes: 'unexpected events, insufficient information, hurried and audacious choices, confusion about motives and interests, plasticity, and even non-definition of political identities, as well as the talents of specific individuals, are frequently decisive in determining the outcomes'. Political organisation - including ideas and discourses, strategies and tactics, leadership and networks - play an important role in determining the outcome of these processes. While specific social, economic and international factors may constitute necessary conditions for successful democratisation, they are not sufficient. As Huntington writes: ‘Economic development makes democracy possible; political leadership makes it real.’ This is not to say that political organisation is isolated from broader factors, whether material, ideological, international or other, but rather that the effects of the structural context are generally mediated through the political realm. This renders the choices made by political actors consequential. Organisations can perceive pressures and opportunities in diverse ways, and then exercise a degree of choice in how they respond to the perceived pressures and opportunities.
Curiously, studies of transition rarely focus on the character of political organisation, despite the acknowledged importance of political factors. One reason for this has already been mentioned: the necessarily speculative nature of any assessment of the role and impact of particular organisations. More important, perhaps, is the general absence of an outstanding, above-ground political organisation in such periods of transition. Non-democratic regimes typically do not permit public, mass-based and determinedly subversive opposition organisations. South Africa was an exception to the general pattern, for reasons that we shall begin to delineate in the section on opportunities below. To emphasise the distinctiveness of the South African case, and thus of the UDF, consider the experiences of communist-ruled Central and Eastern Europe. The anti-communist revolutions of 1989, more or less coincident with democratisation in South Africa, occurred without organisations comparable to the UDF. The one possible exception was Poland, where solidarity remained a key player even during the years of martial law after 1981; the military were eventually left with little option but to negotiate with it in 1989. Whilst perhaps not unique, therefore, the UDF is certainly at one end of the spectrum of political organisation in periods of transition.
Few studies of South Africa assess directly and explicitly the significance of political organisation in the transition. The few that do typically criticise the ANC and the UDF from the left. McKinley, for example, condemns the ANC and UDF for their failure to promote a more revolutionary outcome. According to their view, the structural conditions were favourable for a revolution, but the leadership was derelict. A careful study of the 1980s provides little support for this view. For sure, the UDF leadership did indeed at times seek to rein in the militancy of sections of the population; the UDF was indeed weakly committed to a socialist vision of transformation; the UDF was willing to enter into or support negotiations, and offer compromises in the course of them. But accounts such as McKinley's ignore very real political obstacles to radical change. The street militancy that the UDF sought to rein in was rarely linked to the organised working class or any clear socialist project; there were important strategic costs to such militancy, as well as considerable direct costs to the people living in the townships concerned; the UDF certainly sought to intensify the pressure exerted on the state in other ways; and, above all, the practice and prospect of state repression placed severe restrictions on the UDF and other organisations. The 'moment' of the mid-1980s had much less revolutionary potential than is often imagined. Political organisation, including the UDF, needs to be assessed in terms of what it did achieve, and not simply dismissed for failing to achieve observers' revolutionary dreams.
The roles and impact of the UDF
The 'role' played by the UDF in turning the tide was neither monolithic nor static, but rather varied between regions and changed over time. As the political landscape was transformed, so the UDF too was transformed, organisationally, strategically and above all in its relationships with the ever-changing smorgasbord of organisations, groups and individuals arrayed against the apartheid state.
The UDF was formed, first and foremost, to co-ordinate and hence intensify opposition to the state's reforms. From the outset the UDF stamped its mark on political developments - notwithstanding its initially reactive and piecemeal activities and its deep internal divisions surfacing around the Port Elizabeth conference. The UDF played a minor role in mobilising opposition to new local councils in African townships. More importantly, it was the threat of action by the UDF and key affiliates that deterred the government from holding referendums among coloured and Indian voters over its constitutional proposals. The importance of this should not be underestimated: referendums would have helped to legitimise the new constitution, internationally and domestically, in part through the spurious symmetry of allowing coloured and Indian as well as white voters the opportunity to approve or reject the proposals. The Million Signatures Campaign demonstrated popular opposition to the reforms, even though the campaign fell far short of its goal of a million signatures. Moreover, the campaign involved an active demonstration of support, through signing a petition, and not just the passive demonstration involved in (for example) boycotting an election. This campaign allowed the UDF to capture a significant part of the so-called political middle ground. The election boycott was a triumphant success, with low polls and public opposition, especially in the important metropolitan areas, thereby undermining the political value of the government's project. Finally, the occupation of the British consulate in Durban focused international attention on detention without trial, further undermining the reformist image that the government sought to project. By the end of 1984 the Tricameral Parliament and African township councils were discredited. The government had failed to secure political advantage from its reforms - largely thanks to the scope of opposition co-ordinated through the UDF.
The UDF's existence and activities served to 'push back the frontiers of what was politically possible'. As Morobe later said, ‘We managed to get people to stand up and fight for their rights without any fear and actually challenge authority’. Perhaps it was the government that unwittingly put politics on the table, but it was the UDF that overcame the previously widespread fear and wariness of politics. Its opposition to the constitutional reforms demonstrated not just the efficacy of protest but also the possibility of challenge.
Whilst primarily concerned with opposition to the government's reforms, the UDF also posed the outline of an alternative approach to politics. For the most part this was somewhat abstract: the goal was a non-racial, democratic, unitary South Africa, and the appropriate interim institution was not some multi-cameral parliament but rather a national convention. Not surprisingly, this did not seem to catch the popular imagination. But UDF speakers also put forward a more appealing alternative, couched in the universalist language of rights and morality: in Boesak's words, 'we want all of our rights, we want them here, and we want them now ... Now is the time!' Here was a vision and a rallying cry, simultaneously a demand and an expression of impatience.
The twelve or so months between mid-1983 and mid-1984 also saw the construction of a country-wide movement. The two national conferences of 1983 gave the movement some momentum; NEC meetings provided for inter-regional co-ordination; RECs and RGCs provided for regional co-ordination. The growth of this movement was reflected in, and in turn strengthened by, the Million Signatures Campaign, which involved on sustained basis perhaps a thousand activists in collecting signatures, building cross-racial contact and developing organisational experience. It is easy to criticise the campaign - as UDF leaders themselves did - but it was the first nationwide campaign on this scale since the 1950s.
The importance of the formation of the UDF in terms of building political networks is evident from comparison with the deep fragmentation of opposition politics prior to 1983. Then, some networks did exist, but they were very patchy. Inter-regional contact and debate were limited to individual connections, interspersed with very rare opportunities provided by conferences such as the 1981 Anti-SAIC conference in Durban. Even at the regional level, key activists sometimes did not even know each other. The formation of the UDF ensured the institutionalisation of regular inter-regional and intra-regional co-ordination.
For sure, the Charterist movement was scarred by multiple tensions after 1983: across racial lines in many areas; between more nationalist and more socialist strands of Charterism, in East London for example; between groups plugged into different resource bases, including the battles around Freeway House in Johannesburg; between individuals with different lines of communication to 'the' ANC, especially during the referendum debate; between regions, notably over the election of a president, and also during the referendum debate; and within regions between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas. But most of these tensions were the products or results of improved co-ordination, problems that would not have arisen in a more fragmented context; they were the inevitable frictions associated with building a movement out of disparate components.
Symbolically, the existence of a nationwide front, its campaigns and its media helped to integrate the disparate parts of opposition politics into a larger whole. Activists in smaller townships were encouraged to see themselves as part of a broad movement, and to regard the various aspects of state policy as part of a larger state strategy. The UDF did not seek explicitly to construct a Charterist movement but helped to secure the construction of Charterist near-hegemony. Non-Charterist strands of opposition politics were emphatically sidelined, with the exceptions of Inkatha, whose base lay increasingly within bantustan state structures, and the independent trade union movement, whose political role was muted at the time.
There were clear limits to the UDF's achievements in this initial-period. Much of the impetus to the formation of the UDF came from the specific political needs of apartheid activists in coloured and Indian areas. In terms of leadership, concerns, discourses and strategy, the UDF was orientated primarily towards coloured and Indian politics. This fuelled dissent or at least a sense of distance among some activists from African areas, notwithstanding the UDF's rhetorical commitment to the 'primacy of African leadership'. Perhaps it was the very success of the UDF in advancing the Charterist cause, sidelining rivals in order to secure its claimed position as the 'only' body representing 'all' sections of the population, that subsequently allowed sections of the Charterist movement to adopt a hostile attitude toward the Front.
If opposition to the government's reforms largely frustrated the government's political project, thereby forestalling any shift in the balance of forces in the state's favour, it was the township revolt of the mid-1980s that decisively tilted the balance of forces away from the state. In the Delmas Treason Trial, UDF leaders Molefe and Lekota were initially convicted for their parts in the township revolt. The UDF was found to have been party to the instigation of revolutionary violence. This judicial interpretation is perhaps not surprising: governing elites, including judges, rarely appreciate the ways in which localised political, social and economic conditions can give rise to burgeoning revolt; to do so would be to acknowledge their collective failure to address these causes. Instead, governing elites typically look for conspiracies and agitators.
The UDF's own leadership was taken by surprise by the initial revolt. Certainly the UDF sought the collapse of the apartheid state but, as its own leaders acknowledged in internal documents, the UDF was at the margins of the revolt. Indeed, the sites of the initial revolt were areas with particularly weak direct links to the UDF: Tumahole, Atteridgeville, the East Rand, the Vaal Triangle, Cradock. Even those townships with stronger links to the UDF - including Soweto, Mamelodi, as well as the townships of Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and Cape Town - were slow to be drawn into the revolt.
Much of the initial impetus to the revolt came from issues which the UDF had neglected: rents and service charges, housing, urban development, and even the roles and responsibilities of elected township councillors. The UDF was clearly and emphatically opposed to the reform of African local government, since elected township councils seemed a substitute for full democratic rights. But the Front was not integral to the widespread, locally based opposition to councils and councillors. The UDF was also somewhat distant from the schooling crisis, in part because COSAS resisted UDF involvement. The organisational form of the UDF as a front meant that, at this stage, it could only be involved in issues if the relevant affiliates sought its assistance. Township-based organisations either opposed the UDF's intervention or at least had not sought it.
Indirectly, however, the UDF played an important role in the genesis of the revolt. As Lodge puts it, the Front 'inspired an insurrectionary movement’. Two factors helped to transform localised discontent over civic and educational issues into a nationwide political movement. First, the existence and prominence of the UDF served to encourage local-level activists to link their struggles into the national political struggle. This is presumably what Lodge means when he writes of the 'inspirational' role of the UDF. Secondly, state repression played a powerful politicising role. It is surely likely that the heightened mobilisation around the UDF's campaigns in 1984 was an important factor in the state's often heavy-handed approach to policing in the second half of the year. The fact that township protests coincided with UDF-led resistance to the Tricameral Parliament meant that many police, as well as National Party politicians, were likely to regard civic protests as part of a political conspiracy and then to use a high level of force to contain them.
Revolts may seldom be instigated by political organisations, but revolts typically provide unprecedented opportunities for political organisations to extend their organisational and ideological reach and power. The UDF was initially not well placed to take advantage of the opportunity posed by the growing revolt. Most of its leaders were deeply wary of insurrectionary or confrontational tactics; indeed, the Front had decided against them earlier in 1984. Some UDF leaders saw violence as morally suspect; others saw it as potentially counterproductive, a threat to sustained revolt; most favoured instead extended organisation building. The UDF came to be seen as overly conciliatory and insufficiently supportive of the insurrectionary project favoured by some activists and promoted by the ANC through its Radio Freedom. It was only with escalating violence by the state against its opponents that senior UDF leaders began to endorse the use of 'counter-violence' for ostensibly defensive purposes.
The UDF's capacity to seize the political initiative became hampered by repression. In August 1984 and February 1985 its leadership was decimated by detentions. Top leaders were prosecuted in two treason trials. In the Eastern Cape an REC member and other activists were abducted and murdered. In Natal an REC member was assassinated. In July a State of Emergency was imposed across most of the Eastern Cape and PWV, and later extended elsewhere; the Emergency regulations were used to detain activists at all levels and impose a complete clampdown on political meetings. In August a further round of detentions seemed to herald a third major trial, although in fact this never took place. The effect of this was, not surprisingly, very disruptive. Although resistance was spreading across the country, it was difficult for the UDF to provide direction. The Front sought to re-orientate itself to the new conditions and opportunities. It adopted a more vanguardist approach and streamlined its organisational structures. Discourses of power replaced discourses of rights. But the Front lacked any overall strategic direction, and lacked the authority to retrieve its position at the helm of the Charterist movement inside the country.
In early 1986 the UDF succeeded in seizing the political initiative, both within the Charterist movement and in the politics of the country as a whole. It did this through developing the strategic framework of 'people's power'. By providing direction it helped to intensify and, more importantly, sustain popular insurrection. The impetus to people's power came from several sources: from burgeoning violence and the education crisis, which was deemed to require urgent intervention; from the Eastern Cape, where street committees had been formed at the very local level to provide direction to political struggle amidst pervasive repression; and from the ANC, which continued to preach popular insurrection over Radio Freedom. The UDF's ascendancy was made possible by its endorsement by the ANC - not least at their meeting in Stockholm in January - as playing an integrative role in the Charterist movement inside the country.
The goal of people's power, as Zwelakhe Sisulu put it, was to shift decisively 'the balance of forces in our favour'. ‘Protest’ should be transformed into a sustainable 'challenge'. The strategic framework envisaged converting the situation of ungovernability, in which the state was unable to control the townships, into one in which the people governed themselves. What this meant in practice was a massive programme of organisation building, enlarging the social bases of resistance, and integrating the disparate parts of the Charterist movement. It involved a clear retreat from the more triumphalist and insurrectionary claims of some activists, and a return to the emphasis of political rather than military factors. The brilliance of ‘people's power’ lay in its retention of the discourse of power. Through developing and promoting this strategic framework, through conferences, meetings and an expanded media, the UDF retrieved its leading role in political developments inside the country, at the same time as reducing the risk of the mid-1980s revolt spluttering to a halt in the same way as its predecessor of 1976-7.
It is important here to acknowledge the role of the ANC in the UDF's resurgence. UDF leaders generally saw themselves as subordinate to the ANC in exile, although subordinate in the sense more of a subordinate partner than of a subordinate in a straightforwardly hierarchical command structure. In practice, however, the UDF was often the tail that wagged the ANC dog. The ANC simply did not have the capacity to provide detailed direction and co-ordination for political initiatives inside the country, and it was these rather than the muted activities of MK that were driving forward the prospect of political change. Mufson quotes an unidentified UDF leader who was angry at his treatment on one occasion by the exiled ANC: ‘The ANC had done a lot of ambassadorial tasks we could not have done. But we unbanned the ANC at home ... I'm an equal in the struggle, if not more.’ Where the ANC was decisive was in buttressing the leading role of the UDF inside the country. Faced with dissent or scepticism from important sections of the Charterist movement inside South Africa, the UDF could have its leading role confirmed only by endorsement by the ANC. While the ANC needed an integrative vehicle like the UDF to develop the capacity of the Charterist movement to sustain the revolt, the UDF needed the endorsement of the ANC to play this role. (When, in 1990-1, the ANC's endorsement ceased to be unambiguous, the UDF fell prey to its detractors.)
The state countered the challenge of people's power with an unprecedented clampdown. In July it imposed a country-wide State of Emergency. By the end of the year an estimated 20 000 people had been detained; some were to remain in detention until 1989. The state was unable, however, to secure significant political or ideological gains despite its clear military domination. 'Despite all its efforts, the regime's attempts to reverse the tide of history has been a dismal failure,' the UDF claimed. The National Party government failed to build a significant organised support base in African areas, and failed to erode the support enjoyed there by the ANC and the Charterist movement. The system of elected township councils failed to generate a credible set of conservative, pro-government African political leaders. Those councillors who refused to resign in the face of popular anger fled their townships to live in protected isolation far from their supposed constituents. As a result the National Party was to enter negotiations with the ANC in 1990 devoid of any significant allies in African urban areas. Only among coloured and Indian South African did it bolster its support, laying the basis for its electoral success among these voters in the 1990s.
The UDF's role in boxing in the government is hard to assess. The rhetoric of the Front's leadership was brave, but the reality was that organisation was badly battered, especially at the regional level. In Moosa's words, the UDF sought to conduct a 'holding operation'. Its campaigns were muted, and much of the impetus came from co-organisers in COSATU and the churches. The UDF's own media were disrupted, and its coverage in the commercial press was circumscribed by the press's caution in the face of Emergency regulations. What the UDF did provide was a minimal organisational network across the country, recharged on occasions such as the clandestine 1987 National General Council in Durban, financed through the fast-growing revenues available from Europe, and given some direction through the media. Above all, perhaps, its recommitment to continued public political activity helped to inject into opposition politics an element of continuity from the heady days of the mid-1980s. The late 1980s would not be like the early 1960s, when all efforts had been diverted to the embryonic armed struggle; political struggle was to remain central to the struggle for democracy and freedom. The UDF thus forged a nascent alliance with COSATU and re-engaged the so-called political middle ground, targeting disaffected white political and economic elites. It also played an important part in the rising profile of the ANC, through the Unban the ANC activities and its adoption of the Freedom Charter.
The political strength of the state's opponents became more visible during 1988, notwithstanding the de facto banning of the UDF and other organisations early that year. Popular support was demonstrated through the mass stayaway in June, and this was followed by plans for a broad-based Anti-Apartheid Conference, which was banned by the state at the last possible moment. In October the government gave in to international and local pressure, allowing UDF leaders Moosa and Morobe unrestricted freedom after they had escaped from detention and taken refuge in the American consulate in Johannesburg. In January 1989 the government revealed the limits to its political will when it conceded a de facto end to mass detention in the face of detainees' hunger strikes.
The key development in this period was, of course, the government's recognition not only that the crisis would be resolved politically rather than militarily, but that unilateral political initiatives were insufficient and that the political agenda now hinged upon negotiations with the ANC. As multiple lines of communication were opened between the government and the ANC, the UDF was transformed more clearly into a component of the ANC's strategy. Its role was to maintain political pressure on the government inside the country, discrediting it, chipping away at the margins of its support, and building support for the kind of transformation envisaged by the ANC. The UDF played this part with outstanding success. The UDF-led Defiance Campaign simultaneously strengthened resistance and weakened the state: participation in protest grew rapidly, as public defiance demonstrated the possibility once again of active protest, whilst the campaign embarrassed the government by highlighting racial segregation and police brutality. The marches raised the spectre of escalating defiance, comparable perhaps to the huge marches that were at that very moment rocking Communist Party rule in Central and Eastern Europe. The Campaign, followed by the Conference for a Democratic Future, strengthened the ANC-led opposition politically, and it was this political terrain that was all-important.
Walter Sisulu was quite right to note, in his speech to the final UDF conference, that the Front had placed the 'central question of political power on the agenda'. In 1983-4, when the state sought to present its reforms as extending democracy, the UDF redefined them as exclusionary and anti-democratic. In early 1986 the Front drew together disparate protest and defiance into an explicit challenge to state power. In 1988-9 it pushed the government into actions, which acknowledged that the future would be resolved politically, not militarily. Further, in each of these periods the UDF defined the nature of the political game as involving not the government and its allies and supplicants, but rather the government and the extra-parliamentary opposition - the ANC and its internal supporters and allies. Thus Mandela was right to praise the UDF, on his release from prison in 1990, for ensuring that 'none of the reformist strategies of the Government have succeeded'. But he might have gone further: the UDF, along with other groupings, had ensured that there was no realistic possibility of any reformist strategy succeeding without the full co-operation of the ANC.
Limits to change: the process, form and outcome of democratisation
The onset of negotiations between the ANC and government in 1990 and, four years later, the successful completion of the formal process of democratisation, marked by democratic elections, may be considered as underlining the achievements of the UDF. Yet, in several respects, each of these events was somewhat less than the UDF had publicly aspired to. Firstly, the process of designing a new South African polity was not what the UDF had envisaged. Secondly, the form of post-apartheid democracy differed from the vision set out by some UDF leaders in the mid-1980s. In addition, some critics of the UDF point to the failure to reach a socialist outcome.
From 1983 the UDF called publicly for an alternative process of constitutional change that involved a national convention. As it turned out, the post-apartheid interim constitution was not designed in a national convention but through multilateral and bilateral negotiations among political parties. The country's 1996 constitution was finalised by a democratically elected Constitutional Assembly in the form of parliament, but within guidelines set during the earlier multi-party talks. Furthermore, in 1984 the UDF had set out several preconditions for a national convention, which were not met prior to the start of talks between the ANC and the government in 1990, including the demobilisation of the security forces and the repeal of all racist and unjust laws.
The appeal of a national convention faded with the growing power of the township revolt. The ANC, whilst still a legal organisation, had long advocated a national convention. The concept was put forward again in the 1980s primarily as an alternative to the Tricameral Parliament: a national convention would be inclusive and representative of all South Africans, in contrast to the Tricameral Paarliament. The township revolt transformed the political terrain in such a way that it seemed possible that state power could be seized. The conception of the struggle in terms of power supplanted a conception in terms of rights; the national convention proposal was damned as a compromise with the oppressors. The democratic alternative to the state's constitutional initiatives was not some national-level bargaining forum but the network of representative structures built at the grassroots, from street committees upwards. The UDF embraced and directed this alternative through the strategic framework of 'people's power'. A paper on 'Towards a People's Democracy', widely distributed in 1987, referred to the 'expansion of the democratic process' and did not mention a national convention. Locally based initiatives would serve to fashion a democratic South Africa even before the transfer of 'political power to the majority had taken place'. In so far as there needed to be a national initiative, this was satisfied by the demand that the ANC be unbanned. It was unnecessary to demand that the ANC and government actually sit together at a negotiating table. Similarly, a national convention was not mentioned in the secretarial report to the UDF's National Working Committee conference in May 1987, nor in any of the conference resolutions.
Similarly, the form of South Africa's democratisation was not what the UDF had committed itself to in the immediate aftermath of people's power. In 1987 the UDF set out a vision of democracy that involved far more participatory elements than were later provided in the post-apartheid institutions of representative democracy. Enthused with people's power, and influenced by accounts of Nicaraguan democracy under the Sandinistas, the UDF declared that it was opposed to the existing parliamentary institutions not only because most of the population was excluded, but also ‘because parliamentary-type representation in itself represents a very limited and narrow idea of democracy’.
Our democratic aim therefore is control over every aspect of our lives, and not just the right (important as it is) to vote for a central government every four to five years. When we speak of majority rule, we do not mean that black faces must simply replace white faces in parliament. A democratic solution in South Africa involves all South Africans, and in particular the working class, having control over all areas of daily existence - from national policy to housing, from schooling to working conditions, from transport to consumption of food. This for us is the essence of democracy. When we say that the people shall govern, we mean at all levels and in all spheres, and we demand that there be real, effective control on a daily basis ... In other words, we are talking about direct as opposed to indirect political representation, mass participation rather than passive docility and ignorance, a momentum where ordinary people feel that they can do the job themselves, rather than waiting for their local MP to intercede on their behalf.
In its strongest form, this kind of vision was based on a glorified understanding of both people's power in South Africa, on the one hand, and the experience of socialist democratisation in Nicaragua and elsewhere, on the other. The reality of people's power in South Africa - and of democracy under the Sandinistas in Nicaragua - was more complex and fragile than imagined. The decline of this vision, however, was not so much due to the growth of any critical analysis of such South African or Nicaraguan experiences, but rather to the shifting balance of power in South Africa in the face of state repression and popular demobilisation from June 1986.
Faced with a perceived stalemate under the State of Emergency, UDF leaders became more open to alternative processes of change and forms of democratic outcome. Although some affiliates remained opposed to any kind of negotiation, including even the idea of a national convention, in which the 'oppressors' would be represented, the senior UDF leadership was willing to accept both the ANC's lead in embracing negotiations and the goal, at least initially, of a representative democracy for all South Africans. Some UDF leaders hastily accepted this as reality, and denounced as Utopian any more participatory vision. For others, it seems, this acceptance involved a measure of disappointment. It is easy to see such disappointment as an inevitable part of the process of democratisation. Huntington, controversially, considers disappointment as 'an essential first step in the process of democratic consolidation', because the health of democracy as a political system depends on 'the premise that governments will fail and that hence institutionalised ways have to exist for changing them'. In Huntington's view: 'Disillusionment and the lowered expectations it produces are the foundation of democratic stability. Democracies become consolidated when people learn that democracy is a solution to the problem of tyranny, but not necessarily to anything else.
In South Africa the more substantive view of participatory democracy that had been widespread in 1986 gave way, at least among the UDF leadership, to a procedural view of democracy emphasising elections and representative government. In their comments at the Kagiso Trust's ‘From Opposing to Governing’ conference in January 1990, both Morobe and Manuel intimated that the radicalism and expectations of the UDF's supporters needed to be tempered. Similarly, in describing the preceding Conference for a Democratic Future as akin to a 'genuine people's assembly' and a 'genuinely democratic parliament', Morobe was endorsing a more or less conventional view of representative democracy.
The appeal of an essentially procedural view of democracy probably reflected the ANC political elite's concern to control state power from the top (perhaps for progressive purposes) and the partial demobilisation of protest inside the country, as well as a recognition of the need to reassure white and other minority South Africans, economic elites and the international audience. 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. All the same a weak version of the more radical vision of democracy did persist in South Africa, surfacing somewhat confusedly in the Reconstruction and Development Programme adopted by the ANC as its election manifesto in 1994, and expressed intermittently by critics on the left. It must be acknowledged that former UDF leaders have not been prominent among the visible supporters of such a vision.
In some respects, the South African experience was not dissimilar to that of other contexts where people were struggling against oppressive regimes. In Central and Eastern Europe under Communist Party rule, 'democracy' was widely understood as the antithesis of the existing political and economic system; that is, in terms of freedoms from state and party authority, and economic opportunities through free markets. In South Africa liberation generally meant rights and representation for all, decentralised power, and a re-distributive economic alternative. To some extent, the vision was contingent on the existing system. In South Africa, as in Central and Eastern Europe, a more precise picture of social and institutional arrangements did not begin to take shape until democratisation became imminent.
A more striking dissonance between 1980s rhetoric and 1990s outcome concerns the extent of social and economic transformation. In the early and mid-1980s certain elements of socialist rhetoric were widespread within the Charteris movement, as well as within the movement's growing range of allies in the labour movement. This has led many scholars to the view that 'the UDF's capacious ideological umbrella also sheltered socialists', as Lodge writes. But should apparently socialist rhetoric be taken at face value? Lodge himself tends to caution, believing that 'a substantial proportion of the UDF's working-class following was inspired by a socialist vision' whilst suggesting that the 'ideological predilections of the largely middle-class leaders of the movement' are harder to pin down. Certainly, it is not clear that a hostility to perceived exploitation or even the intermittent use of class in popular discourse is sufficient to warrant categorising a movement, organisation or individual as 'socialist'. The hostility to capitalism among many UDF leaders seems to have been rooted in the perception that capitalism and apartheid were intimately linked, and that capitalists were opposed to democratisation. In other words, social and economic radicalism was rooted at least as much in perceptions of the battle lines around democratisation and liberation as vice versa. When capitalist elites appeared ready to throw their support, albeit conditionally and self-interestedly, behind the ANC and UDF, so most of the top UDF leaders welcomed their support and shifted away from socialist rhetoric.
Even among the broader movement as a whole inside the country, it is easy to exaggerate the extent and depth of radicalism. Radical discourse was often highly contingent on the context. Unfortunately, there is almost no research on popular political culture in the 1980s. Research conducted in the early 1990s tends, however, to deflate assessments of popular radicalism. Surveys of public opinion suggest that few African voters regard themselves as particularly 'left-wing' or 'radical'. Most voters combined radical views on some issues with conservative views on others, so that Johnson and Schlemmer (no radicals themselves) regarded ANC supporters to be 'social democrats'. Research conducted by Charney soon after the 1994 elections found little evidence of revolutionary sentiment: people wanted to 'prod the system, not smash it'. Most African voters regarded the election in a purely political sense, and did not expect any rapid emancipation from economic wants. Certainly, trade union members may be committed to democratic procedures that are more radical than mere accountability through elections, as Maree suggests, using post-1994 survey data; but even this section of the population is committed to representative democracy, which they seek to make more democratic, rather than replace it altogether. As the SACP intellectual Mzala suggested, perhaps the best way of understanding the socialist rhetoric and ideology of the 1980s is as 'populism about socialism', based more in anti-apartheid sentiment than any clear socialist vision.
The UDF leadership generally articulated the view that the UDF was engaged in a 'national democratic struggle'. Its goal was a changed political system rather than a changed society, (political) democracy rather than socio-economic equality.
The UDF Declaration refers to the Front's goals as a 'true', unitary and non-racial democracy. Its demand that 'all forms of oppression and exploitation must end' was appealing but vague. Many self-conscious socialists, whether in the labour movement or elsewhere, tended to remain outside the UDF; those who were active in the UDF tended to subordinate socialist goals to democratic ones. For sure, most UDF leaders held strong beliefs in justice that extended beyond formal political equality, but justice was generally conceived in terms of rights and responsibilities rather than public ownership of the means of production. Beliefs in justice were infused with liberal conceptions of rights, including, especially, freedom from discrimination, together with a religious morality.
The UDF should not be regarded as synonymous with the broader movement - or movements - of popular resistance in the 1980s. It was not even coterminous with the Charterist movement, large parts of which declined either always or sometimes to acknowledge the UDF as the overarching co-ordinating structure for Charterists inside the country. In so far as the UDF was integral to a broader movement, that movement was primarily a 'people's movement', as Boesak put it in 1983, standing for freedom and democracy, and proclaiming a message of hope and freedom, more than for radical economic or social change. Its successes thus corresponded to its objects.
Opportunities
While the UDF's successes, and their limits, were in part the product of tactical and strategic choices made by the UDF leadership, the prospects of success were shaped by the changing structure of opportunities facing the UDF. Crucially, the UDF was formed during a period of liberalisation on the state's part, as the state sought to reconstitute its political and ideological foundations. Liberalisation entailed new political openings and a lowered level of state repression. The changing international context also shaped the prospects of success, with growing international pressure on the South African government and growing acceptance of the ANC. The impact of the UDF was also dependent, in large part, on the organisational basis provided by its many affiliates. The social structure of South Africa had changed in ways that facilitated the formation of collective organisation in the workplace, residential areas and educational institutions. Finally, the government faced elite disaffection and struggled to maintain a broad anti-democratic alliance: democratisation for its part offered growing benefits to some important elite groups, but growing costs to others.
Authoritarian regimes seeking to reconstitute their political bases often tolerate political liberalisation prior to - or as an attempted alternative to - full democratisation. Liberalisation typically involves the relaxation of controls over political communication, association and activity, thus providing openings for opposition movements. 'Liberalizing authoritarian regimes may release political prisoners, open up some issues for public debate, loosen censorship, sponsor elections for offices that have little power, permit some renewal of civil society, and take other steps in a democratic direction, without submitting top decision-makers to the electoral test.' In many cases, including most of contemporary Africa, political liberalisation has been a government response to political pressures, especially from below, but sometimes from the international arena. Often, political liberalisation has not led to democratisation - which suggests that it can serve as an alternative for incumbent regimes.
In South Africa the UDF was formed amidst a general political liberalisation, itself the result of political pressures from within the country and international factors. The constitutional reforms were part of this liberalisation, but more important for opposition was the accompanying relaxation of repression. Although the ANC remained banned, a significant degree of freedom of assembly and association was permitted during 1983-4, except in the bantustans. While outdoor political meetings were banned, indoor meetings and conferences were generally permitted, with rare exceptions - notably in the Border region. The UDF itself was not banned. The Million Signatures Campaign was tolerated: hot without illicit interference, but tolerated nonetheless. Restrictions on many individuals were lifted. The mainstream commercial media reported on the anti-apartheid opposition with growing impunity, and the explicitly anti-apartheid alternative press - community newspapers such as Grassroots - burgeoned, being only partly fettered.
The effect of this political opening was to strengthen the national, rather than local, focus of opposition activity. Had there been a higher level of repression it is likely that more localised and sporadic activities would have been far more predominant. Overt activities at the national level required a higher degree of freedom. (Such national level activity was facilitated, and perhaps even made possible, by the technology of the telephone and improved inter-city road and air transport.)
Liberalisation involved the curtailment of repression. Repression in South Africa had always operated within political limits, its use being governed by political considerations. Even in the late 1980s, when the South African state was widely referred to as the 'security state', politics had primacy. The military and police never had the scope to conduct the kind of dirty war practised in, for example, Argentina after 1976, El Salvador and Guatemala after 1979, or Algeria in either the 1950s or 1990s. As many people 'disappeared' or were murdered in Argentina as were detained in South Africa. In Guatemala over 21 000 people were murdered between 1978 and 1986. In El Salvador 55 000 people were murdered over the same period; no fewer than 31 000 people were murdered in 1980-1981 alone. An equivalent dirty war in South Africa would have entailed the death of all of the activists who were 'only', in the event, detained and often tortured. This would, surely, have transformed the character of resistance in South Africa. There were considerable variations within South Africa in the level and brutality of repression, with the worst atrocities concentrated in the Eastern Cape. Nonetheless, of about one hundred top national and regional UDF leaders, only three REC members, Goniwe, Mxenge and Nchabaleng, were killed by the police or army, with one other senior leader, Ngwenya in Pietermaritzburg, killed by Inkatha leaders.
Repression was particularly muted at the time of the formation of the UDF. This was the result of two related shifts in state strategy, linked to political liberalisation. First, the state adopted what has been termed the 'Rabie Strategy', named after the judge who chaired a commission of inquiry that led to the promulgation of the 1982 Internal Security Act. Under the Rabie Strategy, threats to internal security would be responded to as crimes, through the courts and by the police. The Internal Security Act tightened up the criminalisation of political offences such as subversion, as well as making provision for detentions, bannings and other restrictions. Secondly, the South African Police Commissioner from June 1983, Johann Coetzee, favoured a strategy of stealth over one of confrontation. ‘Believing that the UDF was too powerful to crush and that banning it would merely force it underground, he was reportedly behind the government's relatively tolerant attitude to the organisation in its first years.’ Coetzee sought to weaken anti-apartheid groups by fomenting divisions. This strategy had the additional intended benefit of legitimising the government's constitutional reforms: allowing meetings to be held in protest against the elections would, it was envisaged, legitimise the elections themselves. The state thus allowed its opponents considerable latitude to organise in 1983-1984. Bannings were lifted, meetings and conferences tolerated. Few activists were detained without being prosecuted. Of course, the state engaged in propaganda and a range of dirty tricks against its internal opponents, but these stopped far short of the high level of brutality exercised by many other repressive regimes. Protests in townships - most notably in the Vaal Triangle in September 1984 - were dealt with by the use of force. But organisations themselves were allowed the space to operate.
The Rabie-Coetzee strategy was not, of course, a success. The UDF itself embarrassed the state at the end of 1984, when its leaders occupied the British consulate in Durban and demanded that detainees be charged or released. The state's attempts to criminalise the UDF and its leadership were conspicuous failures: the core of the Pietermaritzburg Treason Trial collapsed; the Delmas Treason Trial degenerated into a farce; preparations for a third major UDF trial in 1985, and of Eastern Cape UDF and other Charterist leadership in 1988-9, came to naught; and Edgar Ngoyi was acquitted on a murder charge. Of over a hundred UDF national and regional officials, none were successfully convicted for activities linked to the UDF. There were some convictions for non-UDF activity: Mpetha was convicted of charges concerning incidents prior to 1983; Stofile was convicted of assisting MK, though on flimsy evidence, in a Ciskei court; several regional UDF leaders were jailed for MK-related activities. For sure, much of the UDF leadership was diverted by prosecution, but neither they nor the Front as a whole were successfully criminalised. Indeed, trials could serve a mobilising purpose, providing a focus for nationwide publicity and local organisational development, as in the case of Pietermaritzburg in early 1985.
The partial liberalisation of 1983-1984 was brought to an end in 1985-1986, as the state sought to retain a firmer grip on politics and society. A blanket ban was imposed on specified political organisations holding meetings indoors in a growing number of magisterial districts. Political leaders were detained under the Internal Security Act or - from July 1985 in parts of the country - under the State of Emergency. The government extended its controls over the media. But even then, divisions within the state kept some options open to the opposition: at the local level, officials were often willing to negotiate with civic leaders; the Department of Education and Training was willing to talk to its critics.
In mid-1986 the level of repression was stepped up with the imposition of a countrywide State of Emergency. Detentions and restrictions replaced prosecution as the primary strategy for containing opposition leaders, whilst force was used to disperse people on the streets. This reflected the failure of the earlier strategy: instead of justifying executive action on prior legal conviction, the government was forced to rely on executive condemnation to justify its more repressive approach. Security remained, nonetheless, subordinate to reform. By this stage, however, the UDF had established itself, and state repression could only legitimise it. Escalating repression also increased the importance of the media - and the UDF took advantage of both improved coverage in the commercial press and the opportunities that increased funding opened up for its own media production. The UDF was also able to work with and through organisations which were less subject to repression: the churches and trade unions especially.
At the end of the decade repression eased off once more, again in response to both internal protest and international pressure. The government lacked the political will to maintain the more repressive strategy of the mid-1980s. The number of activists in detention fell, although the remaining detainees included much of the core national and regional leadership of the UDF and its major affiliates. When Morobe and Moosa took refuge in the American consulate in Johannesburg in late 1988, the state agreed to allow them to leave without restrictions. Faced with hunger strikers protesting against continued detention without trial early in 1989, the state conceded that mass detention would be discontinued; in deciding to release detainees, the cabinet apparently overruled the advice of the State Security Council. Hunger strikes can be an expression of political weakness, as in Ireland, in the early and late twentieth century; in South Africa, however, they were an expression of political strength. Similarly, faced with the burgeoning mass marches, the police were ordered to desist from their initial brutality; the government was not worried by the possibility of defections, as in parts of Central and Eastern Europe at this time, but rather by the political costs associated with highly public police brutality. At the end of the decade, as at the beginning, the UDF was shaped by the political opportunities opened up by liberalisation.
Non-violent protest is far more sensitive to the opportunity structure than violent protest. Severe repression raises the costs of non-violent collective action, rendering it almost impossible to sustain; conversely, greater institutional responsiveness to such action has a mobilising effect. The openings of 1983-1984 and 1989 were crucial in facilitating the demonstrations and defiance of those periods. The only non-violent protests that endured in the more repressive environment of 1985-1988 were passive protests: consumer boycotts, the Black Christmas campaigns, stayaways and rent boycotts.
While liberalisation was driven in large part by the government's need to accommodate internal political protest, it was also a response to the international context. The South African economy had long needed foreign capital. Although investors are rarely very concerned about democracy per se, they do demand a degree of stability, which in turn, in the South African context, was widely seen as requiring a more accommodating political strategy on the state's part. Moreover, the policy of constructive engagement on the part of the United States and, in practice, Britain, depended on the credibility of the South African government's reform programme. When the South African government chose to retreat from reform in 1986, most dramatically through its dismissal of the Eminent Persons Group initiative, it embarrassed and greatly weakened the support of its foreign sympathisers. At the same time, the Cold War began to wind down, reducing perceived stakes in regional conflicts like those in southern Africa. Relations soured between the United States and Britain on the one hand and South Africa on the other. Both the American and British governments shifted towards the endorsement of the ANC as indispensable to a peace settlement in South Africa. The United States intensified economic pressure with the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, whilst the British held off heavy sanctions by agreeing that the European Commission fund the ‘victims of apartheid' through the Kagiso Trust.
The South African government's diplomatic weaknesses were compounded by military setbacks in Angola. In 1987-1988 South African troops incurred heavy casualties among mostly white troops, trying to protect its ally (or surrogate), UNITA, in and around Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola. Whilst the battle cannot be considered a clear military defeat, the costs of fighting in Angola had risen to a level which the politicians were unwilling to endure. The battle thus provided further impetus to the South Africans to negotiate a political settlement not only for Angola but for Namibia too. With the Soviet and American governments reducing their support for their surrogates in the region, and pushing for a settlement instead, peace accords were quickly signed in December 1988.
Skocpol and others have shown how military defeat is often a key element in weakening the state, providing opportunities to the regime's opponents. The South African military had not been defeated; nor was there much likelihood of its being seriously weakened by defections or resistance to conscription, notwithstanding the efforts of the End Conscription Campaign. Indeed, the Angolan-Namibian settlement represented a setback for the ANC, which had to withdraw its bases still further north and away from South Africa. Some sections of the military seem to have remained gung-ho about their capacity to maintain internal repression. It was the civilian rulers whose confidence in the military was dented. Military power no longer provided a bulwark behind which the international pressures for democratisation could be resisted. With the Cold War winding down, the 'third wave' of democratisation would soon sweep over South Africa's borders.
The international context was also important in that the UDF, its affiliates and allies enjoyed considerable funding from abroad. Foreign funds vastly exceeded the meagre sums that these organisations could hope to raise locally. Even the trade unions, which raised fees from their members, relied heavily on foreign funding. The collapse of the rand also helped, inflating the rand value of foreign donations.
The UDF was able to take advantage of the political liberalisation and the international context because there was a base of existing organisations and networks on which it could build. The organisational base of the UDF reflected the character of South African society in the 1980s: professional organisations with fast-growing black membership; community organisations in settled urban areas; student organisations in the burgeoning secondary and tertiary educational sectors; and youth organisations bringing together highly politicised, well-educated activists and unemployed school-leavers. The power of the UDF was rooted in the growth of the settled black urban population, comprising both the urban industrial working classes and the aspirant black middle classes. Without this patchwork of organisations the UDF would not have been possible: a national association of individual activists along the lines of the Release Mandela Committee, for example, would have been too easy to suppress.
The possibility of the UDF was also premised on the existence of the ANC, in terms of both its political traditions - which remained alive, in many parts of the country, into the early 1980s- and its expanding political underground. The actual relationship between the UDF and the ANC may not have been the neatly hierarchical one alleged by the state, but it was certainly true that the formation of the UDF and the subsequent maintenance of unity, albeit fragile and strained, depended on the glue provided by loyalties to the ANC.
The changing social and economic structure of South Africa eroded the ability of the National Party to maintain a 'broad anti-democratic alliance. The hitherto enduring elite alignment that had sustained apartheid collapsed. For some rural elites - especially in sectors that remained dependent on state patronage, through price support for example - and for poorer white, coloured and Indian people, social and economic changes were profoundly threatening. The National Party thus faced a growing disaffection and defection to rival parties to its right. At the same time, economic elites whose well-being depended more on the market than on the state viewed the costs of apartheid, including the prospect of chronic instability, with growing concern. To them, as to many such elites in the advanced industrialised world before them, democratisation seemed preferable to revolution. Having learned to live with trade unions, key business elites viewed the ANC with suspicion but with diminishing hostility. Businessmen sought to negotiate deals with civic leaders at the local level, whilst big business opened up lines of communication with the ANC in exile. Intellectual elites were also increasingly disaffected from the National Party - as was reflected in visits to the ANC by Afrikaner students, academics, newspaper editors and others, as well as the ideological struggles within the Dutch Reformed Church and Broederbond.
In summary, the UDF was very much the product of its context: of liberalisation on the part of the state, of international pressures, and of the growth of anti-apartheid organisation and elite disaffection amidst fundamental socio-economic changes in society. But whilst such opportunities may make action possible, actors also create their own opportunities. The organisational structure of the UDF and its choices of strategies and tactics were important factors shaping its impact on the course of South African politics.
Organisation and resources
The organisational structure of the UDF was an important factor in its capacity to weather adverse conditions and maintain political pressure on the state. Many commentators have suggested that the Front's 'shell-like' structure reduced its vulnerability to repression. More importantly, the organisational form of the Front allowed for the degree of flexibility required for acting in very different modes as conditions demanded - sometimes in a vanguardist mode, taking the initiative and pulling its affiliates along, and sometimes in a more co-ordinating role, linking sovereign affiliates together. The organisational form of the Front varied not only over time, but also between and even within its constituent regions.
The form adopted by the Front was unusual in comparative terms. It was not a mere purposive alliance of competing parties, as the popular fronts had been in the 1930s. In South Africa one political movement, the ANC was hegemonic within opposition politics. But the ANC was banned and unable to operate in the legal and public space provided by the state's political need to be seen as tolerant of non-violent opposition.
The Front could be flexible because its form, and indeed its functions, remained somewhat indeterminate, open to varied interpretation. This inevitably meant that the organisational structure arid practices of the Front were a matter of continuing dispute and rancour. The Front was formed with little clarity as to how it would operate. It had no constitution. Its Working Principles insisted that affiliates retained their autonomy but did not provide any concrete guidance on how the Front would operate. In the face of repression as well as its leaders' concern to strengthen the movement against apartheid, the Front adopted more and more of a vanguardist role - prompting repeated criticism, as we have seen. Its leadership remained insistent, however, that the Front was committed to democratic practices. In the UDF's 1987 paper 'Towards a People's Democracy', five 'basic principles of our organisational democracy' were identified:
1. Leadership must be elected and recallable.
2. Leadership must be collective (and leadership skills must be developed).
3. Leadership must exercise their initiative, but act according to democratic decisions.
4. Leadership must report back regularly and fully to organisations, areas, etc.
5. There must be constructive criticism and self-criticism through regular evaluations.
In practice, the UDF adhered to this democratic model unevenly and intermittently, although generally through no choice of its own. At least initially, its leadership was elected. Its national office-holders were elected in 1983, and again in 1985. Regional leadership was elected in 1983, again in 1984 in the case of the Border region, and again in all major regions in 1985. Some of the regional elections were fiercely competitive. Thereafter, elections were not held regularly. In the Western Cape, elections were held in 1987 and 1989, but in other regions they were only held in 1989, and in Natal it seems they were not held again at all. This was primarily due to repression. The detention or prosecution of elected leaders ensured that in practice leadership roles were played by non-elected leaders from most of 1985 to 1989. At the national level, for example, Morobe, Nair and Mafolo were not even members of the NEC as constituted in 1985. In the face of the constraints on elected representation, the UDF reorganised many of its executive committees so that subordinate structures or sectors sent representatives, rather than elected specific individuals. Repression also curtailed the capacity of the Front's leadership to operate collectively. Until mid-1985, or even late 1985, the NEC retained decision-making power at the national level; thereafter, much power shifted in practice to key officials: Moosa as acting secretary, Morobe in charge of publicity, and Cachalia as treasurer. The same constraints existed at the regional level.
The Front also acted creditably in terms of the last two of the basic principles identified above. The UDF maintained an impressive level of reporting-back and of self-criticism, given the constraints under which it operated after 1985. As is clear from preceding chapters, UDF leaders carried forward an impressive tradition of self-critical reflection on their performance and that of the Front. In public, UDF speakers adopted a celebratory tone, even during the height of repression and disorganisation in 1986-1987. Within the organisation, however, the UDF's own leaders were among the most focused of its critics. It was Molefe who reported to the 1985 national conference that political organisation was 'trailing behind the masses', and who identified a series of weaknesses in the Front's performance. It was Moosa, the acting secretary general in Molefe's absence, who reported to the 1987 NGC that the Front had been unable to maintain its regional structures. And it was Molefe, again, who told the 1991 NGC that the Front was then 'at its weakest in the entire history of its existence'.
It was with respect to the third of the basic principles listed above that the practices of the UDF diverged furthest from the stated goals. Decisions were rarely made on the basis of mandated positions, and the national leadership exercised considerable latitude. Most of the major decisions made after 1984 were taken without extensive discussion and consultation among affiliates or even regional structures. Co-ordination took the form of injunctions from above: help with this campaign, use this tactic, avoid the errors of both populism and workerism, and so on.
Faced with this situation it is not surprising that the leadership of the Front came in for some vicious criticism from ANC-aligned activists as well as from their opponents. It was also no surprise that most of these Charterist critics did not seek to contest control of the Front from within but rather voted with their feet and challenged it from the outside. For all its achievements, the leadership of the Front was not sufficiently accountable to the affiliates to persuade critics to voice their opposition through internal channels. Whilst further research is required on this, it seems that the only times that incumbent UDF office-holders were defeated in elections were when the leadership core supported the challenge, as in both the Western Cape and the Transvaal in 1985, when Oscar Mpetha and Moss Chikane respectively were unseated in competitive elections. With no prospect of being able to contest the UDF leadership successfully, critics were driven to snipe from the outside.
Criticism of the UDF leadership was focused on the so-called cabal. Dissent within the UDF had emerged during the referendum debate in late 1983, grew in 1984 amidst strategic differences - these included the Million Signatures Campaign, the proposed defiance campaign, the calls for a national convention, stayaways or general strikes, and finally the occupation of the British consulate - and cohered during the Pietermaritzburg Treason Trial. Aubrey Mokoena, who had been a member of the initial NEC, and others, began to build the Johannesburg-based Release Mandela Campaign as an alternative forum for leadership in the Charterist movement. Later, supported by Winnie Mandela and sections of the youth movement, Mokoena voiced more strident criticisms of the 'cabal' controlling the UDF, and even complained to the ANC in exile. In 1990, the criticisms became public when he wrote an open letter to the ANC leadership, alleging 'treachery' and 'treason' on the part of the UDF leaders involved in the cabal.
Its accusers conjured up a vision of the UDF that resembled, in some respects at least, the classic analysis of the oligarchic tendencies in organisation formulated by Max Weber and Robert Michels at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Michels' 'iron law of oligarchy', as 'democratic' organisations develop social and economic bases in society, so they inevitably become bureaucratised, and power becomes concentrated in the hands of a few leaders. The organisational leadership grows increasingly concerned to maintain the organisation, prone to adaptation to the existing power structure in society, and retreat from the organisation's original goals. The critics of the 'cabal' in the UDF did not level the second of these charges at the time, although they have done so since 1991; they did level the first and third of these charges.
There is certainly evidence that the UDF became bureaucratised. At the outset, charismatic leadership clearly played a major part. Most notably, Boesak played an inspirational role both in the formation of the Front in 1983 and in some of its campaigns and activities up to the time of the banned march on Pollsmoor Prison in 1985. Boesak was never an office-holder in the UDF (he was, formally, a patron only), but many members of the Front's initial NEC were more charismatic than bureaucratic. As the Front grew, however, and was transformed into an increasingly coherent organisation, so bureaucrats assumed greater authority. Molefe was perhaps the first of the senior bureaucrats; when he and the charismatic Lekota were detained, their places were filled (temporarily) by Manuel and Carolus, and later and for much longer by Moosa, Morobe and Cachalia, all of whom were effective bureaucrats.
It is less clear, however, that there was much 'goal transformation'. Certainly, under the State of Emergency the UDF leadership invested considerable effort in maintaining and strengthening organisational structures, both of the Front and its affiliates. But such organisation building was actually one of the UDF's original goals; the lesson of 1976 was that organisational development was necessary if sustained pressure was to be exerted on the apartheid state. Moreover, most of the strategies and tactics employed by the UDF at the outset were retained. From late 1989 many UDF leaders were conspicuously wary of confrontational tactics. But such wariness was evident from 1983, and in so far as there was a shift in 1989 it took place in a context in which it was believed (rightly) that the UDF had already effectively secured its goal of democratisation, in that the state was locked into a path that would lead precisely there.
In addition, oligarchic tendencies were by no means confined to the UDF 'cabal'. The critics of the 'cabal' were vulnerable to the same charges. Indeed, there was a strong current of vanguardism within opposition politics, including the diverse Charterist movement. Barrell has shown how ANC strategic thought in exile revolved around a conception of its role as the 'detonator' that would spark an irresistible insurrection. The most striking vanguardist statements made by UDF leaders were not made by 'cabalists', but by leaders such as Tshwete, who argued that the UDF's top leadership had a perspective superior to the leadership of its affiliates.
The UDF did develop a bureaucratic leadership; the 'cabal' did wield considerable power through their control of financial and other resources; they did advocate a less immediately confrontational strategy than some of their critics. But they did not do so from an explicit strategy of subverting the organisation or through any conspiracy to monopolise power for personal gain. Rather, they were the products of the context. Moreover, the allegations were part of a contest for power in which the accusers themselves sought to secure the leading role in the internal Charterist movement, sought to control resources, and sought to determine the strategies and tactics to be employed. The contest was fuelled further by a degree of resentment towards non-Africans in leadership positions, and by the complexity of relationships with the ANC, with various sections of the internal Charterist movement using different lines of communication and each claiming a superior mandate.
Control over resources was central to many of the disputes within the UDF. As the Front's resources grew, so disputes intensified. In 1983 the UDF's income depended largely on donations. The two national treasurers, Ramgobin and Saloojee, were especially successful in raising donations from Indian businessmen in Natal. The total budget was limited. Up to mid-October 1983, for example, the Western Cape region spent just over R30 000 - one-third of which was on the national launch, and another third on printing media and posters. Then the UDF began obtaining funds abroad, as prizes, such as the Swedish 'Let Live' human rights award, or grants. By the end of 1984 the national office had distributed R175 000 to the regions, and some regions were able to supplement their share through their own fund-raising. Required to produce a budget for foreign donors, the UDF began to think grandiosely, drafting a budget motivation with a price tag of R455 000 to cover the next six months. Such ambitions were only slightly premature. From 1986 the UDF received massive funding from abroad, enabling it to employ more and more organisers. By 1989-1990 the UDF had an income of about R1.7 million, excluding grants for specific expenses such as the Conference for a Democratic Future (cost: R417 000). In 1990-1991 the UDF's income rose to about R4.8 million; in real terms, taking inflation into account, this represented about ten times its budget for its first year. By this stage the single largest item of expenditure was salaries. All these figures exclude the income received separately by the UDF's affiliates for their own purposes.
The growing availability of funds affected both strategies and politics within the UDF. It enabled the regions to employ teams of organisers. It paid for the production of media. It paid for airfares for the leadership, bought cars, and settled their telephone bills. It paid for some of the transport and accommodation needed at national conferences. In the last eighteen months or so of the UDF's existence, it paid for computers and fax machines. Funding thus enabled activists from across the country to come together for co-ordinating and decision-making meetings, and for organisers to spread out across much of the country, promoting organisational development and protest. Funding was thus crucial to the project of building a nationwide political movement. Funding was perhaps most important during the Emergency, when it enabled the UDF to continue to provide some national leadership through media and organisers, even when many of its organisational structures and affiliates were in disarray.
Funding also affected the internal politics of the UDF, as we have already seen in the cabal allegations. Cachalia, national treasurer from 1985, freely admits that he had considerable autonomy to decide whom to pay and whom not. And, as he himself warned in January 1990: 'As foreign money washes into our organisations, the executives in our organisations become less and less responsible or accountable to the masses.' The accrual of power to the UDF's financial controllers was balanced, to some extent, by the flow of funds to UDF affiliates. Funds from the European Commission and other foreign donors were channelled, often through intermediaries such as the Kagiso Trust, to civic organisations, advice offices, and youth organisations. Thus, whilst the national treasurer became more powerful within the Front, some of its major affiliates became more autonomous from the Front. The concentration of power was accompanied by a diffusion of power.
Although the inflow of funds after 1985 seemed immense and had important political ramifications for the UDF, it must be acknowledged that the sums involved were small compared to those of other mass organisations. The ANC is reported to have had a budget of US$50-100 million per annum whilst in exile; back in South Africa in 1991, the operational costs of the ANC's administration were put at R4 million per month; in 1993 the ANC announced a fund-raising target of R168 million for its election campaign. These sums dwarf the income of the UDF. The trade union movement also commanded much more extensive resources than the UDF. It is difficult to obtain figures for union finances, but by the mid-1990s the unions affiliated to COSATU were employing an estimated 1500 people. The progressive churches also had considerable budgets in the 1980s, and substantial funds were directed to legal firms for defence in political trials and to service organisations for development-related work.
Funds were the most conspicuous resource enjoyed by the UDF, but they were not the only resources. Personnel also comprised a crucial resource. The UDF's leadership included people - some of them lawyers - with a wealth of administrative and professional skills and who, generally through family or education, had networks of contacts with a wide range of skills and resources. When Goniwe needed to get from Cradock to Port Elizabeth for a UDF REC meeting, he could persuade his good friend Sparrow Mhlauli to drive him and others there in Mhlauli's car (assistance that would cost Mhlauli his life, as it turned out).
Leadership
The character of the UDF's leadership has been the subject of extensive debate. Left critics of the UDF's pan-class approach to politics implied that its leadership was middle class, dominated by ‘petty bourgeois intellectuals, rendering it ripe for a post-election sell-out to business’. In response, Swilling asserts that 'a high proportion of the UDF's leadership are (or have come) from poor working-class backgrounds'; he suggests that, of 62 REC members for which he had evidence, about half were in 'economic positions that can be defined as working class'; the other half were in professional occupations or were students. Lodge interprets the same data differently. ‘Socially, UDF leadership is heavily middle-class': the number of NEC-REC members in professional, religious or technical occupations greatly outnumbered those classifiable as workers.’ Lodge notes the absence of 'people from middle-level management, modern commercial occupations, township business, and petty trading'. The UDF leadership, he emphasises, ‘belong to an intellectual middle class rather than an entrepreneurial one’ and therefore he concludes that 'a disproportionate share of the original national leadership came from a radicalized middle-class intelligentsia'. Anthony Marx concurs with Lodge: both the Black Consciousness and Charterist movements were 'to a large extent led by the black middle class and aspirants to it'.
These contrasting assessments arise in part from Swilling's apparent conflation of class origins with class position. Certainly, many of the UDF's leaders - including almost all of its African leaders - came from impoverished, working-class backgrounds. Popo Molefe, for example, grew up in a very poor family in Soweto. His father was a labourer, his mother a domestic servant. His schooling was interrupted several times when his family could not afford his school fees, and he eventually reached Standard 10 in 1976, aged 24. Prior to being employed by the UDF, he was a printing machine operator for Kodak. Leaders such as Molefe were born in South Africa's cities, generally of working-class families that had moved there from rural areas. Similarly, Matthew Goniwe's father was a labourer, and his mother a domestic worker - but he went to high school and on to Fort Hare University, becoming a teacher.
Focusing on class origins obscures the importance of class mobility. From the 1940s onwards, South Africa underwent extraordinary social and occupational change. Children like the young Popo Molefe had the opportunity, which most of their parents had not had, to complete primary schooling and go on to high school. Graduating from high school, students like Molefe were able to secure jobs as skilled or white-collar workers that had not existed a generation previously. For Molefe, working as a machine operator was a transitory stage in a path of upward occupational mobility. In his case, Molefe became a professional activist; eleven years after working as a machine operator he became Premier of the North West Province. Similarly, Stone Sizani, a UDF REC member in the Eastern Cape, was employed as a skilled technician, and is thus classified misleadingly as a worker by Swilling. After several years as a professional UDF activist, Sizani became the Eastern Cape manager of the Kagiso Trust, studied overseas, and then worked as an executive in the Independent Development Trust. Few UDF leaders had any significant experience of blue-collar working-class employment, and these were mostly confined to the older generation of 1950s veterans such as Ngoyi and Fazzie in the Eastern Cape. The younger activists may have had passing experience as skilled workers but were for the most part professional activists. Some had already broken into professional occupations by the time they became UDF leaders - for example, Goniwe was a teacher; and the Natal secretary, Joe Phaahla, was a doctor. Professionals and quasi-professionals played key roles at regional and national levels.
The UDF leadership was most clearly middle class in Natal and the Western Cape.
In Natal, Lodge classified only two out of sixteen REC members as workers; this regional leadership was 'largely middle class and professional'. Similarly, in the Western Cape, Swilling classified only three out of twelve REC members as working class. In Natal the UDF regional leadership was drawn heavily from sections of the Indian middle class and a relatively well-established African middle class. In the Western Cape the UDF leadership included mostly coloured activists, many with post-secondary education. In both cases, a large majority of REC members had experience of tertiary education. Most UDF leaders in these two provinces may not have been African, but they too were drawn from sections of the South African population that were enjoying marked upward mobility.
The importance of high school education led Brewer to identify the driving force of opposition politics as 'educated labour', borrowing the phrase from Habermas. But in also describing this social group as a 'radicalised middle class', Brewer obscures the significance of mobility. The key African social group in the UDF leadership comprised people with working-class origins, radicalised at high school or university, and thereafter set on a path of upward occupational mobility, but who, because of residential segregation and the late development of urban African middle-class housing estates, remained in close contact with their working-class families and neighbours.
The UDF leadership was conspicuously not drawn from certain social groups. As Lodge and others note, there were very few leaders from the 'old' or entrepreneurial middle class; in so far as they were middle class, they were 'new' middle class. Secondly, few if any of the UDF leadership came from peasant or other backgrounds in deep rural areas. The sons, let alone daughters, of peasants or migrants rarely had the opportunity to get to high school in the 1960s or 1970s, and thus had few opportunities to move into a leadership position in the cities, where political organisation was concentrated. Thirdly, and most importantly perhaps, there were very few UDF leaders with any sustained experience on the shop floor. Workers made it into leadership positions in the trade unions but not in the UDF. To take just one example, the leadership of unions in the metalworking industry included Moses Mayekiso and Enoch Godongwana, both of whom came from the Transkei to work in factories on the Reef. Both later became involved in community issues, in Alexandra and the East Rand respectively. But neither became involved in the UDF. While the African UDF leadership had working-class roots and links, it was generally not in or to the industrial working class in particular.
The social character of the UDF leadership had some clear implications for the Front. While Anthony Marx rightly warns against assuming that 'a leader's family background or current professional status determines his or her class sympathies', their experiences surely shaped their political horizons and skills. Even though some of them came from poor backgrounds, few of the UDF's leaders spoke the language of the poor: their schooling, and in the late 1980s their dress, set them apart. Their experiences of upward educational and occupational mobility, but continuing direct and indirect racial restrictions, must have influenced their visions of the goals of the struggle, making them more likely to subordinate 'economic transformation to ending racial discrimination and national domination', as Marx puts it. Resisting affiliation to the UDF in 1983, and remaining wary for the following two years, some trade unionists seem to have dreamed of a blue-collar worker leadership in the struggle for political change. Such dreams ran up against the reality of rapid social change, with political leadership slipping into the hands of classes based not in industry but in the service sector, and not in the working class but in the fast-growing black middle classes.
The racial and gender composition of the UDF's leadership is easier to identify. Despite an oft-stated commitment to the primacy of African leadership, the roles played by coloured, Indian and even white activists were disproportionate to the racial composition of even the metropolitan population. The prominence of people such as Gordhan, Yunus Mahomed, Manuel, Carolus, Moosa and Cachalia all too easily fuelled racist allegations about cabals. Such allegations, as we have seen, belittle the importance of very capable African leaders. The gender composition of the UDF leadership was a much more serious cause for concern, although (tellingly) it never surfaced as a major controversy at the time. Less than one in ten of the UDF's leadership was female; the proportion in the top leadership was even lower. The UDF leadership was also distinctively urban, and mostly metropolitan. Almost none of its leaders came from the bantustans or farming areas.
The final important point about the UDF leadership is its relationship with the banned ANC. Most of the titular leaders of the Front were drawn from the ranks of older leaders, veterans of the 1950s, who remained firmly rooted in the working class. Most of the provincial and national secretaries, by contrast, were drawn from the younger generation of upwardly mobile activists. As the UDF grew as an organisation, expanded its media production, controlled greater funds and relied ever more heavily on modern communications technology, so the relative power of the younger generation increased, fuelling perceptions among the newly marginalised that the more tightly knit bureaucrats were operating as a cabal.
Social differences were also one factor in the highly complex nature of the relations between the UDF and the ANC whilst this remains a topic requiring further research, as is the related topic of relations between the UDF and SACP, some key features are clear. Firstly, most - if not all - of the top UDF leadership saw themselves as part of the ANC underground inside the country, whether formally or informally, to use Barrell's distinction. A significant number of UDF leaders had spent time in jail for ANC or MK-related activities or had joined the ANC whilst in jail. Others had long-standing personal links to the Congress movement. Many of the younger African UDF leaders had grown up in an environment where they learnt ANC songs, read Mandela's old speeches, and generally saw the ANC as 'the mother body', as Molefe recalls; in many cases, especially in Soweto, their links to the ANC had been forged upon the events of 1976.
ANC leaders made bold claims to journalists about the coherence of the ANC. Mufson records being told by Mbeki that ‘The ANC exists in two parts: in South Africa and outside South Africa. No major decision on strategy or important tactics can be reached without consultation with the other part’. Tshwete told Mufson that, when he was inside the country, he communicated with the ANC in exile about once a week. In practice, however, communication and consultation was never easy. As Tshwete emphasised, there were many informers, and this made it difficult to communicate safely. Furthermore, communication channels between the many parts of the ANC underground and the ANC in exile were very fragmented. The ANC's formal lines of command to its formal political and military underground structures were divided, not only between the different bases in the frontline states (Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique) but also at times between political and military structures. Moreover, many UDF leaders were not in the formal underground; for security reasons, several top leaders including Molefe had cut direct links - though no doubt retained indirect links. The result was that there was a multiplicity of lines of communication between the UDF and the ANC. UDF leaders relied on whatever lines they felt most comfortable with. This became clear in late 1983, during the debate over referendums on the constitutional reforms, and again in late 1985 over school boycotts. Both sides in the debate claimed that their positions had been endorsed by or came from the ANC in exile. This complexity facilitated, and was in turn entrenched, by deepening divisions with the internal Charterist movement.
The complexity of the relationship between the ANC and UDF can only have been complicated by the additional presence of the SACP within both organisations. The character and activities of the SACP inside the country remain an entirely unresearched topic. The importance of the topic is indicated by the role played in parts of the UDF by Charles Nqakula, initially Border UDF convener and then publicity secretary; Jeremy Cronin, editor of lsizwe; and Raymond Suttner, who ran political education classes in Johannesburg, especially during 1985-6. All of them were revealed as prominent members of the SACP after 1990. Indeed, when the SACP announced publicly for the first time the names of its internal Central Committee in July 1990, the list of 22 people included Cronin, Billy Nair, Mufamadi and even Carolus.
Strategies and tactics
During the eight years of its existence the UDF employed or endorsed an extensive repertoire of tactics. These included, in roughly the chronological order in which they were used, election boycotts, media campaigns, protest meetings, festivals, petitions, diplomatic occupations, hosting international visitors, overseas publicity, stayaways from work, protest marches, mass vigils, political funerals, consumer boycotts, rent boycotts, creating parallel institutions ('people's power'), media and political education production, negotiations and meetings, civil disobedience, overseas diplomacy, land occupations and (selectively) violence. These can be divided into three main categories: protest and persuasion, non-cooperation and direct challenges.
The bulk of the UDF's efforts fell into the first two categories. Its direct challenges to the state were confined to developing the strategic framework of people's power in 1985-1986, its tangential and vacillating involvement in land invasions in 1990-1991, and its very selective endorsement of violence. The reason for this lay in the predominant strategic thinking within the UDF, which itself reflected an assessment of the relative strengths of the state and opposition.
The UDF faced throughout its existence a choice between two broad political strategies. These were repeatedly conceptualised in terms of the metaphor of the speed of a military column. This metaphor had been used by the ANC in the year 1970s, drawing perhaps on earlier use by Mandela and others in the 1950s. A column could march at the speed of its slowest members: the logic of this was that it would arrive on the battlefield with the greatest possible numbers, and thus with the greatest possible strength. Alternatively, the column could advance at the speed of its fastest members: the logic of this was that it would arrive at the battlefield as soon as possible, would retain the initiative, and would therefore be able to exert great pressure on opponents at their moment of vulnerability. In the early 1970s the ANC had advocated the more cautious approach:
The speed of a column on the march is determined by the pace of the slowest and the weakest soldier and not the fittest and fastest. The most advanced sections should, therefore, at all times, seek to advance the least developed ones, keeping in the forefront the principle of the greatest and highest unity of the people and at all times fighting all tendencies to 'go it alone' through impatience and contempt for the less developed forces of the revolution.
In the 1980s the UDF oscillated between these two approaches. During 1983-1985 the dominant view was that it should draw as many people and groups as possible into an anti-apartheid alliance. As Molefe put it in late 1983, the UDF should not 'mistake the consciousness of the leadership for mass consciousness'; rather, he argued, 'we must take the prevailing consciousness as a baseline and take people through a process that will overcome their scepticism and fear'. In 1985-1987 the opposite view predominated: the people were deemed ready for action, and the UDF should carry forward rather than restrain their defiant impulses. Then, in the face of state repression in 1988, 'the UDF reverted to its initial, more cautious approach. 'We should remember that the pace of a column is not determined by the fittest and fastest soldier but by the slowest and weakest.’ There was one difference between the initial and post-1988 periods: prior to 1985 the Front had sought to compete with the National Party government for the loyalties of coloured and Indian South Africans; after 1987 it sought to pull disaffected white economic and other elites away from the government.
Throughout, however, the UDF defined its role as strengthening the tide of resistance rather than playing a crudely vanguardist role. Even during the rise and peak years of the township revolt, from 1984 to 1986, the UDF emphasised organisation building and the maintenance of discipline within the anti-apartheid movement rather than an immediate explosion of direct action. UDF leaders sought to channel the insurrectionary militancy of the youth in constructive and sustainable directions, and on many occasions sought even to rein it in. 'People's power' was an exercise in self-discipline as well as a mechanism for exerting pressure on the state. What was dropped in 1985-1986 was not the emphasis on organisation building but the privileging of alliance building over intensifying resistance. While many of the more confrontation-orientated leaders agreed that alliance building was important, in practice they made alliance building dependent on the tactical compromises being forged by prospective allies, not by the democratic movement.
The tactics of protest-persuasion and non-cooperation were determined in part by spiritual and moral concerns. Boesak, who wielded great influence in 1983-1985, articulated a millenarian view in which moral integrity would lead, in some undefined way, to political victory. In the case of Molefe, moral concerns were integrated into a more strategic vision. Strategy and morality coincided in persuading Molefe that 'a mature political approach must try to reach accommodation with whites'. UDF tactics often involved self-sacrifice and austerity. In calling for a Black Christmas, for example, the UDF explicitly asked for 'self-sacrifices in order to strengthen the solidarity and unity of our people'. The churches played a very important indirect role in the development of strategic thought among the UDF's leaders - just as they did in the American civil rights movement and in Solidarity in Poland.
The strategic importance of alliance building combined with an embracing morality to underpin the rhetorical invocation of the 'nation' in the speeches and writings of UDF leaders. As Anthony Marx shows, the concept of ‘nation’ was central to the mobilisation of, the Charterist movement and the UDF. This concept enabled the UDF leadership to transcend the divisive politics of race and class.
Violence posed a dilemma for the Front's leadership. Some opposed recourse to violence on moral grounds, others on strategic ones. But, faced with brutal state repression and widespread popular protest, more and more UDF leaders began to endorse violence, albeit very selectively. Defensive violence was understandable, it was said. The UDF pointedly declined to condemn the killing of a Ciskei policeman and a (mistakenly) suspected informer at UDF-organised funerals, and was slow to criticise necklacing. Cachalia explained this in an interview with Van Kessel:
Perhaps we should have come out with a clear position on necklacing. But many of the people involved in necklacing were not part of formal UDF structures. They were the so-called amaqabane, comrades, people who felt themselves to be part of UDF or ANC without formally belonging to any structures. We did not speak out against necklacing because we did not want to alienate those people.
Even at the height of the township revolt, however, UDF leaders did not appear to turn to thinkers who advocated violence. Martin Luther King remained an inspiration; Fanon and the American Black Power leadership did not. South Africa's transition - up to 1990, and excepting Natal - was not particularly violent. Given the importance of morality and especially non-violence in the thought of many UDF leaders, it is perhaps surprising that the UDF did not embark on a more extensive programme of civil disobedience. There was, after all, the precedent of the Defiance Campaign of the 1950s, which had proved an enormous success, transforming the then legal ANC into a truly mass organisation for the first time. Until mid-1989, however, the UDF's engagement in active civil disobedience was limited to the occasional march, the most important of which - the 1985 Pollsmoor march - was prohibited. In 1984 the UDF had discussed the possibility of a defiance campaign but hesitated on the grounds that even this was too strident a tactic for a 'front organisation', and might lose the UDF supporters. Having misread the moment, UDF leaders were rapidly overtaken by events. Had they had time to take stock, early 1986 might have been a propitious time for a defiance campaign, but the UDF leadership was preoccupied with people's power. The Border UDF discussed an anti-pass campaign but there is little record of any organised activity. Not until 1989 did the changing political situation reopen the possibility of a campaign of civil disobedience.
Underlying the UDF leaders' unease with a defiance campaign was, perhaps, the complexity of the UDF's support bases. As it did not have formal membership, and operated in part as a front of autonomous organisations, it is difficult to be precise in discussing the UDF's 'support bases'. Lodge observes that, 'in one essential sense, the UDF is a working-class movement':
In a social context in which a black bourgeoisie scarcely exists, in which members of petty bourgeois or middle-class groups at best constitute a thin layer, and in which the rural population is largely proletarianised or at least dependent on wage labour, any popular organisation has to have a working-class base.
As we have already seen, analysing social class in South Africa in such broad brushstrokes omits important points. Although there remains a paucity of research on the social bases of the many and varied organisations that affiliated to the UDF, it seems likely that their active membership was drawn heavily from the upwardly mobile members of working-class families. The affiliates' active membership did not, for the most part, comprise blue-collar workers, and certainly not farmworkers, the rural poor, domestic workers or mine-workers. Rather, they comprised people in white-collar occupations or studying, with the prospect of entering such occupations. The participants in specifically UDF activities were even more likely to be drawn from these sections of the population. In the case of the Defiance Campaign of 1989, it is likely that support was derived primarily from the coloured and Indian middle classes. Thus, whilst a defiance campaign in the mid-1980s might have been powerful symbolically, it might also have reinforced a sense of detachment from the UDF in some poorer, mostly African areas - undermining the UDF's ambition of achieving the leading role, providing overarching co-ordination and direction within the Charterist movement inside the country.
But this explanation cannot suffice. There were occasions when large numbers of poor and working-class black people engaged in public collective action. The UDF's own affiliates were involved in marches in protest against rent increases, unresponsive councillors, and so on. In 1990 there was a series of protest marches against bantustan administrations. Furthermore, the trade union movement organised mass action on several occasions. Why did the UDF not organise any nationwide campaigns of mass demonstrations? One answer is the UDF leadership's aversion to violence: the lesson of marches in, most notably, the Vaal Triangle in September 1984 and in Mamelodi in November 1985, as well as at countless funerals, was that marches very often prompted police repression, which often led to uncontrolled popular violence.
But again, this explanation does not suffice. It cannot explain why the UDF was, for the most part, opposed to mass action akin to the 'mass strike' advocated in the writing of the German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg. Such action would entail, primarily, mass non-cooperation rather than active and public defiance. In November 1984 the UDF leadership had argued strongly against the proposal that two-day stayaways be lengthened to, or followed by, indefinite work stoppages. In early 1985 the ANC floated a similar idea, but the internal leadership pointedly declined to take it up. The strategic framework of people's power was developed in 1986 in part as an alternative to an insurrectionary mass or general strike. In mid-1989 the idea surfaced again in discussions between the ANC, UDF and COSATU but was not used. Such proposals were opposed by the unions, as well as by the UDF, owing to a conservatism rooted in an assessment of the weaknesses of the democratic movement. The UDF leadership was consistently concerned that the experience of 1977 not be repeated, whilst the union leadership was concerned that their involvement in politics should not prejudice their organisational gains in the workplace. Extended defiance was not deemed conducive to the kind of organisation building that was in turn considered necessary if democracy and freedom were to be won. Repression may have been limited in comparison with Latin America for example, but it nonetheless served to deter many people from confrontation. In view of this, extended defiance would have been unsustainable and ultimately counterproductive.
The legacy of the UDF bequeathed to the ANC
What lasting impact did the UDF make on South African politics? In what ways, if at all, are post-apartheid politics marked by the imprint of the UDF? How would politics be different if there had been no UDF - if, for example, political change had occurred without any political organisation and mobilisation above ground inside the country? These questions bring us to a general question we can ask in contexts besides the South African one: how does the character of a major political organisation or movement prior to democratisation affect political life in the subsequent democratic era?
The legacy of the UDF is most directly visible within the political party that absorbed most of its leadership and supporters: the ANC. Unbanned in 1990, the ANC rebuilt its organisation inside the country, played the leading role in negotiations over the terms of constitutional change, and ran a victorious election campaign in early 1994. With 62 per cent of the vote, the ANC formed by far the largest party in the post-apartheid Government of National Unity, and its leader - Nelson Mandela - became the first President of democratic South Africa.
UDF leaders have played prominent roles in the ANC since 1990. The interim ANC conveners in five of the key regions were former UDF office-holders, and UDF activists were prominent in most (but not all) of the ANC RECs elected in late 1990. When the first ANC NEC was elected in mid-1991 after its unbanning, former UDF leaders were prominent but not to the same extent as at the regional level. Over a quarter of the elected NEC members had been office-holders in the UDF. A long list of UDF activists were elected as ANC MPs in 1994, and more besides elected to the provincial legislatures. Some acceded to key positions in the national government. Trevor Manuel became Minister of Trade and Industry and later Minister of Finance; Tshwete became Minister of Sport; after a spell as deputy minister, Moosa became Minister of Provincial Affairs and Constitutional Development; Omar became Minister of Justice; Mufamadi became Minister of Safety and Security. Other UDF leaders assumed office in the provinces. Molefe and Lekota became Premiers of the North West and Free State provinces respectively; later Lekota was 'redeployed' to the Council of Provinces after bitter struggles within the Free State ANC. Stofile, after a spell as ANC Chief Whip in the National Assembly, became Premier of the Eastern Cape. Many of the provincial ministers were former UDF leaders. Carolus, who was said to have decided against a government appointment, served as the ANC's assistant general secretary from 1994 and acting general secretary in 1997, before being appointed High Commissioner in London in 1998.
These former UDF activists were not the bearers of a single, monolithic political tradition. In the early 1990s there was much discussion of the difficulties the ANC would face in reconciling its different groups of leaders: the internal leadership, the exiles, and the Robben Island prisoners. But these groups had overlapping membership: some of the UDF activists had been prisoners, including Lekota, Tshwete and Nair, and others had been exiles - such as Tshwete and Cronin; most had been in the ANC underground, in one way or another. Moreover, as has been emphasised throughout this book, the UDF was a heterogeneous organisation: vast strategic and ideological differences existed between, for example, Molefe on the one hand and Mokaba on the other.
Notwithstanding the heterogeneity within the UDF, is it possible to identify ways in which activists' experiences within the UDF before 1991 shaped their contributions to the ANC thereafter? Former UDF leaders shared a common experience of and commitment to organisation building, and a commitment to non-racial or multiracial organising. These, however, were not unique to the former UDF leaders. The UDF, after all, had inherited existing traditions of organisation building and non- or multiracialism. What distinguished the former UDF leaders from most other ANC leaders was their experience of public organising above ground in South Africa in the 1980s - an experience that was recent and rooted in conditions that existed in South Africa in the 1980s, but not in the 1950s or 1960s. The ANC leaders of the 1950s had the experience of organising over issues such as the pass laws and restrictions on livestock, which were no longer on the agenda of the 1980s or 1990s. The UDF leadership also had the experience of using modern technology to appeal to settled urban constituencies comprising (increasingly) secondary-school-educated people in white-collar occupations.
The prominence of former UDF leaders gave rise to further allegations about the 'cabal', long after the UDF had dissolved. Most of these allegations were made by Winnie Mandela, who blamed the 'cabal', said to include Moosa, Morobe, Cachalia and Ramaphosa - the last of whom had never been a UDF office-holder but was closely linked to the UDF through the MDM and National Reception Committee -for ostracising her in 1989 because of the murderous activities of her football club. Mandela attacked the 'cabal' during her trial on charges relating to kidnapping and murder in 1991. When her alleged lover and subordinate within the ANC, Dali Mpofu, was sacked by the ANC in 1992, he also blamed the 'cabal' The following year Mandela, by then separated from her husband, hit out at the absence of democracy within both the exiled ANC and the internal UDF prior to 1990. ‘The UDF, hampered by emergency and security legislation, was unable to develop a democratic tradition. In that situation the tendency for small groups to make decisions on behalf of the people became wide-scale, and all regions suffered.’ There were still ambitious, power-hungry, 'elitist dictatorships' within the ANC, she wrote, urging that these be 'eliminated'. The cabal issue arose again in 1997 when Mandela was called before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The continuing attacks by Winnie Mandela may have contributed to the decision of two of the alleged cabal leaders - Morobe and Cachalia - to cease playing prominent roles in the ANC in the 1990s. Morobe, towards whom Winnie Mandela was, it is said, especially aggressive, went on to become chairman of the Fiscal and Finance Commission rather than run for elected office. Cachalia became a senior official in the Department of Safety and Security. But they were certainly not alone among former UDF kaders in choosing to pursue more bureaucratic than political roles. Among other prominent ex-UDF activists who chose similarly were Frank Chikane, although he ended up in Thabo Mbeki's Deputy Presidential office; Molobi and Sizani, who were recruited into the Kagiso Trust and later the Independent Development Trust; Andrew Boraine, who became chief executive of the Cape Town City Council; and Zac Yacoob, who was nominated as a Constitutional Court judge. For activists who saw their UDF leadership roles as involving co-ordination and facilitation and providing strategic direction, such choices made good sense. Indeed, the experience of leadership in the UDF in general can be seen as providing organisational rather than more orthodox public political skills.
Activists from the UDF as well as from the trade unions had organisational skills, which their counterparts from exile or jail had (at best) not practised for many years. It was not surprising, therefore, that the ANC appointed former UDF activists Molefe and Lekota to run its election campaign in 1994. They were assisted by Khetso Gordhan, among others. After the elections the task of running the ANC as a party was entrusted to activists with recent experience of organising inside the country: Ramaphosa and Carolus.
The character of the ANC's 1994 election campaign reveals another aspect of UDF influence: an explicit strategy of contesting the political middle ground rather than relying on its existing support base. In the election context, this meant reaching out to undecided coloured and Indian voters, and not just mobilising the existing, overwhelmingly African support base. The ANC jettisoned its initial election slogan, Now Is the Time, when it became evident that its triumphalism was off-putting to coloured and Indian voters, and adopted instead the more universal slogan, A Better Life for All. The ANC spent a disproportionate share of its campaign expenditure in the Western Cape, and most of its expenses there were targeted on coloured voters. For sure, this emphasis reflected political considerations: victory in the Western Cape depended on winning the support of coloured voters, and the ANC dearly wanted to win this province. But the presence of former UDF leaders was a contributing factor in the ANC's strategic choices.
The influence of the UDF is visible most strongly perhaps in the Western Cape. In this province the ANC faced the same strategic dilemmas that the UDF had in the 1980s: whether to focus on the province's small African population or to build support among the coloured majority. With the shift to electoral politics, winning votes became all-important, strengthening the advocates of a multiracial rather than a narrowly Africanist approach. The challenge facing the ANC was to overcome the perception among many coloured voters that the ANC was a movement for African people - in contrast to the UDF in the 1980s. In part because so few coloured Congress activists returned from exile, the multiracial approach was led by former UDF leaders; the Africanist approach was spearheaded by activists from MK. Repeated interventions from the ANC's national leadership helped to ensure that provincial leadership was passed from one former UDF leader to another: Tinto, Boesak, Nissen, Omar and Rasool.
Ironically, given the prominence of ex-UDF leadership in the ANC, calls for the revival of a UDF-like movement were strongest in the Western Cape. Intermittently between 1992 and 1996 there were calls for the formation of a progressive, broadly ANC-aligned organisation or movement for coloured people. This impulse was fuelled by a feeling among many coloured ex-UDF activists that they 'were just pushed aside, left by the wayside or ignored', as Boesak put it in 1992. More importantly, the ANC was unsuccessful in the contest for coloured support. The NP's strength in coloured areas - reflected in the national and local election results - gave rise to calls for an unambiguous return to the UDF politics of the 1980s. The experiences of the 1980s were painted in romantic, nostalgic shades: ‘If the UDF's support in the 1980s was anything to go by, the ANC should easily have won the Western Cape in the 1994 elections’. What the ANC needed to do was to become a 'home for coloureds as it is for Africans' - as, it was said, the UDF had done through its moral appeal, its strong emphasis on local organisation around bread and butter issues, and its diverse leadership. The influence of the UDF, albeit glorified, was thus important in both calls to reform the ANC and to form some kind of supplementary organisation. It remains an open question whether the ANC could have campaigned more effectively. But, contrary to the assumptions of both ANC activists and academic observers, it is far from clear that the UDF did enjoy such widespread support among coloured people in the 1980s. As we saw in earlier chapters, there is evidence that support for the UDF in coloured working-class areas declined after 1984-1985; the constituencies mobilised thereafter - mostly middle-class, in the Defiance Campaign - were precisely the constituencies that continued to support the ANC in the 1994 elections.
The influence of the UDF was perhaps weakest in Natal, notwithstanding the important role played by Natal activists in the formation and subsequent leadership of the Front. As we have seen, the UDF in Natal withered sharply after 1986, with the focus of Charterist politics shifting elsewhere. In 1990 UDF-linked leaders were marginalised in elections for the first ANC REC after the ANC's unbanning. In contrast to the Western Cape, Natal politics in the early 1990s were dominated by competition for the support of African voters, between Inkatha on the one hand and the ANC on the other. In this contest, the ANC chose to embrace a version of Zuluness, challenging Inkatha's former monopoly. Few former UDF leaders were equipped to play a part in this competition.
Ideologically, the UDF strengthened one strand of the Charterist movement. The UDF was, for the most part, steeped in the tradition of the Congress Alliance, with its emphases on non-racial leadership and multiracial strategy, on alliance building and aspiration to occupy the political middle ground, and on a discourse of rights. The UDF served to strengthen this tradition, although it was far from paramount in the mid-1980s. There were strong continuities between the ideology associated with the UDF and that of the ANC in the 1990s. The ANC emphasised unity, nation building and reconciliation; divisive ideologies, including those focused on class, were downplayed. It would probably be mistaken, however, to attribute this primarily to the influence of the UDF. The personality of Nelson Mandela and the pressure of global economic and diplomatic forces were clearly important, and probably, more so. Moreover, some aspects of the ideologies linked to the UDF have endured less well than others. The rights discourse of 1994 soon gave way to a more results-orientated discourse; the embrace of multiracial diversity appears to be wilting in the face of Africanisation.
In organisational terms, the UDF bequeathed to the ANC a political culture of robust internal debate and self-criticism. This was a tradition which the UDF had inherited from the ANC from the 1950s, but which appeared to have weakened within the ANC amidst the conditions of exile and guerrilla warfare. Some ANC leaders returning to the country seemed to be taken aback by the demands for consultation and the spirited criticisms made at regional and national levels. In the absence of detailed research into the ANC after 1990 it is difficult to assess how widespread and lasting was this culture of debate and criticism, but it was very evident in provinces such as the Western Cape.
Finally, we need to ask whether the UDF left a legacy to the ANC in terms of strategies and tactics. As we have already suggested, the dominant position within the ANC remained one that emphasised alliance building and contesting the so-called middle ground, through nation building and reconciliation. But, as the ANC drew closer to state power in 1990-1993, and then exercised it, the specific strategies and tactics of the 1980s were deemed increasingly inappropriate. Even UDF leaders in 1989-90 began to express reservations about the long-term repercussions of rent boycotts and of direct action, and UDF leaders had been critical of chronic school boycotts from the outset. For the ANC, social and political change would be effected through the state - which, after 1993-1994, they controlled -rather than on the streets. ANC leaders sought to end rent boycotts (with very uneven success), to demobilise the youth, and were very critical of sit-ins and the coerced 'detention' of officials by discontented students and others.
The ANC's change of perspective from 1993 is not difficult to understand, whether or not we agree with it. What is harder to understand is the ANC's failure to utilise the strategies and tactics of the 1980s in the transitional period of 1990-1993, when it might have chosen to maintain the pressure on the National Party government. In 1990-1991 especially, the ANC seems to have lost the momentum that had built up inside the country in 1989-1990. In the absence of careful research on the ANC in this period, we can only speculate why the ANC did not employ, for example, a defiance campaign against the remaining vestiges of racial discrimination and segregation. Was it because of the essential conservatism of the veteran ANC leaders? Were they distracted by the demands of organisation building and negotiations? Did they underestimate the remaining pitfalls along the route to democracy, and hence underestimate the need for countervailing pressures? Whatever the reason, the strategies and tactics of the UDF were not adopted by the ANC, even before its accession to formal power, and South Africa's venerable tradition of organised non-violent direct action and defiance seems to have run dry.
The legacy of the UDF bequeathed to post-apartheid politics in general
The lasting impact of the UDF was not confined to the ANC alone. The whole character of the overall post-apartheid political system reflects, in some respects, the influences of the UDF. The legacy of the UDF can be seen in the character of South African democracy, the contours of political society and the chequered emergence of civil society.
The struggles of the 1980s, and the role played by the UDF within these, bequeathed lasting understandings of democracy. The UDF played an important role in promoting the salience of rights, and of political and economic alternatives based on rights, within popular conceptions of democracy. Discourses of rights were paramount in the UDF at the outset. Although married and to some extent subordinated to discourses of power in 1985-1986, they were resurgent at the end of the decade. Rights played a more important part in the South African struggle for democracy, and in the political system that resulted; than was the case in many other liberation contexts. Notwithstanding the protestations of Charterist activists, there was a strong element of the civil rights struggle in the Charterist movement - with the consequence that South Africa became a constitutional democracy in which the Constitution and Bill of Rights, rather than parliament, were sovereign.
Moreover, the Front also helped to promote a more pluralist political system through its recognition and acceptance of disagreement. The Front was based on the understanding that disagreement over many things did not preclude common action towards the central goal of democratisation. Indeed, the form and rhetoric of a front served to institutionalise this disagreement. The UDF thus did not seek to instil a single hegemonic conception of Charterism within even the Charterist movement; as we have seen, the history of the UDF was one of chronic diversity and disagreement. Moreover, it sought to work together with some non-Charterist groups in the much-vaunted political middle ground without simply dragooning them into a Charterist frame. The UDF's emphasis on alliance building needs to be qualified: at the national level as well as on the ground, AZAPO was treated as a minor player (which indeed it was), whilst Inkatha was shut out altogether, with serious consequences. In general, however, the UDF looked out to prospective allies.
In their analyses of the discourses of the left in the 1980s, Glaser and Steinberg draw our attention to the prevalence of elements intolerant of disagreement and diversity. Glaser argues that the theory of 'national democratic struggle' included an 'authoritarian sub-discourse' that emphasised the homogeneity and collective will of the people and sometimes treated 'dissent as alien and divisive, even treasonous'. The anti-apartheid opposition failed, he suggests, to appreciate the importance of political pluralism and civil liberties - of free expression, association and political choice. It is indeed easy to find evidence of such discourses, especially in civic struggles in South Africa's black townships. But such discourses were far from universal among the UDF's national and - in most areas - regional leaders. There was throughout a parallel discourse, emphasising diversity (especially on a multiracial basis) and disagreement. Pluralist discourses may have been subordinate across large swathes of anti-apartheid politics, but at the national level they were very strong, almost hegemonic.
The domination of party politics by the ANC perhaps disguises the extent of political pluralism in the new South Africa. It is in the realm of civil society that this pluralism is more easily visible. 'Civil society' was discovered as a concept in the early 1990s, as a wide variety of people sought a political arena independent of party politics and especially the overwhelming party political strength of the ANC. Civic organisations, trade unions and the media attempted to define their political roles in terms of civil society. Some drew on Gramscian understandings of civil society, bolstered by the examples of anti-authoritarian movements in Central and Eastern Europe. But these had short-lived relevance: the 'anti-polities' of democrats in Central and Eastern Europe was hardly applicable in a context where democrats engaged with, rather than circumvented, state power, seeking rights in a (just) state rather than freedoms from an (oppressive) state. The inauguration of representative democracy at national and, later, local levels in South Africa led to the withering of this kind of civil society. Other activists and groupings promoted a more Anglo-American conception of civil society, often without realising the etymology of their approach. In this, civil society was complementary to the formal political system, rather than defined in opposition to it. The UDF, through its pluralist emphases on rights and diversity, in practice promoted this kind of civil society: civil society as a pluralist arena, as Glaser advocates.
One other aspect of post-apartheid politics in South Africa that reflects the stamp of the UDF concerns the moral boundaries to politics. In the 1980s political and religious leaders repeatedly called for morality in the struggle on the grounds that it was prescriptive. In Lekota's words: ‘In political struggle, the means must always be the same as the ends. How else can one expect a racialistic movement to imbue our society with a non-racial character on the dawn of our freedom day? A political movement cannot bequeath to society a characteristic it does not itself possess’. This was echoed by Goniwe, who wrote that 'if we are instruments of change, we must epitomise the society we want to bring about'. Most UDF leaders sought to promote non-racialism, an appreciation of rights and a tolerance of difference. Church leaders were drawn in. Of course, emphasising morality and building on the legitimacy of the churches was strategic, drawing attention to the weaknesses of apartheid and building a broad political movement. But it nonetheless had the effect of strengthening the moral strands within opposition politics, strands that remained after 1994. The role of clerics and theology in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and of the Commission in general, is testimony to the enduring importance of morality in South African politics.
Against this, Kane-Berman has argued that the protests of the 1980s were profoundly immoral in that they led to generalised violence thereafter. He attributes the rising crime and disorder of the early 1990s to the encouragement of boycotts, defiance and 'people's war' by the UDF, ANC and so forth in the 1980s. What Kane-Berman overlooks is the repeated attempts by UDF and some ANC leaders to confront the tendencies towards violence and disorder during the 1980s. As we have seen, some UDF leaders were preoccupied with the problem of ensuring that protests were orderly; internal leaders persuaded the exiled ANC to support their calls on students to return to class; people's power was a way of strengthening discipline and organisation as well as of seizing local power. UDF and ANC leaders expressed misgivings about the long-term effects of boycotts and violence.
In all these respects the UDF inherited ideas and tactics, discourses and strategies from the ANC and the Congress Alliance in the 1950s, and then modified and strengthened them before bequeathing them to the ANC and the political system in general in the 1990s. Nonetheless, in so far as post-apartheid South Africa enjoys a pluralist political system and culture, with recognition of the importance of rights, this was in part due to the rhetoric and practices of the UDF in the 1980s.
This chapter is used with the permission of the author:
Seekings, J, (2000). The UDF. A history of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983-1991, Claremont: David Phillip Publishers.