People's War: New light on the struggle for South Africa

By Anthea Jeffrey

More than 25 years have passed since South Africans were being shot or hacked or burned to death in political violence, and the memory of the trauma has faded. Nevertheless, some 20 500 people were killed between 1984 and 1994. Conventional wisdom has it that most died as a result of the ANC's people's war.
Many books have been written on South Africa's political transition, but none has dealt adequately with the people's war. This book does. It shows the extraordinary success of the people's war in giving the ANC a virtual monopoly on power, as well as the great cost at which this was done. The high price of it is still being paid.
Apart from the terror and killings it sparked at the time, the people's war set in motion forces that cannot easily be tamed. Violence, once unleashed, is not easy to stamp out. 'Ungovernability', once generated, is not readily reversed.
For this new edition, Anthea Jeffery has revised and abridged her seminal work. She has also included a brief overview of the ANC's National Democratic Revolution for which the people's war was intended to prepare the way. Since 1994, the NDR has been implemented in many different spheres. It is now being speeded up in its second and more radical phase.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Release date: May 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781868429974

Anthea Jeffrey

ANTHEA JEFFERY is Head of Policy Research at the IRR, a think-tank promoting political and economic freedom. Her previous books include The Truth about the Truth Commission and BEE: Helping or Hurting? Both have been praised for their meticulous analysis, and for breaking new ground on important and contentious issues.

Book preview

Anthea Jeffery

PEOPLE’S

WAR

NEW LIGHT ON

THE STRUGGLE FOR

SOUTH AFRICA

JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of contents

DEDICATION

PREFACE

ABBREVIATIONS

GLOSSARY

MAPS

INTRODUCTION

ONE Lessons from Vietnam

TWO The Balance of Forces in the Run-up to the People’s War

THREE The First Five Years of the People’s War

FOUR Negotiations as a ‘Terrain of Struggle’

FIVE From Political Liberalisation to Codesa 1

SIX From Codesa 2 to the Setting of an Election Date

SEVEN Endgame in the People’s War

EIGHT The April 1994 Election

NINE The Second Stage of the Revolution

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

About the book

About the author

Also by Anthea Jeffery

Imprint page

DEDICATION

This book has been funded by the Donaldson Trust as a memorial to Marjorie Britten: 1915–1998

It is fitting that this book should commemorate the life and work of Mrs Marjorie Britten, for not only was she a prominent and dynamic figure in both the Donaldson Trust and the South African Institute of Race Relations, but she was also an enthusiastic sponsor of the book. Before she died, she urged the Donaldson Trust to commission the Institute to produce it, and she particularly wanted it to be written by Dr Anthea Jeffery, whose work she admired. She also believed that the Institute’s long years of exposing the iniquities of apartheid, together with its reputation for independent-minded and meticulous research, made it ideally suited to carry out what she considered to be a project of vital importance – so much so that she herself was actively involved in raising funds for it.

The Donaldson Trust was founded in 1936 by Colonel James Donaldson DSO mainly to sponsor development among black people. It has since provided schools, bursaries and countless facilities in black communities. Mrs Britten served many years on the trust. Amid active work in the field and as a fundraiser, she found time to write a riveting history of the trust. Mr Benjamin Donaldson, chairman of the trust and grandson of the colonel, relied heavily on her judgement. He said, ‘She was a tower of strength who never flinched from doing or saying what she believed to be right, however unpopular that might make her.’ Up until a few months before her death on 19 April 1998, aged 83, she was still visiting trust projects in far-flung rural communities.

Mrs Britten worked at the Institute between 1968 and 1977, first as administrator and then as trusts officer. During this decade, she turned Dr Ellen Hellmann’s dream of a large-scale black bursary programme into reality. A superb administrator and inspired fundraiser, Mrs Britten was able to fire potential donors with her own enthusiasm for the programme. Nelson Mandela was an early recipient of an Institute bursary, and there are thousands of others who owe their present success – and their ability to contribute to the development of the new South Africa – to Mrs Britten’s pioneering work. Bursary recipients, in whom she took a personal and lifelong interest, remember her with special affection, as do colleagues and Institute employees whom she dragooned, trained and nurtured.

After she retired from the Institute in 1978, Mrs Britten continued working on the boards of two major bursary trusts: the Robert Shapiro Trust, and the Gert and Irmgard Brusseau Trust, of which latter trust she was chairman. A founder member and first Natal president of the Black Sash, Mrs Britten was also an active member of the Democratic Party (ever since it began as the Progressive Party), and a valued member and one-time national secretary of Soroptimists International. All these organisations benefited from her hard work and political wisdom – and above all, in dark days, were heartened by her appealing spirit of gallantry and bloody-mindedness.

A long-time colleague in the Donaldson Trust and Soroptimists International said of Mrs Britten: ‘Marjorie’s sense of the fitness of things, her careful use of language, her real concern for the underdog and her impressively high standards of truth and behaviour could have made her unrestful company had these attributes not been tempered with a devilish sense of humour and total lack of side. She was wonderful company, with a keen intellect that seemed to sharpen with the years. When one failed to measure up to her standards, one was left in no doubt of it, but there was never any cruelty or malice in her strictures. She bore her own burdens uncomplainingly and expected the same from others. She was a great lady, tough and kind-hearted, downright and loyal. I, with many others, greatly miss her liberal and steadfast presence.’

Marjorie Britten left behind her a wide circle of friends – and beyond that a place of honour in the history of the Institute, of the Donaldson Trust and of South Africa.

Jill Wentzel

PREFACE

Founded in 1929, the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR, today shortened to the IRR) played a major part in exposing the iniquities of the apartheid system. Like most other people, we expected that the political liberalisation announced on 2 February 1990 would bring a swift end to the political violence that had flared up in 1984. The opposite happened. The average fatality rate in political violence from 1985 to 1989 had been about a thousand a year. But from early in 1990 to the first all-race election in April 1994, the killing rate roughly tripled from what it had been before. Moreover, most of the 15 000 or so people killed in the early 1990s – when the door to democracy had already been thrown open – were not soldiers, policemen or trained insurgents. Rather, they were ordinary people, nearly all of them black.

Having launched a monitor of political violence in the mid-1980s, we were convinced that most of the conventional explanations of the intensifying violence were inadequate at best. This book is the culmination of a series of studies dating back to the early 1990s. They include The Liberal Slideaway, which explored how liberals often turned a blind eye to revolutionary violence, and The Truth about the Truth Commission, an exposé of the many flaws in the report of that body. Among the other studies of violence published by the IRR were The Natal Story, which examined the murderous conflict between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in KwaZulu/Natal, and Spotlight on Disinformation about Violence in South Africa, which highlighted the many weaknesses in many of the contemporaneous accounts of the violence.

Our research convinced us that the transition in 1994 from minority to majority rule was not a ‘miracle’, as often suggested, but partly the product of the remarkably successful ‘people’s war’ strategy adopted by the ANC in 1979. This new strategy went far beyond the simpler ‘armed struggle’ on which the organisation had embarked in 1961. The people’s war strategy was a brilliant success, for it touched all bases, covered all angles, and allowed the ANC to draw advantage from almost every major incident in the transition. This was especially the case after 1990, when violence and negotiations became closely interwoven and seemed to proceed in tandem.

By 1993 the ANC was able to control the negotiating process, as well as to exert a powerful influence over the deployment of the (undefeated) South African police and army. In 1994, less than two decades after it had embarked on its people’s war, it had trounced the National Party government and the IFP and become the dominant party in a new government of national unity.

With significant financial support from the Donaldson Trust – for which the IRR would again like to record its thanks – my colleague Dr Anthea Jeffery has put together a compelling account of the people’s war and how it was implemented. Unlike any of the other numerous books on the transition, this one gives full weight to the people’s war. It also shows the many weaknesses in the generally accepted explanation for the violence – that the surging conflict was being orchestrated by the police and the IFP, acting together as a sinister ‘third force’.

There was never much credible evidence to support this third-force theory. It nevertheless gained a powerful hold over public thinking through the ANC’s persistent ‘third-force’ propaganda. This propaganda had two key aims: to discredit the IFP in particular, and to deflect public attention from the ANC’s own role in the violence. This third-force propaganda was also assiduously promoted by many journalists and other commentators, at least some of whom were unacknowledged allies of the ANC.

This book is an abridged and updated version of a much longer book published in 2009. The 2009 book was sharply criticised by the ANC’s Mac Maharaj and by a number of other commentators, many of whom had previously promoted or at least implicitly endorsed the third-force theory. Most of these critiques brushed over all the evidence of the people’s war that Jeffery had assembled. Many of them also resorted to ad hominem attacks on her objectivity or intellectual capacity. In the ten years since 2009, however, no convincing evidence of the third-force theory has ever emerged.

Meanwhile, the ANC remains intent – to borrow from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – on ensuring that the story of its people’s war remains at the bottom of the ‘memory hole’ to which it was consigned with the help, witting or unwitting, of the bulk of both the mainstream and the supposedly ‘alternative’ media. This book seeks to counter that propaganda – and to give all South Africans a well-informed foundation for evaluating the way in which the ANC came to power.

John Kane-Berman

CEO of the IRR, 1983 to 2014

ABBREVIATIONS

ANCAfrican National Congress

AplaAzanian People’s Liberation Army

AzapoAzanian People’s Organisation

BCBlack Consciousness

CodesaConvention for a Democratic South Africa

CosagConcerned South Africans Group

CosasCongress of South African Students

CosatuCongress of South African Trade Unions

CPSACommunist Party of South Africa

CPSUCommunist Party of the Soviet Union

CradoraCradock Residents’ Association

DPDemocratic Party

FAFreedom Alliance

FNLA Frente Nacional de Libertacão

FosatuFederation of South African Trade Unions

HRCHuman Rights Commission

HSRCHuman Sciences Research Council

IdasaInstitute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa

IECIndependent Electoral Commission

IFP Inkatha Freedom Party

ISUInternal Stability Unit

MDMMass Democratic Movement

MKUmkhonto we Sizwe

MPLAMovimento Popular de Libertação de Angola

NDRNational Democratic Revolution

NIS National Intelligence Service

NPNational Party

OAUOrganization of African Unity

PACPan Africanist Congress

PFPProgressive Federal Party

PWVPretoria Witwatersrand Vereeniging area

RenamoResistencia Nacional Moçambicana

SACPSouth African Communist Party

SactuSouth African Congress of Trade Unions

SADFSouth African Defence Force

SAPSouth African Police

SasoSouth African Students’ Organisation

SDUSelf-defence unit

SPUSelf-protection unit

SPCCSoweto Parents’ Crisis Committee

SwapoSouth West African People’s Organisation

TECTransitional Executive Council

TRCTruth and Reconciliation Commission

UDFUnited Democratic Front

UnitaUnião Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola

USSRUnion of Soviet Socialist Republics

VATValue-added Tax

GLOSSARY

Askaris‘turned’ ANC cadres, persuaded to work for the security forces

Assegaispear

Bakkiesmall truck

Bantustans black ‘homelands’ during the apartheid era

Boereliterally ‘farmers’; derogatory term for Afrikaners

Bosberaadconference

Caprivi traineesInkatha bodyguards trained in the Caprivi Strip

Casspirarmoured vehicle used by the security forces

Civic associationsstructures set up by the ANC in the place of black local councils

Impiband of armed men

Impimpi‘sellout’, collaborator

Indabaconference

Intelezitraditional medicine

Knobkerrie club

Kombiminibus

Lekgotlaconsultation

Mbokotho‘the stone that crushes’, ANC security department in its camps in exile

Mutitraditional medicine

Necklacing killing by hanging a petrol-filled tyre around a person’s neck and then igniting the petrol

Pangalong sharp knife

Perestroikarebuilding or restructuring

Self-defence units youths armed by the ANC to protect their adherents

Self-protection unitsyouths armed by Inkatha to protect their adherents

Shebeentownship liquor outlet

Sjambokquirt

Taximinibus transport used mainly by black commuters

Third-force theoryidea that the security forces were acting with the IFP to instigate violence

Townships‘black’ residential areas on the outskirts of ‘white’ towns

Toyi-toyidance indicating support for the ANC

Veldopen ground

VolkstaatAfrikaner homeland

Wararaspeople aligned with the ANC

Zim-Zimspeople aligned with Azapo

MAPS

Natal and KwaZulu, 1984–1994

Port Elizabeth and eastern Cape Province, 1984–1994

Durban-Pietermaritzburg area, 1984–1994

Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (PWV) area, 1984–1994

INTRODUCTION

In 1961, when the African National Congress (ANC) embarked on its armed struggle, racial discrimination permeated every nook and cranny of life in South Africa, stunting the lives and betraying the hopes of millions of black South Africans. There was also little realistic prospect that the National Party (NP) government under prime minister Dr Hendrik Verwoerd would abandon the apartheid system of its own volition, for Verwoerd saw himself as ‘the man of granite’ who would hold the race-based edifice together. The Sharpeville shootings in March 1960 had also narrowed the space for peaceful protest, as had the banning the following month of both the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), the organisation responsible for organising the Sharpeville demonstrations against the notorious pass laws.¹

In 1961 the NP government again rejected pleas by black South Africans for a national convention, underlining the futility of patient appeals for a shift in policy. In response, various political organisations began turning to violence to reinforce their demands for change. The PAC established an armed wing, Poqo, which sought to spark a general insurrection. A group of white liberals, the African Resistance Movement, embarked on a series of bombings. Against this background, the ANC may have felt it had little choice but to follow suit. Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the Spear of the Nation, was formed in November 1961 and began its sabotage attacks soon thereafter.²

Though apartheid injustices fostered polarisation and invited insurrection, the ANC’s decision to adopt armed struggle was nevertheless deeply controversial. Most black South Africans were devout Christians who opposed the use of violence on principle. It was also far from clear that non-violent strategies had in fact been exhausted, as the ANC claimed. The turn to violence was also largely prompted by the South African Communist Party (SACP) and encouraged by the Soviet Union.³ Moscow had long taken a considerable interest in South Africa because of its strategic importance and its significantly urbanised and industrialised workforce. In addition, the Soviet Union was engaged in a global struggle against capitalism and saw all colonial countries as potential allies in this multi-faceted endeavour.⁴

Soviet involvement complicated the situation, generating legitimate concerns that majority rule in South Africa would quickly turn to a form of communist dictatorship, as it had in other newly independent African states. However, it was also not true, as the government was wont to claim, that communist agitation was solely to blame for the grievances of the black majority. Those grievances were real. Moreover, the longer they remained unresolved, the more opportunity this provided for the ANC and the SACP to agitate and organise for the overthrow of the minority regime – and to do so with significant international support.

The ANC nevertheless faced huge obstacles in mounting its armed struggle in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite steady infusions of money, weapons, training and other military aid from Moscow, its armed struggle had little impact. The organisation found it difficult to recruit for Umkhonto, especially after Nelson Mandela and other ANC/SACP leaders were convicted of sabotage and attempted insurrection in the Rivonia trial in 1964 and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island. The ANC also found it impossible to infiltrate trained guerrillas back in significant number and failed to sustain its bombing campaign after the collapse of its internal leadership.⁵

By 1976 the ANC’s voice within the country had been silenced for 16 years, while Umkhonto’s armed struggle was moribund. The ANC had largely been forgotten by black South Africans, while new political organisations were growing rapidly in strength. Prime among these internal rivals was Inkatha, which stood for liberation through non-violent means and commanded a strong following in KwaZulu/Natal as well as in Soweto and other townships on the Reef.⁶

Also important was the Black Consciousness (BC) movement, which Stephen Bantu Biko had helped to form. The BC movement aimed to raise political awareness among black people, overcome the sense of inferiority that apartheid had helped to generate, and take the lead in demanding an end to racial discrimination. The BC movement had particular impact on black youth, and was instrumental in sparking the Soweto revolt on 16 June 1976.⁷

The revolt lasted for more than 18 months, and shook South Africa to its core. It revitalised the ANC, showing that internal insurrection was still possible and pushing thousands of youths into exile, where most – despite their preference for the PAC – were induced to join the ANC and went to swell Umkhonto’s ranks. However, the revolt also struck fear into the ANC and its Soviet sponsor, for it underlined the extent to which the ANC had been supplanted by internal rivals. Far from being able to play a vanguard role in the liberation struggle, as it had always claimed to do, the ANC had been eclipsed by black organisations with far more support within the country.⁸

The Soviet Union stepped up its assistance to the ANC. At Moscow’s behest, a senior ANC/SACP delegation embarked on a visit to a newly unified Vietnam in October 1978. The aim was to put the ANC in touch with astute Vietnamese strategists such as General Vo Nguyen Giap, who had succeeded in refining long-standing Marxist-Leninist theories on the seizure of power into an extraordinarily effective formula for revolutionary ‘people’s war’. This formula could be used not only to humble a powerful military adversary, but also to weaken or destroy political rivals. As recently as 1965, it had further proved its value through the defeat of South Vietnam and its American ally.⁹

The formula for people’s war, as developed and applied in Vietnam, has many different ingredients. The parallels between these ingredients and the events that unfolded in South Africa from 1980 to 1994 are remarkable. Though many differences are evident, these are essentially distinctions in degree rather than in substance.

Implementing the people’s war

In 1979 the ANC adopted the lessons from Vietnam and began implementing them with Moscow’s help. The organisation never sought to defeat the South African security forces on the ground, for this was an impossible task. Instead, it aimed to make the country ‘ungovernable’ and to generate a level of violence and economic malaise that in time would put enormous pressures on the NP government to jettison the already crumbling apartheid system. Its key objective throughout was also to weaken and destroy its black political rivals – Inkatha, in particular – and so ensure its hegemony over the ‘new’ South Africa.¹⁰

As the people’s war intensified from September 1984, intimidation and political killings rapidly accelerated. So too did the propaganda campaign, which repeatedly blamed the escalating violence on the NP government and its supposed Inkatha surrogate. Global sympathy for the ANC soared, while Inkatha suffered crippling losses in credibility and support.

After President FW de Klerk’s bold moves in unbanning the ANC and other organisations in February 1990, the intensity of the violence tripled from what it had been in the first five years of the people’s war. In this initial period, some 5 500 people had been killed in political violence. After political liberalisation, however – when the door to democracy had already been thrown open and there was no need to batter it down – the death toll soared to some 15 000 between January 1990 and April 1994.¹¹ As the killings accelerated in the early 1990s, the propaganda campaign vital to the success of the people’s war became particularly sharp. Both De Klerk and Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, president of Inkatha (later the Inkatha Freedom Party, or IFP), were increasingly accused of working together as a ‘third force’ to implement a dual strategy of talking peace while waging a destabilising war against the ANC and its supporters.

The ‘third-force’ theory of the violence

The third-force theory of the violence was assiduously spread, while its many weaknesses were continually overlooked. The third-force theory could not explain the killing of some 400 IFP leaders¹² and thousands of IFP members and supporters – many of whom were gunned down in premeditated ambushes or burnt to death by the ‘necklace’ method (in which a tyre was placed around the victim’s neck, filled with petrol, and set ablaze). Nor could the theory explain the large number of police deaths – roughly 1 000 from 1990 to 1994 – and police injuries (more than 1 700 in the first six months of 1993 alone).¹³ A third force that killed a small number of its own supporters to stir up hatred, foster conflict, provoke counterattack, and try to derail the negotiations process might have some logic behind its actions. But a third force that killed and injured so many hundreds or thousands of its own supporters made no sense at all.

The third-force theory also overlooked other key factors in the violence. Prime among these was the ANC’s determination, in keeping with the lessons from Vietnam, to persist with its people’s war even after its unbanning in February 1990. As Giap had taught it, the ANC saw the negotiations process as simply another ‘terrain’ on which to advance its political struggle.¹⁴ It was also determined to weaken the IFP still further by stepping up its military struggle against its primary black rival before the first all-race election. In doing so, it was greatly helped by the arms smuggled in under Operation Vula, which remained in place for six years – from its start in 1988 right up to the time of the 1994 poll.¹⁵ Important too were the 13 000 armed and trained Umkhonto fighters the ANC was able to bring back into South Africa, under the cover of the negotiations process, by early in 1991.¹⁶ The third-force claim that De Klerk and Buthelezi were using violence to derail the transition was thus a neat subversion of the truth – for if any organisation was intent on marrying violence and negotiations for its own political advantage it was the ANC.

Another important weakness in the third-force theory was the absence of any clear evidence of it, despite the great efforts made to uncover this. Three criminal trials, in particular, were expected to provide important proof of how the third force operated. These trials arose from a massacre at KwaMakhutha (near Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu/Natal) in January 1987, the killing of 11 people at Trust Feed in December 1988, and the Boipatong massacre of June 1992. However, when the evidence of these supposedly ‘third-force’ killings was put to the test, it either left key questions unresolved or crumbled completely under scrutiny.

Judge Richard Goldstone and his commission of inquiry, which was established in 1991 to investigate political violence, also battled to find evidence of the third force. One of Goldstone’s earliest interim reports, written in April 1992, was highly critical of both the security forces and the IFP. However, it found no evidence of a third force in the form of ‘a sinister and secret organisation orchestrating political violence on a wide front’. The commission noted that the causes of conflict were ‘many and complicated’, but singled out rivalry between the ANC and the IFP as a key factor in the violence.¹⁷ Despite comprehensive investigation, moreover, Goldstone found no evidence of a third-force role in the Boipatong massacre.¹⁸

It had also been widely alleged that the South African Defence Force (SADF) had provided training for Inkatha ‘hit squads’ in the Caprivi Strip in South West Africa (Namibia) in 1986. Goldstone thus probed this issue too, but found there was ‘no evidence at all to suggest that the SADF provided the training for the purpose of hit squads being established’.¹⁹

Other Goldstone reports were expected to turn up evidence of the third force, but failed to do so. His inquiry into the fatal shooting of 18 IFP supporters in Tokoza in September 1991 found that the police had played no role in the massacre, which had instead been planned and implemented by an ANC self-defence unit (SDU) from the nearby Phola Park informal settlement.²⁰ His investigation of train violence on the Reef likewise failed to find any evidence that the police or army were behind these killings, which he again linked primarily to IFP/ANC rivalry in the townships.²¹

It was only in March 1994 that the commission, whose reports seemed to become increasingly partisan to the ANC over time, said that it had obtained ‘prima facie’ – but still untested and uncorroborated evidence – that three South African Police (SAP) generals and various other policemen were involved in third-force activities and gun-running to the IFP. This untested testimony indicated that the police’s Vlakplaas unit, commanded by Colonel Eugene de Kock – soon dubbed ‘Prime Evil’ by the press – had been involved since 1989 ‘in violence aimed at the destabilisation of South Africa’, including train and hostel violence.²²

In the end, however, no evidence to substantiate the bulk of these allegations was forthcoming – and De Kock was the only person to be prosecuted. He was convicted in 1996 on five counts of murder for his role in the killing (without any political motivation or justification) of five would-be bank robbers outside Nelspruit in 1992.²³ He was also found guilty on various counts of attempted murder, culpable homicide and defeating the ends of justice. Most of the 89 charges on which he was convicted were for fraud. In the only charge relevant to political violence in KwaZulu/Natal, De Kock was convicted of illegally possessing large quantities of arms and explosives (two truckloads, according to a witness), which he had obtained in October 1993 from surplus stocks that were due to be destroyed. By this time, De Kock had already resigned from the SAP. He lied to obtain the weapons, claiming that the Vlakplaas unit needed them for training new recruits. He then transported them down to KwaZulu to help in the training of the self-protection units the IFP was busy establishing to protect its members from attacks by Umkhonto and the ANC’s SDUs.²⁴ The supply of these arms was clearly unlawful conduct on the part of a former policeman, but it did little to substantiate the sweeping third-force allegations that Goldstone had earlier recorded.

Little attempt to probe the people’s war

While great efforts were made to find evidence of the third-force theory, the ANC’s avowed commitment to implementing a revolutionary people’s war was never properly probed. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) should have uncovered this, for the TRC was instructed by its founding legislation to provide a comprehensive account of the political killings perpetrated on all sides between 1960 and 1994. In keeping with this mandate, the commission unearthed valuable information about security-force killings in the apartheid era, highlighted the many massacres perpetrated by IFP supporters, and found that the people’s war implemented by the PAC was a breach of international humanitarian law because it deliberately targeted civilians. However, the TRC largely overlooked the people’s war conducted by the ANC. It also paid comparatively little attention to the early 1990s – the period after the ANC’s unbanning – when about 15 000 people died and political violence was at its most acute. The result was that the commission provided a partial report that left out more than half the relevant deaths and did as much to distort as to disclose the truth.²⁵

The Goldstone commission could have used its extensive powers to probe the ANC’s people’s war, but made little attempt to do so. Its report in December 1992 on the violence in KwaZulu/Natal – potentially its most important report of all – was disturbingly superficial and one-sided. In particular, it failed to examine the possible role of Umkhonto fighters in the violence. It also omitted to respond to a detailed police submission stating that the ANC was ‘waging an aggressive war’ on the IFP ‘by military means’, and that the IFP was ‘disadvantaged in its resistance to the ANC’s onslaught [because it] lacked the quantity and sophistication of the weaponry available to the ANC’. Instead of probing these issues, and providing reasoned arguments for discounting or supporting them, the commission seemed simply to ignore them. It also made recommendations that were either naive (that Child Welfare should help promote political tolerance, for example) or that implicitly put most of the blame for the conflict on Inkatha.²⁶

The people’s war still little understood

By failing to probe the people’s war, both the Goldstone commission and the TRC made it easier for the ANC to conceal the truth. It also made it much harder for ordinary South Africans to understand the strategy being used to trounce the ANC’s black rivals and bring the organisation to untrammelled power.

Other factors also help to explain why the people’s war is still so little understood. The formula for people’s war is complex and multi-faceted, making it difficult for most people to ‘join the dots’ and see the picture as a whole. However, by far the most important factor in restricting understanding was the ANC’s propaganda campaign and its constant emphasis on the third-force theory. This campaign was waged not only by the ANC but also by many others, which added greatly to its impact.

A number of local and foreign journalists were particularly important in spreading and buttressing the ANC’s perspective. Some of them – as they themselves were later to acknowledge – were closet members of the ANC (Howard Barrell) or the SACP (Gavin Evans), or had been recruited to the task of helping raise the ANC’s profile in South Africa (Alan Fine), or were so outraged by the iniquities of NP rule that they thought ‘journalistic objectivity … in the moral climate of apartheid was tosh’ (John Carlin).²⁷

Alternative newspapers such as The Weekly Mail, New Nation and Vrye Weekblad were crucial in pushing the ‘third-force’ line, even though they knew there was little sound evidence to support it. In August 1992 Anton Harber, one of the co-editors of The Weekly Mail, acknowledged that the newspaper’s third-force allegations were based on ‘patchy evidence’ that was ‘not always reliable’.²⁸ In October 2018 Vrye Weekblad journalist Hans Pienaar described how this newspaper ‘went after what we called the third force, which was supposedly behind mysterious and gratuitous acts of violence across the country’. Added Pienaar: ‘There never was hard evidence of a third force … But week after week we published ghoulish front pages with specially commissioned paintings of monstrous visages towering over their victims.’ Popular belief in the third force was ‘so assiduously cultivated in the alternative media’ that the term soon became a household name, he said.²⁹

This one-sided approach was in keeping with what former Vrye Weekblad editor Max du Preez euphemistically described in 2006 as ‘an old tradition among progressives or the Left in South Africa to be silent on certain problems … if it were judged that speaking out would strengthen the arguments of the reactionaries or the right wing’. In 2007 a disillusioned Du Preez became more outspoken, writing that the ANC had ‘actively supported and encouraged journalists like myself and newspapers like New Nation, The Weekly Mail, South and Vrye Weekblad in the dark days before 1994 to operate as media guerrillas for free speech and democracy’. However, said Du Preez, the ANC’s real objective had not been to strengthen democracy, but ‘merely to undermine their enemy and advance their own cause’.³⁰

Mondli Makhanya, now editor of City Press, went so far as to participate in a battle with Inkatha in KwaMashu (Durban) in February 1990. Writing in 1991 under a pseudonym, Makhanya described how an allegedly approaching Inkatha impi was repulsed and Inkatha supporters were then routed from a nearby shack settlement. Looking back on his experience ‘as a warrior’ in KwaZulu/ Natal, Makhanya added: ‘Nauseating as it all was, I was proud to be part of it … I must also admit that I enjoyed the excitement of battle: the sight of a sea of burning shacks and desperate men running for dear life.’³¹ Even if this was the only time Makhanya took part in the fighting, this experience must have affected his capacity for objective reporting.

Black journalists living in the townships had daily exposure to the growing violence of the people’s war, but were often too afraid to report accurately on it. Said Thami Mazwai at a seminar on ‘the new censorship for the new South Africa’, sponsored by the SAIRR in August 1990:³²

Little has been said about a new type of censorship that is around in the townships and poses the most powerful threat to press freedom in this country. We have a situation where journalists are far less exposed to arrest, detention and incarceration by the government than they used to be, but are threatened and manhandled by activists in the townships, in the towns, and everywhere, and are being told to ‘toe the line’ or else. Now when you are told to toe the line, you must make your stories convey a particular meaning, in other words you must be a propagandist. [And] if you don’t [do so], … then you become an enemy of the struggle … The weapon that is used is to whisper, to spread the word around that ‘so-and-so is against the struggle’. Heaven help you if you are ever cornered by youngsters; they will make you pay for being against the struggle … As a result, what appears in the newspapers will perhaps be 40 per cent or 50 per cent accurate, but there is that other 50 per cent that is made up of particular positions, specific distortions, and an attempt to influence the readership – the public – to think in a particular way.

As the propaganda campaign proceeded, it gave rise to a powerful conventional wisdom that has become tenacious in itself. In all societies, once a common understanding has taken hold, people tend to discount evidence at odds with that view. This is largely an unconscious process and is part of the reason propaganda has such power. In addition, few people find it easy to stand outside the norm, to question perspectives widely regarded as self-evident. In South Africa, moreover, those few commentators who publicly disputed the third-force theory of the violence were generally excoriated via damning ad hominem attacks by the ANC or its supporters. This has reinforced the tendency for most people to stay silent.

The importance of the people’s war

In the 25 years since the ANC came to power in 1994, many books have been published on South Africa’s political transition, but none has dealt adequately with the people’s war. Yet the story of the people’s war is the key to understanding how the ANC gained its hegemonic grip over the new South Africa. It is also the key to understanding a host of adverse social phenomena that continue to plague the country. Among other things, the ANC’s success in making South Africa ‘ungovernable’ in the decade up to 1994 is a major factor in the persistent vandalism, destructive protests and seeming contempt for authority that persist to this day.³³ The people’s war also contributed to the country’s plague of violent crime by turning policemen into targets for attack and brutalising the thousands of youths who were drawn into heinous acts of violence, including necklace killings.

By the time the ANC took power, moreover, its key black rivals had been so profoundly weakened and discredited that the organisation faced little effective opposition. The country thus embarked on its new dispensation without the first and most fundamental criterion for a functioning democracy: the realistic prospect of the ruling party being voted out of power.³⁴ The ANC’s