R.W. JOHNSON / In my late teens and early twenties I was a keen supporter of the Congress Alliance. But as I got a little older, my enthusiasm faded. To this day, I debate with myself what were the turning points. Immediately there were two things. First, in London I encountered Essop Pahad, and was taken aback both by his open racism and by his crudely bullying manner. I knew that if I stayed in the movement I would have to take orders from him or people like him – and that was just unimaginable.
Secondly, I found myself unable to go along with the way that so many people in the ANC reasoned. If someone said or wrote something they didn’t like, they immediately accused him/her of being a CIA/MI5 agent. There was no argument, no evidence, no proof. It was just a way of declaring someone a non-person so that they didn’t have to be listened to or taken account of.
And, in the same way, if the movement required it they would have no difficulty swearing that black was white or vice versa. This was, I realised, an inheritance of the SACP’s Stalinism. It was the way they had argued in 1939 that Stalin was right to make a pact with Hitler, despite having treated Hitler as the very devil up until that instant.
This was about two things. First there was no allegiance at all to the truth. The truth was simply what the Party/the ANC required at any given moment. Secondly, there was this bewildering belief that the needs of propaganda overwhelmed everything else. If the political situation required it, you could turn through 90 or 180 degrees and argue passionately for or against whatever would suit the movement at that moment. There was simply no room for personal integrity at all, let alone objective truth. It was a complete betrayal of rationalism – it was the way the Holy Inquisition had argued. Yet all human progress depended on people standing up for difficult truths – Newton, Darwin, Einstein.
But by then I had also begun to study the politics of independent Africa. Even by the mid-1960s it was clear that none of the varieties of socialism – Zambia’s “humane socialism”, Tanzania’s “Ujamaa”, Somalia’s “scientific socialism” – were working out. Everywhere political power had been inherited by a narrow elite which was greedily helping itself, greatly increasing the social inequality which had characterised the colonial period. Corruption, nepotism and grotesque mismanagement seemed to be universal.
It was tempting to view this as Africa’s own version of a bourgeois revolution, but that didn’t seem right either. The elite was too tiny for that – it wasn’t really a class – and it had not risen by dint of commercial, agricultural or industrial enterprise. Mainly it had simply risen through the public sector bureaucracy: hence Rene Dumont’s coinage of “the bureaucratic bourgeoisie”.
Even then, the word “bourgeoisie” was wrong. These were just rent-seekers from white collar backgrounds. Every now and again there would be a military coup, and the ruling elite would be swept aside – perhaps a hundred people going to jail, it was as small a group as that.
I couldn’t help wondering what the ANC made of all this. Their leaders were often stationed in or at least visited African countries. But when I talked to ANC students or activists in Britain, they didn’t seem to have any real ideas about Africa except that regimes claiming to be left wing were viewed favourably. But, I reflected, there were almost no people of real intellectual or analytic ability in the ANC: Ruth First and Jack Simons were the only names that commanded respect. Despite the rich heritage of the Marxist tradition, you would search in vain through the movement’s publications for any serious Marxist analysis of either the South African or general African situation. Just more empty slogans. The intellectual standard was very low.
When I tried to ask whether there were any lessons for South Africa to be gained from independent Africa, all I got was the standard mumbo jumbo about neo-colonialism, “the seizure of power”, the strength of the South African working class, etc. It was completely formulaic stuff. If you pointed out, for example, that South African wage rates were too high for the country to compete with other parts of the Third World, the response would be horrified, because the movement wanted to believe that South African workers were uniquely exploited, not that their wages were uncompetitively high. That was a real world problem, and apparently no one was much interested in the real world.
The truth was, one realised, that very few, if any, of the ANC activists abroad really believed that apartheid would be overthrown. Not that they would ever admit that, but their whole attitude was that they were up against an immovable monolith. They were in for a very long haul indeed, one whose end they could not see.
This meant that there was a complete lack of realism in any discussion of what post-liberation South Africa might be like. Again, this would be dealt with in a few trite slogans. One realised that if someone was ignorant or just hadn’t thought about something, slogans were things they could hide behind. Often, slogans were literally all that activists had. Even after the ANC had returned from exile and was confronted by the complicated texture of South African life, the sloganeering continued. The word “revolutionary” did overtime, though it was perfectly obvious that there had been no revolution and, indeed, that there wouldn’t be one. Even odder was the use of the word “counter-revolutionary”. Since there had been no revolution, it apparently just meant those who were disliked by people mistakenly calling themselves “revolutionaries”.
But the thing that commanded real compassion was the plight of those who had sacrificed their lives to become MK soldiers. As Stephen Ellis pointed out, they had been sold a bogus bag of goods. The only real use the movement had for them was to make propaganda and show how militant the ANC was. But in practice they were parked in camps in Angola or Tanzania, loaned out to fight other people’s wars, and often maltreated and abused by their own leaders. They were only too willing to fight “die Boere”, but they seldom got a chance. When they returned to South Africa, they ended up destitute. They were often very brave men and women, but they had a high suicide rate.
Imagine being such an MK veteran looking at South Africa today, with social inequalities more extreme than they were under apartheid, with unemployment at all-time record levels, with runaway corruption and a completely cynical and selfish ruling elite. How awful to think one had sacrificed the best years of one’s life – for that. Those who recruited and used them were guilty of the most terrible betrayal. It’s not that they knew what would happen, but they kidded themselves into believing and propagating all manner of illusions and delusions.
Sociologically, the oddity is that the old apartheid ruling class of farmers and mine owners has very largely lost its power, but there is no new ruling class. As in the rest of Africa, power is held by a narrow elite and even that group is ethnically and politically divided. The most favoured group is the state bureaucracy – just 2% of the population, who continue to get grotesque inflation-plus salary increases so that they consume 13.6% of GDP.
The ANC likes to talk as if it represents the African working class and the poor, but in fact the African poor are the biggest losers of all. They have lost millions of jobs, they have had more than a decade of falling real incomes, and increasingly they and their children are hungry. The big question is whether this is sustainable. The fact that the entire power structure depends on such a narrow elite inevitably makes it fragile.
As we have seen, in other African states, such an elite can easily be swept aside. The last election was a warning, in a sense. If you take into account the ever climbing number of non-voters, it becomes clear that the ANC has lost the confidence of a majority of the population. Its leaders still behave as if they are the entirely secure and inevitable rulers of the country, but that is no longer so. Not that one can easily see them being replaced, but the danger is just the growth of African populism – not just Zuma and Malema, but the ANC’s own Lesufi and Lebogang Maile, promising all manner of impossible things but in fact threatening anarchy.
Take just two of the demands of the EFF/MK, for the nationalisation of all industry and the complete redistribution of all land to Africans. The first would quickly see the collapse and looting of all the new SOEs – and they could not be bailed out. And currently the population is fed almost entirely by the food produced by large white-run farms and farming corporations. The new African farmers produced by three decades of land reform have made little dent in that. Getting rid of all the white-run farms would quickly produce mass starvation. In practice, rule by African populists would quickly reproduce the sad tale of Nongqawuse and the cattle-killing movement of 1856-7, referred to in old South African history books as “the national suicide of the Xhosa”.
Hence the ANC dilemma. It grew its challenge to the apartheid regime while making all sorts of impossible promises. Ultimately apartheid’s failure handed them power on a plate, but they have continued to make impossible promises (e.g. NHI) and to force through unworkable policies. The results are the wreckage all around us. The GNU offers a sort of temporary respite, but it is not clear that our society can deal with the complete failure and collapse of the ANC.
FEATURED IMAGE: Ruth First at an anti-apartheid rally on Trafalgar Square, London … according to the author, she was one of few people in the ANC in exile with ‘real intellectual or analytical ability’. Image: International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), held by the UWC Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archive. Photographer unknown. Image on Flickr.