Let's draw lessons from people's power on 40th anniversary of State of Emergency

Mail & Guardian

2 days ago

The formation of the United Democratic Front was 'the most important and truly organisational expression of popular resistance in South Africa in the 1980s'. Photo: Eli Weinberg/Robben Island Mayibuye Archive
This year is the 40th anniversary of the first State of Emergency by the apartheid regime. In recalling this ignoble anniversary, I choose to focus on the challenge the apartheid regime sought to address with that unprecedented suppression tool: people's power. I posit that one of the outcomes of the National Dialogue ought to be the reinvigoration of the spirit and praxis of people's power.
And, if some of the impulses behind the call for a national dialogue are the lack of a coherent national vision, dearth of participatory democracy and the trust deficit between the populace and the state, what lessons could this moment of the national dialogue draw from the people's power moment?
In the mid-1980s, a desperate and panicking apartheid regime declared a State of Emergency to squash unprecedented nationwide uprisings. The 1980s was the most revolutionary period in the history of 20th century anti-apartheid politics in South Africa. These uprisings were revolutionary in the sense that conquered people did not seek to transform the colonial polity so that they could be included in it. Assimilation and integrationist politics were replaced with what participants called the politics and practices of 'ungovernability' and 'people's power'.
Ungovernability and people's power discourses and praxes were understood as means towards the deconstruction of colonial-apartheid and the construction of a new polity based on botho/ubuntu, participatory democracy and social democracy. Understood in this way, this period was a period of refusal of the state of permanent emergency that settler colonisation had sentenced black people to.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, when the apartheid state had banned the two major anti-apartheid political parties, the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress, there was no effective national political organisation that mounted a frontal challenge against the apartheid regime. A popular national movement came to the forefront with the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983. UDF affiliates were the ones that instigated unprecedented nationwide uprisings.
It was in this context that a scared and desperate regime declared a series of formal states of emergency, starting on 20 July 1985. As the president put it then, a State of Emergency was necessary because 'the ordinary laws of the land … are inadequate to enable the government' to squash the popular revolts.
The UDF was a loose coalition of civic associations, student organisations, youth congresses, women's groups, trade unions, church societies, sports clubs and a multitude of other organisations. The UDF's inaugural conference in August 1983 is said to have brought together 565 organisations with a collective membership of 1.65 million. The UDF was initially formed to mount collective resistance against two sets of reform measures.
First, UDF protested the 1983 constitution that sought to open the whites-only parliament to coloured people and Indians while most of the population (black South Africans) were to remain without franchise and representation. Second, and perhaps more immediately, uprisings were sparked by the introduction of Bills that sought to devolve more local governance powers to municipal councils. These latter set of reforms enabled these loathed councils to raise rent and other tariffs.
Impoverished working class communities responded by mounting often violent protests. These uprisings were led by youth groups and civic organisations.
Ideologically, the UDF was ambiguous. The main objective that brought these organisations together was they had a common enemy: the apartheid system of exploitation and domination. The opposition that emerged under the banner of the UDF was therefore shaped more by pragmatic efforts than by ideology.
The journey towards the UDF becoming, what distinguished academic Michael Neocosmos referred to as, 'the most important and truly organisational expression of popular resistance in South Africa in the 1980s' was a long and uneven one.
The high point was the mid-1980s moment when insurgents elaborated the concept of 'people's power' to make sense of their insurrection. Insurrection first erupted in the townships of the Vaal triangle where working class communities refused to tolerate undemocratic local governance and lack of access to basic services and goods. Their direct action included tactics such as road blockades, battles with police and the burning of government offices. These struggles were, therefore, as much about material issues as they were about issues of governance. So, while rendering local areas 'ungovernable', it became necessary to establish 'alternative structures'.
Civic organisations, thus, not only took part in reactive struggles, they presented themselves as alternative loci of representation and governance. Civic organisations and mass organisations, through street committees, street or people's courts, defence committees, student representative councils and other local structures came to be seen as 'organs of people's power'.
A clear interpenetration of civic and political issues was evident in their work. People's power went beyond rendering state control impossible and illegitimate; it was fundamentally about participatory democracy and active citizenship. Writing in 1991, Blade Nzimande and Mpume Sikhosana record that these 'organs of people's power' possessed the essence of participatory democracy because they had the following characteristics: 'a democratic project, fundamental transformation of society, accountability, and working class leadership'.
The high moment of township insurrection and people's power was short-lived. On 12 June 1986, the then prime minister, PW Botha, extended the July 1985 State of Emergency to the whole country and gave the securocrats free rein to implement their own version of total counter-revolutionary strategy.
By the end of that year several thousand activists were arrested and indefinitely detained. Many were assassinated. Using emergency regulations, the state introduced a sustained crackdown on community organisations and their activities. In 1986 alone, more 20,000 activists were detained; some remained in custody until 1989. These crackdowns were followed by a number of political and criminal trials, as well as the banning of meetings and sympathetic newspapers.
In February 1990, the then state president, FW de Klerk, announced the unbanning of the ANC and other liberation organisations. A debate ensued among followers of the Mass Democratic Movement: what should the role of the UDF be in the context of an unbanned ANC? The prevailing argument was that the UDF should disband. It thus came to be that on 14 February 991, the UDF's national executive committee held its final meeting.
This short account sought to present the key characteristics of people's power. But 'ungovernability' and 'people's power' should not be romanticised. At their worst, they were characterised by chaos, mob justice exercised by some of the people's courts, brutal enforcement of consumer boycotts and infiltration by com-tsotsis. At their best, 'organs of people's power' reflected the practical manifestation of 'direct democracy'. This was a democracy that made the slogan 'The People Shall Govern' a reality. The acting publicity secretary of the UDF, Murphy Morobe, put it crisply: '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.'
The significance of people's power goes beyond the fact that it enables people to take control over their lives. 'People's power' inaugurated a distinctly popular-democratic political project in South Africa. In theory and in practice, people's power introduced, albeit unevenly, a new mode of politics based on accountable, mass-based democratic leadership. Raymond Suttner aptly names this mode of practicing politics 'prefigurative democracy': 'Democracy was not understood as being inaugurated on a particular day, after which all the practices and ideals that were cherished would come into effect … Means and ends became fused; the democratic means were part of democratic ends.'
Was the disbanding of the UDF (notwithstanding the formation of the South African National Civic Organisation later) not one of the mistakes of the transition period?
These days, when the dialectic that should exist between representative democracy and participatory democracy is overly in favour of the former; when ward committees have been colonised and hollowed out by branch party politicians; when civil society organisations are facing a shrinking civic space and an unprecedented funding crisis; when community conviviality networks have been replaced by millenarian and charismatic faith-based organisations and crushed by extortion rings, we would do well to look back at this era of people's power. If we don't, the national dialogue risks becoming a platform for frank dialogue and vision-setting, but with no meaningful reinvigoration of participatory democracy and active citizenship.
Tshepo Madlingozi is a commissioner at the South African Human Rights Commission. He writes in his personal capacity.