Southern Africa in Crisis

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Southern Africa in Crisis

30p RED WEEKLY pamphlet

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Southern Africa in Crisis Pretace On Monday 17 May the 1,600 students at Soweto's Orlando West Junior Secondary School marched out of the school gates on strike. They would not return, they said, until the South African Government removed Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in the schools.

The protests rapidly spread to other Soweto schools until, by mid-June, the movement became too powerful for the apartheid regime to tolerate. The racist rulers in Pretoria resorted to their time-tested methods of bloody repression. On the morning of 16 June, para-military police opened fire on peaceful crowds of student demonstrators, killing a 13-year-old and setting off a train of events which brought the most massive uprising in recent South African history.

For nearly eight months the entire student population of Soweto remained on strike. In August the uprisings spread from Soweto to Cape Town, and

CONTENTS Preface South Africa 3 How Apartheid Works 11 Zimbabwe 19 Imperialist Interests 23 Imperialist Strategy 27 History of the Resistance 31 A Programme for Struggle. 41 Further Reading • .48

ISBN0-85 612017-0 Published by Relgocrest Ltd., 97 Caledonian Road, London N.1. Typesetting: The Photosetting & Design Studio (London), 186 Goswell Road, London E.C.1; F.1. Litho Lid., 97 Caledonian Road, London N.1. Printed by Interlink Longraph Ltd., 45 Mitchell Street, London E.C.I.

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from there to yet other cities; while, at the end of August, the first of a wave of strikes was launched by urban workers to support the protests of the students.

The repression unleashed by the regime to crush the movement was ferocious. Thousands were arrested; and hundreds were gunned down in the streets by the police. By November the official death toll stood at 370; though the real number killed was thought to be far higher. Killings took place even in the jails: by the end of January 1977, 14 African detainees were known to have died since the previous March.

At the same time the regime tried to curb the spread of black trade unionism by arresting 26 black union leaders in November. And on 26 October it stripped away the last remaining rights of 1,300,000 Xhosas in ‘white’ South Africa—removing even their citizenship rights in their own country—when the Transkei, a small rural backwater and labour reserve for capitalist industry, became ‘independent’ under strict South African tutelage (and a state of emergency) as part of Pretoria’s bantustanisation programme.

Further north, in South African-ruled Namibia, a guerrilla war mounted by the Namibian nationalists was tying down some 50,000 South African troops by the end of 1976 according to the United Nations Commissioner for Namibia, Sean MacBride; and, in a bid to defuse the nationalist challenge, the Pretoria Government sponsored round-table talks (the Turnhalle Conference) with conciliationist black ‘ethnic leaders’ in an attempt to establish an interim government leading to indirect, neo-colonial forms of rule.

In Zimbabwe, meanwhile, the settler regime has been faced with a widening guerrilla war and massive nationalist mobilisations fuelled—as in the rest of white-ruled Africa—by the victories of the nationalists in Angola and Mozambique. And worried that the nationalist struggle in Zimbabwe could explode the system of white control and imperialist domination in southern Africa as a whole, the NATO powers have launched a campaign to engineer a speedy transfer of power from the settler regime to a reliable black neocolonial regime.

As these tumultuous events unfold, the stakes are enormous. On one side are the basic rights of nearly 30 million blacks in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia; on the other the privileges of some four million whites and the investments and profits of the imperialist monopolies. A victory for the oppressed black majority would be a victory for the oppressed and exploited the world over, weakening the imperialists and inspiring new waves of struggle.

As during the Vietnam war, international solidarity with the embattled liberation fighters is imperative. The imperialist powers must be forced to stop their collusion with the racist butchers in Pretoria. Above all, they must be forced to stop sending Pretoria arms. It is our job in Britain to build a movement with sufficient power to force the Labour Government to honour its own party’s resolutions and halt totally its military, economic and diplomatic support for the South African regime. Any attempt by the NATO powers to send troops to southern Africa to defend imperialist interests must be met with an outpouring of protest.

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[South Africa The Settlers

The first European settlers arrived in South Africa from Holland in 1652. For the next two centuries a bitter struggle continued between the Europeans and the African people as the settlers seized more and more land. Thousands of Africans were murdered, their cattle stolen, and their families forced to flee their land. i The arrival of the British, with the annexation of Cape Colony in 1806, changed nothing. The murder and pillage continued. For example, in 1819 troops from the Cape attacked the Xhosa, led by Makana, killing thousands of people and stealing over 20,000 cattle. During the 1840s and 1850s the Tembu tribe lost nearly all their land, in 1877 Pondoland was seized, and finally in 1887 Zululand was annexed by the British. The thirst for land, cattle and ‘glory for the British Empire’ led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans at the hands of the Boer settlers and the British. The struggle of the black people to regain what was rightfully theirs was just beginning.

While the British and the Dutch Boers stood side by side against the Africans, signs were already apparent of a conflict between the two groups of European settlers. Britain had annexed the Cape Colony to offer a safe anchorage on the trip to the Indian sub-continent, the jewel of the Empire. Between 1790 amd 1845 British shipping boosted Cape trade by 800 per cent.

The British also wished to expand into the African land, as can be seen by the decision to settle 5,000 Britons in the Albany district. This inevitably led to : clashes with the Dutch and eventually provoked, between 1836 and 1842, the treks by the Boers in search of new pastures. To protect their dominance of the sea routes the British annexed Natal in 1842, blocking the Boers’ access to ' the Indian Ocean.

As the Boers retreated inland in search of rural security, ravaging any African settlement that crossed their path, the British were developing the Cape as a typical colony. Like other colonies, the Cape and Natal were to supply the industrial heart of the Empire with the raw material life blood it needed. Merino sheep were brought to the Cape. By 1870 wool exports from the Cape were second only to Australia in importance for British industry, with a value of over £37 million.

For imperialism 1867 marked an important turning point, with the unearthing of diamonds in the northern Cape region. This led to important structural changes in the economy. White farmers left the land for the mines, a development further encouraged by a decline in world wool prices. A rail network to link the mines to the coast was built, for without it the heavy machinery, which had now become an important part of Cape imports, could not be transported.

Nineteen years later, in 1886, gold was struck in the Transvaal. In 1895 annual gold output from the Transvaal stood at £842 million. In the space of nine years £41 million had been invested in the Transvaal alone by imperialism. Gold bullion now constituted 42 per cent of Natal and Cape exports. The discovery of gold and diamonds had created profound economic changes and laid the basis for the present important imperialist interests within South Africa.

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These changes brought greater pressure to bear for the integration of the Rand under British rule. The Boers were determined to oppose any such move. In 1895 the employees of Rhodes, the father figure of British imperialism in Africa, launched an abortive attack (the Jameson raid) against the Transvaal Boer government. Rhodes had decided that the losses his mines had been making were due to the Boers. Shortly afterwards, in 1899, the Boer wars began. Essentially these wars between the Dutch settlers and British imperialism, which lasted for three years, decided whether South Africa would be in or out of the Empire, and thus open or closed to imperialism.

The dominant position that South Africa today holds for imperialist investment within the African continent was already apparent at the turn of the century. Even then over 60 per cent of all African investment took place in what are now called South Africa and Rhodesia. Similarly, South African trade had risen by a staggering 800 per cent in the 27 years between 1870 and 1897. To understand the significance of this one need only look at West African trade, which rose by a mere 40 per cent during the same period.

Racist Capitalism As had been recognised in the Union of 1910, imperialism, despite its economic superiority and its military victories, was unable to impose its solutions on the settlers. Once the white settlers had self-government, as they did in South Africa in 1910 and in Rhodesia in 1923, the state became an instrument to promote the interests of the national bourgeoisie. There was however to be an unwritten agreement, overriding all else, between imperialism and the various white national interests to guarantee the provision of cheap black labour. While the mines owned by imperialism were short of labour, and the settlers wanted more land plus the elimination of black agricultural competition, both parties could agree that labour should come from the dispossession of the black peasants’ land.

The dispossession of the African lands that had taken place in the earlier decades was formalised with the passing of the 1913 Land Act. This Act stabilised the actual distribution of land by stating that Africans could not purchase land outside the reserves, while on the other hand the settlers could not buy land within the reserves.

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Clearly such a decision also formalised the process of separate racial development.

A similar law was passed in Rhodesia in 1931 entitled the Land Apportionment Act.

The settler state intervened not just to legitimise the seizure of African land but also to actively promote the interests of national industrial development at the expense of imperialism’s interests. In the normal order of capitalist growth, the primitive accumulation of capital on behalf of the aspiring bourgeoisie precedes the taking over of the state apparatus. However in the case of South Africa the process operated in the reverse direction—the settler population, for the most part agricul tural petty bourgeoisie, accumulated the capital to transform themselves into a national industrial capitalist class through the control they wielded over the state apparatus. After the 1910 Union, the Land Bank Act was passed giving subsidies to white farmers; various state agencies were established such as the Industrial Development Corporation on Textiles to aid the growth of an indigenous industry; and ' finally in the 1920s a series of measures were taken to lay the basis of an industrial infrastructure via the setting up of ISCOR (Iron and Steel Corporation), ESCOM (Electricity Supply Commission) and the South African Reserve Bank.

State support and the cheap, migrant, labour system were the bedrock of economic growth in South Africa. The migrant labour system can be clearly seen in South Africa’s mines. Throughout the early years of the twentieth century the South African mines faced labour shortages. This lack of labour led the Government to permit the immigration of 25,000 Chinese workers in 1905. But this policy was reversed in 1907. Immigrant workers from other African countries close to South Africa were encouraged, but 70 per cent of the mineworkers were still Afrikaners in the 1920s. However, the 1922 Rand mine strike involved the state authorities in serious clashes with white workers. A reorientation of policy was adopted whereby whites took over supervisory jobs and the blacks the manual jobs.

The efforts to encourage black labour in southern Africa underlie virtually all changes in the political and economic structure—in particular, the relationship between the African land and black labour. Essentially an attempt had to be made to proletarianise the African peasantry. Such a process initially entailed removing a section of the African peasantry off the land and encouraging them to participate in the wage economy. Various factors combined to pressurise the African to search for ‘ cash employment. Among these were the introduction of taxation (for example, hut and dog taxes); the destruction, due to the advance of commodity production, of African handicrafts; changes in demand by the peasant, such as the need for tools, only obtainable through cash payments; and the pressure of capitalist agriculture.

Having succeeded in forcing sections of the African population to seek wage labour, the state had no wish to totally destroy the African subsistence farming in the reserves. Both the 1913 Land Act in South Africa and the 1931 Rhodesian Land Apportionment Act stabilised the existing land distribution. The basic rationale for that again concerned the provision of cheap labour. Obviously wages paid in return for labour power have to be sufficient to provide for the reproduction of that labourer and his or her family if future labour is taken into consideration. The existence of a subsistence agricultural sector providing some of the costs of the reproduction of labour was beneficial to capitalism and therefore to be preserved.

Labour for the mines was obtained from the African reserves by the recruiting organisations, the Labour Bureaux, of the Chamber of Mines situated inside the reserves. Having signed up, the labourer spent one year working away from the reserve in the mines, returning home after that stint to apply for another stint.

The South African Natives Act of 1923 set out the conditions on which black Africans could spend time in white areas. This 1923 Act strengthened the enforcement of the migratory labour system, as did the territorial separation of land in the Page 5

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1913 Act. Thus the three pillars of the system of separate development in South Africa—first, the restrictions on permanent urbanisation of Africans in white areas; second, the geographical division and separation of land; and third, the system of migratory labour—had been established. All were fundamental to the stability of the capitalist mode of production and its future expansion. Such a growth of a landless peasantry made them ready targets for the labour bureaux, and hence the pressure of the black unemployed, a reserve army of labour within the reserves, made certain that wages would not increase.

To maintain such a system of migratory labour, subsidised by a contribution from African subsistence agriculture, necesssitated the continuation of a fragile balance within the reserves themselves, whereby the agriculture product was sufficient to maintain the labourer’s family, but not large enough to make it worthwhile for the labourer to live fully from the land. This equilibrium began to break down before and after the 1939-45 war.

A number of different factors combined to limit the productivity of the African land: such as the population growth in the reserves, which needless to say in both Rhodesia and South Africa were located in the least fertile lands, and the lack of the necessary capital outlay to obtain the technical means to boost production. Thus overall production—and with it the standard of living of the black population—fell during the 1930s; for example, maize production in the reserves dropped from 3.7 million bags in 1934 to 1.2 million in 1936, rising only to 3 million in 1939. The other consequence of this process was that the contribution from the reserves to the subsistence of the migrant labourer decreased.

The other result of this situation was a certain stratification of the black population within the reserves. The Native Laws Commission reported in 1948 that one third of the families had no arable land, while 29 per cent owned no cattle. Such a growth of a landless peasantry made them ready targets for the labour bureaux, and hence the pressure of the black unemployed, a reserve army of labour within the reserves, made certain that wages would not increase. ‘ As South Africa moved into the 1939-45 war the economy was still dominated by the mining sector and the migrant labour system. The impact of the war, however, brought important structural changes. '

Manufacturing Capitalism

South Africa came out of the war having been through a period of forced industrialisation and import substitution. It was developments in these years which laid the basis for the present dominance of the manufacturing sector over agriculture and mining in both South Africa and Rhodesia. Needless to say, it furthered the extension of the national bourgeoisie, but it also saw a growth of the African working class within the urban areas.

This fundamental shift of resources within the South African economy can be seen in the fact that prior to the war 89,613 people were employed in private industry in the manufacturing and service sectors. By 1945 that figure had already risen sharply to 207,797.

The expansion of the manufacturing sectors urgently required a stable, urban, often skilled labour force. Two solutions were undertaken. First, it was evident that the white population could not sustain such an increase in demand for labour, so Page 6

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white European immigration was encouraged. Between 1946 and 1948 there wasa net immigration of 60,000 people into South Africa. Secondly, the labour shortage could be solved by the use of black labour—but that entailed allowing them to settle in white areas, because manufacturing industries need a permanent, efficient work force.

In South Africa the need for a stable work force and the pressure of a strike wave in the 1940s—for example, the 1946 miners’ strike—led the 1946 Native Law Commission, established by the United Party Government, to call for a series of limited reforms. These proposals were incorporated in the United Party election manifesto in 1948. The United Party lost the election to the Nationalist Party, because such reforms, even though limited in character, threatened the privileges of the white working class and petty bourgeoisie. In fact they could only have been implemented at the expense of these sections of the white population. The response of the Nationalist Party to the economic changes was the apartheid system that is still maintained today. This entailed not only defending all the privileges of the white population but also keeping wage costs low through repressive laws and police action.

Thus the policies of apartheid, as opposed to just segregation, were intimately bound up with the structural change that occurred in the post-war economy. Obviously migrant labour was not viable for the manufacturing sector; thus wage costs could not be subsidised by agricultural production in the reserves. Another mechanism had to be found to keep wage levels down: new laws, such as the Suppression of Communism Act, and wider powers for the security police. This sharp change of direction by the Nationalist Party, which had no parallel in Rhodesia until 1962, reflected the greater economic strength of the national bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism, a process which was to continue through the 1950s and *60s until the present. By 1950 only 32.8 per cent of investment was financed by net capital inflow, and by 1972 this figure had further declined to 10.7 per cent. In the latter year 52 per cent of South African investment originated from savings and depreciation.

The transformation of the South African economy can be seen from the tables below, which show the expansion of the manufacturing sector from contributing 18 per cent of Gross Domestic Product in 1940 to 20 per cent in 1945 and eventually 30 per cent by 1971. In the same period mining dropped from 23 per cent in 1940 to 10 per cent in 1971. This development can also be verified in the occupational breakdown of the black population: in 1970, 808,000 were engaged in manufacturing, 1,553,000 in services, and 604,000 in mining. At the same time the percentage of whites in the labour force has been steadily falling (despite net annual white immigration of 30,000 between 1965-1972) from 31.6 per cent in 1957 to 26.7 per cent in 1970. | RENSEREE e s S SOUTH AFRICAN GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT Annual Sectoral Contribution to GDP Growth Rate Agric. Mining Manuf. 1945 16.5 12 14 20 1950 9.2 18 13 23 1955 7.8 15 12 25 1960 5.1 12 14 26 1965 8.5 10 13 30 1970 10.7 9 11 32 (1940 10.9 12 23 18) Eee SS, 6S > SE Page 7

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South Africa In The Continent

Historically South Africa has been the most economically advanced country on the continent—initially due to the presence of imperialist investment, but later through the dominance of the Afrikaner bourgeoisie. In 1973 the Gross National Product in South Africa was $21.4 billion, 14 times larger than that in Rhodesia. This economic domination is also reflected in a military superiority. In formal military terms, South Africa spends $716 million on defence—that is, 26 times more than Rhodesia in 1973.

Since the 1939-45 war, South Africa has been playing a growing part in the surrounding states, not just in terms of providing employment for hundreds of thousands of immigrant labourers, but also through direct investment. This latter point is especially true in the case of Rhodesia, and has grown more pronounced since UDI was declared by lan Smith in 1965. The relationship between South Africa and Rhodesia has always been close. In 1921, the year before the referendum over unity of the two states, 40 per cent of Rhodesia’s white population had been born in South Africa. Many Rhodesian laws have mirrored those already in effect in South Africa.

Economically, South African interests are substantial in Rhodesia, particularly via groups such as the Anglo-American Corporation. Prior to UDI, foreign capital was divided between Britain, the United States and South Africa; one third of the 50 largest British manufacturing firms, for instance, had interests in Rhodesia. Since 1965 the capital inflow has tended to be erratic, averaging around £30 million and mostly coming from South Africa. It is estimated that South Africa now controls the following sectors of the Rhodesian economy: tobacco, beverages, chemicals, nongold mining, food, paper, tourism, distribution, and non-metallic minerals. All this reflects the fact that during this period South African capital has been growing ata faster rate in Rhodesia than has indigenous Rhodesian industrial capital. By 1970 five of the top ten industrial companies in Rhodesia were wholly or partially owned by South Africa, including the top three—Rhodesian Breweries, Hippo Valley Estates and Rhodesian Cement. Rhodesia is an excellent source of profits, needless to say. In the financial year 1971/72, Anglo-American alone cleared Rh.$2.56 million.

NAMIBIA AND SOUTH AFRICA South Africa also maintains a very specific relationship with Namibia—that of occupation and pillage. Namibia is not only a political buffer between the Vorster regime and the Angolan republic, it is also of immense economic importance for the Pretoria Government.

Namibia is the world number one producer of gem diamonds. Firms such as the Anglo-American Corporation and Consolidated Diamond Mines reap extensive profits there. Recently Namibia has taken on an even greater importance for South Africa—especially with the sale by the Giscard regime in France of nuclear power stations to Pretoria—through the development of uranium mining. This venture has been jointly undertaken by the South African Industrial Development Corporation and Rio Tinto Zinc. Both Britain and South Africa are dependent on Namibian uranium for nuclear power.

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levels. In fact all the laws which apply in South Africa—such as restrictions of movement into white areas, bantustanisation, repression through laws like the Suppression of Communism Act—also apply with equal force in Namibia. Consot idated Diamond Mines, who pay some of the highest wages, give black workers a monthly average of between £24 and £28. Its white apprentices start at three times that figure. In the event of Namibian workers getting out of hand, there are always the 40,000 South African troops who occupy the country to sort them out. ‘DETENTE’

Recent South African policy of favouring ‘detente’ with the black states to its north has an economic motivation. South Africa is the most advanced industrial country in Africa. Its manufacturing sector has only limited markets in South Africa and Namibia, because the policies of apartheid limit consumption by the black ; masses. For example, there are 470 cars for every thousand whites, while within the black population the ratio is a mere 1142 per thousand. The detente moves are part of the process of establishing the southern African common market to which the Vorster regime aspires.

Throughout the 1940s and ‘50s the various Nationalist Party governments were strong advocates of protectionism. These tariff barriers played an important part in developing local South African industry at the expense of imperialism. In 1963 Verwoerd launched the project of a southern African common market. From that day forth South Africa became a firm advocate of free trade in its relations with other African states. In 1967 a trade agreement was signed with Malawi stating that trade between the two signatories would be ‘as free and uninterrupted as possible’.

In 1969 Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland all became part of a joint customs union and common currency area with South Africa.

However, it is also through its trade that South Africa exerts its influence over the black states. Free trade between an advanced capitalist economy and another just throwing off the chains of decades of direct imperialist control is inevitably going to f be one-sided. Despite their formal independence, all the states in Latin America, Africa and the Arab East remain subjugated by world imperialism. South Africa’s trade with a country like Zambia does nothing to change this economic domination.

The accompanying table of South African and Zambian trade makes the point clearly. Zambian exports, both in general and to South Africa, are centred around one raw material, copper, while the bulk of its industrial and consumer goods are (SSS SES Gat ee ns SOUTH AFRICAN TRADE WITH ZAMBIA Product Zambian % Exports Zambian % Imports toSA from SA Food, beverages, tobacco 0.41 10.37 Chemicals 0.58 18.25 Copper, lead, zinc 88.83 0.72 Iron and steel 0 13.18 Manufacturing 2.35 16.38 Machinery/transport 0.03 35.31 Other 7.80 5.79

Totalin Kwacha 7,642,971 59,097,398 (1 kwacha = £1.33) (Source: M. Williams, CSE Bulletin, February 1975.) (SS ST eS eS ET Page 9

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imported from South Africa. In general South Africa imports raw materials, agricultural produce and labour from the black African states, exporting industrial goods in return.

South Africa and its imperialist allies have increasingly been investing directly in these states as well. The Anglo-American Corporation has mining interests in Botswana, so do Rio Tinto Zinc and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation of South Africa in Lesotho, and so does GKN in Swaziland. Countries such as Botswana have always been under the thumb of Pretoria, but in the past few years Vorster has been spreading the net further afield, especially in the direction of Zambia. South Africa has taken the opportunity of the, latter's economic crisis to step in directly, as the March 1976 Standard Chartered Bank Review makes clear: ‘Therefore the possibil- ? ity of a regional solution must be explored. South Africa is reported to have already furnished Zambia with considerable export credit facilities in addition to airfreight capacity in Lusaka. Additionally it appears that help is being given with Zambia's oil bill, which approaches R60 million per annum.”

The importance of the other African economies to South Africa cannot be underestimated. The figures below make this abundantly clear. The important point to note is that South Africa's only trade surplus (apart from a minor one with Canada) is with the rest of Africa.

1972 SOUTH AFRICAN TRADE Country/ Trade Balance Continent Imports Exports [R millions] Africa 152 306 +154 EEC 705 394 -311 UK 591 531 - 60 USA 467 147 -320 Latin America 31 16 + £5 Canada 41 51 + 10 Japan 267 259 - 8 , Australia 71 16 - 55 South African expansion through detente has the support of imperialist interests in South Africa itself. These firms suffer from the same problem as other South ; African concerns because of the lack of an internal market. This has been particularly the case with the multinational car manufacturers, all of whom have substantial investments (totalling £270 million) in South Africa. All also have low production levels, resulting in loss-making ventures: for example, in 1972 British Leyland had a turnover of only £61 million, a market share of 7 per cent, and a loss of £312 million. Expansion into the black neo-colonial states would greatly benefit these international firms, especially as they are based in a state with very low wage levels.

However, the detente and economic expansion exercise is fraught with dangers for both the black states and South Africa. The neo-colonial leaders cannot afford to be seen making too many concessions to Pretoria. Any open capitulation to the Vorster regime would have serious internal consequences for them in terms of maintaining their own regime’s political stability. Likewise, while this expansion has an economic logic to it for South Africa, the political consequences are not so unmixed. Concessions to the black states could both alienate white electoral support and encourage the African masses inside South Africa to further their own struggle.

Both the black neo-colonial leaders and the white racists in Pretoria are walking a tightrope which is swaying more and more under the pressure of the black masses.

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2 How Apartheid Works

APARTHEID AND SEPARATE DEVELOPMENT

When the Nationalist Party came to power in 1948, the social and economic structure on which apartheid was to be based already existed. There was an economy characterised by migratory labour and extremely low wages. There were the infertile, crowded and undeveloped reserve areas allocated to rural blacks. There was residential, social and job segregation. Apartheid really meant the transformation of state institutions so that they could most efficiently preserve this structure. This system has indeed been very successful: in maintaining migratory labour as the profitable foundation of the economy; in giving the state total control of the day to day lives of the workers; and in holding the white working class to the side of reaction by preserving their racial privileges.

It was Verwoerd, Prime Minister from 1958 until his assassination in 1966, who made apartheid into a theory of government. Verwoerd called his theory not apartheid (that is separateness) but ‘separate development’. His sophisticated rationalisation of the system held that the whites, the Coloureds, the Asians and each of the major African tribal groups constituted separate nations. The African peoples could best confront their own problems in the bantustans, where their ‘nations’ would have the right to develop free from interference by any other national groups.

The bantustans were those areas where Africans had ‘traditionally’ lived, and likewise for the whites. Therefore any black in a white area became a foreign migrant worker. This ‘theory’ was nothing other than a spurious justification for the migrant ; labour system.

; The Nationalist Party leadership hoped that, by conceding limited powers to the blacks over the 13 per cent of the country that makes up the homelands, a tribalist and reactionary political leadership would emerge to control the African people. In Verwoerd’s own words, separate development was ‘a form of fragmentation we would not like to have introduced had we been able to avoid it ...buying the white man his freedom and the right to domination in his country’.

Atthesametimeit justified total white domination inthe remaining 87 per cent of the land; justified the refusal of all political and legal rights to blacks in the cities; and justified the drive to limit the number of blacks in the cities to those required by the white-owned economy. It is almost needless to remark that the ‘traditional’ areas assigned to the blacks are those into which they have been forced by conquest and domination. The ‘tribal divisions’ were those which the whites arbitrarily considered to exist and wished to reinforce. The final stage of the apartheid policy is supposed to be the granting of independence to the bantustans, as with the Transkei in October 1976. This is extremely important in giving the Pretoria Government credibility in the West. For when the movement of workers from the wretchedly poor backwaters that are the bantustans to the cities is dignified as an exchange of migratory labour between sovereign states, the social democrats of Western Europe will be hard pressed to explain the difference between this and the use of migratory labour which occurs in their own countries.

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WHITE POWER

‘In white South Africa only the white man is boss, and the Nationalist Party will maintain this position forever with force if necessary..—Dr Koornhof, Cabinet Minister.

The unbroken 28 year rule of the Nationalist Party represents the fusion of two different processes in the history of South Africa. First there is the capitulation of the white working class to racism, who can be relied upon to defend their privileges.

The whole affair was initially formalised through the government coalition in 1924 between the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party. The Nationalist Party, pushing the interests of national Afrikaner capital against Botha and Smuts (the allies of British imperialism), could only further its aims by winning a base among the white population, and this it could gain through the Labour Party. Needless to say there was a price to be paid, but one which had the benefit of integrating the white workers into the ruling class bloc.

Soon after its election the Pact Government, as it became known, passed the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924. This Act set up procedures for wage and dispute negotiations, but specifically excluded the black workers. A similar law was promulgated in Rhodesia in 1934 after the building workers union had made this a condition of its support for the Reform Party in the 1933 elections.

In 1944 the total dominance of whites in skilled trades was reinforced in South Africa with the Apprenticeship Act. This made an apprenticeship compulsory for all skilled jobs. The white workers, however, refused to train blacks—hence there are no black apprentices in South Africa. So the first means by which the white workers were granted privileges was by giving them all the best skilled and supervisoxy jobs. In 1960 only 31 per cent of white South African workers were classified unskilled. In fact the proportion of whites taking part in the direct production process has been continually declining.

A second method has been via the payment of considerably higher wages and salaries to the whites. This can be clearly seen in the table below for both South Africa and Rhodesia.

1972 Comparison of Black and White Wage Levels in South Africa and Rhodesia South Africa

Agriculture

Namibian firms are no different; in fact the differentials are even higher. The Tsumeb corporation, a mining concern owned by American and British interests, pays a minimum wage of £13.30 to its black workers, while the starting salary for white workers in the personnel department is £390 per month. The policy of British firms with southern African subsidiaries is no different from that of other concerns.

Thirdly, the job security for the white population is infinitely greater than for a black African. A black worker has no assurance of his or her job. They can be fired Page 12

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The reality of apartheid: black railway workers’ homes near Otjiwarongo in Namibia

at the drop of a hat; after all, the white owners can find many more willing hands. In fact African unemployment is rising. In 1951 it was estimated at 118,000, in 1960 at : 335,000, and by 1970 had risen to 624,000. These figures, of course, take no account of the underemployment that exists in the homelands, where people may be classified as tilling the land when in reality they have no alternative because no jobs are available. Such work on the land simply scratches out a meagre subsistence. In Namibia, in the region ordained ‘Ovamboland’ by the Pretoria regime, unemployment is running at levels approaching 70 per cent.

Unemployment among whites, however, is virtually unknown. In 1932, 17 out of every thousand whites were unemployed, but in the seven years which followed 82,000 new jobs for whites only were created. Thus unemployment per thousand among whites had fallen in 1970 to a mere 0.24 of a person—in other words 24 people per 100,000 thousand.

It is clear that the white working class has benefited from its economic privileges, and has no intention of surrendering these.

The second factor, which fused with this, is the massive ideological and political strength of Afrikaner nationalism. The Afrikaners, suffering impoverishment and urbanisation from the time of the Anglo-Boer war, looked to political organisation as a means of protection. Afrikaner workers wanted their jobs protected against blacks; the nascent Afrikaner bourgeoisie wanted to challenge the domination of economic life by the English speakers; the Afrikaner intelligentsia wanted to preserve Afrikaner culture against the encroachment of the English language attacks on traditionalism. Afrikaner nationalism welded these forces together around an Page 13

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ideology of extreme conservatism, belief in the Afrikaners’ destiny as a people chosen by God, firm adherence to Calvinist Protestantism, and cultural and racial exclusivity.

Nationalist rule has allowed the Afrikaners to achieve their goals in this crossclass alliance. Not only are the workers’ privileges protected, but the Afrikaner fraction of the bourgeoisie has been able to establish itself within massive sectors of finance, mining and manufacturing. Culturally the Afrikaners have maintained a strong separate identity in which the heavy influence of the three Calvinist Churches is reinforced by a plethora of youth, cultural, women’s and social organisations.

The other white political parties are feeble by contrast. The United Party is a decomposing alliance of middle class English speakers and small sections of Afrikaners. It has a segregationist policy differing only very slightly from that of the Nationalists, and has no hope of constituting any sort of political alternative.

A more dynamic force, although equally impotent when confronted with the Nationalists, is the Progressive Reform Party, which directly reflects the views of English speaking sectors of the ruling class. The directors of the multinational Anglo-American Corporation are its leading lights. It presents a strategy of creating a black middle class and integrating it into the ruling class bloc. This strategy is, however, incapable of winning mass electoral support amongst the whites.

The main factor in white politics is the need of the Nationalist Government to rely on its solid base of racist supporters. There are no threats to it from the UP or PRP, but Vorster is potentially threatened by forces on his right—such as the Reconstituted National Party—if he makes any concessions which are seen by white voters as a threat. Far more important than the conflict between the NP and the opposition parties is the clash within the NP between those favouring liberalisation, known as the Verligtes (enlightened ones), and the hardliners, the Verkramptes (literally cramped ones). This conflict is becoming more open under the pressure of events with the powerful and previously servile Nationalist press, for example, now calling for limited concessions to the blacks. Vorster clearly realises the threat to his 7 own position in the NP that any real move towards liberalisation would contain.

THE TOWNSHIPS |

‘The ideal situation would be if we could succeed in having all Bantu present in white areas on a basis of migratory labour only..—P. W. Botha, Cabinet Minister.

The main mechanism through which the flow of black labour into the cities is controlled to meet the needs of industry is the pass system. The conditions for residence in the city areas are laid down in the 1945 Bantu (Urban Areas) Consolidation Act, which stipulated that no African can live in an urban area for more than 72 hours unless he or she has (a) lived there since birth; (b) worked for the same employer for 10 years or lived there with special permission for 15 years; (c) she is the wife or child of a person qualified under points (a) or (b); (d) has special permission from the Labour Bureau. Anyone else is liable to instant arrest and to deportation to a ‘homeland’, to which they may well have never been before.

The extent of the repression meted out under this system can be seen from the fact that in 1969 no less than 1,019,628 people were prosecuted under the pass laws. The long term aim of these laws is to exclude all those blacks not involved in wage labour from the ‘white’ areas. Cabinet Minister Froneman has made this point explicitly: ‘The African labour force must not be burdened with superfluous appendages such as wives, children and dependants who could not provide service.....The moment a Page 14

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Bantu woman starts a family she belongs in the homeland.’

It is clear that anyone whom the Government does not consider economically useful is to be removed from the cities. Those urban areas where blacks are allowed to reside are invariably located a substantial distance from the cities where they work. A good example of urban conditions is Soweto, located 12 miles from central Johannesburg. In Soweto, two kinds of accommodation are provided for workers: endless rows of two room concrete huts, without services, for longer term residents; and single sex hostels, overcrowded, lacking in facilities, and under constant police supervision, for short term migrant workers.

A population of 1% million are provided with only 100,000 houses and 30,000 hostel places. Workers travel to their jobs every day on overcrowded trains in constant danger of being assaulted by criminals bred by the social decay. Soweto has the highest murder rate in the world. In the schools the pupil-teacher ratio is 60:1. In 1970 three quarters of the families in Soweto were earning less than the poverty line determined by the Association of Chambers of Commerce—hardly the most independent authority!

THE BANTUSTANS

However desperate the situation of urban blacks, that of the bantustan residents is infinitely worse. As unemployment increases—which it is presently doing at a rate of 20,000 per month—workers who lose their jobs also lose their right to live in the cities. The Government'’s repatriation schemes are in any case sending more work-

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ers into the bantustans. The bantustans contain no major industrial or urban settlements, no major transport routes, none of the fertile farming land, and only a few mining enterprises. The average income is 84 Rands per year. Inflation in the ‘homelands’ runs at twice the level of urban South Africa. The population density is so great that the agricultural land has suffered from intense Over-use; consequently the production of the staple grains, sorghum and maize, fell respectively by 50 per cent and 40 per cent between 1958 and 1968. As a result the reliance of homeland dwellers on migratory labour becomes even greater. Sixty per cent of bantustan income comes from migrant labour, and 70 per cent of the economically active bantustan population are involved in this form of labour.

Bantustan residents have suffered particularly heavily from the government reorganisation of bantustan territory. ‘Consolidation’ of the bantustans will involve moving over one million people to different locations within the bantustans. Already nearly two million have been deported into the bantustans. According to ?

Barbara Rogers in the pamphlet Divide and Rule, about 6 million people have been moved due to government schemes and a possible further 72 million will be moved in the future. Many of those moved are placed in resettlement camps. These are places the Government has designated as population concentrations, but where no housing, services, medical facilities or sources of employment are available.

Disease, malnutrition and death are the inevitable consequence.

The Government has done little to remedy the problems of its policies. Only 5.9 per cent of the national budget finds its way to the bantustans, and only 14,000 jobs have been created by investment within them. An index of the desperate plight of the homeland dwellers is the fact that 40 per cent of children in the Transkei die under the age of 10. The apartheid state will provide nothing for those who cannot be used by it as wage labourers.

Homeland self-government is an absolute myth. In the legislatures of the bantustans the white South African Government appoints a minimum of 55 per cent of the members from amongst the tribal chiefs, who are government appointed and paid.

The armies, police forces and civil services of the homelands are all controlled by 7 white government appointees. These puppet homeland governments have extensive powers to restrict any individual or organisation; for example, at the time of the Transkei ‘independence’ the opposition leadership were in jail. It is evident that independence for the homelands in both South Africa and Namibia is simply a manoeuvre by the Pretoria Government. So blatant a fraud is it that, despite the millions of dollars spent in the Western capitalist states via advertising agencies, not asingle foreign government has recognised the Transkei.

OPPRESSION OF WOMEN

African women are oppressed as both women and blacks, and exploited as workers.

This is further intensified by the apartheid system. A mixture of Afrikaner Nationalism’s extremely reactionary and Calvinist attitude to women, together with the Government's efforts to strengthen the hierarchical aspects of the tribal institutions as a means to control blacks, has ensured that African women have no rights whatsoever in South African society. Without a male guardian, a woman cannot own property, inherit, act as a guardian of her children, enter into contracts, or sue in the courts. A woman allowed to live in the urban areas will be immediately endorsed out if she marries a man who does not have permission to reside there.

Although the proportion of women active in the economy has risen to 25 per cent, the vast majority are either engaged in agricultural labour (35 per cent) or in service Page 16

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occupations (38 per cent). The latter group includes 1% million women working in white homes as servants. A large proportion of them live on the premises of their employers in ‘white’ areas. It is therefore illegal for them to have their family with them. There are, needless to say, no African women engineers or lawyers, and very few doctors or librarians. Only in the service professions, such as teaching or nursing, do they outnumber men.

EDUCATION

The role of the education system in shaping the apartheid state is crucial. The system of bantu education was devised by Verwoerd as a means of educating large numbers of Africans to a low level, enabling them to take only manual jobs and the lowest ; clerical work. In his own words:

‘There is no place for him (the Bantu) in the European community above certain forms of labour.”

The policy of the state has been to make Africans pay for their own education.

The parents have to pay for school fees, uniforms, books, pencils, etc. A breakdown of government expenditure on education per pupil makes the point very starkly:

Whites, R282 per pupil; Coloureds, R73 per pupil; Indians, R81.02 per pupil; Africans, R16.70 per pupil.

In accordance with Verwoerd’s design, 94 per cent of African children are in primary classes. The schools are so overcrowded that nearly one million children are taught in two shifts, for which obviously both teacher and pupil suffer.

White pupils, on the other hand, are instructed in ‘Christian National Education’, with a heavy emphasis on military preparedness, patriotism, and the favourable attitude of the Almighty to the Vorster regime. The two contrasting educational systems are a methodical preparation for, on the one hand, a life of exploitation, and . on the other, a life of leisure.

STARVATION WAGES AND JOB RESERVATION

It is widely accepted that the real wages of black South African miners were static from 1911 to 1970. This is merely one indication of the degree of exploitation which the black African working class has undergone. First, Steele and Gurney, in their book The South African Connection, hold that Africans’ per capita income even fell between the years 1958 and 1970. And the real wage increases won in the strikes of the early 1970s are increasingly being eaten away by inflation.

African workers were denied the right to be members of white or Coloured trade unions by the 1953 Native Labour Act, and are effectively denied the right to strike under the ‘Settlement of Disputes’ Act. When they do go on strike they are sure to be attacked by the police and possibly prosecuted under the Suppression of Communism Act or the Sabotage Act.

Workplace segregation, although systematised in 1956 when the Government empowered itself to classify all jobs (reserving categories of skilled work for whites), was always a traditional part of the oppression of blacks in South Africa. Job reservation has not, as some have thought, strangled the economy by creating a shortage of skilled labour. First, whites have moved into supervisory jobs, enabling their work to be reclassified so that it can be done by blacks. Secondly, it is possible for employers to get around job segregation by changing the names of jobs, or breaking one ‘white job’ into several jobs performed by poorly paid black workers.

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A celebrated example of the latter is the case of the black painters in the Transvaal who, tocircumvent regulations, were only allowed to apply the first coat of paint.

Demonstrators come under fire in centre of Cape Town

THE STATE’S ARSENAL

The South African state lays great stress on legality. It has prepared the way for even its basest actions by the passage of any number of Acts of Parliament, ensuring that when the South African police mutilate, maim and imprison workers or supervise the removal of thousands of people to a resettlement camp they do so with the most impeccable legal authority.

The two chief legal weapons which the state uses against those who defy it are the Terrorism Act and the Suppression of Communism Act. The latter defines Communism as ‘any doctrine or scheme which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social or economic change within the Republic by the promotion of any disturbance or disorder; by unlawful acts or omissions, or by means which include the promotion of disturbance of disorder or such acts of omissions or threats’.

Under this Act the Minister of Justice may, for instance, serve a banning order on a militant—restricting them to their home for a period of five years, and prohibiting any participation by that person in any meeting. A meeting is a gathering of three or more people according to South African law. During this period of house arrest the person cannot make public their political views. A militant may also be banished — that is, placed under house arrest in a remote border area. These Acts carry penalties ranging from five years imprisonment to death. The Terrorism Act gives the police complete power to detain anyone suspected of terrorism; and this is the Act which was used to detain the thousands who disappeared during the 1976 nots.

The secret service. the Bureau of State Security (BOSS)—whose chief, General Van den Berg, has considerable independent political authority—operates a vast network of informers and agents both in South Africa and abroad. Its activities in Britain, for instance, have been exposed several times in recent years.

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3 Zimbabwe

It was the search for gold and other minerals which led the British South Africa Company in 1899 to obtain a charter for mineral rights and administrative control in the region from South Africa north to the Limpopo river. This endeavour to find the ‘second Rand’ led the BSAC into what became known as Southern Rhodesia.

Considerable amounts of capital were invested by the BSAC, but the potential of the area had been overestimated. The leading 11 mines in the Johannesburg area of South Africa, for instance, yielded a profit of £7 million in 1910, whereas the profit of : the top ten Southern Rhodesian mines was only £614,000. The company had overinvested in relatively unprofitable mines, and it was therefore decided to encourage the settlement of white farmers on the land. The BSAC hoped that by selling land they would be able to recover some of their investment. By 1911 the white population had risen to 23,000 as a result.

The decision to promote land settlement was accompanied by a series of laws with the notable intention of forcing the Africans to seek wage labour. For example, a hut tax was imposed which had to be paid in cash; thus compelling the African either to intensify agricultural production for the market or to seek work. As part of this process of forcing the African to seek wage labour, a conscious effort was made to stimulate and promote European agriculture at the expense of the African producer.

The BSAC set up central farms to provide education on agricultural techniques to white farmers, as well as granting a whole range of subsidies and loans. All these moves, while serving to encourage the establishment of the European settlers, had as Ps their main objective the provision of cheap African labour for the BSAC mines.

In 1904 African agriculture produced foodstuffs to the value of £350,000, while Ps Europeans only cultivated 5 per cent of total land. But after this date European agriculture moved increasingly into competition with the African peasant. The African was forced off white land and into the reserves, which by 1922 contained 64 per cent of the black population. Not only did the settlers have the backing of the state, but they also took the land best served by the transport network, making African produce relatively more expensive due to the distance from the markets.

Despite increases in the total numbers of African cattle and ploughs, the Europeans had overtaken them by 1922. In 1921 the white farmers owned 905,000 head of cattle, compared to 845,000 for Africans.

The 1921 economic slump, bringing with it a sharp decline in maize and cattle prices, forced thousands more Africans onto the labour market. This structural change can be illustrated by the fact that in 1900 70 per cent of African earnings came from the sale of produce; by 1932 that figure had collapsed to only 20 per cent.

The 1920s also saw other important changes. In 1922, growing pressure by imperialist interests to fuse Southern Rhodesia with the Union of South Africa led to a referendum on the issue. The South Africa Act of 1908, which laid the basis for the Union in 1910, contained a clause allowing for the incorporation of Southern Page 19

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Rhodesia. The BSAC had always been fervent supporters of such integration, and established the Unionist Association to promote their cause. Those opposing such a fusion — the civil service, the white farmers, and white workers in Southern Rhodesia (in other words, the settlers) — formed the Responsible Government Association. The referendum, coming as it did after the violent crushing of the 1922 Rand miners strike in South Africa, strengthened the hand of the settlers. 59.4 per cent voted for responsible government, and in 1923 Southern Rhodesia was granted rights of self-government (Northern Rhodesia, a separate territory, remained a British protectorate).

However, Southern Rhodesia was still a British colony, and so Britain retained control over foreign affairs and African policy. In 1923, 30 of the one million Africans were eligible to vote, which says something of the way Britain considered African policy. In fact, only on one occasion did Britain intervene in Southern Rhodesian affairs over African policy — in 1939, to ensure that Africans were included in the call-up for the world war! Despite Britain’s concern over its infantry, in 1943 only 300 Africans had the vote.

The referendum defeat notwithstanding, mining interests continued to call the government tune for a time via the Rhodesia Party. But the 1933 general election was won by the Reform Party of Godfrey Huggins, campaigning on the basis of ‘separate racial development’, and a year later he and a section of the Reform Party joined with the Rhodesia Party to form the United Party. A real white ruling class bloc had thus been established, incorporating the interests of capital and of the settlers, including the white working class. The latter, for instance, benefitted from the 1934 Industrial Conciliation Act, which laid down procedures for settlement of industrial disputes, wage conditions and apprenticeships. Black workers were excluded.

Apart from consolidating its electoral base via such measures, the new Government also actively began to aid national capital development. In 1933 the BSAC was bought out for £2 million. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, public works programmes were set in motion (notably for road building), while a number of bodies were established to aid capital, such as the Electricity Supply Commission, the Iron and Steel Commission, the Cotton Industry Board (1942), and the Sugar Industry Board (1944). While the Southern Rhodesia national bourgeoisie has never been able to attain the independence and significance of its South African equivalent, due to the greater importance of land and the lesser mineral deposits, the achievements it has registered have been equally dependent on the systematic intervention of the state.

Until the end of the 1930s no manufacturing sector had existed at all, but the war brought not merely the need for import substitution but also worldwide demands for strategic raw materials, such as chrome and asbestos, and agricultural produce. This gave the Southern Rhodesian bourgeoisie revenue which could now be invested in the manufacturing sector. The continuing shortage of raw materials after the war allowed the Southern Rhodesian boom to continue.

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Value of Output in Southern Rhodesia by sectors [market prices £m]

European Agriculture Mining Manufacturing 1938 3.8 7.7 | 1945 9.8 8.1 14.1 # 1951 21.2 15.1 51.0 1957 41.8 25.8 105.1

° (Figures taken from Loney, Rhodesia — White Racism and Imperial Response)

The initial response of the ruling class to this expansion of the manufacturing sector was similar to that in South Africa. In 1944, Prime Minister Huggins stated that it had become necessary to create ‘an efficient, stable labour force’. His answer was to push through the 1946 Native (Urban Areas) Accommodation Act, which empowered the municipalities to provide married accommodation for black workers in the urban areas. Clearly this represented a sharp break with previous policies of racial segregation and migratory labour. To encourage the settlement of black families, as opposed to single black workers, the same rent was to be charged to both categories. The Southern Rhodesia railways, which were taken over by the state in 1949, began a programme of building in which 75 per cent of the inhabitants would be married. By 1948 300,000 Africans had moved into the European areas of Southern Rhodesia seeking new work.

The Southern Rhodesian Government’s so-called ‘liberal’ approach was aided by a big influx of foreign capital, mainly of British and American origin. Between 1947 and 1951 foreign investment in Southern Rhodesia rose from £13.5 million to £50.7 million. By 1953 imperialist capital controlled 80 per cent of total indus- * trial investment, with the remaining 20 per cent divided between private Southern Rhodesian capital and the state. These changes led to two important alterations in the class structure: first the formation of a black working class which expanded from 254,000 in 1936 to 600,000 in 1956; and secondly the emergence of a small Southern Rhodesian manufacturing class, as opposed simply to the rural national bourgeoisie and imperialist interests. However, in the same period the white farmers took advantage of the world commodity boom to expand their output dramatically. This was concentrated mainly in tobacco production, which rose tenfold in the twenty years after 1937.

In line with these developments, the Huggins Government substituted the theme of ‘racial partnership’ for that of separate development. The Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister stated this categorically in 1952: ‘ ... (we) quite deliberately thought of power in terms of social class, and aimed at a working alliance between the European ruling stratum and the more prosperous Africans, bus owners and master farmers, building contractors and senior employees.’

To cement such an alliance, the successive governments of Huggins, Whitehead and Todd proposed policies and laws that would give birth to and consolidate a Page 21

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black middle class. In 1954 a Bill was introduced to recognise black trade unions, provided that they operated within the government framework; there was an expansion of African education; government spending on African agriculture rose to £18.8 million for the period 1950-58, as compared to £2.5 million in the preceding decade; the 1951 Native Land Husbandry Act allocated African land in eight acre holdings, which could not be subdivided or sold without state permission, with the aim of being able to produce a £75 cash surplus on top of subsistence; and the 1959 Apprentices Act established minimal qualifications of (a) Junior Education Certificate (that is, 10 years schooling) and (b) appropriate employment before an apprenticeship could be undertaken by an African. These ‘reforms’ did not have the imtention of extending education or land to the black masses; on the contrary, it was through these moves that an African middle class was intended to emerge which could be the other partner in the alliance of which Huggins spoke.

The dominance of foreign capital within Southern Rhodesian manufacturing capital increased the pressure for the establishment of the Central African Federation (CAF), made up of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The main beneficiary of the Federation years was without doubt the Southern Rhodesian white ruling class and its imperialist backers. Four basic points should be made in this respect: (a) the CAF agreed to take over the debts of £88.4 million that Southern Rhodesia had accumulated during the post-war period to encourage white immigration; (b) the bulk of the revenue to fund the Federation was obtained from the sales of copper from Northern Rhodesia; (c) there was a disproportionate expenditure of this revenue in the white regions of Southern Rhodesia; and (d) Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland became protected markets for the manufacturing industry of Southern Rhodesia. The Federation finally broke up in 1962 after the independence of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi).

This was a setback for manufacturing interests in Southern Rhodesia (now renamed Rhodesia), because the country lost its attractiveness as a base for foreign capital. The general trend became that of the repatriation of profits. In 1964 the net capital inflow of £30 million of the preceding decade had become a small outflow. Nevertheless the grip of world imperialism was as firm as ever. In 1963 the foreign sector constituted 68 per cent of gross profits, 65 per cent of interest, dividends and “ profits, 70 per cent of gross fixed domestic capital formation, and 76.5 per cent of all tax payments.

In December 1962 the ruling United Federal Party, led by Whitehead, was defeated in a general election by the Rhodesian Front Party. The UFP, taking its previous policies to their conclusion, had included in its manifesto the repeal of the Land Apportionment Act, thus challenging the interests of the white farmers. The lack of electoral support for measures which would break some of the privileges of the white population was hardly surprising. While these and other measures of the UFP aided the manufacturing sector, they did not have the support of the white settler population.

Nevertheless, the period of UFP ‘reform’ fundamentally altered the course of Rhodesian history. While in South Africa the national bourgeoisie, starting from a stronger base, was able to strengthen its position still further, in Rhodesia it was imperialist interests which took advantage of the potential for expansion in the post-war period. This laid the basis for the present attempts at a neo-colonial solution in Rhodesia, with a proportionately greater presence of imperialism and a black middle class in embryo.

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4 Imperialist Interests The imperialist powers’ basic objective in southern Africa is to safeguard their investments by halting the present revolutionary upsurge of the black masses. This is no small matter for the imperialists: their economic interests in the white-ruled states, especially South Africa, are truly vast.

According to figures published in 1975, there are a total of 630 British companies operating in South Africa, as well as 494 from the United States, 132 from West Germany and 85 from France. Investment from these and other imperialist countries has flooded into South Africa in recent years — the net capital inflow rising from R341m in 1970 to R1,774m in 1975, according to the South African Reserve Bank (SARB). The SARB has put total foreign investment in South Africa at a massive £6,425m—‘a sharp rise on previous estimates’, as the Financial Times of 9 April 1976 remarked. ‘No information’, the paper noted, *is published on investments by individual countries—no doubt to avoid political embarrassment— although it can be seen that Europe, including the UK, accounts for 73.7 per cent of the total.”

Britain is still the largest source of foreign investment in South Africa, though the share of other imperialist powers (like the United States and West Germany) is on the rise. In 1972, the last year when South Africa published a breakdown of the origin of capital inflows, the Sterling Area accounted for 55.8 per cent of all foreign capital in South Africa; and Martin Legassick and David Hemson have argued in their study Foreign Investment and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism in South Africa that ‘the South African connection counts for at least ten per cent of Britain's total foreign investment’.

In 1972 the Dollar Area accounted for 18.6 per cent of all foreign capital in South Africa. But in the last few years American investment in South Africa has rocketed. In 1973 the rate of growth of new US investment in South Africa soared to 24 per cent, and in 1975 reached 25 per cent, taking total US investment in South Africa to around $1,500m. It has been a similar story with German investments, which grew from R300m in 1969 to at least R800m in 1974.

As previous sections of this pamphlet have shown, it is the apartheid system itself which has proved so attractive to the imperialist monopolies. Apartheid—with its denial of all political and trade union rights to the black masses and its creation of the bantustans as cheap labour reserves tied in with the migratory labour system—is the underpinning of the super-profits raked in by these multinational firms from their South African investments. The ultra-cheap labour provided by the apartheid system—which meant, according to the 15 February 1976 Johannesburg Financial Mail, that the average income of a black family (about £52 a month) was oneseventh of the average income of a white family in 1975—has ensured one of the highest profit rates available to capitalists anywhere in the world. ‘British investment in South Africa has consistently shown one of the highest profit rates of any comparable British investment overseas’, noted Labour's Policy for Southern Africa, a policy statement adopted by the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee in September 1976.

The imperialist governments are determined to defend the vast interests of the multinationals in South Africa, And they know that the continuation of the apartheid system is essential if the fantastic profitability of these firms’ South African operations is to continue. That is why, despite their hypocritical moral condem- Page 23

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nation of apartheid, these governments have continued to collaborate with the Pretoria regime and to supply it with the latest military hardware.

But not only is the apartheid system at the root of the super-exploitation of South Africa’s black labour force. Its rigid structure has also blocked the development of a black bourgeoisie. In 1973 98.1 per cent of income from property went to whites, and only 1.9 per cent to blacks. At the same time, South A frica’s relatively high level of industrialisation (by comparison with other African countries) has created the continent’s most powerful African proletariat—with over 6 million urban black workers. These two factors (the extreme weakness of the black bourgeoisie and the relative strength of the black proletariat) make it highly dangerous for the imperialist powers to seek a transfer to neo-colonial forms of rule (along the lines successful- ) ly followed elsewhere in Africa); for a neo-colonial project to dismantle the apartheid system would not only undermine the basis of the imperialists’ vast supera profits but would also threaten to unleash class forces with the potential (given a revolutionary leadership) to lead to a social revolution. A socialist revolution in South Africa would, moreover, have a tremendous liberating effect on the African masses in the rest of the continent, spurring forward the struggle for real liberation in the neo-colonial countries.

South Africa also has a wider strategic importance for the imperialist powers. In the first place, much of their trade is shipped past the Cape of Good Hope. This includes about 7 million barrels of Middle East oil a day, the equivalent of about one-half of the European powers’ daily oil consumption. The Cape route has retained its strategic importance despite the re-opening of the Suez Canal, which is now too shallow to accommodate today’s giant oil tankers.

Another factor is South Africa’s mineral wealth. Many of the minerals mined in South Africa and its Namibian colony are of strategic importance to the NATO powers, for both economic and military reasons. A report of the US African Affairs Advisory Council, submitted in August 1971 to the US State Department, makes this clear: ‘Africa contains a major proportion of the world’s reserves of a few commodities important to US strategic or economic needs. In the future, the US will probably have to look to Africa for, among other products, its chromite, platinum ) natural industrial diamond stones and phosphate rock (in 20-30 years)...Most of ] group metals, tantalite, petalite, gold, long-fibred amosite and crocidolite asbestos, these key minerals are found in southern Africa. South Africa also has large reserves of nickel and manganese.

Namibia, meanwhile, is second only to Libya in the African continent in terms of mineral wealth per head of population. It is the world’s largest gem diamond producer, while substantial deposits of lithium, vanadium, lead, cadmium and zinc exist. the mines are owned and controlled by British, American, Canadian and South African firms. During the 1970s the importance of Namibia to world imperialism has been increased by the development of uranium, the extraction of which has been jointly financed by the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa and Rio Tinto Zinc. This uranium, from mines such as Rossing, is vital to the nuclear power plants in both Britain and South Africa.

Another aspect of South Africa's strategic importance to the imperialist system is its role as the main source of gold. The capitalist countries have been unable to ‘demonetise’ gold; and, as Dorcas Good and Michael Williams have remarked in South Africa: The Crisis in Britain and the Apartheid Economy, ‘any disruption to Page 24

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the gold mines is likely to create uncertainty and panic in the international currency markets and bring the expansion of world credit grinding to a halt’.

WORLD GOLD PRODUCTION IN METRIC TONS

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 South F Africa 1000 976.6 908.7 852.3 758.5 708.1 | Capitalist Total 1273.2 1235.9 1181.8 1118.8 1009.6 951.5 | World Total 1638.3 1614.1 1579.1 1536.4 1450.7 1378.5 (Source: Africa, January 1977. Nearly all the gold mined in the non-capitalist world is from the Soviet Union, representing approx. 20% of total world production.)

As a commodity gold holds a particular place in the capitalist system. It has a use value in two distinct forms: first, as jewellery; but secondly, and most importantly, as the product for which all other commodities exchange. In other words, gold under-pins the monetary system, This can be verified throughout the twentieth century.

Prior to 1933, under the Gold Standard, currencies were tied to gold, so that a strict proportionality had to be maintained between the extent of currency in circulation and the size of a country’s gold reserve. In the wake of the Second World War a new system was evolved through the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. This was called the Gold Exchange Standard. As a consequence, and reflecting the _—-— dominant position of American imperialism, the dollar became the currency to which all other currencies were tied. However, the dollar was in turn exchangeable with gold at the rate of $35 to an ounce of gold. This system was abolished in August 1971 after the continuing crisis of the dollar. Despite the fact that in March 1973 the International Monetary Fund removed gold as the basis for currencies, gold remains an important part, along with dollars, pounds and special drawing rights with the IMF, of the reserves a country holds to finance trade.

It is evident that gold is crucial to the functioning of the international monetary system; and its production is virtually monopolised within the capitalist sector by South Africa. As the table above indicates, in the 1970s South Africa provides well over half the world total and over three quarters of that within the capitalist countries. This monopoly of gold production has certainly helped South Africa to avoid the severity with which economic crisis has affected other capitalist countries—not just because gold is always in demand and always exchangeable, but also because, whenever there have been international monetary crises, gold has offered a safe option free from the fluctuations of the pound, dollar or mark.

Finally there is another, perhaps even more important, consideration for imperialist policy-makers. This is that South Africa, the most industrialised country on the African continent, has the ability to play a military watch-dog role on behalf of imperialist interests throughout southern and central Africa—rather like Israel in the Middle East. South Africa has the largest and best equipped armed forces in the region, with a regular army of some 50,000 (including navy and airforce) and Page 25

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reserves of 300,000 (of which 200,000 can be mobilised in two weeks). With over 750 aricraft, the South African airforce is by far the most powerful in sub-Saharan Africa. And in recent years Pretoria’s military spending has increased dramatically. On 31 March 1976, Senator Owen Horwood, the South African Defence Minister, announced that military spending in 1976-77 would increase by 40 per cent to $1,800m (double what it had been two years earlier).

Furthermore, as South Africa’s invasion of Angola proved, Pretoria is prepared to use its vast military arsenal to defend imperialist interests far beyond its own borders. In fact, according to a Bill recently debated by the South African Parliament, the Vorster regime is authorised to use troops ‘to prevent or suppress all armed conflicts outside of the Republic that are or could become threats to the Republic's security’. South Africa’s field of military operations is extended by the Bill to the Equator, 1,200 miles north of the Namibia-Angola border, and thus includes Gabon, the Congo, Zaire, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Angola.

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5 Imperialist Strategy

The super-profits reaped from the apartheid system, the risks involved in a switch to neo-colonialism, the strategic importance of the Cape route and South Africa’s minerals, especially gold and uranium, and South Africa’s military role in Africa on behalf of the imperialist powers all mean that the imperialists are determined to go on bolstering the racist Pretoria regime. Their occasional criticisms of the apartheid system are mere window-dressing. Economically, the imperialist powers therefore continue to grant the regime massive Euro-currency and IMF loans to finance its industrial projects and prop up its foreign exchange reserves. In the United Nations, the United States, France and Britain have combined on more than one occasion (most recently on 19 October 1976, on the issue of a mandatory arms embargo) to veto anti-South African resolutions. And, though some NATO governments have been forced to apply partial arms bans against South Africa, the imperialist powers have succeeded as a bloc in ensuring that Pretoria receives a steady stream of modern military equipment.

France, for example, has helped to build up the South African airforce over the past five years, contributing over 100 planes (including 40 Mirage interceptors, fighter-bombers and reconnaissance planes) and over 90 Alouette, Super Frelon and Puma helicopters. Now the apartheid regime is receiving a new generation of 45 Mirage F-1 jet fighters, the most advanced military aircraft built in France; and South Africa is scheduled to start building its own Mirage F-1 fighters under licence later in 1977. French arms sales, which were worth $60m in 1975, have also included aircraft engines, Panhard tanks and armoured cars, missile gunboats, submarines, rockets, anti-tank missiles and machine guns.

France has been closely followed by Italy, which sold South Africa $33m of arms in 1975. By 1973 South Africa had built 200 MB-326M Impala jets under Italian licence; and in the same year Italy granted South Africa a licence to assemble a new model of MB-326K Impalas. Israel has become a big arms supplier to South Africa, selling Pretoria some $14m of weaponry in 1975; while West Germany has given aid to South Africa's domestic missile industry as well as providing invaluable technical assistance to South Africa’s nuclear programme (along with France, which is selling nuclear reactors to South Africa).

Britain and the United States claim to ban military sales to Pretoria; but these ‘embargoes’ are full of loopholes. The US, for example, has sold large numbers of Bell helicopters as well as C-131 Hercules and C-141 Starlifter transport planes (which played an important part in South Africa's invasion of Angola). Under ‘Tar Baby’ (Option Two of National Security Memorandum 39-NSSM 39), the Nixon administration’s southern Africa strategy adopted in 1970, US policy was to ‘enforce the arms embargo against South Africa but with liberal treatment of equipment which could serve either military or civilian purposes’. Violating repeated Labour Party conference resolutions opposing all military collaboration with South Africa, the British Labour Government has pursued a somewhat similar policy. While leaving the more overtly military sales to countries like France and Italy, it has continued to sell South Africa ‘dual purpose’ equipment—equipment which can be used for both civilian and military purposes. Thus, under the British Export Order of 1970, a wide range of ‘dual purpose’ items (ranging from radar equipment to components for aircraft engines) can be exported to South Africa despite the arms ‘ban’ and without even the formality of an export licence. Even in cases where a Page 27

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licence is required, militarily important sales to South Africa have been given the green light by the Labour Government. The most scandalous recent example is the Department of Trade's decision on 25 October 1976 to allow Marconi to export an £8m tropospheric scatter system (a sophisticated communications system) to the South African Armaments Board.

The Western powers’ record on these issues can leave no doubt that they are fully committed to bolstering Pretoria’s military capability. But, while they are doing everything possible to defend the apartheid regime from the present and potential challenges it faces from the black masses of South Africa, the imperialist governments favour the replacement of the white settler regime in Zimbabwe by a black neo-colonial government. Since the downfall of Portugal's African empire, the British, American and other imperialist powers (including South Africa) have seen this transition or modification in the forms of imperialist domination as an urgent priority.

THE FARCE OF RHODESIAN SANCTIONS The complicity of various British governments with the racist southern African states, and their failure to seriously challenge the latter internationally, was dramatically highlighted with the Unilateral Declaration of Independence [UDI] by the Rhodesian Government on 11 November 1965.

The decision to go it alone evoked differing responses within Rhodesia. The Rhodesian Institute of Directors were solidly opposed; in fact, only 19 of the 294 Rhodesian industrialists supported UDI, reflecting the feared loss of export learnings and the dominance of imperialist interests within Rhodesian industry. On the other hand, only 36 of Rhodesia’s civil servants resigned in protest.

The Labour Government led by Harold Wilson took immediate action. Rhodesia was removed from the Sterling Area, British capital exports to Rhodesia were banned, and the purchase of tobacco from Rhodesia halted. An oil embargo was not imposed until 17 December, but eventually entailed British frigates patrolling the approaches to the port of Beirain Mozambique.

However the imposition of sanctions was dependent on the support of the Caetano dictatorship in Portugal and the apartheid regime of Vorster. Needless to say, neither had any intention of isolating Smith; in fact, by January 1966 Rhodesia was receiving 145,000 gallons of oil per day from the direction of South Africa, although it required only 83,000 under rationing. Much of this oil was being supplied by the subsidiaries of Shell and British Petroleum, but no action was taken against these firms. No complete mandatory embargo on goods to and from Rhodesia was ever called for by Britain in the United Nations. It is hardly surprising that other imperialist powers, such as Germany and America, continued to trade with the Rhodesian state [Germany even increased its exports following UDI].

Other multinationals, such as Lonrho, invested in Rhodesia through South African subsidiaries, which the British Government never did anything to block.

The only solution would have been for the Labour Government to stop all investment and trade with both South Africa and Rhodesia. All those firms breaking mandatory sanctions should have been nationalised, without compensation and under workers control. But to do that would have meant confronting those British firms with their vast investment in southern Africa — something the Labour Government has never done.

Prior to the victories of the Angolan and Mozambican freedom fighters, US policy (like that of South Africa) had been to consolidate both the white Rhodesian regime and the Portugese administrations in Angola and Mozambique as a buffer zone for South African racism. So, under ‘Tar Baby’, US policy was to ‘maintain public Opposition to racial repression (as an image-polishing manoeuvre) but to ‘relax Page 28

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In search of a solution, January 1977: Vorster \left) and British emissary Ivor Richard political isolation and economic restrictions on the white states’. The US therefore stepped up its economic aid to Portugal after 1970; and, with the Byrd Amendment in 1971, decided to flout UN sanctions against Rhodesia by allowing imports of Rhodesian chrome.

The nationalist victories in Angola and Mozambique forced the imperialist powers to adjust their tactics. Their basic objective—the defence of white minority rule and their huge interests in the industrialised bastion of South Africa—remained unaltered; but their tactical approach to the Zimbabwean question changed. The victories of the freedom fighters in Mozambique and Angola had an inspirational effect on Zimbabwean blacks, spurring forward their struggle for national liberation; while Mozambique’s decision in early 1976 to authorise a new wave of guerrilla attacks from its territory against the Smith regime increased the military pressure on the settler state. The imperialist powers calculated that the retention of direct white colonial rule in Zimbabwe was unrealistic and dangerous; and that, unless they succeeded in engineering an orderly transfer.of power to a black neo-colonial government, the crisis in Zimbabwe might spiral out of control, with dramatic political repercussions both in the bordering neo-colonial states and, above all, in South Africa, When Soweto and the other black townships of South Africa exploded in June 1976, the urgency (for the imperialists) of de-fusing the crisis in Zimbabwe became even greater: it became imperative to ward off the potential for inter-action between the rising nationalist struggle in Zimbabwe and the township rebellions further south.

The imperialists’ new tactics were spelt out in two major speeches at the beginning of 1976. On 22 March, Jim Callaghan, then Foreign Secretary, outlined a set of Page 29

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proposals for the transfer of power to a black neo-colonial regime in Zimbabwe. Callaghan said that the transfer should take between 18 months and two years (a period long enough to consolidate a stable and reliable black regime) and offered financial incentives (through an imperialist-sponsored fund) to win white Rhodesian support for such a transition. Sanctions and the guerrilla war should be halted, Callaghan said, if his 22 March proposals became the basis for a negotiated ‘settlement’.

These British proposals were endorsed by Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, in a major policy speech in Lusaka, Zambia, on 27 April. ‘The Salisbury regime’, he said, ‘must understand that it cannot expect United States support either in diplomacy or in material help at any stage in its conflict with African states or African liberation movements. On the contrary, it will face unrelenting opposition until a negotiated settlement is achieved.’ Specifically, Kissinger declared his support for Callaghan’s 142-2 year timetable. Convinced that a transition to neocolonial forms of rule was imperative, the US and British governments launched the ensuing rounds of shuttle-diplomacy which led to the convening of the Geneva conference on 28 October. Here again, British imperialism insisted on a transition period (15 months, this time) to provide the time needed to consolidate a stable neocolonial regime.

Throughout, however, the imperialists’ plans were thwarted by the Rhodesian settler regime. The problem facing Washington and London was that their objectives were at variance now with those of the white Rhodesian settlers. While the imperialists calculated that their interests (and those of white South Africans) could best be served by coming to a deal with the petty-bourgeois leaders of the Zimbabwean nationalist movement, the Rhodesian settlers knew that even within a capitalist, neo-colonial Zimbabwe they would doubtless lose many of their special privil eges. The conflict was epitomised by Smith's final rejection of the British Government’s settlement package on 24 January 1977, forcing the British chairman of the Geneva talks, Ivor Richard, to announce the same day that there was no point in continuing with the conference. The imperialists’ impatience with the settler regime (whose stance, they knew, was jeopardising imperialist interests throughout southern Africa) was aptly summed up by Ted Rowlands, the British Minister of State for African affairs, who said on 27 January that Smith should make up his mind if he wanted to ‘play Samson and bring the whole temple down’. Despite Smith's 24 January rebuff, however, the imperialists had little option but to continue urging the adoption of a neo-colonial ‘solution’ to the crisis.

The main Zimbabwean nationalist leaders (Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Joshua Nkomo, Robert Mugabe) all urged the British Government during the Geneva conference to assume its ‘decolonising responsibilities’ as the ‘legitimate’ colonial authority in Zimbabwe. As we have seen above, however, British imperialism has never had (and never will have) ‘decolonising responsibilities’ in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean people alone can decolonise Zimbabwe; British imperialism, by contrast, seeks only to maintain colonial domination while shifting to less overt and more indirect, neo-colonial forms of rule. In short, British imperialism’s only possible role is a neo-colonising one, not decolonising one. The dangerous logic of the nationalist leaders’ pleas for British involvement in the decolonisation of Zimbabwe is that they can open the door for (and appear to legitimise) imperialist intervention —from the installation of a British ‘Resident Commissioner’ (as proposed by Richard in January) through to the dispatch of British troops. Such intervention would be designed to serve but one purpose: to guarantee an ‘orderly’ transfer of power to a black neo-colonial regime in order to defend imperialism’s vital interests against those of the black masses of Zimbabwe and southern Africa as a whole.

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6 History of the Resistance

A.South Africa It is impossible to talk of a single history of the southern Africa liberation movement — only about a number of histories. Although southern Africa forms a more or less integrated sub-system of exploitation, the liberation movements have taken on a purely national dimension with very little common history. Because it was the forerunner, and because the other national liberation movements drew on some of its experience, it is convenient to begin with the Republic of South Africa.

The present liberation movements in South Africa stem from two political traditions: the development of nationalist movements from within the African people, and the white labour movement. The defeat of the various tribal groupings with the expansion of British involvement in South Africa was followed by the development of political and nationalist consciousness amongst the Africans: the first African political organisation was established in the Eastern Cape in 1882, and similar organisations were formed in the other colonies. The approach of Union and the colour-bar Constitution proposed by the all-white National Convention in 1909 stimulated the unification of these organisations. African leaders from all four colonies met at a national convention and decided to send a deputation to the British Parliament to demand rejection of the anti-African provisions of the South Africa Act. The deputation was joined by representatives of the pioneer Coloured people’s organisation, the African People’s Organisation.

Not surprisingly the deputation was ignored. This brought home to the Africans the need for an effective national organisation. The result was the foundation of the South African National Native Congress (later renamed the African National Congress) in 1912. The ANC attempted to rouse the Africans against such injustices as the Native Land Bill of 1913, which deprived Africans of their remaining land rights. The Indians also began to form their own organisations, and under the initial guidance of Gandhi the movement took on a militant character.

The white labour movement developed in South Africa under the influence of its British counterpart. In 1902 branches of the British Social Democratic Federation were established in the Cape and in Johannesburg. Trade unions had existed since the nineteenth century. Strikes were frequent and often bloody. But although often very militant, the white workers were also deeply imbued with race and national prejudice.

The Transvaal elections of 1907 saw the emergence for the first time of the labour movement as a serious electoral force, with the Labour Representation Committee winning three out of the thirteen seats. This led to the formation of the South African Labour Party in 1909. This party was from the start an uneasy combination of right-wing opportunism and left-wing socialist internationalism. On the question of the party’s attitude to the Africans the right wing dominated, and no effective protest was raised against the Native Land Act. Nevertheless, the opposition to it led by the ANC had an impact on the labour movement. This was reflected at the 1913 Page 31

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party conference, which decided, against strong opposition, to admit Coloured members.

Unlike the majority of parties affiliated to the Second International, the South African Labour Party initially opposed the war. In September 1914 the War on War League was established in the Labour Party to fight for this position. However by 1915 the right wing had gained control, and a pro-war resolution was passed. A new body of internationalists was then formed, and when it soon became apparent that a revolutionary wing would not be tolerated within the SALP, these members left to form the International Socialist League of South Africa.

The ISL was a principled defender of socialist internationalism as well as of the general principlies of Marxism, but suffered from marked weaknesses on matters like the national question. However in many ways it was an important step forward. In 1915 David Ivon Jones, one of its leaders, had written: ‘An internationalism which does not concede the fullest rights which the native working class is capable of claiming will be a sham. Not until we free the natives can we hope to free the whites.’ The ISL’s first congress in January 1916 adopted a ‘petition of rights’ demanding the abolition of pass laws and indentured and compound labour, and equal rights, political and industrial, for African workers. In contrast to the indifference shown by the Labour Party earlier in the decade to the Native Land Act, the League campaigned in protest against the Native Administration Bill of 1917. A meeting of the time boasted a joint ISL/ANC platform.

The ISL enthusiastically welcomed the formation of the Third International, and came together with various smaller groups to form the Communist Party of South Africa in 1921.

The first real test of the new party came in 1922 with the strike of white miners on the Rand. In 1919 the ‘price’ of gold on the world market was 130s per fine ounce; by December 1921 it was 95s. The Chamber of Mines, seeking to avoid a fall in their profits, resolved upon a policy of cutting labour costs. It was impossible for them to cut the Africans’ subsistence wages, so the Chamber proposed to replace white labour with black labour. In protest the white miners came out on what developed into a general strike.

In this crucial struggle the CP capitulated to the chauvinism of the white working class. As the party’s official history, Fifty Fighting Years, puts it, ‘.... at no time did the party, absorbed in the stormy progress of the strike, turn its attention to the African workers who remained in their compounds and continued operating the mines. It did not propose that they be given skilled work at equal rates of pay; nor did it advance demands around which they could organise.’ Further, “The party was bitterly disappointed in the results and consequences of the strike. Despite the sacrifices and heroism of the Communists, it was not to them but to the chauvinist Labour and Nationalist parties that the white workers turned ....’. The die had been cast: the white workers were never to return.

The Communist Party then compounded this mistake by supporting the coalition between the white Labour Party and the Nationalist Party (based on small Afrikaner farmers) that was elected in the wave of indignation that followed the repression of the Rand strike. This Government represented the beginning of the coalition between white labour and the Afrikaner bourgeoisie on which the foundations of the racist state were to be erected.

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The following two decades were a time of testing for the organisations of the black masses. A succession of nationalist and racist governments followed a consistent project of depriving the black population of their few remaining rights and consolidating the alliance of privileged whites of all classes on the basis of this super-exploitation of the blacks. Tragically, each of the organisations that claimed to speak for the masses failed its responsibilities in turn.

Throughout this period the African National Congress failed to develop beyond the alliance of ‘traditional’ tribal leaders and the tiny educated elite that had set it up in 1912. It confined itself to polite protests and petitions, and, apart from a few courageous individuals, was never prepared to take the road of real mass struggle.

Under these circumstances the oppressed black masses had to seek elsewhere for organisations to express their spirit of resistance. The most important of these was the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), founded after the First World War by a brilliant but egotistical immigrant from Nyasaland, Klements Kadalie. The ICU led a successful dock strike in Cape Town docks by black workers, and on the basis of that victory mushroomed throughout the country, attracting around it some of the most militant and talented leaders of the black struggle. The reputation of the ICU for effective and militant struggle gave it an influeace well beyond the ranks of the still small number of black industrial workers. Oppressed blacks in every conceivable situation — labourers on white farms, domestic servants, even peasants from the reserves — flocked to its banner, seeking a lead in their struggle against white racism. At its height in 1928 the ICU could claim a quarter of a million members, although its organised, dues-paying membership was never more than a small fraction of this.

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potential was frittered away by the opportunism of its leadership and the destructive intervention of international social democracy and South African white ‘liberals’.

These latter forces decided to take Kadalie and the ICU ‘under their wing’. Wooing him with flattery, and offers of international support, they convinced him that the ICU must adopt the ‘responsible’ model of trade unionism that was being pursued in countries like Great Britain, and break with communists and other extremists. These right-wing policies were to lead to a series of defeats for the British working class, as in the 1926 General Strike, and in the conditions of South Africa they were a disastrous absurdity. How could the ICU build a trade union of disciplined, duespaying members, tackling disputes through conciliation and arbitration, when it was based upon an impoverished and often migrant workforce, deprived of all legal rights, subject to the most bloody repression, and met with nothing but implacable hostility from the highly skilled and organised sections of the working class?

Kadalie, at the direction of his social democratic masters, expelled the communists from the ICU in 1926 and then, helped by an adviser dispatched by the British TUC, William Ballinger, proceeded to run the organisation into the ground and shatter it into fragments.

The Communist Party at this time was in no position to offer a clear alternative lead. While it had drawn certain lessons from the debacle of the Rand miners’ strike and the Labour-Nationalist (Pact) Government, it continued to keep its feet in both camps. One wing of the party had turned seriously to organisation of black workers, and undoubtedly played an important role both in educating hundreds of black militants in revolutionary ideas and in organising thousands more, through the ICU and other trade union bodies. But another wing of the party continued to hold illusions in the revolutionary role of the white working class, and compromised the programme of the CP in order to retain a foothold among the white workers.

Leading Communist Party members sat on the executives of unions and of the South African TUC, which operated colour bar employment policies. When the ICU applied for affiliation to the TUC most CP delegates voted against it. Inevitably this had its effect on the ability of the CP to uphold a principled defence of the rights of the black masses: while the CP did struggle against such repressive measures as the pass laws, it was not until the end of the 1920s that it took up the demand of equal voting rights for the black population.

It was only with the intervention of the Comintern in 1929 that the South African CP was forced to break with its chauvinist and opportunist adaptation to the white labour movement, and adopt the slogan of the ‘native republic’ — in other words, for a South Africa ruled by its black majority. On this basis the Communist Party was able to take some important steps forward in organising black political resistance to the rising tide of Nationalist oppression. A ‘League of African Rights’ was set up, and seemed to be on the way to reviving the spirit of militant, mass resistance when international developments caught up with it. The Stalinist faction was consolidating its position in the Comintern and turning the affiliated parties on the uniformly disastrous ultra-left course of the so-called ‘Third Period’. In South Africa this entailed dissolution of the League of African Rights just as it was beginning to develop a mass character, and the destruction of the last hope at that time for a revolutionary leadership for the African masses.

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representing the Afrikaner farmers and emerging capitalists — fused to form the United Party. This pact was signed in the blood of the black masses — for the first plans of the new Government were a further onslaught on the rights of the African population: particularly the Cape Africans, who benefitted from a restricted property franchise which gave a tiny elite the vote.

In response to this threat a call went out for a congress of all African organisations, which met in December 1935. This All-African Convention of over 500 delegates was an important event in the political lives of the black masses. But, coming as it did out of a period of protracted defeat, it remained dominated by the educated elite who for so long had kept the ANC in the blind alley of petitioning and compromise. The potential of the tremendous unity displayed in the AAC was cast away for yet another ‘compromise’ engineered by the white liberals: the Cape Africans lost their right to vote along with white electors, but in ‘exchange’ received the right to vote separately for three white MPs to represent their interests. At the same time a phony Native Representation Council (NRC) with a purely ‘advisory’ status was to be set up.

The ‘leaders’ of the AAC swallowed all this without a murmur, and even went on to decide to participate in the phony elections for white ‘native representatives’ and to the NRC —a move which was supported by the South African CP, which had now swung full tilt from ultra-leftism to opportunism, in line with the Comintern’s inauguration of the ‘Popular Front’ period.

The ignominious failure of the AAC to mobilise against the new racist laws spelt a further downturn in the black resistance movement. But social trends were working in the opposite direction. The almost continuous boom in the South African economy from the mid-1930s onwards multiplied the size and strength of the black working class, and along with it the social discontent of these newly urbanised masses. At the same time the hypocrisy of South Africa’s war effort — demanding commitments from the blacks for a fight that claimed to be directed against some of the very principles on which the South African state was erected — stimulated black political consciousness.

The war years saw a virtual rebuilding of black resistance from the grass roots up.

Spontaneous mass movements broke out over inadequate housing and transport facilities for black workers. A group of black and Coloured militants, including some influenced by the ideas of Trotskyism, who had fought to preserve the unitary tradition of the All-African Convention and to fuse it with a spirit of militant non-collaboration with the institutions of white domination, established the Non-European Unity Movement (later the Unity Movement of South Africa) in 1943. Basing themselves on a ten-point programme for democratic rights, they launched a fight to unite the broadest layers of the South African oppressed to challenge the foundations of white racist domination.

In the same year a militant Youth League of the ANC came into being, drawn from a new generation of urban militants, and with a programme of Struggle and black self-reliance in many ways similar to that of the Unity Movement. In 1949 the ANC Youth League captured the leadership of the ANC, and launched a sustained campaign of mass civil disobedience and strikes. The Government responded with repression; banning public gatherings, attacking and shooting demonstrators, and arresting their leaders. The notorious Suppression of Communism Act, giving the Government sweeping new repressive powers which it continues to use heavily to this Page 35

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day, was enacted in July 1950. The Communist Party, deeply imbued with legalist and gradualist ideas in the war and post-war years, responded by .... dissolving itself before it could be outlawed.

There is no doubt that the repressive attacks of the regime were a major block to the black struggle, and the movement suffered serious reverses. But the tide of militancy was deeply rooted in the social conditions of the black masses, and the struggle against racism and colonialism was opening up on a world scale. Great prospects for developing a revolutionary fight for the liberation of South Africa existed.

There were many obstacles to this development — not least the youth and relative inexperience of the new generation of ANC leaders. But this might well have corrected itself in the course of the struggle had it not been for the policy of the South African CP, which was re-formed underground in 1953. The SACP continued to hold to a ‘pressure’ notion of mass struggle, in which the mobilisation of the masses was seen not as a means of self-liberation but simply as a device for extracting concessions from the oppressor. Thus the SACP, at the same time as it was supporting an ANC campaign that included boycott of elections of ‘native’ MPs and to the Native Representative Council, could prepare candidates to stand in these very elections.

Operating in alliance with white liberals in the ‘Congress of Democrats’ (an all-white anti-racist organisation), the SACP sought to ‘tame’ the young radicals of the Youth League by drawing the ANC into an alliance with the Indian, Coloured and white ‘Democrats’ organisations, and the South African Congress of Trade Unions, where more moderate elements predominated. This was consummated in the Congress of the People, which met in 1956, the Freedom Charter which it adopted (and which still guides the CP-dominated wing of the liberation movement today), and the ‘Congress Alliance’ it set up.

While the Freedom Charter contains an essentially correct programme of democratic demands, its opening words spell out the reformist perspective in which the SACP and their white liberal allies sought to trap the liberation struggle: ‘We the people of South Africa declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people ....’ It is noteworthy that the Freedom Charter refers throughout to ‘all the people’ — never ‘the majority’. This can have only one meaning: a desire to reassure the dominant white majority that their interests and privileges will not be disregarded in a ‘democratic’ South Africa. Moreover, in the context of South African racial domination, such emphasis on considering the ‘rights’ of the oppressors and the need for ‘brotherhood’ with them can only have the effect of weakening efforts to ensure the broadest unity and self-organisation of the most oppressed layers of the masses, the Africans, without which no effective liberation struggle can take place.

This was reflected inside the ‘Congress Alliance’, where each of the organisations had equal weight, overshadowing the one really mass organisation which spoke on behalf of the vast majority of oppressed South Africans, the ANC. It is no coincidence that the Freedom Charter was adopted by the Alliance before its constituent groups discussed it. For within the ANC there was great opposition to this document and the strategy it embodied, led by one wing of the original Youth League leadership. This tendency resisted so vigorously that the ANC did not itself Page 36

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adopt the Freedom Charter for over a year, and even then did so at the price of deeply dividing the organisation from top to bottom. Two years later, in 1959, this division blossomed into a full-blown split, with those who claimed to champion the original spirit of the Youth League walking out to form the Pan-African Congress (PAC).

The PAC correctly criticised the subordination of the African masses to reformist ideals and white liberal interests in the Congress Alliance, and had a much sounder emphasis on black self-reliance in the liberation struggle and the establishment of links with the developing anti-colonial struggle elsewhere on the African continent. But the PAC coupled this with vague and often outright reactionary and anticommunist political ideas; as a result, they failed to develop a clear alternative political strategy to that of the Congress Alliance.

In March 1960 the PAC called for a mass defiance of the pass laws: a militant campaign which the South African state met with the brutal Sharpeville massacre, in which 67 African demonstrators were killed in cold blood. This violent action aroused immense indignation, both internationally and among the South African masses, and coincided with an outbreak of massive unrest among the rural population inthe Pondoland area of the Transkei. The white regime declared a state of emergency, banned the ANC and PAC, and started mass round-ups.

All this caught the liberation organisations totally unaware. Accordingly they were unable to seize this opportunity to strengthen the consciousness and selforganisation of the masses. Instead all the liberation movements — the ANC, the PAC, and the Unity Movement — turned to an ultra-left, and in the event disastrous, course of armed struggle, for which neither they nor the masses were prepared. Certainly the SACP’s decade-long campaign of alliance with white liberalism and participation in the racist political structures laid no basis for such a sudden turn.

Over the next three years there were a number of armed actions and sabotage operations carried out by the military wings of the ANC (Umkhonto We Sizwe — Spear of the Nation) and the PAC (Pogo — We Stand Alone). But the white state had little difficulty in repelling them and tracking down their inspirers. By the middle of the ’60s the liberation organisations were being uprooted from South African soil, driven into exile, and a long night of repression was settling over the oppressed masses once again.

Today the dawn of mass resistance is once again breaking in South Africa. The development of the South African economy has further strengthened the power of the black working class, created deep new grievances, and a dynamic urbanised youth among whom ‘national’ or racial divisions no longer have such great weight.

1973 saw the development of extensive strikes in Natal. Between January and March there were 160 strikes, affecting over 140 establishments, and involving over 60,000 African workers. The events in Angola reinforced an already rising militancy amongst the black youth, and this fantastic development in self-confidence culiminated in the Soweto students’ protest against the compulsory use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools in June 1976. Student organisations, namely the South African Students Organisation (SASO) and the South African Student Movement, played a key role in organising the various protests and strikes that developed throughout the summer. Coupled with the Black People’s Convention (BPC), a militant movement of the adults in the townships, SASO is the focus of the Page 37

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Black Consciousness Movement — a movement of angry young blacks, hostile to the bantustan leaders such as Buthelezi and fed up with the inaction of the traditional organisations such as the ANC, But although the ANC/CP had little to do with the events in Soweto, it is wrong to write them off; they played a not inconsiderable role in the later events in Cape Town.

These new struggles have already given birth to new methods of struggle, new forms of organisation, and new leadership. Unburdened by the defeats and errors of the past, these young militants can move rapidly towards forging a revolutionary leadership for the South African masses. But it is crucial that they study and learn the lessons of their history, lest they fall prey to those whose current policies simply spella repetition of the errors of the past.

B. Zimbabwe In Zimbabwe the formation of the Rhodesian Industrial and Commercial Workers Union in 1927 was the most important early event in the history of the Zimbabwe liberation movement. Prior to this the African organisations were primarily elite organisations concerned with obtaining more rights for these elites.

The RICU never attained the dizzy heights of its South African counterpart, for the working class was weaker and more recent than in South Africa and, with a high level of black unemployment, strikes were relatively easily broken. The collapse of the ICU in South Africa, the inability of the union to gain a firm financial basis, and the arrest of its militants led to the disappearance of the RICU in the mid-1930s. But in appealing to the class instincts of the urban workers, the RICU had introduced an important new element inio Rhodesian politics. However it ignored the fact that the workers had left part of themselves in the rural areas and were therefore to some extent always looking back over their shoulders, and so it missed a vital part of their existence. In 1934 the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress was formed — but at this time it was very much anelitist organisation, not the vehicle of mass nationalist protest it was later tobe.

From the’30s onwards, the rapid growth of the African workforce and the continual decline in African living standards led to the growth of African political activity. The new militancy was reflected especially in the urban industries. In 1944 the Rhodesian Railway African Employees Association was formed in Bulawayo. In October 1945 the African railway workers in Bulawayo went on strike, and this action soon spread to other railway centres in Rhodesia. It lasted two weeks before the strikes were ended, in return for government promises of acommission to investigate grievances.

In 1948 what has been termed the first general strike broke out, with Bulawayo once again the centre. This time the strike broke out amongst municipal employees, but it rapidly spread to other sections of the labour force, and indeed throughout the mining and industrial centres of Southern Rhodesia. The militancy of the strike shocked the settlers; but in response they prepared reforms rather than indulging in a policy of repression.

This growing militancy was reflected in the radicalisation of the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress. Although it was unable to control or direct the 1948 strike, Page 38

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it did play a supportive role. The old RICU was reborn under the new name of the Reformed Industrial and Commercial Workers Union in 1946. The revived RICU, the ANC, and later the City Youth League were the vanguard of the African nationalist movement. The City Youth League was formed in Salisbury in 1955, and provided a serious challenge to the African elites. In 1956 it organised a successful three day bus boycott asa protest against fare increases. All this culminated in September 1957 in the formation of a new national ANC, the product of efforts by the Salisbury Youth League and the revived Bulawayo branch of the old ANC. The first president was a former general secretary of the RRAEBA, one Joshua Nkomo.

The new ANC gained popularity quickly, extending its influence to the rural areas through its opposition to the Native Land Husbandry Act. In 1958 nationalist activity grew rapidly, not only in Southern Rhodesia but also in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. In Southern Rhodesia a state of emergency was declared, the ANC banned, and 500 of its members arrested. After the banning Nkomo, who at the time was the undisputed nationalist leader in the eyes of the masses, stayed abroad until November 1960, when he returned to lead the newly formed National Democratic Party. The NDP was in turn banned in December 1962, and the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) formed to replace it. It in turn was banned eight months later, but decided to operate underground.

In July 1963 a split took place in ZAPU with a dissident group leaving to form the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). The exact causes of the split are unclear, but relate to the fact that Nkomo had spent a lot of time abroad even after his return in 1960. As a supporter of ZANU has explained, ‘Nkomo wanted to circumvent the situation at home and organise effective international support in hopes of bringing effective pressure to bear; Sitholeand Mugabe (leaders of ZANU) saw as the great need more organisation at home to crystallise the situation there.’ However, it should be borne in mind that organisation in Rhodesia was very difficult: the white regime maintained extensive repression; over half the Rhodesian labour force was drawn from outside the territory, which meant that many of these workers did not easily identify with the cause of Southern Rhodesian nationalism; unemployment was rife, and in consequencestrikeaction difficult; and the poverty of the Africans made it very hard to get a financial base. The split between the two movements, and the ensuing violence between them, left the nationalist movements impotent in the face of the Rhodesian Front’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965.

The first response to UDI came in 1966, when the ZANU Liberation Army engaged Rhodesian troopsat Sinoia. Since that datearmed struggle has been stepped up by both ZANU and ZAPU. In 1971, when proposals fora settlement were drawn up between the Tory Government and the Smith regime, a Commission under Lord Pearce was dispatched to Rhodesia to ‘test black opinion’. This created for the first time in years the political climate for open — if limited — agitation among the black population inside the country by the nationalists, and they were able to mobilise sufficiently strong demonstrations of black opposition to make it impossible for the British Government tocontinue with the settlement.

The fusion of this rising political activity among the black population with the strengthening of the armed struggle gave the liberation struggle a renewed impetus. But rather than contributing to the unity of the movement, these developments created yet further fragmentation when the organisation formed to lobby against the settlement proposals — the African National Congress — was converted into a third nationalist Page 39

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movement, associated with the figure of Bishop Abel Muzorewa.

Despite various pressures from the Organisation of African Unity and the ‘front line’

States, the movements remained divided, with few obvious political differences between them. Efforts to create a unified military command have collapsed, and the attempt to form a common front for diplomatic purposes at the Geneva Conference resulted in only the limited success of the ‘Patriotic Front’, which failed to include important forces suchas the ANC, although the latter clearly has a strong organisation and mass base inside the country.

Today all the main nationalist groups declare their commitment to the armed struggle. Yet at the same time the nationalist leaders continue to place their hopes in some sort of intervention by British or American imperialism (even after the debacle of the ‘Kissinger mission’ and the Geneva Conference); this suggests that, for these leaders at least, armed struggle is seen not as a serious mobilisation of the Zimbabwean people for their own liberation but simply as a means of applying pressure on imperialism and the racists to create favourable conditions for a negotiated settlement. However the nature of imperialism and the white settler regime is rapidly undermining the credibility of such a strategy, and wider layers of the Zimbabwean people and the nationalist movements are being convinced of the need for revolutionary solutions.

C. Namibia The history of the liberation movement in Namibia is even briefer. The first democratic political group to be formed was the Ovamboland People’s Congress in 1958, founded by migrant workers who had worked in South Africa. This became the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) in April 1960, following the ; shooting of 11 Africans at Windhoek.

Since 1960 SWAPO has recognised two important points. First, it has acted on the understanding that a liberation organisation has to win a base within the working class even in colonial countries. Efforts were made early on to establish branches in the industrial areas of Windhoek, Otjiwarongo, Tsumeb, Walvis Bay and Oranjemund, and these have borne fruit in SWAPO’s ability to organise mass strike action on several occasions. Second, the organisation has long been committed to armed struggle against the South African repression. Since the first armed actions in 1966, this aspect of the conflict has escalated to the point where more than 45,000 South African troops are now needed to enforce the rule of the Vorster regime.

Despite these achievements, however, important weaknesses still have to be overcome. SWAPO retains serious illusions in both the United Nations (it calls for elections under UN supervision) and the Organisation of African Unity, which it sees as an organisation ‘for the total emancipation of the African continent’ rather than the alliance of neo-colonial regimes it is in reality. Above all, what is missing from SWAPO’s programme is any attempt to spell out the socialist tasks of the Namibian revolution—such as nationalisation of foreign interests under workers control, collectivisation of the land, etc.—and the fact that the democratic tasks it does outline can only be achieved through this process, integrated into the perspective of a socialist southern Africa.

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7A Programme for Struggle Astrategy for liberation must deal with the political problems of the southern African regionasa whole. As our analysis above demonstrates, theregionis closely integrated in terms of its history, the character of the regimes that have grown up there, and its present economic structure and inter-relationship with the imperialist system.

Expressed more concretely, any strategy which fails to confront the problem of the South African state is fatally inadequate. For South Africa stands astride the whole region, dominating it politically, economically and militarily. It is a phenomenally strong bourgeois state, based ona highly cohesive social bloc: the white South Africans. Thus it is insufficient to discuss the problems of defeating imperialism or white racism in onecorner of southern Africa.

Even where this has proved possible, as in Mozambique, the new regime remains at the mercy of the powerful South African economic and military machine. But in the case of Zimbabwe it is unlikely that things could get even this far. The apartheid state has demonstrated its capacity and determination to intervene wherever it feels its interests are threatened in the region. There can be no doubt that it would do so in Rhodesia — either to reinforce the unfettered racism of the Smith regime or, at a later date if events were to go against it, to impose a neo-colonial solution in alliance with imperialism (a possibility it has already flirted with around the Kissinger mission and the Genevaconference).

This is not to deny the specific problems of the different sectors of the southern African revolution and the need to work out a concrete analysis and programme of action for each of them. It is simply to argue that each of these specific situations must be seen in relation to the whole, and that a revolutionary strategy must therefore start from the inter-relationship and the need to coordinate the various areas of struggle.

Wecan begin by looking at the situation of South Africa. The first thing to get clear here is the completely wrong notion of the CP and ANC that apartheid is some kind of evil ‘secondary growth’ on the body of South African capitalism. This view is used to justify their characterisation of the present stage of the South African revolution as ‘national and democratic’, and conveniently leaves open the possibility of a future alliance witha ‘progressive’ sector of white capital, which the SACP hopes will emerge under the pressure of the mass struggle (a hope they hardly dare hint at at present because of the palpably monolithic, reactionary character of all sectors of capital).

The reality is otherwise. South Africa must be understood as thoroughly dominated by the capitalist mode of production and subject to its laws. The specific form that capitalism assumes in South Africa is based upon the system of reproducing cheap (African) labour power known as apartheid. The struggle against the apartheid system will therefore come up immediately against the whole foundations of South African capitalism. The revolution which is on the order of the day in South Africa is the socialist revolution: although, particularly inthe early days of the struggle, it will be the demands of the oppressed against racism and for democratic rights which will serve as the focus of the broadest mass mobilisation, as the events of last summer demonstrated.

In contrast to the days when the Comintern outlined its views on the South African Page 41

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situation, the dominant social force in the South African revolution is not the African peasantry but the black working class. It isnot the agrarian question whichis at the heart of the South African revolution (although it may still play a significant role among sections of the bantustan population), but the struggles of the proletariat, particularly the younger, permanently urbanised layer.

The fight for the unity of all black workers — irrespective of ‘tribal’, ‘national’ or ‘racial’ origin — is of central importance. From this flows the importance and progressive character of the ‘Black Consciousness Movement’, which affirms the common identity of all South Africans not of European origin. And on the basis of this unity we will see born new organisations and forms of struggle which will play the leading rolein the South African revolution.

It is within this layer of the population, and around the fight for the unity and independence of their organisations, that the work of revolution must be centred. The right of the oppressed to defend themselves and fight for their liberation must be intransigently defended; and undoubtedly various forms of ‘armed struggle’ — both mass self-defence and the beginnings of a military challenge to the racist state machine — will have to be developed. But armed struggle must be seen as growing out of the social and political struggles of the masses, in constant association with them, and not, asinthe past, a substitute for them which only serves to draw the most militant fighters away from thecrucial centres of struggle.

The social structure of Zimbabwe, as we have shown, is more complex. Whereas an important African proletariat has been brought into existence, and large sections of the peasantry proletarianised by the development of capitalist agriculture, the agrarian question and the rural population still occupy a central place. The demand for national

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liberation of the Zimbabwean people is the living centre of the mass struggle. As a consequence the strategy of guerilla warfare and the creation of a popular liberation army to wage it are both viable, although they need to be combined with constant political mobilisation of the masses, particularly the oppressed urban population.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to see the Zimbabwe struggle as one that is only ‘national’ in content. It will only be the exploited masses of Zimbabwe — the urban workers and small traders, the rural labourers and peasants — who will wage the fight for national liberation. And their social needs cannot be served by a Zimbabwe that remains locked into theimperialist world system: industry would remain dominated by imperialist capital, either directly or through the effects of the world market; while the rural sector would suffer from competition from capital intensive farming, shortage of credit, and high prices of manufactured goods. The only way a small country can free itself from the stranglehold of imperialist domination is by breaking out of the world capitalist system —as the case of Cuba, for example, soclearly demonstrates.

In that sense we must see the popular revolution for national liberation in Zimbabwe rapidly and continuously ‘growing over’, under the leadership of the working class, from the tasks connected with the destruction of white racism and the establishment of the political rights of the black majority to the social tasks of the socialist revolution.

This is not to say that it will be possible immediately to create socialism in Zimbabwe, but rather that a victorious revolution there could begin some of the important tasks of socialist construction, which could be rapidly reinforced once the revolution had spread to South Africa, placing the latter’s immense wealth and productive resources at thedisposal of the African people.

These programmatic questions need to be debated out within the Zimbabwe liberation movements, and elaboration of a correct political line will be essential for victory. But at the present time the disunity of the liberation groups, which do not reflect clear political differences, is a barrier both to the development of the struggle and to political clarity. What is needed is a serious attempt to unify all the forces in struggle against imperialism: not an abstract ‘unity for unity’s sake’, as the front-line states have proposed, but a fighting unity around a clear programme of demands and action necessary to win the liberation struggle. Evenif clear political differences were to separate the liberation groups (as they do in South Africa, for example) a united front in action would still be necessary.

Zimbabwe is today the key to the situation in southern Africa. The defeat of imperialism and racism there would act as an immense spur to the militancy of the masses in South Africa itself, and decisively turn the tide against the apartheid state. It would place on its very borders an insurgent people who have succeeded in cutting one tentacle of the apartheid octopus, and would rapidly understand the need to strike a blow atits heart.

But the South African ruling class realise this quite well. For that reason they will intervene in whatever fashion necessary to block the Zimbabwean liberation struggle.

The only thing that will prevent them from doing so will be the international opposition of anti-imperialist forces — particularly throughout Africa — and the rising tide of struggle in South Africaitself.

This defines the crucial tasks facing revolutionaries in Africa: to bring into contact and coordinate as closely as possible the struggles in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and to develop the solidarity of the African people with the struggle against racism into a Page 43

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powerful movement that will sweep aside any politicians or ‘statesmen’ who are not prepared to put the entire weight of the African masses behind the struggles in Zimbabwe and South Africa. These tasks must be carried out at various levels and various forms, but a crucial part must be to work for the creation of groups of revolutionary Marxists, and eventually revolutionary parties, throughout Africa, whose revolutionary programme and commitment to an internationalist strategy is concretised by adherence to the Fourth International.

Only inthis way can the hands of the South African state be tied in order to allow the Zimbabwean peopleto finish off Smith and his cohorts and win their freedom. Only in this way can the victory of the Zimbabwean people be converted into the first blow for the liberation of the people of South Africa, and a step towards the southern African socialist revolution, heralding the real liberation of theentire continent.

The political repercussions of a successful socialist revolution in South Africa would be enormous. Not only would such a revolution free the black masses from their present slave-like degradation and oppression. It would also have a tremendous inspirational effect on the masses in the neo-colonial African countries, spurring forward the struggle for real national liberation through the overthrow of capitalism. A successful revolution in South Africa would also provide a powerful example to the peoples of other semi-colonial countries, in Asia and Latin America.

Occurring in a relatively advanced industrial country, a successful socialist revolution in South Africa could open the road to socialist planning on a sub-continental or Page 44

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even Pan-African level, and to rapid development of today’s most backward African neo-colonial countries.

Moreover, with over 1,000 imperialist firms having investments in South Africa today (and over 10 per cent of British imperialism’s global foreign investments there), the impact of a successful socialist revolution in South Africa on the imperialist countries would be profound. Such a revolution would constitute a massive defeat for world imperialism, and above all for the British ruling class. It would shift the world balance of class forces sharply in favour of the world proletariat and its oppressed allies.

SOLIDARITY The black masses of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia are today in the front line of the international class struggle. They need the solidarity of workers throughout the world, above all in the imperialist countries. Effective solidarity means the building of movements that are broad and powerful enough to stop the imperialist regimes from arming the South African racists or intervening in southern Africa to defend their vast interests.

In Britain major stress must be laid on the demand that the pro-imperialist Labour leaders honour the Labour Party’s own conference decisions (most recently, Composite Resolution 44, passed almost unanimously by the September 1976 party conference) and halt all military, political and economic collaboration with South Africa. This should go hand in hand with the development of a mass campaign among trade unionists in solidarity with South African workers.

So far, however, the trade union leaders — for all their ‘left’? words — have merely shown how not to do this. A prime example was the ‘week of action’ against apartheid proclaimed by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) for the beginning of this year, which produced only token industrial action in a handful of places.

One might not have expected too much from an imperialist-sponsored body of trade union cold warriers like the ICFTU, but every trade union militant in this country should be disturbed by the fact that it was the behaviour of the British trade union leaders which was in large measure responsible for this display of weakness.

After all, what trade union movement had greater responsibility in this than that of Britain, the major trading partner and imperialist investor in South Africa?

And how did they respond? Jack Jones, leader of the Transport and General Workers Union, was reputed to have been the most insistent opponent at ICFTU meetings of a militant campaign of strike action and total boycott of the racist state.

He then totally confused his own members by calling on them merely to ‘harass and impede’ South African trade — a directive which he refused to explain further. Since no-one could understand it, no-one implemented it. As for the leaders of the country’s second most powerful union, the. Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, they showed their internationalist concern for the murder and imprisonment of fellow workers by not even issuing a statement of support until the week of action had already begun. The only union which planned any serious moves at all —the Union of Post Office Workers — promptly cancelled their plans when faced with a court injunction obtained by a group of right-wing Tory fanatics. Clearly, if Page 45

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the South African workers had ‘leaders’ like these the racists and imperialists could sleep quietly in their beds — knowing that they only need get an injunction against the revolution!

What is needed is a mass campaign of trade unionists in solidarity with the struggle against apartheid, prepared to fight throughout the movement to educate it about the conditions in South Africa, to win actions such as sympathy strikes and boycotts, to take up the issue of the recognition of black unions by multinational firms operating in both Britain and South Africa, and to take up the cases of imprisoned and maltreated black trade unionists.

‘SHER By | zy o F Stok

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Already workers in some plants have taken a stand. * Members of the Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Staffs (TASS) section of the AUEW at the Huddersfield firm of Hopkinsons Ltd. have waged a vigorous fight in defence of office representative Granville Clay, sacked during a wages dispute for passing on documents which showed that the firm had been trading illegally with Rhodesia for years. * A special mass meeting of workers threatened with redundancy at Hawker Siddeley, Brough, overwhelmingly rejected a suggestion by right-wing Tory MP Patrick Wall that they should fight for their jobs by demanding that the Government allow the sale of Buccaneer jets to South Africa. * All contracts and work for South Africa have been blacked by members of TASS and the Engineering Section of the AUEW at the Henley Forklift Company.

The example of Vietnam shows what a mass-based international solidarity movement can achieve. For, though the heroic Vietnamese masses played the major role in defeating the US onslaught against their country, the international anti-war movement also helped to achieve this great victory. By mobilising millions of people both in the United States and throughout the world against the American aggression, the Vietnam solidarity movement succeeded politically in narrowing the US imperialists’ room for manoeuvre and limiting their capacity for continued escalation of their involvement in the war.

Like the Vietnam solidarity movement, the movement now needed to support the black masses in southern Africa must be based on the principle of self-determination — that is, the right of the oppressed majorities in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia to determine their own futures without any conditions imposed from outside. Adherence to this principle means that the solidarity movement must not only oppose collaboration with the racist Pretoria regime but also reject any attempt by British imperialism to play a role in an interim government along the lines of the US-British scenario for a transition period from settler rule to neo-colonialism in Zimbabwe. The right of the Zimbabwean people to self-determination means the right to immediate, unconditional African majority rule — without a transition : period, an interim government or British involvement.

The solidarity movement should not be tied to political support for particular nationalist factions in southern Africa. This would divert the movement from its real goal of tying the hands of the imperialist governments, as well as unnecessarily limiting the base of support to be tapped by the movement. At the same time, it would cut across the principle of self-determination by placing conditions on support for the struggles of the black masses in southern Africa.

Based on the principle of self-determination, the solidarity movement must focus its fire against the imperialist governments. In Britain, such a movement must seek to mobilise the broadest possible forces in action against the Labour Government’s involvement in southern Africa, attempting through the method of united front-type coalitions to draw into action wide sectors of the labour and trade union movements, the student movement, blacks, immigrants and other potential supporters of the liberation struggle in southern Africa. If that is done, we can help to seal the fate of the white racist states without further delay.

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Further Reading Thelack of serious analyses of southern Africa means that we have included in this list both works which are out of print andsome written froman academic point of view. We do this in the interests of those who may wish to embark onamoreserious study of the issues raised in this pamphlet. The general reader wishing to follow up our discussion should refer to those works marked with an asterisk, which they should find readily accessible. 1. SOUTHERNAFRICA — GENERAL *Davidson, Slovo and Wilkinson: Southern Africa—The New Politics of Revolution (Penguin, 1976). 2. SOUTH AFRICA (a) General: P. Vanden Berghe: South Africa: A Study in Conflict (University of California Press, 1967). M. Wilsonand L.M. Thompson: History of South Africa, 2 vols (Oxford University Press, 1971). Study Project on External Investment in South Africa and Namibia, Papers, Vol. 1: The Political and Economic Military Setting(African Trust Publications, 1975). *F. Troup: South Africa: An Historical Introduction (Penguin, 1975). *1.B. Tabata: /mperialist Conspiracy in Southern Africa(Spokesman Books, 1975). H. Wolpe: ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid’, Economy and Society, Vol. 1, No. 4(November 1972), M. Williams: ‘An Analysis of South African Capitalism—Neo-Ricardianism or Marxism?’, Conference of Socialist Economists Bulletin, Vol.6, No. 1 (February 1975). D. Good and M. Williams: South Africa: The Crisis in Britain and the Apartheid Economy (Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1976). M. Legassick and D, Hemson: Foreign Investment and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism in South Africa(Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1976). (b) The Economy and Imperialist Connections: Study Project on External Investment in South Africa and Namibia, Papers, Vol. 2: The Economic Factor; Vol. 5: The Policy Debate. *R. First, C. Gurney and J. Steele: The South African Connection (Penguin, 1972). *J. Atkinson: How the Labour Government Supports Apartheid (Red Weekly pamphlet, 1976). (c) The Working Class: *A. Hepple: Workers Under Apartheid (International Defenceand Aid, 1969). Study Project on External Investment in South Africa and Namibia, Papers, Vol. 4: The Conditions of the Black Worker. R. Davies: ‘The White Working Class in South Africa’, NLR 82 (November-December 1973). S. Mhlongo: ‘Black Workers’ Strikes in South Africa’, NLR 83 (January-February 1974). (d) The Bantustans: *Barbara Rogers: Divide and Rule: South Africa's Bantustans (International Defence and Aid, 1976). (e) The Resistance Movements: *M. Benson: The Struggle fora Birthright(Penguin, 1966). H.J. and R.E. Simons: Classand Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950(Penguin, 1969). *E. Roux: Time Longer than Rope(University of Wisconsin, 1972). 1.B. Tabata: The A wakening of a People(Spokesman Books, 1974). *Counter-Information Services: Black South Africa Explodes(1977). 3. RHODESIA/ZIMBABWE *M. Loney: Rhodesia: White Racism and Imperial Response (Penguin, 1975). *J.Sprack: Rhodesia: South Africa’s Sixth Province(International Defenceand Aid, 1974). G. Arrighi: ‘Labour Supplies in Historical Perspective’ and ‘The Political Economy of Rhodesia’, bothin Arrighiand Saul, Essays on the Political Economy of Africa(Monthly Review Press, 1973) 4. NAMIBIA *Study Project on External Investment in South Africa and Namibia: The Role of Foreign Firmsin Namibia(African Trust Publications, 1974). For a regular up to date analysis of developments throughout the African continent, we refer readers to Africa in Struggle (also in French), /nprecor, and Intercontinental Press, which are publications of the Fourth International. These, and the books listed above which are still in print, can be ordered from: Red Books, 182 Pentonville Road, LondonN.1.

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