ANC Meeting with the Inyandza Movement of KaNgwane Bantustan

ANC Meeting with the Inyandza Movement of KaNgwane Bantustan

On 4 March 1986, delegations of the Inyandza National Movement and the African National Congress (ANC) issued a Communique following a meeting in Lusaka from the 1st to the 3rd of March, 1986. The delegations, composed of 21 persons each, were led by their respective Presidents, Enos Mabuza and Oliver Tambo.

Following the meeting, on 4 March 1986, Enoch Mabuza, the Chief Minister of KaNgwane and leader of the Inyandza delegation, told a press conference that Inyandza was urging other Bantustan leaders to “be on the side of the ANC”. President Tambo of the ANC said that it was first time the ANC had met a “high powered” delegation from one of the bantustans.

The meeting took place at the request of Inyandza reflecting their conviction that the fundamental problem that was facing South Africa at the time, the question of political power, could not be resolved without the participation of the ANC, which was recognised by the majority of the people of South Africa as their leader and genuine representative.

The ANC welcomed the decision of Inyandza and saw it as a very important step towards the further consolidation of the unity of the people and the democratic movement of the country, of which Inyandza was an integral part.

After extensive discussions on the current internal and international situation, characterised by a warm spirit of comradeship, the two delegations agreed on a number of important issues. They agreed that the solution of the problems that were facing the country lay in the institution of a system of majority rule in a united, democratic and non-racial South Africa. Accordingly, they were united in their opposition to the entire system of ‘separate development’ as represented by such institutions as the tricameral parliament, the bantustans , the community councils, the Regional Services Councils, the proposed National Statutory Council and so on.

The delegation of Inyandza explained that the principal task facing their movement was the organisation of the people to be part of the forces fighting for a democratic South Africa. To achieve this task, Inyandza was committed to non-violent means of struggle. The ANC expressed its full understanding and support for these positions.

The delegation of the ANC also reported to the meeting its policy, its strategy and tactics. The ANC emphasised the need for the greatest possible mobilisation of all the people of the country to join in united political action against the apartheid regime. Equally, and in combination with the mass political struggle, the ANC also stressed the importance of the armed struggle to defend the people against the enemy armed forces and to give the people the possibility to seize power from a White minority regime which was holding on to power by the use of force.

Inyandza expressed its understanding of the reasons which forced the ANC to resort to armed struggle and explained that as a result of the meeting it had gained a better understanding of the strategy of the ANC as a whole.

The two delegations agreed that each organisation would continue to act in its own way, in accordance with its own decisions, independently arrived at, in pursuit of the common objective of the birth of a genuinely democratic South Africa. In this regard, the two sides agreed about the need for regular consultations between the two organisations in the interests of the speediest transformation of South Africa into a democratic country.

The two delegations agreed that it was important that other political organisations working within the Pretoria-created institutions should, in the interests of all the people of the country, actively involve themselves in the struggle for the genuine liberation of the country. In this regard, the two delegations agreed that it is important that these organisations should work in co-operation and not in competition with the rest of the democratic movement of South Africa.

Of central importance, the two delegations agreed, was that the campaign for the immediate and unconditional release of Nelson Mandela and all other political prisoners should develop with even greater intensity. They agreed that both their organisations would do their utmost in pursuit of this goal.

The two delegations further agreed that the obstacle to a negotiated resolution of the South African problem was the Botha regime. They concluded that no negotiations were possible while the leaders of the people were in prison and while the Pretoria regime refused to accept that the country should be governed by all its people, both Black and White, as equals, brothers and sisters. The delegations of Inyandza and the ANC expressed great confidence that the victory of the people over the system of White minority rule was not far off. They also agreed that both organisations would spare nothing in the struggle to realise this objective.

Following this communique, member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the ANC, Mac Maharaj, explained that the importance of the meeting with the Inyandza National Movement was part of the exercise of the ANC to unite the people in action and in struggle. According to Maharaj, the enemy had created the Bantustan system as far back as 1954 in order to divide the people and to fragment the country. And by demarcating the people as belonging to the bantustans, it sought to exploit the pride in the African heritage to a point where “we would agree to treat our people in the bantustans as some other people, belonging to some other country. It was part of the process of dismembering us, dividing us.”

For Maharaj, they had always considered it imperative to organise in the countryside and had never abandoned the goal of activating those areas. To a certain extent at the tactical level, the enemy in a limited way had succeeded with regards to the bantustans. But the people in the bantustans were part of the people, part of the South African nation. During its short existence, the Inyandza National Movement had created a record of struggle; of refusal to accept bantustan ‘independence’. It was a record of determination to see themselves as South Africans first and foremost, and not in terms of the ethnicity that the regime had required of them.

Furthermore, Maharaj believed that the decision of the Inyandza National Movement leadership to see the ANC was of special significance. It was not just some group sitting at the top having taken the decision to meet the ANC. It was a decision taken at their congress in 1985, which was attended by 8 000 delegates who in their turn represented tens of thousands of people who lived in KaNgwane. And they came to see the ANC because they wanted to discuss the way forward from the existing political constitutional crisis that was facing the country.

The communique issued after the meeting indicated a great deal of common understanding between the ANC and Inyandza despite the fact that it operated within the framework of the bantustan system and therefore existed only at the legal level.

With reference to the previous meetings held with the Progressive Federal Party (PFP) and white business, the drive was similar in terms of the unifying process, in terms of pinning down the Botha regime to its narrowest support base and winning over people for a united, democratic and non-racial South Africa. In terms of the depth of feelings expressed, it was not like the KaNgwane meeting, mandated by the congress of KaNgwane.

The characteristic of the meeting with the PFP was that they were meeting a group from within the white community which had a basic interest in the system. “Unlike the Inyandza National Movement of KaNgwane, they represent a people who have no vested interests in the system of white domination. They are part of the system of people who are dominated, even though the bantustans have been created to give some leading levels a share as puppets and collaborators. So there are differences there.”

However, Maharaj thought that the overall drive to unify the people in action did permeate also the meeting with the PFP. Certainly, they criticised it for its role in parliament and had welcomed the resignation of Van Zyl Slabbert from parliament and from his position in the PFP. They nonetheless believed that it had been a development of extreme significance because it had pointed to the irrelevance of the white parliament.

In their discussions with the PFP, they had also pointed to the need for the PFP to square up its practice. For example, to say that the ANC was a relevant force and were part of the solution to the problems of the country was inconsistent with their support for pre-emptive strikes by the South African Defence Force into the neighbouring countries of Southern Africa, directed against the ANC.

So, whilst the discussion with Inyandza was to share and acquaint each other with the ANC’s basic strategy, to try and understand each other better, that too was the case with the PFP. But there was a difference. The ANC did not accept the issue of the mobilisation of the people within the framework of the parliamentary structure because it did not support the solution which merely looked at democracy in terms of formal structures that were elected once every five years and have no answerability and accountability to the masses of the people. The ANC believed that the PFP had a duty to agitate on a regular basis within the white community and in terms of issues which linked up with the liberation struggle.

Then there were some of the differences and nuances between the two meetings. One had been to unify the support base within the Black people. The other was to win over people from the White community who were part of the people that enjoyed the benefits of the apartheid system into the common struggle.

With regard to the Inyandza National Movement, Mac Maharaj maintained that “we quite understood that they are operating at the legal level, within the bantustan system. Their strategy therefore has to search for peaceful ways of change. But the significance was that they not only reject the ‘independence’ of KaNgwane, but the whole bantustan system. That has serious implications, namely, they do not agree even with the existence of KaNgwane bantustan.” How and when they were going to act in terms of their own strategy on that field was another matter. It was a matter that they had to consider on their own.

But the emphasis in the discussions and what the ANC appreciated was the way in which they mapped out a programme to mobilise the people. Secondly, the Inyandza National Movement had gone beyond the stage of confining its activities within their bantustan. They recognised, as their President said at their congress, that what had happened in KwaNobuhle and Duduza during that time, directly affected the people of KaNgwane. That was, over and above the bantustan system, they were seeking for levels of activity and co-operation with all the democratic forces to act in unison against the Botha regime.

The ANC understood their strategy within the context in which they were operating. That did not mean that the ANC accepted that strategy for all time. However, it accepted their independent existence and believed that out of those discussions they had gone back with a broader perspective of the overall struggle. And naturally, the ANC was expecting that they would try to ensure that in mobilising their people to resist and overthrow that system, they would also act together with all the liberation forces.

For Mac Maharaj, the meeting with Inyandza was a step in consolidating the unity of the people and in improving the calibre of mobilisation in the bantustans and the rural areas. It was not the end of the process, but merely the start. Maharaj even suggested that the ANC had to study the success of the Inyandza National Movement in mobilising the people of KaNgwane.

According to Maharaj, their comrades in the Inyandza National Movement had to ask themselves the question what they could do to influence the people in the other bantustans, what they could do to influence even some of the leading people in the bantustans who were acting as collaborators so as to act in such a way as to isolate the die-hard counter-revolutionaries and draw all the others who were objectively oppressed and suffering from the system into the mainstream struggle.

This was the first meeting between the two organisations. It did not map out any specific, structured relationship. It served as an exchange of views in terms of the respective organisations’ strategies and tactics. It had left open the possibility and expressed the need for more meetings and exchanges of views. Beyond that, the meeting avoided questions that could have had other implications, both for the existence of Inyandza National Movement and its legality and the terrain of struggle that it occupied at the time.

The ANC’s response to Inyandza’s request to meet was based on the ANC’s understanding of the Inyandza National Movement. The ANC had been working both among the masses and at other levels in all the bantustans. That was a consistent part of their political work. But whether they were intending to meet any particular group or not had to be assessed within the general context of the ANC strategy and tactics, as well as the specific request. It was impossible to predict in general how the ANC was going to react to a specific approach.

For instance, there was a special problem with regard to Inkatha. The ANC believed that the leader of Inkatha , Gatsha Buthelezi, occupied the same trench with the Botha regime. Even when the ANC met him in 1979, he acted contrary to the understanding and outside of the common agreements that were reached. He had consistently taken positions not only to differ on fundamental issues of strategy and tactics, but to insist and make those differences the key issues around which his whole existence depended at that time.

Looking at the last conference of Inkatha at that time, it was found that approximately 80 percent of the resolutions adopted were giving attention merely to attacking the ANC,  the UDF and the entire democratic movement in the country. They also attacked COSATU at its formation. The assumption then became that a movement of the people, fighting to liberate themselves from the yoke of apartheid, would spend 99 percent of its time attacking P.W. Botha and the apartheid system.

It then became the duty of the ANC to enlighten those people to understand where he was taking them and to show them the right place in the struggle of the people. However, Mac Maharaj did not think that if Gatsha was interested in any talks, he was interested with any seriousness. Maharaj believed that if Gatsha Buthelezi wanted to make a request for talks with the ANC, he was more interested in the publicity that he would acquire.

The ANC was not engaged in the rounds of talks for the sake of publicity, but was engaged in a life and death struggle with the apartheid regime, one of the most vicious regimes in the whole world. The ANC was concerned with building solid unity for the people, unity in action. The ANC believed that Gatsha, in leading Inkatha, had not even led the masses of the people that he commanded into any action. He was in fact leading them to become puppets of the Botha regime.

Sources:
Mac Maharaj, “Interview: Why We Met Mabuza”, Dawn – Journal of Umkhonto we Sizwe, Vol. 10, No. 3, March 1986.
ANC Statements, “Communique of the Meeting Between the ANC and Inyandza National Movement”, Sechaba, April 1986.

Castro Khwela
Good day fellow Compatriots!