Taking the War to the White Areas Campaign
On 3 June 1988, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Chief of Staff Chris Hani and Army Commissar Steve Tshwete were interviewed by John Battersby of The Times of London newspaper in Lusaka following the reshuffle of the military hierarchy in October 1987. Steve Tshwete had replaced Chris Hani as Army Commissar, the latter having been elevated to the Chief of Staff position, which was occupied by Joe Slovo, the new General-Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP).
Chris Hani indicated that MK’s key objective in 1988 was to cause the collapse of the municipal elections scheduled for October, as the African National Congress (ANC) viewed them “as one gigantic step by the regime to restore what our people destroyed three years ago when in the place of this puppet system our people were experimenting with new people’s administration. Street committees, people’s organs of power, people’s courts.”
But then, Hani added, “the regime came in, deployed troops, deployed the police and went out of its way to systematically try to destroy what the people had achieved”. Then the government wanted to “bring back the traitors and install them and strengthen the position of the regime in the townships”. The ANC was therefore, according to Hani, “committed to aborting the municipal elections in October. And it is going to use both political and military methods to stop that”.
When Battersby asked them whether the lat
