The Criticality of the Armed Struggle

The Criticality of the Armed Struggle

On 28 May 1979, African National Congress (ANC) President Oliver Tambo delivered a presidential address to a sitting of the National Executive Committee (NEC) in Tanzania, outlining the state of the struggle. According to Tambo, some years back the NEC took a decision that the process of the intensification of the struggle inside the country required the leadership to begin to move closer to home. He then asked what was the position with regard to this proposal. Based on the on the information he had been provided, out of the total of twenty NEC members, six were based permanently in countries bordering South Africa, five in departments that dealt with internal work, while others participated in discussions dealing with aspects of internal work.

With regard to the armed struggle, Tambo argued that “We must admit among ourselves that our roar is indeed very thunderous while our claws are virtually absent. To correct this situation and strike as effectively as we roar, we must, with utmost seriousness, set about the task of building up a people’s army within South Africa, among the masses of our people.” Given this priority, “military combat within the country now, today can only have the intention of assisting in our organisational and mobilisation work. We must therefore plan for it – plan for our operations to have maximum political impact. The recent operation at the Moroka Police Station in Soweto is of the kind that I am talking about.”

As for the regional situation, “Already we have MK combatants in Zimbabwe operating with ZIPRA (Zimbabwean People’s Revolutionary Army) forces. In this regard we are pursuing the major objectives, namely, to establish a presence in Zimbabwe to enable us to be able to operate independently from Zimbabwe basing ourselves on our combatants who should have dug themselves in within Zimbabwe; secondly, we seek to open another route into our country.” This was basically a recurrence of the Wankie and Sipolilo campaign objective of deploying men to Rhodesia to assist ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) to overthrow the Rhodesian government while simultaneously establishing transit routes through the country that cadres could later use to infiltrate South Africa.

Regarding Swaziland, “It would seem that we have gone through the worst period … Yet it is clear that the Botha regime will continue to pressurise Swaziland if not to evict us from the country, then make it impossible for us to work. Eviction from the territory through which the majority of MK infiltrations into South Africa are launched would be disastrous.” Reflecting on such a situation, Tambo said, “Our own experience points to the fact that we need Swaziland. We shall obviously remain in this position for the foreseeable future.”

“Equally”, Tambo added, “it is in our interest that imperialism should not be allowed to use Swaziland as a base of subversion and aggression against the People’s Republic of Mozambique. What we are therefore confronted with comrades is a difficult, an uphill and a complex struggle for the allegiance of Swaziland to the struggle for the liberation of Southern Africa against her seduction into the ranks of the forces of counter-revolution” (Simpson).

A decision was made to shift the ANC’s approach from sending armed groups of cadres into the country to “spark off” guerrilla warfare and instead emphasised that a period of political reconstruction of the ANC inside the country was necessary, as this would provide the only secure base for successful military organisation. In an interview with “Dawn”, the monthly journal of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the Chief of Staff of MK, Joe Slovo, underscored this perspective. According to Slovo, “our position on the relationship between the political and military struggle has always been clear”.

“Our movement”, Slovo asserted, “has always regarded the military struggle as a continuation of the political struggle by means which include military confrontation and it is for that reason that since the early 60s we have embarked on the policy of combining political action with military strikes against the enemy. But despite the fact that we have done this we continue to accept and will continue to accept that the essence of our struggle remains political. The struggle for power in South Africa is not just a struggle of an elite military force. The struggle (is) of the whole people and there can be no doubt about it that at the moment the activities inside the country by the masses of people and to which we have already referred continue to be the most important threat to the racist regime.”

Slovo emphasised that “The political struggle at the moment is still taking what one might call a guerrilla form. It is happening now here, now there. … We believe that the moment is approaching when what I have called the guerrilla content of the present political struggle will take on a much more permanent and much more national form, that it will come to a point where these actions will be combined on a national scale where the workers throughout the country will act at one time and the question remains, what then is the role of military activity during this kind of phase?”

By the middle of the 1970s decade, several factors had tilted the advantage towards the ANC. Firstly, a new combativeness established itself amongst the people with the rise of Black Consciousness and the new independent trade unions. Secondly, the accession to power of MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique shifted the regional balance of power. Thirdly, senior ANC organisers who had completed prison sentences began to rebuild ANC underground units in major urban centres. Fourthly, the centre of gravity of the exiled movement shifted to countries bordering on South Africa, thus diminishing the cordon sanitaire that had buffered the apartheid state in the early years of the armed struggle.

For Slovo, “Well, there can be no doubt about it that the activities in which Umkhonto we Sizwe has engaged in the last year or two have played a most significant role in preparing the conditions in which the people are responding in the way which we have witnessed. There is no doubt that these activities will be intensified and with the intensification of these activities, there is also no doubt that the political activities and the political resistance of the people will be heightened and therefore there can be no doubt that this combination of political and military activities not only by the movement, but by the people as a whole, who will slowly but surely be involved in the military struggle as well, will culminate in a successful seizure of people’s power in our country.”

The conditions for mass action seemed to be in place at last for Oliver Tambo and the entire movement, which he regarded as a “historic duty that rests on us as a people to liberate our country”. Tambo took into serious consideration the question of how “to destroy or render inoperative apartheid in all its forms. The need for the unity of the patriotic and democratic forces of our country has never been greater than it is today… [It] has become clear to us that more dialogue is called for amongst us, the oppressed, to seek and find common responses to our common oppression” (Callinicos).

“And it is also clear”, Joe Slovo stressed the point “that the current events in South Africa confirm the correctness of the position of our movement which is to continuously work for the combination of mass activities, mass actions, mass organisation, mass resistance together with blows at the enemy which will both damage the enemy and inspire the people to storm the heights of its citadels both politically and militarily.”

DISCIPLINE IS THE MOTHER OF VICTORY!

Sources:
O.R. Tambo, “Let Us Rise to the Occasion: Speech by Comrade President O.R. Tambo on the Occasion of January 8th, 1980, 68th Anniversary of the African National Congress of South Africa”, Sechaba, March 1980.
Joe Slovo, “Preparation for the Final Onslaught: Dawn Interview with Comrade Joe Slovo”, Dawn, Vol. 4 No. 8, August 1980.
Luli Callinicos, “Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains”, David Philip, 2004.
Thula Simpson, “Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle”, Penguin, 2016.

Castro Khwela
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