Insurgency, Terrorism and the Apartheid System in South Africa
| Published date | 01 March 1984 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1984.tb00166.x |
| Author | Paul Rich |
| Date | 01 March 1984 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Political
Studies
(1984),
XXXII,
68-85
Insurgency, Terrorism and the Apartheid
System in South Africa
PAUL
RICH
University
of
Aston
in
Birmingham
This article discusses the development of guerrilla insurgency in South Africa and the
government response centred around the concept of ‘total strategy’. After distin-
guishing analytically between the notions of ‘terrorism’ and ‘guerrilla warfare’, the
insurgent campaign is seen to have a threefold impact in terms of loss
of
economic
confidence, sapping
of
white morale and
a
mobilization
of
black political conscious-
ness. The resulting response of ’total strategy’ effectively represents an escalation of
previous efforts to entrench a black middle class as a factor to enhance political
stability, though political isolation
of
South Africa from close western support
makes it problematical that the South African state can avoid a strategy of full-scale
counter-terror to the increased insurgency threat.
Since the
1976
riots in Soweto and other black townships in South Africa,
black political protest has taken a variety
of
different forms. In addition to the
township burnings and killings which
so
successfully captured the inter-
national headlines, strikes by black workers have continued from the strike
wave initiated in Durban in
1973.
Furthermore, since the grenade attack on a
police van in the Eastern Transvaal in November
1976
by African National
Congress (A.N.C.) guerrillas, there has been an escalating wave
of
sabotage
and bomb attacks, leading most dramatically to the blowing up of the SASOL
I1 plant in the Orange Free State in
1980.
Though this type of action has not
yet developed to the phase
of
fully-fledged guerrilla warfare, undoubtedly its
effects on South African policy have been significant in a period
of
growing
political uncertainty surrounding the attainment
of
black majority rule in
Zimbabwe under the Presidency
of
Robert Mugabe.
It might be concluded that this upsurge of ‘terrorism’ by South African
blacks marks the start
of
a new phase
of
violent resistance to white power in
South Africa after its initial thwarting in the early
1960s.
Whilst two decades
ago the South African government still had the advantages of the protective
geographical barriers afforded by Portuguese colonial power in Mozambique
and Angola and by the Rhodesian settlers to the north
of
the Limpopo river,
this protection has now gone, leaving the country increasingly exposed to
infiltration. In addition, the bannings of the A.N.C. and Pan-African
Congress (P.A.C.) in
1960
following the Sharpeville shootings and the
escalating repression of black political movements and leaders have produced
a much harder generation of political activists. The original founders
of
the
0032-3217/84/01/0068-18/$03.00
0
1984
Political
Studies
PAUL
RICH
69
A.N.C. underground movement
Umkhonto
we
Sizwe
(‘Spear of the Nation’)
under the leadership of Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu moved only
gradually from the dominant A.N.C. strategy
of
non-violence to one based
upon a military strategy
of
sabotage as part of a political campaign to mobilize
black resistance. In the years since Umkhonto’s destruction in
1963-4,
the
predominantly liberal ideology
of
the A.N.C.
of
the
1950s’
based upon a
political ideal of multiracialism and black majority rule through the parlia-
mentary franchise, has given
way
to an eclectic ideology of Marxism and black
consciousness. The new generation of black political activists in the
1970s
has
been schooled in the Bantu Education system established by Drs Verwoerd and
Eiselen in the
1954
Bantu Education Act and the
1959
Extension of University
Education Act, which segregated the universities and removed most black
students to the ‘bush universities’ established as part of the Homelands policy.
Here the ‘black consciousness’ philosophy was developed as part
of
a search
for an independent black cultural identity that scorned the precepts of liberal
multiracialism. This pursuit of black liberation easily allied itself to
a
Marxist
ideology once a number of black activists fled into exile in the wake of the
Soweto riots and allied disturbances in
1976.
It is this amalgam which
currently informs the present strategy of sabotage and movements towards
guerrilla warfare initiated by the A.N.C. and the revived
Umkhonto.
However, to see this upsurge in sabotage as the simple extension
of
a
‘revolutionary situation’ into the very bastion of white settler power’ may be
premature. Previous phases of violent black political upsurge in South African
history, from the strike waves that led to bloodshed after both the First and
Second World Wars to the wave of state repression after Sharpeville to clamp
down on violence in the Eastern Cape and Pondoland,2 indicate that there is a
close and important dyadic relationship between black resistance and white
state response in South African politics. As this article argues, the moves by
the A.N.C. towards initiating a guerrilla struggle undoubtedly enhance its
claims to political legitimacy as a ‘National Liberation Movement’ in South
Africa. But, in a semi-industrial state with considerable military and economic
power, the governmental response to this is likely to be both sophisticated and
ruthless in its efforts to drive a wedge through African political leadership.
This article seeks therefore to analyse first the nature of this guerrilla
challenge to South African state power and then the possible range
of
governmental responses over the next few years. The premise of this discussion
is that there is a basic analytical distinction to be made between the two forms
of political violence that pass under the general classification of ‘terrorism’
and ‘guerrilla warfare’.
As
Paul Wilkinson has pointed out, ‘terrorism’ is by
its very nature indiscriminate, arbitrary and unpredictable and
is
rooted in a
tradition of nihilist political thought that glorifies in the destruction of the
structures of governmental power through violence for its own sake.3 To this
extent ‘terrorism’
is
fundamentally amoral in that terrorists exhibit an
1
N.
Shamuyarira,
‘A
Revolutionary Situation in Southern Africa’,
The African Review,
4
2
Muriel1 Horrell,
Action, Reactiori and Counteraction
(Johannesburg,
S.A.I.R.R.,
1971).
3
Paul Wilkinson,
Political Terrorism
(London, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1974).
pp.
13-16.
(1974).
159-79.
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