The Tricameral Boycott of 1984

By Gorm Gunnarsen

 

 

In late 1979 the Coloured Persons Representative Council, an advisory body with sufficient control over limited budget posts to be a significant source of patronage for its members, collapsed and the apartheid government called no new election. In 1982 the government re-edited a proposal from 1977 to create a constitutional set-up which aimed at the deeper integration of non-black non-whites as junior partners in the new Tricameral Parliament. The proposal was confirmed by a white referendum in November 1983 and single-constituency elections for a special Coloured chamber, the House of Representatives, were scheduled for the 22 of August 1984. Only a small fraction of the Coloureds of Greater Cape Town, which formed roughly half of that population group nationally, submitted their votes on election day.

This boycott was a critical turning point which defined the point at which national and international mobilization against apartheid would surge and become symbiotic.

 

Most writing on the popular involvement leading to the highly successful boycott ascribe the rising tide of resistance to the ideologies and organizations of radicals. Amongst some chroniclers, the causes and significance of this boycott are framed in ways that limit the conceptual space for historical narratives built around popular agency. In this article, the notion of a top-heavy agency behind the Tricameral Boycott of the 22 of August 1984 is challenged through a critique of narrative principles which explain the movement in terms of its leaders and a closer study of the events to show that anti-authoritarian mass participation was the momentous force that carried the day by unifying different leaders and ideologies.

 

Ideological realignment

The United Democratic Front (UDF) and the National Forum (NF) were the two structures which aimed at creating and co-ordinating a boycott of the election. In all cursory accounts of their history, the origin of the UDF and the NF is intimately connected with the introduction of the Tricameral constitution. In such accounts the primary reason for the formation of the two organizations is generally seen as reactive. A typical early example is Hirshmann from 1985 who described the UDF and NF as “formed to fight against the tricameral parliament”.[1] This quest “to confront the state’s economic and political reforms” is often linked with the secondary reason defined as the ideological alignment of two coalitions with the African National Congress (the UDF) or Black Consciousness / the Unity Movement (the NF).[2]

 

The works on the 1980s movements by Martin Murray from 1987 and Bill Nasson from 1991 are two examples of a historical perspective which makes the spread of previously established ideologies into a function of confrontation with the state.[3] They tend to limit agency to the most ideologically conscious and the most organized structures. This understanding is rooted in an inclination to expose a specific organization or ideology as the subject of historical action. The symbolic value of organizations was undoubtedly important. However, the actual course of events, which built the impressive unity of August 1984, can be clouded by an overemphasis on ideological or organizational agency.

 

Already in 1987, Martin Murray establishes the great importance of the boycott. He sees the popular upheaval of 1984-1986 as directly linked to the Tri-cameral Boycott:

“What really triggered the eruption of rioting in the Vaal Triangle townships was the inaugural meeting of South Africa’s tricameral Parliament.”[4]

The connection between the Tricameral boycott and mass involvement is also made when a more fundamental perspective is used to characterize the renewed upsurge:

“What distinguished this escalation of popular protests [late 1984] from the 1976 uprising was that the people .. had no illusions about appealing to the reasonableness of .. black collaborators…”[5]

 Murray’s distinction between the time before and the time after the Tricameral Boycott is expressed as a change in the relative strength of adherents to collaboration (amongst Coloureds collaboration was linked with the rhetorically rather oppositional Labour Party) and adherents to non-collaboration (such as the Unity Movement).[6]

With Murray the trajectory of the democratic movement is reconstructed on the basis of its rejection of the state and the economic elite. The reactions towards the state thus become the primary defining issue in the periodization of resistance. The state and the capitalists also usurp the ideological primacy in Murray’s monography, which has “the upsurge of popular protest” as a part of its subtitle:

“The abstract universality of democratic citizenship and equally ambiguous notions of distributive social justice have figured prominently in popular political consciousness. These recurrent populist themes have invariably stemmed from the manner in which capitalist exploitation and racial/national oppression have been intertwined historically in South Africa.”[7]

When the basic ideas behind resistance are detached from resistance itself, the constituting experiential platform of resistance ideology becomes the life which is determined by the oppressors. The axiomatic quality of this causality is obvious from Martin Murray’s use of the word ”invariably”. The organizing pattern in Murray’s narrative leads to the exclusion of autonomous processing of political experience. The “lessons of struggle” do not appear in his analysis of divergent political currents.

When – as Murray does - the Tricameral Boycott is seen as the ultimate success of principled non-collaboration, the mobilization, which led to the successful boycott, is similarly regarded as a process in which ideological leaders amass supporters to follow their lines. This trait is particularly pronounced in Bill Nasson’s account of three major ideologies in the Western Cape - radical socialism, popular frontism and racial exclusivism – and their struggle for ascendancy. The main dynamic feature emphasized by Nasson is that the groups which represented these ideologies picked up supporters during confrontations with the state. Nasson regards the relationship between the state and resistance leadership as the fundamental political structure, which informed the upheaval of 1984, while he perceives the mass of people who participated in the confrontations as receptacles of the three ideologies they could choose between.

 

Gregory Houston’s 1999 monograph frames the political realignment of the early 1980s in a similar way. Houston focuses on the important role played by Leninist/Gramscian strategic thinking in the formation and consolidation of the UDF. The unification of localized struggles in preparation for the Tricameral Boycott was the UDF’s “first purpose”; before the UDF adopted that goal, the UDF was the goal of the ANC, which adopted the united front strategy in the late 1970s. Generally, Houston describes the united front strategy as one that is “conformed to” instead of one that is pieced together from discussions of struggle experience. The same top-heavy agency is visible in Houston’s repetitive focus on “the spread of revolutionary consciousness” by ANC-aligned forces, and how the UDF “was able to draw under its leadership” the broad alliance of local organizations. In Houston’s synthetic sentences, the creativity of mass action like the Tricameral Boycott is ascribed to Lenin and Gramsci.[8] This conceptual elimination of popular agency might simply express the researcher’s immersion in the language of political science.

 

Consolidation of networks

In the two other recent UDF-monographies, Seekings and Van Kessel, it is unclear whether the Tricameral election was the primary reason for the formation of the UDF.[9] Both regard the Tricameral elections as an opportunity to consolidate already existing networks into national organizations; and both look to needs rising from the development of a new momentum for civic organizing which emerged around 1980. The spread of organization is seen as the central problem for the movement while the spread of ideology is less predominant in the narratives. Mobilization and alliance-building are in focus while the recruitment of supporters to certain ideologies is not seen as the only primary motivation for political campaigns. Seekings expresses his understanding of the driving forces in the following way:

“By the end of the year [1981] Charterists had planted their flag at the head of resistance politics. An essential ingredient in their success was the development of new ways of maintaining the uneasy balance between overt Charterist evangelism and building more broadly based resistance.”[10]

Seekings consistently points to the motivations behind the UDF as an ambigious relationship between advancing the positions of the ANC and the building of a mass alliance around simpler issues.

 

From an inside position, Van Kessel sees parts of the political mobilization in light of a similar scale between the two positions. Kessel identifies examples of mass mobilization disconnected from sound political thinking. In her analysis of the concept of democracy inherent in the Western Cape mobilizations of 1981, Van Kessel sees a rejection of a division of labor within an organization – and a glorifying Populist approach in which class divisions are obscured.[11] Van Kessel's critique of the kind of Populist ideology, which depicts all ”people” as leaders, is used to make a point about the mainstream of UDF, which was formed two years later.

What Kessel thus comes to describe as the populism of the 1980s can be expanded, such as Anthony Marx did in his book from 1992, and used to explain the highly composite nature of the UDF:

“All of these views could be accommodated because all were voiced and no one position was formally adopted or enforced to the exclusion of others. Ideological divisions were defused by the Charterists fundamentally nonideological target of strategic unity. Indeed, unity itself had become the guiding ideology, justifying as broad a national opposition as possible, not as a tight political machine, but as an inclusive social movement.”[12]

In the above quote, Anthony Marx defines the populism of the UDF as tied to the building of non-ideological, strategic unity. This platform is then seen to distinguish the movement from the attempts at building principled unity of the less successful NF. This distinction between the platforms resembles the analytical difference between Nasson and Marx: Strategic unity develops more common principles as it produces more common experience amongst its participants whereas principled unity recruits more adherents during confrontations with the state.

The radically egalitarian pattern of political thinking, which found its way into the UDF, did not jump from the heads of the movement’s focal personalities. In her book, van Kessel is providing important post-1980 examples of the renewed mobilization made possible by an inclusive approach, which simultaneously sidelined traditional notions of leadership as people who produce followers.

 

Through their monographies, Seekings and Van Kessel have defined a track in which organization building has its own life and from which political thinking developed. If this track is more singularly pursued, as I will do in the following, it could make mass involvement itself into the agent that on one hand created ideological divisions in the radical camp and on the other hand created the political thinking which made non-racial, non-sexist, multi-class unity imaginable for growing numbers of people. Mass involvement is impossible to detach from organizational history, but organizational history might be enriched by an approach that looks for agency outside of the established leadership of established organizations.

 

Organization and symbolic power

Already before 1982, the focal personality of the social movements in Cape Town had been largely redefined as the organizer; a person who identifies commonly held grievances and facilitates a group’s collective action.[13] The role of the organizer had been defining a common platform in local communities and at local work places for a diverse cross-section of radicals who only began to split into their different camps once organization had reached a certain level.

After 1982, strategic disagreements between Cape Town’s committed radicals were increasingly reflected in organizational realignments, which Nasson’s three ideological formations puts into a conceptual system. The disagreements inside the radical camp were a sign of the strength of its groundwork. The radicals had created sufficient political space to establish the framework necessary for synchronized mobilization against apartheid on an inter-metropolitan scale.[14] The over-all political direction of the organized mobilization had thus been placed solidly on the agenda.

 

The mediation of a common national platform only allowed for a limited number of organizational representatives. Positions in the new structure had greater attraction, as a national organization would establish a degree of symbolic power, which made it seem more important to define its ideology than to pragmatically find the best way of getting more people involved in the struggle.

Whereas the approach to recruitment defines the specific path to the broadening of participation, alliances between organizations build the symbolic credibility of political mobilization. The name and fame of leaders were negotiated as a part of the associated symbol building. However, the primary impact that the practical methods had on actual mobilization might be lost to research if the opportunities are not separated into, on one hand, the creation of engaging encounters and, on the other hand, the creation of the symbols of resistance. The building of alliances created symbols of unity, which made it easier to win participation. It should be remembered that symbols did not create participation in the first place. Of course, unity was much more than symbolic when it was expressed in greater simultaneity of action. Symbols were of great practical value. The organizational strength of the United Women’s Organisation (UWO) and the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) could easily be seen in light of the symbolic dates that they rallied around. During the 1980s, students never failed to come together on June 16, and women always remembered to arrange special events on August 9.

The organizers defined the function that the alliance would serve and thus sustained an increasingly attractive platform, which could otherwise have collapsed under the weight of all those who competed to give leadership to the new structure. The UDF would never have emerged without a core of radical organizers driving the process through their deep commitment to practical recruitment.

 

The closer study of the Capetonian formation of the UDF, which is outlined below, reveals the extent to which the umbrella bridged the social gaps of race, gender and class – and made the internal resistance a more organic part of the international movement against apartheid. The fully-fledged emergence of a national movement committed to mass participation is the main significance of the Tricameral Boycott. This understanding is lost in modern presentations to the school youth - like the one by Tim Nutall ea. From 1998, which characterizes the NF and “the larger” UDF as belonging in the PAC/AZAPO and ANC camps from their very outset.[15] A presentation like Nutall’s would limit the imagined agency to those who are in power today. It probably does not dawn on the students that many of their parents became involved because they were sick and tired of being bossed around. This could potentially appeal to the social imagination of students who might even end up thinking of the social order as a matter of collective choice rather than of learning the rules to which one should submit. Such a choice of social order showed itself with full force to the Coloureds in 1984.

The choice could easily be presented in clear terms with great relevance to present-day “in-betweeners”: Throughout the 20th century, the Coloured community has constituted about 8% of the total South African population.[16] In an economy with as deep inequality as the South African, it is noteworthy that the relative rise in Coloured incomes also reached 8% of the total income around 1980.[17] Apartheid confronted Coloureds with a dilemma involving the material and spiritual standards of those classified as such: Should they try to pass for white or should they build alliances with Africans?

 

Coloured-African Unity

The Tricameral elections concentrated the choice. The answer depended on the possible imagination of a common black or a non-racial identity. The young generation had done important footwork. Community co-operation across the racial divide had a tradition amongst school students dating back to 1976. The adult generation was approached with the Rents Campaign of 1982. However the African and Coloured civics had too diverse problems to be able to really mobilize in unison. The problems of Coloured group areas - saggy floors, bad traffic regulation etc. - could hardly be compared to those of the African squatter camps that were frequently bulldozed. The African and Coloured civics subsequently organized independently of each other.[18] Fragmentation was inherent in the idea of mobilizing around bread-and-butter issues because the pronounced differences in resources and residential status made it extremely difficult to make different interests converge – unless the convergence was mediated by a highly moral and political agenda. Crudely expressed, one group worked with "bread issues" and the other with "butter issues". As will be shown the Tricameral boycott created much improved opportunities to build synchronized action between all black group areas.

 

On the short term, the Rents Campaign served as a catalyst in terms of the relative failure to make the action oriented civic umbrella in Coloured group areas, CAHAC (Cape Area’s Housing Action Committee), into a structure that also catered to civics in the African townships. In the months following the Rents Campaign, the Western Cape Civic Association (WCCA) was established as an umbrella body for the Bantu Affairs Administration Board areas.

Explanations of the split include tensions around the use of Afrikaans at meetings, where African representatives wanted English or equal access through Xhosa and Afrikaans. Another problem was the failure to convince people that the structures of the local state could be successfully lumped together. Already in late 1980, though clearly on the agenda as a central problem, the group which built CAHAC had largely failed to identify a viable way to include the Bantu Affairs Administration Board areas in the overall game plan for a Cape-wide organization around housing.[19] The unequal access to infrastructure between the Coloured middle class organizers and African community leaders was seen also seen as a primary obstacle at the time.[20] This issue could also be an expression of a greater degree of caution among leaders in the African townships, who were not entirely convinced that aboveground tactics were needed.[21] In terms of the underlying social structure and racial division, the bread-and-butter issues that were at the center of mobilization between 1979 and 1982 were too diverse to be covered by the solidarity within one organization.

 

This division of the civic movement, which crystallized in 1982, was perceived as a betrayal of the principle of non-racialism by a group of non-collaborationist radical socialists, who believed that:

"..NON-RACIALISM must be integral to the active struggle of the exploited and oppressed in their civics..."[22]

The ANC-inspired activists, the Charterists, perceived the split of these interest organizations more pragmatically and continued to look for ways of covering existing structures by one umbrella.

Identifying one common issue to wage the struggle around could only be done once the grassroots claimed public space for a struggle that confronted the way power was defined. In this way the building of an aboveground Cape-wide (and then national) organization was a necessary step to establishing the viability and credibility of a non-racial struggle.

 

The government's constitutional proposals, which took form in 1982, were an opportunity for already existing organizations to unite politically and openly challenge the legitimacy of the apartheid state.[23] For the Coloured communities the new constitution represented a fundamental choice between their white and black aspirations. Coloureds could become junior partners in government and gain control over an unclearly delimited, but undoubtedly significant, area labeled "own affairs" - or they could reject the new set-up and identify with the disenfranchised Africans and a demand for non-racial democracy. All Coloured adults would face that dilemma when they were asked to vote within this new dispensation. The inevitability of this dilemma, looming in the near future, inspired the effort to organize the Cape Democratic Front and subsequently integrate this structure into the United Democratic Front (UDF) with chapters in other regions.

 

Wilfred Rhodes, chairman of CAHAC, spoke from the floor at the founding meeting of the UDF in August 1983 on the need for Coloured-African unity – his focus was clearly on the future needs for a joint platform in the housing struggles. His comment was recorded and transcribed by state penetrators:

“Uh, Mr. chairman and to the house uhm, the Group Areas Act and the removal of people in the Western Cape, as one of the great wounds that we feel, that must be healed uh, in this, uh, in the whole of South Africa. Because we do believe that the Group Areas and removal of people have divided our community to such an extent that we cannot find each other. But we are so happy that uh, via the U.D.F. we as a community will be closer and closer drawn together. Uh, Kaya-litsha I understand it’s the interpretation thereof, is a new home. We as the people in the Western Cape, we don’t need a no, a new home. We have a home in South Africa. The whole of South Africa belongs to us. (Applause) And therefore in the Western Cape, that we feel that, this is another threat and another divisive means whereby they want to divide the so-called uh, Coloured and so-called Indian and so-called African people from uh, make a greater division. We also know that through this uh, a lot of people will be moved from Langa and Guguletu, to the so-called new home. But we reject this ne, this new home, and we believe that all people must decide where they want to be, to live and not be decided by the state where they must live. Kaya-litsha is a threat and we won’t accept it. Uh, the Group Areas Act, at this point in time we know that a lot of families has been divided by it, one is in the north and one is in the west end, and we believe that there must be a community, where people must live as a community and not be divided into separate little groups. Kaya-litsha is a threat and we will fight it and with, the assistance of U. D. F., we, I’m sure, we will overcome. Thank you very much Mr. Chairman.”[24]

 

Wilfred Rhodes clearly tried to outline the way ahead towards a truly non-racial, Cape-wide organization concerned with housing. The solidarity framework for such an organization was imaginable because forced removals was a shared experience between Coloureds and Africans. This reference probably made Rhodes imagine Khayelitsha as a resettlement of Langa and Gugulethu rather than the urban springboard for people from Ciskei and Transkei that it turned out to be. His accommodating response to the criticism against CAHAC’s incapacity to include Africans did not lead to organizational unity between CAHAC and WCCA. The WCCA leaders were probably not interested in such an arrangement.[25]

Interestingly, the applause given to Rhodes was given at the point when he alluded to the Freedom Charter; i.e. to whom ”South Africa belongs”. The Charterist language had become the ticket to common acceptance – much more than the expressed will to find a united platform for community organizations - and political unity had become the dominant agenda while the local issues were increasingly reduced to a pretext for mass contact. However, it is clear that a strong segment around CAHAC, Trevor Manuel in particular, continued attempts to make the UDF a stepping stone towards a national organization for both Coloured and African civics.[26]

 

The creation of the UDF made it seem increasingly realistic to crush apartheid – and widened the political perspectives. At the annual meeting of CAHAC in 1984, Chairman Rhodes opened his address with a perspective, emphasizing the interaction between radicalization and the hopes connected with the existence of a national organization:

“We have reached another milestone in the life of CAHAC. The PC [Presidential Council Proposals], the Tricameral Parliament and the formation of the UDF forced us to see our struggle in a far broader context than the struggle for decent houses.”[27]

The address also pointed to ways in which CAHAC was showing and should show practical solidarity with Africans faced with forced removals. Rhodes also touched upon potential divisions on the possible scrapping of Coloured preferential labor policy. Rhodes believed that the vision of a non-racial South Africa was so strong that even this threat against Coloured privilege could be ignored. This was a more dubious assertion.

 

The failure to fully realize a vision of non-racialism in grassroots organizing can hardly be attributed to the CAHAC leadership or a Charterist conspiracy.[28] The state's translation of racism into spatial and social reality could not be unlived by most people, unless they had some transcendental experience of interracial identification. However, the hopes for a non-racial dispensation began to soar when people of the townships identified with the UDF. The rapid radicalization of CAHAC's constituency around the launch of the new national organization also reveals that the radicals’ teaching of the masses had a limited impact outside a framework of organization and practical experience.

 

Male-female unity

The bridging of the racial gap, which developed in the preparation for the boycott was greatly underpinned when organized women became involved. Conflicts arising from the increasing profile of women is reflected in contemporary material.

 

The 1982 Rents Campaign had received internal criticism from the United Women’s Organisation (UWO), because the UWO was not invited to participate in the campaign from its inception. In a meeting where Trevor Manuel tried to control the damage done by the omission, he said that:

“[T]hese problems had come about because the UWO had not worked out what its site of struggle was and that the UWO should be taking up Women’s issues such as maternity benefits and birth control.”[29]

Behind the male/organizational arrogance, a critical core can be found: The UWO had built itself on the basis of a much more low-profile organization process than CAHAC. Until 1982, it had been much less concerned with claiming public space; but it had anyhow developed a strong Cape-wide network that covered durable local groups in White, Coloured and African areas. Both CAHAC and the UWO were established in 1980, but the UWO’s early path did not go through campaign mobilization. The more subtle methods of recruiting women had been a resounding success.[30] By 1982 the UWO was indeed strong enough to develop more of a public profile; and its leaders were eager to use the organization to mobilize and recruit broadly from a public platform. By the beginning of 1983 the UWO/CAHAC-axis, personified by Trevor Manuel and Cheryl Carolus, took center-stage as convenors of the preparations to launch the UDF.[31]

 

Workers leading the middle class

The individual’s capacity to dominate an organization of volunteers is not only based on race and gender. The correlation to social class is extremely pronounced. From 1979, the idea of working class leadership had been raised by emerging unions, student groups and community organizations. The issue had often been raised to counter-act the intimidating and disempowering effects of the elitist segments, who tended to take the word into prolonged possession – and set the educational standards for power over the internal division of labor. This had left many working people quiet, obedient and inactive. Asserting ”working class leadership” – or ”participatory democracy” for that matter – became the broadly inclusive way of establishing greater unity in a group after 1980. However, a new standard was raised after the first public appearances of the black, green and gold banner in 1981. By 1982 the ”leadership of the ANC” had been squarely placed in the same organizational equation as working class leadership and participatory democracy. This created a contest to be the most ANC-loyal amongst many focal personalities in the movement.[32] As a subtle reaction to the daring new counter-identity, organized labor attempted to reassert the idea of leadership from below and pointed to the need for more caution while mass organizations were still in the making.

 

Devan Pillay has given a detailed account of the ensuing conflict between unions and Charterist community organizers.[33] He understands the clash, which came to the fore in mid-1983, as one over differences in recruitment strategies between high-profile ”voluntarism” and low profile organizing, which was labeled ”abstentionism”. His account is corroborated by a review of the documents relating to the discussions of unity.[34]

 

In August 1982, the Disorderly Bills Action Committee (DBAC) had been convened by the Women’s Front to debate united action against the new bills to halt the urbanization of Africans and the new constitutional dispensation aimed at making Coloureds junior partners of white supremacy.[35] The forum provided a framework for Cape-wide and politically inclusive unity talks but failed to define a sustainable political platform. After 9 months of much principled oratory and particularist bickering - and a little joint activism against pass-raids - Charterists and unions abandoned the forum in April of 1983.[36] The Charterists had been simultaneously preparing for a national UDF since January, while the unions were fed up with the quest for ideological precision, which flourished at the DBAC meetings. In May, a conference to openly discuss the future front brought the differences to the fore:

“We have at this point two divergent views (i) Loose coming together of orgs. (notably two unions [GWU and FCWU] (ii) Est. of Disciplined Front – with clear principles (CAHAC, CAYCO [Youth Congress Organisation], UWO, COSAS) – Open to the floor for discussion of structure – UWO: Express concern at loose structure / this would delay the progress a structured campaign could make / … / We must make haste / loose meeting will retard progress – MWASA: Nature of union work – we must be careful with overt political [?] Union hard hit by state Repression Management calls it political union.”[37]

 

The immediacy of the need for mobilization was clearly contrasted by the care needed to successfully organize workers. Fast mobilization would require a degree of political leadership from a position ahead of the mass, while mass-organized mobilization would require more time to organize.[38] Two weeks later, unions and the politically oriented community organizations met in conference again to part their ways. The language issue was addressed according to trade union tradition by arranging for translations between Xhosa, Afrikaans and English. The UWO, which clearly seemed to be the main spokesperson for fast mobilization, and the other proponents of the more closely-knit structure defined the common interest with unions from the very outset of the conference. It is worth noting that the methods of mobilization where conjured up so as to remind everybody of the common platform they could still share:

“It was crucial that this campaign was not a campaign of activists only. Because of this, organisations stressed that mass work was important. Door-to-door work, house meetings and area meetings would mean that as many people as possible were reached. These activities could eventually build up to mass meetings or rallies. These methods would also help to draw unorganised people into organisations. For example unions hoped to reach unorganised workers through area meetings. Similarly, the community-based organisations hoped to extend and strengthen their organisations through area work.”[39]

In spite of the shared approach to recruitment, the unions would not accept the notion of leadership which was inherent in the UWO model for disciplined organization:

“… [T]hey [FCWU] beleived [!] that the proposed structue [!] reflected the position of the leadership and not of the community. The GWU said that the union leaders could not take decisions for thier [!] members who were not necessarily politicised.”[40]

The unions were already aiming at building their own disciplined national body. The Congress of South African Trade Unions was launched in December 1985 but had been on the way for the previous 4 years. Their concern was clearly of being reduced to foot soldiers in an almost party-like structure. Devan Pillay points out that they wanted to be strong in their own right before they could give up parts of their independence to a political alliance. They also clearly had a different idea of the opportunities for carving out greater political space in the following year. The presence of strong unions who were not automatically delivering their mass of members to the boycott mobilization made leaders, representing different ideologies, compete for the support of unions to an extent that created both local and regional convergence of their action.

 

Militancy as the catalyst for principled unity

Despite the important successes at bridging the gaps of race, gender and class, it was difficult for organizations to consolidate meaningful umbrella-structures. The strong sense of entitlement to have a stake in decisions had emerged in both unions and civic structures during the early 1980s. This sense had made it possible to develop mass-action around single issues. The broadest possible stake in decisions, which was commonly understood as the most dynamic element in broad mobilization, was sidelined somewhat by the urgency of the principled campaign to reject integration into white supremacy as junior partners. The shortcomings of organizing created a return to the militancy of 1976, but on a more sophisticated level than in 1976. Unlike 1976, the militancy of 1983 and 1984 could find a voice in a publicly accessible leadership.  This leadership achieved a prominence, which gave them both a platform and a degree of protection from state prosecution. At the launch of the UDF it was the eloquent militancy of Allan Boesak that best expressed the will to replace the established order. He introduced ”three little words”; the two first were ”all” and ”here”:

"The third word is the word ‘Now’. (shouts) We want all our rights and we want them here and we want them now. (shouts) We, we have been waiting for too long. We have been struggling for too long and now I hear people admonishing us saying ‘You are in too much of a hurry’, can’t you see that the government is making progress. There are changes on the way and they are saying that we must be a little patient and that we must cool off, but I fear that if we keep on cooling off we may end up in the deep freeze (shouts) and the world knows, the world knows that we have been patient, we have waited for many years, we have pleaded, we have tried, we have petitioned for so long, we have been jailed and exiled and killed for so long, but we are saying today, ‘Now is the time’ (shouts)”.[41]

 

The launch of the UDF can still be viewed in two videotaped versions.[42] The less edited version includes panorama pictures of the mainly Coloured audience in the interim tent extension of the Rocklands Community Hall. The degree of intimidation from the presence of a camera was very pronounced – but so were the forceful outbreaks of ”Amandla” – or ”Amanda” as many Coloured newcomers to the movement initially uttered the slogan. On one hand, the fear-torn chance of turning up for the event had been exacerbated by the allusions to ”Sharpeville” in a recent government hoax call-off of the event.[43] On the other hand, the sheer size of the crowd minimized the risk associated with active participation. Boesak’s speech tipped the balance, and made an openly political movement possible by conjuring up the gut aspirations of a sufficiently large group of people. He said in public what most people had preserved for much more private places. And he said it at an event, which offered an opportunity to find a place in the organization of more openly defiant broad mobilization. The critical mass of organizers was present at the moment militancy was re-ignited. Militancy became the catalyst for the principled unity to reject the Tricameral elections.

 

The UDF’s launch was home-made, but the framework for its survival was based on the degree to which it was woven into the fabric of an international solidarity movement. The international support system was multi-facetted. Firstly, a number of leaders had become internationally known, which made it possible for them to enjoy more freedom of speech than the average organizer. Secondly, rapidly increasing external funding was allocated more directly to community organizers. Thirdly, the threat of sanctions was gradually stepped up again; the echoes from the regime’s sighs of relief when Thatcher and Reagan came into power were dwindling as the movement grew in the West after 1980.

 

In the short term, the impressive feat was that the UDF managed to integrate its broad and militant platform into an existing international support system, which was in turn vitalized by the confidence of the front, and thus added further to the credibility of non-violent struggle. By 1984 the UDF was prepared to mobilize broadly among the Coloured population, who had been invited into the set-up of the state.

The UDF in the Western Cape had failed to include the trade unions in the launch, but the unions did send warm greetings. They also became a part of the campaign to boycott the elections for the Tricameral Parliament.

 

Wooing the workers

The boycott campaign was waged as an all-out effort where activists kept campaigning for weeks on end. The extremely successful campaign in Cape Town, which kept voter turnouts down in the one-digit percentages, was not an exclusive product of the UDF and the trade unions. The various organizations led by principled non-collaborationists prepared much of the ground for its success. The Federation of Cape Civic Associations (FCCA) had started holding a series of educative mass meetings already in May 1982.[44] A central feature of the Unity Movement tradition was its keen education on the principles of constitutional law and the history of constitutional change.[45] The NF-associated Cape Action League (CAL) which was formed by many of those principled DBAC members (not the FCCA) who stayed away from the UDF, made use of this tradition. The strongly educational approach distinguished the CAL; many of its supporters asserted that the UDF "can only..retard the political education of the exploited and oppressed."[46]

However, though using a much more flowery struggle language, the campaign waged by the civic associations in the CAL was as propagandistic in its contents as the one waged by the UDF.[47] In the build-up to the elections in August 1984, there was a strong convergence of activism. The constant wooing of the trade unions, which made both the CAL and the UDF Western Cape continuously reassert the ideas of participatory democracy and working class leadership, facilitated this convergence. The unions (e.g. GWU and FCWU), CAL and UDF could thus jointly call for a very successful mass rally on August 6^th.[48]

 

Rejection of imposed leadership

The practical unity of August 1984 in Cape Town was so inclusive that it involved all radical tendencies in the region. It was not a Charterist, socialist, non-collaborationist or BC campaign organization but tended towards networks that managed to involve and engage unprecedented numbers in a rejection of having leaders imposed on them.

The notion of “leadership” had been the predominant justification for a number of principals, priests and other professionals who had allowed themselves to be recruited by the apartheid state to act as leaders for the Coloureds. Since the early 1970s the most significant spokesmen of leadership amongst Coloureds had been members of the Labour Party, who had spoken about many popular issues on behalf of their supposed followers. The Labour Party leaders were unable to recognize the voices of their ’followers’ as those voices were detached from power. Their entitlement to lead was not earned by their accountability to their community. Labour Party leaders justified their positions through their education and charitable behavior – and more subtly through their subservience to a supreme power further up in the system. The communication lines went one way, not the other.

 

The convergence of all the boycott campaigns was particularly pronounced on the local level, where the rejection of the extra-popular leadership is also clearly the main idea. One illustrative example is Grassy Park, one of Cape Town’s Coloured group areas. The then former principal of Grassy Park High School, Joseph George van den Heever, was the top candidate on a Labour Party ticket.[49] In his campaign material, he identified completely with the struggle of the past, but simultaneously tried to reassert the idea of educational leadership as the idea of the future:

“During the student unrest of 1976 and 1980, Mr. van den Heever distinguished himself by his bold and imaginative leadership and support for the legitimate demands of the pupil and parent community for dramatic improvements of educational facilities as well as the speedy implementation of full political rights for all in the country of their birth… The days of sloganeering, shouting of cliques and picketing on street corners, although an important phase of political development at the time, must surely now be replaced by a more in-depth intellectual appraisal of the socio-political deficiencies in our constituency and our country, followed by tough and dynamic negotiation at the legislative and policy-making level.”[50]

 

In the week up to the election in Grassy Park, 1.000 people turned up for an inter-faith rally with Imam Solomons and Reverend Boesak on the same platform, the CAL and the UDF co-ordinated their scheduled rallies. During the afternoon on the 22^nd of August 1984, the day of the vote, boycott organizers in the area came together in a local church. At dusk they went outside and attracted volunteers to form a picket line. The picket grew into thousands and created a walking wall of local people all the way around the place of voting.[51] The event defines a moment in the continuous battle between educational leadership and mass fellowship at which the upper hand clearly belonged to those of the movement’s focal personalities who had assumed the roles of organizers. The strong ironic contrast between Heever’s assertion that ”pickets on street corners” were obsolete and then that very real picket on Grassy Park’s Busy Corner could hardly have been lost on anybody in the neighborhood.

 

The boycott was an all-out effort and inevitably created a degree of fatigue amongst many organizers. However, the 22^nd of August 1984 was a – if not the - moment in the 1980s when simultaneous action on a nation-wide scale assumed much greater nation-wide credibility. As Martin Murray has pointed out, the outbreak of the Vaal Uprising and the mass action in the townships of the Eastern Cape found an important inspiration in the principled stand of the Coloured majority, who proved their will to resist the material temptations of racial exclusivism, and made white supremacy seem vulnerable and weak. With a more ambiguous outcome, the 22^nd of August 1984 could have created a greater momentum towards the ethnification of the struggle. In retrospect, the hair-thin balance, which kept tendencies towards ethnic cleansing at bay during the early 1990s, was enabled by the principled mass rejection of anything less than universal franchise.[52]

 

Participation and mobilization

The universality of political rights won a firm grip on the political imagination of the South African people because of an inclusive movement against imposed leadership dating back to 1979-1980. It is a misperception to see this movement as one that followed a small radical elite or a specific ideological system. Michael Neocosmos’ 1996 critique of the post-apartheid restoration of authoritarian control over social resources could be seen as a warning against undemocratic tendencies within the present government. However, it as much of a warning against accepting the Tricameral Boycott and the mobilization of the 1980s as simply the success of the leadership of the ANC or other particular groups. Neocosmos pointed out:

“In the 1980s, the dominant trend of popular nationalism correponded to the politicisation of civil society and the democratisation of the state from below, while the 1990s are witnessing the statisation of civil society or its politicisation from above. Central to the distinction between the two political and ideological forces of popular and state nationalism, were different conceptions of the relationship between leaders and led. While the former stressed popular democracy and control, accountability and direct mandating of leaders, the latter stressed the independence of leadership, top down prescriptions and statist arguments of various kinds.”[53]

 

In this perspective, democracy grew within and out of the 1980s movement while it mobilized against imposed forms of leadership. The peaking militancy of 1984 was largely an outcome of the growing ability to proactivily initiate mobilization from below. This gives the militancy of this period a different character from that of earlier peaks like 1976 where immediate confrontations with the state formed the basis of mobilization. In 1984 people were organized enough to pro-actively create a degree of simultaneity, which was sufficient to become self-reinforcing. Participation had reached a critical mass. The Coloured population of Cape Town made an important contribution to the establishing of a national movement by a massive boycott of the election to a parliament which would have remoulded them as junior partners in the non-black leadership of the state. They created a degree of simultaneity in action, which added to the credibility of over-all national resistance.

 

This understanding of democracy’s initiating momentum is hard to fathom from a perspective like the one used by Murray and Nasson who focus on the power relationship between state and people. The monographies of Marx, Van Kessel and Seekings have established some independent narrative principles of organization building. To further counter the state-centered narratives of resistance, it may be necessary to turn the constituting axiom of Murray and Nasson upside-down. The story of resistance may then finally come to its right and realize a greater part of its potential to inspire posterity: At the historical root of politics, it is people who decide to become citizens of a state, not the state, which chooses its subjects. And accordingly: the state has no inherent right to a lasting posterity, while people have. The primacy of popular agency is the corresponding axiom. To fully adopt such an axiom could compensate somewhat for the inherent state-centered bias of archives, the greater publishability of narratives from new statesmen and the deferrence of university discourse.