TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 2

Subsection 6

■ THE LAW AND ETHNICITY

47 The legislation of the early apartheid years and the implementation of those laws were countered by considerable political activity and campaigning in the 1950s. This took the form of non-violent resistance campaigns in the cities, such as the Defiance Campaign of 1952/53, the Congress of the People in 1955, the 1956 bus boycotts, the anti-pass laws campaigns in 1959 and 1960 and so on. There were also sporadic and scattered but sustained rural uprisings in Zeerust, Witzieshoek, Sekhukuneland, Marico, Harding and Pondoland, which involved some levels of violence.

48 In the context of this domestic activity, together with growing international hostility and the fever of decolonisation then sweeping Africa, the government responded in two ways. The first was to introduce a battery of security laws; the second took the form of what might be described as its ethnic project.

Domestic opposition

49 Internal resistance forces at the end of the 1950s were weak. Despite the militant rhetoric contained in such policy documents as the 1949 Programme of Action, the 1955 Freedom Charter and the 1959 founding document of the Pan Africanist Congress, the nationalist movement lacked the capacity to translate its intentions into effective action. First, it was internally divided: the 1959 breakaway of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) was the result of a decade of division within the African National Congress (ANC). Second, neither of these organisations had a mass base and their capacity outside of the cities was small. Third, neither organisation had an effective strategic counter to the state’s willingness to employ violence against black protesters. Time and again in the 1950s, non-violence as a vehicle of struggle was shown to be an impotent and ineffective counter to state action.

50 Even after the abandonment of non-violence and the adoption of various forms of armed struggle, the South African government had little difficulty containing opposition until well into the 1980s. The reasons for this need not be discussed extensively here, but they bear out the proposition of the American political scientist, Harry Eckstein, that :

In the real world of phenomena, events occur not only because forces leading towards them are strong, but also because forces tending to inhibit, or obstruct, are weak or absent.¹⁰

Politics in the region

51 One of the factors that inhibited or obstructed the liberation movements in their efforts to mount a serious armed threat was their inability to develop secure and permanent rear bases in the neighbouring states from which they were obliged to operate. Ironically, the explanation for this is to be found in the very circumstances the Pretoria government had viewed with such trepidation - the recent decolonisation of these states. Thus while, up until 1960, South Africa had, on the whole, enjoyed co-operative alliances with the British and Portuguese colonial administrations in the region, these latter would never have tolerated the cross-border violations undertaken by elements in the South African forces from the mid-1970s. However, the new national entities, politically weak and economically bonded to South Africa, were largely helpless in the face of South African aggression. Moreover, and perhaps to South Africa’s surprise, it found that it had the covert support of at least some of the governments and/or their security establishments in parts of the region.

52 Given this situation, it is worth asking why it was that South Africa found it necessary from 1975 to wage what became a thirteen-year long full-scale war in Angola. The answer lies in two factors.