Spear of the Nation: Umkhonto weSizwe

2. The turn to armed struggle, 1960–3

13 2 The turn to armed struggle, 1960–3 It is hard to find anyone in South Africa today who will argue with conviction that the armed struggle for liberation from apartheid was not justified. This was not always the case, especially among whites. even so, most South Africans today are grateful that the country did not descend into a full-scale civil war during the apartheid era. Just as there are few who would deny the justice of the liberation struggle, so there are few who would argue that the struggle against apartheid should have‘gone further’ and that there would have been a beneficial outcome to a bloody civil war, however revolutionary. So what started the three-decades-long armed struggle–termeda‘low-intensitywar’intheacademic literature – between the liberation movement and 14 the apartheid regime? At first glance, it seems quite straightforward. After the introduction of apartheid in 1948,there was a decade of militant yet nonviolent protest and defiance by the ANC and its allies. But when this strategy failed to produce any change of heart on the part of the white government, the ANC began to reconsider its position. The tipping point was provided by the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, when protests against the pass laws were met with brute force by the police: 69 unarmed protesters were shot, many of them in the back as they were fleeing, on 21 march 1960 in an African township near vereeniging. The government declared a State of emergency, detained thousands without trial,and banned both the ANC and the PAC (Pan Africanist Congress),anewlyformedbreakawayfromtheANC. Both bodies declared there was no longer any legal space for them to organise nonviolent resistance to apartheid, and set up their armed wings, mK and Poqo respectively. mK launched its armed struggle on 16 December 1961 with a series of acts of ‘symbolic sabotage’; at the same time it distributed a pamphlet announcing mK’s formation. As the manifesto memorably declared: ‘The time comes in the life of any nation 15 when there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa.’ Despite the accepted wisdom that the turn to armed struggle was obvious, necessary and inevitable, the process was in fact complex and difficult and not uncontested even within the ANC. There were those within the ANC and its allies, such as raymond mhlaba of Port elizabeth,who had been arguing for some years that the time for armed struggle had come. This conventional wisdom about the inescapability of military resistance was widely held among colonised and oppressed people in the 1960s and 1970s throughout the world. Within South Africa, there were also those who did not think the mass nonviolent protests of the 1950s had been ineffective or exhausted; and there were trade unionists and church leaders who were committed to continuing to build and strengthen their organisations and institutions as sites of opposition to apartheid. Because of the largely Christian adherence of most ANC members, including its president Albert Luthuli, the formation of mK was not in the beginning carried out under the auspices of theANC but as a ‘people’s army at the disposal of the South 16 African masses’, not directly linked to the ANC. Luthuli’s stance in fact continues to evoke heated debate. In a radio discussion of a new biography of the Chief in late 2010, listeners who phoned in were incensed that the author,theAmerican Scott Couper, could claim that Luthuli was unable to support the decision to turn to armed struggle. Couper agreed that the argument around the justice of the ANC’s turn to armed struggle was convincing: if ever there was a just war, this was it. And yet he argued equally convincingly that while Luthuli understood why other leading figures in the ANC wanted to adopt a strategy of violence, and would not openly criticise it, he could not personally support the decision. Some ANC activists were also swayed by the Gandhian tradition in South African politics, particularly those of Indian descent who were followers of the mahatma and his philosophy of nonviolent resistance to oppression. In an ongoing history project on South African war veterans’ experiences, one student is examining the way in which Indian mK members from Durban came to terms with the implications of abandoning their Gandhian beliefs and accepting the necessity of violence. 17 Although the decision in...