The Hidden Role of Radicals in the South African Transformation

I get this funny feeling as I'm reading John Carlin's Playing the Enemy. The book is essentially about the role rugby played in uniting black South Africans and white Afrikaners. Carlin describes Nelson Mandela's remarkable achievement in transforming a game initially hated by blacks as a symbol of their brutish Boer enemies into something like a national sport. But that is not what was missing for me.There are scenes in which, while incidents of brutal oppression are going, Mandela is being courted by the Afrikaner government: he is removed from prison, ensconced in an official's fairly luxurious home, given respectable clothes to wear, being able to entertain dinner guests. The author gives  the impression that all of this comes about essentially through Mandela's skills in ingratiating himself to others and generally "working the system," and it is clear that Mandela is an expert in this with lessons for all of us. And it is clear that the government knows that change must happen; there are world-wide protests against apartheid, crippling economic boycotts, world-wide communism is in collapse, the Berlin wall is coming down. What struck me as missing was much consideration given to the Pan Africanist Party and their slogan: One settler, one bullet. A fairly predictable dynamic in revolutionary groups is the split between the "hards" and the "softs." This is the same tension that develops regularly around strikes. Worker Hards and Softs become increasingly polarized, increasingly rigid in their positions, and one-time friends become enemies. Management and governments clearly prefer to work with the Softs, but their motivation to cooperate is heightened by fear of the Hards. When the powers that be are doing their deals with the Softs they don't like or want to admit the role Hards have played in bringing this reconciliation about. I'm no expert in South African affairs and I'm not proposing bullets for settlers, but I do wonder if the Hards had a bigger role in this transformation. And, if so, I wonder why that role isn't a bigger part of the history. Truth is: I don't wonder about that last part at all.

Comments

[Ron Kraybill]

I lived in SA 89-95 and was training advisor to the National Peace Accord. A few thoughts:
1) I think you raise an important point in general. The internal dynamics within each side play a bigger role than is widely recognized in negotiations.
2) The ANC/PAC split was old by the time of the negotiations. There had been years of bad blood and the organizations had grown distant and hostile towards each other. The ANC had a huge and relatively well-organized following that included a lot of radicalized young people, quite a few of whom were raising utter havoc in the streets. The PAC had a much smaller following - it's leaders said some blood-curdling things (eg: the motto, "One settler one bullet") but weren't do much that seriously threatened anybody. So the white government and the ANC just largely ignored them. Everyone was far more worried about Buthelezi, who sat on the sidelines almost the whole time, and the violence between his street thugs and the young ANC lions in the townships than the PAC.

BTW, I led a a workshop for a group of regional PAC leaders at one point in East London. I found them knowledgeable and thoughtful, and less bombastic in person than I expected. The Africanist view which lay at the core of PAC thought - that Africa is for Africans (accompanied by an expansive definition of African that included anyone who truly considered Africa and its heritage home), that Africans need to re-claim their identity as Africans - is one I couldn't and still don't easily dismiss.

Ron Kraybill
www.RiverhouseEpress.com