South Africa - History of a death warrant for the Afrikaner
James Myburgh |
23 September 2020
James Myburgh
explains the purpose behind the 1973 UN Convention declaring apartheid a ‘crime
against humanity’
https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/a-death-warrant-for-the-afrikaner
Earlier this year the former National Party President, FW de Klerk, was
challenged in an interview on SABC as to whether he agreed with the United
Nations designation of apartheid as a “crime against humanity”. He replied that
he “did not fully agree with that” – given the equation with genocide - even as
he accepted and apologised for all the wrongs, presented to him, that had been
committed under that system.
On the 13th February the Economic Freedom Fighters’ leader, Julius Malema,
disrupted the opening of parliament on the basis that an invitation had been
extended to De Klerk, who was in attendance. De Klerk, Malema said, was “a
murderer and has blood on his hands. The people of Boipatong are turning in
their graves.” Furthermore, Malema continued, De Klerk was an “unrepentant
apologist of apartheid who is not willing to accept that apartheid was a crime
against humanity”.
The
following day the FW de Klerk Foundation issued a statement defending De Klerk.
It pointed out that, contrary to ANC claims at the time, the June 1992
Boipatong massacre had not been state-orchestrated, but had been carried out by
Inkatha members, acting alone.
It further questioned whether apartheid could be categorised as a “crime
against humanity”. The designation of apartheid as such by the UN General
Assembly in 1973 was and remains, the Foundation said, “an ‘agitprop’ project
initiated by the Soviets and their ANC/SACP allies to stigmatise white South
Africans by associating them with genuine crimes against humanity — which have
generally included totalitarian repression and the slaughter of millions of
people”.
This description provoked a festival of self-righteous outrage. The Daily
Maverick described it as an “utterly insane
observation”. The EFF said that De Klerk was an apartheid denialist and that
under that system, “millions of black people were killed, banished and starved
to death”. The ANC said that denying that apartheid was a crime against humanity
should be made a crime “as is done in other jurisdictions such as Germany where
holocaust denial is not tolerated in any form”.
The SACP
declared that the 1973 United Nations General Assembly was correct to adopt the
"International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime
of Apartheid". President Cyril Ramaphosa told parliament that to reject
the UN’s categorisation of apartheid as a “crime against humanity” was, in his
view, “treasonous”.
In the face of this barrage FW de Klerk personally announced that the
Foundation’s statement was being withdrawn, as now was not the time to
“quibble” about such matters. He also said that the Foundation supported the
incorporation of the “crime of apartheid” into the 1998 Statute of Rome, which
established the International Criminal Court.
This incident provoked more general comment, with white South Africans
accused of “amnesia”, and unfavourable contrasts being drawn with Germany’s
reckoning with its past. The BBC for
instance opined that De Klerk’s “comments appeared to reinforce
a wider perception that many white people have never been obliged to confront,
properly, the evils of the past.”
For all the
talk of the issue of forgetfulness, and the need to have courage to face up to
the past, this debate was characterised by an almost complete lack of knowledge
as to how the 1973 convention came into being, who drafted it, its context,
what the purpose behind it actually was, and what the implications were at the
time (and arguably still are).
To remedy this, it is necessary to go on a deep dive down the memory hole
in order to retrieve this long-forgotten history.
I
The draft
text of the convention was introduced, in Russian, at the UN General Assembly,
by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and one of its client states,
Guinea, in late 1971. Article I of this draft defined the “crime of apartheid”
as a number of acts, which it defined, “committed for the purpose of
establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any
other racial group of persons and of systematically oppressing them”.
Neither the Soviet Union nor Guinea had spotlessly clean hands. At the time
the Afrikaner-controlled South African state was ultimately responsible for a
few hundred politically-related deaths – from the infamous Sharpeville
massacre, where panicked policemen had fired indiscriminately on a crowd of
protestors, to some twenty deaths in detention, to the executions of a number
of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and Poqo members following their trials and
convictions for murder, and so on.
The Soviet Union was responsible for the killing of millions –
including the mass executions of surrendered Polish army officers carried out
in occupied Poland, in parallel with the Intelligenzaktion of
the German occupiers to the West, in 1939. From the 1950s onwards it had, along
with Red China, become the major international sponsor of a particularly
virulent and immiserating brand of racial nationalism that was sweeping across
the globe. Ahmed Sékou Touré’s regime in Guinea meanwhile is estimated to have
murdered some 50 000 political enemies and opponents, often by locking
them in their cells and starving them to death (the so-called “black diet”),
or, in some cases, publicly hanging them from a bridge in Conakry pour
encourager les autres.
If the drafters of this convention, and many of those who ultimately
ratified it, were not driven by a principled commitment to human rights, as we
now understand them, what was their actual purpose? This initiative was not, as
sometimes been claimed by its critics, just a matter of “propaganda” or
embarrassing the Western powers diplomatically at the UN. To understand it
fully, it is necessary to place it in the context of a major but almost
completely forgotten Soviet-backed SACP/ANC operation which, it was believed,
could well soon lead to the overthrow of the Afrikaner-dominated regime in
South Africa.
II
From its inception a major obstacle to MK’s successful prosecution of
guerrilla warfare in South Africa was the fact that the country was surrounded
by a cordon sanitaire of colonial and minority-dominated states. This hugely
complicated efforts to infiltrate guerrillas and armaments into the country
overland, as was evidenced by the failure of the Wankie campaign of 1967.
One possible strategy to deal with this problem was to simply leapfrog
South Africa’s neighbours – geographically and in terms of historical
development - by bringing in guerrillas and armaments by sea. This had first
been suggested to the Soviets by Arthur Goldreich in January 1963 and it was
raised again by Joe Slovo in discussions in Moscow in July and August 1967. In
October that year the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(CPSU) gave approval for work to begin on the operation. It would come to be
dubbed ‘Operation J’ by ANC President Oliver Tambo. This involved, in its initial
phases, recruiting and training ‘organisers of struggle’ as well as operatives
to surveille the coast to identify possible landing places.[1]
From 1967 onwards the ANC/SACP in London would recruit young leftists and
Communists to travel into South Africa for short periods on various missions.
This was done, in large part, by Ronnie Kasrils either at the London School of
Economics or through the British Communist Party. These were clean skins,
completely unknown to the South African Security Police and Bureau for State
Security (albeit not MI5), who could blend into white society, and operate
without detection. Two of these initial recruits were a young British
communist, Daniel Ahern, and a tough and dedicated communist of Greek
ethnicity, Alex Moumbaris.[2]
The initial focus was on bringing banned ANC and SACP propaganda into the
country. Leaflets were printed on thin cigarette paper, and thousands could be
easily smuggled into the country in false bottomed suitcases. These were either
then posted to recipients across the country or would also be exploded into the
air in city centres using bucket bombs. Pro-ANC banners would also be unfurled
from buildings, and tape-recorded broadcasts played. The leaflets usually
contained the message that the “voice of the African National Congress” could
be listened to on radio every Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday on short
wave 1, 19.44 metres at 8.45pm. These messages were broadcast by the external
service of Radio Tanzania from Dar es Salaam.
The purpose of this propaganda was to communicate the instructions of the
ANC to their supporters in South Africa and stir up nationalist sentiment. For
instance, a pamphlet titled “We are at war!”, distributed in May 1968 and which
referenced the Wankie campaign, declared: “We have suffered long enough. Over
300 years ago the white invaders began a ceaseless war of aggression against
us, murdered our forefathers, stole our land and enslaved our people. Today
they still rule by force. They murder our people. They still enslave us.” The
leaflet called on the recipients to prepare to “support our fighting men!” and
“help the freedom fighters!”. “We are answering the white oppressors in the
language they have chosen!”
In 1969 Operation J seemed to move into a higher gear, along with the
establishment of the Revolutionary Council at the ANC’s Morogoro Conference.
This was the conference where the ANC formally adopted Colonialism of a Special
Type and the National Democratic Revolution as key pillars of the party’s
ideology in a Strategy and Tactics document drafted by Joe
Slovo.
The operation was directly planned by Revolutionary Council members Oliver
Tambo, Moses Mabhida and, in particular, Slovo. Yusuf Dadoo and Chris Hani also
played prominent roles. Thabo Mbeki was made secretary of the council in 1971
although his name is not mentioned in reports on the operation.
In the second half of 1969 Ahern and Moumbaris were sent to the Soviet
Union for training and became full time paid operatives. They were then sent
into South Africa in early 1970 to identify possible landing places with
Moumbaris reconnoitring the coast from the Northern KwaZulu down to the
Transkei, and Ahern the southern Cape coast. Moumbaris then flew out of the
country on 22 April 1970. Based on the reporting of Ahern and Moumbaris a
landing place on the Transkei coast near Port St. John’s was ultimately decided
upon.
In June the South African Communist Party held an Augmented Central
Committee meeting in Joseph Stalin’s old dacha outside of Moscow where it
focused on the question of how to overthrow the Afrikaner regime in South
Africa. It was at this meeting too that both Thabo Mbeki and Chris Hani were
brought onto the SACP CC.[3] The initial work on Operation J, and
the overall revolutionary strategy that it formed part of, seems to have met
with the approval of the Soviets. On 20 July 1970 the Central Committee
Secretariat gave the green light to the Soviet Defence Ministry to start
preparing for the implementation of the project. On 20 October 1970 these
proposals were approved by the CPSU Politburo and the Soviet government.[4]
Among the financial support provided by the Soviets was £75 000 (over
R20m in current Rand values) to purchase a motorised yacht named the Aventura.
Specialised training would be provided to MK combatants, and “continuous
technical and security support by Soviet personnel” also extended to the
ANC/SACP.[5] In early 1971 a group of some 24 MK
members were sent to Baku to begin their specialised training for the beach
landing, which was completed in around July. They were under the command of
Fanele Mbali, who went under the nomme de guerre Lammy Booi.
His deputy was Mongameli Johnson Tshali. Eric Mtshali and Ranka Cholo were the
two commissars. The men were mostly from the Eastern Cape and Natal as, it
seems, this was where the main focus of their activity would be.
The group then returned to a camp at Sirmona near Moscow where they were
visited by Oliver Tambo, Yusuf Dadoo, Moses Mabhida, Chris Hani and Joe Slovo.
Here they were trained in underground work, and how to communicate secretly by
post with the ANC’s Revolutionary Council in London. Their mission on arrival
was to recruit members for the ANC, train and arm them, and organise them into
military and political groups. Sabotage actions were to be carried out in an
organised, not isolated, fashion.[6]
Other operatives were sent into South Africa from London to identify
possible sabotage targets, as well as prepare caches where the armaments
smuggled into the country would be stored. An equally important part of the
operation, which we shall return to, was the propaganda element. Through 1970
and 1971 thousands of leaflets were smuggled into the country and distributed.
There were spectacular co-ordinated bucket bomb operations, in all major urban
centres, which attracted huge press coverage both within South Africa and
internationally, in August 1970 and again in August 1971. Ahmed Timol was deployed into South Africa by the SACP
in early 1970 after eight months of training in Moscow the year before in order
to start rebuilding the Party’s underground structures. Among the tasks
performed by the unit he established, relevant to Operation J, were the
procurement of pass books, and the printing of SACP literature and the
distribution (by post) of ANC leaflets.
By late 1971 Operation J was moving towards implementation. It was to be
launched from the southerly port of Kismayu in the People’s Republic of
Somalia, then under the control of the Marxist-Leninist regime of Mohamed Siad
Barre, in early 1972. The Aventura travelled from the Mediterranean, manned by
a crew recruited by the Communist Party of Greece, around the Cape of Good Hope
(the Suez canal being closed at the time), to meet them there. On the way the
ship docked in both Cape Town and Durban to refuel.
The MK guerrillas, trained in Baku and then Moscow, were flown out from
Russia to Somalia in February 1972. Fanele Mbali recounts of how on its arrival
they loaded the ship with “light machine guns, AK47 assault rifles, large
amounts of explosives and ammunition, limpet mines, hand grenades, hand guns,
maps, binoculars, inflatable rubber boats, life jackets and whatever each
thought would be necessary to arm the volunteers in the regions where we were
going to recruit. There was simply no shortage of anything.”[7]
In early February 1972 Moumbaris and Ahern, along with other operatives,
were sent back into South Africa. Moumbaris was to head the welcoming party at
the expected landing place in the Transkei, and Ahern the back up one at an
alternative location.
As Slovo described it in an article in the MK journal Dawn in 1986 “the
operation was very complicated. It involved having structures inside the
country ready to receive the cadres on the various landing points which had
been chosen for the purpose. The landing was to take place in actual landing
boats of the mother ship. Radio signals were worked out from the beaches to
indicate safety. Arms and equipment were specially prepared so that they could
float in. Trucks, bicycles and other means of transport were ready to take the
men to various parts of the country. Caches had been prepared in various
mountains, ready to receive a vast quantity of armament.”[8]
The ship then departed on 6th March 1972. A few days into the
voyage the radar system started giving trouble and an engine packed up. It was
regarded as too risky to continue to South Africa on just the back up engine
and the ship returned to Kismayu. Repairs were made but by this point the Greek
crew had developed “cold feet” and announced that they would not continue with
the mission. They were placed in a detention camp pending its completion and a
crew of British communists were then flown in to take over.
Repairs were made and the ship departed again on 13 April 1972 but within a
short time it had to towed back to port after the engines experienced
irreparable mechanical. It seems that inter alia sand had
somehow got into the lubricating oil in the engines and fatally damaged the
bearings. At this point the decision was taken to abandon the mission. On 21st April Moumbaris
and the others in the welcome parties on the Transkei coast were informed by
the SACP in London that ‘mother had died’ and the mission had been abandoned.
In his later report to the Soviets Slovo blamed “sabotage” by the “cowardly”
Greek crew for its failure.
The Revolutionary Council then sought to implement a Plan B. The group of
MK members were divided into groups of three and were to infiltrate into South
Africa by land, this time without any armaments. Their instructions, Mbali
recounted, were to go back to their home bases and “organise for a well
co-ordinated popular uprising”. This effort also ended in complete failure with
the arrest by the Security Police of both of Moumbaris and his wife, a number
of MK members who had been part of the aborted landing, and another ‘London
Recruit’ Sean Hosey. The 1973 trial of Moumbaris and five others exposed many
details of the operation.
In the historical literature Operation J is generally mentioned only in
passing, and usually disparagingly. This though is a mistake. Up until the
point of termination the ANC/SACP and Soviet Union were confident of its
prospects for success. Eddy Maloka recounts in his history of the SACP in exile
that both the ANC and SACP “were very optimistic about the operation, according
to correspondence between Tambo and Slovo on the matter, between 1969 and the
period before implementation.”
One sign of this was that Tambo himself wanted to be on board the Aventura
and lead the landing party. Slovo later recounted how there was a meeting, held
in Moscow shortly before the Aventura was due to depart, to finalise certain
details. Various admirals and generals from the Soviet armed forces were in
attendance, as were Chris Hani, Dadoo, Moses Mabhida and Tambo. Once the
consultations had been completed, and the group had had their dinner, Tambo
said he would like a special meeting. Here the ANC leader announced that he
wanted to be part of the landing. It was “going to be in an area very near his
home, as one of the landing points, and he says he wants to go now to Mogadishu
to join the group that is already there and to land with them, and to lead with
them.” When told “on no account” Tambo broke down and wept and was angry for
days afterwards.[9]
Apart from the financial and military resources the Soviet Union had poured
into it, it was, Vladimir Shubin later noted, a product of almost a decade of
planning, and years of preparation. The Soviets were dismayed and infuriated by
its failure, which they blamed on Joe Slovo, and cut the SACP’s annual
allowance as punishment.[10]
III
What though was Operation J actually trying to achieve? What was the
purpose of landing a small ship full of armaments and some twenty guerrillas on
the Transkei coast? What would have happened if everything had gone as planned,
and the hopes the ANC/SACP/USSR had invested in it were realised?
It should be remembered that at the time the tides of history were running
strongly in favour of the national liberation movements. Following the end of
World War II one colonial or minority-dominated regime after another had been
toppled across Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
The first successful Marxist-Leninist revolution in sub-Saharan Africa was
that in Zanzibar in January 1964. This had provided “proof of concept” for how
a small group of armed men– acting at the right moment – could initiate the
overthrow of a regime representing the minority oppressors (‘Arabs’ in this
case) once the deprived majority had been awakened, through effective
propaganda, to revolutionary racial consciousness.
In a long editorial essay in elated response to the success of the
“Zanzibar uprising” the SACP journal the African Communist (1st Quarter January
1964) noted how “we have won and are winning splendid victories for the cause
of African independence, freedom and unity”. It stated that the British were
deterred from intervening militarily in Zanzibar, something which apparently
would have drowned the “picturesque little Island in blood”, by the “speed and
completeness of the take-over”. This had proved that the “Zanzibar masses” were
firmly behind the new government.
“How fortunate, how happy we are to be living in these stirring days of the
African Revolution!” the editorial remarked at one point. “The dream of our
pioneer patriots, the little clear spring of independence and freedom which
they began, has become a mighty river, a turbulent torrent storming through
Africa, cleansing our motherland of the filth and backwardness of colonialism.
Woe betide those who try to halt it, to tame it or to stand in its path!”
The Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, and the white minority
regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa were among the last standing. The
expectation then was that they too would be soon swept away by the great flood
of revolutionary racial nationalism unleashed by the end of empire. In
discussions in Moscow in April 1970 Tambo told his Soviet interlocutors that he
believed that the situation in South African was explosive, but that the black
African population were waiting for the return of armed guerrillas before
initiating an uprising. If this return was delayed for too long such an
unplanned uprising may occur in any event.[11]
The essential strategy that was to be followed was set out by a statement
of the SACP’s Augmented Central Committee after their June 1970 meeting in
Moscow. It was published in the African Communist no. 43 4th Quarter 1970 under
the title, “Freedom can be won: A call to the South African people”.
After recounting the manifold wrongs and injustices of the apartheid system
– from the pass laws, job reservation, skewed racial land distribution, and so
on - it declared that it would not be possible to be “rid of these evils until
we get rid of the main problem – white minority rule”. It
pointed out that the minority regime could and would be overthrown. The fall of
colonial and minority dominated governments across Asia and Africa over the
past two decades had shown that “unjust minority governments cannot last”.
How though could the regime be overthrown while “all the power, all the
money, all the weapons are in the hands of whites”; while the leaders of the
ANC and SACP were in prison and exile, the ANC and SACP underground, political
activity suppressed; and with “spies and informers” helping the police to “trap
anyone who dares to protest or speak of freedom”?
It is true, the statement noted, that the “enemy is powerful. They have the
armoured cars and tanks, the planes and the command of the roads and railways”.
But, it declared, “there is a way to fight; to beat the enemy. It is the way of
people’s war.” This required that “the people” as a whole must stand up and
fight. In this way the advantages of the enemy would be overcome:
“We have no weapons? We shall take weapons from the enemy and make our own
weapons: petrol bombs, hand grenades, the simple weapons of the freedom
fighter.”
“We have only a handful of trained men at our disposal? Those few will
train thousands. Our skills in the art of war will improve with experience.”
The enemy would be met, not head on, but through “hit and run” guerrilla
warfare. As the clashes grew in number and size “the workers will refuse to
work for the oppressor. They will strike and sabotage his production of weapons
and supplies.” The people of the countryside will “take themselves the land for
which they hunger, and arm their own freedom fighters to defend it. The roads
will be bombed and the railways destroyed; by the people in the surrounding
areas.”
As the tide of struggle rises the more strength of the white South African
troops would be dispersed and “our superiority of numbers will assert itself.”
The difficulty it declared was “only one: to start.”
It then made the following call to action to the “African people, the
Coloured people, the Indians and the democratic elements among the whites”:
“Let us unite for the fight to end the shame and suffering of white
minority rule headed by the Nazi National Party.
Let us resolve that the beginning of the seventies will put an end to white
South Africa and mark the beginning of People’s South Africa, advancing towards
socialism.
The armed groups of Umkhonto we Sizwe are ready to enter the fight. But
they cannot fight alone.
The people must act!”
It concluded with a call on “the people” to support and rebuild the
organisational structures of the ANC, trade unions and SACP, to act militantly
for higher wages, land and freedom, to arouse the spirit of resistance and
defiance. It then declared:
“They must arm themselves. The war of national
liberation is on and we must fight it to the finish. Victory or death!”
The report of the meeting of the National Executive Committee of the
African National Congress, held in Zambia from the 27th to 31st August 1971 –
published under the title “The Time for Action Has Come” in Sechaba December
1971- suggested that the liberation movement believed that the revolutionary
situation, in terms of Leninist theory, had now finally arrived in South
Africa. The ruling class was no longer able to rule in the old way, while “the
people” were no longer willing to reconcile themselves to their oppression and
exploitation. The social crisis had created a “vast army” of victims who “have
nothing to lose and everything to gain by the destruction of the present
system”.
In his report to that meeting Chris Hani wrote that in order to carry out
an armed revolution effectively “we need a tight, well organised and
conspiratorial underground to prepare assault groups. We need to prepare a
network of agents who will answer the signal of action the moment it is given.”
The Revolutionary Council members planning the operation believed that, after a
long absence, exactly such a network would soon be in place in South Africa.
In his statement to the “people of South Africa” on the 10th Anniversary of MK
on the 21st December 1971 – as published in Sechaba in February
1972 – Tambo called on the “black masses” to rise up against the “white
oppressor.” The hour had come he said. “Let us fight for Freedom. The White
enemy in South Africa can and must be defeated.”
IV
Given that the ANC/SACP underground structures within South Africa had been
almost completely dismantled by the South African security services by 1967 the
rousing of the masses to revolution, and guidance as to how and when they
should act against their oppressors, depended heavily on propaganda smuggled
into the country by the SACP’s London recruits. Up until Ahmed Timol’s arrest
at a routine police road block in Johannesburg on 22nd of October 1971
the South African police and intelligence services had no idea as how this
propaganda was flowing into the country and were unable to stem it.
These leaflets distributed in the implementation stage of ‘Operation J’ –
in 1970 and 1971 - are highly revealing then of the intentions of the ANC/SACP
and their Soviet backers at the time. In August 1970 the leaflet “The African National Congress
says to Vorster and his gang: Your days are coming to an end!!” was distributed
across SA, including through bucket bombings. A version was also broadcast on
radio from Tanzania.
This conveyed basically the same message as the statement of the Augmented
SACP CC meeting shortly before. It stated that as “our oppressor” took the land
by force so it would be necessary to take it back by force. This would be done
through “the new art of people’s war” – as had been practiced in Algeria,
Vietnam, Mozambique and elsewhere – which had “made it possible for an
oppressed people to defeat an enemy 1 000 times stronger in arms and
equipment.”
The leaflet then called on “the people” to start preparing for what was to
come. The initial focus should be on organising in the factories and townships
and in the rural areas, and securing and hiding arms. In its appeal to youth it
declared: “Youth of our land, you must learn the skills which will bring us
victory. You must try to get a gun. You must learn to use it. You must learn to
hide it until the time for action comes. You must organise every young patriot
in your school and university”. At the end of the pamphlet were instructions
and a diagram on how to make a simple hand grenade. An earlier leaflet had
provided instructions for making a Molotov cocktail.
A few months later another ANC leaflet – titled “Sons and daughters of Africa!” – was more quietly distributed, sent by post to
black African high schools and colleges across South Africa in November 1970.
It was later published in the March 1971 edition of the ANC journal Sechaba.
Here the ANC promised the youth that it was “going to put guns into your hands.
And you are going to have the pleasure of hitting back at last. You will avenge
the massacres of Bullhock, of Witzieshoek, of Sharpeville.”
After listing examples of the humiliating and degrading treatment black
youth experienced at the hands of the “white man” it commented, “You have a
brain… When you get the weapon in your hands, you know you are going to use it
against this cruel enemy”.
It then commended to the youth the actions and tactics the Zulu King
Dingane had used against the Voortrekker leader Piet Retief and his followers.
This was history that both black and white South Africans would have been very
conscious of at the time, given its centrality to Afrikaner nationalist
mythology. The Boers under Retief had been invited to Dingane’s capital,
uMgungundlovu, on 2nd February 1938 to sign a treaty whereby the Zulu King was
to cede a large tract of land to the voortrekkers in return for their
successfully recovering some cattle stolen by the Tlokwa.
Afterwards they were invited to Dingane’s homestead on the 4th to celebrate
the signing, and asked to leave their weapons outside, which they did. Two
crack Zulu “amabutho” regiments performed a dance in front of the party, in
which they moved forward and backwards, moving ever closer. At a signal from
Dingane the amabutho rushed upon the Boers and overpowered them, beating them
senseless. Dingane, who was still seated, then called out “Kill the wizards!”
The men were dragged off, their feet trailing on the ground, and finished off in
front of Retief, before he too was clubbed to death.
Of the party of seventy whites and thirty Coloured servants there was one
survivor. At the command of Dingane the amabutho promised to “kill the white
dogs!” and exterminate the families of the Boers encamped on the Natal plains
awaiting Retief’s return. 40 white men, 56 white women, 185 white children, and
250 coloured servants were killed in the ensuing slaughter.[12]
The “Sons & Daughters” leaflet praised Dingane for the defeat that he
had inflicted on the “white man”. It stated:
“Using simple weapons King Dingaan, gave his orders to his brave warriors:
‘Bulal ‘Abathakathi’ – Kill the evil men. And they were indeed evil men those
slave owning colonialists who had vowed that there could be no equality between
Black and White people neither in church nor in the State. These were the evil
men who robbed the Africans of their land.”
“What is important to understand about this battle”, it continued, “is that
Dingaan fully understood that he was dealing with a desperate and brutal enemy.
Here therefore devised a plan of action that would meet the situation.” Using
deception and surprise he was able to destroy the “white colonialists” using
simple weapons such as knobkerries and assegais.
“History has shown that provided a people is UNITED and DETERMINED to win
its freedom nothing can stop them. But like Dingaan, it will be necessary to
use clever plans of battle to defeat the enemy. We must use surprise. We must
use deception. We must hit and hit hard when and where he least expects us. We must
use the tactics of guerrilla warfare. Dingaan used simple weapons against him.
You too can use simple weapons to attack and rout him and take his gun.”
The leaflet then announced that it was giving the “green light” to the
youth. If the youth wished to burn down a pass office, they should do so. If
they wanted to rob a bank to secure money for organisational work they should
do that as well. If they knew where to steal a gun or two they should go ahead.
It also stated that Oliver Tambo was “organising from outside waiting for you
to stand up tall and receive a gun and FIGHT. Yes, this violence of the White
oppressors will be met by our revolutionary violence.”
Finally, in answer to the question “what must be done?” it declared that
three things were needed. Firstly, the masses needed to be mobilised. Secondly,
“from outside material help and the guns you need will be organised. The ANC
promises today to place the GUN in your hands.” Thirdly, “Everyone must know
that a war means that you MUST KILL.” It declared:
“THE HOUR HAS COME! YOUTH, YOU ARE THE HOPE OF OUR
LONG SUFFERING AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE, GET READY FOR BATTLE.”
In August 1971 - and with the arrival of trained MK guerrillas and
armaments on the Aventura now imminent – a series of yet even more inflammatory
leaflets were distributed across the country. These were specifically written
in the vernacular and, though hitting the same themes, were tailored for
different black ethnic groups. Samples of these documents, and the somewhat
clumsy police translations of them, were submitted in evidence in one of the
political trials of early 1972. They provided further clarity, if any was
needed, on who it was that the youth “MUST KILL” when the hour came.
The purpose of these documents was clearly to, on the one hand, attack the
legitimacy of the Bantustans then being established and, on the other, to
incite hatred of the white minority and those black people who cooperated or
collaborated with them. The drafters clearly knew what they were doing. The
propaganda techniques employed were tried and tested and had been proven highly
efficacious in other contexts.
“Mokgosi wa lela!” was the leaflet published in Setswana. It described “the
whites” as “bloodsuckers, robbers and thieves of our country”. They were an enemy
whose government had long wanted to “exterminate” the “blackman”. It described
black South Africans serving in the police force as “betrayers, like JUDAS,
when he betrayed the Lord: they are snakes, lice that bite while in the
garment. Let the rage of those who love freedom fall upon them.” Black
“sell-outs” were also “enemies” whose “time had expired.” It called on the
population then to rise up and seize power by force. “Fight for the freedom
which is yours, and the freedom of the country of your birth. Remember whites
are your greatest enemy!”
The leaflet in North Sotho was headed “Sebata Kgomo Banna”. This stated
that while South Africa was rich “we have been turned into slaves”. After
listing examples of degrading treatment black Africans had experienced at the
hands of the whites it declared “Europeans are people without humanity”.
Initially “we thought that they are human beings”, it said, and all could live
together in harmony, but it has become clear “that they are not worthy people,
they are killers. Fellow countrymen, these White people are foreigners, they
come from overseas.”
The time had come, it continued, to “ask them from where they do come. All
countries are rule by their rightful owners. Germany is ruled by the Germans,
England is ruled by the British, India is ruled by the Indians. This one of
ours must be ruled by us – The Africans. We do not want homeland
administration, we want to rule our country as a whole.”
Those black people who had been co-opted by the “Boer government” through bribery
were “Coward Africans who assist in dividing the children of the Black Cradle.
We have no plea for the Cowards in our midst, let us get rid of them.” The
leaflet concluded by telling people that “you are called upon and notified” by
the ANC that trouble has erupted. “African take up a weapon, and get on to
fight with all determination. Children of a Black Cradle: the country is never
brought with money, it is brought with blood. A person’s enemy is a white man.”
The leaflet in isiZulu was titled “Saphela isizwe sika Mjokwane”
(Essentially, “the Zulu nation is being annihilated”.) It said that “these
insignificant WHITES deprived us of all we possessed originally, today we are
nothing but beggars. Our children are suffering from malnutrition; our people
our moving to and fro, seeking a place to shelter themselves; The graves of our
forefathers are being unearthed by tractors, We are being pushed about and
settled upon precipices like BABOONS.”
Addressing the Zulu nation, it said, “the enemy of the Black Man in our
country is the European. It is now over a long period they have oppressed us
like BABOONS”. The offer of self-government through the homeland system, it
said, was pure deception. “WE DEMAND THE WHOLE OF OUR COUNTRY… LET THEM DEPART
FOR GOOD.” The whole of all the provinces of the country – the Cape, the
Transvaal, Natal, the Orange Free State – “belonged to the BLACK MAN, therefore
we cannot be given boundaries by the EUROPEANS, we will not be dictated to by
ABATHAKATHI. In fact KING DINGANE sized them up correctly.”
It rejected the belief of some black people that the Europeans were “good”
or “wise”. Rather “WE ARE BEING ANNIHILATED BY THE ABATHAKATHI!!” This document
too said that on the day of reckoning the cowards, sell-outs, traitors and secret
informers would be dealt with and “swept away by the floods” (i.e. killed).
With regards to all this, it asked, “what is our conclusion?” Its answer
included the following:
“Remain at arms and be ready for a fight!!
Our country was taken by bloodshed.
It will be recaptured by bloodshed.
Stab them spear of the nation.
….
Let us all, we black nation, take up arms and repossess our forefathers land.
The whites seized us by force.
We were attacked by dogs while we were defenceless.!
…
In conclusion let us praise the spirits of our late kings, Mzingeli son of
Ehaka as well as Dingane and say: -
“He eventually reached Mlaba the son of Khwani, on arrival he gave him a large
bundle of assegais, and said, “son of Ndaba you must stab them even in their
eyes.
Congress has given the command!
Power to the people!”
The leaflet in isiXhosa was headed “Vukani Mzi Ontsundu!” (Wake up Black
Nation!). This began by asking, “How long shall we remain under white
oppression? For how long shall we live like dogs, living on bones? Where did
such a thing happen, you black people? The freedom is in our hands.”
“We live in slavery on account of the whites” it said. “We have become
strangers in our country on account of intruders.” The offer of self-rule was a
deception, it said.
“How can there be good relationships between a white man and ourselves? The
relationship that exists is just like the relationship between a cat and a
mouse. The deceivers tell us that the whites are good, and that we should
improve our relationships with them. Those who say we should accept dummy
self-government deceive us. We have given the riches of this country to
foreigners. What is that? How can we like a white man, who shot HINTSHA from
behind, and crushed his jaws?”
The Black Nation should unite, it said, and be one solid body. The enemy is
“the white man, the wizard, the one who finished us, is the Afrikaner.” Those
sell-outs who assisted this enemy should be “isolated” and the informers
“exterminated”.
The document declared the black nations must not be deceived by the whites,
and fight among themselves, but “take over the whole country”. “The country is
ours”, it said, “therefore we should prepare to take it over, let us fasten our
belts and be prepared to listen to the instructions of the ANC”. When they come
it is required that, on that day, “we should run on the rampage, embittered and
destroy everyone like what was done by Hintsha, Tshaka, Maqooa, Dingaan,
Sandile, and Sekukune. All the black heroes will support the resolution passed
by the ANC, that this country should be taken back.”
V
To sum up then, in the early 1970s the ANC/SACP planned, with considerable
Soviet financial, material and logistical backing, to engineer the start of a
“People’s War” in South Africa. This involved on the military side years of
intricate planning and preparation for the secret landing of guerrillas, and a
massive quantity of armaments, on the Transkei coast.
The more visible propaganda operation was run in lockstep with these hidden
military preparations. This was meant to steel black youth in particular for
the moment at which they would be required to rise up against the Boers and
their black collaborators. The “detonation” for this racial “explosion” would
be presumably have been provided – in some way - by the sudden and unexpected
emergence of an MK guerrilla force in South Africa and the cohort of
radicalised youth they had secretly armed and trained inside the country.
The plan then of the ANC/SACP and the Soviets was to initiate in early 1972
a mass racial insurrection in South Africa. This was intended to lead not just
to the extirpation of the “blood sucking [colonialist] parasites” and the
“colonialism of the Boers” but the overthrow of the capitalist system as a
whole. This would be followed by a rapid transition to socialism under the
guidance of a Marxist-Leninist style “dictatorship of the people”. As an ANC
radio broadcast from Dar es-Salaam put it on the 28 September 1971 “ending
capitalism and colonialism must be done together”.
Had the Soviet Union and the ANC/SACP pulled this off this would have been
a major victory over the West in the Cold War. Up until the engines of the
Aventura starting seizing up, on the way to the Transkei, the expectations of
all parties involved were riding high. Its failure was a crushing
disappointment.
This then is the context in which the Soviet Union and Guinea’s “draft of a
Convention on the suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid” of 28th
of October 1971 – on the cusp of the “start” of the People’s War - has to be
understood. Only then is it possible to properly read the document for meaning.
Up until that point the definition of a “crime against humanity” was the
one contained in the 1945 Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal. This defined crimes
against humanity as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other
inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the
war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of
or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal,
whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where
perpetrated.”
The successful prosecution of “a war of national liberation” in 1972 and
1973– had it been successfully initiated - would potentially have ticked a
number of these boxes. If you are inciting an ethnic majority to rise up en
masse against an ethnic minority – and commanded your supporters to prepare to
“kill” this “enemy” - then you have obviously reconciled yourself to all that
would flow from that. The SACP were familiar with the lessons of the Zanzibar
revolution, and would have been quite aware of what had occurred during the revolutionary
upsurge.
At the time the ANC/SACP also clearly envisaged the successful
implementation of the National Democratic Revolution followed by a transition
to socialism as involving the total dispossession and expulsion of the white
“colonialists”. It was the African majority who were the rightful owners of the
land. This is what the ANC’s ideological and political allies in Frelimo
quickly accomplished, albeit without significant bloodshed, after being handed
total control of Mozambique by the departing Portuguese authorities in 1974.
The Convention, as formulated, was very cleverly drafted to legitimate what
the Soviet Union was hoping to see realised in South Africa over the following
few years. At the very least the blunt effect of extending the concept of a
“crime against humanity” to include the apartheid and other policies of the
Afrikaner nationalists would counterbalance, and thereby neutralise, the
existing Nürnberg definitions. It did more than this, however.
Article II defined the “crime of apartheid” very broadly. It encompassed
not just the totality of the apartheid and separate development policies of the
National Party government, and the racial discrimination that occurred under
them, but the “exploitation” of black labour as well, and the security measures
the Afrikaner regime used to defend itself from revolutionary overthrow.
In terms of the Nürnberg definitions a perpetrator had to have committed or
ordered an act (such as the massacre of a group of civilians),
which then had to be proved in court, in order for that person to be convicted
of a ‘crime against humanity’. In terms of the draft 1970 Convention however an
unfair and unjust ‘system’ was declared to be ‘the crime’.
The Convention “branded” all those individuals and institutions actively
involved or complicit in this system as “criminal”. Article III stated that the
provisions of the Convention applied to all “representatives of the State
authority and private individuals who, as principals or accomplices,
participate in or directly incite others to the commission of the crime of
apartheid, or who conspire to commit that crime, and to representatives of the
state authority who tolerate its commission”. This potentially covered any
individual or institution that participated in this system, however innocently
or harmlessly.
Article IV meanwhile then empowered the State Parties to the Convention to
adopt “any legislative or other measures necessary to
prevent any encouragement of the crime of apartheid and to punish
persons guilty of that crime.” (My emphasis).
Thus, having defined the system that prevailed in South Africa at the time
as a “crime against humanity” the Convention declared all those who
participated in it as guilty of the “crime of apartheid”. This would have
probably covered, in one way or another, almost all of the Afrikaner civilian
population of the time, most other whites, as well as black South Africans who
willingly collaborated in the system. A narrow exemption would be provided, as
far as the white population was concerned, only to those few individual white
rebels who committed themselves wholly to the cause of black liberation.
At the time a “crime against humanity” was a capital offence, and one which
attracted the highest penalty for the perpetrators. In terms of the Convention
then Afrikaners and those who collaborated with them thus fell under a category
of persons who had rendered themselves unworthy of life. The Soviet Union, and
their allies, were further empowered by the Convention to take whatever measures
they deemed fit to ensure they were punished.
This all slotted in tightly with the actions then being taken by the Soviet
Union, and their proxies in the ANC and SACP, to engineer a mass insurrection
in South Africa, in which the white population and their black collaborators
were to be targeted for vernichtung.
The draft Convention of 28th of October 1971 was, in other words,
a death warrant for the Afrikaner, and those allied with them. It was also one
that was meant to start being executed shortly thereafter. The effort though to
give effect to it, in early 1972, was nipped in the bud by the sabotaging of
the Aventura shortly after its departure for the Transkei. As a result the link
between the Convention and the Soviet sponsored plans for a “People’s War”/”war
of national liberation” was never made or, if it was, has long since been
forgotten.
It was only twelve years later that the ANC was able, and only in part, to
put the People’s War strategy into operation (see here and here), by which time the link between the two
was far less obvious. Indeed, it is commonly assumed in the literature that the
‘People’s War’ approach was only decided upon after the ANC’s Vietnam tour in
November 1978. As a result the connection between that revolutionary strategy,
and the UN Convention intended to legitimate it, was lost.
VI
The Convention continued to make its way through the UN, being adopted
largely unchanged by the General Assembly in 1973. The General Assembly at the
time was dominated by a collection of truly awful regimes, something well
understood in the West at the time. This was the same body that in 1975 gave
Ugandan leader Field Marshall Idi Amin a standing ovation and declared Zionism
to be a form of racism and racial discrimination. The Convention was
subsequently ratified by a host of Soviet client states and African, Arab and
Asian nationalist and Communist regimes, including the Khmer Rouge regime in
Kampuchea. No Western liberal democracy ever ratified it.
In the late 1990s though the ANC was, under the Presidency of Nelson
Mandela, at the height of its moral and political authority internationally. It
was hailed around the world for its historic commitment to “non-racialism” and
its policy of “reconciliation” towards the white minority. Its past (not fully
discarded) ideological commitments, and revolutionary strategies, had been
almost totally forgotten. By contrast the old National Party regime been
thoroughly discredited and disgraced by the exposure at the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of the criminal and murderous conduct of the covert units
of the police and military in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It was at this moment that the “crime of apartheid” was incorporated into
the Rome Statute as a “crime against humanity”, a body of law meant to prevent
another Rwandan genocide. The definition used in the 1998 statute was largely
carried over from the Soviet Union’s original 1970 draft. Not much seemed to
turn on this inclusion at the time however. Apartheid had been abolished some
years before, and the statute was not meant to apply retroactively.
The effect of this inclusion though was to give backwards legitimacy to the
1973 Convention. The authority and legitimacy of that Convention has
furthermore been endorsed by many of the world’s leading human rights lawyers.
In this manner a legal document embodying horrendous - but as yet
unrealised - exterminatory racialism was effectively incorporated into
“settled” international law. It now sits there like an unexploded bomb,
threatening the existence of two peoples in particular. The major focus of the
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign, for one, is to define Israel as an
“apartheid state”. If this was to ever succeed this would set in motion the
provisions of the Convention against the now “criminal” populace of that
country.
As the national revolution the ANC promised to bring about in South Africa
has failed there are increasing calls by frustrated elements within the racial
majority – notably the Fallists and the Economic Freedom Fighters – for the
liberation movement to return to the path of revolutionary purity, and for
there to be a final reckoning with the country’s Afrikaner (and white)
minority. The fact that the “international community” declared “the Boers” to
be guilty of a “crime against humanity” is central to legitimating such renewed
calls to action. In rhetoric which harked back to the 1970 and 1971 propaganda
of the ANC Julius Malema put it this way:
“We, the rightful owners, our peace was disturbed by white man’s arrival
here. They committed a black genocide. They killed our people during land
dispossession. Today, we are told don’t disturb them, even when they disturbed
our peace. They found peaceful Africans here. They killed them! They
slaughtered them, like animals! We are not calling for the slaughtering of
white people, at least for now.”
The ‘debate’ then around the FW de Klerk Foundation’s statement was
characterised by almost total historical amnesia. Even De Klerk’s initial
instinctive resistance to accepting the designation, on the basis that it
(wrongly) equated apartheid to genocide, missed the main point.
The result has been a striking lack of clarity in the debate. The EFF of
Malema have an intuitive grasp of the purpose to which the UN Convention was
(and is) meant to be put, which is why they defend it so aggressively. The SACP
and ANC would also have some residual though faded knowledge of this history.
But many others – journalists, commentators, human rights lawyers - rushed in
to condemn the FW de Klerk Foundation without grasping what it exactly was that
they were, in turn, effectively endorsing.
It was disturbing to see so many different elements in society – at least
some of whom should have known better - embracing in their frenzy of
self-righteousness such a profoundly dangerous document. It was yet another
reminder, if any was needed, of the dangers that come from forgetting the past.
James Myburgh is author of The Last Jacobins of Africa: The ANC and the
making of modern South Africa. It is available on Kindle here.
Footnotes:
[1] Vladimir Shubin, ANC: A view
from Moscow, Jacana Media: Johannesburg, 2008, pg. 82
[2] Ken Keable (Ed.), London Recruits: The
Secret War Against Apartheid, The Merlin Press: Pontypool, 2012
[3] Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The
Dream Deferred, Jonathan Ball Publishers: Cape Town, 2007, pg. 277
[4] Shubin, ANC: A view from Moscow,
pg. 82
[5] Eddy Maloka, The South African
Communist Party in Exile, Jacana Media: Johannesburg, Kindle Edition, 2013
[6] ‘The making of a terrorist’, Rand
Daily Mail, 20 March 1973
[7] Fanele Mbali, In Transit:
Autobiography of a South African Freedom Fighter, South African History
Online: Cape Town, 2012, pp 148 - 152
[8] Joe Slovo, “The second stage: Attempts
to get back”, Dawn Souvenir Issue -
25th anniversary of MK, 1986
[9] Interview with Joe Slovo by Luli
Callinicos, Johannesburg, 5 January 1994. As described in Luli
Callinicos, Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Ngele Mountains, David Philip
Publishers: Cape Town, 2017, pp. 367 - 368
[10] Shubin, ANC: A view from
Moscow, 2008
[11] Discussion with OR Tambo and Alfred
Nzo in Moscow, 24 April 1970, as described in Shubin, ANC: A view from
Moscow, pg. 77
[12] John Laband, The Rise &
Fall of the Zulu Nation, Arms & Armour Press: London, 2008, pp. 87-90
***
Bibliography
Luli Callinicos, Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Ngele Mountains,
David Philip Publishers: Cape Town, 2017
Stephen Ellis, External Mission: The ANC in Exile 1960-1990,
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Irina Filatova & Apollon Davidson, The Hidden Thread: Russia
and South Africa in the Soviet Era, Kindle Edition, Jonathan Ball
Publishers, Johannesburg & Cape Town, 2013
Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, Jonathan Ball
Publishers: Cape Town, 2007
Ken Keable (Ed.), London Recruits: The Secret War
Against Apartheid, The Merlin Press: Pontypool, 2012
John Laband, The Rise & Fall of the Zulu Nation, Arms &
Armour Press: London, 2008
Eddy Maloka, The South African Communist Party in Exile, Jacana
Media: Johannesburg, Kindle Edition, 2013
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Fighter, South African History Online: Cape Town, 2012
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Africa’s Secret Service, John Murray: London, 2006
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Penguin Books: Cape Town, 2016
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Johannesburg, 2008
Sniffer dog E.T. with trainer Anette Kare at the Helsinki airport in Vantaa, Finland, Wednesday Sept. 22, 2020. Finland has deployed coronavirus-sniffing dogs at the Nordic country's main international airport in a four-month trial of an alternative testing method that could become a cost-friendly way to identify infected travelers.
Sniffer dogs Miina, left, and K'ssi at the Helsinki airport in Vantaa, Finland, Wednesday Sept. 22, 2020. Finland has deployed coronavirus-sniffing dogs at the Nordic country's main international airport in a four-month trial of an alternative testing method that could become a cost-friendly way to identify infected travelers. 
Sniffer dog K'ssi at the Helsinki airport in Vantaa, Finland, Wednesday Sept. 22, 2020. Finland has deployed coronavirus-sniffing dogs at the Nordic country's main international airport in a four-month trial of an alternative testing method that could become a cost-friendly way to identify infected travelers. 