THE greatest achievement of the ANC came at its birth - the principle of anti-tribalism. The greatest danger now facing South Africa comes from its reversal.

This has now happened at the head of government, in a kind of (so far) bloodless coup within the ANC itself, made possible by the single biggest flaw in the 1993 interim constitution, as confirmed in 1996: the party-list electoral law.

Nobody foresaw when drafting the electoral law that a system of unmediated proportional representation empowering Luthuli House to sack any ANC MP at a second's notice and replace that individual with a tame instrument from the party-list could undermine the principle of anti-tribalism, after a century in which it had withstood the harshest tests.

The lack of local constituencies, in which local people can select a definite, known individual as their own MP, and hold that person accountable to themselves at the next election, has enabled a single indigenous community that is based in a single province, to rule the country as kingmaker of government.

All that was needed was for ANC membership in that one province to be increased dramatically while it fell everywhere else.

This one province now dictates terms at the ANC's national electoral conference, which in turn dictates the appointment of the whole slate of MPs for the party-list.

Unaccountability and a tribalist government are then locked in by the party-list. The ANC is turned into its opposite.

To see the danger now facing South Africa one need only turn to the country where uMkhonto we Sizwe was based from 1976 to 1988: Angola. Amid the huge changes taking place in South Africa after MK's departure from Angola, what happened in Angola went unnoticed in the years that followed.

Just when the constitution for a post-apartheid South Africa was being drafted, Angola was being torn apart by a terrible series of tribalist massacres, for which the governing party, the MPLA - the ANC's friend and ally - bears major but not exclusive responsibility.

An honest, reliable report of these massacres was written in English and, in 1994, published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) - a respected institution not funded by any government. Titled Angola: Arms Trade and Violations of the Laws of War since the 1992 Elections, it begins: "Angola returned to civil war within one month of its first nationwide elections, held in September 1992.

 "The human cost since fighting resumed is impossible to determine, but the United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 have died. The UN reported that as many as 1000 people were dying daily from conflict, starvation and disease in mid-1993 - more than in any other country in the world at that time."

Angola then had a population of 11-million, compared to South Africa's 37-million. One would have to imagine a death toll of a third of a million South Africans over the same period, to get an idea of the scale of what tribalism did to Angola in those few years alone.

There is only one problem in these words from HRW, the word "nationwide". There is no "nationwide" in Angola because its people have not taken even the first step to becoming a "nation". They never created their own ANC on the principle of anti-tribalism and have still not done so more than 20 years on.

No significant political body in Angola has ever brought the people of the biggest tribal groupings together, in the way pioneered by the ANC, followed by the PAC, Azapo, the DA and EFF.

The armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism was fought by Angola's three main tribal groupings with their own separate political parties and separate armed forces. When Portuguese colonialism collapsed in 1974, one tribal grouping and its allies grabbed the country's government, bureaucracy and economic centre in the capital, Luanda, while the other two main tribal groupings were excluded.

War between these tribal rivals was inevitable. It was immensely accelerated when the Cold War seized hold of Angola, with military support for the government in Luanda from Cuba and the Soviet Union, with US support via the CIA for the main tribal grouping in the north, and military support from the SA Defence Force for the main tribal grouping in the south.

When the Cold War came to an end, and the Russians, Cubans and SADF had gone home, the war between the tribes continued, following a very short break.

Angola was not short of weapons, and its oil and diamonds provided it with even more.

The HRW report describes the main opposition party Unita as having "regional roots, primarily among the Ovimbundu of south and central Angola". The ruling MPLA "drew much of its support from the Kimbundu people of Luanda, Bengo, Malanje and Kwanza Norte provinces" in the central-west of Angola, while the smaller opposition FNLA, drew its support from "the other main ethnic group, the Bakongo... concentrated in the northwest border area".

In this conflict between regional tribal groupings, HRW reported, "the Kimbundu and Ovimbundu ethnic blocks are about the same size", with the voting allegiance of the smaller tribal grouping, the Bakongo, proving "critical" .

General elections for parliament and for president were held on the last two days of September 1992. With a turnout of 91% (4,4-million voters), the UN and other foreign observers declared the results "generally free and fair". In the legislative election, MPLA received 54% of the vote, while Unita received 34%.

In the presidential election, President Jose dos Santos of the MPLA (president of the country since 1979, and still in office today) received 49,6%, while his opponent, Unita's Jonas Savimbi, received 40%. But this election remained indecisive because Angolan law required the president to get more than 50%.

A new election was needed.

Savimbi then declared the election fraudulent, secretly made his exit from Luanda and resumed the tribalist war, with Unita resuming military action on October 8 in the southern Huila province.

By the end of October the conflict became acute in the capital, Luanda, and resulted in what has been called "the Halloween Massacre".

This involved a "general purge of all suspected Unita supporters in Luanda". A former resident in Luanda who came from Benguela province to its south, informed HRW that his wife told him about "seeing guns being given out by government cadres in the middle of the month [October 1992] to neighbourhood vigilante groups".

A friend told him to stay indoors because "all people from the south were Unita suspects". On the last day of the month, he said, shooting "started at lunchtime. Anybody in a Unita shirt or a known Ovimbundu was to live no longer."

Reflecting on what happened, this informant told HRW: "We have no love of Unita but these Kimbundus used Unita as an excuse to get at us. They have been trying to make this into a tribal war. No-one challenges them. In Luanda's confusion I lost three of my family and I had voted for Dos Santos as president."

There was a "similar picture" from other interviews across Luanda. HRW concluded that the MPLA government had been "arming local comitês de bairro (neighbourhood organisations based on networks of informers) up to several weeks before the fighting broke out. "A major distribution of arms took place on October 28-29."

The journalist Karl Maier, in Luanda at the time, reported in the Washington Post (November 20 1992): "Most of the victims here were Ovimbundu, the ethnic group from the central highlands that forms the backbone of political support for Savimbi's Unita."

He quoted an informant who told him: "What is going on here is tribal rivalry... Anyone from the southern part of the country is suspected of being a Unita supporter. If you are Ovimbundu, you are Unita."

Savimbi's nephew and right-hand man, Elias Salupeto Pena, and Unita's vice-president, Jeremias Chitunda, were shot dead trying to escape Luanda, while the party's foreign affairs spokesman, Abel Chivukuvuku, was wounded and made a prisoner of the MPLA, along with 15 other senior Unita officials.

The MPLA's purge of its Ovimbundu citizens was not the last. Less than three months after the beginning of its "Halloween Massacre", the tide of pogrom was turned against Bakongo (or Zairians) from Angola's two most northern provinces, Zaire and Uige. As HRW reported, on a day now known as "Bloody Friday" (Friday January 22 1993) "a week of violence broke out in Luanda against Zairian residents", many of them local traders.

According to the journal Jeune Afrique, the entire city became "a hunting ground", while the police "miraculously disappeared". It took the MPLA government two weeks to condemn the killings, with its official death toll of 69 generally understood to have been much too low, says HRW. (See also the report by Amnesty International, "Angola: Assault on the Right to Life", 19 August 1993).

Unita was no better and would almost certainly have carried out the same atrocities, or worse, had it been the master of government in Luanda instead of the MPLA.

HRW reported that Unita "laid siege to a number of cities and towns, most notably Huambo and Kuito. Unita rained as many as 1000 shells per day on both cities. An estimated 10,000 people died in the battle for Huambo, many of them civilians. "After capturing Huambo, Unita slaughtered many civilians on the roads exiting the city and many of the civilians who remained behind. It is believed that 20,000-30,000 people died in the 21-month siege of Kuito that completely devastated the city."

In South Africa, the great danger of the shift to tribalist authority in the ANC, locked in by the unaccountable and undemocratic system of the party-list, is that it threatens the country with a repeat of Angola's terrible past.

This is the threat which William Gumede warned against in his article "Tipping point: when citizens lose all faith in the system" (Daily Dispatch, February 25), when he considered that citizens might now increasingly "seek answers in populist, tribalist, ethnic and fundamentalist solutions".

In his book Angola: Promises and Lies (Serif 2007), Maier - who reported on that horror in Angola - begins with a terrible warning from that country's most respected novelist, Pepetela, a former MPLA combatant: "How many dead in this war?

"How many homes abandoned, how many refugees in neighbouring countries, how many separated families? For what?

"The tomorrow that never comes, an eternal today. So eternal that the people forget the past and say that yesterday was better than today." (From Pepetela's novel, A Geração da Utopia (The Utopian Generation).

His novel Predadores (Predators) is a scathing critique of Angola's ruling elites.

Let it not be said that the ANC's promise of a non-tribalist and non-racist South Africa was also just ... promises and lies.

Paul Trewhela was editor of "Freedom Fighter", MK's underground newspaper, during the Rivonia Trial. He was a political prisoner between 1964 and 1967. In exile in Britain he co-edited the banned journal, Searchlight South Africa 

This article first appeared in the Daily Dispatch.

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