During the 1990-1994 transition period, it was difficult to identify a distinctively South African Communist Party (SACP) approach to the negotiation process, one which was qualitatively different from, or obviously more militant to, that of its senior partner, the African National Congress (ANC).

The transition itself was a turbulent and violent chapter in South African history and both the preliminary talks about talks period, from May 1990 through to November 1991, and the actual negotiations from December 1991 onward at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) were punctuated by acrimonious exchanges and periodic breakdown.

The ANC and the government traded accusation and counter accusation about where responsibility lay for the violence which had surged from August 1990 onward with the relationship between the two principals reaching its nadir in the period between May and September 1992.

The ANC and its allies - the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) - claimed that there was nothing random or chaotic about this violence. Instead, they viewed it as premeditated and largely state orchestrated as the government sought through a ‘double agenda’ or ‘two-track strategy’ to soften up the liberation movement in order to extract concessions from it at the negotiating table and to erode its popular standing ahead of a future election.

The ANC and its partners argued that while the government ‘is evidently committed to political change, it is becoming clear that it would prefer that change occurs on terms most favourable to itself.’[1]

This approach allegedly involved attacks on ANC leaders and activists as well as more generalised attacks on ANC supporting townships through the covert activities of elements of the South African Police and South African Defence Force (SADF), the latter now redeploying at home the tactics first used in the regional dirty wars of the 1980s.

For example, the massacres of commuters in the PWV region in the early 1990s – with armed men disembarking from moving trains – was said to point to the involvement of highly trained, special forces units of the SADF.

As in the southern Africa region during the era of destabilisation, direct attacks by state forces were complemented by the ‘sub-contracting’ of attacks on the ANC to a variety of proxies, most notably the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), but also vigilante groups such as the so-called ‘Black Cats’ in Wesselton township in the eastern Transvaal.[2]

For its part, the government dismissed these arguments and maintained that the violence was essentially ‘black on black’ and a consequence of the failure of black organisations to control their members. It singled the ANC out for criticism in this regard by insisting it was invariably the common denominator in the violence and was now reaping what it had sown in the 1980s with its irresponsible call for the townships to be made ungovernable.

The government’s sole concession to the ANC narrative was to acknowledge that the security forces might contain some bad apples, but it repudiated any notion of an organised conspiracy within the ranks of the police or military.

The government on the ropes

The government’s position on violence and irregular state activity was eventually undermined by the impact of two developments. First, by the so-called ’Inkathagate’ scandal of July 1991 in which The Weekly Mail and The Guardian newspapers exposed a web of secret state contacts with - and covert financial assistance to - the IFP, all designed to help bolster that party’s standing vis-a-vis the ANC.[3]

Indeed, in June 1991, in an interview with the UK newspaper The Independent, the retired SADF major, Nico Basson had alleged that the SADF was actually channelling weaponry to the IFP as part of a ‘comprehensive dirty tricks strategy’ designed to shape the outcome of negotiations and of a future election, a claim which the SADF dismissed and ridiculed.[4]

However, that dismissal looked less credible one month later in view of the revelations of covert assistance to the IFP and, in any case, Basson’s claims merely supplemented the evidence of a stream of whistleblowers from within the army and police. Overall, Inkathagate legitimised the ANC and SACP view that the government was untrustworthy and could not expect to be both a referee and a player in the transition, and it supported their argument that, if left unchecked, it would seek to manipulate the entire process to its own advantage.

The second development came in November 1992 with the raid by officials of the Goldstone Commission – the official body charged with investigating political violence - on a branch of military intelligence, the so-called Directorate of Covert Collection. The files seized by the Commission unearthed evidence of an extensive dirty tricks operation against the ANC and of complicity in political violence which forced De Klerk to acknowledge that, contrary to his earlier opinion, the rot in the SADF clearly extended well beyond a few bad apples.[5]

In December 1992, following an investigation ordered by De Klerk, and conducted by General Pierre Steyn of the air force, the State President dismissed 16 officers, including two generals and four brigadiers, and suspended seven others. He acknowledged there were elements in the SADF who were seeking to impede his goals and to derail the transition thus, to some extent, vindicating the ANC’s long-standing position.[6]

When viewed in conjunction with two other developments – the Record of Understanding signed between Mandela and De Klerk on 26 September 1992, which allowed negotiations to resume after the upheavals of mid-1992, and the ANC shift towards a series of constitutional compromises in which the SACP played an important role (see below) – the limited purge of the SADF contributed to a change in the political atmosphere.

It also helped pave the way for the breakthrough of 1993 in which the government and the ANC, now recognising a mutual interdependence, established themselves as the critical centre of South African politics. They began to drive the negotiation process forward under the ‘sufficient consensus’ mechanism in which they would ideally secure the consent of the smaller parties for their own bilateral agreements but, if necessary, would be prepared to proceed without it.

Internal ANC and SACP tensions

Throughout this period, the broad ANC alliance was divided into its radical and more pragmatic camps over how best to pursue its objectives and a parallel process was also underway within the De Klerk government. However, SACP members were to be found on both sides of that divide rather than acting as a homogeneous bloc coalesced around a single, unified party position.

For example, in 1992 Ronnie Kasrils of the SACP, was pushing for insurrectionary tactics and the so-called ‘Leipzig option’, the use of mass popular pressure against the regime and its allies in the Ciskei, Bophuthatswana and KwaZulu homelands. This was named after the mass protests beginning in Leipzig in 1989 which helped bring down the Stalinist regime in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and would ultimately result in the demise of the GDR itself.[7]

It is a supreme historical irony that some SACP members, though admittedly not only SACP members, were influential in arguing for the ANC to take the same path as the Eastern European protesters who in 1989 had ousted the very communist governments to which the SACP had previously given such unconditional support. Kasrils was seen as something of an adventurist – this being most evident in the events leading to the Bisho massacre in Ciskei on 7 September 1992[8] – while others in the SACP such as Mac Maharaj, Joe Slovo and Jeremy Cronin adopted more cautious, restrained positions.

However, it would be simplistic to view this division through the lens of those who were in favour of militancy and mass action – strikes, stayaways, and demonstrations of people’s power - versus those who were exclusively committed to negotiations. The real debate was more nuanced and turned on the precise blend of negotiations and pressure with all sides committed to both.

The questions dividing the ANC and SACP were: when should mass pressure be applied? In what circumstances and for how long? To what ends? Should mass action form a permanent backdrop to the negotiations or should it be utilised only as a means of redeeming the situation if the ANC was struggling to advance its goals? [9] SACP figures were to be found on different sides of these debates.

Equally, the role of Joe Slovo, the party chair and former General Secretary, gave the lie to the view that the SACP was always pushing for the most militant approach to the transition. In October 1992, he outlined the broad contours of what would become the ANC-government historic compromise of 1993 via his seminal African Communist article, ‘Negotiations: What room for compromise?’[10]

There, with considerable finesse, Slovo set out the balance of forces in the country as he understood them. This provided a blunt recognition that the regime remained strong, was not likely to be removed by mass action and that the ANC therefore had the option of working as creatively as possible within the existing framework or of abandoning the entire process and returning to various forms of struggle to change the balance of forces.

Slovo clearly did not see the latter option as viable – or at least he considered the costs of it to be severely prohibitive - and therefore strongly pushed the first. This gave rise to a series of compromise proposals aimed at addressing the concerns of key elements in the existing white state apparatus, particularly the civil service and security forces, about their careers, contracts and pensions, and their concerns that they might eventually face retribution, even Nuremberg style trials, in an ANC-led South Africa.

Slovo felt it was important to detach most civil servants and security force personnel, who were principally concerned about their personal interests and material wellbeing, from the hard-line ideologues and rejectionist elements hell bent on destabilising both the transition and, if necessary, a future democratic government.

In addition to this, Slovo also proposed a government of national unity (GNU) after an election which would allow for multi-party participation for a fixed number of years (five was eventually agreed upon) irrespective of the election outcome. Slovo hoped this would signal to these state actors, and to the white population more generally, the ANC’s interest in a reasonable compromise rather than a commitment to the seizure and monopolisation of power.[11]

The debate around these proposals frequently generated more heat than light within the ANC and triggered divisions which transcended any communist and non-communist divide but instead exposed the divisions within those camps.[12] Some communists, such as Harry Gwala and Blade Nzimande, were indeed hostile to the Slovo proposals seeing in them a potential capitulation which would emasculate a future ANC administration, but so were non-communists like Winnie Mandela and Pallo Jordan, the latter a consistent critic of the SACP’s role within the ANC.[13]

Most of these critiques were quite bombastic, often resorting, as the SACP’s Jeremy Cronin bemoaned, to an ultra-militant posturing without proposing any realistic alternatives.[14] They also greatly over simplified Slovo’s position as a betrayal by ignoring his insistence that a GNU should be a temporary mechanism rather than a compulsory arrangement permanently entrenched in a new South African constitution as the NP wanted.

He also insisted that representation in a GNU should be based on a party’s share of the national vote, rather than each party enjoying equal representation, and that there should be no minority veto within it. These were essentially short-term compromises or ‘sunset clauses’ designed to phase out white minority rule and phase in majority rule.

The road to ‘democratic rule in its full connotation’ [15] would remain open with full majority rule now being viewed as a process rather than an event. In any case, Slovo’s proposals were fully compatible with the views outlined by Nelson Mandela in his famous 1989 memorandum from prison to P W Botha in which he provided his own overview of the situation in the country.

In that memorandum he said the task ahead for white South Africa was to recognise that majority rule was a non-negotiable principle which must be applied if there was to be peace and stability in the country, but, equally, that the ANC would be required to address legitimate white fears of that outcome with great sensitivity.[16]

In his African Communist article, Slovo was effectively fleshing out Mandela’s sentiments and, given the absence of credible alternatives, his proposals carried sufficient weight to see them adopted into the ANC National Executive Committee’s Strategic Perspective document in November 1992. At the very moment in history when the SACP’s ideological stock was at its lowest, as it reeled from the aftershocks triggered by communism’s collapse in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the South African negotiations logjam was effectively broken by the chairperson of the SACP writing in the party’s rather arcane theoretical journal. This challenged the view that the post-Soviet SACP was anachronistic and irrelevant, but it was in keeping with a long tradition in which the party had provided some of the ANC’s most sophisticated thinkers and much of its more incisive analysis.

Struggles within the De Klerk government

The Slovo article was significant not only for reshaping the debate inside the ANC but also for giving added momentum to a similar process within the De Klerk government. The suspension of negotiations and the ANC mass action campaign in the middle of 1992 had brought about increasing tensions within the government between its more conservative ministers and younger, more liberal elements.

This divide invited comparison with the internal ideological struggles of the NP in the 1970s and early 1980s between its verkrampte and verligte factions, albeit in a new and quite different political setting. The conservatives included Hernus Kriel, Kobie Coetsee (who in 1984 had helped open the initial dialogue with Mandela in prison), Gene Louw and Magnus Malan who were seeking to outmanoeuvre the ANC by forming an electoral alliance with its opponents.

These would include the IFP, other homeland-based parties and those Coloured and Indian groups who participated in the tricameral parliament – the much vaunted ‘Christian Democratic Alliance.’ The younger and more liberal elements included Roelf Meyer, Dawie De Villiers, and Leon Wessels who regarded a deal with the ANC as the only serious option available on account of its massive support base.

They also argued that the whole purpose of the process launched in February 1990 was to reach a durable accommodation with the ANC and, while this underlying reality may have been obscured by the mutual hostilities of the 1991-2 period, it was now being rediscovered. Slovo’s article confirmed their view that a comprehensive deal with the ANC was possible and should be energetically pursued instead of chasing the dangerous chimera of a ‘Christian Democratic Alliance’ which would certainly be vanquished at the polls.

While De Klerk’s initial instinct was to straddle these competing factions, without definitively opting for either, his movement from September 1992 onward was all in one direction, towards building a de facto partnership with the ANC and a tacit though never explicit rejection of the IFP. [17] This partnership would eventually be prepared to confront and defeat those rejectionists on both the white and black right – allied in, first, the Concerned South Africans Group and subsequently the Freedom Alliance – should they remain committed to the destruction of the process.

The rejectionist coalition was duly faced down in Bophuthatswana in March 1994 - when the far-right campaign began to disintegrate along with the ‘independent’ homelands themselves - and in April 1994 when Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the principal rejectionist, belatedly bowed to the inevitable, abandoned his confedereralist ambitions, and led his IFP into the election with just over one week remaining until polling day.

Looking ahead

If the impact of Slovo’s article provided a reminder of the SACP’s continuing influence and relevance not only within the ANC led alliance but also in the wider political arena, it did not remove the party’s problems as it looked ahead to life in a post-election democratic South Africa. The party was still heavily burdened by its Stalinist past[18] and it had a clear association, through its prominent role in the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and its security branch Mbokodo, with the scandal of the brutality, torture and execution meted out to alleged dissidents in the MK camps in exile in Angola such as Quatro.[19]

While some of these abuses could be attributed to the paranoia and fear of infiltration which was a feature of life in exile, much could also be attributed to a culture of authoritarianism and top-down dogmatism which flowed from the ANC and SACP modus operandi of ‘democratic centralism.’ None of this augured well for a robust commitment to life in a pluralist liberal democracy in which the Constitution was held to be sovereign not the government or the ruling party.

Looking ahead, a range of questions now confronted the SACP which had been deferred by the need to secure, first, an acceptable negotiated settlement and, subsequently, a decisive ANC victory in the country’s first democratic election in April 1994. For how long would its alliance with the ANC last? At what point should it consider the so-called ‘national democratic revolution’ to have been completed and to begin pressing for a transition to socialism as an independent political party in line with its two-stage theory of revolution?

What would socialism mean in a post-Soviet era where capitalism was now considered hegemonic? Could a communist party remain influential in a constitutional democracy in a post-Soviet world, particularly a party which had given the Soviet system such an unqualified endorsement? Those questions would also have to be faced and answered without the presence of its most well-known and charismatic leader, Chris Hani, who was assassinated in April 1993 – in an unsuccessful attempt by the far right to abort the transition - and eventually without Slovo, its most able theoretician, who died in 1995 just one year into the new South Africa.

No one knows what kind of leader Hani would have become and certainly the SACP’s problems in a post-Soviet world went much deeper than the calibre or otherwise of its most senior personnel following the deaths of Hani and Slovo. That said, the mediocre nature of the SACP leadership under first Charles Nqakula (1993-1998) and Blade Nzimande (1998 to the present) - a leadership which, in Nzimande’s case, enthusiastically championed Jacob Zuma for the ANC presidency and therefore bears considerable responsibility for pitching South Africa into its worst crisis since 1994 - is reminiscent of the decline, both intellectual and political, of the Pan Africanist Congress without Robert Sobukwe and the Black Consciousness Movement without Steve Biko.

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