"What we have to look for is what stops the organic capacity of the working class"
Andrew Tait writes on an interview with Comrade Trevor Ngwane, January 2023, Gauteng South Africa. First published in the third volume of The Commonweal, May 2023.
Trevor Ngwane is a socialist, an activist, and a sociology teacher at the University of Johannesburg. He has spoken twice at Socialist Alternative’s Marxism conference in Melbourne, where I first met him. Back in South Africa in January ‘23 for the first time since I left in 1987, I met Dr Ngwane at a burger joint on campus. He was friendly as ever, and generous with his ideas and experiences. He is a lifelong Marxist - so internationalism goes without saying.
Capitalism is a system of contradictions. South Africa is, alongside Brazil, the most unequal society in the world. The paradoxes, like solar panels on every shack in a shanty city, are extreme. Contradictions in society also find expression in the African National Congress, the party that has, for better and worse, carried the hopes of the majority of South Africans for more than 100 years. Much of my interview with Trevor Ngwane was focused on the ANC.
To compare South Africa with New Zealand, I asked whether the ANC contained within itself factions that in other countries would be centre-right and centre-left rivals, like Labour and the Tories. Ngwane disagreed, I think because the history of the party is so different. He said that while there were bona fide social democrats, Stalinists, and of course neo-liberals in the ANC, he felt that ideological divisions were increasingly blurring, internationally and especially in the ANC. This has historical roots. The South African Communist Party continues to be a major player, as a partner in the ‘Tripartite Alliance’ with the ANC and Cosatu (the Council of South African Trade Unions). However, the SACP does not exist as an independent party but only as a faction within the ANC. To complicate matters further, the SACP lost hope in socialism when the USSR collapsed and sometimes will criticise the ANC from a right-wing perspective. When the ANC and the SACP were unbanned in the early 1990s, membership in the CP was allowed to lapse. The ANC was shaking off the influence of the CP, which had been the most powerful faction of the ANC.
Was Mandela a CP member? Ngwane pointed out that in the conditions of the Cold War, no-one knew who was or was not a member. Communists had to organise in secret in apartheid South Africa, but the CP was well-resourced because of its Soviet support. If Mandela was a member that does not mean he was ever a Marxist or socialist. An activist might join the CP secretly either from conviction, for connections, or for resources. Nonetheless, the CP undoubtedly had some great leaders, such as Joe Slovo, the head of the military organisation Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK). When the ANC was unbanned, Ngwane said, it was Joe Slovo’s name, as much if not more than Mandela’s, that young militants would write on the walls of the townships.
I asked about the danger that South Africa might have fragmented like Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Ngwane said that was never a danger, despite the attempts of the apartheid regime and the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party to foment division, because the ANC was always opposed to apartheid, to ethnic nationalism. He gave the example of his father, who was born in 1932 and so was 16 when apartheid was brought in. His father grew up in one country and then was forced into another, a Bantustan. Ngwane said ‘He would tell me, “I am a Boer izinja, a Boer’s dog”.’ The ANC was formed in 1912 as a pan-African organisation. It was founded by chiefs, so was never against privilege in principle but was explicitly pan-African.
The white Nationalist regime took power in 1948. It worked strenuously to create tribal homelands. These were not only fictional nations. The regime created radio stations in Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho and other languages, and school curricula in indigenous languages - the express design was to limit educational opportunities in order to create manual workers and not intellectuals. The ANC, in response, put such a stress on the unity of South Africa that it became ingrained in the party and in the whole of society. Talk of Zulu separatism from Gatsha Buthulezi in the 1990s, and the apartheid regime’s ‘third force’ strategy failed as soon as elections were held. Even in KwaZulu separatism was soundly defeated.
I asked about the relationship between the mass movement in South Africa in the 1980s, led by young militants, the UDF and the trade unions. Was the emphasis on armed struggle, which resulted in exile, a failure to predict the rise of the organised black working class? Is one of the problems of the ANC in government a legacy of the disconnect between the leadership that was imprisoned or exiled and the activists who remained in South Africa? I mentioned a columnist in one of the African papers who said the ANC leadership had never had enough connection to the masses because they had only returned in the 90s and had quickly become the ruling party.
That was one way of looking at it, Ngwane said. But being in exile and prison was hard and necessary. The ANC was part of the 1950s African anti-colonial movement. Their experiences were different - in some cases armed struggle, in others the colonial regimes withdrew without a fight. There was often a battle among organisations to be recognised as legitimate representatives of national liberation by the United Nations, which contained many recently liberated countries. Accreditation gave access to the UN and diplomatic leverage. For instance, the ANC,along with the Pan African Congress, its main rival, successfully instigated a UN motion that condemned apartheid as a crime. That encouraged resistance inside the police state.
Honest ANC leaders do admit that at the time they knew next to nothing about what was going on at home but as representatives on the world stage they had a position they could use to advance the struggle. The ANC’s overseas diplomacy was one of its great successes, he said. They skilfully managed to pull off a difficult balancing act in the Cold War. Based in London, they nonetheless received support from the Eastern Bloc, from Scandinavian social democratic countries and from British trade unions. Neither the PAC and the Black Consciousness movement were as skilful at diplomacy. This contributed to their collapse.
At the same time, although the sabotage campaign allowed the apartheid regime and their supporters like Reagan, Thatcher and Muldoon to cast them as terrorists, the ANC’s military strategy was not pointless. The defeat of the South African Defence Force at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988 was the culmination of a long military struggle that brought the military and security apparatus of the apartheid state to breaking point. The main military forces were Angolan and Cuban. In South Africa the ANC benefitted from the enormous boost in confidence the victory gave to the mass movement.
There was, however, a contrast between the younger and older generations. A recklessness took hold in the townships. Slogans like ‘They can’t kill us all reflected a resilience but also a kamikaze commitment among youth, just as in Palestine during the Intifadas. In exile this led to a mutiny inside the MK. Young militants who left after the Soweto uprising of 1976 typically wanted to join the PAC or Black Consciousness, but more than anything wanted guns. The ANC had the guns, so they joined the ANC. When they became frustrated with the ANC’s lack of action, they mutinied in MK camps in southern Africa. Those mutinies were bloodily suppressed.
The ANC leadership was older. They hated the Boers, like Ngwane’s father, but they also feared the Boers. The apartheid regime had a nuclear bomb and they were ready to use it. The name of their testing site was Pelindaba - Zulu for ‘end of story’, Ngwane said. They were Nazis and were prepared to destroy the whole country. The ANC leadership was for diplomacy because they recognised how unhinged the Nationalist politics was. Mandela said ‘we have to negotiate because these guys are crazy’. By the late 80s, the big bosses of companies like Anglo -American realised they would have to deal with the ANC and the ANC was able to successfully woo them, especially at talks (or rather, drinks) in Dakar, Senegal. White capitalists loved the ANC moderates but the transition to democracy was potentially disastrous for the country because the regime had successfully demonised the ANC among white Afrikaaners to the point that power-sharing seemed to be impossible.
The ANC had to go above and beyond to reassure bosses and the Nationalists that democracy would not mean socialism. ‘The ANC was brought in as a moderating force but its moderation brought the struggle forward and the working class recognised that.’ The working class overwhelmingly voted for the ANC, even if they were members of other parties, in recognition that they had managed to win democratic freedom for the working class. Now though, young activists ask whether the ANC gave up too much as a precondition for liberation.
Ngwane’s latest book is called Ama Komiti. It deals with grassroots democratic organising in South Africa. The origins of ama komiti lie sometimes in traditional decision-making, sometimes in trade union shop steward councils, and usually in both. The first mass strike was in Durban in 1973. Unions had to be worker controlled because apartheid police would pick off organisers. Shop stewards were liable to arrest and deportation, or worse. Dues were often collected by members themselves. Strikes were spontaneous and adversarial. If a boss wanted workers to go back, they had to negotiate with a mass meeting - there were no official representatives and no closed- door meetings. The bosses needed legal unions because they needed ‘responsible’ officials to negotiate with.
Street committees in some cases created liberated areas in the townships – ‘yard socialism’ in East London and Graaf Reinet township were high points in radical democracy in SA.
These committees were powerful because they linked grassroots struggles to an overall vision of social change. Originally the demand of the mass movement of the 80s led by the UDF and the unions was for participatory democracy, not representative democracy. This was the single biggest concession the ANC made to win power, Ngwane said.The ANC made this concession because the ANC (and SACP) understanding of socialism was the post-revolutionary USSR, not the participatory democracy of the Bolshevik period. The fall of the USSR meant the SACP in particular lost its political and moral compass.
The ANC and the CP, having lost their faith, have systematically attacked any vision of socialism as unrealistic, as impossible. This is their greatest fault, Ngwane said. The problem now is to try and show young people the sense of power and possibility that comes from being part of mass action. Workers who have had this experience hold it close to their hearts as their greatest treasure, he said. They keep it close, hidden, because they don’t want this treasure to be treated like trash.
‘Demoralisation is a central term for our analysis. Demoralised people are leading the ANC. They are like a Roman Catholic priest, no, like a Pentecostal priest who doesn’t believe anymore but keeps on talking in tongues. You can be demoralised without knowing it and do great damage because of it.’
Dialectics is at the heart of Ngwane’s politics. He said you know when an organisation is finished because people don’t debate in good faith. In a mass movement the collective decides and, if you miss a meeting, your comrades will fill you in honestly on the line that was chosen, and tell you when they disagree with it. When people lose faith in the movement, they distort the truth and don’t debate honestly.The difference between Ngwane’s outlook and that of many South Africans, especially white South Africans, is a belief in the organic capacity of the working class.
While I was visiting South Africa, I stayed at my aunt’s house. I spoke to her neighbour, an elderly white gentleman who had lived through the whole apartheid era. As a child, he would play cricket and swim together at the pool with his neighbours and friends, who were (or became) ‘coloured’. In 1949, the government deported coloured families from the neighbourhood. The old man said he remembered their father begging his father to help him. The reply: ‘My hands are tied’. Despite the privileges of whiteness and professional status, this gentleman, and his father, experienced history as something to adapt to, beyond his control.
For Ngwane the working class is the revolutionary subject: working people have the interest and power to create a better society for everyone. Whether it is the striking workers who forced the mining multinationals to talks with the ANC or the ability of people in informal settlements to win the everyday battle for survival and self-organise, it is in the struggles of working people that the future can be glimpsed even in dystopic conditions.
‘What we have to look for is what stops the organic capacity of the working class, for example the SACP. Our group has a saying: “if you can’t see it, you have to look harder”.’