Eddie Koch
THE ANC’s armed struggle never amounted to more than a “sporadic and symbolic endeavour” despite a moderately high cost in terms of deaths and casualties, says an unpublished account of the liberation movement’s military tactics written by a former member of the organisation.
The study by Howard Barrell, entitled Conscripts To Their Age: African National Congress Operational Strategy, 1976 to 1986, presents a very different perspective on the ANC’s guerrilla activities to that presented in the organisation’s submission to the truth commission this week.
“Umkhonto weSizwe did not develop its armed struggle beyond the sporadic, symbolic endeavour it was when the ANC first resumed attacks inside South Africa in 1976, despite numerous decisions and attempts to do so,” says Barrell in his Oxford University doctoral thesis.
The work is probably the most exhaustive account of ANC strategy and draws on extensive interviews with leaders and members of the ANC and its military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe.
“On average, slightly more than two ANC guerrillas were killed or captured by security forces for every three of the 634 guerrilla attacks between 1976 and 1986 (almost all of which were carried out by the ANC),” the study notes.
“Since many, perhaps most, MK attacks can be classified as modest in their dimensions, this casualty rate indicates a high cost for what were minimal operational rewards.”
Barrell says that in 1985 and 1986 there was a shift away from sabotage operations aimed at industrial installations with an increased number of attacks being carried out on security forces and civilians.
But despite some dramatic incidents — including bomb blasts in Pretoria and Amanzimtoti and attacks on Sasol and Koeberg — MK remained largely ineffectual at a military level.
“The statistics indicate that on average between 1976 and 1986, for every three insurgent attacks, which were usually modest sabotage actions, security forces killed or captured two ANC guerrillas, recovered seven insurgent hand grenades, captured three firearms and neutralised more than two limpet mines.” These statistics, he says, correlate with the “frustrations and disappointments” described by ANC strategists and members interviewed for the thesis.
Barrell also points out that MK guerrillas had little success in linking up with and getting support from ANC political structures inside the country, with the result that short-term cross- border incursions remained the norm, while guerrillas who successfully infiltrated into the country generally had short periods of survival.
A deeply damaging consequence of this was that the ANC was never able to achieve its objective that political and military structures should cooperate closely — and give direction to the possibilities for popular insurrection that the organisation believed were developing in the townships in the 1980s.
“The failure of its armed struggle to make real military progress defined almost all strategic questions the ANC asked itself between 1976 and 1986. Likewise, almost all the ANC’s decisions to change operational strategy and structures between 1976 and 1986 were designed to remedy this failure. And a high proportion of these decisions were never implemented.”
“Non-implementation was most evident in cases where it was decided that political and military structures should cooperate more closely in the hope of creating the kind of organised domestic political base in which armed combatants might reasonably hope to survive. Personal and departmental rivalries and vanities persistently undermined these decisions.”
Until about 1988, “attempts to develop an internal underground leadership of seniority and genuine organisational power were repeatedly deferred or frustrated … The result was that the ANC underground remained fractured between political and military components, each comprising units that were usually isolated from each other; the only link these units often had with the `ANC’ was with the ANC abroad, which was unable to maintain a dynamic relationship with them or provide them with tactical guidance in what was, certainly from 1984, a fast- moving situation.”
This meant a further failure. The ANC was unable to control or direct insurrectionary activities carried out by informal armed groups that began operating quite spontaneously in the townships under the banner of the ANC and the United Democratic Front in the 1980s — called MK auxiliaries and then “grenade squads” by the movement’s leadership. “Various ANC leaders,” he says, “fought to control it [armed action by informal units operating in the townships] while it appeared to be succeeding and denied any link with it when it failed.”
The thesis says the ANC leadership became obsessed with the idea that apartheid could only be ended by popular armed struggle — “a kind of Sisyphian task to which all else had to be subject” — and that this mindset was cemented by the massive levels of violence unleashed by the security forces against the organisation and its members in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Yet by the mid-1980s the evidence strongly suggested that not only was armed struggle a failure at a military level but that popular political mobilisation, including the activities of the militant trade unions, provided a more serious challenge to the state than the ANC’s military campaign. Much of this political mobilisation and organisation had been initiated or conducted autonomously of the ANC,” says Barrell.
“The political dividend the ANC derived from armed struggle made the resources spent on it and lives lost in it worthwhile in the ANC’s calculations. Indeed, the heavier the ANC’s losses, the higher that return often was: the more MK cadres being buried or marching off to jail, the greater the evidence that the ANC had dared to struggle against a brutal, powerful and internationally infamous enemy.”
This, says Barrell, involved a tragic irony. Apartheid was most effectively challenged by political struggles on the part of ordinary civilians inside the country rather than by the armed actions that dominated the ANC’s tactics in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Therein,” says Barrell “lies the explanation for the paradox of the ANC’s trajectory: how it found its success in failure.”