Just back from Sweden, Howard Barrell reviews the role that the government and the solidarity movement played in the anti- apartheid struggle
Ronnie Kasrils needed a haircut. This was Harare in the mid-1980s, a time of close shaves for Kasrils and other operational chiefs in the African National Congress. So someone needed to keep watch in the mall outside the little barber shop. I felt childishly proud to do so.
Inside, the petite Portuguese haidresser set about the head of military intelligence’s black mop and nostril hairs. As she did so, Kasrils’s eyebrows seemed to bounce as fast as his pulse.
He paid and, as he joined me outside, I said: “Now where would we be without Moscow gold, huh?”
“Not Moscow gold, Howard,” said Kasrils, ever the loyal communist. “Stockholm gold. This is almost certainly Swedish money. They give us more money than anyone else.”
I had been introduced to a simple fact about the South African liberation struggle – one I should easily have guessed at but which had got hidden, I suppose, under a determination not to know what I didn’t need to know.
It was mainly the Swedes who were keeping me, and thousands like me, alive in exile. It was largely Swedish money that I and hundreds of others were sending to others inside the country to fund various activities against the government.
In the years since 1990, the extent and value of this Swedish help seems to have been obscured in the rush to government into which so many in the ANC have been drawn.
The Swedish government gave more than R1,92-billion to the anti-apartheid struggle and institutions involved in it (including this newspaper) between 1969 and 1994, according to Tor Sellstrom, a senior official in Swedish International Development Aid (Sida) who oversaw massive disbursements in the 1980s.
Of the total, Sweden gave more than R692- million directly to the ANC. About a third of this – R231-million – could be used by the ANC for operational purposes, as the ANC was not obliged to provide an audited statement of this portion of expenditure to the Swedish government. This included, presumably, Kasrils’s haircut.
Hundreds of Swedes, including Prime Minister Goran Persson, are due to descend on South Africa for a week-long cross between a Swedish trade promotion and a cultural festival. It looks suspiciously like an attempt to cash in on Sweden’s anti-apartheid dividend. If so, few former ANC exiles are likely to begrudge them it.
But how did the Swedes come to play such a role?
Former apartheid superspy Craig Williamson admits that he and other South African security officials found it difficult to explain this Swedish interest. “It is a question we tried to answer for a long time,” he told Sellstrom in an interview for Sellstrom’s history of Swedish involvement in the anti-colonial struggle in Southern Africa, the first two volumes of which were published earlier this year.
Sellstrom, like the many ordinary Swedes involved in supporting nationalist struggles in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa, also finds it difficult to explain their exceptional interest.
To some extent the support for anti- racist movements in Africa seemed a natural new direction for the energies unleashed by the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
But the Swedish solidarity movement had several quite unusual characteristics. >From its beginnings in the latter 1950s, liberals and centrists felt comfortable involving themselves in protests against apartheid and colonial rule alongside leftwingers in the dominant Social Democratic Party and communist parties. This might have been helped by the fact that Sweden had relatively small business interests in Africa.
Swedes also felt easier than other nations about a foreign policy independent of both the United States and Soviet Union. They were a nation asserting a neutrality in one of the most highly militarised regions. They did not see why African nationalist movements should be forced into one or other Cold War camp.
And, third, the bitter poverty experienced by ordinary Swedes in the early years of the century had made of the notion of solidarity with the poor and downtrodden a widely shared, basic humanitarian value.
The best explanation I heard on a recent visit to Sweden was: “a sense of decency”.
The Swedish solidarity movement with Africa started among students who wanted to help their black counterparts from South Africa and Namibia to study in Sweden. Among the latter was Billy Modise, then of the ANC and now South Africa’s head of protocol. These Swedish students raised money for these Africans literally with their own blood – they gave blood at clinics and donated the proceeds. Gradually church and trade unions also became involved.
By the 1970s a number of these students had entered Swedish politics or joined its foreign ministry. Prominent among them was Olof Palme, a former head of the Swedish National Union of Students’s international committee, who would become Sweden’s prime minister and be assassinated – some allege by a South African sponsored hit man – in 1986. They steered state policy towards active solidarity with anti-colonial movements.
But, as Ernst Michanek, more involved than any other government official in Sweden’s assistance to Southern African liberation movements, put it: “It was not the government that took the political initiative in these matters . The whole build-up of Swedish public opinion on Southern Africa came from below.”
Liberation movement leaders like Oliver Tambo of the ANC and Samora Machel of Frelimo had personal and direct access to the Swedish prime minister from the 1960s onwards – an honour accorded Tambo by the Soviet Union only after Mikhail Gorbachev become communist party general secretary in 1985.
The Swedish solidarity movement came to involve tens of thousands of people in a population of eight million. They gave millions in cash, hundreds of tons of clothing. They gave thousands of tins of sardines to the PAIGC, the liberation movement in the Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau, for sale in its “liberated zone”.
And one Swede, Bengt Nordenbrand, a horse-crazy computer boffin, donated the winnings from one of his racehorses to the ANC. The proceeds bought many pencils, exercise books and erasers for the ANC’s Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania. That horse was called, appropriately, Never Despair.
Howard Barrell was one of a number of South African journalists who travelled to Sweden at the Stockholm government’s expense this month. The trip was intended to publicise the Sweden-South Africa Partnership 1999