Howard Barrell The UDF. A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983-1991 by Jeremy Seekings (David Philip/James Currey/Ohio University Press) For many thousands of people who participated in the United Democratic Front and its affiliates, reading this book will be like stepping once more through the seven tumultous years that brought this country to 1990 – years that are now partly obscured by the 10 that have followed. Its detail – provided in a happy marriage of narrative and analysis – will, however, do more than rekindle memories. It will, almost certainly, also enrich UDF participants’ understanding of the events and trends in which they were involved that finally brought white minority domination in South Africa to its end. Students of South African politics, along with those who seek a deeper understanding of the UDF, will also want to read this book – and will need to. For Jeremy Seekings has produced a remarkable piece of historical writing. It is very well researched (it draws on comprehensive interviews with most of the main actors as well as secondary material), is clearly and relatively simply written, and is closely argued. It also has that rare virtue in writing about revolutionary events, whether in South Africa or elsewhere: maturity. That is to say, Seekings is unafraid to assert his authorial hand throughout; he at no stage surrenders his judgment to special political pleading. The story of the UDF is one of history’s more remarkable instances of successful political mobilisation by political means against repression. Although the UDF’s political mobilisation had the potential to complement and enhance the ANC’s somewhat limited armed struggle – and did to some extent – the political damage this uneven, often chaotic front of organisations did to apartheid was its far more telling contribution. Seekings, professor of politics at the University of Cape Town, shows how, by the late 1970s, the white supremacist state in South Africa faced a crisis which necessitated that it reinvent itself politically. It sought to do so through a series of political reforms, which involved the creation of separate chambers of Parliament for the coloured and Indian minorities and the upgrading of urban and homeland representation for black Africans. The intention was to draw significant sectors of these populations into alliance with the white minority. As Seekings states in his conclusion: “These changes … threatened to tilt the balance of power markedly towards the state … The formation of the UDF, its founders hoped, would help first forestall this prospective shift, and then perhaps to carry forward, the faltering momentum of resistance – to stop the advancing ‘tide’ of counter-democratic politics, and then turn it around.” And that is precisely what the UDF did.
The richness of this book is the tale it tells of the uncertain and hazardous road to that victory. It starts with a convergence of thinking in the late 1970s and early 1980s among the more innovative thinkers in the ANC abroad and at home, as well as among autonomous others working to improve the lives of the black majority. They tended towards three conclusions. One, there was far more space for political organisation by political means than the ANC’s preoccupation hitherto with armed struggle had allowed many people to recognise. And more such space was being created, paradoxically, by the apartheid state’s efforts to reform itself. Two, there was considerable potential to achieve significant unity in action against manifestations of apartheid between a wider range of political outlooks than those falling within the ANC’s traditional catchment. And three, a broad front, guaranteeing significant autonomy to its affiliates, was the best form under which to assemble this array of forces. Abroad, those thinkers included Joe Gqabi, assassinated by South African agents in Zimbabwe in 1981, Mac Maharaj, Thabo Mbeki and, eventually, also the late Joe Slovo. Inside South Africa, the most significant were Pravin Gordhan, now commissioner of the South African Revenue Service, and Popo Molefe, now premier of North West Province, who also wrote the foreword to this book. Seekings meticulously presents the immensely difficult tactical decisions that confronted the UDF leadership throughout and the tensions that divided it. Neither set of problems was ever easy to deal with. For, except for the first few months of the UDF’s existence, many of those whose presence was needed to resolve these difficulties satisfactorily were invariably in detention, on the run from the security police, or holed up in foreign diplomatic missions. Yet, amazingly, the UDF – whose very disparateness and thinness was, paradoxically, also its strength – appeared consistently to out-think and elude the state’s attempts to destroy it. The UDF’s gift to the ANC was itself. The ANC, an organisation whose greatest talent is perhaps an ability to benefit from the efforts of (often autonomous) others, was presented on its unbanning in 1990 with an intact popular support base. The UDF’s gift to South Africans was as generous. As Seekings concludes, the UDF bequeathed a culture of pluralism to our politics – albeit obscured somewhat by the ANC’s current domination. He writes: “In so far as post-apartheid South Africa enjoys a pluralist political system and culture, with a recognition of the importance of rights, this was in part due to the rhetoric and practices of the UDF in the 1980s.” He might have said, “in large part”. Those South Africans – in the UDF and elsewhere – who, in the 1970s and 1980s, sought guidance on how best to help mobilise their compatriots against the state in the circumstances in which they found themselves know how little literature of quality on the subject exists. Most texts on struggles in other countries which deal with the issue have been written either by self-serving political leaders or by their sycophants. Here is a very impressive and useful exception. Seekings’ excellent study is likely to be sought out in coming decades by any serious democratic strategist elsewhere in the world who, pitted against a powerful and repressive state, wants to answer the question: “How might I best help mobilise most of my people against this tyranny?” His book stands at least as tall as Alistair Horne’s account of the Algerian struggle for independence, Savage War of Peace – despite the focus of Seekings’ book being somewhat narrower.