The election race, such as it is, is on. Posters swinging from the lamp-posts in the major urban areas tell us more or less where everyone is at. ‘Whites unite: don’t vote,” says the Herstigte Nasionale Party. ‘Sê nee vir die ANC,” says another. ‘South Africa deserves better,” says the Democratic Alliance.
The governing party’s strategy is vague, as befits a movement that knows it is going to romp home with flying colours anyway. ‘A people’s contract to fight poverty and create jobs,” it says, without telling us how this fight is going to be won, and without really demonstrating how its strategies over the past 10 years have brought us closer to this goal.
On the contrary, there is rampant evidence that both unemployment and poverty have rocketed — although this is not necessarily the fault exclusively of the African National Congress. Sure, the growth, employment and redistribution policy and the dumping of the party’s former socialist policies have meant that the focus of development has shifted elsewhere. The first priority has been to stabilise the country’s economy — even if this has had to be at the expense of social transformation across large swathes of the population.
Look, just for example, at the permanent state of violence, fuelled by poverty and political apathy, in almost every region of the country — especially places like the Northern and Eastern Cape, and rural KwaZulu-Natal.
But you don’t even have to go that far. Get off a plane at Cape Town International airport and your eyes can hardly avoid seeing the spiralling potential chaos of Langa and Nyanga and Guguletu and Khayelitsha, right on the edge of one of the wealthiest tourist destinations in the world. Just a couple of weeks ago, as happens at the beginning of winter every year with tiresome regularity, wild fire raged through one of the squatter camps attached to these informal settlements, leaving many dead and hundreds homeless, even more destitute than they were before, if that is possible.
As I say, it is not exclusively failings in ANC government policy that have brought us to this pretty pass —or rather impasse. We should not forget that the ANC inherited a wildly distorted social and political space from the racist reactionaries who had ruled it with such fervour and unquestioning determination before. Which is not to forgive the party’s failure to seriously tackle much of the fallout of this legacy.
Failure of communication of what the ANC is really about is one of the major problems we are faced with —which is why I say vague election promises don’t really help. Nor does the arrogance of knowing you hardly need to push any buttons to score an automatic win.
But on the other hand, this reticence can be explained by another reality, which is that the ANC, and its military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) achieved extraordinary victories against almost impossible odds in the battle to overthrow the apartheid machine. The party has simply not got out of the habit of refusing to blow its own trumpet, and boasting about why, as Deputy President Jacob Zuma said recently (to the outrage of the religious right), it was a party that could confidently expect to hold onto the reigns of power until the Second Coming, if not beyond.
It was, after all, the discipline of small, secretive units of the ANC and MK, that were prepared to risk all in a war against a political/military machine that was supported by the most powerful forces in the Western world, that ultimately brought the Nationalists to the negotiating table.
Operation Vula is known to most of us as a bunch of crazies who were prepared to continue the underground armed struggle after FW de Klerk had made the seemingly hugely appeasing gesture of unbanning the people’s organisations — including the hated South African Communist Party, ally of the ANC. The release of Nelson Mandela followed not long afterward. So why were Mac Maharaj and Ronnie Kasrils and others with less starry reputations still doing their nonsense after the fat lady had sung and the shouting was, presumably, over?
Conny Braam’s book, simply titled Operation Vula, tells you exactly why.
Operation Vula began long before those historic events of 1990. Very few people knew about it — in fact it was a tiny handful of rigidly trusted activists who made it all possible. Braam, then youthful leader of the Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement, was one of them.
The book, finally published in South Africa, in English, almost 10 years after its first appearance in The Netherlands, is an extraordinarily detailed account of how these activists gradually put together the mechanisms that would finally make the armed struggle for the liberation of South Africa bear fruit.
It is a tale of extraordinary bravery on all sides. It was led at all times by then ANC president Oliver Tambo —a man who has scarcely been given sufficient credit for the role that he played in the liberation of the country, and who died before we were finally able to share the privilege of participating in our first democratic elections in 1994.
Yes, you could dismiss them all as crazies. Three or four people who did not even trust the networks of their own organisation in order to do what they had to do — which was to set up armed groups inside the country, supported by courageous foreigners from The Netherlands, recruited by Braam, who operated from safe houses inside the country and in neighbouring states to build up stockpiles of weapons and information, and who were finally able to strike at the heart of the apartheid state’s military might — and win.
Many died in the process. Many others lived to tell the tale, and are now important (if soft-spoken) players in the post-apartheid dispensation. From the economic heartbeat of the country to the top of its military echelons, former participants in the Vula operation, without boasting about it, continue to be involved in the tricky transition of the country.
The book was written because Braam needed to get the whole personal passion of the thing off her chest — and because the story needed to be told. Not least in importance is her courage in being able to tell not just a political story, but a love story that was inextricably bound up in it — her own. Not to mention the cool courage of Dutch volunteers who were prepared to sacrifice all in a cause that was not, after all, their own — except in the sense that they shared a passion for justice, and a disgust at what apartheid stood for.
Operation Vula is an essential, compulsive, and compulsory narrative. Every home (and school) should have a copy.
Above all, its publication is a landmark that should guide our fearless reflection of what the country has really gone through. And explain to the real loonies, the unreconstructed constituency of the HNP and others, just what it is that has made it possible for us to get to where we are.