THE LEGACY OF THE UDF BEQUEATHED TO THE ANC

What lasting impact did the UDF make on South African politics? In what ways, if at all, are post-apartheid politics marked by the imprint of the UDF? How would politics be different if there had been no UDF - if, for example, political change had occurred without any political organisation and mobilisation above ground inside the country? These questions bring us to a general question we can ask in contexts besides the South African one: how does the character of a major political organisation or movement prior to democratisation affect political life in the subsequent democratic era?

The legacy of the UDF is most directly visible within the political party that absorbed most of its leadership and supporters: the ANC. Unbanned in 1990, the ANC rebuilt its organisation inside the country, played the leading role in negotiations over the terms of constitutional change, and ran a victorious election campaign in early 1994. With 62 per cent of the vote, the ANC formed by far the largest party in the post-apartheid Government of National Unity, and its leader - Nelson Mandela - became the first President of democratic South Africa.

UDF leaders have played prominent roles in the ANC since 1990. The interim ANC conveners in five of the key regions were former UDF office-holders, and UDF activists were prominent in most (but not all) of the ANC RECs elected in late 1990. When the first ANC NEC was elected in mid-1991 after its unbanning, former UDF leaders were prominent but not to the same extent as at the regional level. Over a quarter of the elected NEC members had been office-holders in the UDF. A long list of UDF activists were elected as ANC MPs in 1994, and more besides elected to the provincial legislatures. Some acceded to key positions in the national government. Manuel became Minister of Trade and Industry and later Minister of Finance; Tshwete became Minister of Sport; after a spell as deputy minister, Moosa became Minister of Provincial Affairs and Constitutional Development; Omar became Minister of Justice; Mufamadi became Minister of Safety and Security. Other UDF leaders assumed office in the provinces. Molefe and Lekota became Premiers of the North West and Free State provinces respectively; later Lekota was 'redeployed' to the Council of Provinces after bitter struggles within the Free State ANC. Stofile, after a spell as ANC Chief Whip in the National Assembly, became Premier of the Eastern Cape. Many of the provincial ministers were former UDF leaders. Carolus, who was said to have decided against a government appointment, served as the ANC's assistant general secretary from 1994 and acting general secretary in 1997, before being appointed High Commissioner in London in 1998.

These former UDF activists were not the bearers of a single, monolithic political tradition. In the early 1990s there was much discussion of the difficulties the ANC would face in reconciling its different groups of leaders: the internal leadership, the exiles, and the Robben Island prisoners. But these groups had overlapping membership: some of the UDF activists had been prisoners, including Lekota, Tshwete and Nair, and others had been exiles - such as Tshwete and Cronin; most had been in the ANC underground, in one way or another. Moreover, as has been emphasised throughout this book, the UDF was a heterogeneous organisation: vast strategic and ideological differences existed between, for example, Molefe on the one hand and Mokaba on the other.

Notwithstanding the heterogeneity within the UDF, is it possible to identify ways in which activists' experiences within the UDF before 1991 shaped their contributions to the ANC thereafter? Former UDF leaders shared a common experience of and commitment to organisation building, and a commitment to non-racial or multiracial organising. These, however, were not unique to the former UDF leaders. The UDF, after all, had inherited existing traditions of organisation building and non- or multiracialism. What distinguished the former UDF leaders from most other ANC leaders was their experience of public organising above ground in South Africa in the 1980s - an experience that was recent and rooted in conditions that existed in South Africa in the 1980s, but not in the 1950s or 1960s. The ANC leaders of the 1950s had the experience of organising over issues such as the pass laws and restrictions on livestock, which were no longer on the agenda of the 1980s or 1990s. The UDF leadership also had the experience of using modern technology to appeal to settled urban constituencies comprising (increasingly) secondary-school-educated people in white-collar occupations.

The prominence of former UDF leaders gave rise to further allegations about the 'cabal', long after the UDF had dissolved. Most of these allegations were made by Winnie Mandela, who blamed the 'cabal', said to include Moosa, Morobe, Cachalia and Ramaphosa - the last of whom had never been a UDF office-holder but was closely linked to the UDF through the MDM and National Reception Committee -for ostracising her in 1989 because of the murderous activities of her football club. Mandela attacked the 'cabal' during her trial on charges relating to kidnapping and murder in 1991. When her alleged lover and subordinate within the ANC, Dali Mpofu, was sacked by the ANC in 1992, he also blamed the 'cabal' The following year Mandela, by then separated from her husband, hit out at the absence of democracy within both the exiled ANC and the internal UDF prior to 1990. ‘The UDF, hampered by emergency and security legislation, was unable to develop a democratic tradition. In that situation the tendency for small groups to make decisions on behalf of the people became wide-scale, and all regions suffered.’ There were still ambitious, power-hungry, 'elitist dictatorships' within the ANC, she wrote, urging that these be 'eliminated'. The cabal issue arose again in 1997 when Mandela was called before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The continuing attacks by Winnie Mandela may have contributed to the decision of two of the alleged cabal leaders - Morobe and Cachalia - to cease playing prominent roles in the ANC in the 1990s. Morobe, towards whom Winnie Mandela was, it is said, especially aggressive, went on to become chairman of the Fiscal and Finance Commission rather than run for elected office. Cachalia became a senior official in the Department of Safety and Security. But they were certainly not alone among former UDF kaders in choosing to pursue more bureaucratic than political roles. Among other prominent ex-UDF activists who chose similarly were Frank Chikane, although he ended up in Thabo Mbeki's Deputy Presidential office; Molobi and Sizani, who were recruited into the Kagiso Trust and later the Independent Development Trust; Andrew Boraine, who became chief executive of the Cape Town City Council; and Zac Yacoob, who was nominated as a Constitutional Court judge. For activists who saw their UDF leadership roles as involving co-ordination and facilitation and providing strategic direction, such choices made good sense. Indeed, the experience of leadership in the UDF in general can be seen as providing organisational rather than more orthodox public political skills.

Activists from the UDF as well as from the trade unions had organisational skills, which their counterparts from exile or jail had (at best) not practised for many years. It was not surprising, therefore, that the ANC appointed former UDF activists Molefe and Lekota to run its election campaign in 1994. They were assisted by Khetso Gordhan, among others. After the elections the task of running the ANC as a party was entrusted to activists with recent experience of organising inside the country: Ramaphosa and Carolus.

The character of the ANC's 1994 election campaign reveals another aspect of UDF influence: an explicit strategy of contesting the political middle ground rather than relying on its existing support base. In the election context, this meant reaching out to undecided coloured and Indian voters, and not just mobilising the existing, overwhelmingly African support base. The ANC jettisoned its initial election slogan, Now Is the Time, when it became evident that its triumphalism was off-putting to coloured and Indian voters, and adopted instead the more universal slogan, A Better Life for All. The ANC spent a disproportionate share of its campaign expenditure in the Western Cape, and most of its expenses there were targeted on coloured voters. For sure, this emphasis reflected political considerations: victory in the Western Cape depended on winning the support of coloured voters, and the ANC dearly wanted to win this province. But the presence of former UDF leaders was a contributing factor in the ANC's strategic choices.

The influence of the UDF is visible most strongly perhaps in the Western Cape. In this province the ANC faced the same strategic dilemmas that the UDF had in the 1980s: whether to focus on the province's small African population or to build support among the coloured majority. With the shift to electoral politics, winning votes became all-important, strengthening the advocates of a multiracial rather than a narrowly Africanist approach. The challenge facing the ANC was to overcome the perception among many coloured voters that the ANC was a movement for African people - in contrast to the UDF in the 1980s. In part because so few coloured Congress activists returned from exile, the multiracial approach was led by former UDF leaders; the Africanist approach was spearheaded by activists from MK. Repeated interventions from the ANC's national leadership helped to ensure that provincial leadership was passed from one former UDF leader to another: Tinto, Boesak, Nissen, Omar and Rasool.

Ironically, given the prominence of ex-UDF leadership in the ANC, calls for the revival of a UDF-like movement were strongest in the Western Cape. Intermittently between 1992 and 1996 there were calls for the formation of a progressive, broadly ANC-aligned organisation or movement for coloured people. This impulse was fuelled by a feeling among many coloured ex-UDF activists that they 'were just pushed aside, left by the wayside or ignored', as Boesak put it in 1992. More importantly, the ANC was unsuccessful in the contest for coloured support. The NP's strength in coloured areas - reflected in the national and local election results - gave rise to calls for an unambiguous return to the UDF politics of the 1980s. The experiences of the 1980s were painted in romantic, nostalgic shades: ‘If the UDF's support in the 1980s was anything to go by, the ANC should easily have won the Western Cape in the 1994 elections’. What the ANC needed to do was to become a 'home for coloureds as it is for Africans' - as, it was said, the UDF had done through its moral appeal, its strong emphasis on local organisation around bread and butter issues, and its diverse leadership. The influence of the UDF, albeit glorified, was thus important in both calls to reform the ANC and to form some kind of supplementary organisation. It remains an open question whether the ANC could have campaigned more effectively. But, contrary to the assumptions of both ANC activists and academic observers, it is far from clear that the UDF did enjoy such widespread support among coloured people in the 1980s. As we saw in earlier chapters, there is evidence that support for the UDF in coloured working-class areas declined after 1984-1985; the constituencies mobilised thereafter - mostly middle-class, in the Defiance Campaign - were precisely the constituencies that continued to support the ANC in the 1994 elections.

The influence of the UDF was perhaps weakest in Natal, notwithstanding the important role played by Natal activists in the formation and subsequent leadership of the Front. As we have seen, the UDF in Natal withered sharply after 1986, with the focus of Charterist politics shifting elsewhere. In 1990 UDF-linked leaders were marginalised in elections for the first ANC REC after the ANC's unbanning. In contrast to the Western Cape, Natal politics in the early 1990s were dominated by competition for the support of African voters, between Inkatha on the one hand and the ANC on the other. In this contest, the ANC chose to embrace a version of Zuluness, challenging Inkatha's former monopoly. Few former UDF leaders were equipped to play a part in this competition.

Ideologically, the UDF strengthened one strand of the Charterist movement. The UDF was, for the most part, steeped in the tradition of the Congress Alliance, with its emphases on non-racial leadership and multiracial strategy, on alliance building and aspiration to occupy the political middle ground, and on a discourse of rights. The UDF served to strengthen this tradition, although it was far from paramount in the mid-1980s. There were strong continuities between the ideology associated with the UDF and that of the ANC in the 1990s. The ANC emphasised unity, nation building and reconciliation; divisive ideologies, including those focused on class, were downplayed. It would probably be mistaken, however, to attribute this primarily to the influence of the UDF. The personality of Nelson Mandela and the pressure of global economic and diplomatic forces were clearly important, and probably, more so. Moreover, some aspects of the ideologies linked to the UDF have endured less well than others. The rights discourse of 1994 soon gave way to a more results-orientated discourse; the embrace of multiracial diversity appears to be wilting in the face of Africanisation.

In organisational terms, the UDF bequeathed to the ANC a political culture of robust internal debate and self-criticism. This was a tradition which the UDF had inherited from the ANC from the 1950s, but which appeared to have weakened within the ANC amidst the conditions of exile and guerrilla warfare. Some ANC leaders returning to the country seemed to be taken aback by the demands for consultation and the spirited criticisms made at regional and national levels. In the absence of detailed research into the ANC after 1990 it is difficult to assess how widespread and lasting was this culture of debate and criticism, but it was very evident in provinces such as the Western Cape.

Finally, we need to ask whether the UDF left a legacy to the ANC in terms of strategies and tactics. As we have already suggested, the dominant position within the ANC remained one that emphasised alliance building and contesting the so-called middle ground, through nation building and reconciliation. But, as the ANC drew closer to state power in 1990-1993, and then exercised it, the specific strategies and tactics of the 1980s were deemed increasingly inappropriate. Even UDF leaders in 1989-90 began to express reservations about the long-term repercussions of rent boycotts and of direct action, and UDF leaders had been critical of chronic school boycotts from the outset. For the ANC, social and political change would be effected through the state - which, after 1993-1994, they controlled -rather than on the streets. ANC leaders sought to end rent boycotts (with very uneven success), to demobilise the youth, and were very critical of sit-ins and the coerced 'detention' of officials by discontented students and others.

The ANC's change of perspective from 1993 is not difficult to understand, whether or not we agree with it. What is harder to understand is the ANC's failure to utilise the strategies and tactics of the 1980s in the transitional period of 1990-1993, when it might have chosen to maintain the pressure on the National Party government. In 1990-1991 especially, the ANC seems to have lost the momentum that had built up inside the country in 1989-1990. In the absence of careful research on the ANC in this period, we can only speculate why the ANC did not employ, for example, a defiance campaign against the remaining vestiges of racial discrimination and segregation. Was it because of the essential conservatism of the veteran ANC leaders? Were they distracted by the demands of organisation building and negotiations? Did they underestimate the remaining pitfalls along the route to democracy, and hence underestimate the need for countervailing pressures? Whatever the reason, the strategies and tactics of the UDF were not adopted by the ANC, even before its accession to formal power, and South Africa's venerable tradition of organised non-violent direct action and defiance seems to have run dry.

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