South Africa: 'Return to the Freedom Charter'! -- NUMSA leader Irvin Jim's Ruth First Memorial Lecture

@ http://thesaobserver.com/ruth-first-and-her-virtues-her-enduring-legacy…

RUTH FIRST´s PLACE IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN REVOLUTION - Part II

In her personal relations with Others, Comrades or not, she was quite the Queen Bitch!

I had received research funding from the Swedish Development Aid Agency SIDA to do a project on Migrant Labour between Mozambique and the Witwatersrand in the Early Industrialization Period (c. 1975/6) and a travel stipend from the Scandiavian Insititute of African Studies (NAI) in Uppsala around the same time to travel to southern Africa to complete this work.

I had done my primary theoretical research and preliminary survey during a stay in London @ LSE and SOAS and next-door @ the ICS (Inst of Commonwealth Studies on Russel Sq. between 1974-75 - where I met many of the ANC brass and made contact with the ANC Office there (where I met amongst others the future Professor Jordan of the missing PhD disrepute, Reggie September, the Chief Representative to Europe from Cape Town, who also knew my parents, the Pahad look-alike-twins from Fordsberg @ Josi/ Johannesburg, Essop and Aziz, the former a rude intellectual thug who worked at the "World Marxist Review" in Prague, not worth the paper it was printed on quite frankly, and was a flawed, obnoxious arsehole - the latter was joller (play-boy) who took me to all the "dives" in Greater London and so we were great pals.

In the aftermath of the Soweto Uprising (1976) and the great transformations it caused in all our lives then, I had moved from Lund (south Sweden) to Uppsala (40 mins to Stockholm the capital) to complete my research work @ the African Institute (Uppsala) there and to do solidarity activist work in the Greater Stockholm region. It was then I learnt that Comrade Ruth First would be in Copenhagen on a specific day to discuss the research project she was heading in Maputo on migrant labour between Maputo and the Witwatersrand mines,

- so I travelled down to Copenhagen (my former playground as a student slacker) and actually did meet with Comrade Ruth First and gave her copies of my credentials (cv, letters of recommendation from the ANC Office in London) etc, my research plans and the paper I had written immediately on returning from London at my Department (of Economic History in Lund) in 1995 an Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Migrant Labour in Southern Africa.

Now, on the research team that Ruth First headed in Maputo was an elderly gentleman, a Shangaan, Dr Alpheus Manghezi, who had lived in Copenhagen and was married to a Danish Lady, and he had been to my flat in Lund (I was married to a Swedish lady @ the time) for ANC regional conferences, so at least HE knew me and could vouch for me, politically and academically.

As a Shangaan (an ethno-linguistic group that straddles Mozambique and Norther Transvaal/South Africa) he was both interpreter, field worker, reporteur and an important link in that team between the "researchers" and "those being researched". Ruth then proceeded to Stockholm and Uppsala, as the guest of the Swedish Research Foundation linked to SIDA, who had given me funding also, so I also attended meetings with her in that area then.

1977 came. I had met someone else (formerly I was still "married") in Uppsala, a peace researcher and educationist from Oslo, Cand. Polit. Ragna Veslemøy Wiese (b. 1947), who had studied in Oslo but had blossomed with the Peace Research and the IPRA (International Peace Research Association) and we had children, twin girls, Hanne J. and Eline F. born on 27th December 1977, where we were now both staying, in Uppsala.

I had written repeatedly to Comrade First in Maputo, to the ANC Head-Quarters in Lusaka, requesting a necessary VISUM to get into Maputo and had made it quite clear that time was of the essence, as I had to complete field-work within a stipulated time-frame. Academic research has its time frames, deadlines and the competitive environment of a large capitalist conglomerate, and quite frankly, as individual steal research and findings for personal gain, lie and cheat, as in the private sector, for promotion and merits.

1977-8 was a period of great instability and de-stabilization in the southern African region as hit-squads of SADF-assassins of the South African rogue forces and their Askari killer-gangs would make sorties into neighbouring Botswana, Swaziland and as far afield as Lusaka to murder our comrades in "safe" houses and blow up ANC officials´ homes and offices. Things were not safe in the region and thus "clearance from above" was essential to get into a places like Maputo, which was on the firing-line.

And I waited and waited. No reply.

So eventually, I took a plane to Lusaka, via Luanda (where at the departure terminal awaiting a flight to Lusaka, I saw many of our MK soldiers who were also on their way out from Angola - they were being moved by the MPLA Government, both in the aftermath of the agreements @ Nkomati, with Mozambique, and part of South Africa putting pressure on the new black-majority governments in the region - the military invasion of the SADF into northern Namibia and southern Angola and the deployment of Cuban regulars there **.

I arrived in Lusaka and stayed at the General Teaching Hospital there with an old comrade from Sweden who had studied medicine in Rumania, Dr Mehboob Omar Jooma and who still had a room there, although he no longer worked there. I also met Cmde. Eddie Fundie and other ANC chaps who had lived in the Stockholm region previously, and contacted the Lusaka ANC Office there to see IF my VISA had been processed and when could I take a plane to Maputo.

Now, ONLY Ruth First from the SACP / ANC and as Head of the Research Office at the University of Maputo could grant this!

And this was the crux of the matter - she was actively delaying things and put me "on hold"!

I waited almost three months in Lusaka, fretting and nervous, sleeping rough, and having many anxiety attacks due to this new unstable environment. NO NEWS OF A VISA arrived despite urgent telex messages and so on. Met also Dr Palllo Z. Jordan, the PhD fraud, who was actually Research Assistant to Ms First, in Lusaka by accident and re-iterated my pleas and thought that would do the trick.

I might have been just another gekko or cockroach creeping on the floor, was how I was treated by the Great Comrade Ruth from the Northern suburbs of Josi, editor of the MK underground paper and The Guardian newspaper, journalist and supreme academic as I had to return to Sweden - no field-work done, extremely frustrated and angry.

I had been effectively pushed to the side, "blackballed", "blacklisted", and snookered and sent packing!

So I had to re-write my PhD dissertation, with no field-work having been done, but with a longer historical, philosophical and comparative introduction and finally completed this work and presented it to my Department (Economic History) in May 1983, in Lund, Sweden.

I was then staying with my new younger family in south Norway (Porsgrund/ Skien or Grenland), then working occasionally as a temporary relief teacher in junior and middle high schools.

Cmde First had not "taken a fancy" to the articulate, good-looking Indian-Malay-Coloured smart-allacy New Lefty researcher from Cape Town, and whose additional baggage were parents who had founded a rival and competing Nationalist political tradition, the anti-Stalinist NEUM * , and whose ´60 New Left viewpoints and behaviour had not fallen in the good graces of the Grand Lady from Josi/Johannesburg.

Then came the news of a letter-bomb explosion explosion in the office of Ruth First - Pallo J. was in her office ("he was in the same room as Ruth at the university in Maputo in 1982 when the parcel bomb exploded, killing her and seriously injuring him too. at the time and received minor injuries but Ruth was killed"), writes Paul Trewhela (see also: @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R

- "In November 1978 First took up a post as director of the research training programme # at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, Mozambique. There she continued to work for the downfall of the apartheid regime.

She was assassinated by order of (BOSS agent Craig Williamson, a major in the South African Police, on 17 August 1982, when she opened a letter bomb that had been sent to the university".)

I felt sorry for my then-buddy Pallo - but had no remorse for the SACP/ANC "chief theoretician and planner" Ruth First I can tell you. I had experienced what is known in academic circles as "the cold shoulder" and the proverbial back-stab, and did not like Northern suburbs Josi Jews anyway.

But Ruth was also a political rebel and intellectual maverick, writes underground co-worker and ex-detainee, painter Paul Trewhela:

"Whatever her youthful enthusiasm for Stalin's dictatorship in the Soviet Union, by the mid-1960s that had changed.

Her daughter, Gillian Slovo, writes in her family memoir Every Secret Thing (Little, Brown and Company, London, 1997) that when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the democratic Prague Spring, her mother "protested about the invasion."

Gillian Slovo writes that a "fight" went on in London over the invasion between Ruth and her husband,SACP head Joe Slovo (Mr Go Slow) -

... "for weeks, over family breakfasts, over the television's blare and through dinner parties they gave. They never cared who saw them arguing. "...

Ruth was the critic, the outsider who questioned orthodoxy...". (page 111)

@http://www.politicsweb.co.za/p....

So, whatever is the moral of this somewhat drawn out and meandering piece, my critics say I must "Come to the Point", but a long introduction is sometimes necessary

- when the waters below are so murky and overgrown with lush green foliage and dead bodies - that to see the "point" is not so obvious at first!

But I hope you have learn something from this morality tale as the new inquisition has already started ...

Dr Selim Y Gool, Rauland, Norway 19th August 2014
______________

* See: Further Notes Towards a 're-evaluation' of the NEUM Tradition in the Western Cape@ https://www.facebook.com/notes/selim-gool/further-notes-towards-a-re-ev…

# - Ruth First et al: Black Gold: Mozambican Miner: Proletarian and Peasant, Harvester, Sussex, 1983.

- Centro de Estudios Africanos (Centre for African Studies): Changing Labour Demands Trends on the South African Mines, with Particular Reference to Mozambique, Maputo, Moçambique, 1986.

On me (other articles and writings on the Net): @ http://www.google.no/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3A…

_________________

Cuito Cuanivale, the Cuban Internationalists and the End of Apartheid

South Africa´s military involvement in Angola was to span 13 years, from its initial incursion in 1975 up until the withdrawal in 1988. During this time, the SADF ran a series of devastating campaigns that took a heavy toll on Angola´s military and civilian population.

In the largest mechanised manoeuvre South Africa had undertaken since WWII, the SADF rolled into the Cunene Province, taking contol of nearly 50,000 sq. kilometres of land in ashore period of time.
Towns that refused to bow to the SADF were confronted with a three-pronged attack: long-range artillery bombardment matched with extensive ´carpet bombing´by the South African Air Force, clearing the way for an overwhelming storm of ground troops (including Jonas Savimbi´s black Unita troops).

The result was that, within a short period of time, virtually the entire Cunene province was evacuated by Angolans terrified of the onslaught that left 160,000 Angolans homeless (BBC). UNICEF estimated that between 1980 and 1985, 100,000 Angolans died largely as a result of of war-related famine. Between 1981 and 1988, 333, 000 Angolan children died of unnatural causes. The Angolan government estimated the cost of the war about $12 bn. in 1987 alone.

However, Pretoria´s plan for Angola was to unravel in early 1988 when the SADF attempted to capture the town of Cuito Cuanivale, and were repulsed by combined Angolan and Cuban forces, which were able, in the vacuum, to make advances into southern Angola.

Their failure at Cuito Cuanivale was decisive in pushing the apartheid state into comping into a belated peace through negotiations with Angola in August 1988 and, in a related development, granting independence to Namibia in 1990. However, it was only in 2006 that Angolan´s hostilities finally ground to a halt.

Havana´s Last Stand

""On 16 November 1987 in Havana the Cuban Central Committee made the dramatic decision to reinforce its 25,000 troops in Angola to counter a massive new South African commitment of infrastructure and logistics in northern Namibia which began in March. The South Africans, with the backing of the Reagan administration, were preparing for the most ambitious offensive inside Angola since 1975.

The Cuban´decision to counter it was equal in historical importance to the arrival of the first Cuban fighting contingent on 4 October 1975 which headed off the the South African units bent on installing their client FNL/Unita government in Luanda. The South African generals aimed at the capture of the town and FAPLA base of Cuito Cuanivale, 200 miles from the Namibian border. This would give Unita a completely new strategic base to attack central Angola (and finally install Savimbi and oust the MPLA government).

Through August and September South African units, numbering about 7,000 men, fought off a major FAPLA offensive to retake the town of Mavinga, occupied by South African and Unita since 1980 and an important supply base for them. In mid-September FAPLA units were encircled on the Loma river and took very high casualties.
The South African military, convinced they were close to a decisive victory which would change the course of the war, pushed on towards Cuito Cuanivale.

But in the dry and desolate plains of southern Angola the military tide began to turn against them in the early weeks of 1988 with the arrival of the first additional 9,000 Cuban troops two months after the Central Committee decision.
The troops, who would number 15,000 when the deployment was complete, and their equipment, arrived at the three ports of Luanda, Lobito and Namibe and swept in three columns along the country´s main west/east axes, from the coast to the mist, hills and forest of Malange in the north, to remote Luena near the border of Zaire and Zambia, and to the main war theatre of Cuito Cuanivale in the south of the country.

By mid-February (1988) these thousands of young Cubans were ready to take on the South Africans at Cuito Cuanivale in a set-piece battle of tanks and heavy artillery, including South Africa´s mammoth G5 and G6 howitzers, aircraft, and anti-aircraft batteries. The Angolan/Cuban side, in which SWAPO also fought, was led by the legendary General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez.

In the following weeks of heavy fighting they not only halted the South Africans, but defeated them so definitively that Cuito Cuanivale became a symbol across the continent that apartheid and its arms were no longer invincible.
By early May the South Africans had been pushed back and the Angolan army was 50 miles east of Cuito Cuanivale

… the Cubans fanned out south towards the Namibian border area … ahead of the Cubans some South African units,
together with the Namibian conscripts … retreated to the border area and in heavy fighting a dozen white South Africans were killed.

The Cuban-led campaign struck at the South African military´s confidence and helped to set the scene for quadripartite negotiations which began in London in May with Angola, South Africa, Cuba and the US at the table.
The central agenda items were the long-overdue independence of Namibia from South Africa, under the ten-year-old UN Resolution 435, and a timetable for Cuban withdrawal from Angola of its 40,000 troops.

The South Africans knew for the first time they had lost air superiority to Angola´s MIG23s, a fact which changed the military picture as dramatically as their defeat on the ground at Cuito Cuanivale.

Source: Victoria Brittain: Death of Dignity, Angola´s Civil War, Africa World Press, London, 1998.

The Cuban victory at Cuito Cuanivale, 1988 pp. 276279

"… Faced with the imminent defeat in the south, (president José Eduardo Dos Santos) asked Castro for assistance. This new request came just twelve years after the original Cuban intervention in Angola had turned the tide in 1975. Prompt Cuban intervention on this second occasion, as before, was to change the history of Africa. Cuba rescued the Angolan government from South African attack and paved the way to an end to apartheid in South Africa itself.
In the first weeks of 1988, with the arrival of the first 9,000 Cuban reinforcements, the military tide began to turn against the South Africans …

The long-awaited South African attack came on the 14 February, and their soldiers, in support of the CIA-funded guerrillas of Unita, penetrated the suburbs of the town.

The Cuban forces fought back and Cuito Cuanivale soon turned into a resounding Cuban victory.
After several weeks of heavy fighting the South African advance was halted. Cuito Cuanivale was to become a symbol across Africa, indicating that apartheid and its army was no longer invincible.

The South African defeat obliged its arms to withdraw from Angola.

This intern was followed by the withdrawal of South African troops from namibia, leading to a diplomatic solution - orchestrated by (US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) Chester Crocker - that allowed both for the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola and for the Namibian Liberation Movement SWAPO to come to power in Windhoek.

This strategic collapse in southern Africa was eventually to lead to the end of the apartheid state itself.

In February 1990, two years after Cuito Cuanivale, Nelson Mandela, the black South African leader, was released from prison.

He came to Havana in July 1991 to thank Castro personally for Cuba´s assistance in the anti-apartheid struggle."

Richard Gott: CUBA - A New History, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2005.

Cuba, African Nationalism and the Soviet Union

The Two Stages of Cuban Foreign Policy

"Immediately after having consolidated his control over the island´s foreign policy by the end of 1959, Fidel Castro adhered to a policy that was predominantly a mixture of Guevara´s brand of independent Communism and the Caribbean and Latin American tradition with which he had been associated since the late forties.

During the first period, Cuba´s policy in Latin America involved open and aggressive support for guerrilla movements and harsh denunciation of the traditional Communist Parties n the continent.

It was during this initial period that the Cuban leadership put forward guerrilla warfare as the strategy for the Latin American left.

By the sixties, Fidel Castro and his associates had become firmly wedded to the institutional structures of the one-party state along the general lines of the Soviet model established under Stalin.

The fact that the Cuban leaders modified the model in certain respects, like placing a greater emphasis on popular mobilisation - not to be confused with popular control - did not alter the fundamental structural kinship between the two models.

The early period of conflict between Cuba and the Soviet Union came to an end with Castro´s speech supporting the Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries´invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

This speech showed Castro to be still very critical of the USST and the East European Communist counties and was more a defines of the Stalinist mddl of the one-party state than the Soviet bloc as such.

After Havana withdrew its open support of the latin American guerrillas, Castro began to move toward a second foreign policy stage associated with the traditional Soviet approach.

However, even during this period of close partnership with the Soviet empire … objective features regarding Cuba´s position in the Western hemisphere and in the world made its foreign policy more militant than the Soviet Union´s.
Cuba´s geographical location within the geopolitical sphere of influence of the American empire, its small size and relative economic underdevelopment, forced it to maintain a substantial degree of militance to be able to survive as a society with an economic and social system inimical to Washington´s.

During this stage of closer ties to the Soviet Union, Castro supported the suppression of the Eritrean national movement in the seventies and, with much discomfort and in a low-key manner, the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that began in late 1979 and continued through the eighties.

Until then, Cuba managed to play an important leadership role in the movement of the Third World ("Non-Aligned Nations") in a manner that was compatible and supportive of Soviet goals.

Even when Castro´s policies were closest to those of the Soviet Union, in terms of nth his domestic and foreign policies, he avoided a total identification with the Soviet leaders in the eyes of the world.

As it shifted away from open support of guerrilla warfare ("armed struggle" warfare in Latin America, Cuba became increasingly interested in Africa, a region on the fringes of the American geopolitical sphere of influence where Cuban initiatives were more compatible with Soviet foreign policy.

Besides, there were fewer political risk to Cuba´s intervention in Latin America.

Cuba´s political and military presence in Africa (and in other parts of the world) also had a significant effect on the balance of its power relations with the Soviet Union.

Its global presence along with its development into a significant military power gave Fidel Castro greater leverage and room for negotiation with the Soviet leaders, who for these reasons could not treat Cuba as if it were a mere East European satellite.

The conflict between China and the Soviet Union and what was once called "Communist polycentrism" helped to give the Cuban government even grater room to manoeuvre from Moscow.

At the same time, the substantial subsidies the island received from Moscow and its economic dependence of the USSR allied it, until the late eighties, to maintain a standard of living that, although austere, covered the most basic needs of its population.
The Soviet union was able to compel Cuba to purchase its poor-quality consumer and industrial products at questionable prices … (the sugar quota issue)

…. while Moscow was able to use Cuban ports and airports to service its warships and aircraft and to establish a base (at Lourdes, near Havana) for electronic intelligence gathering and communications facilities.

During the second stage of its foreign policy in the seventies and eighties, Cuba´s strategy was orientated towards building an alliance with African nationalism.

Eventually, this alliance required the commitment of qualitatively far greater human and material resources than those Cuba ever invested in Latin America.

In the course of implementing this strategy, Cuba took independent initiatives without consulting the Kremlin, although they were generally compatible with the overall strategy of Soviet policy in the region even if occasional tactical disagreements arose between Cuba and the USSR.

The Cuban government was able to kill two birds with one stone.

It was able to exercise its own military and political muscle on the African continent without the risk of causing the clash with the Soviet Union that Fidel Castro´s earlier aggressive support of guerrilla warfare in Latin America had provoked. In the axe of Angola, Fidel Castro´s strategy, combined with his alliance with the Soviet empire, allowed him to play a very important role in the defence of that country against Western imperialism and its right-wing (surrogates) agents.

During the initial months of the Angolan operation, Cuba handled the transportation of its troops by itself but used USSR-supplied weapons. Later on, the Soviets took over the transportation operation and supplied the Cubans with a variety of weapons to stop the domestic and foreign enemies of Angolan national self-determination.

The Cubans, in alliance with the MPLA and with the help of the Namibian independence fighters (PLAN of Swapo), eventually won this conflict and delivered a heavy blow against the South African armed forces (SADF), the backbone of apartheid. This victory also opened the way for the independence of Namibia in the late eighties."

Samuel Farber: CUBA since the Revolution of 1959, A Critical Assessment, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2011.

- see especially Chapter Three: Cuba´s Foreign Policy - between Revolution and Reasons of State, pp. 96-130, esp. 105-114.
The most common reasons for Cuba´s International Solidarity with Cuba and Africa has been rationalised as one of "socialist internationalism" and "racial solidarity":

Piero Gleijeses ("Conflicting Missions" - 2003) and the prime historiographer and most quoted writer of this writes: "Prologue: p. 11 - Curiocity about Havana´s intervention in Angola sparked this book. It became the story of Cuba´s halting, self-interested, and idealistic steps in Africa, both at the governmental level and at the individual level, embodies by the thousands of Cubans who doctored, and soldiered, and taught in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.

And it became a parable of the Cold War, in which Washington was blinded by its singular focus on the great powers
…" - pp. 379 "By the early 1970s, reeling from the failure of his revolutionary offensive in Latin America and of his economic policies at home, Castro had softened his attitude towards the Soviet Union.

Cuban criticism of Soviet policies ceased, and Havana acknowledged Moscow´s primacy with the socialist bloc …
In August 1975, when Castro first considered sending troops to Angola, he asked Brezhnev to endorse the operation. In the 1960s, he had never sought Moscow´s approval before embarking on a military mission in Africa, but in the 1960s Cuba had never undertaken such a major and risky operation. To ask for Soviet support in these circumstances was not subservience but common sense …

When Brezhnev said no, Castro stepped back. At the time the MPLA was winning.

Three months later (November 1975), the South African invasion presented Castro with a stark choice: intervene or seal the fate of the MPLA.
It was a defining moment.
Castro defied the Soviet Union.
He sent his troops on Cuban planes and Cuban ships ("Operation Carlota"), without consulting Brezhnev, hoping that Moascow would come around, but without any assurance that it would.
He was no client."
"Of the 30,000 Cubans who went to Angola between November 1975 and March 1976, there were "few casualties" - at the most 200 dead, including 16 prisoners who had been captured by the South Africans, handed over to Unita and executed."

Victory in Angola in 1976 boosted Cuba´s prestige in the Third World.

"The Cubans are now the people who are regarded as the heroes in the black world", said a prominent SA member of Parliament. In 1976 the fifth summit of the Non-Aligned Movement praised Cuba for its intervention "against South Africa´s racist regime and its allies".,Cuba was chosen to host the next summit in 1979 (and therefore to chair the movement in the 1979-82 period). The Soviet leaders´initial displeasure with Castro´s decision to send troops to Angola had turned into warm approval by early 1976, as they concluded that Operation Carlota had achieved an important victory for Soviet foreign policy.

p. 389 "As US officials had predicted, the MPLA victory did not threaten major U.S. interests in Angola. Luanda´s economic tied continued to be with the West, the Soviet Union gained no naval bases, and the Angolan government soon sent signals of its willingness to improve relations with the United States.

The best epitaph to Kissinger´s Angola policy was offered by Kissinger himself. "It would´t be the first time in history", he rued in January 1976, "that events that no one can explain afterwards give rise to consequences out of proportion to their intrinsic significance".

Richard Gott writes of the period around 1988 (2005): Chapter 8: Cuba Stands alone - 1985 - 2003 pp. 272 -320 - esp. pp. 276 - 279

"The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 which had provided financial and subsidised it , and was a source of its military security over three decades, disappeared for all time.

In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed secretary-general of the Soviet Communist Party.
The arrival of Gorbachev on the Soviet scene was seen as aseismic change likely to cause problems in its Cuban semi-colony.

Gobachev´s use of the key words of glasnost and perestroika - the promotion of political openness and economic restructuring - could be dismissed as an internal affair if the Soviet Union with little necessary effect on Cuba.
(But) The Soviet leader´s pursuit of East-West détente with President Reagan was certain to have an adverse impact.
In private Gorbachev made it clear that the old economic relationships, with the price subsidies that had long helped to keep Cuba relatively prosperous, would have to be phased out.

The Russians, in future, would expect payment for their goods in US dollars.

p. 276 "Thousands of Cuban troops ere still stationed in Africa and their safety depended on the weapons that the Soviet Union provided for the Angolan armed forces. In Gorbachev´s view perestroika and the gradual withdrawal from Angola by the Cuban and Soviet armies would mean a more friendly relationship wight he United States, as well as greater resources for the Soviet consumer at home. Dissatisfaction with the reformist winds of change in the Soviet Union was not confined to Havana. Cuba´s close African ally was also worried …

The long war in defines of his (dos Santos) sustained by 25,000 Cuban soldiers and with a heavy strategic input from Soviet advisors, had been going well in 1986. But vigorous attacks by the guerrilla forces of Jonas Savimbi´s UNITA movement, funded and armed by the United States and backed by South Africa, had caused the MPLA´s army (FAPLA) a series of setbacks in 1987. Perceiving Soviet weakness, the South Africans prepared an offensive in southern Angola, their most ambitious since 1976.

Faced with imminent defeat in the south, dos Santos asked Castro for assistance …

Cuba´s first action was to send its most experienced pilots to Angola to Cuba. Based in Menonque, they were to attack the South African forces besieging Cuito Cuanivale. Prompt Cuban intervention on this second occasion, as before in 1976, was to change the history of Africa. p. 278-9 "The South African defeat obliged its army to withdraw from Angola.

This in turn was followed by the withdrawal of South African troops from Namibia, leading to a diplomatic solution - orchestrated by Chester Crocker - that allowed both for the withdrawal of Cuban troops fromAngola and for the SWAPO to come to power in Windhoek. The Cuban victory accelerated an East-West agreement on southern Africa, and the continued negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union, conducted by Crocker, were joined by Cuban and South African representatives.

All four con tries signed an Angola agreement at the UN in New York in December. The internationalist spirit of the revolution lived on, not with soldiers but with doctors and teachers, deployed in ever-increasing numbers throughout Africa."

The Path of Negotiations, "Secret Talks", Global Geo-Politics and its historiography

So now let us look at how the historians and professional scribes view this issue of the negotiations that followed on the defeat of the SADF at Quito Cuanivale.

"Recognising that South Africa could no longer extend its military occupation beyond the country´s borders without risk of defeat, and that the occupation of Namibia would inevitably become vastly more costly in both money and lives, (P.W. State President) Botha in August (1988) reached an accord to withdraw all South African forces from southern Angola and to begin negotiations for the independence of Namibia (which would likely mean that SWAPO would govern the country).

Background

"The combined impact of international sanctions and internal conflict was devastating for the South African economy. Investment in the capital goods necessary to develop a long-term import substitution policy caused, the cost of imports to rise by 60 per cent between 1986 and 1987. Unable to borrow further internationally, South Africa spent almost half its foreign exchange reserves in the 14-month period between August 1987 and October 1988 to service existing loans. The value of the rand plummeted, while the rice of gold (still South Africa´s chief earner of foreign currency) by the end of the 1980s was half of what it had been a decade before.
Inflation was chronic. Businessmen, who had benefited from the cheap labour policies for the apartheid state, became some of Botha´s strongest critics. Even within the Afrikaner business community and the government itself, there was a growing call for new political steps to be taken to alleviate the economic disaster facing the country."

p. 100-101 (Nancy L. Clark& William H. Worger: South Africa - The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, Pearson/Longman, 2004)

"With fighting bringing the country to an impasse, with the black revolutionaries unable to overthrow the white state, and the state unable to eliminate the revolutionaries, Botha contemplated negotiation, but negotiation not in order to compromise or surrender but in order to win. Such a strategy had already been raised at a meeting of the State Security Council late in 1985 when one of those in attendance, General Groenewald, reflecting the consensus of the meeting that some form of settlement with anti-apartheid forces was unavoidable in the long term, expressing the strategy thus:

´You can thus only negotiate from a position of power. If we negotiate with the ANC with the purpose of eliminating it, that is acceptable. If we negotiate with the purpose of accommodating it, that is unacceptable.´

Negotiations could weaken the ANC and destroy its revolutionary potential (TRC, 1998, vol. 2: 703)

Adoption of this strategy lay behind a series of meetings held from May 1988 onwards between a government committee (consisting of the minister of justice, the commissioner of prisons, the director general of prisons, the head of the National Intelligence Service Neil Barnard) and Nelson Mandela. A month later (August 1989) Botha was out of office … he suffered a stroke in January but in August resigned to be replaced by F.W. de Klerk who had taken over as leader of the National Party in February, and replaced him as state president. He was widely regarded as an "unremarkable foot soldier of apartheid".

At the opening session of parliament on 2 February 1990, he (de Klerk) announced that the banning orders on the ANC, SACP, PAC and 31 other organisations were to be rescinded (lifted). Such steps were necessary, he argued, were necessary in oder to carry out the process of negotiation that he considered ´the key to reconciliation, peace, and a and a new and just dispensation´(Hansard, 1990: col. 12) (op cit 102-3)

Hein Marais (2011) writes: Chapter 2: pp 39 - 68: SAVING THE SYSTEM

p. 59 "Early in the 1980s, former president P W Botha had warned whites they had to adapt or die´, by the late 1980s it was clear that adaptation within the paradigm of apartheid offered no escape. The political and social stability needed to restore and consolidate a new cycle of accumulation required a new political model that had to incorporate the basic demands of the political opposition:

* a non-racial democracy based on universal suffrage in a unified nation-state.

As early as March 1986, National Party (NP) ministers had grasped this point … what baffled them was how to proceed. A leap was needed. In 1986, corporate capital fell in line behind state repression - but without offering a congruous strategy for how to proceed once the uprising had been quelled.

By mid-1980s, however, a cluster of ´visionary´corporate and political figures in the ruling bloc (including the top security officials) understood that a political exit had to be carved open and that it would have to involve the ANC.
Meanwhile, two developments had combined to create a favourable balance of forces within the NP and the government.

The NP had jettisoned its far-right supporters and there had been centralised within the party and government
Reformists took heart from the crushing of the 1980s uprisings: by 1990, a five member committee headed by the Minister of Justice Kobie Cortzee, and National Intelligence Service chief, Daniel (Neil) Barnard, had met with Nelson Mandela 47 times.

Facilitation was provided by social-democratic entities like the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) (megabucks funded by Western governments - esp. Scandinavian and German-EU funds and development agencies) was instrumental in establishing the climate and forging the trust that would lead to formal political negations.
A new pack of cards had been dealt."

(Marais: pp 58-59); also; #1 below, footnote :Willie Esterhuyse: Secret Talks and the End of Apartheid, Tafelberg, Cape Town (2012)

AT THE CROSSROADS

Here are some of the factors that tilted the balance of power towards the proponents of political negotiations in the ANC, the NP and the government, and the corporate camp and to establish a broader context that favoured that route.

* International sanctions handicapped efforts to slow the slide of the economy(although how severely remains a point of debate).

Certainly, government´s options for dealing with with internal resistance were influenced by the prospect of harsher sanctions (boycotts and penalties).

At the same time, South African exports experienced an upturn from 1987 onwards, despite sanctions.
The main impact of sanctions seemed to be their negative effect on foreign investment flows and government´s ability to secure financial assistance to offset balance of payments difficulties.

Those pressures would not relax substantially until a political settlement was reached.

In other words, the economic sphere could only be rescued if the political framework could be restructured.

* The absurd duplication of state institutions (3 chambers of parliament, dozens of governments performing the same tasks for racially defined sections of the population, expensive homelands administrations), as well as the costs of the Namibian occupation and the war in Angola, all increased financial strains at a point when the economy was slumping into its worst recession since the 1930s.

* The NP had weaned itself from its old multi class social base, enabling it to free its policies from the ideological straightjacket of (grand) apartheid and transform itself into a party championing the interests of the white middle classes and bourgeoisie.

A power-struggle in the ruling NP ended in the election of F.W. de Klerk as leader, with the party´s ´young turks´ grouping around him.

* The internal anti-apartheid forces had regrouped with the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM inc. the UDF and new Congress-aligned union federation Cosatu) and were capable of noun ting resistance campaigns which, while not posing immediate threats to the state, could further raise the costs of avoiding a political force with sufficient legitimacy and authority among the excluded majority to make the deal stick. The ANC had clearly emerged as as that force.

* A profound process of class restructuring was underway in urban African communities.

A small but distinct black elite had emerged, especially in the homelands where this layer was also invested with political and administrative power. The rise of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in particular (and with it organised black political ethnicity) raised hopes that the hegemony of the ANC could be reduced during and after a negotiations process.

These developments fed exaggerated expectations within the NP that a ´non-racial´centre-right political alliance could be mustered to challenge or hold the ANC in check.

* The military defeat suffered by the South African Defence Force (SADF) at Cuito Cuanivale in Angola pushed militarist hardliners onto the defensive, as did Namibia´s almost anti-climatic achievement of independence and the progress towards a peaceful settlement of Angola´s civil war.

* Pressure from Western governments, principally the US, and their touting of the reassuring examples of ´managed transitions´ to democracy in the Philippines and Namibia softened the reluctance to opt for negotiations.
The options appearing before the ANC, in particular, and the (internal) anti-apartheid movement, in general were influenced by the following factors:

* Withering (unrelenting) state repression, along with organisational and strategic dysfunction (political conflict) in the democratic movement, had dashed the dream of overthrowing the apartheid state by force (military means).
Those favouring an unremitting confrontation with the apartheid state were weakened - a long period of rebuilding the internal popular forces lay ahead.

* The armed struggle never reached a point where it posed a military threat to white rule.
By the late 1980s its potency had faded to the point where the ANC would later admit ´there was no visible intensification´.

(taken together with the Mutiny/"Mkatashinga" in the MK camps in Angola 1982-84 had sown further dissatisfaction with the leadership by the rank-and-file, and resignation and defeatism in the broader layers of the exile movement). After the Namibian settlement, the ANC lost its military bases in Angola and was forced to transplant then as far afield as East Africa (Uganda). There was no foreseeable prospect of re-establishing them in the region again.

* The collapse of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union´s shift towards demilitarising its relations with the West (perestroika/detente) and dramatically reducing its support for revolutionary projects in the south) deprived the ANC of its main (financial and political) backers and effectively curtailed its armed struggle initiatives, and accelerated an endemic retreat by radical forces worldwide.

The radical social transformation (although based on a one-party state model of Soviet/Cuban vintage) projects attempted in Mozambique and Angola had been destroyed through a massive destabilisation campaign by the apartheid state, reinforcing South African hegemony throughout the subcontinent.

* During the 1980s, the ANC had received substantial ideological hegemony among the popular masses and their main organisations (the Charterist current), bolstering their claim to be the ´government-in-waiting´.

* The balance of power within the ANC tilted towards a well-organised (and funded) pro-negotiations faction (clustered around the core SACP figures of Slovo, Mbeki, Jordan, Loots) of "moderates" that got the upper hand over the hardliners ("militarists") embarrassed by the collapse of their insurrectionary strategy ("Operation Vula", Hani and Maharaj) and alarmed by the disappearance of the long-term support traditionally drawn from the Soviet bock.

Thus, political pressure had been put on both the ANC and the apartheid government - the ANC was notified that it, too was best served by "seizing the moment" and accept "constructive engagement".

The collapse of the Soviet bloc meant that post-apartheid South Africa would be knotted into a world wide economic system dominated by the US, Western Europe, Japan and now also China.

"Neither side could claim to have triumphed, but the balance of forces still favoured the incumbents (old regime), who remained in control of the economy, the state (particularly its repressive apparatus) and the media. The apartheid state had weathered turbulent uncertainties and retained the (provisional) support of powerful Western governments.

The retreat of radical projects (Cuba) internationally favoured the consolidation of centrist political alternatives.
Growing class (social) differentiation and the emergence of other contradictions in African communities (the rise of political ethnicity) emboldened those who believed that they could save the system by sacrificing it." (p. 61-62)

Negotiations, talks, compromises and normal political processes were to become the new paradigm of liberation: the discourse that spoke of the violent overthrow of the apartheid state had been foreshadowed by a more moderate one that seemed inclined towards a negotiated settlement.

It was the failure of a strategy centred on an insurrectionary of armed struggle that tilted the ANC onto the negotiations path reconnoiter and explored by Nelson Mandela since 1986.

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#1 Willie Esterhuyse: Secret Talks and the End of Apartheid (2012) gives us an "insiders" version of the wooing and courting of Mandela by the Afrikaner elite: It has a useful chronology/timeline for the uninitiated: From the dust jacket: "The full story of the secret meetings between ANC leaders and a select few Afrikaners in the turbulent 1980s, told for the first time by someone who was there himself.

Stellenbosch professor Willie Esterhuyse (he was also my philosophy professor on the "Island" in Durban harbour, on Sailsbury Island, Durban University-College in 1967). A verligite Broderbonder and a wiley political fox!

"Endgame recounts how these talks, held behind closed doors in England, … kick-started negotiations in South Africa …

Esterhuyse´s first-hand account, filled with anecdotes, offered a fresh look at many South African leaders.

It contains fascinating information on secret discussions in prison, what went on in P W Botha´s situation room, and how the NIS tried to save South Africa from widespread violence by covertly intervening in the high-stakes game played by "enemies".