Contents

21 March 1985: Sharpeville Day – The Langa Massacre

Sydney Ntlanjeni was part of the crowd heading to yet another political funeral on that fateful day when 43 people were shot, most of them in the back, as they tried to escape the bullets fired by policemen from two Casspirs parked across the road: “They shot at the front row in front of us and I saw that the police were all visible from the top of the Hippos. The one behind was also shooting. They also shot up to the third row. I was holding a girl, she fell, and as I started to pick her up, I was shot in the back. I let go of her and I started running and I was grazed by the bullet. I ran up to the house which was in front and I looked back at the scene, and I looked at what was happening. There were people trying to stand up but these were shot at again.”

23 March 1985: The First ‘Necklacing’

Benjamin Kinikini, the Mayor of KwaNobuhle, and his group were surrounded and the house they were in was starting to burn down. To escape, they ripped off the barricade from a window and began climbing out. The crowd was there to meet them and when it saw the group coming out, people shouted “Joh, they are still here and they are not dead yet.” First Silumko climbed out, followed by Geelmuis, Gwala, Benjamin, Qondile, Dumse and then Pram. The crowd allowed them to climb out without immediately attacking them - there was a kind of respite in the frenzy. The group stood helplessly terrified before the crowd and pleaded for “forgiveness”: “Forgive us”, Dumse shouted, “we have done nothing. The people you are looking for, are not here.” The crowd responded by saying that if Silumko throws them the gun, they will be allowed to go. Silumko refused, some stones were then thrown and the Kinikini group passed up the last possible moment of negotiation that could have prevented the first blood-curdling ‘necklacing’ that soon followed.

15 August 1985: President PW Botha’s ‘Rubicon Speech’, Durban, South Africa

“I am not prepared to lead white South Africans and other minority groups on a road to abdication and suicide. Destroy white South Africa and our influence, and this country will drift into factional strife, chaos, and poverty. … I believe that we are today crossing the Rubicon. There can be no turning back.”

1 September 1987: Death Row, Pretoria Central Prison

As dawn broke on Tuesday 1 September 1987, and the first rays of spring illuminated the imposing walls of Pretoria Central Prison, Moses Jantjies and Wellington Mielies were fetched by the wardens from their place on death row. They were prepared in the usual fashion and then taken to a room where they were hung by their necks until they died. Accused of being South Africa’s first ‘necklace’ murderers, these two young men from Uitenhage were tortured into admitting that they were part of a crowd that was directly responsible for the brutal killing and necklacing of Benjamin Kinikini and his sons and associates on 23 March 1985, just two days after the Langa Massacre.

Why this Book

The stories captured in this book are both specific to South Africa, and of general relevance to the many who now face the challenge of confronting authoritarian regimes in an increasing number of countries across the developed and developing world. They are typical of the stories that shaped what is now referred to in South Africa in vague generalities as “the 1980s” – shorthand for the mass struggles that brought an end to white rule when Nelson Mandela and all the other political prisoners were released from prison in 1990. We all know that the stories of these struggles exist, but until we read them in their gory granular detail, they remain generalised, distant, somewhat romanticised and purely cognitive. We don’t really feel them.

These stories need to penetrate deep into our emotional and psychic make-up if we want to come to terms with the agonies and cruelties of the structural violence of apartheid, but also the intentional everyday acts of violent and counter-violent brutalities that became the norm in the 1980s. Arguably, nothing has changed – the violence just morphed into new forms of structural violence and new forms of everyday intentional criminal violence. But saying so would mean ignoring the momentous achievement of these mass struggles against white rule marked most clearly by that February day Nelson Mandela walked out of prison in 1990. But let there be no doubt

-the violence remains and eats away at the fabric of everyday life, preventing even the greenest of shoots from emerging as young entrepreneurs across the country are threatened the moment they succeed in establishing the smallest of successful businesses, or yet another activist who has stood up against injustice is murdered, or a woman who has dared to challenge the masculinities of those closest to her is raped. Hope is the greatest victim of the endemic violence of today. Hope, however, was what inspired the unarmed activists of the 1980s to stand up against the security forces that terrorised their townships, assassinated their comrades and intimidated their families.

1985: The Turning Point

It was these unarmed activists who were responsible for the turning point that was 1985. Unlike most accounts of the democratic transition in South Africa, the turning point is not 1989 when FW de Klerk became President and released Nelson Mandela and the other political prisoners from prison in 1990. Important as that moment was, unless we understand what led up to 1989, we cannot really comprehend what happened afterwards.

Like many cataclysmic massacres in modern history,1 the Langa Massacre that took place in Uitenhage, Eastern Cape, on 21 March 1985 marked a fundamental turning point in South Africa’s history. It took place on Sharpeville Day, so named to commemorate the massacre of 69 unarmed people in the black township of Sharpeville on 21 March 1960. While that massacre marked the turning of the tide in favour of the white minority regime;2 the Langa Massacre marks the opposite - the moment when the tide started to turn decidedly in favour of the internal mass democratic movement and the exiled liberation movements. Five years later, Nelson Mandela walked out of his prison cell. Four years after that, all South Africans voted for a democratically elected government for the very first time. Unlike most democratic transitions in Latin America (e.g. Brazil), Southern Europe (e.g. Greece, Spain, Portugal), Eastern Europe (e.g. Czech Republic) and even parts of Africa (e.g. Ethiopia) in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, South Africa’s was not a return to a democratic era that ended with the rise of authoritarianism, but the birth of a democracy in a country with no history of an inclusive non-racial democracy.

The Langa Massacre intensified a brutal reform-cumrepressive strategy spearheaded by the President, PW Botha, that began in the late 1970s. He was the Prime Minister from 1978 to 1984, after which he became President in terms of a new so-called ‘consociational’ Constitution adopted in 1983 aimed at enfranchising coloured and Indian people, but not black Africans. His so-called ‘total strategy’ doctrine combined a range of reforms inspired by a racially circumscribed form of neo-liberalism with a hardline securocratic strategy to repress the mass democratic movements and the countrywide rolling rebellions that began with the nation-wide schools boycotts in 1980, which began in Cape Town.

1 See Dwyer, P.G. & Ryan, L. (eds.) 2012. Theatres of Violence:

Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History. New York

& Oxford: Berghahn Books; Levene, M. & Roberts, P. 1999. The

Massacre in History. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.

2 Lodge, T., 2011. Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The global and economic dynamics of the time reinforced the political pressures for change. Compared to the early 1970s, the early 1980s were challenging times for South African economic policymakers. Average annual growth rates dropped to 1.9% between 1974 and 1985 compared to the average of 4.9% between 1946 and 1974. Fixed investments were declining, unemployment was rising, the average per capita standard of living was deteriorating, and sanctions were having the desired effect. The decline, however, was temporarily halted by the brief gold price hikes between 1977 and 1980 and good rains. The world recession of the early 1980s and resultant inflationary pressures reinforced the rising levels of domestic political discontent. In particular, the oil shocks of the late 1970s and early 1980s triggered inflationary pressures, resulting in inflation levels well above 12% for most of the 1980s and steep increases in the money supply.

To be able to invoke the legitimacy and ‘authority of experts’ to circumvent political opposition from within the ranks of his own party, the reforms spearheaded by PW Botha stemmed from the recommendations of a range of highly influential Commissions of Inquiry. In the name of ‘reducing state intervention in the economy’, these reforms included the Riekert Commission (1979) that recommended the ending influx control,3 the Wiehahn Commission (1979) that recommended that black workers be defined as legitimate employees, thus allowing them to join trade unions, the de Kock Commission (with reports in 1978 and 1985) which recommended the liberalisation of the financial capital markets, and the de Villiers Commission (1985) which recommended the ‘commercialisation’ of South Africa’s state-owned electricity utility, Eskom, which became the template for ‘commercialising’ many other state-owned enterprises in the lead-up to 1994.

The securocratic logic of ‘total strategy’ went through two stages: the doctrine of ‘counter-insurgency warfare’ (COIN) was the first phase (coinciding with the 1985 partial State of Emergency), followed by the Winning-Hearts-and-Minds (WHAM) coupled to counter-revolutionary warfare (CRW)

Controls over the movement of black people into urban areas.

strategy that supported the declaration of the national State of Emergency in 1986. For PW Botha, the purpose of COIN and WHAM/CRW was to repress those who opposed the reforms for long enough to buy the time needed for the reforms to take effect. With sympathy for his reforms in the West, he was confident he could pull it off. By the end of 1985, very few believed his story -even members of his own political party and top echelons of his all-white public service began to suggest that another approach was needed. By the end of 1985, few in the West still believed that the National Party Government was really serious about reform.

The Langa Massacre was the first in a series of events that all took place during the course of 1985 that tilted the balance of power in a way that led directly to the hunger strike of political prisoners in 1989, and thereafter the release of political prisoners, unbanning of the liberation movements, suspension of the armed struggle, a prolonged period of negotiations and finally democratic elections in 1994. What followed the Langa Massacre on 21 March 1985 was a succession of events that defined 1985 as the turning point.

In response to the escalation of mass protests after the Langa Massacre, a partial State of Emergency was declared in July in certain so-called “hotspots” around the country. This move reflected the failure of the regime’s ‘counter-insurgency’ strategy to crush the nation-wide rebellions.

The first ‘necklacing’ took place two days after the Langa Massacre, of Benjamin Kinikini and his group, the so-called ‘Mayor’ of Uitenhage’s black townships. This gruesome practice of burning perceived traitors of the struggle by placing a rubber tyre over their heads, dousing it in petrol and setting it alight started to be used in a number of other townships across the country.

The existing economic crisis was deepened when American, French and British investors sold off R11 bn of their JSE (Johannesburg Stock Exchange) holdings within a week of the declaration of the State of Emergency.

The Chase Manhattan Bank announcement on 31 July that it was not going to roll over South Africa’s short-term debts, triggered a deep financial crisis as 233 other international banks followed the Chase example.

Reading the insurrectionary mood in the country, the ANC in exile decided to launch Operation Zikomo, led by the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, to intensify insurrectionary activity within the country by sending (poorly) armed cadres into South Africa’s townships to join (and ideally lead) attacks on the security forces.

The President, PW Botha, delivered his infamous so-called ‘Rubicon Speech’ in August, where he arrogantly told the world that he had no intention of leading the “abdication and suicide” of the white minority.

Following the Rubicon Speech, the value of the rand immediately dropped by 20% and capital outflows accelerated, thus further deepening the economic crisis.

In September, the dual exchange rate was re-introduced to halt the accelerating outward flows of capital initiated by businesses and rich individuals who had lost confidence in the regime’s capacity to quell what was perceived to be a revolutionary threat.

A pivotal Sunday Times headline in October 1985 announced that ‘Businessmen and bankers inside and outside South Africa are united in believing that the crisis and its resolution are political not economic’. This was the first major signal that white business leaders had read the writing on the wall and decided that they could no longer assume that the state had the strategic and repressive capacity to protect their investments.

Mirroring the politicisation of business, the formation of the politically aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in November replaced the so-called ‘workerist’oriented Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU).4

‘Workerist’ was the term used to refer to non-aligned industrial trade unionism focused on workplace organisation and workplace demands for better wages and working conditions rather than on political demands for democracy etc.

Finally, by the end of the year, the UN and European Union had imposed comprehensive sanctions. This further deepened the economic crisis and reinforced the views of business leaders that they could no longer trust the state to resolve the economic problems.

By the end of 1985 it was, indeed, very clear that South Africa had crossed the Rubicon – but in the opposite direction to what PW Botha, the so-called groot krokodil5, had envisaged.

All those who today face the challenge of fighting increasingly authoritarian regimes around the world have much to learn from the dynamics that shaped the trajectory of South African politics in 1985. This story, however, is not a simplistic ‘people-versus-power bloc’ story; it is about the complexities, contradictions, ironies and unanticipated outcomes of everyday struggles against authoritarianism.

Uitenhage – The Microcosm that Tells the Bigger Story

The story that I tell here is about Uitenhage (renamed Kariega in 2021).6 Located just inland from the port city of Gqeberha (previously known as Port Elizabeth), Uitenhage became a small manufacturing city within what is now the Eastern Cape province. Langa is located within walking distance slightly to the north of Uitenhage’s central business district. In conventional apartheid terms, it was defined as a ‘black spot’ because it comprised people who should have been relocated to KwaNobuhle, the formal black African township to the south of Uitenhage that was established in 1967. Over the following two decades, groups of black people were forcibly removed to KwaNobuhle. The story I want to tell is about the struggles of the particularly well-organised community of Langa against the forced removal from their century-long place of residence in central Uitenhage, saturated in the gory details of

5 ‘Which means ‘big crocodile’ in Afrikaans – the term used to

refer to PW Botha at the time 6 Because the story told in this book is about a period that predates

the renaming of Uitenhage, the name Uitenhage will be used

throughout. This is not intended in any way to question the

legitimacy of the new name.

the violence and counter-violence of the times. Indeed, when this did eventually take place in 1986 in a particularly brutal manner under cover of the State of Emergency, this was the last large-scale apartheid forced removal before the democratic era began in 1994. It was also one of the first to be reversed.

Langa’s struggle was, in essence, the struggle to belong when the balance of power favoured the white people who believed that their town belonged only to them. But the story has a happy ending. The black majority who struggled to resist forced removals in Uitenhage were eventually victorious. During the very early days of the democratic transition that started at the national level in 1989, the Return to Langa campaign went into full swing. Not only was the Langa community one of the first communities to win back their land as part of the democratic transition that culminated in the first democratic elections in 1994; the success of the Return to Langa campaign marked the final end to nearly a century of repeated attempts by the white residents of Uitenhage to eliminate the Langa community from its rightful place in the very centre of Uitenhage, an urban centre with deep roots in the colonial era. To this extent, the Return to Langa campaign was just one amongst many grassroots initiatives that challenged the vicious logics of apartheid urban spatial planning that supported systemic political disenfranchisement. Uitenhage’s white community has never accepted responsibility for the decades of misery and suffering that it imposed on generations of black Uitenhagers. Nor do most of them even know the stories told in these pages about what happened in their town and in their name. Maybe, if any of them ever read this, they will rediscover the empathy that was obliterated over the course of two centuries of white colonial rule that, in turn, transformed the beautiful Eastern Cape valley that evolved over millennia along the banks of the great Kariega River.

Crowds and Massacres in History

Most of this book is about the way that crowds of people were activated to act collectively against state violence, structural injustice and for the vision of a democratic and egalitarian South Africa. Although the apartheid state used many different methods to counter the rebellions of the 1980s, it was the pre-meditated act of shooting at an oncoming unarmed crowd by a small number of highly armed men invariably standing or sitting in an armoured vehicle that resulted in the multiple massacres of the crowds of the 1980s – the Langa Massacre being one of the most violent and merciless of them all. In authoritarian environments, crowds and massacres are two sides of the same coin, and both shape history from below.

Everything hinges on the assumptions made about the collective intention of the crowd. To determine the intentions of activated collectivities means questioning traditional liberal assumptions about individual rationality and what happens to individuals when they decide to act collectively against injustice. One extreme is represented by a scholarly tradition best represented by Nobel Laureate Elias Cannetti who argued that when individuals join crowds a collective sense of power is created that destroys the individuals’ respect for authority and subverts individual rationality, thus turning him or her into a manipulable member of a “hunting pack” motivated by destructive primordial instincts. The leaders of crowds are represented as pathological paranoiacs who crave power for its own sake and not because they desire retribution or justice.7 In short, because crowds subordinate individual rationality to the logic of the collective, by definition the outcome is irrational behaviour.

A very different tradition is represented by E.P. Thompson, Frantz Fanon, Charles Tilly et. al., George Rude and Barrington Moore who reject the notion that crowds express primordial or irrational impulses.8 Instead, using a historical method absent in the tradition represented by Cannetti’s work, they explain the occurrence of crowd action in terms of the violation of shared moral norms or popular conceptions of justice by those who hold power in society. For Thompson, “the grievances [of the

7 Canetti, E., Crowds and Power, Hanser, 1976.

8 Thompson, E.P., The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the

Eighteenth Century, Past and Present, 50, 1971; Tilly, Charles, Louise

and Richard, The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930, Cambridge, MA.,

1975; Moore, B., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt,

London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1978; Rude, G., Ideology and

Popular Protest, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1980.

crowd] operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices.”9 For the Tillys, “[i]n general, justice - and conflicting conceptions of justice at that - lies at the heart of violent conflict.”10 This tradition is reflected today in the influential work by Manuel Castells in his book Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age.11 Drawing on neuroscience, Castells shows how crowd action during the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement made it possible for individuals to overcome their individuated fear of rulers so that they can mobilise their outrage to act collectively to challenge injustice and articulate alternatives. Along similar lines, I have argued elsewhere that without “thymotic rage” – the kind of rage that the ancient Greeks believed possessed individuals from a place behind the thymos where the centre of our being resides

-there is a limited chance that people will overcome their fear of rules and act collectively against injustice.12

Cannetti’s theory of crowd behaviour is implicit in police perceptions of the township mob presented most clearly at the Kannemeyer Commission of Inquiry into the Langa Massacre (see Chapter 2), but almost all other inquiries and court hearings when security forces are forced to justify their actions anywhere in the world. The crowd’s irrational violent intentions, the strange looking leaders (like the mad Rastafarian that supposedly led the Langa crowd), people carrying petrol bombs and other weapons, primitive rhythmic singing styles and often bizarre accounts of bare-breasted women, are all images of the primordial, clearly calculated (by men) to justify the role of the security forces as enforcers of “civilised” law and order rather than the perpetrators of mass murder.

This book questions the irrationalist conception of crowd behaviour and attempts to reconstruct the logic of crowd action, a

9 Thompson, E.P., op. cit., p.105. 10 Tilly, C., L. & R., op. cit., p.302. 11 Castells, M. 2015. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements

in the Internet Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. 12 Swilling, M. 2020. The Age of Sustainability: Just Transitions in a

Complex World. New York & London: Routledge. (Note: thymotic

rage refers to the classical Greek notion that rage possesses the

here, and is located within the thymos.)

logic that is determined by both the contingencies of the moment and the dull compulsion of deeper longer-run social conflicts. In the final analysis, the crowd in South Africa’s conflicts of the 1980s comprised collectivities united by the immediate belief that they had a right to attend a meeting or a funeral or a march of some kind to express their opposition to an injustice of some sort. Most of these crowd actions were not legally sanctioned, and many were forcibly disrupted by security force action. To act collectively in the face of violent retaliation by security forces and/or vigilantes, this required that crowd participants share a collective sense of fearlessness that only rage can make possible.13 It was a popular consensus fuelled by a deep upwelling of rage that resulted in the march that culminated in the Langa Massacre. It was based on the desire to enforce what was seen as a legitimate practice (mass attendance of a funeral) and not on the revolutionary objective to challenge authority for its own sake.

The other side of the coin, of course, is the massacre. A substantial international scholarship now exists that represents the phenomenon of the major massacre as a historical turning point.14 There is also a useful South African literature that has documented the most famous massacre, the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, and lesser known or even secret ones like the Bloody Sunday Massacre in Duncan Village on 9 November 1952 that resulted in the deaths of between 80 and 200 people – more than the number who died at Sharpeville eight years later.15

13 See discussion of rage as key to standing up against injustice in

Swilling, M. The Age of Sustainability: Just Transitions in the Complex

World. New York and London: Routledge. 14 For the best overview see Dwyer, P.G. & Ryan, L. (eds.). 2012.

Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout

History. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books; also Levene, M.

& Roberts, P. 1999. The Massacre in History. New York & Oxford:

Berghahn Books. 15 See Breirer, M., 2021. Bloody Sunday: The Nun, The Defiance

Campaign and South Africa’s Secret Massacre. Cape Town: Tafelberg;

Lodge, T., 2011. Op.cit.; Clark, N. L., & Worger, W.H. 2024.

Voices of Sharpeville: The Long History of Racial Injustice. New York:

Routledge. Although not about a specific massacre, see also

Rory Riordan’s excellent detailed overview of the Eastern Cape rebellion in the 1980s that includes accounts of a number of large and small massacres – Riordan, R. 2020. Apartheid’s Stalingrad:

Less interested in documenting the kinds of granular detail that I have captured in Chapter 1, the international literature is more interested in discussing the causes, morphology and narratives of massacres. What matters for these scholars, therefore, is the ‘before-and-after’, not the ‘minute-by-minute’ unfolding of the event itself. The accounts by Breier and Lodge of the Duncan Village and Sharpeville Massacres respectively are different – they both provide detailed blow-by-blow accounts of these massacres in order to reveal how wider power relations become holographically reflected in the way that the massacre unfolds in a specific context, and the immediate aftermath as police tried to cover up what really happened.16 The only detailed account of the Langa Massacre is an unpublished paper that provides an assessment of views of the Massacre, the lead-up and aftermath, and a highly summarised description of the event.17 What is clear from all these case studies, which range from the pre-modern, through the colonial and now modern post-colonial era, is that massacres perpetrated by state agencies or agents condoned by the state are not a mark of strength, but of weakness. Dwyer and Ryan conclude their reflections on centuries of massacres by arguing:

“…the act of massacre is usually a response to a certain political event, such as the killing of a prominent person, or the unlawful appropriation of property and that it has two objectives: to impose political domination by submission, and to eliminate or eradicate the group in and of itself. To this end, the massacre event is carefully planned rather than a spontaneous response and it tends to suppose a relationship of proximity between the assassins and their victims. Thus, the act of massacre is not so much an expression

How the townships of the Eastern Cape defied the apartheid war

machine. Johannesburg: Jacana.

16 Lodge 2011, op. cit.

17 Catsam, D. 2000. ‘“Those who command the ones that pulled the trigger see us as less than human”: the Langa Massacre and State Violence in South Africa.’ Paper presented at the Spring 2000 SERSAS Meeting, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina, 14-15 April 2000.

of power by a strong regime but an expression of a position of

weakness subsumed by the recourse to massacre.”18

It follows from this that the aftermath of a state-perpetrated massacre is rarely the reconstitution and reassertion of state power, but rather its gradual or rapid disintegration leading to some sort of transition (which may lead to a better or worse outcome than what existed prior to the massacre). Certain key massacres mark the moment when a given constellation of power relations starts to shift, often giving way to a new constellation of power relations that may more brutally reinforce the status quo (like after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960), or by contrast results in alternative power relations to those who perpetrated the massacre and/or those in whose name the massacre was justified (as in the case of the Langa Massacre). Lodge reveals how the Sharpeville Massacre marked a turning point that resulted in the banning of black liberation movements, jailing of political leaders and an intensification of the oppressive and exploitative nature of the apartheid regime.19 In short, the explicit deployment of various forms of intensified direct and institutional violence after the Sharpeville Massacre ensured that the balance of forces swung decidedly in favour of the apartheid regime until resistance reemerged with the 1973 general strikes in Durban and the student-led uprisings in 1976 that began in Soweto.

The Massacre that took place in Langa, a town in the Eastern Cape town of Uitenhage, in 1985 marks not a moment of strength of the apartheid regime, but its weakness -the moment when consistent bottom-up crowd action in South Africa’s black urban townships since 1980 significantly tilted the balance of power in favour of the internal mass democratic movement and the exiled liberation movements.20 The Langa Massacre, in short, defined 1985 as the year that this shift in the balance of power occurred. Five years later, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison; nearly a decade later the first non-racial democratic elections took place.

18 Dwyer & Ryan, op. cit. p.98. Emphasis added 19 Lodge 2011, op. cit. 20 Riordan 2022, op. cit.

How I Came to Write this Book

In 1985 I was twenty-five years old and I had a job as a Junior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). I taught courses on political theory, South African politics and Russian history. I was also involved with a group of academics and journalists led by the late Professor Eddie Webster who specialised in monitoring the growing number of mass stay aways as trade unions became increasingly politicised in response to the apartheid state’s repressive COIN and WHAM/CRW strategies21. The Braamfontein offices of the South African Labour Bulletin (SALB), a trade union-aligned journal, was the centre of gravity for what became known as the Labour Monitoring Group (LMG). Marcel Golding, an activist from Cape Town with a Trotskyite background, was a full-time employee of the SALB at that time

On 21 March 1985 the Langa Massacre hit world headlines. Thirty-four peaceful marchers in Uitenhage were shot by police, most of them in the back. No-one could have predicted that this would be followed two days later with the first so-called ‘necklacing’ - the brutal method of placing a tyre around a victim’s head, dousing it with petrol and setting it alight. After March 1985 it was often used to murder people regarded as ‘sellouts’ by activists aligned with the liberation movement.

As discussed in detail in the next chapter, the march that led up to the massacre took place during a general stay away that was jointly called by Uitenhage’s trade union and community leadership in protest against police brutality and forced removals. This was unusual, because to date, trade unions and community-based social movements had not often acted jointly to mount protests. This is what caught the attention of the SALB editors. Marcel Golding and I were requested to travel to the Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage region to interview community and trade union leaders with a view to writing up the story of the stay away.

Swilling, M. & Phillips, M. 1989. The Powers of the Thunderbird: Decision-Making Structures and Policy Strategies in the South African State, Centre for Policy Studies (ed.) South Africa at the End of the Eighties, Johannesburg: Centre for Policy Studies.

Marcel and I agreed to split up, with him interviewing the trade unionists and I went to interview the community leaders. This is when I met two men who would completely change my life: they were Mkhuseli ‘Khusta’ Jack, the highly charismatic widely known leader of Port Elizabeth’s so-called ‘civic structures’; and Weza Made, the quiet unassuming leadership figure within the rather amorphous community structures that existed within Langa township located within walking distance of the central business district of Uitenhage.

Khusta and Weza could not have been more different. Khusta was hyperactive, loud, charismatic, well-organised, street smart and the undisputed leader of a tight-knit group of activists who succeeded in building well-organised civic structures in Port Elizabeth’s black townships, including the famous street committees that became so central to the highly successful consumer boycotts of white-owned shops in the mid-1980s.22 While Khusta wanted to be seen to be leading, Weza was a reluctant leader. Thrust into leadership by his own desire to prevent forced removals (including the removal of his family from the family home) and by those around him who trusted his calm disposition, his shrewd integrity, and his way of using well-selected words rather sparingly. Everyone knew that Weza could always be relied upon to get things done in his quiet deliberate way.

Both Khusta and Weza were keenly aware that they needed to retain the support of the older generation, while at the same time ensuring that they were respected by the amabutho – the self-appointed youth squads who defined themselves as the informal ‘military wing’ of the ‘civic structures’. It was primarily the amabutho who engaged the security forces almost on a daily basis in an ongoing series of running street battles that were typical of those years. When any one of them were killed, that was an occasion for another political mass funeral where political speeches were delivered to galvanise sustained actions by all members of the communities.

22 Jack, K. 2018. To Survive and Succeed: From Farm Boy to Businessman. Cape Town: Kwela.

Everything I learnt about community organising and leadership I learnt from Khusta and Weza. How they kept together their respective core leadership grouping, built alliances with trade unions and local businesses, structured their speeches for mass meetings, connected with ordinary people in the streets, and negotiated with ‘the enemy’ when needed. Such a pity that these skills have, to a large extent, been lost.

After Marcel and I reconnected to compare notes and before heading home to Johannesburg, I had one last meeting with Weza at his home in Macuba Street, Langa. In his gentle, deliberate way he said: “We have helped you with your article, and you will do well from this. So how are you going to help us?” When I asked what help was needed, he said they need help to resist the forced removals.

I was deeply moved by Weza’s request, and also profoundly honoured to receive such a request. As I travelled back to Johannesburg, I wondered what in reality I could do. Little did I realise that the answer to that question would fundamentally shape the trajectory of the rest of my life, in particular my obsession with urban infrastructure that remains the focus of my work to this day.

Soon after arriving back in Johannesburg I came across a gifted group of architects and urban planners who were, like me, being approached by communities to assist them to develop plans that could be used to legitimise their struggles to resist removal and upgrade their living conditions. We began meeting in the Architecture Faculty at Wits over the coming months and resolved to set up what we then referred to as a ‘service organisation’ called PLANACT.23 None of us had any experience in building organisations, and for most of the following year the Executive comprised individuals who had full-time jobs. After the 1985 partial State of Emergency was briefly lifted in early 1986, it was redeclared as a National State of Emergency in mid-1986. Three members of the PLANACT Executive, Marc Feldman, Paul Hendler and myself, met soon after the 1986 State of Emergency

23 ‘Non-Government Organisation’ - NGO - was not a word used at that time.

was declared to debate whether to close down PLANACT in light of the State of Emergency, or carry on as best we could. With 25,000 activists detained without trial, nearly everyone we had started working with was by then in jail. We decided to carry on regardless.

After the decision was taken in 1985 to establish PLANACT in order to respond to the many requests from organised communities,24 I was mandated to visit Beyers Naude who was then Secretary General of the South African Council of Churches (SACC). It must have been around August 1985 when I went to Khotso House, then SACC HQ, and was told in no uncertain terms by his rather austere Secretary that I had no more than five minutes with Beyers. I went in, briefly told him my story about Langa, the Langa Massacre and the request to assist with developing an upgrading plan as an alternative to forced removals. He listened intensely, nodded, put his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket, withdrew a cheque book, wrote out a cheque for R10,000, handed it over and ushered me out. There was no request for a proposal, nor did he request a report on how the money was spent. That is how we started PLANACT, which by 1994 had a staff of 45 people with activities supporting communities across the length and breadth of what was then called the Transvaal (North, South, East and West), as well as Northern Cape and the Free State. PLANACT’s first project, however, was a document called Langa: The Case for Upgrade, commissioned by the Langa Coordinating Committee led by Weza Made.

Telling the story

The aim of this book is to allow the story to be told without trying to frame it within an explicitly defined academic framework. To this extent, it is not an academic book but rather a book that tells a story for a broad popular audience. Anyone anywhere in the world confronted with authoritarian regimes that depend on the widespread deployment of state violence to retain the status quo

24 See Swilling, M. 1999. “Rival Futures”, In: Judin, H. &

Vladislavic, I. (eds.), Blank: Architecture, Apartheid and After,

Rotterdam, NAI Publishers, 1999.

can learn from this story. The story should be read for what it is, and each reader can then use it to confirm, challenge or modify their respective worldviews. This is why the book that you as the reader will read is not the book that I think I am writing. I write to tell a story that I largely experienced first-hand in my twenties. You, the reader, will read that which is useful for making sense of your current context no matter where and what it may be. If you are up against authoritarian modes of governance, you will discover how crowds get activated and repressed culminating in (often violent) struggles that eventually succeed under certain conditions in achieving their goals. In our case, that was about ending white minority rule long before most assumed that it would end.

Some of the original research was conducted during the 1985 to 1990 period. This book does not pretend to have an academic purpose beyond telling the story, nor does it offer a full-fledged theory of urban politics or democratic transition. To this extent, readers should allow the story to tell itself rather than be told by me how to interpret these momentous events from a particular academic perspective. There is no claim here to neutrality. Where appropriate, my ideational influences and sources of evidence will be acknowledged by referring in footnotes to the relevant texts. In-text referencing and footnoting, however, will be kept to a minimum, except where these are necessary, such as when drawing on court records and transcripts, or specific contextually significant sources.

Let me admit up front that the language that I use to tell the story is framed by several referential frameworks. The most important is the ‘social history’ tradition in South African historiography -the view of history from the ‘bottom up’.25 My academic mentor in this respect was Tom Lodge - lecturer during my undergraduate years, supervisor of my Master’s thesis, and colleague in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand during the early 1980s. The other influences include South Africa’s urban sociology tradition represented by the work of my friend and colleague Edgar Pieterse

25 For a review see Posel, D. 2010. ‘Social History and the Wits History Workshop’. African Studies, 69:1, pp.29-40.

from the University of Cape Town;26 South Africa’s homegrown complexity thinking tradition associated with the works of Stellenbosch University colleagues (the late) Paul Cilliers and Rika Preiser;27 the wide internationally dispersed literature on urban social movements;28 the literature on relational governance that takes seriously the inner workings of state institutions and how these interact with the (often contradictory) dynamics of intra-community relations;29 the literature on transitions to democracy;30 and the literature on transdisciplinary research.31 Admittedly, I only discovered the literature on transdisciplinary research many years later, which helped me to retrospectively make sense of what I did in practice during the 1980s and early 1990s.

What I lacked then and even now is an understanding of the social-psychological literature on violence32 -mainly because I took it for granted that I was part of a war. This instrumentalist relationship with violence via a theory of war was reflected most clearly in the evidence that I gave in mitigation at the treason trial of Ashley Forbes and his 14 co-accused in 1988 - my job was to prove that he and his comrades defined themselves as soldiers

26 Pieterse, E. & Simone, A. 2017. New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times. Cambridge: Polity.

27 Cilliers, P. 1998. Complexity and Postmodernism. New York & London: Routledge. Also: Preiser, R., Biggs, O., de Vos, A. and Folke, C. 2018. ‘A complexity-based paradigm for studying social-ecological systems’, Ecology and Society, 23(4), p. 46. doi: 10.5751/ES-10558-230446.

28 Castells, M. 2012. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. 29 Jessop, B. 2016. The State: Past Present Future. Cambridge: Polity Press.

30 O’Donnell. G., Schmitter, P. & Whitehead, L. (eds.) 1986. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Latin America. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

31 Regeer, B. J. and Bunders, J. F. G. 2009. Knowledge Co-creation: Interaction Between Science and Society: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Complex Societal Issues. Amsterdam: RMNO. Also: van Breda,

J. and Swilling, M. 2018. ‘Guiding logics and principles for designing emergent transdisciplinary research processes:

Learning lessons and reflections from a South African case

study’, Sustainability Science. doi: 10.1007/s11625-018-0606-x.

32 Straker, G. 1992. Faces in the revolution: The psychological effects of violence on township youth in South Africa. Cape Town: New Africa Books.

engaged in a ‘war’ that was defined as such by the security forces who understood themselves as the coordinators of ‘counterinsurgency warfare’. It did not occur to me then that violence should in and of itself be an object of study. Everything about politics in those years was saturated in violence. Only now have I realised that the violence that we live with today cannot be divorced from the violence that was the crucible of the democratic society that eventually emerged to replace the structural violence of white rule. Our democracy is inspired by the quest for peace, but it comes with a violent shadow that may take generations to transcend.

A word on evidence. Two chapters are based on court records. Chapter 1 is about the Langa Massacre. My primary source of evidence for this chapter is the written record of the proceedings of the Kannemeyer Commission of Inquiry that President PW Botha established the day after the Langa Massacre in response to the global outcry that resulted from numerous reports that the police fired on innocent unarmed people. The report was submitted on 4 June 1984, approximately 2½ months later. These records consisted of dozens of boxes of typed documents that recorded word-for-word (mainly in Afrikaans) what was said during the Kannemeyer Commission. This was complemented by the many dozens of conversations and interviews that took place at the time by virtue of the fact that I was practically involved with many of the oppositional leaders and liberal intermediaries. Chapter 2 is about the ‘necklace murder’ of the Mayor, Benjamin Kinikini. I reconstructed these events from the trial records of those accused of participating in the collective action that resulted in this ‘necklace murder’. I discovered these court records by accident: I was in the small disorganised dusty offices of a human rights lawyer in New Brighton, a black township in Port Elizabeth. While talking about other matters I noticed a pile of boxes reaching up to the ceiling in the corner of his office. After discovering that they were the trial records of Moses Jantjies and Wellington Mielies, co-accused for the ‘necklacing’, the lawyer gave me permission to cart them away. Somehow, I managed to get them to Johannesburg under State of Emergency conditions.

For Weza

This book is dedicated to the late Weza Made. Like so many like him, he was never recognised for his heroic efforts to lead during times when leading meant risking death, detention without trial, torture and assassination. And yet, like so many like him, it was as if he knew he had no choice. Men and women like Weza who chose not to flee into exile lived every day surrounded by people who expected him to express their pain and dreams, but also solve their everyday problems. He was not a tall or large man - he was rather short with a solid but small build, and a clean-shaven handsome face. He loved playing soccer. He tended to move slowly and deliberately, and when he spoke, he chose his words carefully, speaking in a slightly hoarse voice that seemed to almost tremble with emotion. He was heard not because he raised his voice or because he cut an imposing figure, but because groups and crowds had to almost lean into his space to hear him. And when they did, they felt what he felt and decided that he could be trusted. I hope by telling this story, you also lean into his space to hear a voice that today has been forgotten.

Introduction

Thursday, 21 March 1985: it was quiet, hot and cloudless, the start of a typical March day for the Eastern Cape. Most people in Uitenhage’s white suburbs were still asleep as the few dozen riot policemen reported for duty at their Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage bases shortly before 6.00 a.m. Many white workers were sleeping late because the giant VW (Volkswagen) factory was closed for the day. Adhering to the stay away call, very few residents were planning to go to work in the black townships. The absence of the usual bustle of early morning cars, pedestrians and pirate taxis left what one policeman on patrol later described as a “deathly quiet”.1 There were some who tried to walk to work at about 6.00 a.m., but they were turned back by small groups of activists.2 No-one anticipated the tragic violence that was soon to claim the lives of 43 people, nor were the people of Langa to know that their poor dusty township would, by the end of the day, become a name synonymous with the worst of apartheid in the eyes of the world.

The Funeral Bannings

On Thursday 14 March, Captain Andre Goosen of the Security Branch acted in accordance with the new hard-line security tactics by approaching the local magistrate - Magistrate Steyn

-to issue an order banning the holding of funerals on weekends and public holidays. Goosen gave the banning orders to a Sergeant Snyman with orders to deliver them to the families of four victims of police action who were due to be buried that weekend.3 The intention was to prevent further mass political funerals from taking place because these had become the primary means whereby the political leadership galvanised the community into resisting police action.

In response, community organisations called mass meetings for the weekend where it was announced that the funerals had been banned and that they would be held on Thursday 21 March4 - this not being a legal public holiday, but rather a “people’s holiday” to commemorate Sharpeville Day.5 Pamphlets were then distributed urging people to stay away on the 21st to attend the funeral. Follow-up meetings took place after that in various areas.

1 Transcript of verbal evidence submitted to the Kannemeyer Commission of Inquiry into the Events at Langa, Uitenhage, on 21 March 1985 (hereafter referred to as the Kannemeyer Commission), p.184.

2 Kannemeyer Commission, p.886. 3 Kannemeyer Commission, p.16 and p.20. 4 Kannemeyer Commission, p.947. 5 Sharpeville Day refers to the day that police shot peaceful

demonstrators in Sharpeville on 21 March 1960 - this marked the beginning of a clamp down on and eventually banning of the ANC and other liberation movements.

On Monday 18 March, Magistrate Steyn was made aware of the consequences of his banning the weekend funerals - he had effectively assisted the activists in ensuring that Sharpeville Day was going to be a mass stay away and a major political success.6 Employers were equally concerned and together with the trade unions made representations requesting that the banning order be lifted because the result was going to be a stay away. As a result, Magistrate Steyn deliberated on the matter and when he saw Captain Goosen again on 20 March, he issued another order that stated that funerals were only allowed to take place on Sundays.7 This order was issued at 4 p.m. on the 20th and was again given to Sergeant Snyman for distribution.

Police vehicles then announced the new banning order in both KwaNobuhle and Langa. Sergeant Bradley from the Riot Squad in Port Elizabeth was in the vehicle that made the announcements in Langa between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.. Although it is clear that the Magistrate and Security Police intended to prevent all political funerals from taking place on Thursday in a rather fruitless bid to prevent a mass stay away, the wording of the order and the briefing given to those who announced the new order through loudhailers that evening was confusing and unclear. The result was that Sergeant Bradley and his team only announced that the funeral of one of the victims had been moved from Thursday to Sunday.8 The other funerals, the community could only have concluded, were still going to go ahead in KwaNobuhle on Thursday 21st as planned.

Besides the pamphlets distributed by the fleet-footed boys that scamper about the township, as well as the announcements made at many factories reminding people that there was going to be a stay away the next day so that people could go to the funeral, a mass meeting was held on Wednesday night in the Apostolic Church Hall in Tsoshowa Street to finalise the activities. One

6 Kannemeyer Commission, p.16. 7 Ibid., p. 16. 8 Kannemeyer summed up the lengthy testimony provided

by Bradley on the two occasions when he was called by the

Commission: All those who heard Bradley “must have thought

that the funeral, the funeral of Dlanga, is moved from Thursday to

Sunday.”, p.100.

participant in the meeting said that the funeral and proposed stay away were discussed and the transport arrangements were announced. It was agreed that no-one would go to work and people would meet at the taxi rank on Maduna Road between 8

a.m. and 8.30 a.m. to travel to KwaNobuhle. No mention was made of the bannings.9

The Policemen

Lieutenant Fouche, known to his friends by the nickname ‘Smokes’, reported for duty at Uitenhage’s temporary base at 5.45

a.m. He was aware that it was Sharpeville Day, but never discussed this with his men.10 Despite this, he never expected more trouble than the usual unrest conditions of recent times.11 Although he was the station commander in Kirkwood, this tough, hard policeman was brought over to Uitenhage to take command of an anti-riot detail on 15 March. On that day, he found the body of a policeman who had been killed by crowds in a township street12 and retaliated a few days later on 17 March by condoning the vicious beating of young black men in the local police station.13 The human rights campaigner Molly Blackburn who witnessed the beating in police cells, reported Lt Fouche to his Station Commander for being drunk on duty. He was aged 43, had served in the police force since 1961 in various small Eastern Cape towns and had received medals for bravery, merit, loyalty and one for outstanding service during his stints on the South West African / Angolan border. After attending an anti-terrorism course in 1973, he spent 68 days fighting in East Caprivi and Rhodesia in 1974, 106 days in Ovambo in 1977 and 110 days in Ovambo in 1980.14 Fouche was in charge of 2 Casspirs and a Land Rover. There were six men in his Casspir: Sergeant Noonen, one of Fouche’s men brought in from Kirkwood and who was armed with a 9mm pistol which was his personal possession; Adjutant Doyle, armed with a shotgun and his personal 9mm pistol; Sergeant Smit who had an R1 rifle; Sergeant

9 Kannemeyer Commission, p.963. 10 Ibid., p.213. 11 Ibid., p.213. 12 Ibid., p.224. 13 Evening Post, 18.3.85. 14 Kannemeyer Commission, p.178-80.

Manama, another Fouche man from Kirkwood and armed with a shotgun; Constable Danster who had an R1 rifle and Constable Marais who was armed with a shotgun. Fouche had an R1 rifle.

Fouche took charge of one Casspir (a certain kind of armoured vehicle) and put Adjutant Officer Pentz in charge of the other. Pentz, also an Eastern Cape policeman, had behind him 18 years’ experience including three years as station commander in Glenconnor from 1972 to 1975. After this, he was posted to Uitenhage’s detective branch and played a role in the police units that put down township rebellions in 1976. He had performed two stints on the border, three months in 1971 and three-and-ahalf in 1980 when he received two medals.15 On 21 March, Pentz brought his own 9mm Beretta to work and wore it in a holster on his side.

Pentz had six men in his Casspir: Sergeant Stumke, a seasoned policeman with 13 years’ experience in Uitenhage and the recipient of the SAP (South African Police) anti-terrorism medal in 1984; Sergeant Rudman, a 30-year-old who attended police college in Pretoria, participated in counter-insurgency courses in 1976 and underwent border duty in 1977, 1981 and 1984, during which he received a medal for meritorious service; Constable Andrews, a 33-year-old coloured man with seven years in the force behind him, was the only one in the Casspir who could speak Xhosa because he grew up in the poor multi-racial Port Elizabeth suburb of Korsten; and then there was Constable Els and another two coloured policemen, Constables Keteldas and Loff.16

In addition to the Casspirs and Land Rover from Uitenhage’s temporary base, four other units from Port Elizabeth were patrolling Uitenhage. Warrant Officer Bam and Sergeant Le Roux were each in charge of Casspirs, while Sergeant Lekuba commanded a Casspir with a detail of black Transvaal policemen. Sergeant Makgobokoane was in charge of a troop carrier.17 None

15 Kannemeyer Commission, pp.40-42. 16 Kannemeyer Commission, p.42. 17 Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Incident

which Occurred on 21 March 1985 at Uitenhage, hereafter referred

to as The Report), p.17. Note: This was the final report of the

Kannemeyer Commission based on the large quantity of evidence

of these units carried teargas, birdshot, rubber bullets or a loudhailer; only heavy ammunition like R1 rifles and SSG (special small game) shotgun rounds.

After Adjutant Meyer had dispensed SSG and R1 ammunition from the magazine at the base, the Casspirs entered the townships. None of them were worried about the fact that they had no teargas, rubber bullets, loudhailers or the lighter birdshot. The policemen sensed the tense quiet and noticed how empty the streets were. Stumke thought that he had better be “more on guard than normal for these rioters”18 and Fouche thought “this stayaway was one hundred per cent successful”.19 Pentz said that he knew about the stay away call and cancellation of the funerals, but was unaware of the significance of Sharpeville Day.20

Pentz went to patrol KwaNobuhle township to the south of central Uitenhage, while Fouche drove to Langa, located a short distance to the north of central Uitenhage. Pentz arrived in KwaNobuhle at about 6.30 a.m. and as he turned into Matanzima Road, he found a group turning back pedestrians and cars trying to leave KwaNobuhle. An attempt was made to disperse the group and Stumke fired a shot. This probably failed to disperse the group because Pentz radioed Fouche for assistance.21

Fouche arrived in Langa just after 6 a.m. and reported by radio that everything was “still and quiet”.22 Responding to Pentz’s report of trouble in KwaNobuhle, he left Langa soon after 7 a.m. and arrived in KwaNobuhle around 8 a.m. On his way he must have had a tiff with a television crew, because at 7.35 a.m. he reported having bashed their car. This probably explains why he took so long to get to KwaNobuhle. (Television crews were frequently targets of frustrated and aggressive riot policemen.)

From 8 a.m. to 9.20 a.m., Fouche concentrated on breaking up groups and protecting strategic points (such as main

presented to the Commission which has been referenced as

Kannemeyer Commission. 18 Kannemeyer Commission, p.364. 19 Kannemeyer Commission, p.217. 20 Kannemeyer Commission, pp.78-9. 21 Kannemeyer Commission, p.45. 22 Kannemeyer Commission, pp.48.

entrances) from being occupied by stay away supporters.23 Bam and Le Roux were also in KwaNobuhle, but Fouche was unaware of them. At 9 a.m. Pentz went back to the police station to pick up Constable Groep, an additional member of his crew. Instead of returning to KwaNobuhle where Fouche was now, Pentz decided to head for Langa. He took the Kamesh Road entrance, turned right into 23rd Avenue and then right again into Maduna Road. He entered Maduna Road about a block away from the square where the taxis and buses congregated. That is when he saw a crowd of about 250 gathered on the square.24

Pentz and his crew were not the first police patrol to see the crowd. Sergeant Lekuba drove straight to Langa from his Port Elizabeth base and at about 9 a.m. came across a group gathered on Maduna Square, in central Langa. Although the group was singing and some had raised clenched fists, his impression was not that they were in any way unruly or threatening. He drove up a side street out of sight of the crowd and tried to make radio contact with other units to notify them about the crowd. He stayed there for between 20 and 30 minutes as he tried in vain to get his faulty radio to work.25

When the police encountered the crowd on Maduna Square, they felt morally obliged to enforce what they understood to be the truth: the funerals were banned by legal decree and no-one should be allowed to attend them. What they could not have known was that every person who came to Maduna Square that morning supported the stay away and assumed that the funeral had not been banned. Thy were there to participate in a peaceful collective march precisely because they all believed that it was their natural traditional obligation to show solidarity with the dead by attending the funeral. When two such profound belief systems constitute two social groups so antagonistically - one small but armed and the other large and unarmed -the outcome was unsurprisingly violent under the circumstances.

23 Kannemeyer Commission, p.184. 24 Kannemeyer Commission, p.53. 25 The Report, pp.17-18.

The Crowd

Mr E. Thembani lived in a shack on 15th Avenue. He had been unemployed since April 1983 when he was retrenched from Volkswagen. He had a wife and children, one of whom worked to support the family. His mother occasionally shared her meagre pension to help him out.26 On the morning of the 21st he planned to go to the funeral. He never knew the deceased, but planned to attend the funeral because everyone went to these funerals. No-one in particular told him about the funeral, he had “just heard about it”. He had planned to go to the square to catch a kwelakwela (taxi), but by the time he got down to Maduna Road, the crowd had already begun marching towards Uitenhage. Instead of joining the front of the crowd, he walked down to 16th Avenue to find a place in the middle of the crowd. When asked why he joined the crowd instead of going straight to KwaNobuhle on a different road he said: “I knew that these people were also going to the funeral.”27 He never knew that the funerals had been banned.

Gabriel Matebelie was an unmarried man of 24 years who lived in a shack on 10th Avenue with his aunt, brother, cousin and his 6-month-old baby. He lost his job on 8 March 1985. He planned to go to the funeral.28 On his way to the square where he was intending to catch a taxi to KwaNobuhle, he came across the crowd marching down Maduna Road. He joined the crowd and participated in the singing of what he called the “guerrilla song”, the one about the guerrillas who “have arrived in South Africa to free us.”29

Moses Mgwanza was aged 25 and lived with his wife and children in a brick house in du Bois Street. He worked at Volkswagen as an apprentice electrician and was in his third year of training in 1985. A staunch NAAWU (National Automobile and Allied Workers’ Union) member and deacon in the Presbyterian Church, Moses was a good example of a stable politicised young worker. After meeting his friends Tomile and Zanga, these three

26 Kannemeyer Commission, p.826. 27 Kannemeyer Commission, p.842. 28 Kannemeyer Commission, p.962-3. 29 Kannemeyer Commission, p.963 & p.971.

set off to attend the funeral. However, when he saw the crowd marching down Maduna Road and realising that he might have to walk to KwaNobuhle, Moses ran back home to put on his takkies.30

Between 7 a.m. when Fouche left Langa and 9 a.m. when Lekuba arrived on the scene, a crowd of about 250 had already begun to form on Maduna Square. Many of them could tell similar stories to Thembani, Matebelie and Mgwanza. Using biographical data obtained from three sources, it is possible to reconstruct a profile of the crowd as it was shortly before the shooting took place.31

Using a sample of 70 people in the crowd about whose details of their gender is available, no less than 80% were male. Out of a total of 82 whose ages were known, 47,5% (i.e. 39) were between the ages of 10 and 20, 36,5% (i.e. 30) were in the 20 to 30 age bracket, 8,5% (i.e. 7) in the 30 to 40 range and then 7,3%

(i.e. 6) were aged between 40 and 50 years old. Assuming this sample is representative, it would suggest that the crowd was overwhelmingly young and largely male. Nevertheless, the presence of older people and young girls in the front rows of the crowd suggests that this was not a crowd of “angry male youths”.

Probably more important than the age and gender profile of the crowd was its origins from within the township (see map 1.1). Reflecting the existence of a widespread sense of purpose, the 25 members of the crowd whose addresses were known came from all the major sections of the township. Obviously this was facilitated by the fact that Maduna Road was the main road through the township.

30 Kannemeyer Commission, pp.962-3 & p.992.

31 The names, addresses and ages of 17 are contained in a report in the Eastern Province Herald, 12.7.85; the ages of 10 more are in this same report; detailed biographical data on 8 people is obtained from the Kannemeyer Commission, p.826, p.877, p.900, pp.933-4, pp.9623, p.991, p.1009 and p.1025; and the sex and age of 20 people killed and 27 injured mentioned in the Report, p.88 and p.80.

Map 1.1: Langa township., Uitenhage, 1985. Source: East Cape Development Board, Survey Department, 1985. Black dots are addresses of victims of the shootings that were recorded by Black Sash and applied to the map by the author. The X marks the location of the shooting that took place on Maduna Road.

The Kannemeyer Commission concluded that the people who congregated on Maduna Square were indeed intending to find transport to the funeral:

“The point is that the victims were elevated to the position of martyrs in their communities and their funerals assumed a political character. Attendance was a means of showing one’s sympathy for and solidarity with the deceased and the cause they supposedly espoused.”32

32 The Report, p.28.

This is what the political activists had organised through pamphlets and small meetings since the previous weekend. The magisterial ban of the funeral had no effect on this sense of “solidarity”: because the order stipulated that funerals could only be held on Sundays but never rescinded the previous ban of funerals on Sundays, not all the funerals were prohibited on Thursday 21st, and the information announced by police loudhailers the previous day was “inadequate”.33 No witness at the Kannemeyer Commission or interviewee spoken to by the author was under the impression on the morning of 21 March that all funerals had been banned and none of them believed that it might be illegal to try to attend the funeral.

Significantly, very few members of the crowd knew that it was Sharpeville Day. A survey of political attitudes conducted by the lawyers amongst members of the crowd that they had contact with revealed that only about 5% were aware that it was Sharpeville Day. This suggests a low level of national political awareness which, nevertheless, did not in any way diminish support for a local form of defiance and solidarity with the victims of police violence.

In short, the original intention of those who later formed a crowd was to attend the funeral. “I would not have joined if they were going to attack the Hippo”, Thembani said, “I was on my way to a funeral.” Refuting police claims that the crowd was intending to kill white people in Uitenhage and not attend a funeral, Kannemeyer observed that if this was the intention of the crowd, “it is improbable that girls and children would have been included. … Also, had this been their intention one would have expected some degree of organisation. …[T]here is no indication of any organisation. People joined the ranks at random and appear to have walked as and where they chose.”34

Prelude to Violence

While Lekuba was up a side street fiddling with his radio, Pentz approached the crowd and eventually stopped his vehicle on the

33 The Report, pp.28-9. 34 The Report, p.31.

Uitenhage side of Maduna Square facing south. He used his radio to notify Fouche of the crowd and asked for reinforcements. Although police evidence maintained that at this stage the crowd was armed, frenzied and singing about going to “kill the whites”, members of the crowd and eye-witnesses described how the police taunted and provoked a relatively harmless and calm crowd into an aggressive and agitated mood. David Tini described how police shouted to the crowd “throw, throw” and one policeman said: “We’re going to show you today.” Andrew Williams said a policeman shouted: “where are the stones, throw them, throw, throw.” Another policeman shouted: “Now we’ve got them nicely.”35 Because of the inconsistency of police testimony and consistency of community witnesses, Kannemeyer conceded that the police provoked those gathered on the square into a more cohesive and antagonistic posture. This was coupled to police actions to prevent bakkies and taxis from transporting people.36

More important than provocative police remarks was the undisputed fact that the police told the crowd that the funerals were banned. Given this, those who came to Maduna Square soon formed a cohesive crowd when they believed that their right to attend the funeral had been violated - a right that had in effect been sanctioned by the first magisterial order. They rejected police claims that the funerals were prohibited because these claims were seen as arbitrary and unfounded. One member of the crowd said that when asked whether the police announced the banning that yes “they did say that they had banned the funeral and then we said to them that we did not know that this had been done.” Counsel for the police then said: “So in spite of the fact that the police said the funeral was banned, you all said you were still going to the funeral?” “Yes”, was the reply, “we were determined to go to the funeral. .. We did not believe that they spoke the truth. We thought that they did not want us to attend the funeral.”37

This was an unsurprising assessment given the provocative and aggressive behaviour of Pentz’s crew in particular and the community’s perception of the police in general. After breaking

35 The Report, p.137. 36 The Report, p.150 and Kannemeyer Commission, p.81. 37 Kannemeyer Commission, p.1449 (my emphasis).

up to let Pentz’s Casspir through, the crowd then began to move down Maduna Road in an “orderly” fashion.38 The front ranks linked arms and everyone began singing freedom songs. Many held clenched fists in the air. Out in front was a man with dreadlocks dressed in a black cloak and girdle, while others took responsibility for keeping the crowd orderly and giving direction. “The people were singing silently. … I would say softly”, Andrew Williams said.39 Kelman Bafile said “the people were walking in an orderly manner. They said that they were on their way to a funeral and they were not going to turn back.”40 From all sides of the original crowd of about 300, hundreds flocked to swell its ranks. They came down the side streets, across the open ground and out from the houses alongside Maduna Road and intersections. A small group walked below a large sun umbrella and many others simply moved into the crowd and found a place to walk. Twenty-twoyear-old Sydney Ntlanjeni was in the third row where he could see the Rastafarian leader, hear the people singing freedom songs and see the Casspirs moving alongside and in front of the crowd. Like all the other members of the crowd who gave evidence to the Commission, Sydney said he saw no-one carrying weapons.41

After the crowd began to move, Pentz drove 100 to 120 metres along the road and stopped until the crowd reached him again. Although denied by the community witnesses, Pentz insists that he tried once again at this stage to turn back the crowd. He then moved to a spot on a rise just below 15th Avenue and parked across the road. On his way to this point, Pentz was in constant contact with Fouche who said he was on his way from KwaNobuhle.42

38 Kannemeyer Commission, p.1032. 39 Kannemeyer Commission, p.1033. 40 Kannemeyer Commission, p.1438. 41 Kannemeyer Commission, p.1468. (Despite repeated police claims

that the crowd was heavily armed, the only weapons left on the

scene after the shooting were a piece of wood, a pick handle and

a length of iron. Nor could police witness Lekuba and a white

official who witnessed the shooting from 600m away confirm that

they saw any weapons. This is why Kannemeyer had to accept the

overall claim by the community that the crowd was unarmed, see

The Report, pp.33-38.) 42 Kannemeyer Commission, p.84.

Moses Bucwa: The Cyclist

Kwabele Moses Bucwa was 15 years old in 1985. He lived in a shack at 6 Stofile Road with his two sisters and brother. He had a standard 3 education and worked at Graham’s Poultry Farm, a job he landed in January 1985. He left school in 1983 because his mother could no longer afford to pay his fees - “she is poor”, he said. The farm paid him R19.50 per week, part of which he used to buy a bicycle from his brother.43

Moses went to work as usual on Wednesday 20th. He arrived home that evening at 5 p.m. He was aware that the next day was a stay away and that a funeral was to take place because the people had been “speaking about it in the township”. However, he was unaware of the significance of the day itself (i.e. Sharpeville Day), nor did he know that the deceased were meant to have been buried the previous weekend. He never heard any announcements that evening cancelling or banning funerals. Nevertheless, Moses had decided that his job at the poultry farm was too valuable to risk for the sake of a funeral or stay away.

He normally left for work at 6 a.m. However, on the morning of the 21st, he knew “no-one was going to work” and although some people tried to go to work at 6 a.m. he was afraid to go with them at that stage. He eventually got on his bicycle and left for work at 9.15 a.m. He took his normal route from Stofile Road, down 16th Avenue and then left into Maduna Road.

Moses will probably never forget the scene that confronted him as he turned into Maduna Road that morning. On his right was a very large crowd singing the liberation song (that eventually became South Africa’s National Anthem) Nkosi Sikelele iAfrica; and on his left, about 25 metres from the crowd, were two Casspirs parked in a “V” formation across the road just below 15th Avenue. He tried to get past on the right side of the Casspirs, but a policeman standing on top of the Casspir on the left signalled that he should ride in between the two vehicles. He turned in towards the centre of the road, but before proceeding between the Casspirs, he turned towards the crowd and, in order to dispel

43 Most of the information on Bucwa is taken from his oral evidence. See Kannemeyer Commission, pp. 878-888.

any suspicions about his true destination, he gave a clenched fist salute.44 As he did so, he was shot in the back of the head.45 Bucwa said that there was no warning shot nor were there any warnings. The strike-breaker became the first target.

The Shooting

Irrespective of how the policemen represented their version of events after the shooting, there is little doubt that they were a small well-armed group of fourteen policemen faced by a crowd of 1,000 to 3,000 people determined to walk through part of white Uitenhage in order to get to KwaNobuhle for the funeral.46 Pentz said that after parking his Casspir behind Fouche’s in a “V” formation, he realised that there was going to be a confrontation. “That is what I realised - this crowd is approaching, we were standing in the road and we were attempting to stop them. … They swung the sticks and weapons, jumped in the air, made the black power salute and shouted and screamed.”47 Andrews told Pentz that the crowd was singing a song that said: Ons gaan die blankes dood maak vandag in die dorp” (“We are going to kill the whites in town today.”) Fouche’s assessment was that this crowd could overwhelm the Casspirs and recalled the mutilated body of the policeman he picked up on 15th Avenue. “I was not prepared to

44 Bucwa maintains that he gave the clenched fist salute so that the crowd would not suspect him of going to work. Kannemeyer said it was a boyish act of bravado.

45 Whereas police evidence was based on the repeated insistence that there was no cyclist in front of the crowd, witnesses from the community in their affidavits the day after the incident and in their oral evidence to the commission insisted that there was a cyclist in front of the crowd and that he was the first to be shot. After weighing up the evidence, Kannemeyer rejected the police version, accepted that Bucwa was indeed the cyclist, but concluded that he was probably hit by a ricochet bullet that was the warning shot that the police claimed to have fired; see The Report, pp.16-24.

46 In this context, an account of perceptions and feelings of the policemen helps to shed light on why they chose to open fire. I am not claiming that anything that they said about these feelings or the crowd were true. To understand in their own words why a group of people chose to kill other people is an important part of the explanation of violence, even if they are lying.

47 Kannemeyer Commission, p.161 & p.169.

let myself and my men be mutilated like that.”48 Stumke said he was very afraid of the oncoming crowd, “I feared for my life.”49 Andrews echoed this when he said: “With their words that they were going to kill us, that is the boers, and I called myself a boer at that specific moment because they call all policemen boers and dogs. … I realised that my life is now in danger. I was finished, got scared, I was scared.”50 One police witness said that he was so frightened that he cowered on the floor of his Casspir.

Moses Bucwa, the cyclist, told the Kannemeyer Commission: “After I had been shot I fell down and I dislocated my arm and I could hear the shooting going on. After the shot they came back to me and kicked me trying to find out whether I was still alive. I pretended to be dead and they went on to other people. And I lay on my back after they had kicked me. And they were again checking on other people as to whether they were still alive. And they were kicking, still shooting other people to death.”51

Sydney Ntlanjeni: “They shot at the front row in front of us and I saw that the police were all visible from the top of the Hippos. The one behind was also shooting. They also shot up to the third row. I was holding a girl, she fell, and as I started to pick her up, I was shot in the back. I let go of her and I started running and I was grazed by the bullet. I ran up to the house which was in front and I looked back at the scene, and I looked at what was happening. There were people trying to stand up but these were shot at again.”

Gabriel Matebelie: “Well I heard the shooting and as I turned back to run, I heard another shot and I felt it hit my head and I put my hand over my head and I could feel blood. My legs started shaking and I fell down. … It was as I was turning to run into 16th Avenue.”

Two R1 bullets, forty-four shotgun cartridges and at least four 9mm pistol rounds were fired by police during the shooting.

48 Kannemeyer Commission, p.224. 49 Kannemeyer Commission, p.385. 50 Kannemeyer Commission, p.499. 51 Evidence presented by Moses Bucwa to the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission on 27 August 1996.

The Commission had confirmed post-mortem reports of 20 people who were killed. Molly Blackburn and Emson Banda testified to the effect that it was believed in the community that 43 people were killed. Neither of them could provide the commission with hard documentary evidence to support this allegation. Of the 20 official deaths, there were 5 women and 15 men. Their ages ranged from 11 to 50 years, with 9 of the deceased below the age of 16.52 In addition, 27 were wounded, excluding many of those who never went to hospital for treatment for fear of being arrested. Of the known injured, 20 were men and 7 were women. Of the 23 whose ages could be established, 6 were 16 or younger, 15 were between 18 and 30 years and 2 were between 30 and 50 years of age.

Of those killed, one died from a 9mm pistol bullet and 19 died from shotgun ammunition. All except one of the injured were hit by shotgun fire while the remaining victim was hit by an R1 bullet. Only one of those killed was shot from the front while five of the injured were hit from the front. No less than 35 of the total of 47 dead and injured were shot in the back.53 In other words, they had already turned around intending to escape the violence that followed.

Given that most of those injured and killed were probably in the front row of the crowd, and given that over a quarter were women and that a high proportion were young people, it follows that the police shot people - many of whom were women and children - who had already turned around to run away. Their gender, age and absence of weapons would suggest this was not an aggressive organised mob bent on overpowering two Casspirs and making its way to Uitenhage to kill white people. One member of the crowd summed up the feelings of many when he said: “I never thought that they would do anything to us with their guns because we had nothing.”54

The people fled to the opposite hill and watched the police climb down from their Casspirs. About seventy people lay dead or screaming in pain. The community witnesses alleged that

52 The Report, pp.76-80. 53 Kannemeyer Commission, pp.87-90. 54 Kannemeyer Commission, p.1449.

the police then laid stones amongst the bodies to create the impression that the crowd had violent intentions, shot some survivors, made ugly comments and prevented the ambulances from arriving for twenty minutes.

Joseph Jacobs Berry was one of the ambulance drivers called to Maduna Road on the day of the Massacre. In his testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings on 27 and 28 August 1996, he said: “And because of the code of the caller I got, I knew that this was an extreme emergency and not only that it was an extreme emergency but that it was a shooting case. So all speed has to be gathered to get to that scene. Unfortunately, when we got to the entrance of Hillwag we were blocked by the SAP. So much so and for so long that by the time that we did gain entrance ambulances of Kirkwood as well as Port Elizabeth arrived on that scene. I had to go and wash my hands and the only ideal place was the sluice room. So when I entered the sluice room I saw these bodies lying there and one of them was still breathing. So I knelt down to see whether I couldn’t help. And I thought hell, let me go and call the doctor, but when I turned around Doctor Viljoen was standing in the door. And I said, Doc, but this person is still alive, and breathing. And he said Ag hy gaan maar doodgaan. [Ag he’s going to die anyway].”

No matter what happened after the shooting, the fact remains that the moment of extreme violence had arrived. It brought to a head months of ongoing violence between Uitenhage’s black community and police and triggered a rupture between state and community that would, until the forced removal of Langa over a year later, give rise to a new form of resistance and conflict. It also defined what 1985 was all about - a decisive turning point in the wider struggle to end authoritarian white rule.

Fear, Violence And the Truth: Police Versus the Community

The truth about what really happened when the shooting started hinged entirely on whether or not there was a boy on a bicycle in front of the Casspirs. The police could be hugely confident about their story because there was no evidence of the bicycle and the boy who was shot. As long as no-one emerged who could credibly claim to be that boy, they were confident that Kannemeyer would accept their version of the truth. They also assumed he was dead and had never been specifically identified as the boy in question, and so it is not difficult to imagine how confident they really were. What they did not know is that Molly Blackburn, leader of the human rights group Black Sash who was assassinated on 28 December 1985, had managed to find Moses Bucwa. Knowing how crucial his testimony would be, she hid him away in her home located at 13 Brighton Drive, Summerstrand.55 Because of his wound, he was confined to a wheelchair. She arranged for Bucwa to appear in his wheelchair at the Kannemeyer Commission on 2 April and again on 15 April 1985 - long after numerous policemen had testified unanimously that there was no boy on a bicycle. None of the policemen could have anticipated that the man being wheeled into the court room on 2 April 1985 was in fact the man on the bicycle who was shot first - the same man whom they assumed would never contradict their evidence because he was supposed to have died on that fateful day in March. Unsurprisingly, they were all stunned when early on in his evidence it became clear who he really was. By then it was too late to change their story.

Bucwa’s version of events completely contradicted the police version of events. The carefully rehearsed police version of the sequence of events:56 Fouche and Pentz formed a “V” on the hill; the crowd was ordered to stop when it was 50 metres away; a warning shot fired when the crowd was 10 metres away; a bare-breasted coloured woman jumped out from the crowd and threw a stone; the leader pulled out a petrol bomb; the order was given to fire when the crowd was 7 metres in front of the Casspirs.

More importantly, they all emphatically denied the existence of a cyclist. Very few of these claims withstood cross-examination and only some were accepted by Kannemeyer. Both Kannemeyer and Haysom called into question the reliability of

55 This information was provided by John Clarke, Molly Blackburn’s biographer, August 2024.

56 I am leaving out all the inconsistencies and following mainly Fouche’s version, see Kannemeyer Commission, p.7.

police evidence. Haysom argued that the accepted existence of Moses Bucwa on his bicycle by the Kannemeyer Commission proved that the police conspired to fabricate the evidence. The existence of the boy on the bicycle established conclusively that every police witness had lied. Proof that they had lied lay in the fact that boy on the bicycle existed. It also indicated that the crowd could not have been as close and as threatening as the police alleged.”57

The community version can be summarised as follows:58 orderly march of unarmed people took place from Maduna Square; the Casspir moved ahead and parked across the road near 15th Avenue; another Casspir arrived and formed a “V” across the road with the first Casspir; Bucwa appeared on his bicycle when the crowd was 50 metres from the Casspirs; as the crowd moved forward, a policeman held up his hand in what appeared to be a signal to stop; some members in front of the crowd stopped momentarily; Bucwa then turned inwards to go between the Casspirs; without warning, a volley of shots was fired from the Casspirs; Bucwa was the first to fall; the crowd turned and fled as the shooting continued.

The verdict of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that received evidence about the Langa Massacre on 27-28 August 1996 was as follows: “The Commission finds that, while the SAP were justified in preventing the march and dispersing the crowd, they resorted to grossly excessive means to achieve this, using unjustified deadly force, and that they are accountable for the gross human rights violations (killings, attempted killings and severe ill treatment) which resulted from their actions.” When Lt Fouche was asked some months later by journalist Riaan Malan if he would react the same way again, he said yes, he most certainly would.

57 Haysom, F., “The Langa Shootings and the Kannemeyer Commission of Enquiry”, Human Rights Quarterly, 8, 3, August 1986, p.506.

58 I am following the version given by the legal team that Haysom was part of, see Haysom, op. cit., pp.502-3.

Conclusion

Would 1985 have ended differently if the Langa Massacre did not happen - if, in other words, Lt Fouche had not given the order to shoot? We will never know for sure, but all the evidence suggests that the Langa Massacre had knock-on effects that resulted in the intensification of the rebellions around the country that culminated in the declaration of the State of Emergency in July.

The policemen who gave evidence to the Kannemeyer Commission were united in their attempt to argue that the primary objective of the crowd and its leaders was to kill white people in Uitenhage and not attend a funeral in KwaNobuhle. This was crucial for them because as long as the view that the crowd was on its way to a funeral remained credible, then their decision to use such brutal force to stop the crowd could be seriously questioned. They knew that if it came to weighing up the moral validity of implementing a badly conceived magisterial order and the right of the crowd to attend a funeral that had been planned well in advance, the conclusion that the police acted in bad faith was more than a distinct probability.

What Warrant Officer Pentz and his fellow policemen could not have realised is that the decision to shoot Moses Bucwa as he tried to ride his bike between the two Casspirs in order to get to work triggered a series of national and global events that ultimately led to their collective worst fear of all - the ending of white minority rule. They must have taken comfort in PW Botha’s Rubicon Speech later that year as he shook his finger at the world. As the prime perpetrators of the Langa Massacre, they were at the frontline of the apartheid state’s weakest point - the deployment of organised violence to stop the unstoppable.

As news of the Langa Massacre leaked out, the international uproar was immediate and widespread. President Ronald Reagan’s policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with the apartheid regime was discredited and calls for imposing comprehensive sanctions against South Africa grew increasingly louder and more convincing. The exiled African National Congress (ANC) was emboldened to launch Operation Zikomo, led by its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. The internal above-ground mass democratic movement intensified its mass campaigns, and in July 1985 a State of Emergency was declared in those areas defined by the security forces as ‘hotspots’.

In the end, justice was served when the state agreed to settle a damages claim lodged by 51 of the victims. In August 1987, the state handed over a total of R1.3 million to these victims and in so doing effectively admitted liability for the Langa Massacre. Moses Bucwa, who was one of the recipients, told a reporter that he intended using his R17,000.00 payout to buy his family a house. But by then he, his family and many other families who lost loved ones on 21 March 1985 had been forcibly removed from Langa to KwaNobuhle.59 And Molly Blackburn, who helped Moses Bucwa to heal and give the evidence that discredited the police version of the Langa Massacre, was dead -a victim of what many still believe was a plot to assassinate her.

59 Weekly Mail, August 21-27, 1987.

Introduction

As dawn broke on Tuesday 1 September 1987, and the first rays of summer illuminated the imposing walls of Pretoria Central Prison, Moses Jantjies and Wellington Mielies were fetched by the wardens from their place on death row. They were prepared in the usual fashion and then taken to a room where they were hung by their necks until they died.1 Accused of being South Africa’s first ‘necklace’2 murderers, these two young men from Uitenhage were tortured into admitting that they were part of a crowd that was directly responsible for the brutal killing and necklacing of Benjamin Kinikini and his sons and associates on 23 March 1985,3 just two days after the Langa Massacre.

1 Lawrence, P., “A Macabre Procession of the Damned”, Weekly Mail, 4-10 September, 1987, p14; for details on how people were hung during this period, see Bekker, J., Inside South Africa’s Death Row, Johannesburg, Black Sash, 1986.

2 From March 1985, ‘necklacing’ was the name given to the increasingly frequent practice of murdering or burning someone by putting a tyre around their heads, dowsing it in petrol and lighting it.

3 Most of the trail that led to the conviction of Jantjies, Mielies and their co-accused was taken up with what was called a “trialwithin-a-trial” that revolved around the admissibility of the statements made by the accused after their arrest. The defence argued that the statements were invalid because they were made under duress, i.e. torture. In the end, the judge ruled that they were admissible. So despite the fact that the accused pleaded not guilty, it was only these statements that implicated them. This author will accept the version of the accused to the effect that they were tortured into making statements that implicated them because it

Benjamin Kinikini was the Mayor of Uitenhage’s black townships. In October 1983, he was amongst sixteen councillors elected unopposed to the newly established KwaNobuhle Town Council, formed under the Black Local Authorities Act to administer Uitenhage’s black townships. The Councillors elected him as the Mayor. He died when the crowd put a tyre dowsed in petrol over his neck and burnt him alive. This was the first of many so-called ‘necklace murders’ that occurred in many townships across the country in the years that followed.

Even though there was insufficient evidence that Jantjies and Mielies directly assaulted the victims, the mere fact that they were part of a crowd engaged in collective violence was sufficient to convict them of murder in terms of the notorious doctrine of ‘common purpose’. As Justice Mullings, the presiding Judge, argued in his final judgement: “Where …. the state has no evidence of the participation by an accused in the actual assault which causes the death of the deceased, the state must prove not only the intention to kill, but also active participation in the acts or conduct of the group or crowd which was responsible for such killing.”4

It was this simple and remarkable statement that was the basis of the Judge’s decision to not only find Jantjies and Mielies guilty of murder, but also to sentence them to death by hanging.5 During the year-long trial, Moses Jantjies and Wellington Mielies insisted that they were not guilty. The human rights lawyers who acted on their behalf failed to dislodge the doctrine of common

is now accepted that as a general rule this is how the SAP handled its prisoners. This, however, does not detract from the version of events that emerged from other witnesses, as well as from these statements because what was at issue was not the events themselves, but the statements by the accused that located the accused in those events.

4 Transcript of Judgement in the case of The State versus Sydwell T Mpumlo & Others, Supreme Court, South Eastern Cape Local Division, Case Number CC582/85.

5 For a review of this legal doctrine in South African courts to criminalise crowd action in those years, see Davis, D., “Capital Punishment and the Politics of the Doctrine of Common Purpose”, in Hanson, D. and Van Zyl Smit, D. (eds.), Towards Justice? Crime and State Control in South Africa, Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1990.

purpose that was used to justify the guilt of every individual who was in some way involved in or associated with what was depicted as an enraged irrational crowd whose sole intention was to murder the Mayor. The wider socio-political context, the possibility that individual actions within a crowd can in fact be rational and the dynamics of the train of events of that day were all ignored. No-one noticed as two more unknown young men called Moses Jantjies and Wellington Mielies from the violent streets of the Eastern Cape uprising died with a hangman’s noose around their necks on Tuesday 1 September 1987. By then, the national State of Emergency ensured that the press were muzzled, masses of activists were in jail and the security forces firmly in control of the townships.

There was, however, one man who did realise the significance of the hanging of Jantjies and Mielies - Mono Badela. Mono Badela was a renowned Eastern Cape journalist who passed away in 2002 at the age of 65. We became good friends. It would not be an understatement to say that Mono did more to tell the story of the Eastern Cape uprisings than anyone else in the journalist, academic and social movement circles at the time. I doubt I would have been able to tell the stories in this book if Mono did not exist. In recognition of this contribution, the President awarded him the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold in 2023. With deep roots in the oppositional culture of the Eastern Cape, he helped initiate black-led organisations in the media and sports worlds. Like many from his generation, he was a keen rugby player in his youth. Reporting, however, became his passion and over the years he wrote for a range of newspapers, including Sunday World, City Press and Weekly Mail. He was banned for three years in 1980, which meant that he could not publish his writing (at least not under his own name). His house was petrol-bombed in 1985, but he and his family escaped unhurt. Mono was renowned for always pitching up at exactly the right moment to record the most (and least) momentous events. Short, stocky and somewhat dishevelled, he had a crumpled but always curious expression, with an intelligent twinkle in his eye and a slightly bemused downward twist to his mouth. He often seemed out of breath as he darted about with his notebook, questioning and observing as he looked for the angle on his next story. I was useful to him because I provided him with the ‘quote by an expert’ that he needed in order to substantiate the angle of his story without breaching his journalistic ethics. Often his calls for a quote would come late at night, always in his somewhat breathless gravelly tone without the usual pleasantries to the start the conversion: without even a hello, just: “Mark, what do you say about ….. .” I knew what he wanted, of course. We became friends not only because we were both observing participants, but also because we could exchange often sensitive information based on a mutual sense of respect and trust. Above all, we could banter and laugh together in the midst of the horror that surrounded us.

Lead-Up to the Formation of the Crowd

Mzobanzi Kamteni was 19 years old in March 1985. He was not attending school that year and the previous year he failed standard 7. He had studied English, Xhosa, History and Geography and could tell the time. On the night of 22 March he slept alone in his parents’ house because his parents were visiting friends, at least this is what he told the court. At about 4 a.m. (probably a little later because the dawn light was already visible), he was suddenly awakened by the sound of his front door being kicked open. The next moment three men rushed into his room, grabbed him under the arms and dragged him out into the yard, beating him as they went along. Jimmy Claassens, notorious leader of the Peacemakers gang that was collaborating with police to round up ‘trouble makers’, was waiting at the gate with a gun in his hand. Mzobanzi was loaded into a Ford Custom where he found two other boys, Landile Kula and Thami Brenda. A fourth boy was then picked up; his name was Michael Klaas. After moving about the township and accosting people in a generally threatening and aggressive manner, the Peacemakers made their way to Benjamin Kinikini’s funeral parlour, a place that the community and the Kinikini family referred to as the “barracks”. When they arrived there, the youths were put into the cold room where bodies that were there waiting to be prepared for burial were kept. They were in this cold room for a while until at about 6.30 to 7 a.m., they were taken by truck out to a place referred to as “the bush” where Kamteni and one other was severely beaten with sjamboks. The assault was interrupted by the arrival of a police vehicle that took the children to a garage on the outskirts of KwaNobuhle where they were transferred to another vehicle that took them to the police station.6

Major Theron was second-in-command of the South African Police (SAP) forces in Uitenhage at the time, and in full command of all unrest units on 23 March. He was a seasoned policeman with 22 years of experience in the force, during which time he was responsible for conventional policing (except for a brief stint dealing with unrest in 1976). He only started dealing with ‘unrest’ matters in Uitenhage in March 19857 and although he had been stationed in Uitenhage since 1967 and steadily climbed his way up the ladder, he “first set foot” in KwaNobuhle on 22 March 1985.8 This was the man who was to make the key strategic decisions about how to handle crowd action that day.

Major Theron reported for special duty at the temporary base in Uitenhage shortly before 6 a.m. His special duties were the result of a huge police operation that was mounted hours after the Massacre on the 21st, including the flying in of 120 policemen from around the country as reinforcements to deal with the Uitenhage crisis9 - many of them encamped in the temporary base. Major

6 Trial Record, State versus S.T. Mpumlo and Others, Supreme Court, Eastern Cape Division, Case Number CC582/85, vol.58, 3912ff. (All references to this trial record will henceforth be referred to simply by reference to the volume number and page.) Although he disputed his involvement in the actual abductions that morning, notorious Peacemaker Dumse Nogcaza admitted that Jimmy did use his bakkie that morning to take a group of youths to the ‘barracks’. What precisely happened to the children between the time of them being beaten and being released some time in the late morning from the Uitenhage police station was a matter of considerable dispute between the prosecution and the defence. These events, however, are of less interest for this chapter because it was more what the crowd thought was happening than what was actually happening that is of interest. (Dumse Nogcaza was the secret state witness - “Witness D” - during the trial of Jantjies and Mielies to provide the state’s only eyewitness as to the presence of the accused in the crowd that assaulted the Kinikinis.)

7 vol. 3, 103 8 vol. 5, 194 9 vol. 22, 1215

Theron, however, was never given a proper briefing. Instead, he and the other policemen on the 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. shift on the 23rd started the day with what seemed like a haphazard parade where section leaders were allocated their teams and given their vehicles and ammunition. A quick briefing on their duties was provided. As one policeman put it, “things were very disorganised during those first few days”.10

Major Theron had 3 Casspirs at his disposal, a Land Rover and the truck that he was in. There was also a helicopter available at the base. He entered KwaNobuhle to patrol the area shortly after 6 a.m. For much of the first hour he noticed nothing that was cause for alarm.11 That was until he arrived at Poswa Square where a large, agitated crowd had gathered. This was shortly after 7 a.m.

As in Langa on the 21st, both Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth-based security forces were responsible for patrolling Uitenhage townships without much coordination between them.12 This is why Lt Kritzinger of Port Elizabeth’s Diamond and Gold branch was performing special duty in KwaNobuhle on the morning of the 23rd.13 He was in charge of a Casspir and ten men and was in radio contact with the temporary base. He was moving southwards down Mabandla Street towards Poswa Square some time before 7 a.m., when he came across a group of 10 to 12 men. He stopped at the group and with the assistance of Constable April who interpreted for him, Kritzinger established from the group that they were looking for children that Jimmy and the Peacemakers had abducted that morning.

Dumse Nogcaza woke up at his uncle Jimmy’s house early on Saturday 23rd. He was a member of the Peacemakers and had participated in various Peacemaker activities.14 He was 20 years old in March 1985 and was born in Langa at 21 Khetse Street. He was functionally illiterate and could not tell the time. He had left school when he was attending standard 3 because “I did not have

10 vol. 21, 1160 11 vol. 5, 237 12 Major Theron, for example, never knew that Lt Kritzinger was in

KwaNobuhle and therefore no coordinated strategy was possible. 13 vol. 21, 1131 14 See Chapter 1

money to buy books and uniform.”15 Through his Uncle Jimmy, though, he got involved with the Peacemakers. Jimmy gave him work in his shop where he packed groceries and did deliveries.16 After the beginning of the time when, as he put it, “the comrades and the burning of people”17 started, he began living at Jimmy’s house in Relu Street. His whereabouts and what he saw during the course of the morning of the 23rd is what made him the state’s most valuable witness during the trial of Jantjies and the others. (At the time of the trial he was already serving one year of a two-year sentence [one year suspended] for his participation in the assault of three youths by Jimmy and the Peacemakers18 during April 1985.)

Dumse’s story was simple: he, Jimmy, and a group of Jimmy’s men decided to take three (he disagreed that there were four) youths who had been ‘arrested’ by the Peacemakers to the police station. On their way, they were flagged down by Benjamin Kinikini and his sons who wanted a lift to the ‘barracks’. According to Dumse, the Kinikini group were dropped off at the barracks and because it was drizzling slightly and he only had on a t-shirt, he decided to stay behind with them.19 As they always did with people whom they ‘arrested’, Jimmy and his men then took the children to the police station. Ignoring for the moment the fact that Dumse had an interest in denying that the youths were ever taken to the ‘bush’ to be beaten, it is possible to accept that Dumse did join the Kinikini group at some stage and sat outside with them probably talking about the sounds of the toyi-toyi20 coming from the direction of Poswa Square. This group included Benjamin Kinikini (the father), 20-year-old Silumko who was his son, a 13-yearold boy called Stanley (known as Gwala) who was also Benjamin’s

15 vol. 16, 887 16 vol. 9, 415 17 vol. 10, 526 18 This was the man who Judge Mullins chose to believe entirely and

on this basis sent two young men to the gallows. 19 Record of Judgement in the case State versus S.T. Mpumlo and

Others, Supreme Court, Eastern Cape Division, Case Number CC582/85,

(henceforth referred to as Judgement), p.20. 20 A toyi-toyi is the word used to describe the rhythmic march-cum

dance that was performed by groups of “comrades” while singing

freedom songs.

son, the 16-year-old Qondile who was Benjamin’s nephew and 20-year-old Eric (known as Geelmuis) who was another nephew, and Zalisile Pram (a friend of Silumko’s).21 It soon became clear that the toyi-toying group was getting louder and seemed to be getting closer. Geelmuis climbed onto the roof and shouted down: “They are coming towards Mabandla. There are people coming, armed with pick handles and spades, and they are singing ‘sellout’, ‘sellout’”.22 The group then moved inside and began preparing to protect themselves. Only Dumse survived to tell the story of what happened to them that day.

Partly in reaction to the abduction of the children, but also responding to early morning disturbances caused by the Peacemakers, a small group of people gathered on Poswa Square before 7 a.m. Some of them had already telephoned the temporary base where they spoke to a Sergeant Loubscher and inquired whether the abducted children had been brought into the temporary base or police station. Loubscher replied that no children had been brought in and after checking, reported that there were no reports of children having been brought into the Uitenhage police station.23 The effects of the unknown whereabouts of the children and the knowledge that Jimmy and the Peacemakers were responsible for taking them, must have generated a sense of panic and anxiety amongst those who began to gather at Poswa Square to collectively discuss the problem. When Lieutenant Kritzinger first met them, he said that there were only about 10 or 12 in the group24 and that they were extremely agitated by all accounts. Amongst this early group was Brandy Boss and Phindile Mkoto,25 as well as Moses Jantjies.26 Although it is unclear how he actually became involved in this original group, it is clear that unlike most of the others who were accused of murdering Kinikini et. al., he was one of the few who was actually there from when the crowd was still a small gathering of frightened and angry people from the community.

21 vol. 20, 1046 22 vol. 9, 466-474 23 vol. 22, 1221ff. 24 vol. 21, 1132ff. 25 vol. 8, 374 26 Statement to the court by Moses Jantjies, Judgement, 41.

His death by hanging was a tragedy, but for Moses Jantjies, life was probably an even greater tragedy. Like Dumse Nogcaza, whose testimony was responsible for the judgement that led to his death, Moses was caught up in the cycles of violence that consumed daily life during those traumatic days in late March after the Langa Massacre - days when violence gave desperate lives a momentary meaning. Although the court accepted that Moses was born in Langa somewhere around 1964, he never knew his birth date when his lawyer interviewed him on death row in August 1987.27 His father deserted the family when he was four months old and he was brought up by his mother’s sister. He first met his actual mother in 1979, but she died that same year. He remembers being badly beaten by his aunt who often hit him all over his body and head with a stick. He remembers running away at times to get away from the beatings. At the time of his arrest in 1985, he was living with his aunt in KwaNobuhle in a house that they moved into after the forced removals from Langa in 1981 ejected them from their Langa home. His aunt worked as a domestic worker until she lost her job in 1984. She could not afford to send him to school beyond “sub B”, thus leaving him illiterate. He grew up as just another one of those hungry badly clothed boys who roamed the streets of South Africa’s townships. He was last employed as a construction worker in 1983 and after his cousin lost her job in 1984, the household had no steady income. He managed to scrape together enough to buy food by being a caddie at the golf course or helping his uncle who sold firewood in return for some spare food. However, he often went hungry. This is why he eventually turned to crime. He was sentenced to six months in prison for housebreaking in 1981, six months for theft in 198182 and another nine months in 1982-83 for theft. This was also a period during which he started to suffer from severe epilepsy.

Although the prosecution made much of the fact that Jantjies defined himself as a “comrade” in the statement that was coerced out of him during his interrogation, there is no evidence of any real political awareness. He was not a member of a

27 Hand-written notes from an interview conducted by Thole

Majodina who was Jantjies’ lawyer in preparation for a clemency

plea. The profile of Jantjies that follows is drawn from these notes.

political organisation at the time, and his view of the UDF (United Democratic Front) was of an organisation that was “trying to put things right for people. I am told that we as black people want to live in white areas.” He knew that Mandela was the head of the ANC, but not that the ANC was banned. As Straker et. al. found when dealing with similar groups, Jantjies was typical of the kind of person who found a home in the toyi-toyi and an outlet for his deepest rage in crowd violence.28 Like the state witness who testified against him, their domestic and social lives prepared them well for the brutality that they witnessed. They landed up on opposite sides of extreme violence because they were both swept up into the maelstrom through different sets of social connections - one set associated with the state, the other with crowds of people many of whom were young people surviving on the margins of informal employment and petty crime.

The Crowd in the Making

It was wet and cloudy with occasional light rain when people started gathering at Poswa Square between 6.30 and 7 a.m.29 The small group that gathered was intent on finding the abducted children and had already decided to go to the “barracks” to search for them.30 Someone in the group reported that the children were not at the temporary base or the police station and someone else said that normally Jimmy’s captives are kept in what was called the “fridge”, i.e. the cold room for storing corpses that were going to be buried.31 While some stood, most of the group sat around in a circle while someone stood in the centre and tried to organise the discussion about what to do.32 More and more people joined the group over time and a number were armed with various

28 Straker et. al., op. cit., 132-133.

29 Although only Dumse referred to the weather in his testimony, the

Weather Bureau recordings for the day confirm that it was cloudy

and raining in the early morning; personal communication with the

Weather Bureau, 4.10.93. 30 vol. 21, 1132; vol.16, 893ff; vol. 9, 466-74 31 It is being assumed here that the phone calls made to Sgt

Loubscher were by people who were either part of or linked to the

crowd (e.g. a nearby house, etc). 32 vol. 16, 893ff.

implements.33 It was at this point that Lt Kritzinger came across the group. Across the way at the “barracks”, Dumse Nogcaza and the Kinikinis also saw Kritzinger approach the group.34 Lt Kritzinger and Constable April climbed out of their Casspir and with April interpreting, Kritzinger asked the group what the problem was. Everyone then crowded around them and speaking all at once told the policemen that they were looking for the children whom Jimmy had arrested. The group was convinced that the children had been taken to the “barracks”. Kritzinger asked the group to calm down and for two people to be put forward to talk to him. After Brandy Boss and Phindile Mkoto came forward to represent the group, and after some discussion, Kritzinger, April, Brandy, Phindile and a Constable Kruger walked to the “barracks”, taking a short cut through the shop’s yard behind the “barracks” and across the wire fence. This delegation met Benjamin Kinikini outside in the yard of the “barracks” and after a discussion conducted in Afrikaans, Kinikini allowed the delegation to search the premises, including the cold room. They found nothing. They then walked back to what had become a crowd which by this stage had grown rapidly from a small group that had earlier agreed to the terms of a search of the premises to find the children, to a large crowd of about 1,000 that was unaware of what had transpired earlier. Brandy Boss and Phindile Mkoto tried to report back to the crowd that the children were not in the “barracks”. The crowd, however, was not satisfied with this and without denying the truth of what was reported back, started to chant, “We want our children! We want our children!” In other words, the fact that the children were not found in the “barracks” did not resolve the crowd’s problem because this simply proved where the children were not, and not where they actually were. In any case, the problem of the missing children was just the spark that ignited the powder keg of emotions and tensions that pervaded Uitenhage’s townships after the Langa Massacre. By this stage, it was too late to stop what was to follow. According to a journalist who witnessed these events, the crowd was already

33 vol. 21, 1132ff. 34 vol. 9, 466-74

7,000 people in the moments leading up to the attack on the Kinikini group.35

Kritzinger responded by trying to find out by radio if there was any news of the children at the temporary base, but Sgt Loubscher had nothing positive to report. While the original group that were still clustered around Kritzinger were prepared to wait until he found out something definite, the crowd which was growing rapidly to about 3,000 in number was becoming extremely restless and aggressive. Kritzinger, however, did not feel threatened at this stage because he did not believe that the anger was directed at the police. After waiting in vain for a positive radio report, Kritzinger noticed that Major Theron had arrived on the scene in a white pick-up truck, accompanied by a Casspir. A Land Rover with a sneeze machine attached to it followed soon after. Knowing that Theron was first in command, Kritzinger did two things: he wrote down his details on a piece of paper and gave this to Brandy and Phindile, and he ordered his radio man to inform Theron about what had happened.36 Major Theron addressed the crowd through a loudspeaker, but Kritzinger could not hear what he was saying. Instead, he noticed that things had begun to get extremely tense: “I felt here was a can of petrol,” he told the court, “all it needed was someone to light the match.” He eventually left the scene to follow up on a group that had broken away from the crowd and was heading towards Kinikini’s house.37

Although Major Theron insists that he immediately entered into negotiations with representatives from the crowd, Lt Kritzinger said that before he (Kritzinger) left the scene, the sneeze machine was used to disperse the crowd, thus implicating Theron. However, according to Dumse who was watching from the “barracks”, it was Kritzinger assisted by the sneeze machine

35 Badela, M. 1987. ‘The weeks of rage that led to the first necklace

death’, Weekly Mail, 4 September, 1987.

36 vol. 22, 1197

37 Reconstructed from the testimony of Lt Kritzinger and Constable

April, vol. 21, 1132ff & vol. 16, 893ff. Although contradicted by Major

Theron’s evidence, Kritzinger’s evidence is confirmed repeatedly

by Dumse, other policemen and members of the crowd. Judge

Mullins also found that Kritzinger’s version was correct.

who dispersed the crowd38 before Theron arrived. In any event, what is indisputable is that by the time Theron arrived, the crowd was about 3,000 strong and very agitated. It was toyi-toying and slogans were ringing out aimed at Jimmy and the Kinikinis.39 Whether Kritzinger or Theron dispersed the crowd, the fact of the matter was that it had grown rapidly to a large crowd in a matter of an hour and notwithstanding Kritzinger’s efforts, instead of finding redress had been forcibly dispersed by police action. Nevertheless, all accounts agree that it re-grouped and after regrouping was a large toyi-toying crowd of about 7,000 that seemed unlikely to negotiate a resolution to its problems40. This, however, is exactly what happened once again before the final transition to violent action was made.

Going back a few minutes to the arrival of Theron and what he witnessed: his truck and the Casspir that was with him stopped a few paces away from what was then a 3,000 strong toyitoying crowd that comprised men, women and children - it was not simply a bunch of male “comrades”, he insisted.41 Nor was it tightly bunched up in a way that may have reflected an organised crowd with a common purpose. It was loosely structured and smaller groups were constantly breaking off the main group to head off in their own directions.42 Theron insisted repeatedly in court that the crowd was not at all hostile to the police at this stage. The men from the Casspir got out while Theron walked

38 vol. 9, 474. The Judge’s finding that the dispersal took place

before Kritzinger arrived (Judgement, 19-20) seems implausible

because the only source of this information was Dumse, but Dumse

also said that this dispersal took place after the search of the

“barracks”, i.e. after Kritzinger was on the scene. It seems more

plausible that the policemen, worried that dispersal of the crowd

may have been responsible for turning it violent, wanted to make

sure that they were not seen as having given the order to disperse.

Hence, both Theron and Kritzinger insisted that the crowd was

peaceful and unthreatening to the police, but violent later on

and by implication after the dispersal. This mistaken judgement

by Judge Mullins probably derives from his almost obsessive

determination to accept everything said by state witness Dumse as

the truth. 39 vol. 3, 84-85; vol. 5, 238 40 Badela, 1997, op. cit. 41 vol. 3, 141 42 vol. 22, 1202

up to the crowd and asked them to put forward representatives to talk to him. This time four people came forward, two of them old people. After 15 minutes’ discussion, Theron proposed that he send them to the police station to see for themselves whether the children were there. Whereas the two older people agreed with this strategy, the younger ones were opposed to it. To resolve their differences, the four went back to the crowd and through a loudhailer supplied by Theron informed the crowd of Theron’s offer. Eventually, two people came back to Theron and declared their readiness to go to the police station43 - this was how Brandy Boss and Phindile Mkoto came forward.44 They were taken in a police vehicle while Theron remained behind with the crowd. It was an hour before Brandy Boss and Phindile Mkoto returned. Although the toyi-toying continued and the crowd grew in size during this hour, it remained calm and grouped together, waiting for a rational and agreed process to achieve results.45

While the crowd and Theron negotiated, one of the police vehicles was contacted by Sgt Loubscher and instructed to investigate an area where the children were being assaulted. This was done, and as Kamteni’s account makes clear, the assault was interrupted and the children taken to the police station.46 Theron then radioed ahead to the temporary base and found out that a group of children had indeed arrived at the temporary base. However, he was convinced that the crowd would never have accepted his word because this report would have come from the police and not from “their own people”. In other words, he assumed that “they will not trust the police” during a process that he appropriately called a “negotiation”.47

43 The process that Theron was involved in is reconstructed mainly

from his evidence, but cross-references with other accounts, vol. 5,

242ff. 44 vol. 8, 373 45 vol. 6, 254-5 46 This episode was never acceded to by the prosecution, nor was it

admitted by police witnesses or accepted by the Judge. From both

the court record and verbal accounts heard by the author, there is a

good chance that this episode did in fact take place. Whether it did

or not, however, does not affect the process of crowd formation. 47 vol. 6, 253

When Brandy Boss and Phindile Mkoto returned by police vehicle from the temporary base, they reported to the crowd through the loudhailer that the children were safe. They did not, however, bring the children with them because the police were still processing charges placed against them by Jimmy - charges that Theron was to later in the day dismiss on the grounds that Jimmy had unlawfully “arrested” the youths.48 Unsurprisingly, given the context, the news that the children were “safe” but still in police custody failed to satisfy the crowd. Theron then ordered the crowd through an interpreter to disperse, but there was no reaction. Instead, stones were thrown at the police as the crowd’s frustration mounted and suspicions were expressed that the children were still not safe.49 In other words, the failure by Brandy Boss and Phindile Mkoto to bring back the children was interpreted as a refusal by the police to give back to the community the children whom Jimmy had effectively kidnapped. Theron then ordered all his men back into their vehicles and for the sneeze machine to be used to disperse the crowd. Although he had sincerely attempted to resolve the immediate problem by negotiating with the crowd, at the trial he described the refusal of the crowd to disperse after hearing that the children were safe as very “strange” behaviour.50 In so doing, Theron revealed how little he comprehended about the post-massacre dynamics within the community as a whole and how these dynamics were playing themselves out in the behaviour of this crowd. He then left the scene to patrol other areas where trouble was brewing and therefore never saw the way that the crowd rapidly re-grouped after he left.51

This was, in effect, the turning point for two reasons. Firstly, the crowd that re-grouped was probably also re-composed in a way that brought elements to the fore who were prepared to go to the next stage of defiance under the leadership of people with a very different approach to Brandy Boss and Phindile Mkoto

-possibly the kinds of people who had disagreed with Theron’s proposal to send a delegation to the police station to find the

48 vol. 5, 211; vol. 22, 1221ff. 49 vol. 6, 265 50 vol. 6, 256 51 vol. 22, 1202

children. Lt Kritzinger, who was one of the few state witnesses who seemed aware of differences in the crowd, illuminated this tension between immediate and deeper dynamics when he said that even if the children had been found and brought directly to the crowd, then the “immediate group that had been directly concerned with the issue would have been satisfied. I don’t know if we could have satisfied everyone.”52

Secondly, the re-grouped crowd was now no longer in a mood to negotiate. It was angry and unsatisfied because its attempt to find recourse by negotiating with the police was premised on the hope that the police would support community demands instead of continuing to protect Jimmy and the Peacemakers. When the children were not physically returned and no matter how reassured Brandy and Phindile were, the fears and concerns that led to the formation of the crowd in the first place were not adequately addressed by the police. By the time that the crowd was involuntarily dispersed for the second time that day, the immediate issues of the children and the clumsy police responses had passed away and the deeper dynamics created by the context of general upheaval that characterised the post-massacre period began to take over.

Given the fact that by this time the crowd where convinced that Jimmy Claassens had kidnapped the children and that he and his men were perceived to be allies of Mayor Kinikini, it is unsurprising that the crowd gravitated towards the nearby buildings associated with Kinikini and a supermarket owned by Jimmy Claassens. Significantly, neither the prosecution nor the Judge countered the defence argument that aimed to “show how correct the crowd was. It is to show the probability that Kinikini and his family were rightly or wrongly viewed as being enemies of the community.”53 When asked why she thought her family was killed on 23 March 1985, Joyce Kinikini, Benjamin’s wife said: “They died on that day because the beginning of the whole thing was about that key. The 28th of November … 1984 … and that he

52 vol. 22, 1210

53 Record of Matter between S.T. Mpumlo and Others and the State,

Supreme Court, Appellate Division, p.162 (henceforth referred to as

“Appeal”).

was a member of the Bantu Council. Thirdly, he was an impimpi of Piet Botha (sic).”54

In short, unable to attack armoured vehicles with implements, and given the direct connection between Claassens, Kinikini and the police that had been the subject of negotiations between the crowd and police that morning, and given the overall perceptions of the community captured so graphically by Joyce Kinikini’s court testimony, it is unsurprising that the re-grouped and re-composed crowd was driven inexorably towards targets that were accessible, in close proximity and largely unprotected despite the circling helicopter and police presence in the township. And, furthermore, for young men like Jantjies who ran with this crowd, these were targets that were morally justified by a popular community consensus. It is possible, therefore, that for them this moment of violent action was the fulfilling of a deeper mission to do for the community what they would have liked done for themselves - a decisive apocalyptic delivery from intense suffering by forcibly removing the cause of this suffering.

The Burning of the Barracks

Soon after re-grouping, the crowd started moving up Mabandla Road towards Kinikini’s house and Jimmy’s supermarket located opposite the Kinikini house. Smaller groups started roaming the streets attacking targets that were associated with the police, local government and authority in general.55 Significantly, the group that moved past former Mayor Tini’s house never bothered to attack it despite the fears of Tini and his family who were peeping through the windows from behind closed curtains: “They didn’t even throw a stone at my house”, he told the court.56 This suggests that the crowd was able to rationally select explicable targets - in Tini’s case, his resignation from the council eliminated him as a target. As the main group moved up the street, it split into two, with one group attacking Jimmy’s supermarket and the other Kinikini’s house. According to Mono

54 vol. 19, 1031 55 vol. 6, 286; 56 Appeal, p.103

Badela, a journalist who witnessed the events57: although the police initially used teargas to break up the crowd, the police on guard outside the house eventually fled when they saw the size and mood of the approaching crowd. Luckily Joyce Kinikini had packed up her house and, with the help of Lt Kritzinger and his Casspir,58 taken what she could carry and her daughters out of the township shortly before the main crowd arrived.59

After the truck parked outside the Kinikini house was set alight shortly before 11.45 a.m., the house was next to go up in flames.60 It was after this that the crowd turned its attention to the “barracks”61 where the Kinikinis, Dumse and Pram were boarding up and securing the windows.62

Shortly after the crowd was dispersed for the first time earlier that morning, the group that had been sitting around in the yard of the “barracks” decided to go inside. Although Dumse testified that they were not particularly worried at first, he did admit that Silumko said at the time that the “barracks” had been stoned before and that the people who did it may be involved with the oncoming crowd. Following a suggestion by Silumko, the group boarded up and secured the windowless windows with planks and corrugated iron63 - windowless because frequent stonings had smashed the window panes. Given that they must

57 It was at this moment that Mono Badela, a City Press journalist, arrived after having been called by one of the “comrades” who said to him “things are bad - come quickly”. Badela was one of the few independent eyewitnesses of the events that followed,

see Badela, M., “The weeks of rage that led to that first necklace

death”, Weekly Mail, 4-20 September, 1987.

58 vol. 21, 1147 59 vol. 20, 1051ff. 60 The first report on the attack on the Kinikini house came in at 11.45

a.m., which means that the attack took place shortly before this,

vol. 8, 380 and vol. 22, 1305. 61 Badela, op. cit. 62 Because Dumse Nogcaza was the only survivor of the attack on the

barracks, it is on his testimony that the account of what actually happened is based. His account of the sequence of events, however, is largely confirmed by verbal evidence from prosecution and defence witnesses as well as by video material and the accounts of independent witnesses (see Badela, op. cit.). Dumse’s testimony appears in vol. 9, 466 - vol. 12, 650. Unless otherwise indicated, the account is drawn from Dumse’s evidence in chief, vol. 9, 466-500.

63 vol. 11, 579

have started boarding up the windows anywhere between 7 and

8.30 a.m. (i.e. before the second re-grouping of the crowd), it is conceivable that the group was not too concerned that they were going to be directly attacked, especially with so many police around. Benjamin, however, carried his loaded revolver on his hip just in case. They went into a TV (television) room to watch TV which is where, a while later, they heard the first stone land on the roof.64

As the stoning intensified, the group heard the crowd chanting the names of Geelmuis, Qondile and Silumko, calling them impimpis (“sellouts”).65 The cars were then set alight, starting with Benjamin Kinikini’s that was standing at the garage and with Jimmy Claassens’ Datsun that was parked on the street. This was followed by the burning of the outside toilet. By this stage the entire building was surrounded by the crowd and parts of it began to be set alight as petrol bombs were thrown. Using a wet blanket, some of the group failed to put out the fire that had broken out in the office because the stones flying through the broken windows made it too dangerous. Gwala was struck by a stone in the ribs and screamed, while Dumse was hit on the leg.66 To avoid the spreading fire and the stones, the group decided to find a safer room. Silumko, meanwhile, grabbed his father’s gun and fired three shots into the crowd through a window facing Jongilanga Street - he obeyed, however, an instruction from Benjamin to stop. By this time, none of the rooms were safe from fire and stones and above them they heard banging as someone tried to break open the roof. Burning tyres were thrown into the building through the doorways creating a stench and smoke that caused Gwala to suffocate and faint. While Silumko tried to revive him with a wet blanket, Benjamin also started to faint. This was when they realised that they would need to get out of the burning building. With tyres burning in the doorways, their only way out was through a window. They ripped off the barricade from a window and began climbing out. The crowd was there to meet them and when it saw the group coming out, people shouted

64 vol. 16, 881 65 vol. 12, 626 66 vol. 12, 629

“Joh, they are still here and they are not dead yet.” First Silumko climbed out, followed by Geelmuis, Gwala, Benjamin, Qondile, Dumse and then Pram. The crowd allowed them to climb out without immediately attacking them67 - there was a kind of respite in the frenzy. The group stood helplessly terrified before the crowd and pleaded for “forgiveness”: “Forgive us”, Dumse claimed they said, “we have done nothing. The people you are looking for, are not here.”68 The crowd, momentarily frozen by the realisation that for the first time they were not about to be the victims of the brutal violence meted out by Kinikini and his henchmen, responded in a profoundly rational way: they told Silumko to throw them the gun and if he did they will be allowed to go. There is no way of knowing if this promise would have been fulfilled, but it is possible. In any event, Silumko refused, some stones were then thrown and the Kinikini group passed up the last possible moment of negotiation that could have prevented the killing that soon followed.

Silumko took the lead in trying to make a desperate dash for freedom by darting around the corner to the back of the building towards the fence. The others followed, with the crowd not far behind. Dumse was hit on the back with a stone just after jumping over the fence; Silumko was hit by a brick. The others then changed direction to jump the fence further away, but before they got there Geelmuis decided to hide in a dog kennel in the backyard of the “barracks” while Qondile was pummelled by stones. Gwala and Benjamin were then grabbed by groups and began to be assaulted, while Pram made it over the fence. Groups, however, caught up with them all. In Badela’s words:

“The angry crowd started hacking at their bodies with pangas, beating them with sticks, and then dragging them to the township’s main road, Matanzima Street. Tyres were placed over what was left of their bodies, and they were roasted. People danced around the bodies of these people

67 vol. 12, 634 68 vol. 12, 634

as they burned. To them, they were burning the symbols of

oppression.”69

Dumse, in the meantime, managed to find his way into the burnt-out garage and made his way back through the wreckage to the Jongilanga Street side of the building. He looked out and saw only a few people standing around - the crowd had all moved round to Mabandla Street.70 He ran out, and like Moses Bucwa, the cyclist who did not want to be seen as a strike breaker on 21 March, he wanted to hide his true motives - he picked up a stone and threw it at the house shouting impimpis so that others would think that he was part of the crowd. He then fled towards Jabavu Street in the direction of the hostel where he found policemen congregated at the Labour Office.

Major Theron left the township at about 10 a.m. and returned to the temporary base. Before taking off in the helicopter at about 12.45 a.m., he made sure that the children were released without being charged. It was from the air that he first noticed that the “barracks” and other buildings in the vicinity were on fire. He landed the helicopter near the Development Board offices. Dumse was there to meet him and briefed him on what had happened. He arrived on the scene at 1 p.m., where he found the victims and the burnt-out buildings, some of which were still burning.71 Kritzinger also arrived on the scene after the killing and burning had already taken place, and there are no reports of others having been there. The truth will probably never be known as to why there were so few police vehicles in the vicinity for that crucial hour and forty-five minutes between 10 and 11.45 a.m. despite the fact that all the police were aware that earlier that morning there was a crowd that was quite clearly very angry with the Kinikini/Claassens group.72

When the police arrived to inspect the scene, all that was left of Benjamin was his spinal column lying near the “barracks” and Eric’s and Qondile’s bodies were found near the dog kennel.

69 Badela, op. cit. 70 vol. 12, 650 71 vol. 6, 258 72 This never emerged as a key issue during the court case for reasons

that are attributable, in this author’s opinion, to neglect on the part

of both the prosecution and defence.

Eric’s penis had been cut off, his skull smashed and he had been stabbed twice in the neck before being burnt. Qondile’s arm was amputated, his jugular cut and his head bashed in before he was burnt. Silumko’s body was found in Mabandla Street - his right leg and arms were amputated and he was badly assaulted before he was burnt. Pram was found further down Mabandla Street where he died from head injuries before he was burnt - a 20-cmlong knife was thrust deep into his mouth.73 Gwala’s body was never found.

The video taken of the toyi-toying crowds surrounding the burning bodies caught one prominent person shouting: “These things that they do, we have had enough, we must burn them.” The videoed evidence that finalised the guilt of Jantjies in the eyes of the court was him standing around Silumko’s burning body saying: “This is a dog, viva!” Another moment of extreme violence had arrived. What was not clear then is how much of a turning point it really was.

Aftermath

The search for the children, followed by crowd-police negotiations and the climax in the killings was the start of a day that Lt Kritzinger said was very different from the heightened state of unrest that existed during that March-April period: “It was”, he told the court, “in fact absolute chaos.”74 The shift that day never ended at 6 p.m. - Major Theron only went off duty at 2

a.m. the next morning. Badela’s description captures, once again, what followed the killings and how little the police were really able to do:

“The crowd moved towards the homes of policemen in the township. They hunted the streets for several hours, searching for other symbols of oppression. By 4 p.m., more than a dozen policemen’s homes had been destroyed. The policemen themselves had moved their furniture and possessions while Kinikini was burning. … For the next

73 Judgement, op. cit., 4-15 74 vol. 21, 1150

two days, police were unable to enter the township. It was a no-go area - all police could do was hover the area in a helicopter, powerless to act. It was a day to remember: the first necklace killings in South Africa. It was the culmination of a spiral of violence that had been building for months in the two Uitenhage townships of KwaNobuhle and Langa.”75

By the end of the weekend, the houses and numerous businesses that once belonged to Benjamin Kinikini and Jimmy Claassens lay in smouldering ruins. Jimmy, his family, what was left of the Kinikini family and many black policemen and their families fled the township. They were given a disused building in the white suburbs of what was once the prestigious Innes Primary School to sleep in.76 By mid-April the homes of some 30 policemen and police reservists had been gutted.77

And then, as a kind of reminder of where it all began, the funeral of those who were supposed to have been buried on 21 March took place on Sunday 24th in KwaNobuhle.

Conclusion

Although triggered by concerns by parents that their children had been kidnapped by the Peacemakers, the crowd that initially gathered in solidarity with the parents expanded rapidly until around 7,000 were on the march. It was this extended crowd that ended up necklacing Kinikini and his sons just two days after the Langa Massacre. These two events not only catalysed similar cycles of violence elsewhere across the country (and especially in the Eastern Cape), their extensive coverage in the local and international media reinforced calls by the security forces for much harsher measures. The result was the declaration of the partial State of Emergency on 21 July 1985.

The transformation of a small crudely armed search party led by people like Brandy Boss and Phindile Mkoto into a large

75 Badela, op. cit. It is not clear whether these were in fact the first

necklace murders – the first may have been in Duduza township on

the East Rand. 76 Sunday Tribune, 7.4.85. 77 Evening Post, 18.4.85.

highly mobilised violent crowd has been explained in terms of a chain of events that were simultaneously contextual and fortuitous. Contextual because the individuals and forces that created these events were the product of their context. These were Jimmy and the Peacemakers, the vigilantes who had hitherto acted as extra-legal extensions of the local authority and the local police. But on the 23rd they acted in a way that, in the aftermath of the Langa Massacre, finally triggered a community reaction that the police could not cope with. The policemen were overextended, badly briefed and untrained to manage themselves out of a conundrum that was partly the result of their alliance with Claassens and Kinikini, and partly a response to the Langa Massacre. And then there was the Kinikini family: as defenders of the council, they were as unpopular as other councillors; but with Benjamin being seen as a hard-liner who refused to resign when the other councillors did and as someone who represented the violent wing of that whole group of “sellouts”, they were predictable targets. Finally, there was the crowd and its different elements. From the small group concerned about the children, to people like Jantjies and others like him, the crowd’s reactions were clearly shaped by the economic and political context that will be described in subsequent chapters. After all, it was this context that defined the targets of those who threw the stones, propelled the petrol bombs, assaulted the victims and lit the tyres dowsed in petrol.

But these events were also fortuitous. A close look at the key moments in the chain of events - from the moment the first reports came into the temporary base that the Peacemakers had abducted children to that final moment when the Kinikini group climbed out of the window and faced the crowd - reveals a certain contingent unpredictability. It is only possible to speculate about what would have happened if the following things had played out even slightly differently: the misinformation that the children were in the fridge, the lack of coordination between Theron and Kritzinger, the tactically disastrous decisions to disperse the crowd on two occasions, the failure by whoever took Brandy Boss and Phindile Mkoto to the temporary base to secure the release of the children so that they could have been brought back for the crowd to see, and then the final absence from the immediate vicinity of key security vehicles (Theron was in the air and Kritzinger was taking Joyce Kinikini to safety out of the township).

In the final analysis, the granular details of the power relations that have been unravelled in this Chapter reveal that it is possible to discern the way that the decisions and activities of those with authority and coercive power created dynamics that shaped the nature of crowd formation and action, and how crowd action reacted back on authority in ways that created the conditions for escalating cycles of violence. This dynamic ended in extreme crowd violence that effectively transformed the balance of power at the local level and triggered the intensification of the Eastern Cape rebellion and national resistance.78

As discussed in later chapters, this moment marks the start of a disastrous strategy by the security forces and Uitenhage’s white establishment to implement a final solution to the ‘Langa problem’ -namely, the forced removals that began a year later in July 1986. But before this could happen, there was a brief moment when an amicable negotiated settlement was a distinct possibility. This would have resulted in an agreement that instead of forcibly removing Langa to KwaNobuhle, it would be upgraded. Like in so many other places across South Africa, this moment between the lifting of the 1985 ‘partial’ State of Emergency on 7 March 1986 and the declaration of the much more brutal National State of Emergency on 12 June 1986 was when forces in favour of a negotiated outcome of South Africa’s conflict at national and local level threatened the hegemony of the security forces who had no control of negotiated processes and outcomes. Heavily supported by the ‘securocrat-in-chief’, President PW Botha, these security forces enjoyed their dominance and prominence in ‘resolving’ the South African crisis. With sufficient autonomy to deploy the violence that they had been trained to use to defend white rule, they mercilessly hunted down, detained, tortured and killed

78 For the most comprehensive overview of the origins,

geographical scope, political dynamics and impact of the Eastern

Cape uprising see Riordan, R., 2022. Apartheid’s Stalingrad: How

the townships of the Eastern Cape defied the apartheid war machine.

Johannesburg: Jacana.

people who were, in their minds, nothing more than ‘terrorists’. Because most had fought ‘terrorists’ in army units engaged in South Africa’s ‘border war’ in Northern South West Africa before joining the police force, they could easily adapt their battle landscape to the complexities of South Africa’s urban townships. Reassured by PW Botha’s Rubicon Speech, their mission was crystal clear - keep white minority rule alive. Unbeknown to them, the Langa Massacre and the subsequent necklacing of Kinikini and his group set in motion a series of events that would over the next five years contribute to a wider movement that succeeded in ensuring the lifting of the State of Emergency, release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners, the unbanning of the liberation movements and four years of negotiations that the security forces often tried to disrupt.

A Methodological Note

This chapter is disinterested in the individual guilt or innocence of Jantjies and Mielies, and is more interested in how this crowd formed and why it acted in the way that it did. The defence, prosecution and the Judge spent much time during the year-long trial discussing this crowd, but only in order to establish whether the accused were part of and/or shared the putative intentions of the crowd. Without being concerned with court-room argumentation, this same material was used in this chapter to understand the crowd and its direct and undisputed involvement in extremely brutal forms of collective violence.79

When it comes to the “behaviour” of crowds and mobilised groups involved in collective violence, it has been the social psychologists rather than the sociologists, historians or

79 Although the use of court records as empirical evidence for

sociological analysis has not been extensively debated in South

Africa, it is common practice by historians. In this case, the actual

events were largely common cause between the defence and

prosecution; what was disputed was the nature of the relationship

between the accused, these events and state witnesses who were

involved in the events. This relationship, however, is not what is of

major concern in this chapter because this chapter is about what

happened, and not about who did it and whether they are guilty

or not.

political scientists who have in recent years been most helpful in illuminating the moral economy of violent crowds.80 Foster,81 Manganyi82 and Straker et. al.83 all share the view that crowd violence needs to be understood in terms of a complex merging of the wider set of power relations that are socially, culturally and politically structured and the psychology of the individual participant in crowd action that is the subject that mediates these relations in space and time.84 Taking this as a conceptual point of departure, this chapter linked the events of 23 March to the immediate aftermath of the Langa Massacre, and to the deeper and more longer-term consequences of the political conflicts discussed in subsequent chapters.

The analysis of crowd action provided will in this chapter will go beyond most previous accounts of crowd action because instead of simply looking at causes (mainly ‘social’ and ‘structural’ for opposition writers and ‘conspiratorial’ for state-linked writers) and effects (mainly psychological and political), an attempt will be made here to examine the specific events and actions that transformed what was an initially relatively peaceful (albeit defensive) gathering, into an extremely violent crowd that

80 Important exceptions are the sociological works on violent conflict by Byerley, My., “Mass Violence in Durban’s Settlements in the 1980s”, M.Sc . thesis, Department of Geographical and Environmental Studies, University of Natal/Durban, 1989; and Seekings, J., 1986. “Identity, Authority, and the Dynamics of Violent Conflict: Duduza Township, 1985”, paper presented at a Conference on Political Violence in Southern Africa, University of Oxford.

81 Foster, D., “Social Influence III: Crowds and Collective Violence” in Foster, D. and Louw-Potgieter, J. (eds.), Social Psychology in South Africa, Johannesburg, Lexicon Publishers, 1991, pp.441-483.

82 Manganyi, N.C., “Crowds and their Vicissitudes: Psychology and Law in the South African Court Room”, in Manganyi, N.C. and du Toit, A. (eds.), Political Violence and the Struggle in South Africa, Johannesburg, Southern, 1990.

83 Straker, G. et. al., Faces in the Revolution, Cape Town and Athens, David Philip and Ohio University Press, 1992.

84 Significantly, Seekings also turned to this literature when grappling with a similar problem from within a sociological paradigm, see Seekings, J., “Identity, Authority, and the Dynamics of Violent Conflict: Duduza Township, 1985”, paper presented at a Conference on Political Violence in Southern Africa, University of Oxford, June, 1991.

embarked on actions that started a new trend in the way that crowds vented their rage in South Africa’s townships - a trend that many caught up in the desperate street battles of the 1980s were to emulate in townships across the country over the years that followed.85 This examination of violent crowd action also fills a gap that Seekings identified in his survey of 500 publications on township politics, after which he concluded that whereas nonviolent crowd action was well researched, the opposite was true for cases of violent crowd action.86 It also takes up where Dennis Davis left off when he criticised the notion of “deindividuation” which was, he argued, used as a psychological device by defence teams during “common purpose” trials to diminish the rational intent and therefore guilt of their clients.87 In other words, echoing the writing of Elias Canetti, the crowd was depicted by the defence teams as ‘irrational’ resulting in the irrational behaviours of ‘deindividuated’ participants. Like arguing that a mentally unfit person cannot be held fully responsible for their actions, being part of an ‘irrational’ crowd had a similar effect. This was contrasted to the presumed rational behaviours that only individuals are capable of under so-called ‘normal circumstances’ where, it is assumed, reason prevails. But as the British social historian EP Thompson famously argued, the actions of ‘the crowd’ in history are easily explained in terms of rational collective responses to exploitation and disempowerment. The crowd, in this sense, is profoundly rational – even when acting extremely violently. Rather than the outbreak of some irrational primordial predilection for violence, the violent behaviour of the Uitenhage crowd on 23 March 1985 not only had a history within the socio-political context of the times, but also context-specific catalysing events that originated in the very early pre-dawn hours of that fateful day.

85 See Straker, et.al., op. cit. for the best overview of the dynamics of

these processes, based on a set of events that took place in Leandra

township in the Eastern Transvaal. 86 Seekings, J., South Africa’s Townships, 1980-1991: An Annotated

Bibliography, Occasional Paper No. 16, Research Unit for Sociology

of Development, Department of Sociology, University of

Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch. 87 Davis, D., “Capital Punishment and the Politics of the Doctrine of

Common Purpose”, op. cit.

Origins

Under the leadership of Jan van Riebeek, the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) took possession of the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 and retained control until 1795. However, it was European wars that caused the changes in ownership and governance of the small colony on the southernmost tip of the African continent that had become a strategic sea route.

The French Revolution in 1789 marked the start of the French Revolutionary Wars that threatened the established monarchical order in Europe. England led the European effort to contain revolutionary France, culminating in the short-lived Treaty of Amiens between the French and English forces in 1802. Following the Battle of Muizenberg in 1795 between a fleet of British ships and the land-based VOC forces that were at that time allied with the French, the British defeated the Dutch and took control of the slave-based Colony that the VOC had built up over the previous century. Only seven years later, the Treaty of Amiens provided for the return of the Cape Colony to the Batavian Republic, a client state of revolutionary France that lasted only until 1806 when it was re-invaded by Napoleon’s forces after which the Kingdom of Holland was restored.

After briefly serving as Head of State of the National Assembly of the Batavia Republic and a brief stint in prison in 1798 for his political beliefs following an attempted coup d’etat, Jacob Abraham Uitenhage de Mist (1749–1823) was appointed by the Batavian Government as Commissioner-General of the Cape Colony. He arrived in the harbour of the Cape Colony on 23 December 1802 and he hoisted the Batavian flag over the Castle built by the VOC near the harbour on 21 February 1803. His job was to oversee the transfer of the colony from British to Batavian rule, not knowing that the British would regain possession three years later. Born in 1749 in Zaltbommel, Netherlands, he studied Law at Leiden University before joining the public service. His lasting impact was to streamline the administration of the four districts of the Colony, namely the Cape, Stellenbosch, Swellendam and Graaff-Reinet. The latter, however, was split into two districts for ease of administration, each with a so-called Landdros responsible for local administration, including property taxation, land allocation and, of course, slavery. When ‘Graaff-Reinet’ was split into two, the result was a new district called Uitenhage, named after himself. The administrative centre was established on the banks of the Kariega River, and has been known as Uitenhage until it was renamed Kariega in 2021.

Batavian rule did not last long. After Napoleon restored the Dutch monarchy in 1806, the British reconquered the Cape Colony in 1806 at the Battle of Blaauwberg. After landing his army of 5,000 soldiers at what is now Melkbosstrand north of Cape Town, Sir David Baird led his forces into battle with the 2,000 strong Dutch forces (which included some Khoi soldiers) led by General Janssens. Janssens surrendered on 18 January. The British governed until the aftermath of the Boer Wars a century later, which culminated in the ‘Union of South Africa’. British colonial rule was handed over to the white settlers (the so-called ‘Boers’) who agreed that South Africa would remain an integral part of the British imperial system. White minority rule lasted until 1994, three hundred and forty years after the VOC colonised the Cape.

Uitenhage, however, survived the transition back to British colonial rule in 1806 as an intact district. Indeed, there was even a lobby to make it the capital of the Cape Colony because of its vast high-quality water resources, abundant lands (that were initially handed out to settlers for free without compensating the local population who had always lived there), proximity to Port Elizabeth’s busy harbour (which was, until the abolition of slavery in the 1830s, where slaves were brought in to support the expanding colonial economy) and attractive weather conditions. Part of the attraction included the large plot of land that was available adjacent to the home of the local administrator, the Landdros, so he could supplement his meagre salary by selling produce from this land that was, in turn, tilled by Muslim slaves imported mainly from Malaysia.

The rich biodiversity and clean waters of the Kariega River was what made Uitenhage so attractive for the settlers. Its significance as a spiritually sacred river in the eyes of the local indigenous population was ignored, so too was the fact that the Kariega River had for centuries sustained the livelihoods of the many Khoi and amaXhosa groups as it wound its way through to the Indian Ocean at a place now called Kenton-on-Sea.

John Paterson, prominent Port Elizabeth businessman and founder of the Port Elizabeth-based Standard Bank of British South Africa (which eventually became one of South Africa’s largest banks today), wrote a booklet in 1851 which he called A Dissertation on the Absolute Necessity of Resident Government in the Eastern Province of the Cape of Good Hope, that included an article on the eligibility of the nascent town of Uitenhage on the banks of the beautiful Kariega River “as the site pointed out by nature herself for the seat of the supreme power in British South Africa”.

The origins of industrial economic activity in the Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage (PEU) region date back to the 1820s when a permanent white settlement was established at Algoa Bay, renamed Port Elizabeth in 1820 (after the wife of then Governor-General of the Cape Colony). After Frederick Korsten set up his (failed) whaling factory in Algoa Bay, in 1851 a wool washing factory was established by Frames in Uitenhage. The abundant and clean waters of Uitenhage were particularly well-suited to wool-washing. Port Elizabeth’s main function, however, revolved around the export of agricultural commodities, particularly wool, which was the Cape Colony’s main export.1 With the founding of the Standard Bank of British South Africa by John Paterson in Port Elizabeth in 1862 and the take-off of the import/export trade through her port that exceeded Cape Town in volume by the late 1950s, Port Elizabeth began its transition from a settler entrepot

Mabin, A., “Class as a Local Phenomenon: Conflict Between ‘Cape Town’ and ‘Port Elizabeth’ in the 19th Century”, paper presented to the History Workshop Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, 31 January - 4 February 1984, p.3.

to one of the colony’s most important centres of mercantile capital.2 Under John Paterson’s charismatic leadership, the Standard Bank of British South Africa consolidated its grip on the colony’s finances by merging with the Commercial Bank of Port Elizabeth, the Colesberg Bank, the British Kaffrarian Bank, and the Fauresmith Bank.

By 1900, Port Elizabeth had a population of 33,000. The city’s transport links with the interior made the port a crucial link in the chain between the Transvaal mines and the colonial Metropole. The service sector activities that this stimulated, plus the small-scale manufacturing centred largely around wool washing and leather tanning, provided the foundations for Port Elizabeth’s c.20th industrial base.

For many decades Uitenhage was merely the small centre of a large agricultural community. By the mid-1800s, it had firms engaged in craft production, tanning, wool washing and the manufacture of hats and saddles. The key turning point in Uitenhage’s economic trajectory came when the first sod of the new railway line between Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth was turned in Port Elizabeth on 9 January 1872 by the Governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Henry Barkly, and it was opened for traffic on 21 September 1875. Because Uitenhage was situated beyond the ‘rust belt’ it was ideally suited for large-scale construction and repair of railway rolling stocks. By the late 1800s, the rail yards employed over 1,000 workers, including 300 white skilled workers who were mainly English immigrants living in cottages built for them by the railway company, while the remainder were a mix of African and coloured people (including a large Malay group who had their own Mosque) living in self-built mainly informal structures. Several churches were built to cater for the different religious groups in the white population, including a large Dutch Reformed Church that took 27 years to build.

However, it was only during the 1940s with the establishment of a tyre and rubber factory that Uitenhage became

See Ibid.

an industrial centre.3 In 1946 a firm called South African Motor Assemblers and Distributors Limited (SAMAD) was established in Uitenhage to produce Studebakers. In 1951 SAMAD signed an agreement with Volkswagen (Germany) to produce Beetles. In 1956 Volkswagen acquired a controlling interest in SAMAD and in 1961 the company changed its name to Volkswagen of South Africa Limited. By 1964, Volkswagen (Germany) had bought all the shares of the company thus turning it into a wholly owned subsidiary.4 It catered for an almost exclusively white market that expanded rapidly after the Sharpeville shootings in 1960. The Beetle became synonymous with white suburban middle-class culture that was, in turn, a carbon copy of post-Second World War North American urban consumer culture.

The urban population of the PEU region grew from 68,000 in 1921 to 350,000 in 1960. Approximately half this population was black by the end of the period.5 The number of industrial establishments increased at an average rate of 2,3% per annum, from 186 in 1920/21 to 469 in 1961/2. These establishments employed just under 5,000 people in 1920/21 and nearly 53,000 in 1963/64. This was a 5,4% rate of increase per annum, the highest rate of growth in the country.6

After the First World War, PEU’s industrial base was limited. Measured in terms of numbers of employees per enterprise, textiles and footwear were by far the most dominant sectors that supplied both local and non-local markets. Whereas these sectors employed 34% of the total workforce, food and beverages employed 28%, metals and machinery 8% and the rest was divided fairly equally into the other sectors. The picture had changed slightly by the 1930s because although textiles and footwear were still dominant (employing 43%), the establishment

3 Philips, B.D. and de Coning, C., Secondary Industry in the Port

Elizabeth/Uitenhage Region, Port Elizabeth, University of Port

Elizabeth, Institute for Planning Research, Research Report No.2,

p.42. See also Faull, N.H.B, Volkswagen SA (PTY) LTD, unpublished case study research report, University of Cape Town, 1983, Part One, p.3-4.

4 Faull, op. cit., p.3. 5 Philip, B.D. and de Coning, C., op. cit., pp.46-47. 6 Ibid., pp.49-54.

of two motor vehicle assemblers in the 1920s meant that 15% of the workforce found employment in the transport sector.7 By the 1960s, the industrial base of PEU in order of size of employer was as follows: transport, 29%; textiles and footwear, 27%; food and beverages, 13%; metals and machinery, 13%; nonmetals, 5%; wood, 4%; printing, 4%; chemicals, 3%; and furniture, 1%.8

In general, the PEU economy underwent the classic transition from mercantile colonial capitalism, through intermediate processing coupled to service sector growth, and finally, with the help of import tariffs and later local content legislation, the establishment of a secondary industry. As the metropolitan heartland of the Eastern Cape, it inevitably became the focus of black urbanisation.

The Regional Economy

The PEU regional economy was unique in the South African context, because by the late 1970s, the manufacturing sector produced the highest percentage of this region’s geographic product compared to other regions, i.e. 34,8% as compared to 3,5% in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (PWV) region, 24,1% in Durban/Pinetown and 22,7% in the Western Cape.9 The manufacturing sector was followed by transport and communication (15,1%), wholesale/retail (13,2%), finance (11%), government (9,4%) and then a few smaller sectors.10 In short, because of the dominance of manufacturing, Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage were the classical industrial working class cities. Unsurprisingly, this created the basis for the emergence of strong industrial trade unionism by the late 1970s.

The largest industrial concerns in Uitenhage were related to the motor and transport industry. They were Volkswagen; Good Year Tyre and Rubber Company (established in 1945); Guestro Industries (Dorbyl subsidiary) that produced crankshafts

7 Ibid., pp.60-63. 8 Ibid., p.66. 9 Wait, C.V.R and Renders, V., “Economic Trends in the East Cape: A

Comparative Study”, Port Elizabeth, University of Port Elizabeth,

Institute for Planning Research, Occasional Paper No.3, 1981, p.5. 10 Ibid., p.6.

and other forged components; Cam TRW (established 1970), an Australian company that produced steering gear mechanisms; Bosal Afrika (established 1964) produced exhaust systems; SKF, the giant Swedish firm that produced ball bearings; Borg-Warner South Africa produced rear axles; Hella, a German linked producer of lighting and signalling equipment for motor vehicles; Veady and Sharples, machine builder; National Standard produced steel wire for the tyre industry and copper wire for the Post Office; finally the South African Railways Workshops - the century-old foundational stone of the manufacturing economy of the region

- still manufactured spares and repaired rolling stock for the country’s entire railway system.

Although the motor and transport industry dominated Uitenhage’s economy by the 1980s, the roots of this economy lay in the wool and mohair processing plants. The main companies still involved in these activities were Gubb and Inggs, Cape of Good Hope Woolcombers, Veldspun, Union Cotton Mills and Llama Fashion Techniques (Feltex). In general, all these establishments employed huge labour forces of between 1,500 and 6,000 people, were controlled by the large national monopolies or multi-nationals and had capital investments of between R20 million and R300 million.11 This well-serviced area located beyond the “rust belt” but close enough to a fully-serviced port, probably contained by 1978 the highest concentration of large-scale modernised manufacturing industry per geographical head of population in the country.

The manufacturing sector in PEU was dominated by the motor industry and its various feeder sectors. Table 3.1 presents the data.

Faull, op. cit., pp7-9.

Source: Wait and Renders, Table 2, p.8.

Wait and Renders calculated that in 1978 “the motor and motor related manufacturing activities in Port Elizabeth/Uitenhage [amounted] to R694 million or 61,3% of the total locally manufactured product.”12 The table also shows that 70,4% of the manufactured product were consumption goods and the nature of the production processes involved were such that there were very weak backward and forward linkages within the regional economy. Furthermore, 74% of the locally manufactured product was sold to non-local markets (including a few exports). Furthermore, 75% of the manufacturing sector’s material inputs came from outside the region. 13 In short, the PEU regional economy was structurally very weak indeed: it had weak internal linkages, most of its product was sold externally and most of its inputs were imported from non-local markets. That said, this is often what an industrial entrepot looks like the world over - raw materials come, products get exported and what makes this possible is manufacturing capabilities, productive labour, technological advancements and access to capital. The PEU region had all four over a number of decades.

Although the motor industry was important for PEU as a whole, it was far more central to Uitenhage’s economy than Port Elizabeth’s. The original SAMAD factory produced 32 cars per day with a workforce of 320. Although the original Beetle was the mainstay of production, this changed as the Kombi was introduced in 1955, the Audi in 1967, the Passat in 1974 and the Golf in 1978. By 1980 250 vehicles were being produced per day by 6,000 workers. Volkswagen’s investment has been nothing short of massive. In 1956 R1 million was spent on plant expansion, in 1963 R8 million was invested in expanded premises and facilities, another R800,000 was spent on plant in 1966 and then in 1980 it was announced that R100 million would be spent over the following three years to expand production facilities, increase local content, add to the vehicle range, establish a new car engine plant and improve welfare and training facilities for staff. Volkswagen claimed that it spent over R100 million per year to

12 Wait, C.V.R. and Renders, V ., op. cit., p.7. 13 Ibid., pp.9-13.

purchase locally made components.14 The following list15 presents the number of new cars sold per month between 1975 and 1986:

1975 - 19,086 1976 - 15,428 1977 - 13,897 1978 - 17,061 1979 - 17,773 1980 - 23,088 1981 - 25,127 1982 - 23,619 1983 - 22,735 1984 - 22,396 1985 - 17,027 1986 - 13,955

The dominance of the motor industry justifies further discussion of the problems faced by this sector. After the 1981 peak, “[t] here has since been a downward trend in annual sales which has accelerated in 1985 and 1986. This has plunged the motor industry into a crisis which is worse than that faced by any other major manufacturing sector in the economy.”16

There are a number of cyclical and structural reasons for the decline of the motor industry.17 One market-related reason for the decline in vehicle sales in the early- to mid-1980s relates to motor vehicle price increases. Whereas motor vehicle prices increased by 37,3% between 1984 and 1986, the consumer price index and incomes only rose 18,9% and 12,1% respectively. The underlying cause of this price hike was the falling exchange rate. Between mid-1984 and December 1985 the rand value of the US$, German Deutchmark and Japanese yen increased by 105,6%, 124,7% and 133,7% respectively. This adversely affected the motor industry

14 Faull, N.H.B., op. cit., p.3.

15 Black, P.A., Davies, WJ., Wallis, J.L., McCarthy, PJ. and Clayton, P.M., Industrial Development Strategy for Region D, Second Interim Report, Grahamstown, Rhodes University, 1986, p.26.

16 Ibid., p.27. 17 For this analysis of the motor industry I will rely entirely on Black, P.A., et. al., pp.27-47.

because no less than 50% of the value of vehicles sold in South Africa were imported.

In response to the deepening financial crisis, Government introduced a range of fiscal measures in a desperate attempt to prevent outward flows of finance and generate more income. Coupled to the effects of the falling exchange rate was the effect of rising taxes. Over the year since January 1984 general sales tax rose from 6% to 12% and an import surcharge of 10% was imposed. Volkswagen calculated that R2,628 tax was paid on a R15,000 car in January 1986. The decline in sales that this produced was exacerbated by the introduction of a fringe benefit tax in 1985 that undercut fleet sales, a traditionally stable segment of the market.

These fiscally induced challenges reinforced the structural weaknesses in the industry for which there were few remedies. Firstly, given that there was a small domestic market of 350,080 units per year, and given the relatively competitive nature of the industry, no manufacturer could realise the economies of scale attained by overseas producers. Secondly, as a result of the subsidised local content programme, manufacturers had to purchase materials from local suppliers even though these could be imported at cheaper rates. Thirdly, although the white market was saturated, the black market remained too constrained to facilitate major expansion. Fourthly, although the port was the original reason for locating assembly-based motor manufacturers in PEU, with the shift away from assembly to direct manufacture as a result of the local content programme, the Reef-based competitors were closer to material input supplies. Fifthly, the PEU firms were located comparatively greater distances away from the main consumer markets in Natal and southern Transvaal. Sixthly, motor manufacturers complained that because the PEU motor industry experienced the longest period of unionisation of the workforce, wages had risen faster than productivity increases. Finally, the more attractive industrial decentralisation incentives in industrial decentralisation points located elsewhere in the Eastern Cape/Border Region diverted potential investors away from the high-wage zones of PEU to areas close to the apartheid-created bantustans. Given these problems, the share of the national market accruing to PEU manufacturers fell from 58% in 1965 to 46% in 1970 to 41% in 1980 and finally to 32% in 1985.

As one authoritative analysis put it: “In 1986, PEU manufacturers have for the first time, received a smaller share of the market (23%) than either Durban (28%) or Reef (39%) based manufacturers.”18 The growth of PEU manufacturing as a whole was -0,09% during 1970 to 1979.19

As far as the PEU workforce was concerned, it was relatively well paid, fairly productive, relatively well educated and skilled. The average annual wage and salary per worker in 1979 was R3,811.80, the highest after the PWV region where workers earned R4,588.30. This corresponded to high productivity levels with the PEU workers producing the second highest output per worker in the country.20 As far as the racial composition of the workforce was concerned, in 1979 26,4% were white, 34,3% coloured/Asian and 39,3% African.21 The dominance of the motor industry resulted in the creation of one of the most skilled regional workforces in the country. After categorising different industries according to “high”, “medium” and “low” skill levels, Black et. al. provide the information contained in Table 3.2:22

Source: Calculated from Black, P.A., et. al., p.29

18 Ibid., p.39.

19 Ibid., p.39.

20 Black, P.A., et. al., “Industrial Development Strategy for Region D”, First Interim Report Submitted to the Development Bank of Southern Africa, Grahamstown, Rhodes University, p.27.

21 Ibid., p.28.

22 Ibid., p.29.

This relatively high skill level in PEU and the consequent bargaining power through trade unions afforded to semi-skilled and skilled workers, helps to explain the relatively high wage levels in this region and the depth of union organisation.

The problems of labour ‘control’ and productivity were of primary concern to the white capitalist interests in the region. These interests were rooted in the manufacturing sector and to a lesser extent the commercial sector. The Midlands Chamber of Industries (MCI) that represented the former and the Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage Chambers of Commerce that represented the latter were totally dominated by white English and Afrikaans business interests. The multinational corporations that controlled the motor industry were clearly the dominant interest in the MCI. Small-scale largely English-speaking commerce in Port Elizabeth and Afrikaans traders in Uitenhage dominated the chambers of commerce.

How these interests understood the economic problems of the region was reflected in a survey of opinions conducted amongst leading local business and public representatives in 1982. They identified the following problems: (i) under-utilisation of infrastructure (e.g. the harbour operated at under 50% capacity);

(ii) rising unemployment; (iii) local authorities had insufficient income to provide all essential services; (iv) contracting industrial base because of more attractive investment opportunities in other regions; (v) PEU-based industries losing their competitive advantage; (vi) slow industrial growth relative to the PWV and the country as a whole; (vii) “labour unrest and poor black/white relations resulting from this”; (viii) slow job creation coupled to 3% annual growth of the “labour force”; (ix) shrinking pool of skills and talent in the region.23

This survey also revealed that business regarded “labour unrest” as the second most important “barrier to economic growth” in PEU after “distance from major markets”.24 When asked which organisations “do you feel hindered local economic

23 Louis Heyl Associates, “The Economic Growth Potential of the

Greater Algoa Bay Area”, Pretoria, unpublished report, 1982, p.20. 24 Ibid., p.21

development”, labour and political organisations that organised “unrest” were regarded as the primary culprits.25 Nevertheless, when asked what were the PEU region’s “most important assets”, “unskilled labour” was rated most highly. The second “most important asset” was the harbour facility. When asked what “improvements are required” to solve some of these problems, the list in order of priority was not surprising: “Improvement of general business attitude; provision of low income housing; improved public transport; improved training facilities; industrial parks for small [black] entrepreneurs; improvement of recreational facilities; more serviced industrial land; development of irrigation potential; improved hotel accommodation; expansion of water and sewerage systems.”26 In short, except for the demand for improved hotels and business attitudes, the primary demands of PEU’s capitalist interests were for substantial upgrading of the main reproductive urban facilities (housing, transport, water and sanitation, training and recreation). One typical comment from the respondents was: “Adequate labour force although untrained and unhoused.”27

In a special research report into black living conditions commissioned by the business-funded and led Urban Foundation’s Eastern Cape division, one of the key conclusions was:

“A major education programme is required to develop home ownership desires leading to increased home purchases and ultimate social security. The growing importance and influence of the youth group must be recognised and maximum attention given to providing needed acceptable education, recreational and entertainment facilities. These facilities are fundamental to quality of life and neighbourhood awareness and pride.”28

25 Ibid., p.30 26 Ibid., p.34 27 Ibid., p.28 28 Executive Projects, “Greater Algoa Bay Affordable Housing

Research Project”, Port Elizabeth, unpublished report, 1985., p.16/11

Supporting a statement like this, of course, is the rather crude racist assumption held by liberal businessmen associated with the Urban Foundation in the mid-1980s that ‘blacks are not capitalist enough – if they were and could own property, they would not be so troublesome’.

This preoccupation with reproductive urban facilities was directly related to the general perception amongst employers that workplace resistance and township unrest were the real obstacle to economic growth and not low wages. Their response to black protest was to argue that living and related reproductive facilities needed to be improved - problems that the state was supposed to address, not them. This perception legitimised and supported popular black demands for housing and better urban services. However, in light of the state’s failure to address these problems in any meaningful way (especially housing), these issues were to become the foci of sustained popular rebellion and protest amongst the popular classes during the mid-1980s. Organised workers, however, were to attach meanings to these community needs that contradicted the “social security” and “quality of life” concerns of the private sector. Workers blamed employers for paying ‘poverty wages’.

In short, by the 1980s the PEU regional economy was moving rapidly into a severe structural recession with little relief from the state. The rapidly contracting regional economy and the drastic limits that this placed on occupational mobility and income distribution was incapable of meeting the needs of the increasingly well-educated, relatively highly skilled and relatively well-paid working class. Given that all this was overdetermined by rapid urbanisation and population growth rates without simultaneous expansion of housing stock (as the next section will show), it is unsurprising that community-based struggles over the terms of labour power reproduction became the focus of political conflict in this region and in Uitenhage in particular during the 1980s.

Demographic and Socio-Economic Trends

The total population of the PEU region for 1984 was conservatively estimated to be 727,580. Of this, nearly 400,000 or over 50% were black African.29 The total growth rates of this population were 33% during the two decades 1960 to 1980. However, African growth rates increased from 37,9% in 1960 to 1970 to 44,3% in 1970 to 1980.30 A more reliable population estimate put the figure at 450,000 in the range 420,000 to 470,00031. This source also argued that the most reliable annual population growth rate since 1970 was 4,7% in a range of 4,5% to 5,0%.32

According to Kruger and Potgieter, there were 1,041,760 African males and 1,337,120 African females in Region D in 1970 or, in other words, a 78 “masculinity ratio” (i.e. number of males per female).33 By 1980, the masculinity ratio had shifted to 81 with 1,474,424 and 1,815,925 females.34 The age profile of Africans living in Region D is reflected in Table 3.3:

29 Black, P.A., et. al., “Industrial Development Strategy for Region D”, First Interim Report…, op. cit., p.3

30 Ibid., p.10.

31 Executive Projects, op. cit, p.16/4.

32 Ibid., p.16/4.

33 Region D is the pre-1993 term that was used to refer to what is now the Eastern Cape Province which incorporates the former Transkei and Ciskei homelands, plus the Border region and the Eastern Cape hinterland and coastline. Region D was created as a functional planning unit along with 8 other similarly constituted regions across the rest of the country. They were created by the state as part of a reformist initiative in the late 1970s when the then PW Botha Government was looking for ways of maintaining political independence for the homelands, but within a framework of a nationally planned integrated economy. For a detailed analysis see Cobbett, W., Hindson, D., Glaser, D. and Swilling, M., “A Critical Analysis of the South African State’s Reform Strategies in the 1980s”, in Frankel, P., Pines, N. and Swilling, M. (eds.), State, Resistance and Change in South Africa, London, Croom Helm, 1988.

34 Kruger, G. and Potgieter, J.F., Development Region D: A Comparative Study of Socio-Economic/Demographic Features Based on the 1970/1980 Censuses, Institute of Planning Research, University of Port Elizabeth, Series C-Report No. 3, Port Elizabeth, 1985, p.30.

Source: Calculated from Kruger and Potgieter, Table 3.2.

This table is important because it shows that no less than 53% of the African population were younger than twenty and that 76% were younger than thirty-five. The first figure in particular is revealing because it points to the demographic centrality of what came to be known in everyday language as “the youth”. Given the conditions of poverty and economic recession that they lived under, this was one reason why this group came to play such an important political role in the struggles of the 1980s. Also, given that most of this group were of school-going age, it becomes easier to understand why education grievances rapidly affected the community as a whole.

Using a “dependency ratio” calculation, Kruger and Potgieter demonstrate from these figures that there were 135,2 dependents (young and aged) per 100 economically productive people (aged between 20 and 64) in the African community. This compared with 82,5 for white people, 88,9 for Asian people and 128,5 for coloured people.35 If a 50% unemployment rate is included, then this dependency ratio must be doubled to approximately 270 or 2,7 dependents per earner.

As far as African education is concerned, similar crucial sociological implications emerge. Table 3.4 presents the basic data:

35 Ibid., p.25.

Level of African Education in PEU, 1970-1980

Source: Calculated from Kruger and Potgieter, Table 4.2(d)

Like the age profile, the sociological implications of this table shed invaluable light on political dynamics in the black townships at the time. In the short space of a decade the number of Africans who achieved some sort of education up to standard 5 increased by over 50,000. The number who achieved standards 6 and 7 more than doubled, while, most dramatically of all, those who obtained standard 8 and 9 more than trebled and those who achieved standard 10 (and higher) increased almost five times. This rate of educational advancement continued into the 1980s as the state increased its expenditure on black education. Given the politicised nature of black education since the 1976 student uprising and given that the PEU regional economy had entered a deep structural recession from the late 1970s, the education system was producing politicised young people with diminishing chances of using their qualifications to obtain economic positions to satisfy rising expectations. Adding fuel to the fire, rising state expenditures were aimed at increasing the quantity of people going through the educational system without a concomitant improvement in the quality of the system itself.

36 This table lists the highest school standard passed on average,

regardless of what post-schooling qualifications may have

been attained. As far as the “None” category is concerned, it is

misleading because it includes infants and pre-school age groups.

The National Technical Certificate I, II and III are included in the

Std. 6&7, 7&8 and 10 categories respectively. They are not counted

as post-school qualifications.

This trend towards rapid educational advancement is reflected in increases in the number of diplomas and degrees achieved by Africans in the PEU area. Between 1970 and 1980, the number of diplomas awarded to Africans in this area increased from 1,080 to 2,100 and the number of degrees awarded increased from 40 to 200.37

It was reliably estimated in 1985 that the unemployment rate in PEU was between 50 and 60 per cent.38 Rising unemployment was the product of slow employment creation and high urbanisation and population expansion rates. Whereas 41,980 new jobs became available for Africans during the decade 1970 to 1980, the size of the African population increased by 123,520 from 242,260 in 1970 to 365,780 in 1980.39 With the population growing at three times the rate of employment growth, it is unsurprising that unemployment rose. It also explains why there was a significant decline in the number of economically active Africans (defined as those with actual employment) in PEU. Whereas 90,1% of the total population in the 20 to 64-year age bracket were economically active in 1970, this dropped to 71,3% in 198040 and it is safe to assume that this downward trend accelerated with the onset of the recession during the first quarter of 1982. If these trends are seen against the backdrop of relative educational advancement, a clear picture of a context conducive for severe social tension begins to emerge.

Despite relative declines in employment growth and economic activity ratios reflected in the above percentage shares, there were crucial economic changes that, if measured in absolute terms, reflect the extent to which shifts in the industrial base affected the occupational structure of African employees. Table 3.4a presents the basic data:

37 Kruger, G. and Potgieter, J.F., op. cit., p.39.

38 See Levin, M., “The Unemployment Rate of Blacks in the Port

Elizabeth/Uitenhage Area: Special Report”. Employment Research

Unit, Vista University, Port Elizabeth, 27 July, 1985. 39 Calculated from Kruger, G. and Potgieter, J.F., op. cit., p. 10 and p.73. 40 Ibid., p.57.

Table 3.4a: Changes in the Occupational Structure of African Employees in the Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage Area 1970-1980

* This refers to the percentage increase from 1970-1980 for each category. Source: Calculated from Kruger and Potgieter, Table 7.1 (d)

If we assume that the production, service and farming categories refer to employees broadly located in unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled labour, then this table reveals that about two-thirds of all African employees can be defined as falling within wage-based labour, or what could be categorised as the working class. However, during the decade 1970 to 1980, the number of working class employees increased negligibly. The most important shifts were significant increases in the number of employees in professional, administrative and clerical employment. This, if seen in the context of relative educational advancement, suggests the emergence of an important - albeit small - upwardly mobile middle class. These professional and white-collar employees complemented and reinforced the growth of another crucial segment of the black middle class, namely the entrepreneurs. A study of Port Elizabeth’s small business sector arrived at this conclusion:

“[T]here is little doubt that a significant Black entrepreneurial class does exist in the city… They are of a relatively small group of entrepreneurs, predominantly middle-aged males who probably constitute less than half of one percent of the total black population of some

400 000.”41

In short, the PEU’s regional political economy had a productive base that grew, transformed itself and then began declining as structural constraints reinforced cyclical downturns. When the impact of these economic trends are located in their social context, a picture emerges of a severe set of dislocations between employment growth, population expansion, demographic transformation and occupational restructuring. The crisis in production that these dislocations reflected were reinforced by state urban policies that were responsible for creating a serious urban crisis by the 1980s.

Housing, Infrastructure and Township Services

The black townships of the PEU region, like those built in the rest of South Africa’s urban areas, were the product of apartheid urban policy. Although designed to maximise state control of the labour force, the Eastern Cape townships became the bases for a popular movement that emerged as a direct threat to state power in the 1980s.42 Although an important mix of ideological currents gave shape to this movement, urban contradictions were the underlying structural determinants that led to the formation of networks of local community organisations that supported the movement.

No less than 85% of all African housing in the PEU region by the mid-1980s was built prior to 1970 (63% prior to 1960).43 After 1948, the local and national apartheid state agencies implemented a brutal programme of forced removals to systematically segregate white, coloured, Indian and black African areas from one another. As the PEU region’s manufacturing-based cities grew organically for over a century, a number of racially mixed suburbs scattered across the PEU region were allowed to survive. The Port

41 Davies, W.J., “Black Entrepreneurial Experience and Practice

in Port Elizabeth”, unpublished mimeo, Rhodes University,

Grahamstown, 1987. 42 Riordan 2022. Op. cit. 43 Executive Projects, op. cit., p.0002/4.

Table 3.5: No. of Units/Sites per Township per Decade

Key: Ibhayi was the name of the local authority that was responsible for the administration of townships in Port Elizabeth. ECDB refers to those townships that fell directly under the Eastern Cape Development Board (ECDB) - a regional structure of the national state responsible for black settlements outside the homelands. KNB = KwaNobuhle which refers to the local authority that was responsible for the administration of townships in Uitenhage.Source: Calculated from Expro. p.UF6/004 & p.UF7/005-1

Elizabeth suburb of Korsten was a good example. As a result, as areas were cleared via forced removals to make way for the development of white suburbs, black areas like New Brighton were rapidly overburdened with households that had lost their urban landholdings and were dumped there to find their own means of survival. To compensate, some housing was built for them by the state, but this largely had stopped by 1960. Unsurprisingly, many of these households had no other choice but to move into - or create -informal shack settlements. The state’s failure to provide housing despite high urbanisation and population growth rates forced poor and working people to resort to illegal land invasions to build their own shelter, i.e. shacks. This is why over 40% of all African dwellings in the PEU region in 1985 were shacks.44 Table

3.5 sums up the state of African shelter by 1985.

Table 3.5 reveals that in 1985 there were 38,717 houses, 28,001 serviced sites and 26,011 shacks in the PEU’s black townships. It would be incorrect to assume that the serviced sites would have been able to cater for the shack dwellers because too many of the latter could not afford the rates in any formal or controlled settlement schemes (more on this later). The two highest shack concentrations were Soweto-by-the-sea in Port Elizabeth and Langa in Uitenhage. It is significant, though, that in Uitenhage as a whole, there were more shacks (8,350) than formal houses (8,185). Furthermore, between 1983 and 1985, the number of shacks erected in Port Elizabeth only increased by 1,5% (from 17,397 to 17,661), whereas in Uitenhage the number of serviced sites increased substantially. They were located in a very different place to where the squatters erected their shacks, i.e. the serviced sites were in the planned township of KwaNobuhle located some distance from the town, and the shacks were in Langa, an illegal settlement close to town. The resultant struggles over the spatial mismatching of where people settled and where investment in serviced sites took place supported the dynamic of political conflict and resistance in the PEU townships in the 1980s and forms the key focus of the chapters that follow.

44 Ibid., p. UF6/004.

Using the findings of two studies of squatter settlements in the PEU region,45 a profile emerges of stable communities whose incomes were relatively high compared to other similar communities. 56% of the squatters surveyed said that they moved to the settlement because they wanted shelter. This was high compared to the 9% response obtained from the same question in Durban. This suggests that the reason for moving into squatter settlements in PEU were primarily related to the housing shortage rather than employment or relocation reasons. This was reflected in the relatively low importance of other reasons given for moving into the settlement, namely because they had recently moved to the PEU area (18%; Durban -26%), they had been displaced from previous lodging (11%; Durban - 9%), they wanted a congenial environment (12%; Durban - 4%) and, most important of all, the need to be close to employment (3%; Durban - 52%). The stability of the squatter communities was largely facilitated by the fact that no major forced removals or evictions of squatters had taken place in PEU since 1981. The Jardine survey revealed that of those in the communities she surveyed, 74% had resided there for five years or more. The largest number (44%) had resided there for between 8 and 11 years.

Unlike in the Western Cape where the state acted heavily against squatters in the 1980s, the Eastern Cape Development Board (ECDB) never followed this example. This had much to do with the fact that the “coloured labour preference” regulations were applicable to the Western Cape, but not to the Eastern Cape. This effectively “protected” African squatters in the PEU settlements. However, given the above figures which show that squatters were not recent migrant arrivals (as in the Western Cape), it is safe to assume that most of the squatters qualified as ‘urban insiders’ in terms of Section 10 of the Urban Areas Act which meant they could not be evicted from the urban areas. They were forced to live in shacks because although they qualified to be in the urban areas, the housing shortage defined them as urban marginals. Ironically, this meant that the notorious ‘influx

45 Jardine, A.F., “Endlovini: A Case Study of a South African Squatter

Community”, unpublished mimeo, 1984; Jardine, A.F., “Squatter

Settlements”, Executive Projects research paper, 1985.

control’ laws actually protected these communities from being defined as rural marginals. The implementation of influx controls meant that they were defended from authorities who would have liked to “resolve” the squatter problem by simply dumping the homeless in the bantustans. This anomalous situation provided the material basis for housing struggles in squatter communities which, in the absence of meaningful state and capitalist initiatives, were forced to build their own shelter.

It has been reliably estimated that the population density of African households in the PEU region in 1985 was 6,9 persons per dwelling. This was 0,9 times higher than the optimum density of 6,0 persons per dwelling which was used to determine Household Subsistence Level (HSL) estimates. Based on an estimated 450,000 Africans in PEU, a further 10,600 dwellings would have been required to reduce this density down to the normal 6,0 persons per dwelling.46 This meant that the housing shortage equalled 26,011 shacks plus 10,600 additional dwellings, resulting in a total shortage of 36,611 houses or a number nearly equal to the existing regional housing stock.

Urban services in PEU townships were totally inadequate. A 1984 HSRC (Human Sciences Research Council) survey found that 98% of its respondents had no running water, 91% had no electricity, 96,2% had no bathroom in their houses, 91,4% had no kitchen sinks, 36,4% had no ceilings, and 19,3% had no interior doors. The report concluded that the conditions in which 76% of the respondents lived were “poor or very poor”.47

The severe shortage of basic services within the household was reproduced in the community as a whole. For a population of nearly 600,000, a large percentage of whom were under 18 years of age (38% in Port Elizabeth and 25% in Uitenhage), there were very few recreational and community facilities. In the area as a whole, there were 34 recreational facilities (e.g. sports facilities, swimming pools, etc), 37 entertainment venues, 123 educational institutions, 41 health and welfare agencies (e.g. crèches, legal aid,

46 Executive Projects, op. cit., p.16/4.

47 Human Sciences Research Council, “Socio-economic research

in the metropolitan areas: 1983/84 Blacks in Port Elizabeth”,

Pretoria, 1984.

social workers, etc), 144 religious institutions and 201 commercial outlets (supermarkets, service stations, bottle stores, etc).48 In short, few institutionalised recreational or communal facilities existed for the youth in these communities.

The cost structure of African housing in PEU reflected the complexities that faced an administration that had to deliver houses to extremely poor communities. In Port Elizabeth there were four rental schemes, namely sub-economic housing, economic housing, subsidised housing and shacks.

*There were no less than 16 different graduations calculated on the basis of a means test. Source: Expro, p.0018/15

It is important to note that these service charges and rentals were not increased between 1982 and 1985. This probably reflected a reluctance on the part of the state to risk increases during a period of heightened politicisation and resistance.

Uitenhage had a different set of schemes with a bureaucratically more complex means grading system.

48 Executive Projects, op. cit, p. 24A/2/s and p.0019A/5.

Source: Expro, p.14/7/2 and p.0018/21

In addition to rental schemes, by 1985 houses could be purchased on the basis of a 99-year leasehold scheme and an “indefinite occupation” scheme based on a 30-year residential occupation contract. As far as 99-year leasehold was concerned, the houses were valued at between R2,500.00 and R3,000.00 and the land cost between R435.00 and R475.00. Depending on income status and time of purchase, various discounts and incentives could be obtained including free deposit, 3% interest on loans and low house prices. In the end, the resident got security of tenure for monthly rates of (a) R64.00 for a house purchased that cost below R2,500.00, (b) R21.00 for a house that cost above R2,500.00 but was purchased by someone with a monthly income of below R450.00 per month; and (c) R45.00 for a house that cost above R2,500.00 per month but was purchased by someone who earned above a monthly salary of R450.00. (The initial outlays in each case were R6.00, R156.00 and R156.00 respectively.) It is important to note that these monthly costs excluded the monthly service charge that still needed to be paid.

The Great Sale of state-owned housing that was initiated by the state in the early 1980s as a reformist measure, was not very successful in the PEU region. Of the 26,899 houses available for sale in Ibhayi, 20% were purchased. And in Uitenhage, out of a total of 8,185 houses available, only 5% were sold.49 The reasons for the failure of the Great Sale had not been systematically studied by the mid-1980s. The Executive Projects (Expro) report asserts that the clumsy half-baked nature of the 99-year leasehold scheme was to blame because it did not make leasehold more attractive than rental in financial terms.50 Another explanation is that housing was a relatively low priority for township dwellers compared to problems related to income, transport, criminality, services and education.

Although failure in the delivery of housing was clearly one cause of the housing crisis, another was the economy’s wage structure which effectively excluded large sectors of the African community from the housing market. If we take into account the fact that the HSL was about R325.00 per month in PEU in 1985, that the average wage rate for Africans in 1985 was R352.0051 and that each breadwinner had an extended family to support because of high unemployment, then it is not surprising that the Expro report could come to the conclusion that “the shack community effectively represents a financially attractive accommodation area”.52 This crisis of affordability was reflected in the fact that over 20% of all township residents were in permanent arrears because they could not afford normal housing costs.53

49 Ibid., p.UF6/003 50 Ibid., p.0023A/1/smg. 51 South African Institute of Race Relations, Annual Survey,

Johannesburg, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1985,

p.131. 52 Executive Projects, op. cit., p.14/2/2. 53 Ibid., p.14/2/2.

The Expro report, on the basis of three independent surveys and census data, concluded that total monthly household income

(i.e. not just head of household income) in the PEU region was as follows: 40% earned below R300, 15% between R400 and R500, 20% between R500 and R600, 5% between R600 and R700 and 5% above R700. Furthermore, 39% earned below the HSL.54 If we assume that a household could only buy into the formal housing market at the very lowest level (i.e. a R5,000.00 house with a loan at 12% interest) if it earned R400 or more, then it meant that no less than 55% of all PEU households had incomes below what was required to meet the costs of the most basic housing structure. This exclusion level rose dramatically when it came to the number who could purchase newly built houses, the cheapest of which cost about R20,000 in 1985.

State and capital responded differently, albeit equally inadequately, to the PEU region’s housing crisis. The Minister of Co-operation and Development, Dr P. Koornhoof, appointed the Metropolitan Black Planning Council (MBPC) - the so-called Rive Commission -in October 1982 to investigate problems in the supply of housing and infrastructure in the PEU region.55 Organised business, through the Urban Foundation, commissioned its own investigation in May 1985.56

The MBPC was chaired by Louis Rive and Dr J. Wessels was the vice-chairperson. Its members comprised the chairpersons of the Uitenhage Community Council and Port Elizabeth Community Council, as well as the Chief Director of the Eastern Cape Administration Board (ECAB) and the Chief Commissioner. The personnel drawn into the panel of experts that helped the MBPC came from ECDB, Greater Algoa Bay Planning Authority, Port Elizabeth Municipality, Uitenhage Municipality, SA Association of Consulting Engineers, SA Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors, CSIR, Department of Constitutional Development and Planning, Department of Community Development,

54 Ibid., p.0018/1.

55 PLANACT, “A Summary and Analysis of the Rive Report on

Upgrading Proposals for the Greater Algoa Bay Area”, unpublished

mimeo, PLANACT, Johannesburg, 1986. 56 See Executive Projects, op. cit.

Department of Cooperation and Development and the Department of Posts and Telecommunications.

In short, the MBPC was a central state initiative that drew its personnel from the heart of the white-dominated political, professional and bureaucratic establishment. Easy to imagine this group of white middle-aged men sitting around a table thinking about housing solutions for a poor black majority dominated by people half their average age.

The MBPC’s brief was restricted to infrastructure and how the backlogs could be remedied. Its stated commitment to formulate proposals in consultation with the black communities never went further than co-opting two black community councillors. In any event, the full MBPC only met on three occasions during which the councillors made no contribution.57 All the work and thinking took place in the technical sub-committees. The final recommendation of the MBPC boiled down to minimal upgrading of services in existing townships and provision of “sub-minimum” services for 29,187 new sites in township areas.

The recommendations were as follows:

The glaring omissions and failures in the final report were obvious: because only estimates of costs were calculated and not affordability estimates, there was no way that the community could know how much it would have to pay after the upgrading was completed; no growth predictions were given and therefore

57 Interview with Roger Matlock, Eastern Cape Director of the Urban Foundation, June 1986.

the community had no idea whether the quality and quantity of services would be adequate by the time the programme was completed; all “black spots” designated for removal were excluded from the plan despite vigorous anti-removal struggles in Walmer, Langa and Red Location; and the management structure proposed by the MBPC to run the upgrading project was totally dominated by technocrats controlled by the ECDB - the community councils were given the status of an “advisory panel”.

In short, there were no recommendations for substantial upgrading of infrastructure nor were there proposals on how the housing shortage could be resolved. It was essentially a programme to facilitate the servicing of sites for squatters so that these communities could be brought into a “controlled squatting” system rather than allowing them to continue as illegal uncontrolled settlements with all the security risks that this implied.

The Greater Algoa Bay Affordable Housing Research Project report58 was commissioned by the Urban Foundation’s Eastern Cape office. The steering committee comprised the managing director of the Urban Foundation, Robin Lee; the Director of the Urban Foundation Eastern Cape, Roger Matlock; Peter Arton-Powell, Chief Executive Officer of Unifound - a construction utility company; Derek Cleary, ex-director of Housing in the Port Elizabeth Municipality and managing director of Urban Villages; Stan Anderson, managing director of Maybaker - a multinational chemical company based in Port Elizabeth; Rod Philip, prominent Port Elizabeth architect and board member of Urban Villages; and Lindi Tshume, personnel manager of British United Shoe Machinery. Once again, almost entirely white male.

The report focused essentially on the problem of how to facilitate housing development following the preparation of serviced sites in line with the Rive Plan. It concluded that “uncoordinated efforts by government agencies and independent enterprises” and the absence of “home ownership desires” necessary for “increased home purchases and ultimate social

58 Executive Projects, op. cit.

stability” were the main problems in the housing market.59 The recommendations of the report were presented in report form as follows:60

In short, the focus of this report was on the housing delivery system rather than on infrastructure. Although its aim was “to determine the range of affordable housing options potentially available to low-income groups” and which are “acceptable to the total community”, the report never questioned the two underlying determinants of inequities in housing provision, namely the Group Areas Act and the low wage structure in the economy61. Nevertheless, by accepting the need for subsidisation and opposing removals of squatter camps, it deviated in these important respects from government policy.

59 Executive Projects, op. cit., p.11/1/3. 60 Ibid., pp.11/1/3-16/11. 61 Ibid.,11/1.

Conclusion

The picture that emerges from the analytical overview of housing and urban services in the PEU region points to the existence of a deep crisis of reproduction. By the 1980s household and community structures were experiencing the combined pressures of population growth, urbanisation, housing shortages, low absolute incomes, unemployment, relative educational advancement and expanding size of the youthful age groups. In their struggle to survive, at least 40% of all the households were forced to move into the squatter settlements. When the Port Elizabeth informal settlements became too congested, Uitenhage became the major growth point during the 1982 to 1985 period.

With many returning to the old residential area close to Uitenhage’s CBD that still existed in the memories of at least three generations despite successive forced removals, Langa was to become the focal point of PEU’s urban social movement. Langa emerged as a symbol of many struggles: the struggle for shelter, for land, for the right to build a community and eventually, the right to control social and political destiny. By 1985, Langa had become the only space in the PEU region where homeless people could build a structure within walking distance of the CBD of a major town. The struggle against the forced removal of Langa became the epicentre of PEU’s urban social movement.

Introduction

South Africa’s unique pattern of urban development has been the subject of extensive scrutiny by sociologists, planners, anthropologists, historians and public administration analysts. The central issue at stake in all this writing is how best to explain the evolution of the South African urban system and its various elements. This is no mean feat because of the enormous complexity of a system that evolved as a result of a costly, bureaucratically driven and repressive combination of initiatives that affected where people were born, where and how they were educated, where and how they lived, where and who they worked for, what their labour power was worth, how they recuperated their health, where and how they grew old and eventually died and, after that, where they could be buried. As an exercise in social engineering, the construction of urban apartheid must rank in the same class as the numerous grand feats of social engineering that purposively attempted to create in reality what city architects imagined to be the ideal image of urban living -from Haussman’s Paris, to Peter the Great’s St. Petersburg, to Robert Moses’ New York and onward to the incarnations of Le Corbusier’s one dimensional urban modernism from Atlanta to Brasilia.1 But unlike these cases where the search for modernism masked the domineering drive by the world’s urban bourgeoisie to mould the cities in ways that suited their image of ‘modern living’, the South African city - the apartheid city - was consciously portrayed by white urbanites, apartheid-aligned planners and architects,

See Berman, M., All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, New York, Penguin, 1988.

and those who controlled the state at central and local level as a racial project.

As the debate has progressed through structural functionalist (‘urbanism’ will stabilise as modernisation takes its course), Marxist reductionism (‘the city reflects the logic of capital’s labour requirements’) and liberal economistic paradigms (‘the non-racial economically rational logic of the market will undermine the irrationality of race-based development’), it has become increasingly clear that although grand concepts like class, race and state help to outline general trends, they are less than useful when it comes to comprehending the complexity of urban political dynamics in specific contexts. This is why terms of a different order and history have emerged, namely locality, specificity, agency and contingency. It is this approach that emerges most centrally in the recent works of many contemporary urbanists from many different disciplines.

This chapter will start with the evolution of Uitenhage’s urban geography. This provides the backdrop for an understanding of the institutional development of apartheid-created black local government and how this created a local black political elite whose interests lay in a pattern of urban development that did not accord with either the bureaucratic interests that represented the central state, or the local white political interests rooted in Uitenhage’s white community. It was these contradictions that laid the foundations for the emergence of Langa township.

Uitenhage’s Urban Geography

Black urbanisation in Uitenhage dates back to the mid-c.19th. By the 1920s, black Africans resided in four proclaimed ‘locations’: Kabah (or what became known as Langa), Doornhoek, Gubbs, and Oatlands situated respectively to the north, west, south and east of the centre of Uitenhage (see Map 4.1). The population by 1936 was 6,588 black Africans, 4,334 coloured and 9,437 white people.2

Adler, G., “Trying not to be cruel’: Local Government Resistance to the Application of the Group Areas Act in Uitenhage”, paper presented to the Southern African Research Programme Seminar, Yale University, 20 January 1988, p.7.

This demographic position was arrived at after a period of high countrywide urbanisation rates, but with the highest rates experienced in the Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage region and surrounding areas. Whereas 58,9% of black Africans in the PEU region resided in rural areas in 1921, this had fallen to 26,7% in 1936. Given that gender ratios in the urban communities were equalised during the period, it follows that the urbanising black Africans in this region were not single-sex migrants as was the case in a number of other localities.3 This pattern of relatively early ‘urban stabilisation’ is significant for an understanding of the subsequent history of urban control and social movement resistance to these controls.

Map 4.1: Uitenhage (now Kariega). Source: Rosmarin and Associates (1985)

Ibid., p.8.

Kabah was located in an area that was later to become known as Langa and was the largest of the ‘locations’ that housed Uitenhage’s black African population during the 1920s and 1930s. It had electric street lights, central water hydrants and daily rubbish removal from central points.4 Like similar inner-city settlements elsewhere in the country prior to the forced removals of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Sophiatown, Lady Selborne, Top Location, Duncan Village, Dukatole, etc), these inner-city black African urban settlements were the product of paternalistic white local government policies and the home of a rich and lively urban culture rooted in survival, adaptation and cultural fusion. Conditions in the other ‘locations’ in Uitenhage were worse than in Langa. The number of self-built structures increased, services were rudimentary to non-existent, health conditions were very poor, and officials found it difficult to collect rent and service charges.5 As urbanisation continued and unemployment rose and conditions declined, the Uitenhage Municipality began considering alternative options. After first applying in 1933 for the application of influx controls in terms of the notorious Urban Areas Act of 1923 (as amended) to control in-migration and the settlement of unemployed people, officials began working on plans to reorganise the locations. These plans essentially involved the demolition of the three smaller locations and the removal of the population to Langa.6 Part of the plan was to separate the coloured people living in the three smaller locations from their black African brethren and to relocate them to an area in Langa designated for coloured people.7

Although numerous measures taken by the Uitenhage Municipality during the 1930s succeeded in running down the three smaller locations and relocating the people in Langa, by the mid-1940s officials were still dealing with an extremely overpopulated Langa township where development had failed to take place as planned. This prompted the Uitenhage Municipality into taking certain strategic steps. These steps included the permanent settlement of urbanised black Africans in sub

4 Ibid., p.10 5 Adler, G., op. cit., 10-11. 6 Ibid., pp.11-12.

Ibid., pp.13-14.

economic housing with freehold title,8 as well as a proposal to demolish all residential buildings in Langa on the grounds that they were unhygienic, that there was inadequate room for expansion, that coloured and black African people were too inter-mingled, and that Langa was too close to the white areas. The result was a proposal to remove Langa to an area known as Sandfontein, east of the town centre.9 No decisive action was taken, however, during the Second World War years.

After the Second World War and the coming to power of the Nationalist Party Government in 1948, a national policy framework began to be put in place that favoured much stricter racial segregation of different racial groups living in the urban areas. It was in this context that the Uitenhage Municipality revisited the problem of what to do about Langa. The renowned Johannesburg town planner T.B. Floyd was retained as a consultant. He was a partner in the prestigious Johannesburg firm Bowling, Richardson and Floyd and in 1960 Floyd published his book Town Planning in South Africa, which became the primary reference for educating generations of urban planners in the logic of apartheid spatial planning.

Like his work elsewhere in the Transvaal and East London, Floyd’s town planning prescriptions were premised on racial and spatial principles that were precursors to what would later be inscribed in the Group Areas Act, namely strict residential segregation on racial grounds. Floyd was critical of Langa because it was not separated by a buffer zone from the white areas, it was not adjacent to the employment areas in the south-east which meant black Africans were required to walk through the white town from the north to get to work, and it mixed together coloured and black African people. He therefore proposed that Langa be retained for coloured people and that black African people be relocated to Sandfontein in the east where they should be housed in sub-economic housing and work as unskilled labour in the nearby factories.10 There is no evidence that Floyd discussed his ideas with any of Uitenhage’s black African citizens. Although

8 Ibid., pp.14-15. 9 Ibid., p17. 10 Ibid., pp.18-19.

it initially accepted Floyd’s town planning scheme, the Uitenhage Municipality rescinded this decision and decided in 1945 to upgrade Langa via a comprehensive sub-economic housing scheme - a policy framework that was developed and pushed through by white liberal politicians in control of the ‘native affairs’ administration.11

Taking advantage of the funds provided by the newly created National Housing and Planning Commission, the Uitenhage Municipality approved a scheme in 1947 for the erection of 320 semi-detached houses in an extension of Langa called McNaughton. The longer-term aim was to build 2,000 semi-detached units (i.e. 4,000 dwellings) for black African people. However, the quid pro quo was to ensure alignment with the Urban Areas Act by removing coloured people from Langa. Hence, in a separate scheme located closer to town, 100 sub-economic units were planned for coloured people. Although this was vigorously opposed by the coloured political leadership, promises of voluntary relocation with financial incentives pacified the protestors.12 It was this plan that the Uitenhage Municipality thought would stabilise the black African workforce, segregate off the coloured community and prepare Uitenhage for what it thought would be the paternalistic segregated future envisaged by the United Party Government (led by Jan Smuts), complete with financial subsidies to make things happen and freehold title for black African people. In the end, however, this Faganite vision for Uitenhage was not to be realised.13 In the meantime,

11 Ibid., p.21. 12 Ibid., pp.22-23. 13 Ibid., p.25. The reference to “Faganite” is to the Fagan Report

that was the report that came out in the mid-1940s that proposed a soft paternalistic segregationist approach that recognised the permanence of fully urbanised black Africans (see Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Operation of the Laws in Force in the Union Relating to Natives in or Near Urban Areas; the Native Pass Laws: and the Employment in Mines and Industries of Migratory Labour, 1946-48.) This policy framework, however, was replaced by the Sauer Report that was adopted by the newly elected Nationalist Party Government after 1948. This report effectively echoed the racial geographic principles of the Stallard Commission of 1921. The Sauer Report proposed much stricter reinforcement of the notion that black African urbanisation should be prevented by way of a national system of labour regulation and control

as indicated in Chapter 3, it was after the Second World War that Uitenhage’s local economy changed from being an agricultural processing and service centre to a growth centre for the motor industry. The economic growth that ensued was a major stimulus for further urbanisation. Whereas the black African population was 6,588 in 1936, this grew to 10,016 in 1946 and then to 16,942 by 1951. Between 1936 and 1946 the population increased by 3,4.% per annum, and between 1946 and 1951 the increase was 8,2% per annum. As far as the coloured population was concerned, it increased from 4,334 in 1936, to 4,958 in 1946 and 7,161 in 1951. The white population increased from 9,437 to 11,015 to 14,272 during the same period.14 With increased investment and growth and these levels of urbanisation, it is not surprising that the urban policy of the Uitenhage Municipality right up into the 1950s tended to support residential stabilisation within a segregationist framework, including even the scrapping of influx controls.15 However, even though strongly supported by employers keen on having their labour properly housed, the Uitenhage Municipality never had the resources nor the will to commence a large-scale mass housing programme commensurate with the principles of the Fagan Commission.

The Nationalist Party Government moved quickly to ensure that its Sauerite urban policies were implemented. The combination of the amended Urban Areas Act, Group Areas Act and Population Registration Act and associated regulations fundamentally changed the nature of the game in all urban areas,

(see Verslag van die Kleur Vraagstuk Kommissie van die Herenigde Nasionale Party, 1947.) Both Hindson, D., op. cit. and Posel, D., op. cit. developed sophisticated theoretical and empirical analyses premised in large part on the differences between these two approaches. They both argue that the Faganite approach persisted into the 1950s after the Nationalist Party election victory in 1948, but that by the end of the 1950s the Stallardist-Sauerite approach had become dominant. This dominance lasts well into the 1970s at the end of which there is a return to Faganism in the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Legislation Affecting the Utilisation of Manpower (Excluding the Legislation Administered by the Departments of Labour and Mines), 1979 (the so-called Riekert Commission).

14 All figures are from Adler, G., op. cit., pp.27-28.

15 Ibid., p. 28.

but especially in Uitenhage where a consolidated Faganite urban policy could have been implemented if there was a United Party Central Government to complement the political orientation of the United Party-controlled Uitenhage Municipality. Instead, like many other United Party controlled local governments, the Uitenhage Municipality was faced with the prospect of being the implementing agents of an urban policy devised by the white supremacist Nationalist Party Government and in so doing it would have had to cut across the delicately balanced matrix of political, social and economic interests at the local level.

In practical terms, implementing the new urban policy in Uitenhage effectively meant reversing many of the plans and schemes that Uitenhage’s officials had been developing since the Second World War. Whereas the new policy required separate residential areas for coloured, black African and white people with each area separated by an adequate buffer zone, Uitenhage was faced with an existing situation where coloured and black African people lived together in Langa; coloured, black African and poor white people lived together in the poorer sections of Uitenhage; and the new coloured area that was about to be built across the road from Langa was unacceptable to central government because it was only across the street from Langa and not properly separated by a decently sized buffer zone.16 Throughout the early-to mid-1950s, squabbles and tensions between on the one hand various central government departments (the new Commissioner for Coloured Affairs, Native Affairs Department and the Land Tenure Advisory Board), and the Uitenhage Municipality on the other over the application of central government’s urban policy effectively prevented forward movement with respect to both the Uitenhage Municipality’s Faganite strategies and the Central government’s Sauerite strategies.17

Under pressure from Indian and Chinese business interests and the coloured community, the Uitenhage Municipality resolved in 1953 to defy central government by deciding not to actively implement the Group Areas Act provisions. However, it was also under enormous pressure from industrial employers to initiate

16 Ibid., pp.37-38. 17 Ibid., pp.38-40.

housing schemes for black workers, schemes which themselves needed the approval of the agencies that the Municipality had resolved not to cooperate with. When it came to resisting the Group Areas Act, what was at stake was the economic interests of Indian and coloured business who together owned a sizable chunk of rateable property, as well as the fact that Indian and coloured people were still enfranchised at the local level in the Cape at that time and therefore had votes that were crucial for United Party Councillors faced with electoral challenges from the Afrikaner-based Nationalist Party.18 No such economic and political considerations existed when it came to black African interests, other than the housing demands of employers.

In July 1957 the Uitenhage Municipality was informed by the Chief Native Commissioner for the Eastern Cape that no financial support for housing development could be provided unless and until the residential pattern conformed to the requirement for 500-yard buffer strips between the residential areas of different racial groups. Besides squeezing it between the housing demands of employers and the urban policy priorities of the central government, this presented the Uitenhage Municipality with a serious practical problem because it never got round to clearing the buffer zones - an intended neglect on the part of liberal councillors in control ‘native administration’. In addition, large numbers of squatters had moved in over the previous 5 years. Since 1952 the population of Langa had swelled from 2,000 to 11,100 and the number of dwellings from 300 to 1,200.

To resolve Uitenhage’s problem, the Chief Native Commissioner bluntly suggested the wholesale removal of Langa. When this was rejected by the Council on the grounds that it was impractical, he immediately made applicable to Uitenhage the onerous financial provisions of the Native Services Levy Act -these levies were payable by employers to finance black housing and collectable by local government. This, in turn, prompted a policy change that led the Uitenhage Municipality to resolve to purchase a farm south of Uitenhage as a site for the relocation of Langa. Its only motive was financial: if keeping Langa was

Ibid., 46-47.

going to be costly to employers and the ratepayers, and if central government was willing to subsidise the development of a newly located black African township, then the choice was very clearly to go along with what the Chief Native Commissioner wanted. After further financial incentives were provided, the Uitenhage Municipality formally resolved in January 1961 to remove Langa to the newly acquired site.19 By July they were discussing proposals with the Group Areas Board on using the Langa site (when it was eventually vacated) for coloured development and a year later the Municipality was fully involved in discussions to apply the Group Areas plan to Uitenhage as a whole. The quid pro quo from central government was to declare a portion of the commercial area a “free trade zone” in order to allow the Indian and Chinese businessmen to continue conducting business, and substantial financial incentives for Uitenhage’s urban restructuring. It took six years of preparation until, in October 1967, Uitenhage as a whole was declared a pure apartheid town when it was formally proclaimed in terms of the Group Areas Act.20

Like many other so-called ‘black spots’ elsewhere in South Africa during this period, the forced removal of the century-old community of Langa began a year later to an area that was called KwaNobuhle – ironically this means “place of beauty”. Again, like the naming of other places into which people were forcibly removed (e.g. Atlantis for coloured people in Cape Town) in the 1960s, the reality was the complete opposite. Unlike Langa, this was to be a well-planned classic apartheid township located on the periphery of the white town and safely behind a hill. As for the employers, their labour was about to acquire housing for no extra cost and the white ratepayers were saved from paying for it all because of sizeable grants from central government. And as far as the Indian and coloured middle class was concerned, they had their businesses protected and were provided with exclusive middle class residential areas, complete with financial compensation and freehold title.

Although the forced removals began in 1968, it was not a simple one-off process. Instead, a series of removals took place

19 Ibid., pp.50-52. 20 Ibid., 56-7.

in 1972, 1979, 1981 and then finally in 1986. The reasons for this were numerous and inter-linked and included the following: the messy disentangling of the coloured and black African communities as the state attempted to convert Langa into a coloured Group Area without adequate funds to achieve the job in a way that compensated everyone for their various property losses; the relatively slow pace of development at KwaNobuhle that failed to keep up with the rate of urbanisation; the massive growth during the 1960s of the motor industry in Uitenhage that drew into Uitenhage increasing numbers of working class families who tended to infiltrate the ‘coloured’ areas in their search for accommodation; and then finally the impact of a new set of political interests represented in the post-1976 local government institutions that were created by the state as one response to the build-up of resistance to the implementation of grand apartheid in South Africa’s towns and cities. It is this latter process that is the subject of the next section of this book.

The Changing Local State and the Re-Making of Langa

The first major removal of Langa’s residents took place in 1968 when the first houses began to be built in KwaNobuhle. This, however, was incomplete because not everyone moved21 - only those closest to the white areas were moved.

Another removal took place in 1972. On this occasion, 2,000 Langa households were relocated. By this stage, all black African houses had been demolished between 1st and 19th Avenues and the residents removed to KwaNobuhle (see map 4.2). However, between 1972 and 1985, shacks began to re-emerge on the old plots in Langa for four reasons: the ECDB and then the KTC decided to limit the number of lodgers who were allowed to live in houses in KwaNobuhle, which had the unintended consequence of increasing the number of people who had no choice but to live in shacks in Langa;22 housing construction in KwaNobuhle failed

21 Interview with Former Mayor Tini, Uitenhage, 10.9.87. 22 Lodgers are people who are not part of the immediate family of

the registered tenant who were only allowed to stay in the house if

to keep pace with population growth and urbanisation; some people wanted to move back to Langa for social reasons;23 and, most importantly, the rentals that backyard shack dwellers were expected to pay were much lower.24 In 1979 all shacks beyond 12th Avenue were demolished and at least some of the residents relocated to KwaNobuhle. In 1981, the 1st to 17th Avenue area was cleared.25

Map 4.2: Langa, 1985. Source: Eastern Cape Development Survey (1985)

Although there is evidence of a significant ANC-led social movement in Langa during the 1950s and 1960s,26 many activists say that no real resistance took place during the 1968, 1972 and

they applied for and received a lodger’s permit. This also applied to children of tenants when they became adults.

23 Some of the information about removals was obtained in an interview with Barry Erasmus and Eddie Coetzee, Administrator and Town Clerk respectively of KwaNobuhle, 26.5.86.

24 Interview with Mayor Tini, op. cit.

25 Interview with Freddie Magugu, Uitenhage branch organiser for the National Union of Textile Workers, 27.5.1987. Magugu lived in Langa at the time of the interview and he had experienced some of the removals.

26 See Adler, G., op. cit., pp.53-55.

1979 removals. This paved the way for the ‘de-proclamation’ of a section of Langa in terms of Proclamation No. 1414 of 3 July 1981. This section was proclaimed coloured and recreational (see Map 4.2).

The late start of the construction of KwaNobuhle in 196869 and the commencement of a series of removals during the early- to mid-1970s meant that by the late 1970s Uitenhage’s Group Areas plan was only partially implemented. By this stage, the Uitenhage Municipality had come under firm Nationalist Party control and had lost control of the black townships of Langa and KwaNobuhle to the East Cape Bantu Affairs Administration Board (or later the Eastern Cape Development Board [ECDB]) - one of 14 administrative extensions of the central state responsible for black township administration in 14 regions across the country.27 However, unlike when they were controlled by the white Municipalities, the townships were now fully self-financing and therefore any internal upgrading and development had to be financed from revenue derived from the residents themselves. Given the dormitory nature of black townships and the absence of a commercial and industrial tax base, this administrative framework steadily led to rent and service charge increases without these increases being sufficient to cover the costs of substantial upgrading. This was one of the factors that contributed to the 1976 national uprisings which, in turn, forced the state to make reform concessions.

By the late 1970s not all black Africans were living in KwaNobuhle and coloured people were still living in mixed areas with black Africans. In addition, influx control failed to stop black African urbanisation during the 1969 to 1979 period. Reforms in urban controls introduced after 1976 as well as liberal lobbying by organised business helped to create a climate that weakened the classical Verwoerdian resolve to implement a purist urban vision. This fed into trends within Uitenhage that had resisted this

27 See Bekker, S. and Humphries, R., From Control to Confusion: The

Changing Role of Administration Boards in South Africa, 1971

1983, Pietermaritzburg and Grahamstown, Shutter and Shooter

in association with the Institute of Social and Economic Research,

Rhodes University, 1985.

vision since the 1940s. It was this rather extraordinary mixture of tendencies that provided a space for the re-emergence of Langa in exactly the area that black Africans had inhabited since the middle of c.19th.

Between 1979 and 1983, the number of shacks in Langa increased from about 1,000 to 4,205. By June 1985 there were 6,116 shacks.28 Although the reasons for why people moved to Langa will be given later, suffice it to say at this stage that by early 1983 the pressure on the local state to provide shelter within the framework of the new urban policy was mounting. At the same time, the government’s local government policy was changing in line with the new urban policy framework outlined by the government-appointed Riekert Commission.29 Based on the assumption that ‘urban insiders’ must now also be granted the right to ‘vote’ for their ‘own’ local governments, the government passed the Community Councils Act in 1977 that provided for the creation of Community Councils in black African townships. This was the first step towards creating fully-fledged and autonomous

28 Executive Projects, “Greater Algoa Bay Affordable Housing Research Project”, Port Elizabeth, unpublished report, 1985, p.UF6/006.

29 The Riekert Commission reported in 1979 and recommended a fundamental change to the kind of urban policy framework that originated in the Stallard Commission of 1921, and carried on through the Commission effectively recommended - and the government adopted - the kind of policy framework that the Fagan Report recommended in the 1940s, namely the recognition of that fact that there was a sizeable black African community that was fully urbanised and should therefore be accepted as fully fledged urban dwellers complete with rights to property, movement, trade and local government representation. In other words, in light of the urban-based uprisings of the mid-1970s, this was a political manoeuvre to accept the incorporation of the ‘urban insiders’ on condition that influx controls were intensified to keep out the ‘rural outsiders’. Although the Riekert framework therefore retained influx control as a central tenet of apartheid, it removed another central tenet of apartheid by accepting that at least some urban black Africans were not ‘temporary sojourners’ in the white towns and cities. For analysis of these processes see Cobbett, W., Hindson, D., Glaser, D. and Swilling, M., “A Critical Analysis of the South Black African State’s Reform Strategies in the 1980s”, in Frankel, P., Pines, N. and Swilling, M. (eds.), State, Resistance and Change in South Africa, London, Croom Helm, 1988: also Hindson, D., op. cit.

local governments for black African townships in terms of the Black Local Authorities Act of 1982.30

In June 1983, the Director of ECDB, Louis Koch, announced that the Community Councils of Cradock, Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and Grahamstown would become Black Local Authorities in terms of the 1982 Black Local Authorities Act.31 The body created for Uitenhage’s black African townships (namely Langa and KwaNobuhle) was called the KwaNobuhle Town Council (KTC). Remarking on what was to become a major source of tension between the ECDB and the KTC, Koch said that it would take six months after the establishment of the council to transfer administrative functions from the Board to the councils, including financial powers. He said that elections for the first councils in the Eastern Cape would take place in October 1983.32

Out of 29 community councils that were ‘elected’ throughout the country in the major urban areas in 1978, Uitenhage’s community council was the only one whose councillors were elected unopposed. Although the voters’ roll had 15,757 people on it, no-one voted for the 14 councillors.33 The same thing happened again in 1983 when the local authorities were elected in terms of the 1982 Black Local Authorities Act. On this occasion, 16 councillors were unopposed (75% of whom were councillors in the community council). This only happened in 3 out of the 29 elections that took place in 1983 (the other two being Mhluzi [Middleburg] and Lingelihle [Cradock].34

A common saying in Uitenhage during the 1984 to 1986 period was that “the councillors elected themselves”. It is not hard to see how this popular perception came about. It

30 See my writing at the time on the emergence of ‘city politics’:

Swilling, M., “City Politics Comes of Age: Strategic Responses to

Local Government Restructuring”, Schrire, R., Critical Choices

for South Black African Society, Cape Town, Oxford University

Press, 1990: as well as various articles in Swilling, M., et. al. (eds.),

Apartheid City in Transition, op. cit. 31 Eastern Province Herald, 7.6.1983 32 Ibid. 33 Urban Foundation, “An Analysis of the First 29 Elections Held

Under the 1982 Black Local Authorities Act”, March 1984, p.13. 34 Ibid., p.12.

signified the absence of those legitimising mechanisms the new Black Local Authority system was supposed to create, i.e. the appearance of popular representation based on electoral sanction. Precisely why one more candidate could not be found to contest an election is difficult to determine. It may be because of a powerful unified patronage network that eliminated potential competitors, or else 14 candidates in 1978 and 16 in 1983 really did represent the outer limit of the number of people willing to participate in local government. If the latter was the case, then it is possible that different reasons might explain the low level of participation in each case. The point, however, is that whatever the underlying explanation may be, the effect was the absence of the legitimising mechanism of elected popular representation. And it is this mechanism that was needed to prevent the gap between expectations of improvement and actual improvement from exploding into protest.

Although the KwaNobuhle Community Council was converted into a Black Local Authority in 1983 and in the wake of the unopposed election of the council, the ceremonial inauguration of the KTC took place on 16 January 1984. All 16 councillors present were elected unopposed after paying their R300 candidature fee. The Deputy Minister of Co-operation and Development was the guest of honour and in his speech he made an ironic plea that councillors should not be motivated by “personal gain”:

“No councillor or official should grant special consideration, treatment or advantage to any person which would not be made available to any other member of the public in similar circumstances. Councillors and officials should conduct themselves to promote the full confidence of the public in the integrity of its local government and their conduct in both official and private affairs should be above reproach. They should do nothing which would create in the minds of the ordinary citizen a lack of confidence in the honest and impartial administration of the municipality and should not give any grounds for the impression that they can be improperly influenced in the performance of

their duties.”35

The Mayor of Uitenhage was also present and paternalistically compared the KTC and Uitenhage Municipality to the relationship between a daughter and a mother. The KTC Mayor, Tini, incisively cut to the root of what was the main problem with the Black Local Authority system when he used this occasion to appeal to Central Government to “find other sources of revenue other than service charges”.36

With grandiose visions of how autonomous municipalities could be used to further the “social and political development for blacks”,37 many councillors began preparing a social base. They were well aware of the limitations, but were of the opinion that political rights for black people needed to be achieved by first starting with socio-economic development and that this could best be attained by securing control of local state structures that were no longer extensions of the ECDB, but had direct access to their own Minister in the Cabinet.38 Realising the low credibility of the Community Councils, existing councillors were well aware that if they were going to enjoy the fruits of being the ones to bring about change for black people, a strong support-base for the new local government structures was indispensable. And what better way to create such a support-base than exploiting people’s housing needs?

It was at this stage that old Mr G.K. Majombozi began to realise that popular pressure for shelter could become the basis for a successful patronage network. Majombozi was a Councillor, he was 81 years old in 1985, lived in Langa and had been involved in black African local government for 40 years. Faced with pressure from people who wanted to move back to Langa from KwaNobuhle because they could not afford the rent and service charges or who

35 Evening Post, 17.1.1984. 36 Minutes of Meeting to Inaugurate the KTC, 16.1.1984. 37 Interview with ex-councillor, Uitenhage, 30 June 1986 (he wanted

to remain anonymous). 38 Interviews with Tini, op. cit., and with a former councillor (who

wanted to remain anonymous), op, cit., 30.6.1986.

no longer had access to housing,39 Mojombozi began organising these people into a constituency that shared his lifelong desire to see Langa built up into a black African community. It was, in fact, the policy of the KTC to enforce the provisions of the national Riekert-inspired urban policy framework by insisting that the only people who should be allowed in KwaNobuhle are those who had work, who had ‘appropriate accommodation’, and the ability to pay rent and service charges.40 Without the capacity to forcibly exclude people from the urban areas who had Section 10 ‘rights’41 and with the loss of direct ECDB control over the intra-urban movement of people, this policy framework for KwaNobuhle led those excluded from KwaNobuhle but not from the urban area as a whole to seek out an area where urban control was less severe

-and what better place than the historical home of Uitenhage’s black African community, Langa.

Not all structures inhabited by black Africans were demolished in 1981. The deproclamation of a portion of Langa in 1981 following the removal of people from this area meant that parts of Langa were still proclaimed black African. During the three years mid-1981 to mid-1984, an increasing number of people began moving back into Langa, but mainly into the area still proclaimed black African. According to Eastern Cape Development Board figures, there were 3,737 “unauthorised structures” in Langa by November.42 By July 1984 this figure had gone up to 4,105.43

When ‘Old Man’ Majombozi decided to turn the increasing number of shack dwellers into a support base, he had a number of factors in his favour. Firstly, because the portion of Langa that

39 For example, the housing regulations were such that women lost

their housing rights if their husbands died or divorced them. 40 Minutes of KTC Meeting, 25.7.1983. 41 Section 10 qualifications entitled people who had resided in the

urban areas for a certain period of time to remain in the urban

areas permanently - a provision that the Riekert framework

entrenched. 42 Document entitled “Progress Report for the Month Nov. 1983”,

KwaNobuhle Town Councils archives, document no. 00000167,

p.60. 43 Document entitled “Progress Report for the Month July 1984”,

KwaNobuhle Town Council archives, document no. 00000407.

was still proclaimed black African was transferred from the ECDB to the KTC, this gave the KTC effective control over this area. This meant that for the first time, Langa shack dwellers were not dealing with white officials employed either by Uitenhage Municipality or the ECDB, but politically vulnerable moderate politicians. Secondly, there was no need for Majombozi to organise a land invasion; all he needed to do was ‘sanction’ the right of those who had moved in to remain there. So, over the Easter Weekend of 1984 - when the ECDB officials were safely out of the way on their Easter vacations - Councillor Majombozi unilaterally decided to allocate lodgers’ permits to people occupying sites - or as former Mayor Tini put it, he actually “allocated sites”.44 When the ECDB officials arrived back from their Easter breaks, they were furious, but as Mayor Tini put it, “people were officially given the sites. We could not say people must demolish the shacks -we could have been sued.”45 Majombozi convinced the council to accept what had happened as a fait accompli and even got them to agree to install more taps, grade the roads and commence a bucket system. It was a master stroke for Majombozi because no-one wanted to rock the boat at that delicate moment - the councillors were keen to build a support-base where they could and since the establishment of the KTC which also controlled most of the Langa area, the ECDB was powerless to act unilaterally in the area. Tini pointed out:

“After this we were forced to re-demarcate the Langa area and the old man automatically moved to the shack area. He knew that in the next election he was sure of his 100% support. That was his motive for allocating sites, but he never gave that as a reason. He only said that he felt sorry for the people.”46

Under Majombozi’s ‘protection’ and sanctioned by the issuing of what the KTC declared to be legally invalid ‘lodgers’ permits’, people seeking secure shelter close to Uitenhage began building

44 Interview with Mr Tini, the ex-mayor of KwaNobuhle, 10

September, 1987. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid.

shacks in Langa according to the street layout of the old Langa. By January 1984 the shacks had been erected up to 13th Avenue.47 This caused considerable alarm amongst white residents and in its meeting in January 1984, the Uitenhage Municipality discussed the problem. After a discussion that must have echoed similar discussions by similar kinds of people in the same hallowed halls of the ‘Council Chambers’ down through the decades, the council resolved that because there was “[n]o infrastructure provided for this situation”, the spread of shacks in Langa constituted a health problem.48 For over a century, the eminent white leaders of South Africa’s towns and cities have cited health threats as the rationale for forced removals. Answering this in true populist style that simultaneously provided a legitimising discourse for the squatters, Mayor Tini said:

“The people who put up shacks in Langa enjoy residential rights and come from KwaNobuhle where there is a housing shortage. The people do not like their living conditions, but what else can they do? Shacks are their last resort and we cannot wish them away. Whatever the legislation, shack dwelling will never be easy to control. The best way is to provide proper housing.”49

Echoing this sentiment and using terms not substantially different from Tini’s, the main anti-state body, the Uitenhage Black Civic Organisation (UBCO), said:

“They [the squatters] would rather have a roof over their heads and tolerate those conditions than sleep in the open.”50

In short, the established moderate and radical black leaders condoned shack construction in Langa, thus reinforcing a popular consensus created initially by Majombozi that squatting in Langa was officially sanctioned. The patronage network on which

47 Eastern Province Herald, 17.1.1984 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid.

this popular consensus rested gave Majombozi a much-needed support-base on the one hand, and the squatters had the apparent protection of official approval on the other. Not surprisingly, this arrangement was not without its contradictions.

KwaNobuhle, Despatch’s “Old Location” and Langa fell under KTC’s jurisdiction. KTC had 16 councillors who represented 16 wards; three in Langa, three in Despatch and ten in KwaNobuhle. Each ward had a ward committee of between 7 and 10 people which was, in turn, chaired by the councillor. Mojombozi’s ward represented Langa’s shack area. The main activities of each ward were to maintain a support-base of some sort by providing a link between the grievances of ordinary people, the councillor and the council. Tini described these activities as follows:

“Those people [on his ward committee] used to help me and tell me that this and that is going wrong in my constituency. They would tell me there is a blockage of water there, there is no water there, the streets are bad, etc. In turn, I would instruct technical people to fix these things.”51

By linking these “neighbourhood-based” ward committees to the council’s service departments, the councillors aimed to link local notables co-opted into the ward committees to the councils

-a system that can most appropriately be called ‘administrative clientelism’. Although this never succeeded as intended because of resource limitations, it did entrench what had been started with the community councils a few years earlier, namely a conception of local government that rested on the practice of neighbourhood participation. Unlike white local government, the councillors fused political support-bases, patronage networks and administration into a complex regime that in the end failed to weld together a stable alliance dependent on existing local government structures. As will be shown, without a successful collaborative alliance to keep the local power structure together, new power-centres emerged which skilfully appropriated and recast the participatory morality of the ward committees.

Interview with Tini, op. cit. and a reading of the Council minutes.

There were two issues that dominated the proceedings of council meetings throughout its existence,52 namely (i) the inadequate fiscal base from which the council had to derive its income, and (ii) the control of squatting in Langa. It was the failure to resolve these two issues that led to the deep and eventually violent conflict between the KTC and the community.

At the very first meeting of the KTC on 16 January 1984, Mayor Tini proposed that the Department of Co-operation and Development be requested to find “other sources of revenue other than service charges” to augment the council’s income.53 This demand was unsurprising given the attempt by the councillors to use their systems of administrative clientelism to legitimise the state instrument that they now controlled, an instrument that they used to sustain petty accumulation initiatives (allocating trading sites, etc) and to build up political support bases and patronage networks. They were of the view that rent and service charge increases would have made them too unpopular and hence threatened their control of the KTC and its associated benefits. Although this view rested on the assumption that they had an electoral support-base to start off with (partially true for people like Majombozi, but by no means for all the councillors), it does help to explain why they acted in the way that they did. In any event, the state’s failure to resolve this fiscal problem forced the KTC to contemplate rent and service charge increases in September 1984. As elaborated below, this triggered the unrest that paved the way for the resignation of the councillors in March 1985, the Langa Massacre and the killing of Kinikini.

The squatter problem caused enormous tensions and contradictions within the local state. On the one hand, the councillors wanted to protect their squatter support-base by preventing the ECDB from demolishing shacks in Langa. They did this by insisting that their new status as autonomous municipalities meant that the ECDB had no right to unilaterally take action against Langa’s squatters. On the other hand,

52 This assessment was obtained from a reading of all the council’s

minutes in the offices of the KwaNobuhle Town Council in

September 1987. 53 Minutes of KwaNobuhle Town Council meeting held on 16.1.1984.

the ECDB and the white officials employed by the KTC, were under tremendous pressure from Uitenhage’s white political establishment to remove Langa’s squatters.

The Oosterlig, an Afrikaans-speaking daily newspaper, reported in early March that white house owners in suburbs located close to Langa were selling their houses. House owners interviewed said that when they bought their houses 30 years ago, they were promised that black Africans in Langa would be moved to KwaNobuhle. Reflecting an accurate understanding of the history of the Municipality’s approach to the problem over the decades, one resident was quoted as saying: “We don’t want the question to take twenty years to deal with, it must be resolved within the next six months. We feel that the council is ignoring us.”54 Barry Erasmus, Uitenhage’s town clerk, tried to reassure his white constituency by saying that he was trying to find ways to raise funds to facilitate the removal of black Africans from Langa. Once this had been achieved, he said, the area would be deproclaimed black African and turned into a golf course for white and coloured people. The remaining area would be proclaimed coloured, he said.55

In other words, by 1984, the Uitenhage Municipality was still singing the same tune it had sung since the early 1960s - a tune that was first invented by T.B. Floyd in the 1940s: it was committed to the implementation of Group Areas, but only if the central state covered the costs. But by this stage, however, the Uitenhage Municipality was having to operate within a nationally determined urban policy framework that was less inclined to spend large amounts of money implementing a grand apartheid plan it no longer completely believed in. More importantly, this framework’s local government policy (i.e. one of the Koornhof Bills) had resulted in the existence of the KTC because the central government needed in all black townships a set of black political allies at the local level who, in the case of KwaNobuhle, were unlikely to support the forced removal of squatters in Langa, not least because these squatters were an important support-base for these allies. While this hiatus between changing national

54 Oosterlig, 2.3.1984. Translated by the author. 55 Ibid.

urban policy and the more orthodox apartheid agenda at local level provided the space for the expansion and survival of Langa, it also put in place a contradiction that was only ‘resolved’ when a State of Emergency in 1986 provided a national security policy framework that overrode the reformist urban policy framework (see Chapter 9).

Despite concerted attempts by the ECDB to convince the councillors to support the removal of Langa’s squatters, the councillors refused. The ECDB even tried to argue that the KTC should relinquish control of Langa and hand the matter over to the ECDB. In the meantime, the number of shacks expanded and the pressure from Uitenhage’s white community mounted. In the end, central government became involved in the fray, resulting in a special meeting in Uitenhage between the councillors, the Uitenhage Municipality and the Deputy Minister of Co-operation and Development to discuss the Langa squatters.56 This meeting, which took place in early May, was followed by another between Mayor Tini, KTC’s town clerk and the Chief Commissioner. At both these meetings, the state offered to make available money to build 500 new houses in KwaNobuhle on condition that the KTC agreed to let the ECDB take control of Langa.57 Tini tried to delay this decision by saying that he needed to consult with his council.

On 16 May 1984, a crucial meeting was held in the KTC’s chambers. Present were Mayor Tini, Deputy Mayor Ntsiko and four councillors (Majombozi was absent). Then there were all the officials: R.J. Rautenbach, acting town clerk; P. Mulder, treasurer;

S. Erasmus, deputy town secretary; R. Basson, administrative officer; P. Veldtman, township manager of Despatch; N. Mqulwana, township manager of Langa; M. Machemba, senior clerk; C. Hobongwana, committee clerk. Louis Koch, chief director of the ECDB and D.J. Bezuidenhout, Director of the Department of Community Affairs, were also present.58

56 Document entitled “Minutes of the 4/1984 special meeting of the

Executive Committee held in the council chambers Matanzima

Road, KwaNobuhle on Wednesday 16 May 1984 at 14h00.” 57 Ibid., p.36. 58 Ibid.

After an introduction by Tini, Koch was asked to present the government’s position. He started by conceding that he “understood the Council’s problems where it had to face an acute housing shortage and pressure from legitimate residents where it was compelled to make available open land in Langa which had already been vacated. This took place in the council’s area of jurisdiction. The Minister had received complaints from white residents as well as from the municipality and the matter was eventually introduced at ministerial level.”59 Koch went on to argue that by taking over control of Langa, the ECDB was simply facilitating what was eventually going to happen in any case, i.e. the transfer of the land to Uitenhage once all the people had been removed. This did not mean that the powers of the council were being undermined. To support this argument, Koch even said that the KTC could continue to speak for the Langa residents even though Langa was no longer under the council’s jurisdiction. Koch concluded with an uncomfortable reminder for the councillors, namely that given that the ground was going to be transferred to Uitenhage in any case, by transferring control over Langa to the ECDB, the KTC “would be relieved of political pressure as this would then be shouldered by the board.”60 The carrot that Koch offered was that if the council agreed to this strategy, 500 new houses would be erected in KwaNobuhle before Christmas.

In rapid succession, councillors Tize, Matshaka, Mbengo and Mqoloma rejected Koch’s proposal and argued that the council should retain control of Langa. Mbengo said that unlike elsewhere in the Eastern Cape, Uitenhage was politically quiet and the “civic organisation locally did not enjoy the support of the residents”. However, if the KTC relinquished control over Langa, this situation might be upset. Koch replied that he understood why the civic organisation was a threat, but argued that the consequences for the council would be negative if it still controlled Langa. Ntsiko responded by saying that just “as the municipality had obligations to their ratepayers so this council had a responsibility towards its residents.” He said that if the deputy minister implemented his plans, the result would be a “forced removal”. The KTC was

59 Ibid., p.36. 60 Ibid., pp.36-37.

not consulted by the minister and therefore the decision was unacceptable, he argued. He concluded by proposing (a) that the KTC will undertake to ensure that no further shacks are built, (b) that if more shacks are built, the ECDB can take control of Langa,

(c) the 500 houses should be built as soon as possible, after which the people will move to KwaNobuhle.61

Clearly searching for a back door into regaining control of Langa, Koch responded by suggesting that the KTC and ECDB enter into a formal agreement whereby, (a) the ECDB could be appointed as the KTC’s agent with a mandate to control squatting in Langa and re-house the people in KwaNobuhle; and (b) the KTC would remain in full control. Not seeing the trap set by the wily Louis Koch, this proposal was accepted by Tize and Tini. In the end a motion was passed that rejected the Minister’s proposal on the grounds that “it may adversely affect the good relations existing between the Council and the residents and may give rise to political exploitations (sic) which the council has to date been able to avert through its effective management of the area.”62 The alternative that was accepted involved (a) that the council would continue to “render all civic services”; (b) that joint control between the KTC and the ECDB through a liaison committee be established; and (c) that the ECDB will handle the control of squatters and the re-housing of Langa’s residents. In short, the KTC (largely unwittingly) agreed to the final implementation of the apartheid blueprint for Uitenhage, but on terms that ensured that central government first made available housing in KwaNobuhle before they would agree to the relocation of the people. This rather shrewd move on the part of the KTC enabled them to agree to the relocation of Langa, but on terms that they knew very well could never be met, i.e. all that needed to happen was for insufficient houses to be built in KwaNobuhle and Langa would remain. In this way they hoped that they would not lose their support-base. What they forgot to consider was the possibility that the emerging Langa community was less interested in housing in KwaNobuhle than in staying in Langa where they were in walking distance to the Uitenhage CBD and industrial area, and where urban controls

61 Ibid., pp.38-39. 62 Ibid., p.38.

were easier to avoid. It was this dynamic that re-emerged later in the process at a time when councillor-driven patronage networks were no longer an effective means of control.

More significantly, Mayor Tini and his councillors were remarkably naïve in thinking that they could retain control even though they had agreed to appoint the ECDB as the implementation agent of the KTC. This effectively gave the ECDB control to implement the apartheid plan, while the KTC would be unable to deny responsibility. The judgement that they could retain political legitimacy and effectively control the ECDB proved to be the root cause of the collapse of the KTC as political pressures mounted.

The ECDB submitted a memorandum to the council on housing construction costs. The memo was discussed on 23 May. It listed six different house-types ranging from R5,914.00 each to R6,783.00. House rentals were calculated on the basis of 11 different income brackets. The cheapest house would have cost R13.61 per month for someone earning between R0 and R50.00. The highest rent for the cheapest houses would have been R19.09 for someone earning between R141.00 and R150.00.63 The type of house being recommended here had the following features: single 150 mm concrete block walls, concrete floors, no floor coverings, no ceilings, no electrical installations, unpainted internal walls, and no fences or gates.64

By April 1984 the KTC, the ECDB and the Department of Cooperation and Development had accepted this option, as well as the wider plan to relocate Langa’s residents to KwaNobuhle. Included in the package was the KTC’s commitment to prevent further squatting and the ECDB’s commitment not to remove people until adequate housing had been erected. In so doing, they effectively agreed on a plan that was impractical for two reasons: firstly, there is no way that the KTC had the capacity to prevent the further erection of shacks given the pressures of urbanisation and

63 Memorandum to KwaNobuhle Town Clerk from L. Koch, Director of

the East Cape Development Board, 16 May 1984. 64 Memorandum sent to the Director of Development and Special

Tasks in the Department of Technical Services in the ECDB by J.B.W.

Johnson, 19 April, 1984.

homelessness; and secondly, the amount of money allocated was insufficient to finance the construction of an adequate number of houses to re-house all the Langa residents. Furthermore, these two objective obstacles were overdetermined by another set of political processes that the officials and councillors never anticipated, namely the build-up of highly conflictual tensions between the KTC and the state in general on the one hand, and the community as a whole and the Langa squatters in particular on the other from about November 1984 onwards. But before these conflicts are analysed in greater detail in Chapter 6, a socioeconomic profile of the emerging Langa community is required.

Langa: A Socio-Economic Profile65

In general, living conditions in Langa were poor and inadequate. There was one small health and dental clinic on the south-western edge of the township. In the squatter areas there were 28 taps. The sewerage system was one of the biggest problems. A bucket system operated in the formal housing area. Buckets were placed in the road and collected twice a week. In the squatter areas, an irregular combination of pit latrines and bucket system operated. No formal school buildings existed in Langa during 1985-86. Some concerned teachers and social workers organised some form of tuition in four church halls and a large wood and iron shed. There were seven areas that served as “sports fields”. These were rough, ungrassed open pieces of land that were frequently littered with rubbish or were too swampy to use. There were eleven churches, four of which were wood and iron buildings. There were no other services in Langa: no electricity (except for the brick houses), no libraries, no parks, no post office, no places of entertainment, no eating places and no civic halls.66

65 This section is drawn from a socio-economic, demographic and

attitudinal survey supervised by the author during the course of

1985. Although by this stage the Langa community was larger than

it was in 1984 when the conflict began, this profile provides the

basis for an understanding of what the conflict was about during

the 1984-86 period. The survey was financed by PLANACT, a

Johannesburg-based development NGO. The report was publicly

released in March 1986 as Planact, Langa: The Case for Upgrade,

Johannesburg, Planact 66 Ibid., pp.35-40.

The most important economic services were provided by four general shops located on Maduna Road and a few houses were converted into shops. There were also various clusters of informal sector activities around Maduna Square and along 20th Avenue. The bustling legal and pirate taxi business centred around Maduna Square and provided links between points within Langa, between Langa and town and between Langa and KwaNobuhle.

Using the results of a survey conducted by PLANACT covering 225 households and 1,147 individual members of these households, it is possible to construct a fairly accurate socioeconomic profile of Langa.67

Reflecting a lower average household density than in the PEU region as a whole, Langa’s households had approximately 6 members each. Only one-third had more than 7 persons per household. This figure is significant because it stands in stark contrast to comparable figures obtained from similar surveys of shack settlements where the household density was 10.68 Furthermore, it is significant that the density figures for the formal housing areas and shack areas is only 5, whereas in the formal areas it is 7. This suggests that shack erection was a solution both to the housing shortage and overcrowding. In their natural quest for shelter, Langa’s squatters sensibly used available land space to build enough dwellings to avoid the overcrowding problems experienced as a matter of course in the formal townships.

The low household density of Langa’s squatters was because the predominant structure of each household unit was the nuclear family. The PLANACT survey found that the majority of adults living in the shacks who were not heads of the households were

67 Unless otherwise indicated, the remainder of this section of

the socio-economic profile of Langa will be entirely based on

Planact, op. cit. All figures and facts come from this report. It is

important to point out that I was a lead author of the PLANACT

report. Furthermore, I played a role in administering the

survey, formulating questions and liaising with the community

organisations that commissioned the report. 68 Sutcliffe, M., & Wellings, P., “Attitudes and Living Conditions

in Inanda: The Context for Unrest”, Built Environment Support

Group, working paper, Durban, 1985.

wives or husbands. Very few (only 5%) were people outside the nuclear family relationship. The large majority of people living in the shacks (60%) were children of the head of the household.

Equally significant is the fact that no less than one-third of all the household heads were women and 54% of the members of the households surveyed were women. This points to the unusually prominent role in relative terms that women played in Langa’s community. Many had migrated to the urban areas or had left the formal townships to set up homes and raise families by themselves. Women were forced into these informal settlements as a result of a “triple oppression” that apartheid policies forced onto women; namely, migrant labour meant that only men could come to town legally - if women migrated to urban areas, they invariably had to live in illegal settlements; up until the late 1970s, single, divorced or widowed women were not legally entitled to rental housing stock; wage rates were nearly 50% lower than men and unemployment levels higher amongst women compared to men, i.e. families with women heads were poorer and hence less capable of affording rates in formal townships. Women in Langa often justified this in terms of the high costs of consumer culture in KwaNobuhle, i.e. the pressure to own modern furniture, a large dining-room table, a hi-fi, modern stove and permed hairstyles.

Langa’s age profile is of crucial importance given the prominent political role played by the “youth”. The PLANACT survey revealed that over 50% of Langa’s residents were under the age of 25 and no less than a third were of school-going age. Given that no schools existed in Langa, it is not surprising that Langa residents regarded educational facilities as a critical problem (more on this later).

As far as employment was concerned, only 46% of the potentially economically active population said that they had a job. A large proportion of the population (43%) said they were unemployed despite having had work previously and then 13% said that they had never been employed. This last category - many of whom were young - is the group that was not located in the workplace or even in the household economy and which came to fill the ranks of the youth congress in 1984-86.

A breakdown of the relationship between personal characteristics and work status is contained in Table 4.1:

Source: PLANACT, 1986, p.16

This table reveals that male household heads aged over 30 years who had some education tended to have jobs. Women, the youth and the minimally educated had the highest unemployment rates.

Uitenhage’s labour market was very unstable. This was reflected in the fact that only 7% of those who were employed had worked for an employer continuously for at least 20 years. 60% of those who were unemployed had worked for their previous employer for one to five years. Furthermore, it is significant that of those who had lost their jobs, 46% said that they had been retrenched or sacked, while 30% lost their jobs because they fell sick or pregnant. Only 23% said that they voluntarily left their jobs by retiring or resigning.

Of those who were employed, 32% said that they were union members. This was much higher than the national union membership average which was 12% at the time. 90% of the union members said that they were members of a Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) affiliate while the rest were members of a Council of Unions of South Africa (CUSA) affiliate.

Bus transport was the primary link between home and work, with 60% of the respondents saying that they used the bus to go to work. The remainder used taxis, private cars or walked.

Contrary to the general educational profile of the PEU region, the general standard of education in Langa was low. Table

4.2 gives the range and percentages:

High unemployment, low levels of education and general recessionary conditions resulted in very low wage rates and extreme poverty. Table 4.3 reveals that 21% of all the households had no regular income and that only 9% had monthly incomes of over R400. The average monthly household income was R186.38.

This table shows that only 4% of all heads earned more than R300. More significantly, the fact that only 9% had total incomes of over R400 suggests drastic differences between Langa and the Port Elizabeth squatter areas, where 45% of the households surveyed earned above R400. This can only be explained by the fact that, whereas in Port Elizabeth, people were driven into the informal settlements by the housing shortage, in Uitenhage the cause was poverty and therefore an inability to afford the cost of living in the formal townships - especially those households where women were the head.

The quality of the shacks and when they were built tells us something about the permanence of the community. 92% of all the shacks were built between 1971 and 1986, 76% of which were built between 1981 and 1986. The most distinctive feature about Langa’s shacks is how substantial and well-built they are. Seasoned observers of Durban’s shack areas, Crossroads and Port Elizabeth’s “Soweto-by-the-sea” remarked on the high quality of Langa’s shacks, most of which were built from “zincs” and planks. The high quality of the shacks may be explained by the fact that there was a small informal sector of builders who built shacks for people. This is why 28% of the shack dwellers said that their shacks had been built for them. The permanence of Langa’s squatters that this reflects is reinforced by the fact that no less than 54% of the shacks had between 3 and 7 actual rooms and 37% had separate kitchens.

The explanation for the stability of Langa’s shack dwellers emerges when the average length of residence is taken into

account and why people lived in Langa. Contrary to the common belief that squatter settlements comprise “recently arrived rural-urban migrants”, the evidence suggests the opposite. In response to the question “How long have you lived in this house?”, 53% said between 0 and 4 years, 12% said between 5 and 9 years, 8% said between 10 and 14 years, 6% said between 15 and 19 years, 9% said between 20 and 29 years and 12% said over 30 years. More significantly, it was found that no less than 84% of the respondents said that they lived in Langa prior to moving where their shack was at the time of the survey. In other words, the large majority did not come from a rural village to live in town. In fact, the majority of respondents (62%) said that they moved to their present dwelling in Langa because they wanted their own house or because of overcrowding in other areas or because they wanted a better home. 22% said that they moved because they liked the location, 6% said that they moved because of removals, and only 4% because they needed work in the area. This confirms with remarkable exactness the general trends in the PEU region.

Although the housing shortage was by far the most important reason why people moved to the dwellings they were in in 1985-86, when asked “What do you like most about living here?”, the following responses (that measured the benefits of living in Langa as compared to KwaNobuhle) were recorded: 97% said that the location of Langa was what they liked most, which refers to the closeness to the centre of town. This was followed by less rent to pay than in KwaNobuhle (79%); Langa had a good social life (39%); there was a sense of communal solidarity (21%); it was cheaper to live in Langa (19%); houses and plots were larger; it is easier to survive (12%); living conditions are better (11%); and Langa is nearer to other races (3%). Besides the expected importance of material factors such as location close to town and places of work and low rent, it is significant that these figures show that 60% felt that Langa’s social life and sense of communal solidarity were what they liked most about the community. This contrasts sharply with the sense of isolation, alienation and breakdown that was recorded amongst these same people after they were moved to KwaNobuhle in 1986.

In short, Langa’s “stability” and sense of “community” was created by its residents’ determination to carve a niche out of the soft underbelly of the PEU urban region. These efforts, however, would not have been successful if the contradiction between the demand for shelter and state housing policy was not overdetermined by the equally contradictory effects of influx control and the patronage networks of local councillors. It is significant that 71% of the respondents to the PLANACT survey were in possession of what they regarded as official “lodgers’ permits” and that 94% had never been evicted from their places of residence. This suggests that either most residents had Section 10 qualifications and hence were protected from being “repatriated” Western Cape style to the bantustans, or influx control regulations were simply not being enforced.69 These remarkable figures bear testimony to the fact that the patronage network that Majombozi created was most certainly in the material interests of the squatters and that the ECDB officials could not or did not undermine this network by “removing” the squatters out of Uitenhage. This meant that squatter struggles in Uitenhage were not about entry into the urban domain (as in the Western Cape70), but rather were about the terms of this inclusion.

Conclusion

Successive waves of forced removals of Langa’s residents from the centre of Uitenhage was, in essence, about the use of state violence to preserve the urban space of Uitenhage for its white residents. However, the incomplete application of the apartheid

69 This was a common trend during this period. See Hindson, D., op. cit., pp.86-91.

70 See Cole, J., Crossroads: The Politics of Reform and Repression, 19761986, Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987. Although the Western Cape has a long history of squatter struggles, the fact that it was defined as a coloured labour preference area meant that black Africans were deemed to be legally excluded from the labour market. This contrasts with Uitenhage where the coloured labour preference policy was not applicable. The result was that the substantive content of squatter struggles over access to land was de facto a struggle against the coloured labour preference policy i.e. urban space and labour control were much more intimately connected than in the Eastern Cape.

spatial blueprint in Uitenhage was the result of tensions and conflicts between a complex constellation of local interests contesting the application of nationally determined and locally inspired urban policies over consecutive historical periods. These local conflicts mediated the way that national policy was interpreted and applied, while national policy prescriptions created structures and processes that constantly constituted and reconstituted different local interests. These vertical and horizontal flows of power resulted in the creation of an urban environment by the 1980s that, in turn, was the well spring for some very serious multiple political conflicts within the local state system and between this system and the Langa community. These urban dynamics, however, may have been a necessary condition for these political conflicts, but it was by no means a sufficient condition. For an understanding of these sufficient conditions, we need to venture onto the relatively more unstable and intangible terrain of political organisation and struggles, without losing sight of the fact that it was the urban system that was the subject of these wider political conflicts. In short, by 1985 the complex struggles over the existence, expansion and control of Langa’s destiny exemplified what had become evident in most of South Africa’s large and small urban centres by the mid-1980s: intense local-level resistance to the structure and dynamics of urban spatial dynamics by the black majority was a central driver of the much wider national struggle for democracy.

Introduction

Popular organisation in Uitenhage’s black communities was, in many ways, unique. The actors, ideas and social conditions that shaped the patterns of mobilisation and organisation in these communities gave rise to atypical formations. The distinguishing feature about Uitenhage is that it was probably the only “union town” in South Africa. With Volkswagen employing nearly two-thirds of Uitenhage’s economically active population and with the rest of the labour force concentrated in large private and public sector establishments, it is not surprising that the unionisation of Uitenhage’s black working class made a substantial impact on the organisational form and ideological content of community-based movements during the 1980s.

Although popular organisation in Uitenhage’s black community probably stretches back to colonial penetration, direct contemporary linkages can be traced back to Communist Party agitation during the 1940s and 1950s and, more importantly, widespread ANC organisation during the 1950s.1 A number of old-timers from the fifties who did time on Robben Island could still be found speaking or in the audience at political meetings during the 1980s in Uitenhage. They told heroic stories of how they worked with Govan Mbeki, how they held mass meetings in the veld and how they organised ANC branches and campaigns in Uitenhage. The leading Uitenhage organiser, Mr Mfazwa, recounts in some detail how he organised Freedom Volunteers to collect demands for the Congress of the People in 1955 that drew up the Freedom Charter. Many of today’s leading youth congress activists in Uitenhage had parents who participated in the Defiance Campaign. Although no mention is made of Uitenhage in the accounts of the 1950s, we can safely assume that popular struggles in Uitenhage’s black communities developed along similar lines to those which emerged in Port Elizabeth.

Unlike in Port Elizabeth, where the re-emerging popular organisations in the 1980s were rooted in student and community

Interview with Mr Mfazwa, ANC organiser for Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth in the 1950s, 4.11.1987.

protests,2 the re-emergence of popular organisation in Uitenhage was shaped largely by trade union organisation. The massive impact that large-scale industrial manufacturing had on Uitenhage’s economy not only explains the formation of an advanced industrial proletariat, but also why trade unions were to play such an important role in the establishment of contemporary social movements. During the early 1980s I was particularly curious about actual existing relationships between militant trade unions and community-based organisations on the East Rand and in East London because I did not trust the prevailing orthodoxy on the left that worker’s interests were not aligned with the narratives of the national liberation movement -an orthodoxy which, in my view, hampered the anti-apartheid struggle.3 This is why this chapter starts with an account of the Uitenhage trade union movement. Like the East Rand, the remarkable feature about Uitenhage’s trade unions is how they entered the 1980s as fairly conservative economistic trade unions opposed to community involvement, but ended up as strong allies of radical politicised community organisations by the mid-1980s.

The period 10 October 1979 to 16 June 1980 saw the birth of mass organisation in the Eastern Cape’s factories, communities and schools4. The form, content and pattern of these struggles were not only distinctly different from previous phases of resistance, but they generated conceptions of struggle that were to shape national strategies and tactics in the years ahead. This is because at root they raised, for the first time, the critical question of how home and workplace struggles could be combined to create a new and effective social movement. It was from this crucible that

2 See Cooper, C and Ensor, L., PEBCO: A Black Mass Movement,

Johannesburg, Institute of Race Relations, 1980; also Riordan’s

detailed contemporary account- Riordan 2022, op. cit. 3 See Swilling, M. “The Politics of Working Class Struggles in

Germiston, 1979-1982”, paper presented to History Workshop

Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, February 1984: also

Swilling, M. “The Buses Smell of Blood’: The 1983 East London Bus

Boycott”, South Black African Labour Bulletin, 9,5 1984. 4 See Riordan 2022 op. cit. for an excellent journalistic overview

of this movement that provides a detailed account in somewhat

heroic terms of the key actors and events over this period.

leaders, activists and analysts would draw lessons, precedents and arguments during the rest of the 1980s.

It would be a mistake, however, to comprehend the emerging politics of resistance in the PEU region simply as an outgrowth of unionisation in the workplace. The communities had their own dynamics that led to forms of community organisation in the region that quite often had conflictual relations with the unions.

The key moments in the October 1979 to June 1980 period were 23 October - founding of the Uitenhage Black Civic Organisation (UBCO); 31 October - commencement of Ford Strikes; 30 April - commencement of the East Cape schools boycott; and 16 June: the Uitenhage General Strike.5

The Union Movement

Right-wing racist unions and politicised black trade unionism are two sides of the same coin. And in the Eastern Cape, this irony was to be overdetermined by social conditions and a political culture that eventually spawned the most militant union movement in the country.

The form and structure of contemporary Eastern Cape unionism goes back to the decision by the conservative white union Yster en Staal to organise white workers in 1964, and the formation in 1967 of the mainly coloured National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers of South Africa (NUMARWOSA).

Yster en Staal, a conservative union whose membership was drawn largely from Afrikaans-speaking artisans in the Transvaal, began organising in the Eastern Cape motor firms in the 1960s. It won recognition from General Motors (Port Elizabeth) in 1966 and subsequently at Ford (Port Elizabeth) and Volkswagen in Uitenhage. The basic strategy of the right-wing white artisan unions during the 1960s was to use their race as a bargaining

Although my research and writing on these events precedes the book by Riordan, his book provides useful additional detail of the personalities and events that I describe below.

tool.6 As mechanisation and job fragmentation steadily diluted the bargaining power of white workers after the Second World War, and given that this increasingly privileged stratum was attached to a racist ideology that prohibited cross-race class alliances, it followed that a key form of pressure available to white workers was their ability to pressurise the state into job reservation.7 This is exactly what Yster en Staal did in the Eastern Cape motor firms.

In 1967 Yster en Staal asked the Minister of Labour to appoint an industrial tribunal to establish whether white workers were unfairly losing jobs to cheaper black workers. Based on the findings of this tribunal, the Minister promulgated Job Reservation Determination Number 16 which stipulated that all supervisory and control work in the motor industry must be reserved for white workers; that 65% of all jobs must be occupied by white people and that all existing jobs occupied by white workers were reserved for white people. Furthermore, if an employer wanted to employ a black worker in a job reserved for white people, an application for a special exemption had to be forwarded to the Department of Labour which in turn referred the application to Yster en Staal for sanctioning.8 The severe constraints that this imposed on the labour market not only caused tension between white workers and employers, but was to eventually lead to the formation of an Industrial Council in 1970 that would, because of pressure from black workers, steadily undermine the only bargaining power that white workers had, namely their race.

Fred Sauls, a 27-year-old “cycle checker” at Ford, decided to join the embryonic union of coloured motor workers in 1967. After formally registering in June 1967, NUMARWOSA was to grow into a significant force. After becoming general secretary of the union in 1971, Fred Sauls led NUMARWOSA into the Industrial Council (IC) for the Eastern Cape Motor Industry in the same year. At the same time, the union leadership decided to organise black African workers into a “parallel” union called the United

6 Webster, E., Cast in a Racial Mold, Johannesburg, Ravan, 1985,

pp.94-117. 7 Ibid. 8 Faull, N.H.B, Volkswagen SA (PTY) LTD, unpublished case study

research report, University of Cape Town, 1983. Part One, p.17.

Automobile Rubber and Allied Workers Union (that used “UAW” as its acronym). It was “parallel” because black Africans were not allowed to join registered trade unions at this point. NUMARWOSA believed that this was important because “it was in our direct interests to unite workers to prevent management from dividing them. … We made it clear from the start to management and the Industrial Council that separate representation for coloureds and Black Africans was completely against our principles.”9 The NUMARWOSA and the UAW worked closely together and caucused positions prior to IC negotiations. The UAW applied for and won de facto recognition from employers in 1977, claiming that it had 50% representation at Ford and Volkswagen and 20% at General Motors.10

Responding to the unionisation of black workers in the Eastern Cape and elsewhere, the state adjusted the Labour Relations Act in 1973 to provide for the formation of “Liaison Committees”. These in-house committees that gave black Africans a very limited voice were given representation on the IC but under the supervision of the Department of Labour’s regional Bantu Labour Officer. Although intended to make unions redundant, the NUMARWOSA-UAW succeeded in organising the liaison committee members, which meant that the key black African liaison committee representatives on the IC were in fact UAW members. One of them, John Mke, was the UAW President and well connected to international auto and metal federations. The other was John Gomomo, the skilful leader of Volkswagen’s black workers.11 Finnemore captured the underlying reasons for the success of black African unionisation in the Eastern Cape when she commented:

“The dominance of white workers, differing structures of industrial relations, fears of repression and general recession in the auto industry all contributed to the relatively powerless position of black workers during the

9 Interview with Freddie Sauls, Secretary of NUMARWOSA, South

Black African Labour Bulletin, 6,2 & 3, September 1980, p.55. 10 Faull, N.H.B., op. cit., p.19. 11 John Gomomo eventually became national President of the giant

Congress of South Black African Trade Unions.

1970s. The negotiated minimum wage still fell below the Household Subsistence Level, and where wage increases were granted above this, it was at management’s discretion.”12

The emerging strength of UAW solidified its relationship with NUMARWOSA. It was this relationship that led to NUMARWOSA’s resignation from the moderate Trade Union Council of South Africa (TUCSA) because of this federation’s reluctance to seriously apply itself to the unionisation of black African workers. The NUMARWOSA and the UAW were thus freed to participate in the movement that culminated in the founding of the Federation of South Black African Trade Unions (FOSATU) in 1979.13

The failure of the liaison committee system, the growing power of the ‘independent’ trade union movement that the formation of FOSATU symbolised and the pressures emanating from employers to review the industrial relations system culminated in the findings of the 1979 Wiehahn Commission and subsequent amendments to the Industrial Conciliation Act on 1 December 1979. These amendments not only legalised the registration of black trade unions, but by providing for the phasing out of job reservation - the infamous Job Reservation Determination Number 16 of 1968 was summarily scrapped. White workers now had nothing except their racism to defend themselves, and this they were to use to support the growth of right-wing political parties in Uitenhage - a political process that undermined the hegemony of the National Party during the 1980s and pressurised local National Party politicians into adopting aggressively racist and authoritarian approaches towards black urbanisation.

The East Cape unions entered the new labour relations era with an advantage that most other unions were only to achieve by 1982, namely a base on the factory floor.14 Because this was

12 Finnemore, M., “Worker Mobilisation in the Auto Industry of the

Eastern Cape”, paper presented to the Association of Sociology of

Southern Africa, July 1984, p.4. 13 See Interview with Freddie Sauls, op. cit. 14 Friedman, S., Building Tomorrow Today, JHB, Ravan, 1987, p.277.

achieved by using a combination of strict workplace bargaining, tight disciplined shop-floor organisation, strategic participation in ICs and caution when it came to community politics, the NUMARWOSA-UAW unions (that later merged to form the National Automobile and Allied Workers Union [NAAWU]) supported a strong “workerist” current in FOSATU that stressed similar principles.15 With its roots in moderate “parallel unionism” during the 1960s and 1970s, the leaders of the Eastern Cape motor unions were acutely aware of how much their organisational power depended on adherence to these tactical principles. What they remained unaware of, however, was how much the conditions of struggle had changed by 1980. Instead of recognising the contingent nature of these tactics and devising new ones to cope with new conditions, the old tactics were retained and defended. In Uitenhage during 1979-80, this tendency translated itself into a radical workerism where workplace and community struggles were funnelled through trade union organisations. However, in Port Elizabeth during the same period, these unions were simply marginalised as mass protest action and resistance took place under the leadership of community-based organisations.

Port Elizabeth: Factories, Communities and the Schools

Community Organisations in Uitenhage

The Uitenhage Black Civic Organisation (UBCO) was in many ways an anomaly. It grew out of a PEBCO initiative in 1979 to establish a residents’ association in KwaNobuhle called the KwaNobuhle Residents’ Association (KRA), but culminated in the formation of UBCO under the direct leadership of ‘workerist’ oriented FOSATU activists. This outcome reflected power relations between the factories and townships in Uitenhage that reversed the logic that produced the opposite outcome in Port Elizabeth: instead of weak factory organisation and strong community structures as in the latter case, in Uitenhage there were powerful factory structures and very weak community organisations. Although workplace mobilisation will be dealt with later, this section will attempt to develop a picture of how community organisation developed in 1979-80.41

This picture, unfortunately, because there are no written or journalistic accounts of this period and the organisations involved

By 1980 tensions were mounting in Uitenhage’s townships. The underlying causes were housing shortages and the high cost and poor quality of urban services. Bill Hickson of the local South Black African National Tuberculosis [TB] Association said that Uitenhage was “rotten with TB”. In July 1979, 36 new TB cases were reported. Dickson said that the high incidence of TB in Uitenhage as compared to “other parts of the country” was directly related to the severity of the housing shortage in Uitenhage.42

Like in Port Elizabeth, local activists used urban grievances to mobilise a support-base. On 23 October, an interim committee was established to plan the formation of what was to eventually become UBCO. According to one leading organiser at the time:

“What we actually wanted to deal with was civic matters only. Although you cannot separate the civic from politics, we felt it was strategic to fight for the rights of our community through the civic. The first problem we intended to tackle was the rent issue. Our rent was too high. So we decided to organise the community and we explained to them the situation.”43

This conception of a “civic” was identical to that held by PEBCO leadership. Then, on 14 November 1979, Thozamile Botha spoke at a meeting called to establish the KwaNobuhle Residents’ Association (KRA).44 This was consistent with the PEBCO strategy of establishing local associations to support the township-wide umbrella organisation, i.e. UBCO in Uitenhage’s case. About 2,000 people attended the meeting which was held in St. Anne’s Church Hall. Botha called for the “equal distribution of wealth among all the peoples of Azania”. He argued that the problem was not race but “economic oppression”. However, the economy depended on

have been so repeatedly hit by repression that they have no historical documentation either. I have had to rely, therefore, on oral accounts. The problem with these oral accounts is that serious tensions existed amongst leaders of these organisations which means that the truth often is hidden or compromised.

42 Weekend Post, 9.8.80

43 Interview with a group of ex-UBCO leaders, Uitenhage, 20.10.1987.

44 Evening Post, 14.11.79

black people and there were shouts of Amandla when he said, “If we remove our labour and our buying power, what will happen to the white man?” He called for unity and criticised “cosmetic changes” on the grounds that white people made concessions because “they want you to keep quiet”. He argued that political rights must be accompanied by “the need for economic liberation of the black man”. Botha went on to criticise the Urban Foundation and called it “a devil bent on creating class divisions among the oppressed”. Finally, Botha and other speakers criticised the community councillors saying that they were not representative of the people.45 The main decision at the meeting was to oppose the high rentals in the townships.

Following several more rallies and mass meetings, it became clear that three issues were of central concern to the residents: (a) high rentals, (b) opposition amongst Langa residents to moving to new housing extensions in KwaNobuhle because the rents were higher than in the older parts of the township,46 and (c) resistance to the proposed removal of Langa to KwaNobuhle. A strategy to deal with these problems was formulated which involved a decision to negotiate with the ECAB authorities. After several meetings with local officials, it became clear to UBCO that “in all these instances they could not redress our grievances. Then we mobilised the people.”47

In short, UBCO went through the initial stages of grassroots mobilisation: the expression of grievances, formation of an organisation, petitioning and negotiation to bring problems to the attention of the authorities and then, when this failed, the turn to mass organisation. Many constituencies were mobilised around the issues which affected them directly: pensioners who were forced to queue up for hours to receive their money each month; residents opposed to high rents and removal; women around child-care issues and the youth under the auspices of the “youth league”. Because UBCO activists were also shop stewards at Volkswagen, and given that this factory employed most employed workers, it is not surprising that much of the community

45 Ibid. 46 Eastern Province Herald, 10.10.80 47 Interview with ex-UBCO leadership, op. cit.

organising was actually conducted in the factory. “That is where the idea started”, said one informant, “because at Volkswagen we could explain to the people our objectives and we could organise.” Specific shop steward meetings of Volkswagen workers were called to discuss community problems.48 From these meetings, workers would be dispatched to different parts of the township to organise meetings to discuss community problems. These meetings usually took place on Sundays in houses and then once a month a mass meeting would be held which was announced with loudhailers.49

Decentralised structures were established that were similar to what became known later on as the “street committees”.50 Although they were not given this name, informants said that they amounted to small house meetings of all those in a particular neighbourhood or zone. These meetings were particularly successful in Langa.51 The organisational power UBCO attempted to generate this way was directed into a boycott of shops owned by local government councillors. In this way, pressure was brought to bear on the local state to redress popular grievances.

Volkswagen workers also tried to organise a “worker’s culture”. They did this by forming dart clubs in the townships because, as one UBCO leader put it, “for darts you need an education, you need to be able to count and have judgement”.52 This could not express more clearly the centrality of the established skilled and semi-skilled worker in the NAAWUUBCO project. This is the actor that had traditionally moulded a “working class culture and politics” in industrial societies and in Uitenhage, this process was well underway by the end of 1980, complete with its own political ideology, cultural clubs and general strike (see next section).

Although all informants agreed that UBCO did achieve some success in organising the community at grassroots level, all was not well amongst the leadership. UBCO was initiated before the

48 Interview with ex-UBCO leaders, op. cit. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid.

Ford Strikes. By the time that the Port Elizabeth divisions had been packaged into ideological categories and disseminated, the UBCO executive had been formed and included what later emerged as two opposing ideological positions, the FOSATU “workerist” and congress “populists”.

Unlike in Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage’s unionists -particularly the Volkswagen shop stewards - felt that their factory base was strong enough to support their move into community politics. Instead of leaving UBCO to the “populists”, the unionists contested and won top executive positions. The biographical characteristics of this group are significant: they were mostly skilled or semi-skilled workers; came from fully urbanised stable backgrounds; were relatively well educated and fairly fluent in English; and their ages ranged from late twenties to late thirties. Unconnected to the ANC traditions of the 1950s and excluded from the student protests of the mid-1970s, these workers - like their contemporaries on the East Rand53 concentrated on building “worker power” on the shop floor. They tackled community problems only if this was a logical extension of workplace struggle and if their factory base could be strengthened in the process. In the final analysis, it was the strength of union organisation at Volkswagen that made it possible for unionists to enter township politics and because of the persuasive dominance of this factory, the shop steward elite at Volkswagen emerged to dominate all union and community structures. At the centre of this elite was John Gomomo - charismatic, shrewd, skilful, powerful and a brilliant organiser. With his power base apparently secure, he and his comrades came to share Freddie Saul’s interpretation of the after-effects of the Ford Strikes:

“The workers will decide what interest is paramount to them and what should be pursued by any party political organisation. But at this point, I think we are operating in a dangerous area where there’s a lot of politicisation, where black nationalist ideologies dominate. The people who are practical realise that to get workers united, you need to

53 See Swilling, M., “The Politics of Working Class Struggles in Germiston…”, op. cit.

work in the union movement -and our prime objective is to build solidarity and proceed step by step to improve on the demands of the workers. The danger is where, like the Ford situation, workers can be motivated on party political issues, but what do they achieve and how do they benefit?”

In short, this classic statement of so-called “workerism” accurately suited the organisational power base, interests and values represented in the Volkswagen dominated union, community and cultural structures in Uitenhage. Strategies, tactics and ideas were shaped by workplace organisation and extended outwards to the community. Alliances with other community-based organisations were unnecessary. Not surprisingly, this tightly organised exclusive leadership soon created its enemies and opposition. This did not come from a rival source of power within the community context, but rather emanated from leadership groupings in the union movement itself who used the ideological rivalry generated by the Ford Strikes to justify the formation of a separate organisational project.

The NAAWU-UBCO rival coalesced around two men: Ficks Kobese who worked at Goodyear and felt excluded from the Volkswagen elite, and Emson Banda, a salesman at a clothing firm in central Uitenhage. Banda was born in 1950 in Uitenhage into a family of 11 children. His schooling was uneven because the farmer who employed his father on a farm near Kirkwood insisted on the children working and refused them permission to attend school regularly. In 1968 Banda’s oldest brother died and he had to give up school altogether to help his family. He found a job in a clothing shop and remained in its employ until he was badly assaulted by vigilantes in 1987.

The formation of MACWUSA later in 1980 provided Kobese with an opportunity to challenge the Gomomo leadership. Resigning his position as secretary of the Uitenhage branch of NAAWU, Kobese established a MACWUSA branch in Uitenhage. Using an array of arguments to justify his break with FOSATU -ranging from a critique of workerism to accusations that NAAWU was organisationally ineffective as a union - Kobese built an organised worker support-base in Goodyear. Unlike the NAAWU leadership, the MACWUSA leadership at Goodyear comprised younger more politicised workers, many of whom had links with the emerging student and community organisations. It was logical for Banda to join this group because he knew that his network of organised commercial workers in town had no place in NAAWU.54 After joining MACWUSA, he said “I was organising to make trade unions active at the supermarkets, dry cleaners and all the town’s small business places”.55

By joining MACWUSA, Kobese -who was on the UBCO executive -and Banda who helped out in the UBCO office, identified themselves with a strong anti-FOSATU movement and in so doing effectively challenged the UBCO leadership. After failing to win a power struggle within UBCO, they resigned and formed a rival body called Save the Starting Community (SSC). The SSC immediately began organising a constituency that the NAAWU-UBCO leadership ignored, namely the unemployed. It is worth quoting Banda’s description of what he did:

“[The SSC] had an executive. I was the chairman. We had field workers who went door-to-door with a survey. They got information from the owner of that house about unemployment, what accounts he got and all that. This was done in KwaNobuhle and Langa, but it was strong in KwaNobuhle. We also thought of the pensioners every three months. By the time the third month came, there was no food, nothing. We gave food to pensioners monthly and unemployed people weekly. We started writing letters to the factories that produce food and the East Cape Chamber of Commerce. We got donations of food and money and made up food parcels and we also collected old clothes from people and gave them out.”56

This strategy was extremely effective and soon led to the decline of UBCO’s influence in the community. It also paved the way for the formation in 1983 of the Uitenhage Youth Congress (UYCO)

54 Interview with Emson Banda, Uitenhage, 24.10.1987. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.

that came to represent a wide range of community interests, but under the leadership of a remarkably capable and articulate leadership of young workers, unemployed school and tertiary institution graduates who also commanded a considerable support-base amongst the more marginalised largely illiterate unemployed. By 1984, MACWUSA, the SSC and the UYCO were the primary opposition to government bodies in Uitenhage. They were solidly within the national democratic camp represented by the UDF and extremely critical of FOSATU which was regarded as “workerist” and unsympathetic to the problems of workers in the community.

Although it would appear from the above account of the evolution of the SSC-MACWUSA-UYCO movement that the contours of ideological development replicated the workplace-community divisions that had evolved in Port Elizabeth; this apparent similarity belies three important facts. Firstly, it ignores the way that the union leadership did make an attempt to organise the community through UBCO in a way that is not evident in the Port Elizabeth case. Secondly, the divisions between coloured and black African workers in Uitenhage were not nearly as severe as they were in Port Elizabeth, a phenomenon that has much to do with the different patterns of urbanisation and urban development in the two cities. Thirdly, the militant general strikes that hit Uitenhage in 1980 were responsible for creating the space and organisational context for the growth of community mobilisation during the early- to mid-1980s - it was this historical connection that led to a community- and workplace-based social movement during the mid-1980s that was built around a common interest between unions and community organisations in a negotiated non-racial and affordable urban system that suited the needs of the marginalised and employed working people.

Unionisation in Uitenhage and the 1980 General Strike

The unionisation of Uitenhage’s employed workers was heavily dependent on the central role of the union leadership in the giant R120 million Volkswagen plant that employed about 6,000 people in 1980. The next largest was Goodyear that employed 2,000 in 1980. Representing 6,000 of the 30,000 workers in Uitenhage in 1980, Volkswagen’s central role in the city’s economic and labour history was not surprising.

In 1980, three unions represented workers at VW in Uitenhage: Yster en Staal that represented 72,4% of the 1,080 white workers, NUMARWOSA represented 77,7 of the 1,620 coloured workers and UAW represented 58,9% of the 3,300 black African workers.57

Like many other industries in South Africa, wages and working conditions were negotiated in Industrial Councils (IC). The IC for the Eastern Cape motor industry essentially involved the three unions and the three major employers, namely Ford, Volkswagen and General Motors. Agreements reached in the IC were binding in law and conflict resolution mechanisms were managed by the IC. Wage negotiations invariably revolved around the calculated household subsistence level (HSL) for Uitenhage as determined by the University of Port Elizabeth. The HSL was the cost of the most basic basket of goods that a black African family of 6 or a coloured family of 5 would need to barely survive above the poverty datum line. The HSL plus 50%, however, was regarded as the household effective level (HEL), i.e. the basic minimum required by a family to ensure a decent living and long-term reproduction. The HEL was regarded by the European Economic Commission guidelines for European employers in South Africa as the yardstick for evaluating the adequacy of wage levels.

Eastern Cape motor manufacturers were proud of their record as employers who set relatively high wage levels as compared to Transvaal employers in the motor manufacturing sector. Eastern Cape rates were 117 cents per hour in September 1978 as compared to 82 cents in the Transvaal. The IC agreement that came into effect in February 1978 was valid for 18 months with an unwritten agreement that it would be reviewed - not

57 Faull, N.H.B., op. cit. The rest of this section is based on the account

of events provided in Faull’s documents, but also in press clips and

personal communications with people involved.

adjusted - every six months. The wage levels that this was intended to promote over 5 years were as follows:

A new IC negotiated agreement came into effect in August 1979 that provided for a minimum R1 per hour wage increasing to R1,15 per hour by February 1980. This meant that the net pay of someone working 43 hours per week was R218,74 when the HSL was R169,72 for that month; or R254.58 if this was used to calculate the HEL. VW, however, added in the value of meal subsidies, transport levies and medical aid in order to increase the basic minimum wage to R271,60, or 60% above the HSL or 10% above the HEL. The assumptions underlying the HSL and HEL calculations were, however, mistrusted by union leaders and members.

In addition to improved wages, VW also implemented extensive training programmes aimed at black staff. This, however, could not keep up with the very rapid rate of employment growth that was taking place in order to meet the growing demands stimulated by the 1979-1982 boom. The Industrial Relations Director reflected on the consequences of labour expansion when he said:

“Most of these new employees are young blacks who have

never worked in a factory before, and I can’t say we are

doing a good job of introducing these new people to the

industrial environment. The object is simply to get in as

many people in the shortest possible time.”58

The boom, however, was accompanied by rising prices at a rate of about 12% per annum that rising wages could not always keep up with.

The first indications of tension emerged in May 1980 when wildcat strikes broke out amongst small groups of workers on 23 and 26 May and 9 June. Although there were other grievances expressed, the striking workers demanded a R2 an hour minimum wage. With talk of general strikes for a living wage rippling through the workforce, and the departure for the United States of key shop steward John Gomomo in early June, the scene was set for the 12 June IC negotiations. All this, in turn, was taken within a countrywide context of rising mobilisation within the communities59. The schools boycotts described in the previous section provided a focus for community actions that were coupled in some cases to strike actions in the workplace. With the 16 June commemoration of the Soweto Uprising in 1976 coming up, it was clear to all involved that local and national tensions were coming to a head.

Without going into the details, a joint employer offer at the 12 June negotiations was rejected by all three unions in favour of more substantial increases and less job restructuring. The employers wanted a speedy settlement on increases that did not exceed the 10,5% limit that they had budgeted for. The unions, however, tabled proposals that would have resulted in 13,5% increases. Agreement was not reached and negotiations shifted to the plant level.

The NUMARWOSA and UAW unions had arranged a report-back meeting for Sunday 15 June. However, this meeting was banned by the authorities and enforced by the police. With no

58 Quoted in Ibid., volume 1, p.46. 59 For the best overview of the 1980 strike see Adler, G. 1997.

Shop floors and rugby fields: the social basis of auto worker

solidarity in South Africa. International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 51: 96 – 128 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0147547900002003

way of achieving a mandate to continue with negotiations while workers continued to work, the union leaders were catapulted into a conflict that they never planned for.

Although the black and coloured workers reported for duty on the morning of 16 June - the 4th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, by 8 a.m. they had begun to congregate on the lawn outside the Managing Director’s Office. Eventually, 4,000 workers had gathered. The union leadership were powerless because the crowd said they wanted a report from management, not from the shop stewards. The shop stewards, in turn, informed a worried management that the workers wanted R2 an hour. After attempts by management and union leaders to explain things to the crowd, it eventually broke up into grumbling smaller groups who trickled off the site after agreement was reached to hold a mass meeting at VW the next morning.

On Tuesday 17 June, the mass meeting took place and after being addressed by Freddie Sauls, dispersed with the assurance from the union that their demand for R2 an hour before returning to work would be put to the management. Subsequent meetings with management resolved nothing. Instead, management informed workers the next day that the plant was closed until further notice.

By Tuesday the strike had begun to spread to other factories. Workers at Hella, where 80% of the workplace was coloured women, went on strike over R2 an hour living wage demands. They were joined by workers at SKF that afternoon.

In all cases where strike action broke out, the union leadership seemed out of control and unable to encourage workers back to work while negotiations proceeded. Instead, the workers left their plants and marched through Uitenhage’s CBD singing freedom songs and raised clenched fists. When they walked past the union offices, some of the crowd jeered at the premises in an apparent gesture of disgust. In the townships, police clashed with youths and like in 1977, when the students and gangs went on the rampage, the acrid biting smell of teargas once again drifted across the township.

The strike continued through 18 June and police clashed with workers at certain factories and in the streets. Workers at three more factories plus others joined the three already on strike, including at Goodyear, Borg Warner, and M. Jeeva and Sons. At the same time, black African and coloured schools were on full-scale boycotts with no resolution in sight. As tension mounted and police reinforcements were brought in, Uitenhage was declared an emergency area, which effectively gave the security forces carte blanche to secure the area, including control over access to information about what was happening by restricting journalists from having access to the area.

As far as the managers, police and press were concerned, the strike was pre-planned political action enforced through intimidation and aimed at forcing a conflict around an unrealisable R2 per hour wage demand in order to focus attention on foreign investment in South Africa and extend the political influence of PEBCO and UBCO in the union sphere. Radio Xhosa accused the strike of furthering the aims of the ANC. Meetings and formal and informal contacts between managers, police and the press soon consolidated this general strategic position that was premised on a conspiratorial analysis and as is common with this kind of analysis, more is ascribed to the powerful and ominous intentions of a conspiratorial leadership than to the self-activity of ordinary people angered by their poverty and politicised by their local and national environment. Indeed, by focusing attention on how to counter a conspiracy that was, in turn, reinforced by messaging emanating from exile movements that overstated the role of these movements, the security forces and business leaders focused on strategies that were completely misaligned with what was really happening.

By Friday, management had lost control of the situation to the police. This meant that negotiation processes to resolve the conflict were difficult to arrange, strike levels rose and conflict in the townships intensified. Over 8,000 workers at twelve establishments, including the municipality, were affected by strikes by Friday. However, it was also payday. This meant that workers congregated at their factories to receive their pay, but because the factories were closed, they received their pay and then marched back in their thousands through Uitenhage’s CBD to Kabah, whereupon the marchers were attacked by police who used birdshot, teargas and hand grenades to disperse the crowd. By the end of the week, the police had extended the news block out to include the whole town - probably the first time, one journalist noted, that this had happened to a whole town.

While conflict continued, negotiations resumed on Tuesday

24. Employers offered R1.40 per hour, increasing at six monthly intervals to R2 per hour by January 1982. At a mass meeting of VW employees on 26 June, the employer offer was rejected outright. Workers voted to continue with the strike. Management, in turn, decided willy nilly to reopen the plant on Friday 27 June. This proved to be a complete failure as only 96 coloured workers and 10 black African workers reported for duty.

By the beginning of the third week of Uitenhage’s general strike, two things were very clear. Firstly, employers were divided with some choosing to settle quickly on higher than standard wage rates (e.g. SKF), some decided simply to fire-and-rehire (Goodyear), others to call the police (Hella) and others adopted a wait-and-see approach (e.g. VW because of the fact that it was under the international spotlight in Germany). Secondly, unlike during the Port Elizabeth strikes the previous year, the FOSATU unions managed to retain the political leadership of the movement instead of losing it to political-cum-community groups. This had much to do with the fact that the movement was jointly driven by coloured and black African workers, many of whom lived in mixed areas or in close proximity to one another in and around Langa.

By the end of the third week, employers that had adopted a compromise-and-settle position and those that adopted hard-line fire-and-rehire positions early on in the strike were beginning to move back into full production. Heavy-handed police action coupled with detentions of union leaders helped to intimidate workers in many factories into returning to work. The strike at VW, however, continued. VW employees were instructed by their German HQ (headquarters) not to fire their employees - a response that had much to do with pressure from the powerful IG Metal, Germany’s biggest trade union. To reinforce the role of the international unions, a representative of the 15-million-strong International Metalworkers Federation arrived in South Africa to assist the FOSATU unions. VW management were terrified that they may provide the unions with valuable information about VW’s finances that could, in turn, have supported the “living wage” demand.

With IC negotiations planned for Friday 4 July, positions began to move. The unions obliquely indicated the possibility of settling for R1.60 per hour and management was coming under international pressure to follow the example of SKF, i.e. to agree on R1.60. In the meantime, more workers began turning up for work and unions began to worry about retaining the support of coloured workers. The dissipation of the general strike substantially weakened the VW workers, who were the first to strike and stayed out the longest.

Agreement was reached at the IC negotiations on 4 July that workers should return to work and in return, employers agreed to accept in principle the “living wage” concept. Further negotiations were arranged for the following Tuesday. After the workers returned to work as agreed on Monday, an agreement was reached at the Tuesday negotiations on R1.45 per hour, a service bonus of 3 cents per hour minimum and an investigation into what constituted a “decent living wage”. The agreement was formally accepted at a meeting of the IC on 15 July after the unions received a mandate of support from the workers.

Conclusion

Although the 1980 General Strike ended well, in that workers managed to win the principle of a living wage, it also demonstrated to workers and community leaders that the combined power of the employers, police and press proved to be far greater than the power of unions and workers. In addition, the free hand that the police enjoyed in the townships underlined the need for strong community organisation. As a result, during the months and years that followed the 1980 General Strike, unionisation escalated and prepared the way for the merging of NUMARWOSA and UAW to create the National Automobile and Allied Workers Union (NAAWU). Over time, more flexible and less conflictual approaches to industrial bargaining emerged.

The General Strike contained the seeds of an organisational approach that subsequently became accepted practice both inside and outside the workplace in Uitenhage, namely mass organised workplace and community-based action around popular demands, coupled with ongoing and direct negotiations. The existence and maturation of this approach in the workplace prepared the leadership with the organisational and negotiation skills that were to be used later on to negotiate alternatives to forced removals.

In short, by the mid-1980s the historical evolution of Uitenhage’s industrial workplaces and urban spaces had given rise to trade union and community-based movements that were starting to work together to not only counter and challenge the dominance of white employers in the workplace, but also challenge police and white local governance interests (and their co-opted black African allies) that were attempting to shape the urban spatial dynamics of Uitenhage. This workplace-community collaboration in Uitenhage both supported and helped to shape wider national trends, in particular the formation of COSATU in 1985 as a trade union federation that was prepared to explicitly align itself with national political positions. After all, John Gomomo was not only a trade union leader at Uitenhage’s Volkswagen plant; he played a leading role in setting up NAAWU and became the President of COSATU in 1991. He always emphasised the importance of working-class leadership of community-based and national political campaigns. He had experienced first-hand in Uitenhage how workers have more to lose by only relying on their workplace-centred organisational power.

Introduction

The sun was setting over Durban Bay, and I was sitting on the veranda of a home built on the peninsula jutting out into Durban Harbour known as The Point. I was having a conversation with Marxist historian Jeff Guy. Eventually we came round to talking about my research work on the Langa Massacre. I was excited about using the records of evidence presented to the Kannemeyer Commission of Inquiry to reconstruct the details of the event itself. Looking wistfully out over the bay, his response was: “Interesting … sounds to me like an interesting exercise in irrelevant detail.” That response somewhat shocked me and triggered, in turn, my lifelong obsession with the granular micro-dynamics of how things work and why, in particular, they cannot be written off as “irrelevant detail”. His comment led me to ask why someone with his experience would regard the micro-dynamics of a cataclysmic event like the Langa Massacre as an “irrelevant detail”.

This chapter provides an account of the conflicts that led up to the Langa Massacre. These conflicts - and, indeed, the Massacre itself - arose out of tensions that existed within the local state system and between this system and the community as a whole, which was in turn embedded within the wider national-level dynamics at the time. To give such an account it is necessary to go beyond the traditional approach to resistance politics in most South African writing. The typical approach of most analyses of township politics is to sketch out a structural and political context, followed by a brief statement that the event took place, and then concluding with some statement about what this tells us about the sociology and/or history of these structural or political conditions. In other words, the dynamics of the events of the conflict are not seen as a subject of analysis in and of themselves because the actual event is simply used as a kind of entrée for analysing why it took place. In other words, what matters is not the event itself, but rather the context and the contradictions that gave rise to the event. Hence, for Jeff Guy, reconstructing the Langa Massacre was merely “an interesting exercise in irrelevant detail”. Instead, as reflected on more deeply in the conclusion of this book, my vantage point is what Christopher Clark refers to the “intermediate plane of causation”. This, he argues, is a “plane of causation that is sometimes lost from view when we think of revolutions as the consequences of remote causes … and the proximate events”.1

This chapter will sketch out some of the immediate political dynamics that created a context of generalised conflict during the period leading up to the Massacre. Although these events led to a massacre that was a product of police violence directed against a non-violent crowd on its way to yet another political funeral on Sharpeville Day, 1985; the necklacing of Kinikini and his group was a very different form of crowd action that has received far less attention by scholars of community politics and resistance. Both kinds matter if we are to understand the dynamics of the 1980s.

Analyses of township politics have been either ‘structural’ or ‘conspiratorial’ in nature. Whereas structural approaches explained township politics in terms of the political economy of material inequality and oppression, conspiratorial approaches explained these same political processes in terms of the activities of a small group of ‘agitators’ (in the case of state apologists) or ‘leaders’ (in the case of oppositional propagandists) conspiring to overthrow the regime. Whereas the conspiratorial approach was used by national political organisations (state and ANC), the structuralist approach dominated academic perspectives -hence the reason for Jeff Guy’s comment that early evening on

Clark, C. 2024. Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 18481849. London: Penguin, p.294

The Point, Durban. What matters, rather, is the irreducible and contingent nature of the political and strategic choices made by local actors caught up in the hurly burly of rolling unpredictable conflicts on the ‘intermediate plane of causation’.

Contextualising Conflict in the Early 1980s

The six-month period leading up to the Massacre was a period during which conflicts broke out in the schools, factories and communities across the country, and in the Eastern Cape in particular.2 The so-called ‘general elections’ for the newly created ‘tricameral parliament’ for white, coloured and Indian people were held in August 1984. For the black majority, the white minority government offered up what were called the ‘Koornhof Bills’, named after their chief architect and promoter, Minister of Cooperation and Development Dr Piet Koornhof. The three Koornhof Bills were the Black Local Authorities Act (which created black local governments for black urban areas), the Orderly Movement and Settlement of Black Persons Bill (which effectively intensified the influx control laws regulated the movement of black people in urban areas), and the Black Communities Development Bill (which converted the Administration Boards that previously managed black urban areas into Development Boards, including the recognition of the rights of black urban dwellers to own property and acquire various so-called ‘development rights’).

The ‘tricameral elections’ in August 1984 reinforced for the black majority their sense of exclusion from the governing of South Africa. This was immediately followed by the rapid countrywide spread of township resistance and the emergence of new forms of mass action in the form of the mass stay away, consumer boycotts, general strikes and mass demonstrations. The Vaal Uprising in September 1984, followed soon after by the Transvaal Regional Stayaway in November 1984 and then spreading outwards to Natal and the Eastern Cape, all set the tone

See Riordan 2022. See also Lodge, T. & Nasson, B. 1991. All Here, and Now: Black Politics in South Africa in the 1980s. Cape Town: David Philip.

for the intensification of conflict and resistance at the local level. The new ‘tricameral Constitution’ and the ‘Koornhof Bills’ were the focus of this mass action.

Compared to the early 1970s, the early 1980s were challenging times for South African economic policymakers. Average growth rates dropped to 1.9% between 1974 and 1985 compared to the average of 4.9% between 1946 and 1974. Fixed investments were declining, unemployment was rising, the average per capita standard of living was deteriorating, and anti-apartheid sanctions were having the desired effect. The decline, however, was temporarily halted by the brief gold price hikes between 1977 and 1980 and good rains. The world recession of the early 1980s and resultant inflationary pressures reinforced the rising levels of domestic political discontent. In particular, the oil shocks of the late 1970s and early 1980s triggered inflationary pressures, resulting in inflation levels well above 12% for most of the 1980s and steep increases in the money supply. The resultant negative impacts on poor black households reinforced the popular belief that black people were suffering because of white minority rule that the so-called ‘reforms’ did nothing to change.

By 1985, 78% of all income from property accrued to white people who made up only 14.5% of the population (i.e. R64 bn out of a total of R82 bn of property assets). Per capita incomes were also extremely unequal. Between 1980 and 1985 they increased as follows: black people - R5,107 to R5,423; coloured people -R8,822 to R9,855; Indian people -R13,296 to R15,113; white people -R46,670 to R48,370. As a result, the percentage of the black population living in poverty in 1985 was the highest at 49.1%; followed by coloured people at 28.3%, Indian people at 10.6%, and white people at 1.8%.3

Van der Berg, S. & Louw, M. 2003. Changing patterns of South Africa income distribution: towards time series estimates of distribution and poverty. Paper presented to Conference of the Economic Society of South Africa, Stellenbosch, 17-19 September 2003. p.19

Contours of Rising Conflict in the Eastern Cape

By the early 1980s attending the funerals of people killed during politically inspired clashes with the police had become a weekly event in the Eastern Cape, in particular from late 1984 onwards. These funerals became, in turn, mass rallies that were used by activists to reinforce resistance. They arose because the police were trying to stop the gradual build-up of resistance in the name of maintaining ‘law and order’ in an area where ‘unrest’ had reached what the police perceived to be crisis levels - a euphemism for ‘threat to the white community’.

Increasingly violent policemen, the activities of vigilantes linked to the police and the increasingly organised amabutho4 squads were the central actors in an escalating cycle of violence and counter-violence that characterised the September 1984 -to March 1985 period. Two empirical surveys conducted at the time provide rough indicators as to the nature of this escalation. Table

6.1 is derived from figures provided by the police in evidence to the Kannemeyer Commission.5

Although this table is indicative of these rising levels of conflict, it is obviously misleading because it creates the impression that the only source of violence was groups who were attacking government, SAP and private property and persons. To rival this view, the human rights activist group Black Sash released a report entitled Memorandum on Police Conduct in the Eastern Cape.6 This report was compiled from a long list of affidavits taken from ordinary people who experienced firsthand extremely brutal forms of police misconduct during this same period. These included drunken behaviour by policemen on duty, repeated lashings of randomly arrested people,

4 The name used in the community to refer to militant groups of

mainly youths who took it upon themselves to attack the people

and property associated with the police, authority and less

frequently private business. 5 Computed from SAP evidence, Transcript of verbal evidence

submitted to the Kannemeyer Commission of Inquiry into the

Events at Langa, Uitenhage, on 21 March 1985 (hereafter referred

to as the Kannemeyer Commission), pp.615-618.

6 Black Sash, Memorandum on Police Conduct in the Eastern Cape, unpublished mimeo, Johannesburg, March 1985.

Table 6.1: Targets that were Attacked by Groups, October 1984 to March 1985

indiscriminate shooting at individuals and groups, assaults of innocent people walking along the road, prolonged torture in police cells (especially of young people), the beating up and killing of children, and the intimidation of public and private doctors into revealing the identities of patients who reported bullet wounds.7 The memorandum concludes:

“There are too many corroborating affidavits for anyone to believe that the police are blameless in helping create conditions in the Eastern Cape which led to the disaster on 21st March.”8

The rising levels of increasingly violent conflict in Uitenhage may have been the result of police and vigilante action, but before this is empirically established, the relationship between violent action on the part of police, vigilantes and amabutho and the internal and external dynamics of the KTC needs to be understood. For in the final analysis, it was these dynamics that triggered the build-up of conflict from September 1984 onwards.

The Politics of Fiscal Unviability

The fiscal unviability of the KwaNobuhle Town Council (KTC) was an issue that was raised by Mayor Tini as early as 16 January 1984, the day this newly established Black Local Authority (BLA) was inaugurated in terms of the Black Local Authorities Act (one of the infamous ‘Koornhof Bills’). The KTC was established to ‘govern’ Uitenhage’s black townships. Like BLAs elsewhere in the country, this fiscal crisis originated in the mistaken notion that black townships that had no viable tax base could become politically autonomous and financially viable. In reality, the labour and consumer power that resided in the townships helped to sustain the tax base of a legally and constitutionally separate local authority (namely the white municipality) that, in turn, had no fiscal responsibilities towards the township. The resulting

7 Handwritten summary of affidavits that were used to compile the

memorandum, provided to the author by Black Sash, Port Elizabeth

office. 8 Black Sash, Memorandum …., op. cit., p. 33.

intra-urban resource flows systematically underdeveloped the townships in a manner reminiscent of colonial relationships of exploitation.9 This in-built fiscal fault had disastrous political consequences for the new local political elites who grasped these local state instruments: they were illegitimate from the start because they were presented by the national government as substitutes for national political rights and they did not have the resources needed to bring about substantive urban upgrading and development - a strategy designed to ameliorate the consequences of political illegitimacy. It was this conundrum that the KTC found itself trying to handle during 1984 and in so doing found itself squeezed between central government departments that were reluctant to provide the Council with additional funds, and an increasingly politicised community that was unable and unwilling to shoulder the burden of increased levies at a time of deepening recession.

At a meeting in the Council Chamber on 28 May 1984 attended by Councillors, Council officials, the Director of Local Government John Hitge, and C.C. Kloppers from the Chief Commissioner’s Office, the overall financial position of the KTC was reviewed.10 As far as the 1983/84 budget estimates were concerned, no real problems were raised and it was noted that they provided for no service charge increases for the period up to June 1984. However, John Hitge expressed concern about the fact that the Council’s income was not as high as was projected in the budget estimates. This, the city treasurer explained, was because of the fact that the expected income from lodgers’ fees was not forthcoming, i.e. the fees from people who the Council had resolved were not members of the family in whose name houses were rented, but nevertheless lived in these houses. To compensate, Hitge proposed that the Council’s liquor outlets should generate higher profits, vacancies should not be filled,

9 The first ‘political economy’ of South Africa’s local government

finance system was provided in PLANACT, The Soweto Rent

Boycott, Johannesburg, PLANACT, 1989. I was intimately involved

in conceptualising and writing this report. 10 The account of the meeting is drawn from “KwaNobuhle Town

Council: Minutes of the 4/1984 Special Meeting of the KwaNobuhle

Town Council held in the Council’s Chamber, Matanzima Road,

Monday 28 May 1984 at 15h00.”

debts currently being carried by the ECDB on behalf of the KTC should be retained in the ECDB books and not transferred, and that various special funds and levies currently managed by the ECDB should be transferred to the KTC to make the income side of the books look a bit more respectable. In other words, to make the books look a little better, Hitge wanted them juggled and manipulated.

However, when it came to the 1984/85 budget estimates, manipulative accounting was not going to solve the problem. In essence, the KTC proposed a budget for approval by the Minister that increased expenditure by 117% over the 1983/84 budget without recommending an increase in service charges levied on the residents. Hitge rejected this outright and proposed service charge increases of between 15% and 20% and a reduction in expenditure. The councillors agreed to reconsider the matter in line with national guidelines laid down by the Department of Public Finance (normally around 15%).

After various discussions and meetings during May and June, the Council met again on 3 July in a defiant mood.11 It resolved to confirm and approve its 1984/85 budget estimate of just over R6 million, which represented a 30% increase over its previous budget - a substantial compromise from 117%! Nevertheless, this effectively meant going against the instructions contained in a letter dated 8 March 1984 from the Department of Public Finance. To justify a higher increase than what the Department of Public Finance was prepared to recommend for approval to the Minister, the Council pointed out that with its increased responsibilities as a result of becoming a BLA, it had additional costs that needed to be taken into account. However, the Council resolved that it was prepared to accept only very minor increases in service charges, namely an increase in hostel fees from R7 to R10 per month, and the installation of water meters in businesses so that water can be charged in accordance with metered consumption. The problem with the budget, however, was that income was well below

Document entitled “KwaNobuhle Town Council: Minutes of the Continuation of the 5/1984 Special Meeting of the KwaNobuhle Town Council held in the Council’s Chambers, Matanzima Road, KwaNobuhle on Tuesday 3 July 1984 at 8h00.”

the planned expenditure. The Council rejected the notion that increases of more than 15% should be contemplated to make up the difference on the grounds that residents were unable to afford this “... as a result of the current recession and unemployment prevalent in the areas… .”12 It was in this light that the Council concluded that “having only very recently become a local authority, [it] will at an early stage already be faced with a serious financial problem… .”13

To resolve its “financial problem”, the KTC resolved to request the then Minister of Cooperation and Development to agree to (i) that the profits that accrued from liquor outlets during 1982/83 owned by the ECDB be paid over to the KTC; (ii) the transfer of “labour contributions” payable by employers to the ECDB to the KTC; (iii) the direct payment to the KTC of money provided to the ECDB by Central Government to make up for deficits incurred from service provision; (iv) the transfer from the ECDB to the KTC of the R357,138 in the Services Levy Fund; (v) the transfer of all interest made by the ECDB from investments made by the ECDB of money that by rights belonged to the KTC;

(vi) provide the KTC with suggestions on how it could balance its budget without increasing service charges by way of direct subsidies from Central Government or indirect taxes.14

In the end, the meeting resolved on increases for residential and business sites that were all more or less 13%. As far as residential sites in KwaNobuhle were concerned, these were supposed to go up from R19.90 per month to R22.90, and in Langa from R17.29 to R19.90. The meeting also resolved to impose lodgers’ fees on various categories of lodgers (married with dependents, single with dependents, single without dependents).15 However, although this was the formal decision taken, there is clear evidence that the Councillors were of the view that no real increases would need to be levied because all that was needed was for the ECDB to give the KTC a grant to offset the additional income that was supposed to be obtained from service charge

12 Ibid., p.6. 13 Ibid., p.6. 14 Ibid., pp.7-8. 15 Ibid., pp.8-9.

increases.16 But for this to happen, the KTC needed community support as a form of pressure to back up its case - something that it attempted to get at a public meeting in September.

In short, after several months of wrangles and tension with various central government departments that dragged out the final approval of the KTC budget to a point where it risked collapsing financially altogether, the KTC was eventually cajoled into accepting a drastically reduced capital development programme as well as service charge increases - albeit more moderate ones than originally envisaged by John Hitge. This effectively placed the KTC in a politically invidious position vis-ávis the community: by August to September it had failed to acquire the large-scale resources that it needed to finance substantive upgrading and development to legitimise the KTC structure; it had effectively compromised on the principle of retaining Langa as an African settlement; and it had committed itself to (moderate) service charge increases. By the time the Councillors called a public meeting in September to discuss the council’s activities and the question of service charges, it had nothing significant to deliver to counter the growing social movement campaigning against it.

The Failure of Legitimation and the Rise of the Social Movements

The build-up of national resistance against the implementation of the tricameral constitution and the “Koornhof Bills”17 began in earnest in 1983 with the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF). It was common for a “civic association” of some kind to form in order to mobilise residents around housing and service

16 Transcript of interview with Former Mayor Tini, Uitenhage,

10.9.87. What exactly happened is the subject of dispute because the minutes of council minutes for the period September 1984 into early 1985 disappeared from the KTC offices.

17 There were three “Koornhof Bills”: the Black Local Authorities Act (creation of black local governments), the Orderly Movement and Settlement of Black Persons Bill (intensification of influx controls), and the Black Communities Development Bill (conversion of Administration Boards into Development Boards and the upgrading of various property and development rights).

charge issues that the BLAs were supposed to deal with. However, the historical pre-existence of UBCO meant that the “space” for a militant grassroots mass-based civic association was already occupied. It was therefore the leadership of the Uitenhage Youth Congress (UYCO) that became the primary organisers of the anti-BLA campaign in Uitenhage.18 Although UYCO’s base was in the ranks of young workers, students, unemployed school leavers as well as marginalised elements with very low literacy levels and minimal chances of employment, it soon began building a base amongst tenants of council housing, owner-occupiers in site-and-service schemes and shack dwellers - all of whom were opposed to increases in municipal service charges. In the words of Nkala:

“The people all over the country rejected overwhelmingly the puppet councils. In Uitenhage (i.e. Langa and KwaNobuhle townships) the Uitenhage Youth Congress undertook a peaceful but vigorous campaign against the dummy councils. Through one of the Koornhof Bills which later became law, the ‘community’ councils were given repressive and oppressive powers. For example, the community hall was placed under their control. So it was easy for the council to refuse the use of the hall to whoever was opposed to their Pretoria-cooked ideas. Had it not been for the protest for the residents, they would have raised the already high rents. The rent issue is also under their control.”19

Although tensions between the councillors and the community were building up during the course of 1984, these tensions came to a head and broke out into open conflict on 9 September 1984 – six days after the new so-called ‘consociational’ Constitution came into force with the launch of the new ‘tri-cameral parliament’

18 From a document entitled “Uitenhage Massacre, 21st March 1985 -Speech delivered by Uitenhage Community Leader to Grahamstown Congress of Democrats, Commemoration Service, 28 March 1985”. Sue Lund, a Grahamstown activist at the time, told the author that the author and presenter of the speech was Wonga Nkala, President of UYCO.

19 Ibid., Section B.

that included coloured and Indian people. 9 September was the day that the Councillors called a public meeting to inform the community about the progress of the council and to inform them about the issue of rent and service charge increases. There is agreement amongst informants that the bulk of the meeting was taken up with reports from councillors about what had been achieved and what their plans were. Mayor Tini, however, was not there for most of the meeting - he was addressing a meeting in Uitenhage. However, the meeting had been informed that it was Mayor Tini who was going to deal with the service charge issue. When he eventually arrived, the hall was tense and there were clearly elements present who were waiting for this issue to come up. Although newspaper reports leading up to the meeting reported that the meeting was called to announce service charge increases, and although this is what was reported to have happened at the meeting,20 Mayor Tini is adamant that he came in and announced that there would be no increases. In order to get the ECDB and Central Government to provide the KTC with additional funds, he explained in an interview that “we were going to force that it should be a grant, hence we called the public meeting so that there should be no increases in service charge. Nobody would return and say there must be an increase in service charge. We called the meeting and informed the people that no increases were forthcoming, but it was too late because there were political organisations which were saying there will be no increases.”21 After Tini made his announcement, in his view the crowd became extremely angry and accused him of lying. By all accounts, the crowd simply dismissed Tini no matter what he said

20 Eastern Province Herald, 10.9.1984

21 Interview with Tini, op. cit. Also, when giving evidence in 1987 in the trial of the alleged murderers of Councillor Kinikini, he was adamant that he went to the meeting to announce that there would be no increases - see Record of Appeal in the Matter between S.T. Mpumlo and others and the State, Supreme Court, Appellate Division, 13th May 1987, p.107 (Hereafter referred to as the Appeal). The Eastern Province Herald report and activists, however, deny this claim. Given the rising tension in the community, this author is of the view that it is unlikely that Tini would have called a public meeting to announce increases. Given the acrimony between the KTC and the ECDB, it seems more likely that he needed community backing for this fight to prevent increases - this being a tactic used by councillors elsewhere in the country.

- if he said there were to be no increases, they never believed him; and if he tried to justify the increases, they would have rejected that too. Tini’s and other eyewitness accounts are in agreement that the crowd then started throwing things at the councillors and as the dynamic became uglier, it was clear that the councillors were in danger of being physically attacked. They managed to escape out of a side door and that night chose to sleep outside the township.22

In short, Tini received his resounding community rejection of increases, but it was not his political project that received the credit. Instead, increases were prevented, but it was UYCO that received the credit.

This was the turning point. From this point onwards, the relationship between the local state and the community shifted: it was no longer about a race between different political projects using different means to improve township living, it became an outright violent confrontation. Councillors, officials, policemen and activists are in agreement that this was the event that triggered the escalation of open conflict leading eventually to the Massacre. But, once again, there is nothing inevitable about this train of events. The actual activities and decisions of the actors need to be comprehended.

It was immediately following the 9 September debacle that the Councillors requested and received both personal arms for their protection, and a police guard.23 The community response to the meeting was immediate: UYCO called for the resignation of the councillors and a boycott of their businesses. Tini admitted that the boycott of both his and the businesses of Councillor Benjamin Kinikini was a “100 per cent boycott”.24 Not surprisingly, having lost their bid for community backing for their struggle with higher levels of the state to receive additional resources, the councillors, who were now in defensive positions, had to react to the way that they were being targeted by UYCO and its supporters. This was not, however, achieved in a united manner. Instead, different factions

22 Interview with E. Coetzee and B. Erasmus, town clerk and

administrator respectively of KTC, KTC Offices, 26.5.86. 23 Kannemeyer Commission, p.640. 24 Appeal, p.111.

emerged with different approaches. The leading elements of the two factions were Mayor Tini and Councillor Benjamin Kinikini.

Splits in the Council and the Turn to Violence

Tini was 45 years old in 1984. He was born in Uitenhage and lived in Langa until 1976. He spent 24 years working his way up the lower ranks of the so-called ‘Bantu Administration’ bureaucracy where he came to understand the workings of the apartheid state’s elaborate mechanisms of oppression and control. It was also a position he used to have himself elected on the Executive Committees of sports and community bodies. He joined the Community Council in 1978 and was ‘elected’ (i.e. appointed) the first Mayor of the KTC in 1983. He became involved with Benjamin Kinikini’s undertaker business in the late 1970s and in 1983/84 started his own funeral parlour and undertaker business. This followed a fall-out with the Kinikini family, particularly Joyce Kinikini, Benjamin’s wife.25

Benjamin Kinikini was a petty accumulator in the classic mould. He was a thin sickly man who often needed to spend time in bed.26 He wore large square steel-rimmed tinted glasses that were too large for his thin drawn face. Beneath the face and wizened body, however, it was not difficult to sense the hardened cruelty of a self-made man that had used whatever means that were available to survive and who managed to command the absolute loyalty of his family and the small group of young men that he collected around himself - young men who became police informers and members of a vigilante gang called the Peacemakers.

Instead of being concerned primarily with defensive action, Kinikini - together with the Peacemakers and leading Peacemaker and wealthy businessman Jimmy Claassens - entered into a proactive relationship with the police. As advocated by the strategic framework of “counter-revolutionary warfare”, security agencies formed alliances with moderate elements in

25 Interview with Mayor Tini, op. cit., pp.1-2; Appeal, pp.88-91.

26 Trial Record, State versus S.T. Mpumlo and Others, Supreme Court,

Eastern Cape Division, Case Number CC582/85, vol. 21, p.1123-4. (All

references to this trial record will henceforth be referred to simply

as Trial Record, followed by the volume number and page.)

the community who became the “eyes-and-ears” of the security forces and were willing to perform extra-legal activities that the security forces were prohibited from performing.27

Even before the September meeting and subsequent conflicts, it was clear that there were distinct factions within the Council itself. At a Council meeting in late August, Mayor Tini referred to divisions amongst councillors and called for a vote of confidence in his leadership. Ten out of the fifteen councillors present voiced their support for Tini, while Kinikini reacted negatively to the way that the issue was handled.28 Tini publicly admitted much later that there were two factions in the Council; one led by himself (most of whom bowed to community pressure and resigned in March 1985), and the other led by Kinikini who publicly refused to resign and was eventually murdered by a violent crowd two days after the Massacre.

It was Kinikini and the Peacemakers who effectively brought the police directly into the KTC-community conflict and in doing so gradually marginalised Mayor Tini and his group. This was demonstrated most clearly by an incident that officials, policemen, ex-councillors and activists always refer to when describing the build-up of conflict during this period, namely the conflict over the use of the community hall in November. The UDF organisations applied via a committee of respected individuals to use the hall for a mass meeting. Although there is confusing evidence on how it came about, Kinikini was the person who either directly controlled the key to the hall, or controlled the caretaker who kept the keys to the hall.29 After heated confrontations where Kinikini openly brandished his firearm, Kinikini flatly refused on behalf of the Council to allow the UDF organisations to use the hall. UYCO was extremely angry and some of its supporters stoned

27 For an outline and analysis of this strategy, see Swilling, M. and

Philips, M., “State Power in the 1980s: from ‘Total Strategy’ to

‘Counter-Revolutionary Warfare’”, in Cock. J. and Nathan, L.

(eds.), War and Society: The Militarisation of South Africa, Cape Town

and Johannesburg, David Philip, 1989. 28 “Minutes of the 8/1984 Special Meeting of the KwaNobuhle

Town Councils Held in the Council Chambers, Matanzima Road,

KwaNobuhle on 30 August 1984 at 16h45.”, pp.11-13. 29 Trial Record ,vol.20.p.1057.

the Kinikini residence in protest. Joyce Kinikini said that crowds gathered outside their house and chanted: “Kinikini, give us the key to the hall.”30 It was after these events that the conflict was taken over by two groups that were openly committed to the use of violence, namely the Peacemakers and the amabutho. The police, in turn, openly backed the Peacemakers and in so doing transformed the conflict into a low-intensity war.

The Peacemakers were a gang that operated as a close-knit vigilante-cum-dispute resolution group. It was based in Langa and had a leader called Mfusi Sibigla who was known to his followers as Busa Bisa.31 The day-to-day activities of the Peacemakers revolved around apprehending ‘criminals’ and ‘troublemakers’ and taking them to the police station to be charged. They would also recover stolen goods and assist feuding groups or families to resolve their problems. They had a “court” at 20 9th Avenue, Langa where there was a judge, prosecutor and defence that disposed of the matters that the Peacemakers brought to it for a decision, usually in the form of an aggrieved and an accused party. The role of the Peacemakers was to enforce the decisions of the court - including referring the matter to the police or the authorities.32

As the conflict between the KTC and the amabutho33 (who were often rank-and-file supporters of UYCO) intensified, Kinikini sought the assistance of the Peacemakers. Eric, one of Kinikini’s sons, was already a member of the Peacemakers.34 The Peacemakers, who already had strong relationships with the police because of their role in bringing into the police station people against whom others wanted to lay charges,35 quickly took over the role of hunting down “comrades”, “arresting” them (as they called it) and bringing them into the police station for questioning,

30 Ibid. 31 Trial Record, vol.10.p.534. 32 Ibid., vol. 10, p.531. 33 “Amabutho” was the popular name that was given to the crudely

armed gangs of youths that allied themselves loosely with the

social movements, but unlike the movements their primary activity

consisted of harassment of and attacks on policemen, municipal

officials and other representatives of the state. 34 Trial Record., vol.5, p.230. 35 Ibid., vol. 10, p.529.

torture and occasionally arrest or simply prolonged detention. Quite often the Peacemakers participated in the assaults.

The police soon came to rely heavily on the Peacemakers as their interface with the community. In a trial of three Peacemakers accused of assaulting a group of young men on the night of 29/30 January 1985 (one of whom later died), evidence of the relationship between the police and Peacemakers was given in camera - evidence that led the Judge in his judgement to conclude: “It seemed from the evidence that accused no’s 1, 3 and 5 belonged to a group called the Peacemakers who either with the connivance of the police, or upon whom the police turned a blind eye, apprehended and dealt with law-breakers in the township. If we understood the evidence correctly it would seem that these people acted as vigilantes; that in the case of minor offences they would deal with the perpetrators themselves, and in case of more serious efforts they would hand them over to the police.”36 This remarkable confirmation of the way police used extra-legal means to intervene in township affairs, was reinforced by other policemen during the trial of those accused of murdering Kinikini on 23 March. Major Theron, second-in-command of the SAP in Uitenhage, said that the police regarded the Peacemakers as helpful in maintaining law and order and admitted that members of the Peacemakers were acting as “informers” for the security police.37 One well known Peacemaker, Dumse Ngocaza, was very familiar with, in particular, the black policemen - “he moved freely with us when we went out [on patrol]”, one policeman admitted.38

After the community hall affair, the Peacemakers effectively became the private army of Kinikini and his cabal in the Council. They set out to wage war, and in the process reinforced the buildup of the amabutho squads as the only defensive mechanism available to the community. As a prominent supporter of Kinikini and the Peacemakers, Jimmy Claassens was directly associated with them. Inevitably, urban legends about the extremely

36 Record of the Judgement, State Versus Dawid Sikiweo and Others,

Case No. CC 44/85, Supreme Court, South Eastern Cape Local

Division, p.3, emphasis added. 37 Trial record, vol.5, p.205-6. 38 Trial Record, op. cit., vol.9, p.436.

violent and rapacious behaviour of the Peacemakers circulated around the community. These legends were fuelled by fear and extortion that preyed on impoverishment and the existence of a legally unprotected and politically voiceless majority. Some of the exploits of the Peacemakers were tolerated by the security forces, but even this tolerance was insufficient to protect some of the Peacemakers who were eventually tried and imprisoned for violence-related activities. A common story was related by Weza Made:

“There’s this guy Jimmy Claassens who is being used by the police. He’s the one who has been kidnapping people. He’s a businessman in Uitenhage. He moves with these gangsters at night, kidnapping people. We don’t know what happens to the people he kidnaps. But people believe he killed them. We now have evidence that this guy killed people. We have this girl who was kidnapped by Jimmy Claassens but fortunately escaped. She told us how she was given a lift by Jimmy Claassens, but he took her into the bush and raped her. She was then taken to a spot where there were many heads of people and parts of flesh of people. She said that human flesh was being cooked.”39

Although one of the more horrific accounts of the activities of the Peacemakers, Made’s story is similar to numerous accounts of abduction, rape, torture and intimidation that were captured in Black Sash affidavits, court records and press reports from the period. The fact that the police - and black policemen in particular

-were implicated in these activities helps to provide a foundation for understanding many of the events and activities that occurred before, during and after the Langa Massacre. It also helps to explain the extremely violent demise of the Councillors.

The Cycle of Violence

The schools crisis was an important dimension of the conflict. In fact, according to one policeman, the “unrest” began in Uitenhage

39 Interview with Weza Made, Executive Member of UYCO. June 1985.

in the schools in August 1984.40 By August 1984, many parts of the country were plagued by endemic school boycotts, a number of which started early in 1983. Conflict between the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) and the education authorities in Uitenhage frequently spilled over into running street battles in the streets. This generated an atmosphere of tension and conflict that began, in turn, to engender sympathetic responses from the trade union movement. The schools crisis resulted in an important alliance between the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) and COSAS as unions came under pressure from parents to do something about the problems. The Uitenhage Parents’ Committee was established by FOSATU elements which were, in turn, instrumental in resolving the schools crisis in Uitenhage in January to February 1985. FOSATU was also involved in the Parents Teachers and Students Association which was formed in February 1985 to take up educational grievances in Uitenhage’s coloured schools.

On 3 December the home of Fikile Kobese -prominent union organiser and Vice-President of the UDF Eastern Cape - was firebombed and in a subsequent attack, his brother Leslie Kobese was killed. The Peacemakers were blamed for this and Benjamin Kinikini’s nephew, Zamuxolo Mondile, was subsequently killed by an amabutho group outside Kobese’s home on the day of Leslie Kobese’s funeral. Triggering an amabutho reaction, a running series of attacks and counter-attacks ensued claiming lives throughout December, January and February. For every house belonging to a “comrade” that was attacked, the house of a black policeman or councillor would be attacked. While the Peacemakers and the police initially had the advantage because of the fact that they were armed and patrolled in police vehicles, the amabutho soon picked up the crude skills of urban warfare. Petrol bombs were their main weapons. Eleven different kinds of petrol bomb were invented, including the so-called “acid bomb” - a bomb made of sulphuric acid.41 By January, in the words of Captain Goosen of the Uitenhage SAP, “sporadic incidents of unrest and firebombing were the order of the day. The situation escalated

40 Kannemeyer Commission, p.42. 41 Kannemeyer Commission, p.707.

… with more attacks on police patrols taking place… .”42 The amabutho groups quickly learnt how to counter teargas, rubber bullets and birdshot - the primary means used to disperse groups until March. For birdshot and rubber bullets, they wrapped their bodies and limbs up in strips of tyre tubing. Then when they were shot, they would fall down and a few moments later, in the words of a policeman, “jump up and run away as if nothing happened”.43 Using urine-soaked cloths to counter the effects of teargas was another tactic. Wounds soon became status symbols amongst these self-anointed urban warriors.

By February, several incidents per day of direct conflict between amabutho groups on the one hand and a combination of Peacemakers, police and armed Councillors was the norm. The ineffectiveness of vigilante terror and police action became a source of concern to both councillors and senior policemen. In two successive statements, Mayor Tini and Kinikini called for peace talks between the Council and UDF organisations in a bid to quell the escalating violence.44 However, a few days later, a group of Councillors visited the Chief of Police for Uitenhage, Colonel Pretorius, to appeal to him to find more effective ways of countering the “unrest”. They said that teargas was causing great discomfort to the residents. They proposed that hard ammunition be used, “as in 1976”.45 This set the stage for a visit to the region by the Minister of Law and Order Louis Le Grange and Commissioner of Police General Coetzee on 19 February. They were thoroughly briefed on the situation by local policemen and the ineffectiveness of “soft” weaponry was demonstrated.46 Less than a month later, police were no longer being issued with tear gas, rubber bullets and birdshot.47

42 Kannemeyer Commission, p.158. 43 Ibid., p.605. 44 Eastern Province Herald, 4.1.1985. 45 Kannemeyer Commission, p.692. 46 Ibid., p.820. 47 Riordan 2022, p.199

From Soft Ammo to ‘Elimination’

On 8 February the District Commander of the Port Elizabeth Security Branch sent a telex to Security Branch HQ in Pretoria that outlined the unrest situation and pointed out that teargas, rubber bullets and birdshot were no longer effective. He requested permission to use buckshot and handguns. Brigadier Wandrag replied the same day giving permission on condition that daily reports were sent to Pretoria outlining the effects of the new tactics.48

On 14 March Uitenhage’s most senior police officers that comprised what was called the “Order Group” met to discuss strategy. Colonel Pretorius laid out the problems for discussion, including a telex from Pretoria urging all police vehicles to ensure that helmets and shields were carried; the fact that petrol and acid bombs were becoming an increasingly serious problem; the growing danger to life and safety of the policemen; that they never had AAA ammunition (a relatively light shotgun shell); that they only had SSG ammunition (a heavy shot); and that under certain circumstances, rubber bullets and birdshot were ineffective against petrol and acid bombs. He told the Order Group not to use teargas, rubber bullets and birdshot when under heavy attack.49

As a result of the Order Group discussion on 14 March, police patrols were not issued teargas (because the community leaders objected to the smell and it was becoming too expensive50), nor were they given rubber bullets and birdshot on 15 March. Instead, they carried heavier ammunition only and no loudhailers.51 On 19 March a telex was received from Pretoria instructing all Casspirs to carry R1 automatic rifles and sufficient ammunition. The telex read as follows: “When acid bombs and/or petrol bombs are thrown at police vehicles, private vehicles and buildings, then under all circumstances an attempt must be made to eliminate the guilty parties.”52 In short, as the cycle of violence and counter-violence escalated, all the police could do was to finally issue the order to its patrols to “shoot to kill”. Additional policemen were flown in and on 20 March, a special “temporary base” was established on a Uitenhage sports field to coordinate the new operation. The stage was now set for a ten-day period beginning 16 March of organised resistance, increasingly brutal police action and barbarous crowd violence - ten days of fury that transformed Uitenhage’s political relationships.

In the meantime, the Councillors finally realised that the game was up. Three Councillors resigned in mid-February, one resigned in early March and the rest (except Kinikini) led by Mayor Tini himself resigned en masse on 12 March at a special meeting of the Council. Benjamin Kinikini was not at the meeting and was, therefore, the only Councillor who never resigned.53 Instead, Kinikini, his sons and members of the Peacemakers were guarding Kinikini’s funeral parlour day and night - a building that both he and the community began to call the “barracks”. Under pressure from his wife Joyce, Benjamin inquired from the officials how he could resign given that he was not at the meeting. Joyce Kinikini said “he was told that … [it] was late for him to resign. … he should come and see them the following week.”54 Benjamin Kinikini never lived long enough to carry out his wife’s wishes.

The Black Weekend

In response to dynamics that originated in UDF organisations in Port Elizabeth, a call was issued for a three-day stay away and consumer boycott starting Saturday 16 March. The issues around which these mass actions were organised were recession-induced retrenchments, the merger between Amcar and Ford motor companies that was going to result in more retrenchments, and petrol price increases. Although the unions rejected the action, it went ahead nevertheless. The “Black Weekend” of 16-17 March was successful in Port Elizabeth and moderately supported in Uitenhage. However, at least two and up to six people were killed in clashes with the new heavily armed police patrols. It was these

53 Record of Appeal…, op. cit., p.93. 54 Trial record, op. cit., p.1129.

victims who were eventually to be buried on 21 March - the 25th anniversary of Sharpeville Day!

The Labour Monitoring Group conducted a study amongst employers, unions, and community organisations in the area to ascertain the dimensions of the various actions.55 In Port Elizabeth a random sample of 50 of the 235 firms listed in the Midlands Chamber of Industries Directory were interviewed. Seventy-five per cent of industrial employers in Uitenhage were interviewed, along with a sample of employers in the commercial sector. All interviews with employers were conducted over the telephone. In-depth interviews were conducted with key activists in the community and the trade unions. The main findings of the telephone survey were:

55 This section is taken directly from Swilling, M., “Stayaways…”, op. cit.

The unions’ opposition to the stay away has been interpreted in different ways. The consensus amongst community organisations was that the stay away was a resounding success, and that the unions had misjudged the level of support for it amongst workers. In the words of the President of the Port Elizabeth Youth Congress: “For the first time we have managed to draw our parents into the struggle”. As far as the unions were concerned, workers stayed away because of intimidation. Although it is extremely difficult to ascertain the truth of the matter, there was evidence of substantial support amongst workers for some form of collective action, but there was also a feeling that workers feared the consequences of not staying away.

Views of the political objectives of the stay away also differed. The vice-president of FOSATU criticised the stay away as not being in the interests of the working class. Instead, he argued, non-workers ultimately benefited: white chain stores registered record takings on the Friday before the Black Weekend; black traders and shebeen owners made a fortune over the weekend; taxi drivers did extremely well because there were no buses; and it was only workers who lost out - they lost a day’s pay, some lost their jobs, and they were left weaker and more divided than before.56

Community organisers judged success in very different terms. As they saw it, the stay away demonstrated the level of resistance in the township, increased the organisational power of community organisations, and satisfied the demand by unemployed youths for more militant action.

These differences reflected the disharmony between unions and community organisations over the purpose of political mobilisation. To the unions, community-based action should not have played into the hands of non-working-class interests. The unions did not provide an alternative plan of action which, in turn, reflected the difficulty of organising a pure working-class politics outside the workplace, especially when unions were preoccupied with defending workers on the shop floor during a recession.

To the community organisations, there was no real difference between the interests of the community and those of employed workers, many of whom were on short-time in any

56 FOSATU Worker News, 37, May 1985.

case. Therefore, they argued, the unions should have followed where the community was leading. This indicated that the political strategies of the community organisations were being shaped predominantly by community conditions and particularly by the highly politicised youth who bore the brunt of the depressed regional economy.

This kind of politics, however, ran the risk of intensifying divisions between unemployed and employed workers, especially as it was couched in populist ideology. All this reinforced the traditional ideologically based divisions that had plagued union-community relationships in the Eastern Cape for many years.

Significantly, during the stayaways in Uitenhage on 21 and 22 March, there was greater harmony than in Port Elizabeth between community and union organisations as well as between coloured and African workers. This was partly because of the strength of UYCO which, unlike PEYCO, had a substantial base amongst the older working-class members of the community,57 and also because the unions did not oppose these stay aways. This paved the way for greater unity later on when struggles around the forced removals of Langa became the focus of political action.

Conclusion

The most important consequence of the Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth stay aways and the state’s response to them in the form, in particular, of the Langa Massacre, was to catapult the Eastern Cape into the forefront of mass resistance.58 By joining the rebellions started by the Transvaal organisations towards the end of 1984, the Eastern Cape’s youth-led organisations turned township resistance into a national uprising that eventually forced the state into imposing a selective State of Emergency in these two regions for the period July 1985 to March 1986. This chapter has brought into focus the contextually specific factors that shaped the strategic choices of those involved in the Uitenhage conflict during the period September 1984 to March 1985. These strategic

57 UYCO claimed that it has 8,000 paid-up members. 58 For the best overview of the Eastern Cape uprising, see Riordan

2022.

choices were typical of the strategic choices made by local activists across most of South Africa’s large and small towns, in particular in the Eastern Cape. The November 1984 to March 1985 period of intensifying struggles at local and national level prepared the way for the Langa Massacre on Sharpeville Day, 1985.

Introduction

By focusing largely on the struggle that Langa squatters waged against forced removal, this chapter will attempt to analyse the complex interactions between local township administrators, the white establishment, employers, community organisations and trade unions. To understand this complexity, the romantic conception of unstratified communities united against a monolithic state needs to be jettisoned. Instead, the internal relational workings of both the social movements and state apparatuses must be studied. This cannot be achieved, however, without taking into account the impact that social movements have on the state and how the actions of state officials affect the strategies of social movements. Furthermore, these relationships do not exist outside the influence that employer interests exert on the local state and the way that this influence is mediated by trade union pressure, especially when local unions have links with unions in the home countries of multi-nationals. Similarly, relations between urban social movements and workplace-based industrial unions must be taken into account.

As this chapter will show, once the object of study is extended in this way, social processes come to light that call into question two teleologies. The first is the optimistic view that social movements are only important to the extent that they will contribute to the build-up of a national movement that will, at some moment in the future, detonate the collapse of the state. This basic revolutionary tenet has a long tradition in South African radical theory. After a useful review, Colin Bundy sums up this conception of a “revolutionary seizure of power” by arguing that “this will only happen if those who seek transformation from below can construct organisational means to their ends, so as to link mass actions and effective leadership; if appropriate strategies are devised in the interplay between theory and practice, and if the armed forces of the state can to a degree be neutralised.”1

The second is the pessimistic view that social movements only win those concessions that structural conditions allow ruling class interests to concede.2 In both cases, the impact of local movements and how they determine the terms of social organisation is largely irrelevant. For the former, the structure of society will only be transformed at the moment the revolution arrives and not before. As far as the latter is concerned, any changes that do take place, occur on terms determined almost entirely by the ruling class. As an alternative, I prefer to value what I have called ‘radical incrementalism’ to make sense of the emergent (often highly conflictual) dynamics that lead to deeper transitions and transformations over time that often become negated in advance by the two perspectives referred to above3. This should not be read as implying that this is a linear process leading to inevitable outcomes. Instead, in the real world, this can mean ‘two steps forward, one step back’, or even three steps back

1 Bundy, C., “Around Which Corner?: Revolutionary Theory and

Contemporary South Africa”, in Transformation, 8, 1989, p.20 (my

emphasis). 2 There are numerous examples of this view in South African

scholarship, much of it influenced by the classical seminal text

by Piven, F. & Cloward, R., Poor People’s Movements: Why They

Succeeded, How They Fail, New York, 1977. By contrast, although

my thinking was initially deeply influenced by Piven and Cloward,

from the mid-1980s onwards my thinking has been more informed

by the post-Marxist work on social movements by Castells, M.,

The City and the Grassroots, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of

California Press, 1983.

3 Swilling, M. 2020. The Age of Sustainability: Just Transitions in a Complex World. New York & London: Routledge.

before real forward motion is achieved depending on the context-specific organisational capacities and alliances that emerge.

The struggle of Langa’s squatters helps to demonstrate that concessions can be won prior to the moment of fundamental change and that these changes did not take place entirely on terms determined by the interests of the dominant class interests. Instead, the differential responses within the state and the complexities of responses from differentiated interests within “the community” led to outcomes that could not have been predicted from the outset from a reading of structural conditions. These patterns in the case of Langa that are studied in this and the next chapter confirm the research that was conducted during the 1980s in other local contexts across South Africa which were based on similar experiences elsewhere.4 This chapter will deal with the political conditions that led to the beginnings of what was one of the country’s first ‘local level negotiations’. The analysis, however, extends into the next chapter where a detailed analysis of these negotiations is provided.

To anticipate the argument in this and the next chapter, there were in fact five aspects of Langa’s pattern and form of political mobilisation and organisation that determined its impact on the strategic thinking of the representatives of the local state and local business. Firstly, and most importantly from a symbolic point of view, there was the Langa Massacre. This generated enough national and international attention to prompt the appointment of a Commission of Inquiry. Secondly, Langa had become one of the most organised communities in the Eastern Cape. Thirdly, Langa’s squatters had begun to construct their shacks in a way that made police patrols impossible, thus effectively rendering parts of the community, in the words

Morris, A., “The South African State and the Oukasie Removal”, Transformation, 8, 1989; as well as his “The Complexities of Sustained Urban Struggle: The Case of Oukasie”, in South Black African Sociological Review, 2, 2, 1990; and “Racism and Space: The Endeavour to Remove Reagile Township”, paper presented to the Association of Sociology Conference, Cape Town, July 1991. See also Sapire, H., “Protest and Politics in South African black Squatter Settlements: The PWV Region, 1980-1989”, paper presented to Conference on Political Violence in Southern Africa, Oxford, 1991.

of a policeman, “uncontrollable”. Fourthly, the community leaders were prepared to enter the risky area of negotiations. Finally, by forging unity between community organisations, youth movements and trade unions, and then using this to force business to support key community demands, the Langa community significantly increased pressure on sections of the state to address its grievances.

The power mobilised by the social movement was enhanced by tensions within and between the state apparatuses and employer organisations. The collapse of the KTC, trade union and international pressure on Volkswagen, right-wing political tendencies in the white community and tensions between local and central state representatives and between these and the security forces, all played themselves out in ways that initially gave the social movement space to win some key victories. However, as Chapter 9 will show, these forces eventually lined up behind a coercive option after the declaration of the 1986 State of Emergency that led to the decimation of the social movement as local leaders were murdered, imprisoned or so badly assaulted that they were physically and mentally disabled.

From Mobilisation to Mass Organisation

The Massacre, the revenge on Kinikini and rising levels of conflict between the community and security forces in Langa, transformed popular consciousness. As thousands flocked to join community organisations, the activists had to find new creative ways of coping with a mass base in the context of heightened repression.

It has been reliably calculated that 140 people died in politically related incidents in the Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage area during 1985.5 This was higher than any other region. Significantly, although 20 were killed in the Langa Massacre, the number of deaths in March was 52 - the highest for any month.6 This means that another 32 people were killed in that month, most of them in

South African Institute of Race Relations, Race Relations Survey, Johannesburg, South Black African Institute of Race Relations, 1986, p.535.

Ibid., p.535.

Uitenhage. This is just one indicator of the intensity of political violence in Uitenhage’s townships after the Massacre. The number of violent ‘incidents,’ however, is a superficial measure of resistance. More important is the extent to which different layers of the community were being mobilised. The most significant feature of the post-Massacre period was the rapid mobilisation and organisation of different constituencies; a process which was uneven, frequently undirected and often contradictory. It was this process that transformed daily life in Uitenhage’s townships as schools, factories, community halls, shebeens and shacks all became abodes for the relentless struggle for control and power. Weza Made summed up the atmosphere when he said:

“People of Langa asked our leaders to go to Brigadier Swart to ask for the removal of the soldiers and SAP. People believe that if the soldiers and police force can be removed in our township, there will be no death and violence. The people need peace. But there is no peace when there are people moving around us with guns. Uitenhage is the Ovambo of the Eastern Cape7. What you hear about Ovambo, it is happening in Uitenhage. Brutal killing of people, kidnappings, disappearances, lot of things. The people believe that what happens in a war zone is happening in Uitenhage - weapons, Hippos, Buffels and war vehicles.”8

Continuing the long-standing boycott of schools that began in 1984, the Uitenhage branch of COSAS continued to support school boycotts into 1985. The key demand of the Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage schools was the release of 11 senior COSAS leaders. When 9 were released on bail after being charged with public violence on 21 January, the boycott was temporarily called off in Port Elizabeth. The Uitenhage branch of COSAS said it would not suspend the boycott until its nine demands had been met. By mid-July, Uitenhage’s schools were still empty. This hard-line position

7 Ovambo refers to the war zone on Namibia’s far norther border

where South African military forces were fighting the South

West African People’s Organisation, which was backed by Cuban forces.

8 Interview with Weza Made, Johannesburg, June 1985.

in Uitenhage can be explained in terms of the impact escalating violent clashes with the police was having on school pupils. In this context, the schools actually served contradictory purposes. On the one hand the schools movement could not be sustained if the boycott continued indefinitely because COSAS leaders lost direct contact with their base. On the other hand, school-goers were soft targets for frustrated policemen who saw every uniformed black youth as a potential rioter. Even though there may have been good reason to continue the boycott, it was an accepted fact that going to school even when there was no boycott was a high-risk venture. It was in the context of this vicious circle that parents began to be drawn into the education struggle. Their desire to find some way of resolving the problem and the absence of channels for them to do so within the educational establishment gave the Parents’ Committee the opportunity that it had been waiting for to organise parents.9 By the end of the year, organised parents were playing a more important role than pupils in the education struggle.10

Reflecting heightened levels of political consciousness, Uitenhage’s factories, Volkswagen in particular, were hit by strikes in April. On Friday 22 April at about 11 a.m., 3,500 NAAWU workers downed tools at Volkswagen over wage demands.11 Some workers threatened to march down Uitenhage’s main street, but a downpour of rain prevented this suggestion from being taken up. The issue at stake was directly related to the recession: up until the end of 1984, an agreement was in force that provided for wage increases at six-month intervals. Because of the recession, management claimed that this agreement could not be renewed and that it intended increasing wages only every twelve months. NAAWU rejected this by pointing out that this would result in wage increases falling below the consumer price index. To prevent this, NAAWU demanded increases of between 20% and 27%.

9 Interview with Emson Banda, Chairperson of the Uitenhage Parents

Crisis Committee, Uitenhage, 24.10.1987. 10 This was reflected in the fact that the Parents Committee was

negotiating with the DET by that stage, see Eastern Province Herald,

1.10.1985. 11 This account of worker action in this period is based on a number

of informal discussions and Eastern Province Herald, 23.4.85; Die

Vaderland, 24.4.85; Oosterlig, 24.4.85; Evening Post, 24.4.85; Eastern

Province Herald, 15.5.85.

Underlying this conflict was another struggle related to control over the bargaining process. Following the example of NAAWU workers at East London’s Mercedes Benz plant, who won a 21% increase in the minimum wage through plant-level bargaining, VW workers demanded direct negotiations with management outside the Industrial Council. After initially refusing to accept this, management agreed after the strike went into its second day. Besides wage demands, Uitenhage’s workers were also demanding a reduction of the working week from 45 to 40 hours, new job security provisions, paid public holidays including May Day, and paid maternity leave.

Throughout the year, many of Uitenhage’s factories were hit by go-slows, stoppages and strikes. This workplace resistance reflected the spread of a new militancy amongst workers in both organised and unorganised factories. Significantly, a number of Uitenhage factories observed the FOSATU call for solidarity action on 14 May in protest against the death of Andries Raditsela, a Transvaal unionist. Like the stay aways surrounding the Massacre, this was another sign that political grievances were bound to spill over into the factories. Much would depend, however, on how relations with constituencies who had much less to lose than a job or a house would be worked out.

The so-called “youth” were the most potent force to emerge from the battles of township resistance during 1984 to 1986.12 In Uitenhage, the “youth” became important in a number of roles, specifically in defence of the community against vigilante and arbitrary policy actions, door-to-door organisation, ideological direction and crime control. Although the details

Researchers at the time wrote about these dynamics. For an impressionistic account of this see Lodge, T. & Swilling, M., “Year of the Amabutho”, Africa Report, January-February 1986; for more systematic treatments see Johnson, S., “The Soldiers of Luthuli’: Youth in the Politics of Resistance in South Africa”, in Johnson, S. (ed.), South Africa…, op. cit.; and Bundy, C., “Street Sociology and Pavement Politics: Some Aspects of Student/Youth Consciousness During the 1985 Schools Crisis in Greater Cape Town”, Journal of Southern Black African Studies, 13, 3, 1987; Johnson, S., ““The Soldiers of Luthuli’: Youth in the Politics of Resistance in South Africa”, in Johnson, S. (ed.), South Africa: No Turning Back, Basingstoke, MacMillan, 1988.

of youth organisation will be dealt with in a later section, it is necessary at this stage to examine the rather amorphous meaning of “youth”. In general, the “youth” in the political culture of the time referred roughly to a political generation that lay somewhere between the school pupils and the employed workers. There are, however, important overlaps. In the Uitenhage area, those who constituted the “youth” can be divided into roughly three categories. The leadership of the youth congress came essentially from a fairly well-educated group of young workers, unemployed young men and students. It was largely male and most were in their mid-twenties. This group had a remarkably clear political ideology derived from a reading of the alternative media, banned literature (usually ANC material) and some well-used Marxist texts (especially Lenin) published by Progress and Lawrence and Wishart. Other influences included regional or national gatherings, workshops and discussions with leaders or old-timers from the 1950s. Many of these people remembered 1976 and the leaders of that period as important early political experiences.

There was a relatively small group of young, employed workers involved in the youth movement. Although this group overlapped in obvious ways with the formal employed working class constituency, it did nevertheless constitute an important grouping active in both youth congress and trade union activities. Therefore, it helped to bridge differences later on.

From the perspective of sheer numbers, the most important component of the “youth” were the largely uneducated unemployed. These people were the product of prolonged school boycotts that had forced them out onto the streets, age-limit restrictions and structural unemployment. Exacerbating this was the fact that there were no schools in Langa for black Africans and it was frequently too expensive for the poorest parents to afford the bus fares that pupils required to travel to KwaNobuhle. All these pressures produced desperate young men who lived on the fringes of legality and who soon found a home in the social movements as political conflict escalated. Their ages ranged from early teens to late twenties. A large number came from extremely poor families who lived in shacks and whose main breadwinner would invariably be unemployed. Interestingly, some of the more renowned members of this group came from families that had strong rural links.

Out of this marginalised group of poverty-stricken youth came essentially two types of political actors. The one was the person who for some time had been a petty criminal and came into the social movements largely because by adopting an anti-state resistance ideology he could legitimise his illegal activities and define his actions as being in the interests of the community. Their anti-social subculture and predisposition to use violence existed uncomfortably alongside the social and communal morality that imbued the ideology of national resistance and their own desire to be reabsorbed into the community. Prior to the hegemony of “liberation”, it was these same groups who were members of the Peacemakers who comfortably reinforced the dominance of criminal, petty accumulator and Councillor interests. However, there were elements in the amabutho who were the products of the schools movement rather than these more criminally minded groups and they joined the amabutho for very different reasons. Because they were more articulate, they often became what were referred to within the amabutho as “military commanders”.

On the surface, it seems incorrect to lump the young ideologues and unionists into the same category as the much less educated “more militaristic” unemployed. However, these social categories were bound together by the ideology propounded by the youth congress leadership. The leaders, ideologues and young workers were defined as leading the “political wing” of the movement, while the less articulate, poorer unemployed youths soon formed themselves into a “military wing” comprised of fairly disciplined action groups - called amabutho - with a separate leading body called the “Military Council”. Although these “wings” were a recipe for tension, the political leadership attempted to retain the loyalty of the amabutho by appealing to them to respect the political leadership in the same way that MK (uMkhonto weSizwe) was subordinate to the ANC.13

Interview with Weza Made, Uitenhage, March 1986. MK was the term used to refer to Umkhonto We Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC.

Finally, there was the constituency loosely referred to in township political jargon as “the residents”. Obviously, this group also overlapped with the employed working class and “youth” constituencies, but given an unemployment rate of at least 56% -a figure that was usually based on the grossly inadequate records of job seekers - there was obviously a sizeable proportion of family heads who were unemployed.14 The residents of Langa, then, were those employed and unemployed working-class people who were responsible for the reproduction of their households including the construction of shelter which, in most cases, consisted of shacks. White opposition to the existence and spread of Langa soon mobilised the residents into tightly structured organisations aimed at “protecting the community”.

After the Massacre, community organisations experienced a huge inflow of members and for the first time, mass-based grassroots structures were established. Two interlinked forms of organisation emerged. To represent specific constituencies, there was a range of constituency-based organisations. These included UYCO, Uitenhage Women’s Organisation (UWO), Uitenhage Students Congress (USCO), Uitenhage Parents Crisis Committee, Uitenhage Traders Association, Consumer Boycott Committee and trade unions. In January 1986 the Uitenhage Residents Civic Organisation (URECO) was formed specifically to take up “civic” issues, a function that UYCO had been fulfilling up until then. Alongside the constituency-based structures, locality-based multi-constituency structures emerged, namely the street and area committees. By the end of 1985, nearly all Langa’s streets had street committees which in turn elected representatives to five area committees. Whereas the actual membership of the street committees varied in size, the area committees stabilised at about ten members each (more on this later.)

The first community-based campaign that was mounted after the Massacre was the consumer boycott.15 Although originating from within the youth congress, the initial boycotts gained support. Uitenhage experienced more consumer boycotts

14 This was certainly reflected in PLANACT, Langa: The Case for

Upgrade, PLANACT, Johannesburg, 1986. 15 Riordan 2022, pp.231-5

than any other town during the 1985 to 1986 period. Consumer boycotts were called for the following periods:

The first boycott was a direct response to the Massacre and reflected the growing strength of the community organisations as large numbers became actively involved. The success of the first three boycotts, according to press reports, varied from between 70% and 100%. However, the last one was relatively unsuccessful, with less than 50% support.

The consumer boycott demands can be divided into local and national ones. The local ones were: students be allowed to form SRCs (student representative councils); reinstatement of dismissed workers at Volkswagen; upgrade rather than removal of Langa. The national demands were the release of detainees; the unbanning of UDF meetings; the withdrawal of troops from townships; the killers of the Cradock leaders be charged (added in July)16; leaders must not be killed, kidnapped or harassed.

Unlike the Port Elizabeth boycott, the Uitenhage boycott was not nearly as successful, nor did it have as dramatic an impact. There were four reasons for this: firstly, unlike most Eastern Cape towns, Uitenhage’s black African community was located in two townships to the north (Langa) and south (KwaNobuhle) of the white town. This made it difficult to organise a united and synchronised response from the two communities because each faced very different problems related to the fact that in Langa people were poorer, black shops with appropriate goods were less available, the imperatives of the anti-removal struggle often conflicted with those of the largely KwaNobuhleled consumer boycott, and antagonisms between the youth and residents often produced a reaction against the boycott. Secondly,

The killers of the Cradock leaders refers to the people who were responsible for the kidnapping and murder of three prominent leader of the UDF in the Eastern Cape.

the trade unions never threw their full weight behind the boycotts. Thirdly, the consumer boycotts dragged on for too long without any meaningful concessions being won. Fourthly, Uitenhage did not have a local Chamber of Commerce imbued with the same liberal ideological bias that Tony Gilson and his colleagues gave the Port Elizabeth Chamber of Commerce.

To emphasise the role of the youth in the boycotts, it must be pointed out that the militaristic sub-culture of the amabutho militated against the successful implementation of this strategy. Shaped by the dynamic of ongoing street battles with the security forces, the consciousness of the amabutho was not sensitive enough to the complex task of organisation, persuasion and tactical decision-making. Furthermore, FOSATU’s controversial role in the magisterial decision to reverse the bannings that led to the Massacre, created considerable tensions between amabutho groups and NAAWU workers. It was these tensions between the unemployed youth, unionised workers and residents that undercut the consumer boycott.

The rest of this chapter will show that it was the struggle over the terms of reproduction of the labour force rather than consumption or production struggles that was to facilitate the building of organisational unity in Uitenhage across community and workplace organisations. There is little truth in the assertion by one researcher that in Uitenhage “working class responses to worsening social and economic conditions were at best completely uncoordinated during 1985, or at worst in direct conflict.”17

After the councillors resigned en masse and ECAB began finding it increasingly difficult to enter Langa to carry out administrative duties (e.g. rent collection, house repairs, garbage collection etc), responsibility for the development of the community fell onto the shoulders of the community organisations. Renewed efforts by Uitenhage’s white people to secure the removal of Langa underlined the need for direction and leadership from the community organisations.

Adler, G., “Uniting a Community”, Work in Progress, 50, 1987. This disregard of the facts is even more surprising given that Adler spent over a year studying union organisation in Uitenhage and developed some fairly close relationships with key activists.

However, these organisations had no idea about how to proceed or what alternatives were available to them. This is how Weza Made summed up the dilemma facing community organisations by June 1985: “The first stage of our strategy was to force the councillors to resign. We succeeded. The second stage was to eliminate the black policemen from the townships. We succeeded. And now we don’t know what to do.”18

The impossibility of emulating other “Third World” revolutionary strategies by creating liberated zones defended by permanent people’s armies in South Africa’s urban areas meant that popular organisations had two choices: either they could immediately take on the might of the state in a full frontal assault to “seize power”, or they could reach an accommodation with the authorities to secure space to organise and consolidate their structures until this moment is reached. The first was not a realistic option because of the loyalty to the state and strength of the security forces and the regionally uneven nature of the national movement and the young, underdeveloped condition of the local grassroots structures. Not surprisingly, in Langa, as elsewhere, this dynamic led community organisations into what was referred to as “people’s power”. “People’s power” referred to a complex set of apparently contradictory activities including negotiations with authorities and businessmen on the one hand, and “mass action” on the other. Reading this strategic choice correctly and then leading with an appropriate strategy was, in this context, a particularly difficult and often hazardous task for anyone in a leadership position. It was Weza Made who played a central role in leading Langa’s community organisations into the unchartered territory of local-level negotiations.

Weza Made, the soft-spoken, intelligent, shy and slightly built man whose name was to become synonymous with the anti-removal campaigns of 1985 to 1986, was 25 years old in 1985.19 He

18 Interview with Weza Made, 20.6.1985.

19 What follows is premised on an interview conducted on 22.5.1988 in

Johannesburg. This interview, plus other interviews, conversations,

discussions and group meetings that involved Weza and myself

during this period generated the material for the biographical

sketch of Weza that follows. However, he was never the only source

of information. Personal observation, supporting evidence from

was born in Kabah on 15 February 1960 in a house on 4th Street. The first eight to nine years of his life were spent in a one-roomed backyard unit behind a house on 5th Avenue that had been constructed for rental by a relatively well-off businesswoman who owned the main house - ownership made possible by the fact that she was classified coloured, although she was a Xhosa from Cape Town. Weza lived with his grandmother, mother and younger sister (who died from illness early in his life.) He was nine years old when he started school in Kabah at the James Ndulula lower primary. He was living at the time with his grandmother’s sister’s family in a mud-built house on Nakani Street. Although this was a big family, they survived on the brink of starvation because the sole income was from his grandfather’s job at Gubb and Inggs. He fondly remembers that “there were very very good relationships among the family. We loved each other and we were happy … despite such poverty and starvation …”20 The house on Nakani Street and the James Ndulula School were demolished in 1969-70, victims of the first forced removals. By 1970 the household had been moved to KwaNobuhle and Weza was enrolled at the Alex Jayiya lower primary. Weza’s mother, however, managed to escape removal to KwaNobuhle by finding a house in Macuba Street.

Weza’s most enduring memories of his childhood are of starvation and the struggle for food. He remembers hating school because he would often go there hungry and be unable to cope, only to be faced with severe and continuous beatings from his teachers who abused children that were seen as lazy and stupid. He eventually stopped going to school and he and others in a similar situation would go off into the forest to eat food that they had stolen from their homes. Huts were built in the forest where they often stayed to escape from the brutalities and misery of school, home and the street. They formed relationships with the young men who spent time in the forest going through

other interviews and documentation (e.g. minutes and recordings of meetings) were used to corroborate Weza’s account of events. Invariably, Weza’s disarming candour, remarkably clear memory, and highly intelligent analysis of events and people generated an understanding of the processes that was repeatedly corroborated.

20 Interview with Weza Made, 22.5.88

their circumcision and initiation into manhood ceremonies - in return for food they would run errands for these young men and the older mentors who ran the circumcision camps. They also kept themselves alive by picking the berries and beans off the hedges that grew on the fences of certain houses which they then sold to the Indian traders in town. It was the money from these transactions that was used by the boys to go to the cinema, or to buy bread and pilchards - their favourite food.

He received his first break while he was still in school in KwaNobuhle when a young woman teacher began to encourage him to take his studies seriously. To keep him in school she brought him bread and butter each day - “I wanted that bread and butter, it was the only thing I went for at school.” But he soon discovered that he had ability and began passing well until he came second in the school. He no longer had a reason to “dodge schooling”.

When his grandfather died in 1972, a key breadwinner was lost to the family. Things became even worse for the household. One way he survived was to sell fish baked by his grandmother over the weekends. By 1974 his mother’s financial position improved so she brought him back to Langa to live in her Macuba Street home. He progressed well in school until 1977, when he encountered the harsh realities of the political struggle for the first time. It was on 26 June 1977, when students from his school tried to organise other schools to commemorate the events that took place a year earlier in Soweto. The school was surrounded and before any action could be taken, large contingents of police invaded the school, beat up some students and arrested many more. Weza managed to escape. His school, however, was burnt down when members of the Mongrels and Mafia gangs joined forces with angry students and went on the rampage. After that, it was back to KwaNobuhle for Weza where he resumed school in 1978 and furthered his successful amateur soccer career. By 1980 he was working in Uitenhage’s auto factories where he experienced a very different form of resistance, namely militant trade union action. By the mid-1980s he was unemployed, living in Langa and active in the Uitenhage Youth Congress.

Removal and the Search for a Strategy

The squatters’ struggle against removal began in earnest in May 1985 after 350 white ratepayers signed a petition drafted by the deputy Mayor, Mr Bokkie Human, to the deputy Minister of Cooperation and Development, Dr G de V Morrison. It called for the removal of Langa’s squatters. Refuting press reports that ECAB was planning the removal, the Director, Louis Koch, quickly pointed out that Langa fell under the jurisdiction of the KTC and that the ECAB’s only function was the technical provision of housing and infrastructure.21 On 21 May, Koch told a journalist that the ECAB was giving “urgent attention” to the rehousing of Langa residents in KwaNobuhle. He said that this was a decision made twenty years ago but because of a “lack of funds” this was not immediately feasible. Now 3,000 sites had been completed and 520 houses were in various stages of completion. How many were going to afford these houses without a subsidy was a problem that his Board had not yet resolved.

By this stage, however, KTC was not only defunct because the Council had resigned, but also because an Administrator had not yet been appointed. This bureaucratic confusion within the state was a crucial moment for the Langa community because it meant that there was no coherent or capable authority that could respond immediately and with sufficient force to implement the demands of the white community. Nor was there sufficient agreement on the issue between the local NP (National Party) MP (member of parliament) and the Uitenhage Municipality over how to deal with the issue.22 There is very little likelihood that Langa’s community organisations could have instigated united resistance against removal if the state had acted immediately. In the event, bureaucratic confusion meant that there was sufficient time and space for the community organisations to organise a response and develop appropriate organisational forms.

Soon after the press carried reports of the white petition, a meeting of 1,800 people representing youth, students, women’s and community organisations met on Sunday 26 May to discuss the threatened removal. Speakers from the floor repeatedly emphasised the injustice of the white call for the removal of Langa. One old man stood up and said: “I will build my shack right in the back yard of the white man’s house. And when he wakes up the next morning and asks why I have built a shack in his yard, I’ll say: Because your yard is too big.”23 The meeting called on the KTC to upgrade Langa and rejected the proposed removal. Made told a journalist:

“The people decided they will not be able to afford the high rents in KwaNobuhle. Most of the squatters are unemployed or on short-time. Most people are dependent on pensions and on money paid by their lodgers.”24

It was decided that a delegation should meet the KTC to enquire about plans to remove Langa. The delegation comprised youth congress, area committee and trade union representatives. Its leader was B. Haas (UYCO-KwaNobuhle) and the rest were W. Made (UYCO-Langa), B. Sandi (area committees), S. Mandabana (MACWUSA), P. Speelman (area committees), G. Nojilama (area committees) and S. Nxusa (area committees). Significantly, this delegation excluded FOSATU unionists and the clergy.

Deftly exploiting the bureaucratic confusion in township administration, the spokesperson for the delegation, Weza Made, said that: “Since Mr Louis Koch made it clear that he was not responsible for the removals and said that it was the council, we would like to ask Mr Tini to clarify that comment.”25 Made went on to say that the Sunday meeting had resolved to call on the KTC to upgrade rather than remove Langa, and to build “decent low-rent houses”. According to Made:

“The people decided they will not be able to afford the high

rents in KwaNobuhle. Most of the squatters are unemployed

23 Conversion with Weza Made, July 1985.

24 Quoted in Addendum “D” in “Langa Could Flare Again”,

memorandum by Grahamstown Rural Committee, 11 November,

1985. 25 Eastern Province Herald, 20.5.1985.

or on short-time. Most people are dependent on pensions and money paid by their lodgers. The people are aware that living conditions in the area are bad in terms of health. But the people [have] asked the town clerk to develop the area and make it healthier.”26

When the press contacted Tini, he referred all questions to the town clerk, claiming that he had disassociated himself from the council. Coetzee, speaking for the KTC, said that he had received no requests from the community to upgrade Langa. He said: “If I receive such a request I will evaluate it and discuss it with the Department of Cooperation and Development. Those concerned may either come and see me or put their request in writing.” Before Langa is removed, he claimed, a long negotiation process would have to be completed:

“I must first find out what the people want. I’m not going

to force anyone to move.”27

Coetzee maintained that the KTC was doing three things to control squatters: Firstly, it had already prepared 3,000 sites in KwaNobuhle but was planning to more than double this number to cater for Langa’s “6,600” squatter families. Secondly, strict measures were being taken to ensure that no new squatter families arrived in Langa. Thirdly, illegal residents were being warned to move out, but no-one was being fined or prosecuted. Fourthly, steps still needed to be taken to “clear” shacks that had been erected on roads, thus barring the path of sanitation and refuse removal trucks.

The delegation met the officials on 11 June 1985 at 3:30

p.m. in the Langa offices of the KTC. The officials were J. Coetzee (town clerk), P. Veldtman (acting deputy secretary), S. Somtsewu (superintendent of Langa), and R. D. Basson (administration officer). (Barry Erasmus was not present because he had yet to be appointed as Administrator.)

26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

The meeting, which lasted an hour and forty minutes, never progressed much further than both parties stating their respective cases.28 However, it started with both parties applauding the fact that such a meeting had taken place. Coetzee thanked the delegation for initiating the meeting and proposed that such meetings take place on a regular basis. He pointed out that whereas meetings of this sort were impossible in the past because the councillors had prevented him from meeting community representatives, in future he would be prepared to meet any group regardless of their “political attitudes” provided they were genuinely concerned about the welfare of the community. Haas, in turn, thanked the officials for the meeting and expressed his appreciation of the view that the basis of such meetings should be community problems rather than political affiliation.

Despite their promise not to forcibly remove anyone, the officials strongly urged people to move to KwaNobuhle Extension IV because services were better and houses could be purchased there. The delegation reiterated their opposition to forced removal. However, there was a significant difference between what KwaNobuhle and Langa representatives respectively were saying. Whereas the KwaNobuhle representatives argued that people would probably move if they could afford the rentals and were convinced that conditions were improved, the Langa representatives insisted that Langa residents were only interested in the upgrading and retention of Langa.

Some key issues were discussed during the course of this meeting. Firstly, in response to the claim by the delegation that Langa residents did not want to move because they believed that they could afford the rents in KwaNobuhle, the officials spent some time explaining the affordability advantages of moving to KwaNobuhle. These included, (a) a built-in R64.81 subsidy per site to be carried by the government so that service charges could be pegged at R19.90 per month; (b) rentals calculated according to income on a sliding scale; (c) the right to purchase a house for

28 Document entitled “Minutes of the meeting between officials

from the KwaNobuhle Council and a delegation representing the

residents of Kabah held on Tuesday 11 June 1985 at 15h30 at the

township offices Kabah.”

R6,794 + R160 (for 99-year leasehold) + R 6.00 (administration cost). As far as the officials were concerned, all employed people should have been able to afford these rates.

Mandabana and Made both responded by asking what plans existed for unemployed or retrenched workers. Coetzee said that although a blanket policy exempting unemployed people from payments does not exist, each case would be dealt with on its merits and with sympathy. He strongly emphasised that evictions were not an answer. Nevertheless, the unemployed clearly never figured in official planning, something that the delegation was quick to notice.

Secondly, the question of upgrading was discussed. The delegation argued that the houses under construction in KwaNobuhle should be made available for homeless people in KwaNobuhle and that Langa should be retained and upgraded to cater for the Langa residents. Coetzee said that he supported the idea in principle but gave reasons why the upgrading of Langa was practically not possible: (a) Langa was only big enough for 2,000 sites, whereas 8,000 were needed; (b) no funds were available to cover the high costs of upgrading Langa’s infrastructure; (c) there was no adjacent land into which Langa could expand; (d) in situ upgrading was impossible.

In response to Coetzee’s insistence that the upgrading of Langa was practically impossible, Made explained that the majority wanted to remain in Langa and suggested that the services be upgraded. Mandabana submitted that there was enough land in and around Langa if the Group Areas Act was ignored. Made pointed out that “peace would not be restored” in Langa as long as there were poor living conditions. He strongly urged Coetzee to convey to the government Langa’s request to be upgraded. Coetzee promised at the end of the meeting to submit a report to the government.

The importance of the land issue was brought home to the delegation during the meeting, prompting Made to coin a phrase that he used often in the months to follow: “The squatter’s struggle is the struggle for land.” More importantly, the leaders realised how seriously the officials took the community’s capacity to resist. Made’s implicit threat that confrontation and unrest would result from removal pointed to the only real form of leverage that the community had over the KTC.

Thirdly, the delegation expressed grievances about existing conditions: high bus tariffs, no lower primary school facilities which meant that parents had pay high bus fares to send children to school in KwaNobuhle, no street lights or high-mast lighting and the poor condition of Maduna Road.

Fourthly, in response to Haas’ argument that some Langa people wanted to move to KwaNobuhle but were prevented because of an inability to pay the rent or service charges there, Coetzee suggested that with the help of the delegation and the residents he would conduct a survey to determine the housing needs of the community. This would have involved finding out how many wanted serviced sites only, how many wanted the Council to obtain loans for them to erect houses on their behalf, how many were assisted by employers and how many could afford to take out a bond. Coetzee’s request that the delegation work with him on this matter displayed how seriously the authorities took the extra-state community leadership at a time when official policy was to define such groups as revolutionary agitators bent on overthrowing the state. It also pointed to the mechanisms that could have been used to co-opt the leadership into an administrative structure that would have compromised their legitimacy in the eyes of the community.

Towards the end of the meeting, Coetzee summed up the situation by saying that the committee had to decide which option was in the best interests of the community: remaining in Langa and bearing the cost of upgrading it, or moving to KwaNobuhle where sites had already been prepared at very low cost. The delegation responded that it had no mandate to make that choice. It was only there to communicate the demands of the community and intended returning to discuss the outcome of the meeting with the community.

The meeting ended with both parties agreeing on the usefulness of the meeting and on the necessity for meeting again. However, the conclusion left both sides in limbo. The officials were deeply suspicious of the delegation’s insistence that it had no power to make a decision and required a mandate. Displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy and how things worked in the extra-state organisations, they interpreted this as a sign of weakness and concluded that if these leaders were so unsure of what their people wanted that they had to go back and “consult”, this must mean they were not the “real leaders”.29 Over and above the ignorance that this view displayed, by making this comment, the officials were in fact admitting how they judged the representivity of black leadership in the absence of legitimate institutionalised representative mechanisms.

As far as the delegation was concerned, they were well aware of the fact that a choice in economic terms had to be made about which option was in the best interests of the community. However, they had no way of making such a calculation. They were well aware of the dangers of either depending on the expertise of the officials or simply rejecting the KwaNobuhle option without offering an alternative to the community. It was decided to resolve the above dilemma that Made and a few of his comrades decide to seek professional assistance in Johannesburg.

Through friends, Weza Made and his comrades made contact with various support groups and press reporters. These groups pledged their support for Langa’s anti-removal struggle and during the coming months he was to work closely with academics connected to the Durban-based Built Environment Support Group (BESG), Sue Lund of the Grahamstown Rural Committee (GRC), Mono Badela of City Press and a group of Johannesburg-based professionals who later formed PLANACT.30 Resulting from discussions with members of these groups, Made proposed that the community organisations initiate their own upgrading proposals as an alternative to the removal plans of the KTC. A group of Natal, Johannesburg and Grahamstown academics were assembled and plans made to travel to Uitenhage in late July to assess the viability of this suggestion. However, those plans were aborted when a State of Emergency was declared in July.

29 Interview with Barry Erasmus, Administrator of the KTC, and Eddie

Coetzee, Town Clerk, 26.5.1986. 30 I was part of this group.

By June-July, the leadership was faced with a range of related problems that demanded organisational solutions. These included: (a) appropriate means of defence against both official repression and vigilante action; (b) the necessity for finding ways of reorganising to cope with expanding membership and rising levels of mobilisation: (c) how extra-state organisations could move beyond reaction and boycott politics to proactive strategies aimed at resolving the crisis of daily life in the townships, i.e. the role of negotiations in particular. In other words, the leadership were searching for a balance between challenging the state, defending the community against repression and negotiating with officials to find solutions to local problems. At a national level, the UDF was faced with similar problems and responded with the call “Mobilisation to Organisation. Protest to Challenge.”31 However, the call for “ungovernability” - a popular slogan of the time -reflected more accurately the nature of popular politics in mid1985 - rising levels of mobilisation, violent attacks on councillors and police, collapse of township administration and spreading consumer boycotts. The declaration of the State of Emergency in July and detention of the most established leaders, enabled the militant youth and their belief that violence must be met with violence, to take control of township politics. This pattern repeated itself in particularly violent ways in Langa.

Emergency Rule, Ungovernability and the Rise of the Amabutho

There is little doubt that the rising levels of police violence and community counter-violence in Uitenhage were related to the threat of removal. The youth squads by this stage were becoming increasingly organised. Whereas outsiders visiting other communities were greeted with the familiar clenched fist and pointed thumb sign accompanied by the shout Amandla, in Uitenhage they were greeted with the call Asiyi KwaNobuhle (“We will not move to KwaNobuhle”). By July, some of the youth squads

For a text written at the time that reflected these tensions, see Swilling, M., “The United Democratic Front and Township Revolt”, in Cobbett, W. and Cohen, R., Popular Struggles in South Africa, London, James Curry, 1988.

were armed with stolen arms and captured R1 rifles. They would agree amongst themselves who would stand guard at selected points, watching for any attempt to demolish shacks. They had their own quasi-military command structure and identity. Crude guerrilla tactics were devised to harass SADF (South African Defence Force)-SAP patrols. The most famous was the “Hippo trap”. A hole longer than the length of an armoured patrol vehicle (called a Casspir) and about four feet deep would be dug in the road. Sheets of corrugated iron were then placed over the hole and disguised with a layer of sand. The next unsuspecting Casspir that came along would drop into the hole at which point a large contingent of crudely armed youths would pounce on the Casspir from different sides, throwing stones and petrol bombs. They would invariably be repulsed, but, according to some sources, not before a number of stones and petrol bombs had caused considerable harm.

The white youth patrolling the townships in police Casspirs and army Buffels were equally uncontrollable and extremely vicious. According to one soldier who staffed an army Buffel in Langa during July-August 1985, it was accepted practice that each Casspir or Buffel unit would beat up a black person at least once a day. This would invariably take the form of selecting a target who had pulled a fist or thrown a stone, chasing him down and then beating him up on the spot in front of the community. No arrests would be made.32 This meant that about seven to ten people were beaten up in Langa and KwaNobuhle each day if we assume that there was an average of seven units patrolling the townships on a daily basis. Furthermore, informants insisted that they never carried teargas or rubber bullets.

During the height of the Emergency in about August-September 1985, reports of police brutality flowed into the Black Sash offices and churches. One story that was documented is worth repeating in full because it is representative of the many

32 Interview with National Serviceman, Stephen Louw, Johannesburg, 20.1.1988.

documented accounts that organisations such as the Black Sash accumulated.33

“I was born on 3 March and am 18 years of age. On 15 September 1985 I attended the funeral of Lungile Nqgikashe at Despatch. The police were watching the funeral from a distance over the bridge. They were there from 10 a.m.

On our way back from the graveyard after we had buried Lungile, the police put a Hippo across the street where many of the people were returning home. They took me there and put me in the Hippo. I have the same mother as Lungile and I spoke at the church and at the grave.

Then the Hippo drove to the rent office in Despatch and I was put in a white police van. There were a number of policemen there - more than 6, but they were in different cars. Some of them were wearing uniform, some of them were in plain clothes. They were all whites.

When I was in the police van, the police sprayed teargas about three times through the mesh with aerosols. The van did not have windows. The teargas was too much because they sprayed it on my clothes and in my face. I was coughing and then I think I lost consciousness.

One of the cars that came to the police van before they put me in it was a yellow Sierra. There were two white men in plain clothes inside. One of them hit me with the open hand a few times in the face. This policeman I know his face as a Uitenhage policeman, but do not know his name - accused me of being the leader of Despatch. They also asked me where I got my T-shirt. I said somebody at the funeral gave it to me there. It was a Uitenhage Youth Congress T-shirt. Then I was taken to Swift grounds where the police have tents. This is where I was tortured.

They took me from the police van to another sergeant. He asked me where I bought my T-shirt. I said somebody gave it to me there at the funeral. Then they asked me what

Hand-written copy of an affidavit entitled “ZolileTwana”, obtained from the Black Sash office, Port Elizabeth, n.d.

I said at the graveyard. Then I said to them I was doing a

prayer there. After that they took me to a tent. Then there was an iron there - they handcuffed me to the iron with my hands behind my back. Then they started to hit and kick me. There were four white men who were not in uniform. They kept on hitting me. The police left me standing there handcuffed to the iron bar. I think they went to eat. Then the same four men came back and started to hit me again. I lost consciousness. They put me in a police van and left me to sleep. They threw water into the van, and I had to sleep in the water. I stayed like this the whole night.”

As conflict took its toll, a politicised culture emerged and spread through the community. The toyi toyi was the most visible manifestation of this culture. These were dances performed in the streets by large groups of mainly young people ranging in age from young children to people in their early twenties. It took the form of a slow forward moving jog accompanied by rhythmic freedom songs, most of which were about or in praise of armed resistance, the ANC and its leaders. Winding their way through the dusty dilapidated streets, these groups performed two crucial political functions: they absorbed into their ranks increasing numbers of young people and acted as effective means for communicating political messages on a regular basis. Given that the style of this communication was repetitive, relatively simple and widespread, it is not surprising that their depiction of the threat of removal was in terms of a white challenge to the “unity” of the Langa community. It was this emotive rejection of removal, coupled to a political discourse of national anti-apartheid resistance, that underlay the determination of many youth squads to meet violence with violence.34

Alongside the youth groups, street committees had begun to emerge as early as May in certain parts of Langa, i.e. some months before they were being written about in the press and before they were evident in other parts of the country (except, of course, in Cradock). Nevertheless, although ever-widening layers of the

34 Interview with Amabutho leaders in Langa, June 1986.

community were being politicised, the volatile and violent state of conflict between the security forces and youth squads militated against the organisational priorities of the activist leadership. The declaration of the State of Emergency forced them underground or into detention, leaving the youth squads free to pursue their own voluntarist strategies.

When Made reached Johannesburg in mid-June, foremost in his mind was the rising level of violence in the township and its link to the threat of removal:

“We now have a problem in Langa. It is surrounded by the coloured area, the white area and the business sector area. The white people of Levyvale, they made a petition asking the government to remove the people from Langa to KwaNobuhle because they said in their petition that they feel unsafe. They said that KwaLanga is too near to them. The people of Langa asked the whites to stop demanding the removal of Langa and pointed out that it is the people of Langa who are unsafe from these white soldiers and SAPs who enter our township carrying guns, killing the people, killing the children and innocent people. But the people of KwaLanga never signed a petition about that.”35

Another well-known KwaNobuhle-based UYCO activist was also in Johannesburg at this time. He presented a similar picture of escalating violence but went further to say that activists who still supported non-violent methods of organisation and resistance were finding it increasingly difficult to justify their position and even presence in the township. He told one of his friends in Soweto that he decided to come to Johannesburg after a crowd forced him to light the petrol of a “necklace” after he voiced strong objections to that method of punishment.36

Although the position of the activist leadership became even more tenuous after the Emergency was declared in July, they were painfully aware at this stage - as were the national

35 Interview with Weza Made, 20.6.1985. 36 Conversation with Soweto Youth Congress leader, Soweto, June 1985.

leadership - that unless “mass mobilisation” was turned into “mass organisation”, the struggle was in danger of degenerating into a straight military confrontation which the communities could never win.

For the next few months the Uitenhage leadership ceased to operate as a coherent force. Although some were detained

(e.g. Haas), others disappeared underground. The only groups who remained organised and retained the capacity to mobilise opposition to the security forces were the amabutho. The trade unions concentrated on protecting the union’s base in the face of mounting repression and increasingly politicised communities.

Rather than resolving Langa’s problems, the State of Emergency exacerbated them. With the security forces and amabutho squads battling it out on the streets, the township administrators were unable to restore the council’s authority and it was too risky for community activists to pursue above-ground legal organisational methods. Not surprisingly, negotiations on the removal question in this context were impossible. In any case, Mr Haas, the leader of the delegation that met KTC in June, was detained. The only communal response to the Emergency was the consumer boycott which was resumed in late July after being called off in early July. However, in the absence of an organisational infrastructure capable of coping at this stage with repression and given the militarised nature of daily conflict, the renewed consumer boycott was coercively enforced by the amabutho, who staffed “people’s roadblocks” to “check” whether residents had purchased goods in town. There methods alienated many Langa residents.

Shifting Battle Lines, New Tactics

As endemic violence continued, both the state and community organisations realised that new strategies were required to move beyond this no-win situation. Whereas the state decided to proceed with the removals in a more direct and purposive manner, the community activists attempted to establish new structures to cope with repression, removal and mass support.

By the end of October 1985, conditions began to change in two respects. Firstly, leaders began to re-emerge determined to operate underground in ways that kept them out of sight as far as the security forces were concerned, but in contact with their constituencies. Having monitored the methods and strategies of the security forces fairly closely so as to identify predictable patterns, the activists decided to re-emerge and operate in ways that they thought least risky. This is when the street committees became crucially important as defensive structures. Secondly, and related to the new organising style of the activists, older residents began reacting to youth domination of township politics by establishing their own structures to represent their interests. This led to the spread of the street committees and the formation of Parents’ Crisis Committees in line with the national Soweto Parents’ Crisis Committee initiative to bring the schools boycott to an end.

The semi-underground activist leadership plugged into these street committee and parents’ initiatives because they supported the need to establish organisational bases capable of countering the power of the amabutho. What followed was an important series of conflicts over the control and direction of the street committees and Parents’ Committees as older residents and activists struggled to assert a less militaristic and non-voluntarist approach. Ironically, it was renewed attempts by the KTC to evict 426 squatter families in October that galvanised older residents into action.

It was in this light that it became necessary for the leadership to find strategies to deal with new needs and pressures. These included space to organise; the need to reassert political authority to displace the dominance of the youth squads; concessions to sustain organisation; and defence against repression. This was the context that led key Langa leaders to the conclusion that firstly, negotiations with the local authority must be re-initiated; and secondly, that organisational structures must be decentralised along street committee lines, a particularly important step if the support of the older residents was to be retained.37

By late September, the KTC and its Administrator, Barry Erasmus, appointed on 13 September, was caught between two contradictory pressures. Firstly, the Uitenhage Municipality, responding to renewed demands from its white ratepayers for the removal of Langa, was becoming increasingly insistent that KTC do something about the expanding squatter camp. To increase its pressure on KTC, the Uitenhage Municipality appealed to Minister Heunis at the National Party’s congress held in Port Elizabeth in September, to intervene directly on its behalf.38 Secondly, the continued unrest in Langa that repressive tactics seemed unable to quell, virtually brought daily township administration to a standstill. This enabled incoming squatters to erect shacks in the

4th

to 9th Avenues area (more on this later) thus fuelling white opposition to the continued existence of Langa. The KTC realised that a resolution to the squatter problem was impossible without bringing an end to the unrest.39

It took the KTC until September to work out a clear strategy because of bureaucratic confusion within the local state. Although Erasmus was formally appointed as Administrator on 13 September in terms of the Co-operation and Development Second Amendment Act, he had been what Heunis called an “advisor” to the KTC’s town clerk since June,40 i.e. one month after his early retirement from Uitenhage Municipality, where he had been town clerk. Furthermore, lines of authority were unclear because responsibility for Black Local Authorities was transferred to the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning in July following the cabinet reshuffle that finally dismantled that old Verwoerdian empire, namely the Department of Cooperation and Development (formerly the infamous Department of Native Affairs).

37 Interview with Weza Made, 20.6.1985. 38 Eastern Province Herald, 31.10.1985. 39 Document titled “Minutes of meeting held between the

KwaNobuhle Town Council and a delegation from the residents

of Kabah held on Tuesday 22.10.85 at 16h00 at Kabah Township

Offices, Kabah.” 40 Eastern Province Herald, 12.7.1985.

Significantly, Erasmus said that he turned down the offer of a senior management position at Volkswagen in order to accept his post. This points to a link between Erasmus and Volkswagen that was to crucially affect the outcome of the Langa struggle later on.

As the bureaucratic dust began to settle, the KTC devised two strategies to deal with the pressures that it was facing - one coercive and the other concessionary. The concessionary response arose out of a memorandum that Coetzee sent to the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning (DCDP), reporting the demands expressed by the Langa delegation that met KTC in June. Responding to the community’s strong demand for upgrading, the DCDP appointed a special Task Group to investigate the Langa problem41 and its existence was publicly announced by Heunis at the NP Congress.42 The Task Group comprised members of various government departments including the police and army, Barry Erasmus and was chaired by Dr Scheepers, deputy director-general of the DCDP. The Task Group’s brief was to investigate the feasibility of upgrading the area between 22nd and 9th Avenues and to compile a Guide Plan.

Two points must be noted: firstly, the fact that squatting was only taking place between 22nd and 9th Avenues up until June, and that the Task Group’s brief was limited to this area, meant that no account was taken of how rapidly the shack settlement was growing. This meant that agreements reached in June were irrelevant by October when literally hundreds more shacks had been erected. Secondly, the Pretoria-based state engineer who worked on the project was told to operate within a conventional planning framework which was deeply hostile to the concept of in situ squatter upgrading along lines proposed by the Urban Foundation. Nevertheless, the seniority of the chairperson bears testimony to the importance attached to the Langa problem.

It was also at this point that the NP MP for Uitenhage, a Mr D. le Roux became directly involved in the Langa problem. Le Roux was a large, extremely confident and bright man in his late

41 Minutes of meeting referred to in footnote 34. 42 Eastern Province Herald, 31.10.1985.

thirties. He was the senior partner of the most prestigious firm of Uitenhage attorneys whose offices were located in the old colonial magistrate’s building, complete with palm trees and colonnades at the entrance. His office was lined with hunting trophies, pictures of Afrikaner ancestors and of his old rugby and university teams. His firm acted for the KwaNobuhle Town Council and because Erasmus used to be Uitenhage’s Town Clerk, Le Roux knew him intimately. Together, Le Roux and Erasmus made up a formidable duo of skilful manipulators.

Although the KTC’s coercive response was formulated in a private caucus between Le Roux and Erasmus, it was formally recorded at a meeting of “the council” (i.e. Coetzee and Erasmus) held on 30 September 1985, shortly after the NP Congress. On this occasion, a resolution was taken to empower the Town Clerk to instruct the KTC’s attorneys (i.e. Le Roux’s firm) to institute an action or alternatively an Application to the Supreme Court to secure the “removal of all illegal shacks/homes and/or structures in and the eviction of all persons living in the area between

9th

Avenue…and 4th”.43 On 8 October, the KTC served eviction notices on 426 squatters living between 9th and 4th Avenues. The notices were delivered between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. by KTC officials accompanied by a phalanx of SADF troops who aggressively broke down doors and damaged shacks. This response was clearly designed to remove squatters closest to the white areas in order to temporarily assuage white fears until a more permanent solution could be found. It was no coincidence that the 426 squatters occupied the only part of Langa that was visible from the white suburbs. However, the carefully worded eviction notice prepared by Le Roux gave very different reasons for the removal.

The notice pointed out to each shack dweller: his/her shack was erected without “any permit or authority from KTC” and is “accordingly an illegal structure”; invoking the kind of health threat that colonial authorities had used for a century, the shacks were depicted as a health hazard with the danger of a cholera

43 See appendix “C” in Notice of Motion in the Matter Between The

KwaNobuhle Town Council and David Andries and Others, case

number 2966/85, Supreme Court of South Africa, South-Eastern

Cape Local Division.

outbreak because in the area between 9th and 4th Avenues there are no toilets, water supplies, drainage or sewerage; and the area is a fire hazard because the shacks have been built in a manner which prevents “proper access”.

The eviction orders were violating the patronage contracts between councillors and squatters, contracts which squatters could “prove” because councillors issued them with “Lodgers’ Permits” in the name of the “Cape Midlands Bantu Affairs Administration Board” (the original name of the ECDB) and stamped with a Uitenhage-Despatch Community Council stamp. Consequently, the eviction notice contained a paragraph which clearly stated that if “you have been shown a site by certain persons [read: Majombozi] who have taken it upon themselves to allocate sites in the area for shacks” and/or if “you paid any money to a person in order to allocate a shack site to you”, then this person acted illegally. This legal protection against potential claims that squatters were given “permission” to reside in the area was coupled to another more serious measure. When the KTC officials and SADF troops served the notices, they asked the squatters to surrender their permits. Although most unsuspectingly obliged, a few wily old women with years of experience that had taught them that possessing official-looking documents is better than having nothing, simply refused by saying that they had lost their permits.44 Nevertheless, by surrendering their permits, the majority gave up their only proof that someone officially sanctioned their right to reside in the area. By defining this sanction as illegal, the eviction notice overturned the community’s popular conception of the justice of their residential rights.

Aware of the political consequences of this violation of popular norms and patronage contracts, the KTC attempted to establish and legitimise a new norm. The eviction notices stated that the KTC is “aware of the need for housing” and has, therefore, provided fully serviced sites in KwaNobuhle at a monthly cost of R19.90. In addition, the notice stated, the KTC will transport all belongings from Langa to KwaNobuhle free of charge.

44 Interviews with various women living in 9th to 4th Avenue area, October 1985.

The notice ended by stating that the shack dweller had ten days to remove his/her structures. If he/she fails to do so, the KTC would assume that he/she “thereby contest[s] the right of the Council to remove you” and it will apply for a court order to remove the shack by force.

The eviction notices generated a sense of panic and outrage in the community as a whole. Panic because the removal of the 426 squatters was seen as a first step towards the removal of Langa as a whole. Outrage because a popular norm - despite it being rooted in the patronage networks of the councillors - had been violated. The effect on political consciousness was immediate and electric.

Fortuitously, the following day was 9 October, the Day of Peace and Reconciliation that Bishop Tutu and other prominent clergy had called to protest against the State of Emergency. Although there was general confusion in most parts of the country as to whether this day was meant to be a stay away or not, in Langa the message was rapidly spread through the street committees that no-one must go to work and that as many people as possible must squeeze into Langa’s eleven churches to discuss Langa’s problems as a whole and the evictions in particular. Disguised as “prayer meetings”, discussion about the evictions and other problems went on throughout the day, providing activists with a rare opportunity to canvass a broad spread of opinion at a time when all meetings were banned under the Emergency regulations.

The activists, taking full advantage of the opportunity, divided themselves into groups and took charge of proceedings in the churches. They had agreed amongst themselves that although the usual speeches, freedom songs and discussion were important, the main aim should be to ask the meetings to throw up demands related specifically to Langa. These were written down in order of priority. At the end of the day the activists met and, as one of them put it, “Congress of the People style” put all the demands together, categorised and prioritised them. The result was six key demands (wording as in original):

“lifting of influx control;

“relieving unemployment;

“upgrading of township: who is the cause of health and fire

hazard?

“people must be allowed to live where they like;

“schools, clinics, crèches, playing grounds;

Local Moves Beyond Emergency Rule

The LLC immediately contacted the KTC and requested a meeting to discuss the removals and to urge the KTC to stay the evictions. The KTC agreed not to go ahead with removals until the meeting had taken place. The fact that the meeting took place on 22 October, i.e. four days after the deadline to move had elapsed, greatly strengthened the resolve of the squatters and activists who interpreted this concession as a sign of weakness on the part of the KTC. In reality, the local administrators were deeply concerned about the political implications of the evictions.46 This concern was reinforced by the fact that Volkswagen wanted to avoid at all costs another blow-up in Langa because of the international profile of the township. Le Roux, the KTC and elements in the municipality were well-aware of the consequences of a Volkswagen pull-out if the international spotlight on Langa resulted in disinvestment pressure on Volkswagen’s German headquarters. The KTC tried on several occasions prior to 8 October to arrange meetings with the LCC, but the response was that no meetings would take place until Mr Haas was released from detention.47 In the end, mounting pressure from the Uitenhage Municipality forced the KTC to issue eviction notices.48 When this galvanised the community organisations into action, including the LCC’s decision to request a meeting and drop its precondition that Haas be released, the KTC was more than willing to find a way of going ahead with the removal without escalating the unrest. Coetzee and Erasmus genuinely believed that they could convince the leaders to support

46 Interviews with Erasmus and Coetzee, op. cit. and Let Roux, op, cit. 47 Minutes of meeting cited in footnote 34. 48 Ibid.

the removal with scary reports about health hazards, welfarist housing concessions in KwaNobuhle and denials of white pressure on their decision.

The meeting was delayed because the LCC knew that meeting the KTC to simply appeal against the removal was too weak and reactive. They were aware of the need to make concrete counter-proposals in line with the community’s demands. As a result, they contacted the group of Johannesburg and Durban-based academics that they had had contact with before the Emergency and urged them to come down before the meeting with the KTC. Two of us travelled to Uitenhage on 17 and 18 October and after some discussions, a document entitled Proposed Steps for Developing Langa was written up that outlined a strategy.

The document started by defining the KTC position as follows: 1) Langa must be removed; 2) Langa cannot be developed;

3) there are no financial resources to upgrade Langa. Based on the assumption that the removal could be stalled, the document recommended that this time be used to develop an alternative that should start with three steps: firstly, the initiation of a detailed socio-economic and attitudinal survey; secondly, use the survey as a basis for the compilation of a detailed development plan; thirdly, initiate a campaign both within the community as well as nationally and internationally to ensure that maximum pressure is brought to bear on the authorities. The document ended by emphasising two general points: a) if leaders negotiate without a mandate, they can be co-opted; B) unity and cooperation between community organisations and trade unions will be necessary. The document was subsequently discussed and accepted by the community organisations.

The meeting with the KTC took place on the appointed day at 4 p.m. in the KTC’s Langa offices. The officials present were the newly appointed Administrator, Barry Erasmus, Town Clerk Eddie Coetzee, R. D Basson, Administrative Officer and S. Somtsewu, Langa Township superintendent.

Erasmus started the meeting by explaining his appointment as City Administrator. He then immediately went on to say how urgent it was that unrest in Langa be brought to an end. However, betraying a callous ignorance of problems in Langa, he continued to reiterate the need for removing squatters between 9th and 4th Avenues because of pressures from Uitenhage’s municipality, i.e. white residents. As far as upgrading was concerned, he said that the Task Group was favourably disposed towards this idea, but agreed with the KTC that Langa was only big enough for 2,000 sites and that 8,000 sites were needed to accommodate all Langa’s inhabitants. Erasmus informed the LCC that the Task Group would be holding its first meeting on 28 October.

Erasmus explained that eviction notices were served on the 426 squatters living between 9th and 4th Avenues because of the appalling living conditions in the area and the constant threat of a cholera outbreak. He rejected press speculation that the evictions were motivated by a concern for Group Areas boundaries. He said that those who moved to KwaNobuhle would be given a serviced site, free transport to the new area and unemployed people would not be required to pay service charges. Employed persons who wanted to erect houses would be given loans from the council to purchase on-site materials and council-paid labour would be made available.

In short, the KTC was making every possible concession to attract people to KwaNobuhle to satisfy white demands. Free services for unemployed people and cheap loans and labour for those who wanted to erect houses were, in fact, welfarist policies. Similar schemes did not exist elsewhere in the country which reflects the extent to which the government was committed to finding enough money during a recession to address the fears of white residents of an encroaching informal settlement.

Made responded on behalf of the LCC delegation by pointing out that the community was prepared to negotiate solutions to any problems and difficulties it experienced. He then went on to say that the LCC called the meeting to discuss the notices that were handed out. He pointed out that: (a) the squatters were unhappy about the ten-day ultimatum to move to KwaNobuhle,

(b) the people were angered by the actions of soldiers who damaged shacks when doors were kicked open, (c) the LCC was discontented by the fact that the KTC went ahead with the eviction notices without consulting them, and (d) the people want their permits returned to them.

Other members of the delegation added their comments: Teyise said that the KTC claims that its concerns were health conditions and not white pressure was doubtful in light of the fact that other areas of Langa were worse off than those in the 9th to 4th Avenues area. Mge said that people were angry because they believed that permission to erect shacks had been given by the councillors, but now that the shacks were getting close to the white area the KTC was under pressure from white residents to remove the shacks. Antonie, in true unionist style, said that the KTC was undermining the authority of the LCC by issuing eviction notices without the Committee’s consent.

Much of what followed amounted to argumentation about various conflicting perceptions and reports about what was happening between 9th and 4th Avenues. In particular, it became evident to the officials that the LCC was not buying their arguments. The former’s position was finally discredited when, at one stage, Erasmus found it necessary to defend white fears by pointing out that Levyvale residents complained about regular burglaries, seven petrol bomb attacks and dropping property values.

Erasmus said that there were three ways to deal with the problem: (a) shacks could be demolished by KTC officials immediately; (b) a court order could be obtained from a magistrate; (c) an application to the Supreme Court could be made. As far as Coetzee and Erasmus were concerned, the latter option was best because it would allow the community to put forward its case in court, following which the Supreme Court decision - which they were confident would go in their favour

-could be implemented. This would create the appearance of neutrality and fairness49 in order to redefine the issue in legalistic terms. Le Roux worked out this scheme to use the Supreme Court

49 Document entitled “Minutes of meeting held between the

KwaNobuhle Town Council and the Kabah Coordinating Committee

held on Tuesday 28.10.85 at 16h00 at Kabah Township Offices,

Kabah.”

to depoliticise the issue.50 In the long run, as the KTC and Le Roux intended, this forced the community organisations onto a terrain where they were weakest.

In response to Erasmus’ proposals and in a clear bid to retain control of the decision-making process, the LCC submitted two concrete proposals: firstly, the Task Group must meet the Committee; and secondly, Mr Erasmus must point out to the Task Group that the 9th to 4th Avenues area must be included in the upgrading proposals. The officials responded by pointing out that when the initial request for upgrading was received from the community in June, no-one was living in the 9th to 4th Avenues area. This meant that the Task Group’s brief only concerned the 22nd to 9th Avenues area. Nevertheless, they recommended that the LCC submit a memorandum to the Task Group. The officials agreed to the request that the Task Group meet the LCC. In return, however, they requested the LCC to ensure that no further shacks were erected. The Committee, unlike the Councillors before them, refused to give this undertaking.

At the end of this rather stormy two-hour meeting, the two parties agreed on three significant formal resolutions:

“Resolved:

It be noted that:

a) The KwaNobuhle Town Council has instructed their attorneys to issue letters to the residents between 9th and

4th

Avenues Kabah to remove their illegal structures to KwaNobuhle within 10 days expiring on 18.20.85.

b) No action was instituted by the KwaNobuhle Town Council in terms of paragraph (a) above pending deliberation with the residents committee of Kabah.

That the residents committee BE REQUIRED (sic) to compile a memorandum on the upgrading of Kabah for submission to the Task Group at a meeting to be held on 28 October 1985.

50 Interview with Le Roux, op. cit.

That a report back meeting on the meeting of the Task

Group on 28.10.1985 BE SCHEDULED (sic) to take place on

29.10.1985 at 16:00 at Town Council offices, Kabah.”51

On a number of levels, the activists felt that “the negotiations” were a success: the removal had been stalled; the KTC had effectively recognised the LCC as the representatives of the Langa community; the KTC agreed to support the inclusion of the 4th to 9th Avenues area into the definition of the area which must be upgraded; and the KTC’s support for its proposal that the Task Group meet the LCC was won.52 The other gain -that activists never perceived because it was not related directly to the removal question - was the welfarist housing and settlement policies that the KTC was proposing for KwaNobuhle. These were substantially improved concessions to what they were offered in June. Their spatial location, however, undermined their socioeconomic impact.

On the negative side, two processes were evident that would eventually weaken the community’s capacity to resist. These were firstly the clear indication that the KTC was going to proceed with a Supreme Court Application. Over-optimistic expectations in the “fairness” of the legal system in the coming months would serve to distract activists from concentrating on the organisation of the community, their only real source of power. Secondly, the LCC agreed to submit a memorandum to the Task Group without first discussing this tactic with community organisations. Although the idea of an upgrading plan was being discussed, these discussions were by no means as widespread in the community and factories as they should have been. Given that outside “experts” were inevitably going to be involved in formulating this memorandum, this was the first step towards a dependence on experts as a substitute for organisation that would, like legalism, critically weaken the whole anti-removal movement.

Some activists were keenly aware of these dangers. However, they were not simply strategic or organisational problems. They were, in fact, inscribed into the institutional

51 Minutes of the meeting. 52 Telephone conversation with Weza Made, 22.10.1985.

framework within which the community organisations and trade unions had to operate. This applies to their inability to challenge the decision to take the matter to the Supreme Court, the necessity for “experts” once the decision was taken to enter into negotiations and the sustained level of repression that severely constrained mass participation in the complex and intricate negotiation and planning processes.

Very similar problems were facing the Parents’ Crisis Committee, which was engaged in negotiations with the Department of Education and Training. A crucial meeting took place between the Committee and Sam De Beer, deputy Minister of the Department of Education and Training on 30 September 1985. The meeting, which was organised by Le Roux and Erasmus and took place in the KTC offices, resolved that Uitenhage’s schools boycott could only be ended when student representative councils were established.53

After the meeting with the KTC, I helped the activists to contact Dr Mike Sutcliffe, an urban planner and member of the Durban-based Built Environment Support Group (BESG). They asked him to travel to Uitenhage immediately to help them compile a memorandum for the Task Group. Sutcliffe spent the weekend of 25-26 October in Langa, at the end of which he compiled a memorandum entitled A Feasibility Survey of the Prospects for Upgrading Kabah, Uitenhage. The memorandum made the following points:

Eastern Province Herald, 1.10.1985.

Sutcliffe concluded by pointing out that political consciousness in Langa was such that top-down planning decisions made on behalf of, rather than in consultation with the community, would be rejected. He proposed that the KTC petition Minister Heunis to obtain approval for the upgrading of Langa, including the identification of available land. This, he argued, should be coupled to an LCC strategy aimed at securing funding for a large-scale development project. The first step in this regard, he proposed, should be the initiation of socio-economic and site surveys in Langa.

It is important to note that Sutcliffe took his brief from the LCC which insisted that the 9th to 4th Avenues area be included in the upgrade. One of the reasons given by KTC officials for why the Task Group did not consider the report at its meeting was precisely because the LCC refused to give Sutcliffe the same brief that the KTC gave to the Task Group, i.e. consideration only of the 22nd to 9th Avenues area. This is a good example of how planning expresses conflicting material interests.

Sutcliffe’s memorandum was handed in to the KTC early on the morning of Monday 27 October in time to be discussed at the Task Group meeting that day. Not unexpectedly, the KTC officials were extremely surprised when the LCC arrived with the memorandum. They never thought that the LCC had the resources or the inclination to compile a memorandum during the short time since the last meeting. In the event, the Task Group did not discuss the memo that day.

The LCC met the KTC again on 28 October. It started off with a report-back by Erasmus of the Task Group proceedings the previous day. Erasmus was at pains to point out that the Task Group comprised representatives from all government departments. Furthermore, Scheepers delivered a message from Minister Heunis that the KTC should proceed with an application for a court order to remove the squatters between 9th and 4th Avenues. Erasmus pointed out that after taking the Task Group on a tour of Langa, he felt positive that its members would view sympathetically the community’s request for upgrading. However, he insisted, no firm decision was reached within the Task Group on whether to support upgrading or not. Erasmus and Coetzee pointed out that the Task Group was of the opinion that urbanisation was inevitable, but contradicted themselves by insisting how problematic it was that the influx of unemployed people into the urban areas was increasing. That this view was expressed then is significant, because it prefigures government thinking that eventually led to the scrapping of Influx Control in July 1986. This might suggest that Langa’s struggle and the very real difficulties that it posed for the state, made a direct impact on government policy.

The LCC forcefully expressed its dissatisfaction with the fact that the Task Group never considered their memorandum and that the only firm decision concerned the court order. Magugu submitted that this indicated a refusal by government to listen to the Langa community’s demands and that there is, therefore, no reason why there should be further negotiations. Evidence that Magugu’s suggestion plus the Task Group’s lack of a strategy put the KTC in a difficult position came when Coetzee suggested to the LCC that it wait for the Task Group’s next meeting where issues might clarify before reporting back to the community. Clearly, he was reluctant to see the LCC tell the community anything: if they said upgrading had been won, this would remove the pressure to move and lend too much legitimacy to the UDF; if they said that removals were to go ahead, this would, as Mandabana pointed out, lead to confrontation.

The KTC replied by trying to redefine the issue in legalistic and technicist terms. The legalistic solution lay in the KTC’s constant insistence that the LCC respond in court to the KTC’s application, i.e. they clearly perceived that the community’s willingness to “participate” in the legal action would ensure its “success”, no matter what the outcome was. Keeping the conflict off the streets was their only concern. If the court ruled in favour of the community, then, the KTC officials conceded, the 9th to 4th Avenues area would be included in the upgrade and the LCC would have to participate in “certain of the replanning and upgrading aspects”. If the court ruled in favour of the KTC, then the community would have to “accept” this. The technicist solution lay in Coetzee’s argument that the Task Group would be considering the feasibility of upgrading the 22nd to 9th Avenues area “in Pretoria”. Once again, its conclusions would be “final” and beyond dispute.

Contrary to Lund’s suggestion that negotiations had “come to nothing”54 because the KTC and Task Group were of the opinion that upgrading would only be considered after the court ruling, the evidence seems to point to a much more sophisticated divide through concession and rule through repression strategy: concessions to those living in the 22nd to 9th Avenues area and repression for the 9th to 4th Avenues area. This is why Coetzee reacted so strongly when Mandabana threatened this strategy by suggesting that the 9th to 4th Avenues area people move into another area of Langa until the Task Group and Court had reached their respective decisions.

Finally, and confirming the Task Group’s technicist thrust, when the LCC asked whether Erasmus had asked the Task Group to meet the Committee, Erasmus said that the request was denied because “the politicians” would be brought in and deliberations would be delayed. Later, when the Urban Foundation attempted to urge Scheepers to meet the LCC, the Task Group’s response was that its task was technical, not political. Only after he had reported to Heunis, Scheepers pointed out, could this decision be made.55 The Task Group subsequently formed a technical sub-committee chaired by an engineer called Mr Bath to compile a report about the technicalities of upgrading Langa. Bath visited Uitenhage twice, spending his time meeting the Uitenhage Municipality and the KTC, but refused to meet the LCC.56

54 Lund, S., op. cit., p.59. 55 Various conversations with Roger Matlock, November 1985. 56 Document entitled “Minutes of meeting held between the

KwaNobuhle Town Council and Kabah Coordinating Committee on

The meeting ended on a bad note, with the LCC under the impression that the Task Group never took its memorandum seriously and with the KTC officials feeling that the LCC was unreasonable for refusing to accept the welfarist incentives to encourage people to move to KwaNobuhle. In reality, the KTC officials later admitted that they never took the Sutcliffe memorandum very seriously because Sutcliffe did not bother to come to see them while conducting his research!57

Although the Task Group did not oppose the need to apply for a court order to remove the 9th to 4th Avenues squatters, there is no evidence that any clarity existed on whether Langa should be retained and upgraded, and, if so, how this should be undertaken. This reflected uncertainty in government urbanisation policy as a whole.

By then, government policy was deeply hostile to the spread of informal settlements, particularly if they were as close to the white areas as Langa was. However, this lack of clarity was a function of changes in macro urbanisation policy. The Report of the Committee for Constitutional Affairs of the President’s Council on an Urbanisation Strategy for the Republic of South Africa was published on 12 September 1985. This reflected the thinking of a reformist group with support in the upper echelons of the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning. It was a response to the obvious fact that influx control was simply not working as a mechanism to keep the urbanising masses out. More importantly, however, the influx control system was a negative urbanisation strategy in the sense that once a large contingent of urbanising people had broken through the urban barrier and established communities like Crossroads and Langa, the official policy framework did not provide guidelines on how these settlements should be dealt with. In fact, once these settlements became inhabited by people with Section 10 (1) (a), (b) or (c) “rights”, influx control instruments were rendered ineffective. This enabled these communities to survive and expand, providing relatively protected spaces for other incoming groups. The conflict in Langa, therefore, came at a time when two contradictory

3rd February 1986.” 57 Interview with Erasmus and Coetzee, op. cit.

tendencies were reaching a head at national level: on the one hand the squatter communities were clearly winning the battle against influx control and their struggles helped to destroy the classic myth that the urban areas were an exclusive white abode. These struggles finally buried the Riekert Commission’s urbanisation policy and the intentions of the fated Orderly Movement and Settlement of Black Persons Bill. On the other hand, by the end of 1985, policymakers had come to support the Urban Foundation’s argument that influx control needed to be scrapped, but like the Urban Foundation’s policymakers, they were unclear about what should replace it.58

It was in this context that the impact of the struggles of the Langa community on state policy should be assessed. It was important to have prompted the formation of a Task Group headed by the Deputy Director General of the DCDP not simply because it physically existed, but because it had established for itself a political identity.

The political sensitivity of Langa became apparent in contradictory press statements made during the week after the Task Group met. Whereas Erasmus said that the decision to apply for a court order to remove the squatters was made by Heunis and communicated to the KTC by the Task Group, Scheepers said that his Task Group had nothing to with the removal and was only investigating the feasibility of upgrading.59 Erasmus’ statement was in any case false, because he and Le Roux had already concocted the scheme and the KTC had already resolved on 30 September to apply for a court order. What was certain is that no-one wanted to accept responsibility for what might happen if the removal went ahead, especially in light of repeated warnings from the LCC that confrontation was inevitable.

Related to, but more significant than the decision to apply for a court order, was the KTC’s conclusion that negotiations with

58 Conversation with Willie Breytenbach on 10.12.1985. Breytenbach

had just resigned from his position as senior assistant to Minister

Heunis and sat on the committee that was reviewing influx control

legislation. 59 Eastern Province Herald, 31.10.1985.

the LCC were fruitless.60 In the notice of motion it distributed in November, Coetzee wrote:

“Prior to the delivery of these letters, certain negotiations also took place between the Applicant and unofficial representatives of a large number of shack dwellers, aimed at voluntary removal of the shack dwellers to Applicant’s housing scheme site in KwaNobuhle. These negotiations made some progress, but later did not continue and have come to naught.”61

This statement starkly reveals that for the KTC, negotiations were seen as useful only to the extent that they could facilitate the implementation of its own preconceived plans. When the possibility was thwarted by the LCC that had no mandate to compromise the squatters’ demands, the KTC officials used their power to terminate the negotiations.

By the beginning of November, the community organisations were uncertain where they stood: negotiations had broken down, the Task Group engineer claimed that he was still conducting his study, and the KTC was probably preparing its case but this was by no means certain as far as the LCC was concerned. The KTC strategy only became clear on 8 November when the KTC served notices of motion on 426 squatters in the 9th to 4th Avenues area. These notices were handed out between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. in an extremely provocative manner. One policeman said to a resident: “We know you are going to resist, but let us see who is going to win.”

The notice gave the respondents until 22 November to notify the court of their intention to respond and a further 14 days from that to file responding affidavits.

The notice of motion that was given to the 426 squatters was a lengthy 78-page document with detailed maps, photographs and affidavits to back up its case. The KTC supported its case by arguing that uncontrolled squatting in the 9th to 4th Avenues

60 Interview with Erasmus and Coetzee, op. cit. 61 Coetzee’s affidavit in Notice of Motion cited in footnote 42.

was taking place at such a rate that 10 new shacks were erected each day. Furthermore, the structures were put up without the Applicant’s permission or knowledge. This meant that there were no taps, sanitation or refuse removal services in the area, thus creating the real danger of a cholera or typhoid outbreak. Proper roads did not exist because of the unplanned nature of the area, which meant that in the event of a fire, the fire brigade would be unable to get in to stop the fire. What was not said, of course, is that this also limited security controls. Adding salt to the wound, the motion also pointed out that 400 white residents of Uitenhage signed a petition that prompted the Uitenhage Municipality to lodge a formal complaint with the KTC about the “dangerous and unsanitary conditions” in Langa. Regarding services, the motion stated that the drainage and slope of the land was such that “while upgrading of this area may be theoretically possible, it is not possible at any practically acceptable cost level”. Fully serviced sites had been made available in KwaNobuhle in an area that “is about the same distance from the Uitenhage industrial area…as the illegal shacks”, attempts to encourage the squatters to move voluntarily by negotiating with “unofficial representatives” failed, thus leading the KTC to conclude that the “Respondents dispute the illegality of their occupation in the area”.

The key component of the notice was provided by an affidavit from Major Theron. Theron was in charge of Uitenhage’s Riot Control Unit as of March 1984. He argued that the “high density” and “unplanned” nature of the shack area had given rise to a situation that “is extremely difficult to patrol and to police properly”.

“There are no proper streets or street numbers - nor are there any passable roads. Attempts to put up street numbers have been frustrated by elements in the population who remove the numbers or over-paint them. Because this happens at night, it is not possible to say who is responsible.”62

62 Affidavit by Major Theron in Ibid.

Criminals are protected because it is “very difficult to trace witnesses afterwards who melt away into the mass of unplanned, haphazard shacks”. However, Theron proceeds, the same does not apply to the new area in KwaNobuhle to which the KTC would like to move the squatters. Revealing the intimate connection between urban planning and police control, Theron pointed out that “[i]n this area Police protection of residents will become vastly facilitated [sic] and investigation of crime tremendously simplified.”63

It is important to note that Coetzee’s affidavit specifically pointed out that the 9th to 4th Avenues squatters had erected shacks without in any way notifying or informing the KTC. This is significant because it meant that unlike the 22nd to 9th Avenues squatters, the 9th to 4th Avenues squatters erected their shelter without the confirmation of councillors and their patronage networks. The resignation of the councillors, therefore, had two contradictory effects: it removed the protection of patronage but simultaneously created the impression that official obstacles to the erection of shacks had also been removed. The ideology of ungovernability served to confirm this latter impression. But when it became clear that the KTC was still able to function and threaten the squatters, it was not the patronage networks that they turned to for support but rather the extra-state organisations whose opposition to the state offered a solution that made sense to people whose attempts to find an accommodation within the system had failed.

The delivery of these notices clearly drew the battle lines. As far as the local state was concerned, the first priority was the clearing of the 9th to 3rd Avenues (i.e. the number of squatters had increased beyond 4th Avenue into 3rd Avenue) area to satisfy the white residents. Once this was achieved, the rest was negotiable. However, given the political nature of the community, the KTC was attempting to legitimise the removal by way of a Supreme Court Action that would require the “participation” of the community in the process. KTC officials hoped in this way to at

63 Ibid.

least diminish to acceptable levels the confrontational aspect of the removal.

As far as the community was concerned, the new terrain had both obvious advantages and dangers. The main advantage was time. The lawyers assured the community leaders that they could comfortably expect the case to come to court only in early 1986. This was important to leaders who were aware that time was required to build a social movement capable of directly countering any attempt to forcibly remove the squatters if the court case failed. The main danger, of course, was legalism and the possibility that a belief could spread that organisation was now unnecessary. Some of these issues and problems surfaced at a mass meeting of squatters held on 24 November. On the one hand, the meeting had to approve the appointment of the lawyer, while on the other, the activists were careful to reiterate the need to strengthen organisation.

On 12 December 1985, the squatters submitted, via their lawyers, counter-applications to the court that contested the legality of KTC’s right to evict on the grounds of a small technicality. Pointing out that it was the “Town Council of KwaNobuhle” that was established in terms of the BLA Act in 1983 and not the “KwaNobuhle Town Council”, and therefore there was no Town Council with any members able to exercise any rights or powers. Virginia Williams said in her affidavit that the 9th to 4th Avenues squatters did not need to obtain permission from the KTC to build shacks because it was not a lawfully constituted authority. It followed from this that the lack of services that created health and other hazards was because of the KTC’s failure to provide adequate facilities. Made’s affidavit rested on a rejection of Coetzee’s contention that the negotiations had come to naught. Submitting minutes of these meetings, Made argued that the negotiations were wide-ranging and revolved largely around the question of upgrading. He said that the community would like to continue negotiations.64

64 “Langa: Summaries of Application and Counter-Application

Submitted to the Supreme Court Regarding the Removal of 426

Families from the Kabah Area, Langa Township”, Grahamstown

Rural Committee, memorandum, n.d.p.3.

Between November 1985 and May 1986, a stalemate existed. Except for the demolition of twenty newly erected shacks on the outskirts of the 4th to 9th Avenues area “because they were challenging the authority of the KwaNobuhle municipality”,65 neither side opted for negotiated or coercive strategies to win the strategic initiative. The community needed to build organisation and formulate its alternative to removal, while the KTC waited for its case to be heard by the court. This stalemate was not affected by moves to suspend the boycott and bring about negotiations in accordance with the Port Elizabeth example.66 The Uitenhage Consumer Boycott Committee said its demands were:

On Sunday 8 December, a mass meeting took place in Jabavu Stadium in KwaNobuhle to discuss the consumer boycott. Permission was granted by the magistrate when applications to hold the meeting were supported by the KTC.68 The meeting agreed that negotiations with the Chamber of Commerce could take place only if Uitenhage’s detainees were released.69 The statement released by the Consumer Boycott Committee said:

65 Barry Erasmus quoted in Eastern Province Herald, 9.11.1985.

66 On consumer boycotts and the resolution of the 1985 Port

Elizabeth boycott see Helliker, K., (eds.) South African Review 4,

Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987. 67 Evening Post, 3.12.1985. 68 Eastern Province Herald, 6.12.1985. 69 Evening Post, 3.12.1985.

“This shows that when leaders are released from detention

they are in a better position to talk and solve problems. This

was the case in Port Elizabeth.”70

There were three reasons why the consumer boycott “talks” in Uitenhage went in a very different direction to those in Port Elizabeth. Firstly, unlike the Port Elizabeth Chamber, the Uitenhage Chamber of Commerce was National Party-dominated. Secondly, the pillar of economic power in Uitenhage was industrial capital, not commerce - this is why the MCI eventually came to play such a crucial role in negotiating a solution to the squatter crisis. Thirdly, unlike the Ibhayi Town Council, all the councillors resigned from the KTC, leaving the white officials with much greater scope for proactive intervention and unconventional action.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the KTC became the central actor. During December and January, Erasmus went on the offensive to coopt KwaNobuhle and Langa leaders into a multiracial ad hoc committee. He called a meeting of all the community organisations - mainly UDF affiliates - on Saturday 25 January to discuss the proposed Regional Services Councils and the potential for non-racial municipalities. Most of the key KwaNobuhle leaders went to the meeting, while the Langa leaders refused. Despite Erasmus’ personal approach to Weza Made urging him to come to the meeting because he is a “true leader and supported by the people”,71 the Langa leaders were deeply suspicious of Erasmus’ motives. They were unwilling to cooperate on any venture until the removals issue was resolved. In the event, an ad hoc committee was elected at the meeting comprising Erasmus, Coetzee, Sam Haas and another URECO representative. Keith Ingram of the Chamber of Commerce was also incorporated into the committee. The committee decided to approach Brigadier Schnetler to request the release of detainees and permission to hold meetings. However, before the following week was out, the URECO leaders were forced by the KwaNobuhle organisations to resign from the committee on grounds that they never received

70 Ibid. 71 Telephone conversation with Weza Made, 23.2.1986.

a mandate to participate. Luckily, the Langa leaders escaped the acrimony that this KwaNobuhle-centred controversy generated.

Despite the failure of this committee, Erasmus was deeply impressed with the URECO leaders72 and his optimism was reflected in a press statement that he made at the time:

“There is a conciliatory spirit at the moment. There is an

atmosphere of change.”73

It was in this context that Erasmus called for a local power-sharing option for Uitenhage. He made the suggestion at a special symposium for the public and private sector in December 1985 to consider Uitenhage’s future prospects. He suggested that black community leaders be incorporated into the special “contact committee” that the Uitenhage Municipality had recently established in response to the consumer boycott. He argued that this will help improve Uitenhage’s image as a place with one of the worst race relations problems in the world.74

Even the school pupils voted at mass meetings in stadiums at KwaNobuhle and Langa that they should return to school on 28 January in line with resolutions taken at the Johannesburg conference of the Soweto Parents’ Crisis Committee.

Conclusion

The easing of tensions in the Eastern Cape from the end of 1985 and into January 1986 was clearly part of a shifting state strategy that reflected, in turn, the impact of international pressure and the growing influence of the reformist faction within the state, led by, in particular, Minister Chris Heunis. Withdrawal of the massive security force presence, negotiations with UDF organisations, release of detainees and other moves were also coupled to an injection of R43 million into township development. Minister Heunis personally handed the cheque over to the ECDB in November. To be used for unemployment relief, infrastructural

72 Interview with Erasmus and Coetzee, op. cit. 73 Evening Post, 27.1.1986. 74 Oosterlig, 28.11.1985.

upgrading, self-help housing and the training of municipal police, these funds were distributed to 35 Eastern Cape townships with Aliwal North, Bedford, Cathcart, Cradock, Fort Beaufort, Grahamstown, King William’s Town, Kirkwood, Molteno, East London, Queenstown, Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth receiving the largest amounts.75 These areas, not surprisingly, were the most well-organised Eastern Cape towns. The municipal police forces that this fund helped to establish were to play a critically important repressive role later on.

Uitenhage’s political pendulum was to swing a few more times between January and July 1986 before this ‘atmosphere of change’ gave way to undiluted repressive rule.

75 Eastern Province Herald, 15.11.1985.

Introduction

From the end of 1985 through to the declaration of the national State of Emergency on 12 June 1986, South Africa slowly began to recover from PW Botha’s disastrous ‘Rubicon Speech’ that was arrogantly delivered in Durban to a National Party conference on 15 August 1985. Repressive action by the security forces eased a bit, more mass meetings were allowed, restrictions on press freedom were slightly less than severe, delicate negotiations with the banks on how to resolve the debt-standstill crisis were proceeding well, broad-based alliances between business, faith institutions and civil society emerged, international pressures were growing stronger, academic conferences on prospects for change took place and local-level negotiations spread. Although PW Botha was still very much calling the shots, serious divisions had opened up within the Cabinet, the senior public service and the State Security Council that the Rubicon Speech merely exacerbated. This state of uncertainty within the state created the space for the flowering of initiatives to address the challenges facing South Africa during the period leading up to 12 June 1986. It was a space that created immense opportunities for local initiatives, in particular the space needed for an alternative to forced removals in Uitenhage to be formulated and mutually agreed by all parties. But alas, like the movie Awakenings when Robin Williams is briefly liberated from his ‘sleeping sickness’ by a newly developed drug, the potential of this awakening was shut down as hope dissipated as the iron hand of the groot krokodil was felt as he confidently declared the 1986 State of Emergency.

The state of uncertainty that allowed for the awakening had ended - PW Botha and the securocrats had seized the initiative within the state, Cabinet and National Party. The security forces were back on the streets. After hunting down and jailing thousands of activists in a vain attempt to quell the township rebellions that had spread to all provinces, the securocrats turned on those in the state who had tried to convince PW Botha to deliver a very different speech in August 19852. By the end of 1987, the reformers around Heunis had been marginalised and Langa had been forcibly removed by deploying extreme levels of violence to realise, once and for all, the vision of a whites-only Uitenhage.

During the first six months of 1986, the Eastern Cape erupted into a regional revolt that dominated international headlines, supported by revolutionary hopes amongst leaders of the liberation movement and led eventually to the declaration of a National State of Emergency on 12 June 1986. After the lifting of the partial State of Emergency on 7 March, an opening was created that exploded outwards into a set of social movements the nature of which will be debated for many years to come.

Uitenhage may not have been the epicentre of this revolt, but there is little doubt that the Langa Massacre loomed large in the collective imagination of the region’s amabutho squads as they took to the streets to do battle with the security forces. More importantly, the regional revolt must be understood as the context within which the localised dynamics within Uitenhage itself took place. In addition to responding to the logic of local dynamics, the leaders of Uitenhage’s stakeholders across the spectrum took into account the regional processes as they made their tactical and strategic decisions. This is why it is necessary to outline these regional dynamics in this chapter in order to set a

Cloete, op. cit.

context for an understanding of the local processes that unfolded in Uitenhage during the awakenings of early 1985.

Previous chapters have explained the dynamics that turned Uitenhage into one of the Eastern Cape’s primary arenas of conflict. Although the first part of this chapter will briefly describe the rebellions of January to July 1986, it will remain focused on Uitenhage so that complex local processes can be revealed that may shed light on what may have been happening on a wider scale. In the process, certain assumptions will be questioned, in particular, the struggle for and negotiations about the removal or upgrading of Langa involved processes that do not fit neatly into the popular notion of ‘people’s power’ that was used at the time to describe what was assumed to be an emerging insurrectionary movement. Two in particular are worth mentioning. The “people’s power” literature that flowered during the mid-1980s depicted the emerging forms of grassroots popular power as the precursor to an emerging revolutionary rupture. The concept of “ungovernability” captured the essence of this notion, but it was an extremely unstable essence that highlighted some important organisational weaknesses facing those who hoped for revolution. Whereas on the streets ‘ungovernability’ was the slogan used by the youthful street fighters bent on attacking the symbols and representatives of authority in a way that challenged the state but did not necessarily build up a revolutionary alternative, the UDF leadership argued that ‘ungovernability’ was not an anarchistic drive, but referred rather to the process of making the townships ‘governable by the people’. To back up this ideology, written analysis of these ‘organs of popular power’ argued that the form, function and leadership of these structures reflected the dynamics of revolutionary transformation.3

For an insight into the discussions of and debates about “people’s power” that was prominent at the time see Boraine, A., “Mamelodi: From Parks to People’s Power”, Bachelor of Arts Honours Thesis, University of Cape Town, Department of Economic History, 1987; Callinicos, A., South Africa Between Reform and Revolution, London, Bookmarks, 1988; Jochelson, K. (ed.), “Urban Crisis: State Reform and Popular Reaction: A Case Study of Alexandra”, Bachelor of Arts Honours Dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Department of Sociology, 1988; Jochelson, K., “Reform, Repression and Resistance in South Africa: A Case Study of Alexandra

The second view diminished the significance of the emerging forms of popular power by arguing that “‘[p]eople’s power’ was primarily a response to the breakdown of formal local state structures, but also the lack of discipline amongst the militant youth, and com-tsotsis.”4 In other words, instead of conceding that people actually can make their own history, even substantive mass action and organisation was written off by this kind of state-centric analysis as simply a reaction to the internal collapse of the state system.

In the end, the literature on revolution and social movements is not particularly helpful in understanding the interface between the grassroots structures that emerged during this period and the state system at different levels.5

Instead of assuming that state systems are impervious to external challenges and that the logical strategic choice for a radical social movement is the revolutionary seizure of power, the emergence of a vast range of local-level negotiation processes highlights the minutiae of dynamics at a local level that demonstrated that parties locked in conflicts at the local level prior to the commencement of the transition often reached a point where the balance of power was in neither of their interests. To break this kind of ‘power stalemate’, negotiations to find a new

Township, 1979-1989”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 16, 1, 1990; Shubane, K., “The Soweto Rent Boycott”, Bachelor of Arts Honours Dissertation, Department of Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, 1988; Sisulu, Z., “People’s Education for People’s Power”, Transformation, 1, 1986; White, R., “Building People’s Power”, The Democrat, 2, 1, 1986. For a more contemporary overview of the civic movement, see Adler,

G. & Steinberg, J. (eds.). 2000. From Comrades to Citizens: The South African Civics Movement and the Transition to Democracy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

4 For an example of this perspective, see Seekings, J., “Civic Organisations in South African Townships”, in Moss, G. and Obery,

I. (eds.), South African Review 6, Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1992, p.222.

5 Riordan’s book is an excellent contemporary journalistic account of the Eastern Cape rebellion that escapes these two perspectives because his purpose is to document and describe rather than explain what happened with reference to the deeper underlying power dynamics rooted in the social structure, organizational agency and state action. Riordan 2022, op., cit.

equilibrium took place in those situations where the parties came to understand that negotiating may be less costly than destructive spiralling conflict.6

The Regional Revolt

In many ways, the images, language and iconography that make up the idealisation of the entire process of rebellion during the 1980s that culminated in the transition of the 1990s were drawn from the Eastern Cape. Nowhere else in the country (except possibly in parts of the Transvaal and Orange Free State) was there anything approximating the heroic battles between ‘people’ and ‘power bloc’ that the idealisation portrays.7 Across the region, from metropolitan Port Elizabeth to the smallest Karoo towns in the north and north-west, local activists launched campaigns, waged dramatically intense struggles and tried their best to mobilise and organise households on a door-to-door basis.

In the small Eastern Cape town of Kirkwood, a notice was pinned to the door of the so-called Bantu Administration offices in the local black township, that captured well the narrative that the amabutho would have used, but not what the suave urbane UDF leadership would have used at a Johannesburg press conference:

“Children of Africa, let us fight for our lives. We have lost our soldiers of Africa and they were killed by white pigs. Hollanders, Sea Dwellers, etc. Shoot us like birds, because we have no weapons. Those suckers of our bloods. I mean white pigs, Boers, white dogs, why does not emancipate our black nation from under this oppression? They must packed their bags and go to Holland their motherland. We

6 I wrote about this at the time based on my experiences in many Eastern Cape towns - needless to say, my reflections did not fit the prevailing narratives of the time. See Swilling, M., “Beyond Ungovernability: Township Politics and Local-Level Negotiations”, Policy Issues and Actors, Centre for Policy Studies, Johannesburg, November, 1988; Also, see Atkinson, D., “One City Initiatives”, in Swilling, M., et. al., Apartheid City in Transition, op. cit.

7 Riordan 2022, op. cit.

are uprising against government. May God bless you. By Comrades Soldiers of Africa.”8

Sure, one cannot discount the possibility that this was written by an agent provocateur under instructions of the police to discredit the mass democratic movement and therefore justify harsh security action - this happened often in the 1980s and it was relatively easy to detect. But this one rings true - a few weeks later these offices were attacked and burnt to the ground.

The following map of ‘flash points’ prepared by the Indicator SA project illustrates the geographical dispersal of reported processes of action and conflict in the region.9

Based on detailed studies of conflict in some 30 localities countrywide (with most of the case studies drawn from the Cape province), it was possible to draw up a typology of the conflict processes as they manifested themselves at local level over time.10 This typology is offered here as a general description of what happened in the communities identified in the map. However, it would be a mistake to see this as a linear set of phases that proceeded irreversibly to the final phase in all cases.

These non-linear phases started with grievance expression: the first signs of community protest emerged when grievances were expressed about appalling living conditions in the community. When these were not addressed by councillors or administrators, a delegation of local notables would normally present the grievances in the form of a petition of some kind or simply as a verbal articulation of ‘what the community felt’.

8 Quoted in Malan, R. 1990. R. My Traitor’s Heart, New York: Grove Press, p.90.

9 Palmer, R., “Militant Traditions: The Ungovernable Townships”, in Bennett, M. and Quin, D., Political Conflict in South Africa: Data Trends 1984-88, Durban, Indicator SA, Centre for Social and Development Studies, University of Natal, Durban, 1988.

10 This is based on what I wrote at the time, namely Swilling, M., “Local-Level Negotiations: Case Studies and Implications”, paper commissioned by the Urban Foundation, September 1987; and Swilling, M., “Beyond Ungovernability…”, op. cit.

Map 8.1: Township Flashpoints: Locating Political Violence. Source: Palmer, R., "Militant Traditions: The Ungovernable Townships". in Bennet, M. and Quin, D., Political Conflict in South Africa: Data Trends 1984

88. Durban. Indicator SA, Centre for Social and Developmental Studies, University of Natal, Durban, 1989.

Grievance expression was in all instances followed by an official rebuke: invariably, in case after case the authorities simply ignored, rebuked or dismissed petitioners. Officials frequently responded with excuses that rested on unproven bureaucratic assertions rather than reasoned discussion or demonstrable facts,

e.g. ‘this is a political matter ‘ or ‘this is not my jurisdiction’.

The official rebuke is what then catalyses the process of mobilisation of counter-power: given the absence of democratic representation in government and a lack of access to intermediaries like the media, professionals and liberal pressure groups, active elements in the community then resorted to the mobilisation of counter-power as the only reasonable response to official rebukes.

Mobilisation, however, has be turned into more sustained organisation: grassroots organisation then spread across communities resulting in regional and national webs and networks that facilitated resource transfers, communication and campaign building. It was these networks that were formalised into UDF structures from 1983 onwards that were, in turn, effective articulators of the link between the failure to resolve local grievances and the political nature of state power.

Mobilisation and organisation eventually translated into demonstrating power: local and regional organisational structures provided the basis for mounting campaigns to demonstrate counter-power on a coordinated basis.

The predictable repressive response to the demonstration of power is what then triggers the spiral of repression and resistance: as grassroots organisation developed and as campaigns gathered momentum, so the security forces escalated the level of repression. Although repression did weaken organisation, it also provided a compelling country-wide rationale for greater effort and determination to strengthen organisation, build solidarity and demonstrate that the weaker party actually did have the power to match the power of the state. This, in turn, was met with repression which in turn encouraged greater resistance.

To counteract repressive action, constructing dual power becomes necessary: as the cycle of repression and resistance continued, so it became necessary to form defensive decentralised structures capable of bringing greater numbers of people into the daily struggle to defend the residents from repression and to mount offensive strategies. It was these dynamics that contributed to the formation of street and area committees.

Finally, this all culminated in stalemate and negotiations: eventually, the repression-resistance cycle resulted in an equilibrium of sorts as the activists began to find community allies from outside the communities in both business and local state circles. Partly as a result of mass actions of various kinds, these alliances were built on the desire to find an alternative to brute repression to solve the problems. This helped to isolate the security forces to some extent at local level and effectively prepared the way for ‘local-level negotiations’. Because the security forces were absent from these negotiations because they did not share the perception of stalemate, they effectively reserved the power to destroy the negotiations process at will -a power that they used with devastating effect after the State of Emergency was declared in 1986.

Although an inadequate measure of organisational coherence, the number of recorded fatalities caused by political conflict does point to the levels of conflict between organised forces within communities and the security forces. As indicated in the tables below, if the high March 1985 figure tapering off into the also relatively high April 1985 figure is regarded as a special case because of the Langa Massacre and aftermath, it is clear how the number of fatalities from political conflict rose consistently from February 1985 through to July 1986, with the first six months of 1986 recording more fatalities than the last six months of 1985.

Fatalities arose out of many different circumstances, but some of the most common circumstances surrounding fatalities suffered by the community included massacres of demonstrating crowds, shootings at funerals, attacks on security vehicles by amabutho, random shooting of innocent people by security forces, planned assassinations or assaults by secret security units, and deaths while in custody. In most instances, deaths came at a time of heightened tension between communities and the security forces.

Given that the national State of Emergency that was implemented in June 1986 was aimed at ‘destabilising’ oppositional organisations and detaining activists, it should be no surprise that this corresponded with a drastic reduction in the number of fatalities. This correlation lends weight to the fatalities indicator as a measure of organisation, without claiming it is anything more than an indicator. (see Table 8.1.)

As far as mass campaigns were concerned, five are significant and can be measured from reports. The Eastern Cape was renowned for the effectiveness of its consumer boycotts. The following tables describe the timing and some of the processes.

Table 8.2: Rent/Service Charge Boycotts

Note: By May 1985 it was estimated that the Eastern Cape Development Board was owed more than R5m in rent and service charge arrears. By February 1987 Port Elizabeth’s township residents (falling under the control of the Ibhayi council) was estimated to owe the council R4m in arrears.

Source: Palmer, R., “Militant Traditions: The Ungovernable Townships” in Bennett, M. and Quin, D., Political Conflict in South Africa: Data Trends 198488, Durban, Indicator SA, Centre for Social and Development Studies, University of Natal, Durban, 1988.

Note: Many of the work stayaways that affected the Eastern Cape were part of a broader national stay-at-home calls. It was in the Port Elizabeth/Uitenhage conurbation that these national stayaways tended to have their greatest impact.

Source: Palmer, R., “Militant Traditions: The Ungovernable Townships”, in Bennett, M. and Quin, D., Political Conflict in South Africa: Data Trends 198488, Durban, Indicator SA, Centre for Development Studies, University of Natal, Durban, 1988.

Note: It is extremely difficult to establish precise dates for the beginning or end of consumer boycotts. Boycotts did not run continuously (as the above dates might imply) - in many instances they were suspended for brief periods and

then resumed again.

Source: Palmer, R., “Militant Traditions: The Ungovernable Townships”, in Bennett, M. and Quin, D., Political Conflict in South Africa: Data Trends 198488, Durban, Indicator SA, Centre for Development Studies, University of Natal, Durban, 1988.

The classic Eastern Cape urban context was the small white town centred around its CBD characterised by well serviced suburbs, and an outer perimeter comprising a black township with uniform houses centred around transport nodes, basic commercial services and all this surrounded by shacks. This was a particularly easy geographical unit to use as a basis for organising consumer boycotts, particularly if township business people stood to gain from the boycott of white shops and in return supported activists with food, money and transport. The consumer boycotts invariably had two sets of objectives. The first set was articulated by politically articulate local and regional leaders in terms of the need to force local businesses to support political demands such as the lifting of the State of Emergency, release of political prisoners, unbanning of organisations and so on. This set of demands were often published in pamphlets, news and other popular forms. The second set was articulated at a local level by local leaders involved in mobilising local constituencies and/or involved in justifying the strategy. To achieve these organisational objectives, local activists and leaders attached a set of local demands that were specific to each local context (e.g. repair and/or upgrading of services, improvement of recreational facilities, scrapping of local petty apartheid laws, stopping of forced removals or even the release from detention of a local leader or two). It was these demands (that were hardly ever given prominence in the print media) that became the basis for local-level negotiations between Consumer Boycott Committees and local business and local government representatives.11

The second form of action was the stay aways. Unlike the consumer boycott that could be sustained for fairly significant lengths of time, the stay away remained a short dramatic demonstration of power rather than the embryo of a general strike because in a stay away labour simply stays at home rather than occupying the points of production. Like the consumer boycott, the geography of the town or city was extremely helpful when it came to mobilising people to stay at home - the neighbourhood rather than the workplace was where the stay away was organised from (with the exception of Uitenhage in certain instances). The

Helliker, K. and White, R., “Asithengi’: Recent Consumer Boycotts”, in Moss, G and Obery, I., South African Review 4, Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987.

stayaways had a range of local determinants, with some stay aways motivated entirely by local community demands and others simply imposed on local communities by national campaigns. Quite often the overuse of the tactic and lack of coordination between workplace and community organisations led to serious confusion.12

Although not as prominent as the Transvaal during the 1985-86 period, there were also transport boycotts. The most well-known and probably longest transport boycott took place in Mdantsane-East London, but was over by 1985-86.13 There were other smaller boycotts at local level for short periods of time (e.g. there was one in the Port Elizabeth township of KwaZakhele that began in April 1985 in response to conflicts over the introduction of mini-buses).

The rent or service charge boycotts were often a combination of spontaneous household decisions to stop paying for affordability reasons, and organised strategies by civics and/ or youth congresses. Although spontaneous household decisions driven by declining household income as rent or service charges rose probably played the most important role, it would be a mistake to ignore the organisational energy that went into organising rent or service charge boycotts in certain communities. In particular, the rent or service charge boycotts connected to a larger nationally conceived campaign against township administration and government. This provided legally informed and linked activists with an important motive for introducing and/or supporting the boycotts of service and rental tariffs.

Finally, there were the sustained campaigns against the Community Councils and Black Local Authorities in the region. Prior to the conversion of all Community Councils into fully-fledged local authorities in terms of the Black Local Authorities

12 See Adler, G., “The Season of Stayaways: Popular Protest in Port

Elizabeth-Uitenhage in 1986”, unpublished mimeo, 1986; and

Swilling, M., “Stayaways, Urban Protest and the State”, South

African Research Service, South African Review 3, Johannesburg,

Ravan Press, 1986. 13 Swilling, M., “‘The buses smell of Blood’: The 1983 East London

Bus Boycott”, South African Labour Bulletin, 9, 5, 1984, pp. 45-75.

Act in 1986, there were 46 Community Councils established in terms of the Community Councils Act of 1977 and 4 Town Councils established in terms of the Black Local Authorities Act of 1982. The campaigns against the councillors and the councils themselves began in earnest from about September 1984 when a spate of service charge increases were promulgated. Local activists probably spent more time and energy mobilising people against these local government structures than anything else. They were motivated by a complex mix of political strategy, response to genuine grievances caused by the injustices of the system and competition between competing local elites. These campaigns -together with the inherent fiscal and administrative weaknesses of the system itself - were responsible for the virtual collapse of black local government by mid-1986. Table 8.5. reflects the collapse over time:14

Information taken from Swilling, M., ‘Reform, Resistance and Change at the Local Level in the Eastern Cape’, unpublished report prepared for the Urban Foundation, 1986, p.7.

These figures reveal that the majority of councillors resigned between September 1984 and May 1985, i.e. the period between the start of mass anti-BLA campaigns that began nationally with the Vaal Uprising in September 1984 and the declaration of the first State of Emergency. However, despite the large number of resignations during this period, only 39% of the Councils actually collapsed. The collapse of the majority of Councils (68%) occurred during the second period, i.e. June 1985 to July 1986.

This focus on primary campaigns and the recorded effects of these campaigns does not reveal the complexity of everyday political life in the Eastern Cape communities. As the old apartheid regulatory mechanisms broke down in the face of political pressure and because of their own inherent weaknesses, local activists found themselves having to deal with day-to-day problems. With no resources, hunted by the police and caught up in a whirlwind of fairly disorganised activity, these activists were unable to hold together all the components of the emerging processes. At an ideological level they promoted “people’s power”, i.e. the view that what was being created was the embryo of the new society by direct mass action from below. To quote one popular pamphlet titled Forward to People’s Power - Down with Minority Rule!:

“1. APARTHEID - THE REAL AGITATOR: The government and its stooges are blaming the current political turmoil on the work of so-called agitators. Before their own ignorant eyes they see how the people destroy the system day by day. No longer are we prepared to wait for Botha to make changes in our country - we are taking our destiny in our own hands. Democracy will not come at the day of our national liberation - it should be built already in the process of destroying the old order. …..

“5. BUILD PEOPLE’S POWER EVERYWHERE: The people have long decided that they have to take control over their own destiny. We must consolidate all organisations and the structures which organises and develops politically every single member of the community. Those structures (area committees, street committees, etc) must be tested to see its (sic) ability to sustain struggle. Our people have shown their understanding that organisation can only be strong if they are strong.”

Although these structures of ‘people’s power’ were far more robust and deep-rooted than some analysts have suggested,15 it is true that the reality did not measure up to the ideology. Rather than accepting the scepticism of observers like Seekings, a more reliable indicator of the problems with the ‘people’s power’ structures comes from the activists who were building these structures. In a report that I compiled at the time for the UDF,16 activists identified a range of grassroots organisational problems.

In certain areas where the councillors had resigned, the state’s administrative machinery chose to work through local civic associations and other UDF structures. Although this was seen by activists as recognition of the ‘people’s structures’ and hence a victory, many were concerned that by taking responsibility for certain administrative tasks they were effectively helping to “govern apartheid”. The road from this to co-option was seen as a very short one indeed. It was this organisational dynamic that supported the heated debates about “local-level negotiations” at the time.

Although the ‘people’s power structures’ were supposed to be more accountable and democratic, in reality the amabutho were only loosely controlled by these structures. This helps to

15 For this kind of sceptical reflection from a writer who witnessed some of these processes in the Transvaal region see Seekings, J., “Civic Organisations in South African Townships”, in South African Review 6: From ‘Red Friday’ to Codesa, edited by Moss, G. and Obery, I., Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1992.

16 Swilling, M., “Report: Apartheid Local Government and the Emergence of ‘People’s Power’ in the Eastern Cape”, unpublished mimeo, 1986.

explain the controversial people’s courts - whereas in certain areas there was evidence that these constituted genuine - albeit very rough - attempts to forge a new form of ‘popular justice’, there were probably more examples of ‘people’s courts’ that were in fact coercive ‘kangaroo courts’ that some local leaders tended to distance themselves from. In addition, clearly defined written rules and procedures and the necessary organisational skill to sustain self-organised structures were very rare. This militated against sustainable long-term institution-building and opened up these structures to two dangers: top-down coercive control from the leadership and/or undirected spontaneous action from below.

Although the language of the ideology of ‘people’s power’ often masked what were in reality quite often very mundane activities of ordinary people involved with the struggle for daily survival in impoverished conditions, this language led the security forces to believe that the street and area committees were in fact part of an elaborate revolutionary plan to revive the 196061 cell structure that was devised by the ANC to launch the armed struggle. This, in turn, invited vicious repressive retaliation from the security forces for activities that were probably quite harmless and which had little to do with the crudely armed amabutho squads that were committed to meeting violence with violence.

Activists were also concerned about the absence of strong and effective regional and even national coordination of ‘people’s power’. This weakness, it was argued, meant that campaigns were shaped by local rather than regional or national demands and that this enabled the state to use different strategies in different areas,

e.g. stopping forced removals in Duncan Village (East London) and proceeding with them in Langa.

Finally, activists clearly recognised the limits of a movement that was confined to a single group area, namely the black/African group area. It was out of this limitation that the demand for non-racial municipalities emerged in certain areas.

Although a large number of people in the communities were involved in and/or affected by to a lesser or greater degree the campaigns mounted by the local activists during the peak of the revolt during the first six months of 1986, in the end it was a relatively small group of local leaders who had the energy, moral legitimacy, resources and (in some cases) coercive capacity to mount what Robin Palmer has described as the “tenth frontier war”.17 The Black Sash estimated conservatively that 1,200 people were detained in the Eastern Cape between June 1986 and late 1988. If it is assumed that the security forces managed to detain at least the rump of the activist leadership, and given the decline in resistance the extraction of this leadership caused, it can be assumed that this constitutes more or less the size of the inner leadership core that effectively executed the 1984-86 Eastern Cape rebellion. The outer limits of this leadership grouping was probably three times this size. But larger, if the amabutho leaders are included.

Three conceptions exist of the Eastern Cape rebellion. The first is the “frontier war” image developed from a liberal perspective by Robin Palmer18 and which appeared repeatedly as a powerful leit motif in the writings of Port Elizabeth-based liberal human rights campaigner Rory Riordan.19 The second is the orthodox revolutionary line developed by intellectuals close to the UDF and the ANC. For them, the Eastern Cape rebellion provided the best example of how a mass-based urban-based movement could develop into a revolutionary movement capable of challenging state power itself. Thirdly, there was the security force interpretation that took the UDF/ANC position at face value in order to justify its conspiracy theory that the rebellion was purely the result of the work of a small group of agitators rather than the function of resistance to the apartheid system.

The notion of a clash between two power blocs that these three conceptions share tends to mask the way that urban conflict leads in complex and locally specific ways to the breakdown of narratives of survival within the interstices of urban apartheid, and the definition and development of new “urban meanings” more appropriate to changing urban dynamics and processes.20

17 Palmer, R., op. cit., p.53. 18 Palmer, R., op. cit. 19 Riordan 2022, op. cit. This perspective typifies his writings at the

time in the Port Elizabeth journal that he runs called Monitor. 20 This notion of a changing urban narrative that emerges from

struggle was heavily influenced by my understanding of ‘urban

Out of the stress and pain of the 1984-86 rebellion there emerged signs and elements of an alternative urban meaning that prefigured what later became a core element of the non-racial democratic constitution after 1994. The clearest indication of this revolved around the notion of a non-racial municipality. In a region-wide survey conducted in 1986 amongst local activist leadership and amongst white local government officials, it was found that the notion of a non-racial municipality was seen as a possible ‘fresh start’ for the region because it was seen as a concept that all stakeholders could support.21 It was this concept that became the central demand of local activists and thus became the focus of a number of local-level negotiations.22

The impact of the social movements and negotiations on white local officials was measured in the 1986 survey and it was found that of those interviewed, 63% were in favour of some form of non-racial alternative and that an additional 21% believed that the black township should be administered by the same authority that administered the white town.23 In April 1986 the Queenstown municipality formally proposed to a conference of the Cape Municipal Association to discuss the formation of some form of non-racial municipality at the local level. This may sound trivial from today’s perspective, but such a statement in the midst of the Eastern Cape revolt was highly significant. Similar calls were made by the Town Clerk of Port Elizabeth in July 198624 and by the Midlands Chamber of Industries in January 1986.25

However, instead of supporting the local negotiation processes in the Eastern Cape that could have allowed this region

meaning’ in the great book that was I was reading in the early 1980s by Castells, M., The City and the Grassroots, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1983.

21 Swilling, M., “Reform Resistance….”, op. cit.

22 For writing about these dynamics at the time see Atkinson, D., “Local Government Restructuring: White Municipal Initiatives, 1985-88”, Institute for Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 1989; Swilling, M., “Local-Level Negotiations…”, op. cit., p.28.

23 Swilling, M., “Reform, Resistance…”, op. cit., p.28.

24 Botha, P.K., “A Few Thoughts on Local Government in the Port Elizabeth Urban Area”, unpublished mimeo, (translated from Afrikaans), July 1986.

25 Eastern Province Herald, 29.12.86.

to amicably resolve problems at the local level, the central state intervened from mid-1986 onwards with three new reform-cumrepressive strategies: the National State of Emergency, Regional Services Councils and township upgrading to the tune of R1 billion over five years for the Eastern Cape (more on this unfolding national process and its impact on Uitenhage in Chapter 9).

Back to Uitenhage

The preceding section provides an overview of the changing regional context for the local processes and dynamics that emerged in Uitenhage during the first half of 1986. The complex set of conflictual and negotiation processes that emerged led to concrete changes in how the local stakeholders came to understand the future of Uitenhage’s urban system. Although this was overridden by a forced removal managed by the activated security system acting on a central state mandate after the National State of Emergency was declared in July 1986, the processes that preceded this destructive event gave rise to a new urban project that was finally allowed to come to fruition after the national transition began in 1990. Before examining the actual negotiations in detail, a closer insight into the internal workings of the social movements in Uitenhage is required.

Taking advantage of the general perception in the community that the KTC had decided to take legal action rather than seek negotiated solutions, activists began to strengthen and systematise organisation. They were helped by political and security conditions which were easing and by December, following the famous negotiated settlement that ended the Port Elizabeth Consumer Boycott26, security force harassment had diminished considerably. The general feeling in the community was that advances were being made and that victories were possible. It was this sense of expectation coupled to the specificity of Langa’s struggle that facilitated the rapid growth and entrenchment of the street and area committees.

26 For the best account of this process see Riordan 2022, op. cit.

Contrary to the popular view that street and area committees were initially produced by a deepening revolutionary rupture between state and people,27 it was actually the context of breakdown and social disruption towards the end of 1984 that brought people together in small meetings at street level. The most notable comment made by all activists when asked about street committees was, to quote a good example, “when it comes to issues of trying to ensure discipline amongst the people, like theft and quarrels, then they [street committees] were quite active.”28 Otherwise, this informant said, “they were not very strong from a ‘political’ point of view.”

The absence of the most basic services such as sewerage, adequate water supplies, drainage, electricity and shelter, made daily life both a struggle and the cause of internal friction. The disposal of buckets of nightsoil when the authorities failed to collect them, for example, created huge problems. If they were disposed in holes dug for the purpose, crucial questions were raised: Where must these holes be? Must everyone use them? If so, who will dig the holes? What about water from the few available taps? Numerous squabbles arose when women did their washing at taps while others were queueing up to fill their water buckets. Then, of course, there was the problem of where new arrivals in the community should build their shacks. Each new arrival meant more pressure on available services, i.e. more people wanting to do their washing, more people at the queue at the tap and more people needing to dispose of their sewage. The division and fencing-off of yards, garbage disposal, child-care and many other problems of collective living that state agencies usually take care of, became the responsibility of the residents themselves and therefore, a potential source of friction. Local leaders had to face these challenges and find solutions - but this is not what

27 For two examples which share an over-politicised view of street

committees, see my own unpublished paper on this, namely

Swilling, M., “Apartheid Local Government and the Emergence

of People’s Power in the Eastern Cape”, May 1986; and Suttner,

R., “Popular Justice in South Africa”, paper delivered at Sociology

Seminar, University of the Witwatersrand, 1986. 28 Interview with Freddie Magugu, Uitenhage branch organiser for

the National Union of Textile Workers, 27.5.1987.

strategists of revolution sitting in meetings in Johannesburg were thinking about.

In addition to these communal tensions, unemployment and poverty created cleavages within the household. Young unemployed men - especially those who had turned to crime - fed off the household without contributing financially. Furthermore, because they were too poor, they could not afford the lobola required to turn their sexual liaisons into marriage. This often resulted in offspring outside marriage that the parents ended up taking care of. The tensions that this caused between unmarried mothers living with ‘mothers-in-law’ frequently blew up into severe arguments about familial rights and duties. The absence of formal marriage arrangements also caused bloody conflicts between men who accused each other of ‘stealing’ women. Then, of course, there were tensions that arose out of the economic redundancy of the traditional male head of the family. When his sons or wife were the breadwinners, he experienced this as undermining his authority, thus removing the traditional patriarchal mechanism for resolving conflict.

These kinds of communal and household tensions that emerged at the time in impoverished communities were well documented by only a handful of researchers at the time29, giving rise to organic coping mechanisms only some of which were non-violent. However, when these tensions are overlaid by the perceived failure or breakdown of state-coordinated regulatory mechanisms, then members of the community can only cope if they can find alternative dispute-settling or administrative structures. Given the context of rising levels of violent conflict between the police and members of the community and the permanent failure of the KTC to deal with the squatter problem, then it is unsurprising that new forms of social organisation began to emerge to handle community and household problems. The most logical structure to create in this context was a meeting point for people that occupied an area that brought them into direct daily contact with one another, i.e. the street or block.

29 See Ritchkin, E., “Mobilisation and Organisation in Mapulaneng”,

Honours Dissertation, Johannesburg, University of the

Witwatersrand, 1987.

When asked who were the most active street committee members, Magugu said:

“Most of them were elderly people. The idea [of street committees] itself was not projected in a political way. People regarded street committees as being things that looked into the problems of the street. This means that if you project that they were acting in that sense, then people would always look for elderly people to take up their problems. Every street in Langa had a street committee. It was something that came up quite rapidly with no political input.”30

It is also worth noting that ward committees were established by KTC Councillors as part of their project of establishing their leadership roles and legitimacy in Uitenhage’s townships. Unsurprisingly, after the Councillors had resigned or had been killed, those who were active in ward committees continued as the core of what became street and area committees.

After the Massacre it was these pre-existing structures that came to fulfil two functions: they were identified by the activists as useful networks and meeting points when organisation and meetings were effectively prohibited; and they provided crucially important forums capable of absorbing the influx of people into grassroots structures. This is what underlies the comments of two leading activists:

“Before the Massacre they [the street committees] had just a low profile. They were there before the Massacre, but not very strong and only in some areas. But after the Massacre they just rocketed.”31

“The police and the community councillors lost control of the people, they have no control over the people. That is why people formed these area committees to prevent the crime rate and keep control of the community.”32

30 Interview with Magugu, op. cit. 31 Ibid. 32 Interview with Weza Made, 29.11.1985.

Drawing from comments made by activists and my own observations, the following pattern of organisation emerges: before the Massacre, inconspicuous forms of local organisation emerge in some areas to handle household and community problems; after the Massacre there was a massive influx of people into these meeting points and for the first time activists begin using the term “street committee” to describe these meetings; with the declaration of the 1985 Emergency, many of these meetings ceased or became much smaller. It was only towards the end of 1985, from about October, that the most politicised activists in the upper echelons of UYCO began formalising the structures and using them as foci for organisational consolidation under repressive conditions.

The organisational drive from the end of 1985 aimed at establishing an elected street committee for each street. Once these committees had been elected at rather large but loosely organised house meetings, then they elected representatives to area committees. Langa was divided into five areas each presided over by an area committee of between ten and twenty people. The area committees acted as a higher authority over the street committees, i.e. structures to which more difficult problems could be referred. Then at township level, there was a committee elected by the area committees, called the Coordinating Committee or Advisory Committee. These structures were put into place by energetic groups of activists who would spend three to four weeks concentrating on one specific area. One activist described the process as follows:

“So what we did was that we went at night for each street and we called a mass meeting in one of the houses to address the people. We explained what a street committee was and why we wanted to form them, what are their future goals so that the people can have a clear idea of what they are participating in. One of us has to be there when the street committee was formed...When we finished, the election followed and they decide who they want to represent them in the street committee. We make it clear to them that it is very important to them for street committees to be formed and especially in these conditions and the situation we are now in, with the repression of the South African government and the people fighting under the State of Emergency, banning of meetings, troops and police. It is very difficult for people to meet and discuss their problems in mass meetings. So it will be very dangerous for us when the repression is high to sit back and wait until the government will allow us to have the freedom of movement and the freedom of expression. We must adapt ourselves to work under these conditions and continue with the struggle.”33

Given that many ordinary people in these structures were there to resolve basic communal and household problems, a key problem lay in how the balance between control functions and political functions could be achieved. Many activists complained that the committees had emerged too quickly and there were too few experienced cadres to give them direction. Consequently, street committees were not structured by a single directive from a coordinated leadership centre, nor did they develop in a unilinear direction. The quirks and concerns of the dominant personalities played the most crucial role in pushing some committees into coherent organs of political mobilisation, while others became rather disjointed marriage guidance associations or street cleaning collectives. One activist said: “Some of the people you find that it is the first time they participate in these structures and they lack the experience, some don’t even know what they are fighting for.”34

To coordinate the street and area committees according to coherent guidelines, a new structure was established in late 1985. This was called the Uitenhage People’s Congress (UPECO). It met on Wednesdays and the chairpersons of all the area committees attended. Representatives of the executives of all the organisations also attended these meetings. The main activity of these meetings was to deal with problems, queries and issues raised in the area committee meetings that needed to be referred

33 Interview with leading UYCO activist, March 1986. 34 Ibid.

to a higher authority. UPECO would then discuss the ways of handling these issues and if action was required, tasks would be assigned to the relevant organisations, i.e. civic matters to URECO, youth matters to UYCO, women’s issues to UWCO, and so forth. If there was a very serious matter too sensitive to handle even within UPECO, then the “Committee of Ten” would meet secretly to decide on a course of action. It was within UPECO that activists formulated in early 1986 a “code of conduct” and “timetable” for these committees that stipulated what days of the week they should meet and when “social problems” or “political issues” should be discussed.

The UPECO exercise was an attempt to formalise the dual function of the committees and in this respect was only partially successful. In the end, the removal and police violence (e.g. funerals) became the main “political issues” that were discussed at street level. There was very little evidence that any “ideological education” took place in the committees (e.g. study groups, discussion of ANC strategy, or even UDF educational material, etc). The “social problems” discussed included domestic squabbles, crime control, street cleaning, shack allocation, health conditions, child care, transport problems and occasionally unemployment. The most important of these was crime control which included issues ranging from petty crime, but in addition issues related to marital conflicts, and local neighbourhood conflicts also had to be dealt with.

In general the committees spent a lot of time dealing with petty crime. Thieves were found and ordered to return the goods to the original owner, thugs who had assaulted people would be required to cover the medical fees of those who had been assaulted, wife beaters would be brought together with their wives and relatives to talk about the family problems.

There was also a general campaign to disarm the criminals or at least to prevent them from carrying arms into shebeens. Shebeens were given specific times to close so that troublesome drunks could be kept off the streets at night. This was an effective way of making the walk home through Langa’s dark unlit streets measurably safer for thousands of workers. The general principle was to avoid the use of physical force. The emphasis, instead, was to use a political logic to divert grievances outwards against the state. Made expressed this in these terms:

“In these things we get a chance of educating people about our struggle. We try and bring people nearer to our cause. What we say is that fighting each other as oppressed people won’t help us, the major thing which people must concentrate on is our fight against the system.”35

On why shebeens were told to close at 9 p.m., Made said:

“It is because some of these fights and attacks start as people leave the shebeens for home and most importantly because people can be victims of the system which is patrolling our streets.”36

Major crime, however, was not dealt with by the committees. This was not for any theoretical or moral reason, but because in practical terms crimes such as rape required medical examination. Murder too was referred to the police. There was no people’s court in Langa, although there was one in KwaNobuhle.

The street and area committees were crucial not only for the mobilisation of power, but for the instrumental use of that power to win recognition and concessions via the negotiation process. Without this network of committees, the leadership would never have been able to negotiate because a mechanism for obtaining mandates and gauging opinion would not have been available. Made said:

“Whatever we get the mandate for from the street committees. Even under this heavy repression we do hold meetings and so we do get mandates from the people… So that we know that from each street the problems of the street will come. In each and every street we will know

35 Interview with Made, 29.11.1985. 36 Ibid.

what is happening and what we will go to present to the authorities is really a reflection of the real situation.”37

“The community supports these negotiations. All the negotiating committees must report back to the community. The community monitors these negotiations through the street and area committees. Even before we go to negotiate we scout for views and suggestions from the people through the street committees.”38

Street committee meetings varied in size and frequency. When a particular section of the township was faced with a direct threat,

e.g. vigilante action or removal, then large meetings of a few hundred could take place a few times a week. This, however, was unusual. Most of the time, a large meeting of a few hundred people from the street would meet fortnightly or even less often. The street committees themselves started off by meeting weekly, but as the crisis mounted during the months that led up to the 1986 Emergency, they began to meet more often. The smaller more disciplined area committees provided the link between the street and leadership levels. This coordination became particularly important during the negotiation phases.

The story of Mrs Peta, a middle-aged assistant in a dental surgery and mother of a son in his early twenties, was typical of these times. Whereas before the 1985 Emergency she used to make disparaging comments about her son’s politics and why he needed to take such risks “for nothing”, by early 1986 she was participating in her local street committee. Interviewed in mid1987 when talking of this activity was dangerous, she had this to say:

37 Interview with Weza Made, 9.3.1986. 38 Ibid.

This story confirms what was probably the most significant aspect of the street committees, namely their ability to facilitate grassroots participation. Recognising this, one activist said:

“Street committees are the best way of organising and mobilising people. It is the easiest way of having campaigns and support and making the point that at least the people will support and participate fully in our campaigns. It is the easiest way again to help the people and get their ideas, sometimes more so than in mass meetings, because in mass meetings some people are free to express their ideas, but many people are afraid, maybe because they think their ideas will not be accepted by the whole.”39

The most dramatic interpretation of the role of the street committees was given at a mass meeting of squatters in May 1986. The speaker got up and said:

“Comrades, when we talk of the clause of the Freedom Charter that says “the people shall govern”, it is not right. This is because the people are governing! Today we have the people’s government that did not exist when the Freedom Charter was written during the times of Z. K. Mathews in 1955. If you have a problem with your house, take your matter to your government and not to the puppet local

39 Interview with Langa activist, January 1986.

authorities. The people have started to exercise their own future government of South Africa, just as it has been prophesied in the Charter in 1955.”40

At the end of his speech he said: “Viva the people’s government, Viva!” The crowd replied: “ VIVA!” The speaker: “The People..!” The Crowd: “...are governing.” And a new slogan was coined.”41

The Youth

Although “the youth”42 played an important role in the buildup of popular power. The role played by the amabutho was problematic because they tended to use arbitrary violence and act autonomously from civic structures. Activists knew that this could weaken the support base of the community organisations over the long run, especially amongst older people. The activist leadership were acutely aware of these problems but struggled to secure durable structures to control the amabutho. Their most powerful ideological weapon was to demonstrate how Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) was subordinate to the political leadership of the ANC, and therefore so too must the amabutho be subordinate to the civic structures.

I recall a discussion in a shack in Langa with the man introduced to me as ‘the General’. Clearly less educated than the trade union and civic leadership, he defined himself as a soldier and leader of the amabutho. It was not hard to imagine him carefully and earnestly plotting an attack on a police vehicle and then leading that attack himself. Although a man of few words, he felt it necessary to reassure me that the amabutho were like MK – “we get our instructions from the leadership”.

40 Tape recording of various speakers at mass meeting in Langa

stadium, 8.5.1986. 41 Ibid. 42 In many ways the notion of “the youth” is a misnomer because it

was a category that implied all “youth” and then applied to this inclusive category certain general behavioural traits that were actually the traits of a minority, albeit a very loud and visible minority. It is therefore more accurate to refer to the amabutho without collapsing all youth into this category.

Although youth groups committed to meeting violence with violence emerged as early as 1984, it took some time before a formal structure evolved. By mid-1985 the amabutho were organised into so-called “action committees” whose role was consciously defined in military terms. This organisational initiative and self-definition tended to come from within amabutho ranks and not from the activist leadership or formal community organisations. The action committees had a crude military command structure and enforced their own internal military discipline. The most organised groups comprised people who changed their names and began living together in groups on the outskirts of the townships in what they referred to as “bases”. Up until late 1985 there was an overall military commander -referred to as a “general” - who coordinated the activities of the action committees. However, he was captured by the security forces, charged for Umkhonto We Sizwe activities and sentenced to 24 years in prison. Although the General had managed to keep the amabutho under control to some extent, after his capture the action committees became increasingly violent as an anti-social element gained the upper hand in some areas.

The activist leadership were forced to step in to take countermeasures. A Military Council was established and a group of “commanders” appointed who were politically aware and trustworthy from the activists’ point of view, but also respected by the amabutho. The identity of this Council remained secret, except for the overall commander who was the liaison between the area committees and the action committees. In other words, the activist leadership could only control the amabutho to the extent that they could retain the loyalty of some key amabutho leaders. Not all amabutho were UYCO members and even if they were, this was not formal disciplined membership in the organisational sense. This rather tenuous link was coupled to the permanent possibility and reality of tension between the autonomous action committees on the one hand and the street and area committees on the other.43

43 Interviews with Magugu, op. cit., Made, op. cit., Langa activist, op.

cit. Also based on interview with amabutho leaders in Langa, June

1986.

The activist leadership were painfully aware that without a disciplined relationship between the area committees and executives of the community organisations on the one hand and the action committees and Military Council on the other, they would be unable to prevent the amabutho from using force against the community. As a result, the activist leaders worked out a framework for winning the allegiance of the amabutho. To quote Made’s version of this:

“What I did was never condemn them and I tried to say look I think we can move together and sit together and tell stories and discuss the history of resistance. I found them so fascinated when I told them we can discover a history of resistance from the time of the Youth League when Mandela joined the struggle in 1943, the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955 and the formation of Umkhonto We Sizwe. They were so interested and they listened. What I found out was that when you talk to them about MK they were very interested in that they would like to imitate it. They would ask me to tell them about Umkhonto. I told them that MK was the most disciplined military and so they wanted to imitate that discipline. I told them that anyone who has done something wrong in MK made a correction and was disciplined by the army. MK is very loyal to the ANC and MK is aware that it cannot negotiate with the Botha government, it is only Mandela, Oliver Tambo and the ANC that goes there. MK is there to protect the people and confuse the government. So they took all those things into the local situation. They saw us as the ANC, so that is why they are now very loyal, because of what I have told them.”44

The amabutho commanders confirmed this conception of the relationship when they said:

“Before we do anything we go to the people and tell them. If they refuse we stop, because it is the people who must govern, not amabutho…The action committee consults with

44 Interview with Made, 9.3.1986.

the executive and the area committee…The area committee has stopped us to kill people here in the township.”45

The activist leadership understood the youth and knew how to handle them. Displaying a sensitive insight into the problem, Made said:

“You find that young people are so emotional, they think that we are going to get liberation tomorrow, so some of the things they do are out of hand, but they are innocent because they think they are doing the right thing without any knowledge that they are wrong.”46

The amabutho had their own internal disciplinary structure. If any resident had a complaint about the behaviour of one of their members, this was taken up through the area committees and then to the leadership who would then take the matter up with the Military Council. Usually, the Military Council would isolate the offender for a few weeks, confining him to his house. Or, if the crime was severe enough, he would be physically punished.

Despite these formal structures and agreements, the cut and thrust of township conflict, unstable conditions and the sheer enormity of the demands on the relatively small activist leadership prevented the amabutho from being brought effectively under control. Although the amabutho violence was drastically reduced by about February 1986, there were still occasional reports of arbitrary violence, e.g. stonings of buses, beatings of consumer boycott breakers, killing of AZAPO supporters47 and forcible disruption of funerals of “sellouts”. For every activist

45 Interview with amabutho leaders, op. cit. 46 Interview with Made, 29.11.1985. 47 AZAPO refers to the Azanian People’s Organisation which was

a rival political party on the left of the political spectrum that adhered to the Black Consciousness ideology. It was quite common in the Eastern Cape for rank-and-file activists to assume that AZAPO members were agents of the state simply because they were not for the struggle as defined by the ANC and the UDF. At times there was a certain truth in this claim because state security officials did at one stage set up a front organisation that claimed to be allied to AZAPO - a claim that AZAPO itself denied. Nevertheless, there were occasions when people who were deemed to be

who was detained, a potential controller of amabutho violence was removed. At times, Magugu said, the “amabutho became a reign of terror over the community.”48 In the end, the amabutho took on the system where the community was weakest - on the streets and barricades. Any security policeman worth his salt had ample opportunity to exploit this; all he needed was a handful of agent provocateurs.

On a lighter note, it is worth mentioning that the amabutho developed a strange anti-shebeen alliance with middle-aged women. Both these groups had a vested interest in running down shebeens - the male amabutho because they could not afford the cost of shebeen liquor and hence had no access to the women who frequented the shebeens; and the middle-aged mothers who held the view that their daughters “got pregnant” because they went to shebeens. So when the amabutho enforced the closure of shebeens at 9 p.m., this was met with considerable approval from older women.

Community Organisations

Langa and KwaNobuhle had very different organisational structures. In general, the leadership of the various community organisations was based in KwaNobuhle and revolved largely around Ficks Kobese of MACWUSA, Emson Banda, who was chairperson of the Parents’ Committee, and Wonga Nkala, president of the Uitenhage Youth Congress. These articulate, politicised and public figures were well-known in UDF circles as the “Uitenhage comrades” and could draw on a support base of students, youth and a relatively small group of MACWUSA organised workers. The inner policymaking structure was the so-called the “Committee of 10” - a secret committee that gave effect to its decisions via the various organisations. Significantly, KwaNobuhle did not have street committees. Instead, area committees and the executives of the organisations were the key

informers were attacked by amabutho on the grounds that they were ‘anti-struggle’.

48 Interview with Magugu, op. cit.

structures. The youth played an important directing role in these structures. Furthermore, a people’s court was established.

The organisational links between Langa’s structures and the largely KwaNobuhle-based community organisations was very unclear. This was probably because of the mobilisation of support bases with different profiles. Unlike in KwaNobuhle, the Langa structures were rooted in the material requirements of impoverished residents living in an unserviced township. Social cohesion depended on organisation at street level. Furthermore, some of the leading Langa activists had strong links with COSATU unions.

Very few of Langa’s activists held formal executive positions in any of the organisations and none of them were public figures or well-known in UDF (or COSATU) circles. Langa’s street and area committees were not given formal representation in the KwaNobuhle-based structures except, of course, when they were specifically invited to send representatives to meetings of activists. This division between the Langa and KwaNobuhle leadership was reflected in where they were contactable: the KwaNobuhle leadership could invariably be found in the Black Sash-funded Advice Office on the south-east side of town, while the Langa leadership usually gathered at the COSATU offices on the north-western fringe of town next to Langa.

Given that KwaNobuhle’s formal community organisations had very shallow roots in Langa, it was not surprising that the Langa Coordinating Committee became the de facto civic representative of Langa’s residents as the squatter struggle against removal became the dominant dynamic of resistance in the community. Instead of simply acting as a delegation to represent squatter grievances to the authorities, it became a key coordinator of organisation and struggle. It also came to represent Langa’s struggle as special and therefore distinct from KwaNobuhle’s. It was this, plus the leadership’s union connections, that resulted in a power struggle over the Langa issue between the Langa and KwaNobuhle leaderships.

The dominance of the KwaNobuhle leadership meant that Langa’s leadership had virtually no access to resources. Langa’s organisational infrastructure was built and sustained without financial support. There were no full-time paid organisers, nor was there money for pamphlets, reading material, offices, legal assistance or publicity. The financial resources that did exist were accessible largely to the KwaNobuhle leadership. The unionists at least had offices which gave the Langa leadership access to a telephone, a meeting place to connect with outside support workers and occasionally a photostat machine. Normal organisational procedures were absent such as, for example, bookkeeping, budgets, minute taking, membership lists, training, specialisation, documentation and forward planning. Not even the activists were sustained by donations to cover their living expenses, a particularly severe problem for those who were unemployed. Instead, most activists made up for all these organisational deficiencies with Herculean efforts to inform their communities without media, to sustain organisation without resources, to build support without promises of improvements and lead without clearly defined structures. It is not surprising that they were continuously exhausted and often fell asleep or arrived late during crucial meetings - much to the disdain of the relaxed support workers, visitors and media people.

Contrary to expectations, this situation was not improved by the founding of URECO in January 1986. This was an important step for the whole anti-removal struggle because up until this stage, the LCC was largely an ad hoc grouping of leaders whose organisational connection with the main organisations and street committees was unclear. It made sense, therefore, that a “civic” take responsibility for the removal. Unfortunately, the initiative to establish URECO came from the KwaNobuhle-based Kobese grouping which had, until this stage, attempted to dislodge the Langa leadership located in the LCC from their position as representatives of Langa’s high profile anti-removal struggle. URECO was formed at a meeting in KwaNobuhle to which the Langa leadership was not invited and the key resolution of the meeting concerned the removals. However, after the Langa leadership threatened to publicly denounce URECO, Weza Made accepted an offer of an executive position in the organisation, thus preventing an open rupture amongst the leadership. Made’s demand to be included in the URECO executive could not be ignored because he had the full backing of Langa’s street and area committees plus significant COSATU unionists based at Volkswagen, although the latter did not count for much in the eyes of Kobese and his associates.

If Langa’s social movement had had absolutely no access to resources, its impact on state and society would have been negligible. The LCC connected with various “operators”49 which gave the movement access to crucial media, academic and publicity resources. There were four groups of operators: lawyers, academics, media and service organisations. By far the most important service organisation was the Grahamstown Rural Committee (GRC). The GRC was established as part of the network of rural support groups loosely affiliated to the National Committee Against Removals (NCAR). The GRC had a local committee of progressive Grahamstown-based intellectuals and employed Sue Lund, an ex-student activist from Rhodes University and member of the UDF-affiliated Grahamstown Democratic Action Committee. Lund had a fairly well-equipped office in Grahamstown and a nationwide network of support group contacts to draw on. The GRC’s main function was the coordination of legal aid and publicity. PLANACT, a collective of engineers, architects, planners and urban sociologists, complemented the GRC’s activities by acting as consultants on the upgrading of proposals that the LCC presented to the authorities. I was a co-founder of PLANACT, which was based in Johannesburg, had offices, funds, full-time workers and its members were largely left-wing intellectuals. Without these skills, the LCC would not have been able to present alternative planning proposals to the state. Finally there was Mono Badela of City Press and Patrick Bracher, a Port Elizabeth lawyer. Badela committed himself to keeping Langa in the news, which meant that there was good international coverage because of the way that foreign media used to take their cue from City Press reports. Bracher, whose fees were covered by the Urban Foundation via the Legal Resources

49 I am using this term in the way that Castells uses it, i.e. to refer

to those agencies that connect the movement to civil society. See

Castells, M., The City and the Grassroots, Los Angeles and Berkeley,

University of California Press, 1983.

Centre, became a crucial source of legal aid and advice throughout the struggle.

In short, Langa’s social movement was made largely by the voluntary practices of the people whose grievances it represented. Welling up from below, these grievances generated an organisational structure that enabled people to cope and live in conditions of deep conflict, violence and grinding poverty. Wanting only to protect their space and right to create their own environment, Langa’s residents could mobilise only one resource: their collective capacity to organise, protest and demand. It was only when the movement connected with its operators that it had access to resources, but this was on terms that the movement’s structures had no direct control over. Unlike comparable movements,50 these resources did not become the foundation of a stabilised professional leadership.

Ideology

The most distinctive feature about the popular ideology of township movements in the 1980s was their complexity. The mix of ideas, symbols, demands and perceptions was not codified by a single ideological centre. Nor did the movement have a uniform class profile across localities. The specificities of each local terrain of struggle also generated different ideologies and consciousness. In this section an attempt will be made to reconstruct the worldview of Uitenhage’s social movement.51

50 See studies of the US ghetto revolts and Spanish Citizens’ movement in Castells, M., op. cit., more importantly, see also the seminal text of these dynamics by Piven, F. and Cloward, R., Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, New York, 1977.

51 Because this cannot be achieved by reading off the elements of this worldview from documents, formal statements or even the stated perceptions of leaders, notes and tape recordings of a mixture of group interviews, informal discussions and mass public meetings were used for this account. Formal quotes have been used when they confirm the general tendency being described. I was heavily influenced at the time by the writings of Alain Touraine

-see his Touraine, A., The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1981. This text justified the researcher’s role as a participant. As indicated

Uitenhage’s popular ideology was a complex mix of apparently contradictory elements. A speech made by UYCO president, Wonga Nkala, to 60,000 people on the first anniversary of the Massacre, is an example worth quoting to illustrate this point:

“In 1960 all the people of South Africa were complaining about the unfair distribution of wages. They were also protesting against the carrying of passes. In 1960 the people were shot dead in Sharpeville for having fought this. This regime continues to assault and attack the people. Today we are saying, this country is not ours, but it’s our father’s country. This is our forefather’s country. This country belongs to Hintsa, Naka, Cetshwayo, Moeshoeshoe and many others. We therefore cannot betray that to anybody whatever it may cost. We are prepared to fight shoulder to shoulder, we are prepared to travel this journey together from Egypt into the promised land. We are prepared to die together or lie with one another on the road to freedom. We say enough is enough.”52

National liberation was one of the more important ideological elements in Langa’s social movement. By this is meant the view that, to quote one activist, “this is an illegitimate government” that “we must bring down.”53 In order “to be liberated in our lifetime”, one speaker urged, “we have the street committees and area committees. We are here to build the people’s government and this demands your commitment and participation.”54 For the average activist, this struggle was a non-racial struggle. This message was repeated ad nauseam. Talking in deep Xhosa at a mass meeting of squatters, one speaker said: “We must commit ourselves to educate our people about non-racialism because our struggle is not about colour. We therefore invite the white

in the Introduction, it was only in the late 1990s that I discovered transdisciplinary research methods that achieves the same thing. 52 Tape recording of a speech given by Wonga Nkala, UYCO President, on 21.3.1986, commemorative anniversary of the Langa Massacre. 53 Tape recording of mass meeting held in KwaNobuhle stadium, 21.3.1986. 54 Ibid.

community to join us.”55 One of Weza Made’s concerns was the ideological consequences of the white petition against the squatters: “People are saying the white man is the enemy.”56 The most remarkable feature about Langa during this period - and indeed throughout the country -was the extent to which non-racialism had penetrated downwards to the grassroots. From the most uneducated battle-scarred amabutho fighter to the urbane left-wing intellectuals, non-racialism was an accepted principle.

The notion that the enemy was the “illegitimate white minority regime” and that this had to be dismantled by an organised popular movement based on a complex network of “people’s committees” was coupled to an uncontested definition of who the leading organisations and people were. To quote one well-known song:

“The ANC is the organisation (3 times); The government is scared of that; Oliver Tambo is our leader (3 times); Mandela is our leader (3 times); Umkhonto is going to seize the land (3 times); COSATU is going to lead us.”

The ‘Congress Movement’ as it was termed at the time was not only seen as leading the struggle in real terms, but it was also seen as a tradition that could be appealed to when mobilising the “older people”. To quote one activist:

“It is very difficult to organise old people, because some of them have lost hope and some of them have found it very difficult to get work. So if you address them you must address them in a way that interests them, like if you remind them of the sacrifice of their leaders, like Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo…[This is] so they can remember the old days, the Defiance Campaign and sacrifices by our leaders in the past.”

55 Mass meeting, 8.5.1986, op. cit. 56 Interview with Made, 29.11.1985, op. cit.

In terms of long-term perspectives, Made summed up popular consciousness when he said in answer to the question “What do you think will happen in the long-term?”

“The South African government doesn’t see that the majority of the people support the African National Congress and regard Nelson Mandela as their leader. Botha must release Mandela and talk to him about the future of this country. The majority are not demanding that the black man must rule this country. They are demanding that everyone must have a right to this country, regardless of colour or race. No group must dominate over another group. If the South African government can release all political prisoners and allow those who were forced to go into exile to come back to their country, and unban all those who have been banned, then freedom and democracy will rule in this country. This is the only solution I see. I believe in oneman-one-vote. The people must choose their leaders.”57

These remarkable words from Weza Made in June 1985 were spoken in his classic manner - deliberate, thoughtful, slowly formulated in a quiet, measured tone. In many ways, they were also prophetic because this is exactly what happened in the 1990s. It reveals how profoundly popular this vision of the future had become after the Langa Massacre.

The Langa movement’s working-class profile at leadership and rank-and-file level meant it was receptive to socialist ideas that depicted the interests of the workers, homeless and unemployed as lying beyond simply the dismantling of apartheid. This socialist discourse mingled relatively easily with the ideology of national liberation. One speaker told a mass meeting in Langa:

“I am saying the struggle continues. It will only end when we have dismantled apartheid and when we have destroyed the capitalist economic system. We are being removed

57 Interview with Made, June 1985, op. cit.

because the government is protecting the interests of the capitalist class.”58

Another speaker at the same meeting said:

“To all those who believe in the national struggle and as an oppressed nation, we know that the government is trying to hide behind its racial laws and we know the monopolistic power of capital and we know that we are the creators of wealth in this country. We know that this wealth is being appropriated by Anglo-American, Barlow Rand and the Rembrandt Group and these are the people who together with the government are responsible for these removals.”59

There were times when socialists explicitly criticised the “petty bourgeois leadership” of the national movement, with one activist saying “we are not prepared to be diverted in our direction as the working class by the petty bourgeoisie”. The most dramatic public statement of socialist loyalties came during the Langa commemoration meeting on 21st March 1986. Wonga Nkala, UYCO president, began his address to the 60,000-strong crowd as follows:

WN: Long live the spirit of Karl Marx! Crowd: Long live! WN: Long live the spirit of Lenin, long live! Crowd: Long live! WN: Long live the spirit of Moses Kotane, long live! Crowd: Long live! WN: Long live the spirit of Moses Mabhida, long live! Crowd: Long live! WN: Long live the spirit of Oliver Tambo, long live! Crowd: Long live!

58 Mass meeting, 8.5.1986, op. cit. 59 Ibid.

WN:Long live Joe Slovo, long live! Crowd: Long live!60

As far as the implications of this socialist discourse for practical politics was concerned, it became clear during the early months of 1986 that the basis for unity between unions and community organisations was the perceived link between “exploitation wages” in the factories and the cost of housing in the communities. One unionist put it this way:

“We know that the struggle of the workers is not only confined to the factory floor, but it goes beyond the factory floor. We know that the rent we have to pay cannot come from our meagre wages. We know that the money we earn is not sufficient to pay the ever-increasing transportation costs. It is therefore for these reasons that the shop stewards must work hand-in-hand with other activists outside the factory.”61

Although socialism and trade unionism are not synonymous, there is no doubt that Uitenhage’s trade unions were partly responsible for the introduction of socialist discourse into the wider movement. At the same time, straight trade unionism -understood as collective bargaining over the terms of employment

- was an extensive and accepted part of popular consciousness. This role was rarely questioned, except when trade unions used the imperatives of this role to justify non-support for popular campaigns.

What needs to be recognised is that trade unions provided a model of how mass organisation around short-term economic demands should be linked to long-term political goals. It was this conception of the relationship between short- and long-term objectives that translated itself into the community context when forced removals were thrust onto the agenda. The result was the

60 Kotane and Mabhida were prominent black African members of the SA Community Party. 61 Mass meeting, 8.5.1986, op. cit..

emergence of the third key element in Langa’s popular ideology, namely urban reform.

Urban reform refers to those strategies that involved bargaining over the terms of urban living. This included the demand for upgrading as an alternative to removal. Weza Made said this to a question put to him by a visiting UDF activist:

“Q: In your opinion, how do you think the people can go

beyond the point they have reached?

A: We have short-term and long-term plans in our struggle. Our short-term plans are seeing that Uitenhage becomes developed to a standard which is comparable to other towns. In the long term we want to see a national strengthening of area committees, unions and student organisations.”62

It went without saying that the short-term objective could not be achieved unilaterally. It involved - as in Uitenhage - of necessity bargaining with the state over immediate concessions to sustain an organised base for struggle over the long term.

Urban reform was linked in practice to national liberation through the process of “people’s power”. The street and area committees were a system of local democracy necessary for the urban reform strategy but also intimately connected to a conception of liberation. This desire to democratise local power and empower local communities was a common feature of urban movements in other parts of the world.63 It arose, in the South African context, out of a need to win control over the mechanisms of urban regulation as the first step towards creating a liberatory system of administration. This was a natural and logical opposite to the corrupt bureaucratic Black Local Authority system. One speaker told a mass meeting:

“The people today are governing their own affairs. If you

have a water leakage problem, we put on our overalls and

62 Interview with Langa activist, op. cit. 63 See Castells, M., op. cit.

help. We take your problems and make them ours. We wake up in the middle of the night and help immediately.”64

Weza Made captured, as usual, the complexity in these simple terms:

“Street committees is where all the people are participating. It’s where they are producing people’s power. It is where they will learn to govern themselves and make decisions about what they need or what they desire for the future of this country. So they will learn at the local level. We hope that this will spread to other townships in other parts of the country. What we aim is to improve the government from the local level.”65

Finally, militarism was also mixed into this already complex web of discourses. Although the UDF’s formal position was one of non-violence, and although the community organisations and local leadership in Uitenhage firmly refused to sanction any deviation from this, the amabutho groups brought with them a lexicon and set of symbols that glorified the armed struggle and Umkhonto We Sizwe. The toyi toyi, the commonly worn black beret, the petrol bombs and the wooden AK-47s, were all manifestations of a militaristic sub-culture that became part of township life and political meetings. The most common amabutho songs were:

“The boer is oppressing us (repeatedly); The SADF is shooting us like animals (x 3); Kill the boer (several times).”

And:

“We won’t abandon Umkhonto We Sizwe (x 5); These boer blood suckers won’t get us (x 3); We won’t abandon Umkhonto We Sizwe (x 3).”

64 Mass meeting, 8.5.1986, op. cit. 65 Interview with Made, 9.3.1986, op. cit.

And:

“Have hope parents;

Have hope workers;

Umkhonto is going to assure us of our victory.”

The first verse of a well-known poem called “Run guerrilla run” goes:

“Run guerrilla run

Chase them for the run

Get Botha and Malan

Destroy mother, father and son

‘Till they say to you

Number one

Run guerrilla run.”

The amabutho see themselves as soldiers. One senior commander said during a group discussion:

“I don’t want to go to school or work. I want to fight for

freedom. We will go to school and work after we have won

our freedom.”66

Another member of the group said:

“We are prepared to talk to them [the government], but if

they kill, we are also going to kill them.”

In short, national liberation, socialism, trade unionism, urban reform, local democracy and militarism come together in an intricate blend of discourses that was fluid, fragile and uncodified. There were no formal instructions or even permanent organisations to reproduce them. The rise and fall of different forces as the cut and thrust of struggle went through different phases, brought some discourses to the fore while others

66 Interview with Amabutho leaders, op. cit.

were suppressed. During times of popular power, symbols and slogans were forged and found their way into the local public eye as graffiti67 and/or in pamphlets and speeches. Langa’s social movement had its own language, messages and culture. However, when the entire community was eventually dismantled shack-by-shack in 1986, the organisational infrastructure that reproduced this popular ideology was smashed. The discourse of this consciousness then sank down to subterranean levels only to resurface when the Emergency ended, but by then urban reform had become the dominant discourse.

Urban Reform in Practice: Exploiting the Contradictions

Given the context in which popular mobilisation was taking place, the mere existence of popular structures was insufficient when it came to making gains. This grassroots power needed to be coupled to the use of a range of instruments if the outcome was going to be anything but straight repression. From late-1985 but more concertedly from early January 1986, a combination of tactics were devised to complement grassroots organising.

Realising the importance of communicating their demands as widely as possible, the activists worked closely with their allies to publicise Langa’s struggle. Working closely with Sue Lund of the GRC, Mono Badela of City Press and myself, the activists attempted to build Langa into a story that could remain in the headlines. This turned out to be a remarkably successful strategy, mainly because the Langa Massacre had turned the township into one of South Africa’s most well-known, after places like Soweto and Crossroads. A number of international TV documentaries were made by foreign crews and local newspapers regularly carried news from Langa. There is no doubt that this helped to keep the pressure on the authorities, but more importantly, it built a self-confidence in the community and amongst the leadership.

67 But when this power is crushed, new counter-revolutionary graffiti

emerges and one can always tell how badly organisation has been

affected when no-one even has the courage or energy to wipe out

these reactionary messages.

Regarding the KTC’s supreme court application, a decision was taken to contest it. Significantly, this decision did not follow a debate in the organisations. It was assumed with very little discussion that lawyers needed to be retained and responding affidavits filed. Although there was an awareness that optimism about the outcome should not replace the need for organisation, there was still a surprisingly hopeful view even amongst the activists that the court would rule in favour of the squatters. This optimism was probably attributable more to an internal moral belief that the squatters were right in what they were doing than a faith in the justice of the legal system. As far as the activists were concerned, they constantly reiterated the danger of a full-frontal violent confrontation between the authorities and the squatters if the removals went ahead. The prospect that this moment could be postponed by way of a protracted legal battle was more than appealing to them. Nevertheless, in a brief meeting that the LCC initiated with the KTC in February, Made urged the KTC to withdraw its case because the people were unwilling to defend themselves in court and would not, in any case, respect the findings of the court.68

The most important part of the overall strategy used to counter the removals - besides grassroots organisation -was the commissioning of an alternative development plan. The GRC, BESG and PLANACT were instructed to proceed with the survey as the first step towards formulating an alternative upgrading plan for Langa. The brief to BESG and PLANACT was to formulate an upgrading plan based on four principles: (a) upgrading must take place for the whole of Langa, not just a part, as the KTC was recommending; (b) the plan must take into account the needs of all strata, particularly the unemployed; (c) financial formulae must be based on what people can afford; (d) the upgrading process must be democratically controlled. The decision to go ahead with this initiative without official sanction was communicated to the KTC at a meeting on 3 February. One of

68 Document entitled “Minutes of meeting held between the

KwaNobuhle Town Council and Kabah Coordinating Committee on

3rd February 1986”.

the resolutions taken at the end of this meeting that expressed the feelings of the LCC went as follows:

“ That all planning with regard to the upgrading of Kabah BE DONE in conjunction with the Coordinating Committee of Kabah. Furthermore that it BE NOTED that any planning done without the consent of the committee would be rejected by the people of Kabah.”69

It was decided not to abandon negotiations. However, the activists ruled out any possibility of talking sense into the KTC officials and decided, therefore, to meet the Task Group which was perceived as a higher authority that may be more rational and responsive. To reach the Task Group, activists decided to go through the KTC once again and also the Urban Foundation. At the 3 February meeting with the KTC, the LCC’s main request was that the KTC make contact with the Task Group to ask it to meet the LCC. In addition, the academics were requested to set up a meeting with the Urban Foundation which, the activists decided, would be requested to support Langa’s struggle and take steps to pressurise Dr Scheepers into meeting the LCC. It was this meeting that marked the start of the most interesting phase of the Langa story: the development of an alliance between business, trade unions and community organisations. However, unlike in the Crossroads case, this alliance was not characterised by the dominance of business and reformist interests.70

The Urban Foundation (UF) meeting took place on Sunday 10 November, two days after the notices were handed to the

9th

to 4th Avenues squatters. The high-powered UF delegation comprised Dr Robin Lee, Managing Director of the UF; Roger Matlock, Director, Eastern Cape Region of the UF; Anne Bernstein, Director, Urbanisation Unit. The LCC delegation comprised the core Uitenhage leadership: Weza Made, Freddie Magugu, Sipho Mandabana and Nelson Teyise. The others present were Sue Lund of the GRC, Father Lerniham (Catholic priest in whose house the

69 Ibid. 70 See Cole, J., op. cit., pp.29-60.

meeting took place), Glenn Adler (an American student) and the author.71

After all the parties had introduced their roles and after some discussion that helped to clarify the function and purpose of the UF, Made explained why the meeting had been called:

“The delegation decided to call the UF. They came to the conclusion that it was vital to call the UF to talk with it. The question of eviction and the feasibility of upgrading: maybe the government can approve upgrading, that we don’t know. The KwaNobuhle Town Council will opt for the UF and try to co-opt it to its side and I think that will be a major problem.”

Magugu reiterated the point when he said:

“If ever the government decides to go ahead, it is highly likely that the UF will be co-opted and used against the residents. The UF has the expertise and is in a position to help as the people involved in these activities.”

The agreement reached between the LCC and the UF was as follows: the UF would support the Langa community’s opposition to removal; the UF would approach Dr Scheepers, chairperson of the Task Group, in order to arrange for a meeting between him and the LCC; the UF’s Eastern Cape office would provide the technical skills required to compile an upgrading plan, with Dr Mike Sutcliffe of the BESG as the coordinator on the technical side; no press statements or meetings with government officials without the knowledge of the LCC; UF must only consult with the LCC on the question of Langa, no-one else has a mandate to represent the community on this issue.

As far as the activists were concerned, this meeting was a success because it won them a powerful ally and the UF could provide crucial technical skills in the event of state approval of

The account of this meeting is taken form a document entitled “Minutes of meeting between the Langa Coordination Delegation and Urban Foundation, Sunday 10 November 1985, 8.00 pm, Uitenhage Catholic Church.”

upgrading. The significance of this alliance only emerged later when the state attempted to undermine it. The UF team was under surveillance when they arrived in Uitenhage.72 That night, the UF’s Port Elizabeth offices were broken into and searched. More significantly, Minister Heunis later communicated his displeasure to the UF’s Managing Director Jan Steyn questioning why the UF had agreed to cover the legal costs of the Supreme Court action. Heunis communicated this grievance to leading Afrikaner corporate businessman Fred du Plessis as well. As far as the KTC officials were concerned, PLANACT and BESG were merely UF fronts that Matlock established them to hide his involvement in Langa.73

Made was under no illusions about the game that needed to be played. He said this to a visiting UDF organiser:

“We called the director of the Urban Foundation and its Eastern Cape director. We told them that the people see the Foundation as a government created structure and the people are aware that the Urban Foundation was created immediately after the 1976 riots for the purpose of neutralising and normalising the situation. In its projects it works hand-in-hand with the councillors which are not representing our community. We told them that most of their projects are unpopular among the people. They build houses which people cannot afford, and the rental of their houses is expensive. We even told them that they are helping the government by forcibly removing people for its strategic reasons by building these houses. We asked them to dissociate themselves from the government if they want to regain credibility. We told them that in future, if they want build houses, they must consult with the people.”74

Meeting the LCC made a substantial impact on Matlock. Whereas before the meeting he was extremely nervous that the community leaders were about to criticise the activities of his organisation,

72 Interview with Erasmus and Coetzee, op. cit. 73 Ibid. 74 Interview with Langa activist, op. cit.

some months later he explained to me that the meeting was the start of a new set of relationships between the UF and extra-parliamentary organisations in the Eastern Cape.75 Obviously, this realignment affected the UF’s relationship with the state. In particular, in a letter to Erasmus, Matlock spelled out his support for, (a) “process oriented housing mechanisms as opposed to the normal product oriented housing delivery mechanism”; (b) in situ upgrading of informal settlements; and (c) the necessity for “forming a coalition with communities in the planning and implementation of select projects”.76 Obviously these policies differed drastically from the KTC’s technicist top-down approach and should be interpreted as a response to pressures and demands emanating from the black communities that the UF had to deal with.

Just over a month after the meeting with the UF, Roger Matlock sent an internal memo to Robin Lee enclosing a letter that he recommended should be sent by Lee to Dr Scheepers of the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning.77 This letter was a follow -up to a meeting that Lee had with Scheepers in the weeks that followed the original meeting. After referring to discussions with representatives of multinational companies who were signatories to the Sullivan Principles, the letter went on to warn about unrest and called for direct negotiations between the government and the LCC. The most important paragraphs of this rather remarkable letter are quoted in full:

“The multinational companies in Uitenhage are strongly supportive of their employees’ aspirations, including their rights to live where they like and to express their political rights in whichever way possible. As a result of the international focus on Uitenhage prompted by the incident in Kabah in March 1985, they are extremely concerned

75 Conversation with Roger Matlock, 20.3.1986.

76 Private correspondence between R. Matlock and B. Erasmus,

25.11.1985. (These two men knew each other from the days when

Erasmus was town clerk of Uitenhage and Matlock was director of

Technical Services in the East Cape Development Board.) 77 “Internal Memo to Dr Robin Lee from Roger Matlock”, Urban

Foundation, Eastern Cape Region, 17.12.85

about the adverse effect on their presence in South Africa which a further similar incident would invariably precipitate. It is their belief that no action which is contrary to the attached draft corporate statement on fundamental human rights should be undertaken…

“...[F]rom the Urban Foundation’s limited degree of contact with the residents of Kabah it does appear that they are a highly organised community which has shown a great deal of solidarity with regard to the retention and upgrading of Kabah…

“In conclusion, I feel that the time is ripe for an agreement to be negotiated between the authorities and the community for the replanning of Kabah.”

During December, January and the early part of February, the activists concentrated on building organisation and completing the survey. Sutcliffe and Lund drafted the survey and after a group of Uitenhage volunteers were trained to administer the questionnaire by someone connected to the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University, a sample was drawn and the work began in earnest. It was by no means a simple task. After the security police cottoned on to what was happening, activists caught at roadblocks in possession of surveys were immediately detained. The completed surveys were stashed with a sympathetic nun at a nearby convent located in a white suburb located on the opposite side of a valley to Langa’s expanding informal settlement. Despite numerous problems and breakdowns, the surveys were eventually completed. By mid-February they were sent to Sutcliffe in Durban who began processing them.

About the time that the questionnaires were completed, the lawyers notified the activists that the date set for the court case was 25 March. This gave the activists little over a month, but they also realised the need to take full advantage of the fact that the court case was to take place four days after the first anniversary of the Langa Massacre. In conjunction with PLANACT and GRC members, the LCC activists formulated a strategy. This involved the completion of an upgrading report under the auspices of PLANACT and in conjunction with the GRC and BESG. This report, the LCC decided, had to be completed before the court case so that a press conference could be held to announce the community’s own proposals for a peaceful solution to the Langa problem. Significantly, the LCC decided to invite everyone to this press conference: the UDF affiliates, trade unions, all Uitenhage employers, the KTC, police, Dr Scheepers and even Minister Heunis and his senior officials.

In the meantime, the number of Langa squatters was increasing. It is worth discussing in greater detail the development of a new growth point in the Kamesh Road area that the KTC decided to take action against (see Map 8.2).

Map 8.2: Expansion of informal settlement in Langa, 19851986. (Source: Robin Williams, Town Clerk of Uitenhage, Rate of Increase in the Number of Squatters in the Kameash Road Area, 7.11.1985 to 22.2.1986)

The ground occupied by the squatters was formally proclaimed for black residential use but this was revoked in 1981. People began erecting their shacks in this area in early November 1985. On 4 November 1985, a number of these were demolished by the Uitenhage Municipality. From that point on, the number of shacks increased as follows:78

The most significant feature about this expansion was that it took place despite official warnings that the structures were illegal. Furthermore, the people were not allocated sites by corrupt councillors. Instead, this erection of structures was in open defiance of authority and hence, almost from the start, this area had a thriving area committee. The municipal officials also referred repeatedly to the fact that “there has been an escalation of violence in the area in that Municipal Officials had

78 Affidavit by Robin Williams, Uitenhage Town Clerk, 11.3.1986.

been threatened with their lives if they continue to carry out inspections and services in the area.”79

During the week of 10 to 14 February, eviction notices were served on 72 families who had built shacks in this area over the previous few months. The case was heard on 15 April and an order was granted that declared the shacks illegal and gave them until 30 April to move to KwaNobuhle, failing which their structures would be forcibly dismantled. This effectively meant that if the squatters failed to move, the forced removals would take place on May Day, the day that COSATU planned on staging South Africa’s biggest ever national stay away. Clearly the pressure was building up to a climax - some residents could not handle it and about 70 families moved to KwaNobuhle at this point.80 By this stage, however, a new set of negotiations had been initiated that were to substantially alter the balance of forces in the area.

Surprisingly, everything worked according to plan. PLANACT completed an upgrading report entitled Langa: The Case for Upgrade, and a large press conference was held on 19 March attended by a number of TV crews, journalists and business representatives. The KTC never came and Heunis sent a telegram to Made’s home address apologising for not being able to attend. Press reports and editorials remarked on the constructive nature of the press conference and the report.

Weza Made opened the conference with these words:

“By calling this press conference it is our last attempt to find a peaceful solution; this is our last attempt to prevent bloodshed and confrontation with the government…We want you to save the township from explosion because if the government can force us to move to this place we don’t want, we therefore have no alternative but to use force, to use anything at our disposal.”81

Freddie Magugu then gave a detailed account of the LCC’s attempts to find a negotiated solution to Langa’s problems and

79 Ibid. 80 Interview with Langa activist, op. cit. 81 Tape recording of this meeting.

ended with the query: “The KTC claims to be representing us and yet it is the one which is taking us to court, this does not make sense.”82 Wonga Nkala, president of UYCO, gave an articulate, emotional speech that centred around what he called “the crucial question”, namely:

“[W]here will the money come from? According to the report the people have no money. The first phase will cost about R3,5 million and the second phase will cost about R22 million. The government has the money which has been taken from the people of Langa and big business has benefited from the people of Langa. If the government had no money, there wouldn’t be an SADF occupational army in Namibia, oppressing and killing Namibians. If the government didn’t have any money, RENAMO and UNITA wouldn’t have any support. It is high time the government diverted its financial assistance from rebel groups to the people of Langa.”83

The formal speeches were followed by comments from residents who arrived at the press conference on their own accord. Speaking in broken English but with great emotion, many old people stood up and made comments like this one:

“Why must I move to KwaNobuhle, I stay here and this is

my home. I am not moving anywhere, they can shoot me

dead.”84

In addition, the Eastern Cape’s most prominent political and trade union leaders were present. Stone Sizane of PEBCO and the UDF Eastern Cape Executive expressed solidarity with the Langa struggle on behalf of the UDF. Michael Dube of COSATU’s interim executive and one-time Langa resident, forcefully backed the LCC’s demand that the state and business pay for the upgrading of Langa. He argued that it was high time that business did something for Langa in return for the labour power that this community provided for Uitenhage’s industry. Finally, Gugile Nkwinti of Port Alfred threatened solidarity action from the hinterland towns if the Langa removals proceeded.

The report’s basic conclusions were delivered by PLANACT representatives. The most important were: an average household income was R186.38 per month; only 9% of households earned above R400 per month, while less than 1% would have qualified for a mortgage; 43% of the respondents of the survey were unemployed.

These figures, PLANACT concluded, pointed to the need for subsidised housing. The report itself, however, recommended a R3,5 million Emergency Scheme and a larger R22 million programme to upgrade infrastructure. This, PLANACT argued, would involve a waterborne sewerage system, water supplies to each house, tarring of certain roads, improvement of the drainage system and the installation of electricity. This focus on infrastructure rather than on housing was shaped by survey results which revealed that housing was less important to the residents than basic services.

Most importantly, PLANACT recommended that the street and area committee system could have become the structure through which community participation in the upgrading process was organised.

Community solidarity around opposition to the removal was greatly strengthened by the press coverage given to the report. More importantly, however, the whole of black Uitenhage forcefully demonstrated its unity and power by giving 99% support to the stay away call on 21 March 1986 - the first anniversary of the Langa Massacre. Furthermore, 82% of Uitenhage’s coloured workers also heeded the stay away call. Over 60,000 people packed the KwaNobuhle stadium for a day-long rally in commemoration of the victims of the Langa Massacre. The sustained mobilisation of the older residents that this meeting represented was explained by many activists in terms of the effect that repression was having. One activist said: “The repression and violence from the government made the parents to unite with the youth and fight back.”85

This stay away marked the high point of community-union solidarity. In dozens of factory meetings during the weeks leading up to the stay away, workers had debated the issues and come to the decision to call a full day stay away. This decision was widely supported in street and area committee meetings. The combined impact of tight workplace and community organisation ensured the success of the stay away. This is why grassroots activists were more than a little peeved when two days before the stay away the KwaNobuhle leadership issued a directive that all workers must stay away.86 They must have been aware that workers made this decision long before this call was made.

Langa’s problems, however, were by no means over. The court case took place as scheduled on 25 March. It was clear that the state was under tremendous pressure to find an amicable settlement by this stage. Le Roux had this to say about that period:

“There was active agitation to encourage people to move in and squat. It became a real problem from the point of view of control. There was nothing anybody could do to stop this flow because the police, municipalities and management committees all feared an eruption. It then became a political test of wills: the squatters defiantly moved towards the white areas. The position was out of control. Everyone was scared of an international incident. Everyone knew it was a bomb with a lid on it.”87

Roger Matlock of the Urban Foundation phoned Dr Scheepers at the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning on 21 March to propose a deal that went as follows: after the KTC obtains a court order to evict the squatters on 25 March, this should be used as a stick to negotiate with the community from

85 Interview with Langa activist, op. cit. 86 Various conversations with union and community activists during March 1986. 87 Interview with Le Roux, op. cit.

a position of strength. He urged that direct removals should be avoided at all costs.

No doubt responding to international media coverage of Langa on the anniversary of the Massacre, from business pressure and from the threat of extensive disruption, the KTC’s lawyers arrived with a message from Minister Heunis on the morning of 25 March urging the parties to reach an out-of-court settlement. The deal KTC offered was that if the 9th to 4th Avenues squatters agreed to move to KwaNobuhle, they could live there rent free; while the rest of Langa would be upgraded. Realising that if they agreed to this offer without consulting the people, serious divisions could open up in the community and the LCC turned it down. The case went ahead and judgement was reserved indefinitely.

The LCC had now rejected what was, in effect, the state’s final offer. This was the most that it could have hoped to win at that stage. However, the imperatives of extra-state organisation and the potential for division if agreements were reached that resulted in the sacrificing of the interests of even a minority group, were pressures that the LCC could not have ignored. Some of the LCC leaders were well aware that it was “divide-and-rule” deals like this that resulted in bloody intra-community conflicts in the Western Cape.

As mentioned above, the Kamesh Road squatters case came to court on 15 April and a removal order was issued instructing squatters to vacate the premises by 30 April. Obviously the Langa conflict was reaching a head and the potential for major confrontations prompted community, trade union and business leaders to seek last-minute solutions. Using the LCC call made at the press conference urging business to involve themselves in the Langa conflict, and under pressure from the unions to do likewise, the Uitenhage branch of Midland Chamber of Industries (MCI) decided to take action. Ronny Kruger of the giant Volkswagen company commented on this decision by saying that “business has a responsibility to get involved in issues that affect their workers…Happy employees make for happy consumers.”88 The

88 Interview with Ronny Kruger, Public Affairs Director of Volkswagen, 27.5.1987.

LCC met the MCI for a preliminary meeting on 25 April and it was agreed that future meetings would take place to hammer out a compromise.

The MCI then took steps that managed to convince the KTC to stay the removal of the Kamesh Road squatters for ten days, on the grounds that the MCI wanted to meet trade union and community representatives in an attempt to find a less violent solution. This intervention was timeous because the Uitenhage Municipality was under tremendous pressure from its Conservative Party members to go for a full-on armed confrontation to remove the Kamesh Road squatters -an option with widespread support in Uitenhage’s white community. The Mayor was quoted in a Grenada television documentary screened in November 1985 as saying: “If we are attacked we will resist.”89 Using their considerable influence, Le Roux and Erasmus -responding largely to pressure from business - managed to convince the Deputy Sheriff and the Mayor to stay the removal for ten days. This bulwark against an ultra-right-wing line brought together an informal five-person caucus of Uitenhage’s most powerful white leaders -Le Roux, Erasmus, Coetzee, Kruger, and Robin Williams, Uitenhage’s town clerk. They met regularly to plan strategy and agreed to support a negotiation or compromise position for the moment.90 This crucial alliance between multinational capital and the local state revolved largely around two concerns: (a) the international consequences of a violent eruption, and (b) the potential advantages of upgrading. It was agreed that Kruger would act as the broker between the state and the community. Their objective was twofold: (a) to secure the removal to KwaNobuhle of the Kamesh Road squatters and the 9th to 4th Avenues squatters; and (b) upgrading of the rest of Langa.91 Their weapons were the stick of forced removal and the carrot of upgrading.

Two mass meetings took place that cemented the alliance between community organisations and trade unions that was to carry the next round of negotiations through. The first was a mass

89 Eastern Province Herald, 5.11.1985. 90 Interview with Le Roux, op. cit. 91 Ibid.

political funeral in Langa stadium where Weza Made spoke on the removal issue. This was the first high-profile mass meeting he had ever spoken at. The second was a mass indoor meeting on May Day. The speakers at this meeting included Freddie Magugu, Wonga Nkala, John Gomomo and Weza Made. Made’s comment after the meeting was: “For the first time we see unity between the unions and community organisations. It was decided that whatever we do there should be joint decision-making.”92 From this point on, the LCC became a core of leaders that comprised the original four: i.e. Made, Magugu, Mandabana and Teyise, plus the NAAWU leadership centred around Gomomo. It was this alliance that finally forced an open rupture between the Langa and KwaNobuhle leadership. The URECO leadership accused the LCC of working autonomously because of the influence of “FOSATU” (sic). Underlying this tension were the old disagreements over strategy. The KwaNobuhle leadership saw no reason why negotiations should take place with the MCI to resolve a forced removal problem. For them, it was nothing less than a question of state power.

The meeting between the LCC, trade unionists and the MCI took place on 2 May - the day after all Uitenhage’s workers stayed away for political reasons. Only 11 Africans out of a total of 7,615 employed at Uitenhage’s major enterprises turned up for work that day - it was clear who held power on the factory floor.93 The MCI delegates arrived at the meeting94 with a discussion paper relating to solutions to the question of the Kamesh Road squatters only. The paper started by saying that any solution arrived at must be acceptable to the Uitenhage Municipality, the “coloured community” (read: the Coloured Management Committee), the Langa community and the Kamesh Road squatters. Having defined the parties to the conflict in this way - a definition that was not opposed by the unionists and the LCC, the MCI paper then went on to identify the cause of the problem as conflicting “interests arising from the problems of rapid urbanisation” (my emphasis).

92 Conversation with Weza Made, 3.5.1986. 93 Eastern Province Herald, 2.5.1986. 94 The full details of these meetings and the minutiae of the options

discussed have been included because they changed and modified

as the bargaining process proceeded.

Accepting the squatters’ reasons for not wanting to move as being ease of access to places of employment and the high cost of living in KwaNobuhle, the MCI paper said that it was prepared to “lobby support for the implementation of the following”:

In return for its support for these proposals, the MCI argued that the community should agree that the Kamesh Road squatters be “temporarily and acceptably…accommodated elsewhere.”

The LCC responded by making four points:95 firstly, if the Kamesh Road squatters agreed to move, this would be a sign of weakness that could set a precedent for the removal of all Langa’s squatters in the future. Clearly, the leaders were reluctant to be party to a decision that would allow the thin end of the removal wedge into the community. This demand also clearly revealed the extent to which politically organised squatters who had physically occupied land could use this presence as a lever when making community demands.

Secondly, the leaders said that they would refuse to agree to any compromises until the basic principle that Langa be upgraded is approved. This reflected a shrewd realisation that it would be a mistake to separate bargaining over the future of the Kamesh Road area from the larger struggle for upgrading.

Thirdly, and related to the second point, the leaders argued that upgrading must be planned to ensure that it not only benefits the better-off sections of the community, but that the poorest elements also benefit. This point was made because activists had been discussing the mistakes made in upgrading schemes elsewhere that worked to the disadvantage of the poorest strata who were pushed out of the community because of an inability

95 Conversation with Weza Made, 8.5.1986.

to afford the upgraded services and housing (e.g. Crossroads and Alexandra).

Fourthly, they said it was unacceptable that the only reason why people could not live in the Kamesh Road area was because it was zoned in terms of the Group Areas Act as “non-residential”.

The MCI and LCC agreed to meet again on 9 May. The MCI delegates went back to discuss the issues raised by the LCC with the caucus. The LCC returned to discuss various options with the community. A special meeting for all Uitenhage’s organisations was held on Saturday 4 May to discuss the removal and the meeting with the MCI. The same day, Made gave a moving speech to the Kamesh Road squatters. Relating the stories of Sofasonke’s struggles in Johannesburg in the 1940s and the struggle for Crossroads, he reiterated his view that “the struggle of squatters is the struggle for land”. On the court case, he related how Mandela refused to recognise the legitimacy of the South African courts at his trial. He concluded by saying that all the squatters have is the power to organise and that “there is no easy walk to freedom”. This is why, he said, the Kamesh Road squatters should agree to move to another area in Langa.

By this stage, the Kamesh Road area committee was meeting on a daily basis to discuss plans for resisting the removal. A key problem, as far as the amabutho were concerned, was the open and unprotected location of the Kamesh Road squatters from a military point of view.96 The key question in the minds of the LCC activists was whether the Kamesh Road area committee would agree to the voluntary relocation of the squatters to another area inside Langa. The activists were well aware of the fact that if the rest of Langa was to be upgraded, the community might have to agree to compromise on the Kamesh Road area. Everything, however, depended on the Kamesh Road area committee. Eventually, this area committee decided at a meeting on 6 May that the Kamesh Road squatters would agree to move voluntarily to another location in Langa if this would ensure the upgrading of the rest of Langa. The activists, who had spent literally dozens of hours in talks with the Kamesh Road squatters, were elated

96 Interview with amabutho leaders, op. cit.

with this decision. However, the amabutho leaders and some KwaNobuhle leaders were opposed to the decision, arguing that this in effect meant recognising the Group Areas Act. They also argued that the “black man’s struggle for the return of his land” must not be reversed for the sake of compromise.

In the meantime, the LCC and the unionists had decided that a mass meeting needed to be held to gain a general mandate for the Kamesh Road comprise. The white caucus agreed to support the LCC application to the magistrate to hold such a meeting. The result was that the LCC applied for permission to hold a meeting with letters of support from the KTC, MCI, and Uitenhage Municipality. Not surprisingly, the magistrate gave permission for the meeting. The meeting took place on 8 May on a soccer field in Langa. It lasted most of the day, with speeches from all the major Uitenhage organisations, including the trade unions. The LCC leaders chaired the meeting.

An old ex-Robben Islander gave a key speech which began with these words:

“I remember in 1937 and 1938 when people were removed from what is known today as Van Riebeeck’s Hoogte to Kabah, some of those people were thrown here in Uitenhage. The white people who occupied these areas are still there today. The crucial question to ask is why should we be moved around like this? What kind of people are we to be moved around like this? There is even a court order saying that we must leave this place. It is quite clear that the courts belong to the white community because our people were shot and the courts did nothing about it…Today we are being moved from this place because of this monster that the government has created, this monster of apartheid. We are saying that the people of South Africa must unite irrespective of colour, creed and ideology. I was a member of the ANC and I have spent 22 years in jail, but all this has not broken my spirit. The fight we fought continues even today.”97

97 Mass meeting, op. cit.

A call was also made on residents to support the forthcoming rent boycott, to prepare for another consumer boycott and to participate in the living wage campaign.

The meeting ended with discussion from the crowd about what should happen to Kamesh Road. Unfortunately, attributable mainly to lack of experience, the leadership posed the problem as being a question of whether people should move to KwaNobuhle or not. Obviously, this was roundly rejected as an option. One speaker from Kamesh Road area committee said:

“Comrades, I am not going to give a long speech. What I

want to say is that we must make it clear to Botha and his

children that we are not going to KwaNobuhle.”98

However, because the leaders never laid out the complexities of the compromise then under discussion with the MCI - i.e. whether the Kamesh Road squatters should agree to move to another area in Langa - no clear mandate was obtained for action either way from this meeting. In the end, the most radical elements took this opportunity to make emotional statements about the weak and cowardly nature of any proposed move. Given the atmosphere of the meeting, speakers from the Kamesh Road area also spoke out against the decision to move.

With no room to compromise at this stage, the LCC activists decided to go ahead with its meeting with the MCI scheduled for 9 May, but to use “delaying tactics”, i.e. not to agree to anything concrete until further community meetings could be held.

The meeting with the MCI took place as scheduled on 9 May. The MCI arrived with a revised paper that noted that, in addition to the previous reasons for why the squatters refused to move, i.e. ease of access to employment and high cost of living in KwaNobuhle, there was also a fear that the Kamesh Road squatters would set a precedent for the removal of all squatters and that “non-residential” zoning of the Kamesh Road area was perceived as “political and therefore not acceptable”.

98 Ibid.

In addition to the three proposals put forward at the last meeting, the MCI suggested a further three:

The paper ended by saying that all the above concessions were conditional on the Kamesh Road squatters agreeing to move elsewhere.

The LCC requested the scrapping of the proposal that the Kamesh Road area be zoned for community recreational facilities (proposal 1 above). What eventually happened to this area, they argued, should be negotiated as part of the overall upgrading process. They also asked for more time to discuss matters with the Kamesh Road squatters before finally agreeing to the MCI’s proposals. Through most of the night of 9 June and into the following day, the Kamesh Road squatters and the leaders met and discussed all the options. Bitter arguments broke out, but eventually all the squatters agreed that to compromise at this stage was preferable to losing the battle for the whole of Langa in the long run. When the more radical elements heard about this decision, they accused the LCC leadership of acting without a mandate.

At the meeting with the MCI held on 11 June, the LCC agreed to all the MCI’s proposals (set out in points 1 to 6 above). In addition, further discussion on related issues resulted in agreement on the following points:

However, the LCC activists insisted that before final agreement on all these points was reached, they wanted to return to the community to fully discuss the proposals. Despite the declaration of the Emergency the following day (i.e. 12 June), the proposals were discussed by area committees, the URECO executive and COSATU’s Uitenhage local. A final meeting between the LCC and MCI was held on 14 June where six key points were agreed to. Because they represent the basis of an agreement arrived at democratically through negotiation, compromise and community participation, they will be quoted in full as they appeared in the minutes of the meeting:

“The MCI is prepared to recommend and lobby support for the implementation of the following:

This deal meant that the Langa squatters were being offered much more than before the court case in March, i.e. the removal of 9th to 4th Avenues and upgrading of the rest. They were, in fact, being offered all that they had struggled for from the beginning.

With this agreement under his belt, Ronnie Kruger of VW and the MCI convinced the Uitenhage Municipality to allow him to talk to the Council as a whole. It was this talk that convinced the Mayor to agree to come to the 20 June meeting to discuss the upgrading proposals. Largely because of pressure from VW, by the middle of June all the major interests in the white establishment had accepted the proposals, i.e. the KTC, Uitenhage Municipality, Le Roux, and the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning and its Minister, namely Chris Heunis.99 As far as the community leaders and unionists were concerned, the 20 June meeting accepted the proposals that the MCI and LCC had agreed to on 14 June. Although the coloured and Indian Management Committees were not there, the KTC, Uitenhage Municipality, LCC, trade unionists and MCI sat around a table and, with a map of Uitenhage on the wall, discussed the most suitable areas into which Langa could be extended.

According to Freddie Magugu, “it was quite a nice meeting where everybody was convinced that if we can keep working in this spirit, we can achieve a lot of things”.100 The KTC agreed to provide the bulldozers to clear the area agreed upon. The MCI said that it would provide the materials for the re-erection of the shacks and the LCC agreed to provide the full names and addresses of the Kamesh Road squatters to the KTC so that the area cleared would be inhabited by the right people. All this proceeded as planned.

Heunis visited Port Elizabeth at this stage to hold discussions with MPs and officials where he expressed support

99 This was established at two key interviews, namely with Minister

Chris Heunis and six of his top officials on 14.7.1987 in Pretoria;

and with Brian Mathew, Director of the Midlands Chamber of

Industries, Port Elizabeth, 25.5.1987. Also confirmed at interviews

with Erasmus and Coetzee, op. cit. and Le Roux, op. cit. 100 Interview with Freddie Magugu, op. cit.

for the retention and upgrading of Langa.101 This message was communicated at the time to the MCI.102

As far as the Task Group was concerned, Scheepers abandoned his early position that stipulated that his brief was strictly technical and therefore he could not meet community representatives. Prior to the 20 June meeting in Uitenhage, Scheepers led a delegation of Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth MPs (Dawid Le Roux, Sakkie Louw and Gert Van Der Linde) that met representatives of the UDF’s Eastern Cape Regional Executive on 4 June. The meeting was held at the offices of S.A. Bottling and was chaired by Mr P. Gutsche, an S.A. Bottling director. Also present were representatives of the Eastern Cape Chamber of Commerce, the Eastern Cape branch of the National African Federation of Chambers of Commerce.

Scheepers defined the purpose of the meeting as the need to discuss the future upgrading of infrastructure in the Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage region in terms of the Rive Plan guidelines for the Eastern Cape (see Chapter 1). Scheepers pointed out that government had allocated R200 million for this purpose. The UDF delegates, who were all from civic organisations, emphasised their commitment to non-violent solutions and the need for joint negotiation over the upgrading and development of infrastructure.

The issues discussed were:103 the crucial importance of negotiations over upgrading; that a special Task Force of government officials be established to carry forward these negotiations with the community; the fact that the Rive Plan was not compiled in consultation with the community; the general acceptance that the Rive Plan was sufficiently flexible to allow for changes that might flow from negotiations; that the UDF organisations were representative of the community; and the necessity for community leaders to enter into genuine negotiations instead of acting as rubber stamps.

101 Interview with Minister Heunis, op. cit.

102 Interview with Brian Mathew, op. cit.

103 Minutes of meeting which were compiled by an Urban Foundation employee who went as part of the ECCOC delegation.

The meeting ended with agreement that further meetings were essential and the next meeting was scheduled for 23 June, three days after the Uitenhage meeting and, in the event, eleven days after the State of Emergency was declared. All this was possible because of the state of uncertainty within the state. None of the parties realised the full implications and impact of the State of Emergency. In particular, they did not realise that negotiation processes were not controlled by the security forces. It was the State of Emergency that enabled the security forces to regain the initiative that they had lost when the LCC decided to initiate negotiations to find solutions.

Resistance and the Democratic Opening

To all intents and purposes, therefore, the struggle for Langa had been won. Through grassroots organisation, mass struggle, negotiation, compromise and the building of alliances, Langa’s social movement forced multinational capital, the local state and top government officials and the Minister to agree on concessions that favoured the majority of Langa’s residents. In addition, the function of Scheepers’ Task Force changed towards the end when agreement was reached with the UDF regional leadership that planning would take place within the context of genuine negotiations.

A truly remarkable democratic opening occurred between September 1985 and the imposition of the National State of Emergency on 12 June 1986. Mass uprisings from below coupled to local-level negotiations were responsible for forcing this opening. When the partial State of Emergency was lifted on 7 March 1986, this was a mere formality - to all intents and purposes it had been neutralised from below by the uprisings. The nine months between September 1985 and June 1986 should be seen as a democratic opening that could have led straight into a negotiated settlement along the lines that Weza Made envisioned when I asked him how he sees the future. Like the eye of a storm, it was a moment of relative peace - repressive security force action was reduced, more political mobilisation was allowed, detainees were released, more open public dialogue about the need for negotiated alternatives took place, and at the local level many local-level negotiations between local community leaders and representatives of white business and local governance structures took place.

These widening of spaces for deliberative dialogue emerged because there was no consensus at the highest levels of white power as to how best to respond to the increasingly powerful uprisings from below, growing pressures from business, and the tightening of international sanctions. At the highest levels of the apartheid state, there were strong strategic divisions along multiple fault-lines: there were strong disagreements between influential reformist elements associated with Minister Heunis and Operation Skrik vir Niks (discussed further below) and the so-called hardline ‘securocrats’ associated with Military Intelligence; as well as between the leadership of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) who were at odds with both Military Intelligence and the reformists associated with Operation Skrik vir Niks. The reformists and NIS were both vying for exclusive control of the channels of communication with the mass democratic movement and the ANC - while the former built links to the various elements of the mass democratic movement, the latter focused on talks with Nelson Mandela (see next chapter for details of this). International pressures reinforced the hand of the reformists and the NIS, and - until June 1986 - weakened the options offered by the ‘securocrats’. Minister Chris Heunis was the face of the reformist faction, although he was in a weaker position vis-à-vis his main rival, Neil Barnard, who was head of the NIS and much closer to PW Botha at the time.

When I interviewed Chris Heunis in July 1987, he admitted that his helicopter ride over Uitenhage during the NP conference in Port Elizabeth in October 1985 played a major role in convincing him that the forced removal of Langa would be impossible. This was part of his overall acceptance that repression was not going to resolve South Africa’s political problems. Senior officials in his Department reinforced this view and some were part of the group of forty senior civil servants who wrote the Skrik vir Niks report.104 Recordings of the clandestine meetings that I had with

104 Cloete, op. cit.

these officials were some of the material used by the National Intelligence Service to remove Fanie Cloete, a senior official close to Heunis, from his job and eventually to convince him to take early retirement in 1988 at the age of 39.

Fanie Cloete and Kobus Jordaan were the strategic brains behind the Skrik Vir Niks initiative. They complemented each other well: Cloete was by inclination and instinct an academic who enjoyed elaborating his theorisation of a given context in ways that reinforced his rather fixed conceptually framed strategic conclusions; while Jordaan was a more agile and feisty strategist who chose his words carefully in ways that were designed to subtlety – but politely - trouble the underlying assumptions of his audience. They both seemed to enjoy stepping into spaces others feared treading, and they were both on a steep learning curve when it came to comprehending the complexities of the mass democratic movement. I first met Kobus Jordaan at a gathering at the Mount Grace Hotel in the Magaliesberg outside Johannesburg. It was just after the 1987 General Election which resulted in the Conservative Party becoming the official opposition in the all-white parliament. The popular assumption was that this marked a shift to the right. Jordaan troubled that Mount Grace audience by arguing it was a shift to the left. He previously said that as the National Party moved leftward into the space previous occupied by the liberal opposition, it’s previous ideological position was occupied by the Conservative Party, but now as a minority party. I was so impressed by this, I wrote an Op Ed in the Weekly Mail entitled “It was’nt a shift to the right, it was a shift to the left”.

The declaration of the national State of Emergency in June 1986 marked the moment when Heunis and his reformist faction lost the initiative to the securocrats who were united in believing that a crackdown was needed - for some, it was about using brute force to crush the revolution, but for others like Neil Barnard, force was merely the necessary means to shift the balance of power in order to negotiate from a position of strength. The forced removal of Langa began soon after. Heunis resigned in 1989.

Conclusion

In the end, as the next Chapter will elaborate, the gains made through negotiations were reversed. The unique and fragile balance of forces carefully orchestrated in particular by Weza Made was made possible by united mass organisation in the townships and workplaces, divisions in the white power bloc (at local and national level) and negotiations over realisable concessions to sustain the belief that making the effort to be organised can deliver benefits. But this balance of forces changed fundamentally when the State of Emergency that was declared on 12 June 1986 imposed an external dynamic that subsumed by its sheer brute force all other local dynamics that the security forces did not control. With negotiations terminated, the security forces brought the conflict back onto the streets which is where they could best control it. As the next chapter will reveal, working closely with the SADF and SAP, Le Roux and Erasmus reneged on their commitment to negotiated solutions and colluded with the security forces. They used their newly trained “green beans” (the name given to the newly created “municipal police force” that were nothing more than vigilantes in green uniforms) to engineer one of the most sophisticated and precision-timed forced removals that South Africa has ever seen. Uitenhage’s white residents thought they had won and that urban apartheid would remain forever.

Introduction

Even though he recognised “[w]e are in deep trouble” and he admitted he did not “know what to do”, in the end, fully supported by the State Security Council (SSC), PW Botha opted to go with the hardegat (stubborn or obstinate) option that he knew well, rather than step into the unknown by agreeing with those who were recommending negotiations with the ANC in 1985/86. Consistent with his hardline attitude in his famous Rubicon Speech on 15 August 1985, he declared a national State of Emergency on 12 June 1986. The forced removal of Langa began just a month later. On 13 July the municipal police and a bulldozer moved into Extension 61 and began demolishing shacks. To prevent resistance, Uitenhage’s key community leaders were detained on 11 July and by 14 July many key activists (including Weza Made) had been - to use the security-speak of the time - ‘taken out’. The way was clear for one final attempt to impose an apartheid urban plan on Uitenhage by implementing the last forced removal of the apartheid era.

Sometime in mid-July I called the nun who was helping us to stash the surveys in the nearby convent after they were completed. Aware that my phone was tapped and not wanting to endanger her, I asked what she knew about the forced removals. In a formal matter-of-fact tone she simply said: “The forced removals have begun, Mark - we can hear them night and day.” This confirmed what was filtering through various informal channels. I felt like I had been punched hard in the stomach and plunged into a deep depression. There was no way of knowing what was going to happen next.

According to Neil Barnard, in the face of the “the revolutionary upheaval in which South Africa was embroiled in the 1980s”4, the State Security Council (SSC) effectively took

Barnard, op. cit. Kindle version loc. 1689, my emphasis

over control of the entire state system - what Barnard somewhat nonchalantly calls “a necessary coup”. Confirming my own research published as far back as 1989 when much of this was officially denied by the regime5, Barnard has now conceded that the SSC takeover of formal constitutional governance was undertaken via the secretive National Security Management System (NSMS) with parallel security coordination structures (called Joint Management Centres) at the national, provincial and local levels.6 Retaining the façade of constitutional government while the security forces usurp power behind the scenes was referred to in the 1980s as the ‘Brazilian Option’ because that was where the method was pioneered.

I wrote the article about the ‘Powers of the Thunderbird’7 with my research assistant, Mark Phillips, from my upstairs office at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). At that time, the CPS occupied a beautiful old mansion located on top of the Parktown ridge within walking distance of the modern square structures of Johannesburg Hospital (now the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital) that now dominate that ridge. The northward view from my window stretched out across the leafy green northern suburbs of Johannesburg, all the way through to the commercial towers of Sandton City. I knew, of course, that the squalor of Alexandra township and its fiery political leadership lay seething and explosive on Sandton’s doorstep. Behind me to the South lay a completely different reality: the coloured and Indian townships, and the great sprawling mass of matchbox houses that was Soweto. It was 1 May 1989 and I was working in my office when the phone rang - it was my friend and academic colleague Jackie Cock. Without saying hello she said in a somewhat alarmed tone: “Where are you now?” “In my office”, I replied, “Why?” “Good - don’t go home. David has just been assassinated at his

5 See Swilling, M. & Phillips, M. 1989. “The Powers of the

Thunderbird: Decision-Making Structures and Policy Strategies

in the South African State”, Centre for Policy Studies (ed.), South

Africa at the End of the Eighties, Johannesburg, Centre for Policy

Studies. 6 Barnard, op. cit. 7 The title of the article comes from a quote by PW Botha himself,

who threatened to unleash what he called his own “powers of the

thunderbird”.

home in Troyeville - please be careful. I am worried about you.” She was, of course, referring to David Webster, an academic colleague in the Social Anthropology Department. His office was four doors down from where my office was the previous year - in Central Block, at the University of the Witwatersrand.

The NSMS coordinated the implementation of the State of Emergency. The aim was twofold: to win black support using the “winning-hearts-and-minds” (WHAM) strategy, and to apply maximum force to suppress the revolutionary forces using methods derived from the theory of counter-revolutionary warfare (CRW).8 For Barnard and NSMS strategists, CRW was supposed to create the conditions for WHAM to succeed. As Barnard argues, they learnt lessons from the Algerian War of Independence, where the French colonial authorities won militarily, but lost politically. It followed, they concluded, that a military strategy without a political one would have failed. The declaration of the State of Emergency was premised on the assumption that a “revolutionary upheaval” was, indeed, underway, and therefore a “total strategy” was needed to deal with the dual military and political revolutionary threat that faced the state - by defining the challenge in political rather than military terms, Barnard conveniently placed the NIS at the centre of “total strategy”.

The recent revelations about intra-state dynamics in 1985 by two former senior government officials, Neil Barnard from NIS9 and Fanie Cloete from the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning10, suggest that many -including myself - were mistaken when we counter-posed only two factions during the 1980s: the hardline securocrats led by PW Botha (backed by the NIS) and the reformers led by Chris Heunis - the stereotypical ‘hawks versus doves’ storyline that journalists (and myself) loved to reproduce. As discussed in the last chapter, it was

8 Swilling, M. & Phillips, M., 1989. “From ‘Total Strategy’ to

Counter-revolutionary Warfare: The Politics of State Power

in the 1980s”, in Cock, J. and Nathan, L., War and Society: The

Militarisation of South Africa, Cape Town: David Philip. 9 Barnard, op. cit. 10 Cloete, op. cit.

far more complex than that, with multiple factions of hawks and doves vying for influence.

In February 1987 forty very senior civil servants from different Departments met under the Chairpersonship of Martin Koekemoer, who was then a Deputy Director-General in the Presidency. The group met in the West Wing of the Union Buildings, which is where Koekemoer’s office was located. As the seat of exclusive white power since it was built in 1910 after the Second Boer War, the hulking bulk of the Herbert Baker-designed Union Buildings presides over the city of Pretoria from its historic location on a hill known as Meintjieskop. Since 1994 I have often walked up the stairs to the first-floor meeting rooms and wondered what PW Botha must have thought as he contemplated the hardegat option during the months leading up to the 1986 State of Emergency. I also found myself wishing I could have been a fly on the wall when the forty civil servants sat down to discuss an end-game for white rule. Were those the terms that Martin Koekemoer used at the outset? Highly unlikely.

Known as the Skrik Vir Niks (“Scared of Nothing”) project, the team of forty produced a document that they all signed. Contrary to the simplistic distinction between ‘hardline’ (i.e. Military Intelligence) and ‘softline’ (i.e. NIS) securocrat positions, the Skrik Vir Niks group essentially argued for a third position, namely that the ANC-led mass democratic movement could not be defeated by the security forces. Instead, a political solution was needed sooner rather than later that included the initiation of inclusive negotiations premised on the assumption that the outcome would be one-person-one-vote, representation of all groups at all levels of government, decentralisation of power, an independent judiciary, protection of human rights and scrapping of discriminatory laws. To this end, the State of Emergency must be lifted, troops withdrawn from the townships, and a transitional executive authority and parliament of some kind set up to ensure full political inclusion.

Cloete argues that PW Botha was supportive of engagements with the mass democratic movement that Operation Skrik vir Niks had initiated, but believed that the strategy that they came up with was premature.11

This is confirmed by Barnard who provided this advice to PW Botha in 1985/86:

“I am convinced that if the new political dispensation in 1984 had also given black people political power at the highest level, the chances of a right-wing coup would have been dangerously high. This would probably have led to civil war. … As far as I am concerned, those [read: such as Fanie Cloete] who now use the benefit of hindsight to argue that the initiatives of 1989/90 should have been introduced earlier are misinformed and naïve.”

Barnard expects us to believe that it was only a question of timing, not substance. That somehow all along he knew in advance that one day negotiations with the ANC would be inevitable, but not when the balance of forces gives “the enemy” the upper hand. And this was advice that he gave PW Botha at the time. He insists that the SSC - which was chaired by PW Botha - acted correctly during the State of Emergency by “maintaining a reasonable degree of law and order so that a climate could be created in which preparations could be made for a negotiated settlement.” Furthermore, “[h]ad it not been for these institutions [i.e. the SSC and NSMS], bloody civil war and scorched earth would more than likely have been South Africa’s fate.” In short, while overplaying the threat of a right-wing coup as a ruse to justify delayed action, Barnard insists that it was strategically necessary to ensure that there was enough time to suppress the revolutionary forces so that negotiations could be conducted from a position of strength. In short, it was about forcibly gaining control of the terms of the transition. He even goes so far as to suggest that the NIS had the remarkably omniscient capacity to know that it was worth waiting for the immanent collapse of the Soviet Union which would further weaken the ANC. Conveniently for his analysis, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Personal correspondence with F Cloete, 26 Dec 2024

According to Barnard, the “government’s overriding strategic reaction to the domestic and foreign onslaught on all fronts … rested on two pillars: the phasing in of political reforms and the maintenance of law and order and general stability.” In short, to regain control of the terms of transition in line with the WHAM theory, political reforms were to be introduced on terms controlled by the state; and the ‘enemy’ (i.e. the ANC) weakened via CRW. Hence, the emphasis on delaying until the time was right. Negotiating with the ANC too early would have meant negotiating from a position of weakness which, he asserts, would have been “naïve”. This is why, presumably on the advice of the NIS, Operation Skrik vir Niks led by the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning officials was scuppered. This also, conveniently, left the NIS in control of engagements with the ANC. It is also why the support provided by Minister Chris Heunis for a negotiated settlement in Uitenhage in early 1986 was overridden by Uitenhage’s security-led Joint Management Centre after the State of Emergency was declared. Negotiating with anyone associated with the liberation movements and the mass democratic movement in 1986 was not part of the “total strategy”, especially if these negotiations happened outside the direct control of the NIS.

What the Uitenhage story reveals is that instead of CRW creating the protective shield for WHAM as per Barnard’s profound misreading of the power dynamics at the time, CRW achieved the opposite: it undermined negotiations rather than creating a climate for negotiations to take place. WHAM, in short, was contradicted rather than reinforced by CRW. From this perspective, the SSC’s decision to support PW Botha’s hardegat option was a stunning strategic miscalculation. Barnard’s arrogant assumption that he and his President had an omniscient capacity to know better than everyone else about when and how to negotiate are nothing more than pure ideological bravado that has been retrospectively invented to justify profoundly mistaken strategic judgements during 1985/86 that resulted in the loss of thousands of lives as the levels of violence rose rather than subsided during the State of Emergency that followed. Indeed, the truth of the matter lies elsewhere.12

On 2 August 1985, thirteen days before the Rubicon Speech was delivered, a secret meeting of 33 of the National Party’s top leadership - including all the Cabinet Ministers - took place in the Astronomical Observatory near Fort Klapperkop in Pretoria. The unedited 133-page transcript of this day-long brainstorm session was recently discovered by accident in an obscure file in the Archive of Contemporary Affairs (ARCA) at the University of the Free State, complete with handwritten annotations by PW Botha and a separate note instructing that it not be distributed to anyone. Cloete suggests that Botha secretly tape recorded the meeting.

Based on a reading of the contributions to this meeting from PW Botha plus comments from all the Cabinet Ministers, including Chris Heunis and Pik Botha (Foreign Affairs Minister), Cloete concludes that “none of the speakers gave any indication that they were prepared to relinquish final white control over the country” at that moment in time. PW Botha set the tone by reiterating that he was not in favour of a unitary state, a federation or a fourth chamber of parliament for black Africans. His preference was for a confederation of independent states

(i.e. Bantustans) because “…power-sharing with Coloureds and Indians [is] different from power-sharing with black nations and black cultural groups”. In a bizarre recognition of the collapse of the Black Local Authorities, PW Botha asked: “don’t we enforce a form of local government on them that they are not used to?” Referring to “traditional leadership structures” as not premised on democratic principles, he quoted what he referred to as a “witchdoctor” who had claimed that “…one man one vote is one of the biggest delusions in the world”. He concluded with pompous self-serving magnanimity that democratic practices should not be imposed on black people if this is not their way and suggested instead that maybe “witchdoctors” could play a role!

What follows in the next few paragraphs is entirely drawn from Cloete, op cit.

Minister Heunis suggested that there were ways to include black Africans into executive power-sharing at national level without compromising white control. Some Ministers - FW de Klerk in particular - had the courage to suggest that this may not be acceptable to some black leaders. No reference was made to negotiating with the ANC, releasing Nelson Mandela or unbanning the liberation. In the end, in his summary, Botha referred to negotiations with “legitimate black leaders” and it was clear this did not mean the leaders of the exiled liberation movements or of the internal mass democratic movement. Nor was there any agreement reached on how to include black leaders into national-level executive decision-making. White control was, therefore, non-negotiable. Given the profoundly racist and quite frankly bizarre views of black African political cultures that were articulated by PW Botha and others, this consensus view was unsurprising.

Despite this, Pik Botha’s interpretation of the Sterrewag meeting (as Cloete calls it, referring to the Fort Klapperkop Astronomical Observatory meeting) was that a major political breakthrough had in fact been achieved and that negotiations with “legitimate black leaders” was in fact approved, including with Nelson Mandela. This is what he told his staff and his vast international diplomatic network during the lead-up to 15 August, which is why expectations of PW Botha’s speech in the media were so high. But as Cloete points out, Pik Botha misinterpreted the outcome of the meeting. It is also why PW Botha ignored the notes that Pik Botha provided on what should be included in the speech, which included the need to refer to unbanning the liberation movements and releasing Mandela. PW Botha also ignored the notes that Chris Heunis provided, accusing him of proposing a “Prog speech”.13

PW Botha’s Rubicon Speech was, therefore, perfectly consistent with the majority opinion at the Sterrewag meeting.

This is a reference to the Progressive Federal Party, the liberal

official opposition.

“I am not prepared to lead White South Africans and other

minority groups on a road to abdication and suicide”,

he thundered.

Political control by the white minority, in short, was nonnegotiable. The intensification of the “revolutionary upheaval” (as Barnard called it) and the international isolation that the speech triggered culminated in the 1986 State of Emergency which was, in turn, fully supported by the SSC because there was consensus that PW Botha’s hardegat option was the most appropriate response to the “total onslaught”.

But within two years, Neil Barnard was negotiating with Nelson Mandela, who was still in prison. Contrary to Neil Barnard’s bravado repeated in several places in his book, this was not because the hardegat option (i.e. WHAM plus CRW) had succeeded but because it had failed. Barnard reported every meeting in detail directly to PW Botha. He met Mandela fifty times over the two-year period between 1988 and Mandela’s release in 1990! That is about one meeting a month. Contrary to his unsubstantiated assertions about the effectiveness of CRW, there is no way that he was negotiating with Mandela from a position of strength. The State of Emergency had failed to quell the “revolutionary upheaval” and both the WHAM and CRW strategies had dismally failed to achieve their respective goals. Contrary to what the participants in the Sterrewag meeting assumed, the ongoing “revolutionary upheaval” rendered white control unviable and, therefore, it was negotiable. The large number of South African delegations that travelled out the country to meet the ANC in 1985 through to 1990 suggested that this was a widely held view amongst white elites. What was unthinkable for PW Botha in 1985 was inevitable by 1988. But his stroke in 1989 saved him from seeing through to the end what had begun on his watch.

Before returning to the Uitenhage story, I want to return to the treason trial of Ashley Forbes and his 14 co-accused that took place in 1988. Ashley Forbes was an Umkhonto we Sizwe Commander and was trained in Angola before being sent back into the country. He was captured and tortured by the notorious security policeman, Sergeant Jeffrey Benzien. He refused to recognise the legitimacy of the Apartheid Court, which is why he and his co-accused refused to plead either guilty or not guilty. They argued that they were soldiers and needed to be treated as prisoners of war. Every day they marched military-style into court and would stand to attention on the command of Ashley Forbes, and would only sit down after he issued the ‘at ease’ command. Their point was obvious: they saw themselves as soldiers and, therefore, as prisoners of war. In mitigation of his sentence, his lawyer requested me to give expert evidence on the theory of counter-revolutionary warfare (CRW) that had been adopted as official policy and strategy by the security forces. To prepare, his lawyer took me into Pollsmoor Prison to meet with Ashley Forbes and his co-accused. Although I was only 28 at the time, my lasting impression of them was how young they were and how intensely focused they were on the logic of the argument that their lawyer wanted to pursue. We sat huddled together for our briefing, and I recall them being impressed by the fact that I was wearing army boots. They all knew that they were going to prison -their only concern was to ensure that their political message was clearly articulated, namely that they were prisoners of war and should be treated as such and not as criminals. My job was clear: to substantiate their claim that they were indeed soldiers and therefore needed to be treated as prisoners of war.

All I needed to prove was that the state’s commitment to CRW was by definition a declaration of war against the ANC and anyone who chose to stand up against the injustices of apartheid. Given the internal strategy documents and training manuals that I had acquired, this was not a difficult job. What was terrifying was that the top brass of the security police sat on the front benches of that Cape Town courtroom throughout my testimony. During cross-examination, I was so distracted by the undisguised hostility of high-ranking security policeman Brigadier Herman Stadler who smirked and shook his head as my testimony unfolded, that at one point I failed to hear a question posed by the prosecution. I hesitated and must have stared blankly for a moment, and when the prosecuting advocate asked if the question needs repeating, I said no. Not knowing what to say, I just said yes to the question. To this day, I don’t know what I said yes to!

Returning to the local level within Uitenhage, it was Uitenhage’s Joint Management Centre (which was the local component of the NSMS) that coordinated the forced removals that began on 14 July 1986. As the local manifestation of the “necessary coup” (as Barnard called it), top-down security instructions overrode all locally negotiated agreements. This marked the end, therefore, of local-level negotiations and the beginning of a period of jackboot urbanism - a mode of top-down repressive urban reform that disrupted the lives of thousands of black families while the white residents applauded. They were the result of a strategy aimed at forcibly realising the long-cherished vision by Uitenhage’s officialdom and white community of an urbanised black community settled far away from leafy white suburbia where property prices had a higher value than the quality of life of the black community, and where white ratepayers were moving rightward in their political allegiances.

The irony is that the State of Emergency did not shore up the cracks in urban apartheid as was hoped by the officials, policemen and politicians who enforced the removal. Instead, the failure of the State of Emergency was the prelude to a political transition that began in 1989-90 at national level that was complemented by the beginnings of an urban transition that included the scrapping of influx control, the Group Areas Act and racially structured local government. As Chapter 10 will describe, the newly negotiated post-February 1990 national urban policy framework provided the necessary conditions for the Return to Langa campaign to succeed in winning back Langa for the people. In short, although the forced removal, violent repression and the State of Emergency scuppered the agreements reached via complex negotiations prior to and just after the declaration of the Emergency, these agreements were finally implemented three-and-a-half years later. Before this dream could be realised, Langa’s residents were forced at gunpoint into a nightmare of midnight raids using extreme levels of intimidation and fear, forced removals, mass beatings, systematic torture, assassinations, detention without trial and bloodthirsty vigilante action. The white residents of Uitenhage celebrated as their property prices began to recover.

WHAM, CRW and Urban Policy

Although the literature on the shift in state strategy published during the mid-1980s adequately provided overviews of the dynamics of state reform policy and strategy, less attention was given to how all this intersected with local-level dynamics of resistance and struggle. Where this was done, it became abundantly clear that WHAM and CRW strategies as implemented by the NSMS via the Joint Management Centres had clearly and unambiguously targeted urban townships as the key foci for WHAM. This, in turn, led to attempts to reconceptualise at a general level the relationships between local urban dynamics and national security strategies during the Emergency period. The conclusions were that the complexity of the urban system was such that the aims of state security strategy were extremely difficult - if not impossible - to realise at the local level. The contradictions and cross-cutting structure of interests in towns and cities across the country was such that state security strategies failed to nail down the lid on urban social movements in the way that was originally intended. Instead, by the late 1980s, local-level negotiations returned with a vengeance, but this time driven by powerful rent boycotts that were crippling the central linchpins of both WHAM and CRW, namely black local government.14

It was these local-level negotiations that preceded the commencement of the transition at national level in February 1990 when Nelson Mandela was released and provided demonstrable proof to both the state and the opposition that a mutually hurting power stalemate could be broken.15 Although these direct linkages between WHAM and the urban system had

14 See my writing on this at the time: Swilling, Cobbett, W. and

Hunter, R., “Finance, Electricity Costs and the Rent Boycott”, in

Swilling, M., Humphries, R. and Shubane, K., The Apartheid City in

Transition, Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1991; and Swilling,

M & Shubane, K., “Negotiating Urban Transition: The Soweto

Experience”, in Lee, R. and Schlemmer, L., Transition to Democracy,

Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1991. 15 See my reflections on this stalemate at the time: Swilling, M.,

“The Extra-Parliamentary Movement: Strategies and Tactics”,

in Gilliomee, H & Schlemmer, L. (eds.), Negotiating South Africa’s

Future, Johannesburg, Southern, 1989.

much to do with the ‘targets’ that WHAM strategists selected, they also resulted from the way that urban policy shifted in the mid-1980s in response to two primary points of pressure; namely the demographic processes and social movements that ignored and/or resisted the logic and regulations of influx control, and the calls from organised business to scrap influx controls. The State President announced the abolition of influx control in June 1986, shortly before the Emergency was declared.

Now whereas organised business had hoped that this would have triggered a new urban development approach that was not premised on the principles of racial control that had shaped the urban system since at least the 1920s, in reality the state implemented what they called an “orderly urbanisation” policy, with much more emphasis on “orderly” than on “urbanisation”. At the very centre of this policy framework was the need to build strong, legitimate and viable black local governments - a project that inevitably needed to be achieved coercively. In short, urban reforms were conceded from 1985-86 onward, but these were subsumed into a national security strategy that contradicted what the social movements and capital would have liked a post-influx control urban system to achieve.

To realise the aims of WHAM (popular support for the system by meeting certain material needs) and CRW (elimination of the revolutionary threat by ‘taking out’ the revolutionaries), three strategies in particular were used in urban townships: mass detentions to ‘take out’ the activists, forced removals, and the restructuring of civil society via the creation of state-supporting “community leaders” (invariably vigilantes). All three of these were implemented in Uitenhage during the Emergency period. Not surprisingly, it was the specific constellation of local interests that mediated the particular form that WHAM (and to a lesser extent CRW) took in Uitenhage.

‘Taking Out’ the Leadership

It is commonly accepted that the 1986 State of Emergency hit the Eastern Cape region harder than the other regions of the country. It has been estimated by the Black Sash that 1,200 people were detained from the Eastern Cape communities.16 The rate of detentions (i.e. the number taking place per month) peaked during the June-August 1986 period and dropped off slightly from September through November. Releases started occurring from September and roughly equalled the detention rate through to April-May 1987. From this point through to mid-1988 the number of detainees declined steadily until there were 56 still “inside” by April 1988.

De Villiers and Roux conclude:

“Analysis of our data suggests that the underlying purpose of emergency detention is destabilisation. As a strategy, it destabilises both communities and individuals by the huge length of detentions and the emphasis on young adults. Interviews with a sample of 200 ex-detainees show that the average period of emergency detention is ten months. Over 50 per cent of these ex-detainees are under the age of 26 years.”17

The Detainees Parents’ Support Committee’s estimates were higher than the Black Sash figures. It estimated that out of a total of 2,516 known detainees from the Eastern Cape for the period mid-1986 through to early 1987, 552 were political activists or community workers, 169 were scholars, students or teachers, 28 were church workers and 9 were journalists.18

In order to find out whether there was a strategy behind the detentions, de Villiers and Roux interviewed 200 ex-detainees. The pattern was that leadership would be removed to remote police stations for interrogation for between one and three weeks, either at the beginning or the end of the detention period. Non-leadership people, however, were quite often never interrogated. Torture was widely used, with police using in particular a technique that combined suffocation and electrocution that was difficult for doctors to trace. It was also common for detainees who

16 Figures taken from de Villiers, M. and Roux, M., “Restructuring Apartheid: Terror and Disorganisation in the Eastern Cape 19861988”, South African Sociological Review, p.51.

17 Ibid., p.51. 18 Ibid., p. 51

had been tortured to be used by police to identify others who were paraded before these anonymous informers.19 de Villiers and Roux conclude that detentions were “used to unnerve communities and break down individuals.”20

A total of 752 people from the Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage area were known to have been detained in terms of the Emergency regulations by August 1986. The real figure, however, could have been double this amount because these lists were compiled from reports of detentions that were received by the Black Sash Advice Office, PE Crisis Centre, Legal Resources Centre and private attorneys. Out of the 752 known detainees, 100 were from Uitenhage.21

‘Taking out’ the leadership through detention and assassinations22 was a strategy that went hand-in-glove with the establishment of poorly trained municipal police forces. In accordance with the theory of ‘counter-revolutionary warfare’, law and order can only be maintained in a revolutionary situation by people who come directly from the communities that revolutionaries seek to control and these ‘constables’ must work closely with friendly community leaders, hence the strategy of effectively ‘arming the councillors’ with the newly created municipal police forces - or ‘greenflies’/’green beans’ as they came to be known in the townships after their green uniforms. By July 1986 there were 429 municipal policemen in Eastern Cape townships with many more employed over the next year. de Villiers and Roux argued that they played four essential roles: (i) to fill the vacuum left by the decimated community organisations,

(ii) to enforce the policies of the councils, (iii) to act as black auxiliaries of the SAP, and (iv) to work with and provide support for vigilante groups. Significantly, there is extensive evidence

19 These torture methods were systematically revealed in Riordan,

R., “Two Irregularities Made Possible by the Present State of

Emergency”, unpublished mimeo, Operation Real South Africa,

Port Elizabeth, 26 August 1987. 20 de Villiers, M. and Roux, M., op. cit., p.51. 21 Untitled memorandum compiled by Black Sash, August 1986. 22 A year-long inquest into the assassinations of Mathew Goniwe of

Cradock and his comrades has revealed that the Security Police

were directly involved in extra-legal ‘hit squad’ activities during

this period.

that a number of municipal policemen were recruited from the ranks of the amabutho and so, as one activist put it, “they know everything” about the community.23

The declaration of the State of Emergency and the commencement of detentions fundamentally altered the delicate balance of power that had emerged over the previous six months. Before the Emergency, local leaders were becoming increasingly relaxed about their profile. They slept at home, called public meetings, spoke openly to the press and some even began contemplating their longer-term futures. The prospect of upgrading and development would have created job opportunities that some, at least, could have applied for. The security police, in the meantime, were excluded from negotiations and so were most of their informers. They began, therefore, to lose control of township political dynamics. Even the local white establishment began to think that maybe Minister Heunis was correct when he told them that negotiations rather than kragdadigheid (forcefulness) was the future. This was, at least, what the leadership of the white industrial sector had concluded. All of this was, of course, wiped out by what subsequently happened.

After the Emergency was declared, activists went into hiding. Finding safe places with family, friends and sympathetic white people from town was the name of the game. With no access to mass public meetings and the press, strategy was developed in whispers in small clandestine meetings that had to be carefully set up so that only those who were supposed to be there were informed about it, and even then, there was a chance that someone was an informer. Not surprisingly, effective negotiations and non-violent action in this context were impossible.

But as detentions proceeded, it became clear that police strategy was to systematically break down the leadership structure by brutally breaking up the relationships that sustained the dynamic of the movement. And in their place to put the notorious municipal police and vigilantes. In a letter to his mother, Weza Made described his conditions of detention in Hankey Prison as follows:

23 de Villiers, M. and Roux, M., op. cit, pp.53-54.

“I have a difficult time. I do not get food. For three days I had one meal a day and sometimes I sleep very hungry, not even having any money to send someone to buy me some bread. … I feel lost, as if no-one cares for me any longer.”

In a subsequent letter to me that was smuggled out of the prison he said:

“I’m still alright in health, but my mind is a little disturb because of conditions inside the cell are deteriorating every day, even this letter I’ve written under difficult conditions because we are being searched … This chief here and his sergeants have a conservative attitudes towards us, they really hate us. One detainee here asked to see a doctor because he was beaten by police. He was taken by the chief and another black sergeant. When they arrived at doctor’s surgery, the chief threaten him that if he tell the doctor who beat him, he (chief) will beat him again at the police station. .. I’ve heard of what happened to my township… .”

Forced Removal

Although influx controls were scrapped in mid-1986, thus removing restrictions on rural-urban migration, the Group Areas Act remained intact. This meant that the locus of control shifted from a focus on the rural-urban nexus, to the intra-urban movement and location of the black African population. The struggles waged against influx control succeeded in destroying these rural-urban controls, but in so doing communities were created that did not fit into a Group Area grid. The result was a second round of battles against intra-urban removals in places like Oukasie in Brits, Crossroads in Cape Town, Hasbult at Soekmekaar, Thusang at Roedtan, Tshikoto in Louis Trichardt, Wheeler’s Farm outside Vereeniging and, of course, Langa in Uitenhage24 where nearly 50,000 people were forcibly moved in a space of three to four months, making it one of the largest ever

24 The Star, 6.3.1987. For analysis of these struggles by progressive researchers at the time in the context of an analysis of urbanisation policy, see the “Special Focus on Influx Control Police”, South

forced removals in an urban area.25 It was, of course, also the last forced removal of the apartheid era.

The introduction of the State of Emergency, mass detentions and the judicial defeat in late July suffered by the squatters in the court case initiated by the KTC earlier in the year were the necessary conditions for the execution of the forced removal of about 50,000 people during the July-October period from Langa to Tyoksville - the popular name given to the tent town that originally housed those who were removed.26 There were, however, organisational processes that provided the sufficient conditions.

The declaration of the Emergency and the commencement of detentions immediately triggered crippling tensions within the community structures. Prior to the Emergency there were tensions within the Langa Coordinating Committee between the community leadership and NAAWU trade unionists with the former accusing the latter of not putting sufficient pressure on employers to do something about the removals. Related problems were that NAAWU representatives did not regularly

African Labour Bulletin, 11, 8, Sept./Oct. 1986, especially articles by Morris, Lund, Cole, Watson and Cobbett.

25 When measured against the magnitude of urban removals during the 1960-1983 period, then the enormity of the Langa removal comes into perspective. According to the Surplus People Project, between 1960 and 1983 no less than 612,000 people were relocated in urban areas in the Cape province - which means the Langa removals were the equivalent of just under 10% of this total (Platsky, L. and Walker, C., The Surplus People, Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1985.) Compared to the great removals over the decades, the Langa removal ranks with the largest: the nearly 80,000 forced out of Cato Manor in Durban during the 1950s, the 55,000 evicted from Sophiatown in 1955, the bulldozing of the Modderdam camp in 1977 that was home to some 10,000 people in Cape Town, and the 70,000 or so people who were relocated out of District Six over the decades. Most of these big removals, however, took place over fairly long periods of time, decades in certain cases. Langa, therefore, may be in a class of its own.

26 Unless otherwise specified, the account of the forced removal that follows is taken from Mashego, M., “Caught in the Web of Orderly Urbanisation’: Forced Removals in Langa”, Johannesburg, Planact,

n.d. This study and report was directly supervised by myself but I could not, for security reasons, be personally involved in the on-site research. I also wrote up sections of the report.

attend LCC meetings and NAAWU appeared reluctant to support a rent boycott campaign by calling on employers to cancel stop-order payments to the KTC that covered the rental and service charge payments of union members. After LCC leaders were either detained or disappeared underground, new leaders took over the LCC who were unfamiliar with the complexity of the process. This exacerbated tensions between the LCC and the URECO leadership who had felt excluded from the anti-removal struggle for some time.

The URECO and NAAWU leadership decided to launch a separate structure to deal with the removals and so, three days after the declaration of the Emergency the Anti-Removal Committee (ARC) was established, composed of two NAAWU representatives, two MACWUSA representatives, one NUTW representative, one youth representative and one URECO representative. The resultant competition between the LCC and ARC meant that by the time the authorities moved decisively to execute the removal in July, the leadership were too divided to respond appropriately. These divisions filtered downward to the community - a fact that became evident when a stay away called by the unions for 20 June failed.

At 10.30 a.m. on 11 July a key meeting of the Uitenhage Joint Management Centre took place between officials from the KTC and SAP, the local member of parliament and senior government officials. This meeting agreed on three points: (i) to establish a temporary police station in Langa staffed by municipal police as the command centre for the removals that were to take place; (ii) to prevent the further erection of any additional shack structures in Langa; (iii) to commence with the forced removals - or what was termed the ‘intensification of the process of persuasion of shack dwellers to move to KwaNobuhle’.

By 5 p.m. on the same day, the temporary police station was up and staffed by the new municipal policemen that the KTC had recently been financed and empowered to employ. That night, numerous key activists were detained and a spree of detentions continued through to 14 July. The close connection between the success of the removals and the detentions was acknowledged by KTC Town Clerk Eddie Coetzee in a court affidavit when he said:

“I respectfully believe that these arrests and the consequent

removal of the threat of intimidation by the ‘comrades’ had

a great deal to do with the events that followed.”

The NP Member of Parliament for the area, Le Roux, agreed with Coetzee’s view, but added that the removal would not have been possible if the police did not have the extended powers granted to them by the Emergency regulations.27

On 13 July municipal police began dismantling shacks in Extension 61. Although the KTC Town Clerk Eddie Coetzee denied that force was used to remove people, affidavit after affidavit and the author’s own interviews repeatedly confirm that Coetzee was lying. No-one, however, could independently verify what the people were saying because of the total control over the press that the security forces had in terms of the Emergency regulations. Instead, Coetzee instructed his ‘greenflies’ to tell the people that in KwaNobuhle they would have fully serviced sites, and that there would be free transportation to the new area and that tents would be provided to those who needed time to re-build their shacks.

By 15 July Coetzee was arguing that there were suddenly large numbers of people who wanted to move voluntarily. This was challenged on 15 July by NAAWU unionists who visited KTC Administrator Barry Erasmus to raise claims by union members that they were being forced to move. The unionists were given 60 names of people who had stated categorically that they wanted to move - claims that the unionists found difficult to question, but promised to provide their own lists of people who did not want to move. The problem with this debate, of course, was that the officials were smart enough to define the issue in technical terms by breaking up the question of removal into an individual matter rather than contesting leadership claims about a collective mind-set.

27 Interview with Mr D. Le Roux MP, 4.11.1987.

As momentum built up, Coetzee used the rapid decision-making system that the National Security Management System made possible to find the money to rent more trucks, have tents flown down from Johannesburg, purchase a large number of portable toilets and mobilise more policemen. The number of trucks used ranged from 8 in July, 35 in August, 39 in September, 27 in October, 27 in November and 6 in December.28 This provided Coetzee - who was effectively in command of operations - with the necessary resources to intensify the forced removal. In the process, officials in the KTC cut corners and instead of tendering as is normal practice, they gave the job to friends who, in turn, became rich overnight by renting trucks to service what in the end was a R6 million contract for the transport alone. These fraudulent practices became the subject of a police investigation in 198929 and led to Eddie Coetzee’s resignation in mid-1989.

The assaults would start at around midnight when trucks, bulldozers and police vehicles would roll into selected sections of Langa under blinding floodlights. Commands to residents to dismantle their shacks would be barked through loudhailers. Residents were given a simple choice: either demolish your shack yourself, or the bulldozer would do it for you. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising what happened. Le Roux - the NP Member of Parliament - was out of town when he received a call from a jubilant Eddie Coetzee who said there was a “miracle, they are breaking down their shacks”. Le Roux, in turn, was in contact with Minister Heunis on a daily basis to keep him informed30 even though Heunis had made it clear to the Uitenhage Council that removals were no longer a matter for Pretoria to decide upon, but “will be left to the local interest groups.”31 And just over the hill these local interest groups celebrated the removal in the white suburbs of Vanes Estate and Levyvale. White residents formed themselves into armed street guards just in case

28 Written reply by the Minister of Constitutional Development

and Planning to questions put to him by Andrew Savage MP in

parliament. 29 Eastern Province Herald, 11.2.1989. 30 Interview with Mr D. Le Roux MP, 4.11.1987. 31 Quoted from minutes of a meeting of the Uitenhage Council, cited

in Walt, V., “Too Close for Comfort …”, Weekly Mail, 14.8.86.

violence triggered by the removal spilled over into the suburbs -a defensive measure that neo-Nazi leader Eugene Terre’Blanche commended at a mass meeting in Uitenhage in mid-July.32 One white resident praised the removal: “Our houses were going right down in value. There is hardly a house that hasn’t been burgled. We’re delighted.”33

The following story, contained in an affidavit that was

signed on 23 July 1986 before legal representatives of the

community, says it all:

“I am an adult black male 24 years old, residing at 1500 5th Ave, Langa and employed at Farm Fare (Pty) Ltd., Kruisriver Road, Uitenhage. I was living in a two room corrugated sheet shack in 5th avenue. This residence was erected by myself during June 1985. Prior to this I was living as a lodger with Mrs Mamzwanga at no. 11 Sinyani Street, Langa. I came to Uitenhage during March 1984 from Cookhouse to find a job and was living at the mentioned address. At this stage my family were still living in Cookhouse. I was given permission to reside in Uitenhage by the E. Cape Development Board. My common law wife and my 8 year old son joined me during July 1985 and we lived in the residence which I erected. There were already a lot of squatter shacks on these premises when I started building.

On a certain day, I cannot remember the day and date, at about midnight I was awakened by a knock at the door of my shack and when I opened the door I was confronted by a white Police Officer dressed in camouflaged uniform. This officer did not introduce himself so I do not know his name. He handed me a piece of paper and explained to me that it was a notice stating that I would be required to move from my house to KwaNobuhle as this area is a health hazard, because of the lack of sewerage facilities. I was also informed that I would be called to the E. Cape Development Board in due course to be formally informed about the eviction date. The Police Officer then left and I saw him

32 Weekly Mail, 25.7.1986. 33 Weekly Mail, 14.8.1986.

walking to the house next door. I also noticed two ‘Hippo’ police vehicles outside. I was also informed that no. 1500 has been allocated to my house.

The following day I heard that all the residence (sic) in the area has received similar notices from the Police and people were talking about it. I heard that some of the people had gone to the Offices of the E. Cape Development Board to inquire about the notice and they were told to remain in the area pending the outcome of a Court decision.

I did not hear anything about this incident until Monday

21.7.86 after work when I was again approached by a Police Officer at my house and was instructed that I would be moved to KwaNobuhle today and was instructed to prepare my belongings to be loaded later. There were a lot of Policemen present and I saw one Hippo Police vehicle. There were also trucks from the E.Cape Development Board onto which some of the people’s belongings were being loaded. There people were unhappy about the removal and were protesting as they were moved against their will.

When being instructed by the police to get my things ready for removal I told him that I did not want to move and I was told that I am the only person objecting against the removal as the other people had agreed to move, so I had no option but to comply with the instruction. The Police left my house and I move my belongings out of the house and then demolished the house. I did this because of fear of being assaulted if I did not comply. The water supply to the taps in the area has also been cut off.

At 01h05 a truck from the E. Cape Development Board stopped at my place and four Black Police Officers, dressed in camouflage uniform, took my belongings and loaded it onto the truck. They did not say anything to me. The material that I used to build the shack with was also loaded. I was then instructed to board another truck with my family. There were other families also on the truck. We were then taken to the Offices of the E. Cape Development Board and upon arrival taken into an office. A White clerk placed a form in front of me and instructed me to sign it.

The contents of this document was not explained to me so I refused to sign my name. The other people also refused to sign the forms. We were then instructed to again board the truck to be driven to KwaNobuhle.

At KwaNobuhle the truck stopped at a site where a lot of army tents had been erected and I was allocated a tent where all my belongings were off-loaded by the same people. This tent is divided into two sections. One section is used to store my belongings and the other section serves as living quarters for me and my family.

I wish to object to this removal in the strongest terms as I have forcefully been removed. I did not give my consent for the removal. Physical force was not used on me.

I am supposed to live in this tent for six days during which period I must re-build my shack on area allocated for this purpose by the KwaNobuhle Town Council. I must live in my shack until the Town Council gives me a house to rent.

I do not wish to live in KwaNobuhle because of the high cost of living. I now have to pay bus fare to go to work where I usually walked to work. The of renting a house will also be more than what it costed me to stay in Langa.34

By 19 July 50 families had been moved to Tyoksville, the area in KwaNobuhle that was set aside for the relocated families (see map 9.1). It was on this day that four residents brought an urgent application to the Supreme Court to obtain an order to stop the demolition of shacks. The case was postponed to 30 July pending the judgement of Justice Kroon on the case of the 426 squatters -a judgement that was due on 29 July.

Meanwhile negotiations continued, albeit at an informal level. On 23 July a discussion took place between representatives of the Midland Chamber of Industries, unions and civics. Besides the schools crisis and industrial relations matters, the industrialists announced that they had raised money for the purchase of building materials to improve living conditions in the emerging Tyoksville. The community and union leaders, however,

34 Affidavit, Griffiths Mhase Mantewu, 23.7.1986.

responded by saying that the materials should be used to assist those who wanted to go back to Langa. It was agreed that a list should be compiled of all those who wanted to return to Langa.

The removal juggernaut ground relentlessly on. By 25 July, 500 families had been moved and the pace continued to speed up. Liberal attempts to stop it all were brushed aside. On 30 July human rights lawyers and groups took down 150 affidavits from people still living in Langa who said that they did not want to move. The reasons that they gave were that KwaNobuhle was too far from town, thus making transport costs high; rents were higher in KwaNobuhle; schools were too far for children to walk; political feuding in KwaNobuhle made it an unpleasant place to live (more on this last point in the next section).

Map 9.1: Location of Tyoksville. Source: Riordan, R. The

4th

Incidents in Kwanobule, Sunday January 1987, unpublished mimeo, 22.1.1987

These efforts, however, made no impact, especially in light of the fact that Justice Kroon ruled the previous day, 21 July, that all the 426 structures between 4th and 9th Avenues “be and are hereby declared to be illegal. … [and t]hat the Respondents vacate the said area and each Respondent remove any structure erected or occupied by him in the said area by 15 August, 1986.”35

When Justice Kroon delivered his judgement on 21 July, his courtroom in a stately building in the centre of Uitenhage was filled with many residents from the 4th to 9th Avenue area. They had come to listen to the fate of their self-constructed community. Some activists were also there. Most of those present were quite elderly. They came in their Sunday best - the men with their well-worn somewhat baggy dark suits and fedora hats that had seen better times; the women in their blue-andwhite African patterned dresses and 'doeks' or in their church uniforms. The men held their hats between their knees, and looked out expectantly with solemn expressions on their faces. They had all been here before - listening to a white representative to the state telling them where to live and how. The activists were in their usual smart but casual clothing, but with jackets and caps against the winter chill. They all waited patiently and in silence as the court took its time to get underway. Eventually, with a rustle of papers and a verdict delivered disrespectfully in Afrikaans and in a hard-to-hear monotone as he read from his document, Justice Kroon delivered his verdict. Very few people in the room understood what had just happened. After the Judge ended his brief statement and left, there was a heavy silence - as if those present expected more to come that they could understand. Even I was not sure what I had heard correctly. But as the lawyer confirmed what the activists and I thought we had heard, we informed the crowd present of the outcome. As the realisation spread through the room, the profound disappointment was palpable. But for people used to being repeatedly battered by the system, the response was not indignation, but rather a steely

35 The KwaNobuhle Town Council and David Andries and Others, Supreme

Court of South Africa, South-Eastern Cape Local Division, Case Number

2966/85, 29 July 1986. Unlike a few similar cases of the time, Judge

did not stipulate that alternative accommodation must be provided

by the state.

inward stomach churning determination to survive another day in an urban system that denied them rights to live where and how they want. It had always been like this, and in that moment it looked as if it would remain like that forever.

True to form, the South African judiciary came to the rescue of the Executive and in so doing ensured the overwhelming success of a two-day mass stay away that began in Uitenhage the next day. 100% of black African workers and 70% of coloured workers stayed away from unionised factories in Uitenhage in protest against security force actions against residents, continued detention of Emergency detainees, the re-registration of black pupils, and the removal of 426 families from Langa to KwaNobuhle.36

The standard procedure for implementing the removal was as follows: the midnight visit by a police officer or official who instructed the shack dweller to visit the temporary police station; the shack dweller was then given a form to sign with no explanation - the form said that the undersigned was moving voluntarily and that transport was provided by the authorities on request; the shack dweller would then be given a green card with a stamp on it; they would then also be given 2 bags nails, 500g of salt, 500g of sugar beans, 500g samp, 200g mielie-rice and a tin of canned fruit; the shack dweller’s goods and family would then be loaded on a truck and taken to KwaNobuhle; on arrival the shack dweller would be required to produce the green card to police officers at the site; a stand and tent would then be allocated to the new arrival with warnings not to start fires inside the tent; to re-build the shack the KTC offered a loan of R900 to hire a construction company to build the shack.

Night after night throughout August and into September, the trucks, bulldozers and police vehicles rolled into the shack areas to intimidate, destroy and remove people against their will. Without a tough and courageous leadership to give them confidence and voice, the ordinary shack dwellers chose to dismantle their shacks and move rather than risk losing everything to the steel jaws of a bulldozer. A survey of 56 households that were moved found that

36 City Press, 3.8.1986.

none moved voluntarily and in answer to the question “Why did you move to KwaNobuhle?”, answered as follows:

In a subsequent survey designed to reveal the subtleties of the removal process, Riordan distinguished between promises of better services, threatened force, perceived but not experienced force, and direct experienced force. He found that 80% of those who were moved early on in the removal were promised better roads, water facilities, toilets, schools, clinics, no rental and leasehold rights; but that most people who were moved later in the process were not given these incentives. 100% of the sample of 20 households said that they were threatened by policemen in various ways that “you must go” or else their shacks would be demolished. None of those surveyed were told that they could stay if they wanted to. With respect to perceived force, 19 households said that they saw police demolishing other people’s shacks, 8 saw policemen kicking in the doors of other people’s shacks, 7 saw policemen stoning shacks, and 5 saw policemen hurting or beating others. As far as direct force was concerned, 2 had their shacks pulled down, 5 had their shacks bulldozed, 5 had their doors kicked in, 6 had stones thrown at their shacks, none were shot at, 2 were hurt or beaten, and in 5 cases police banged loudly on the walls of the shack to make them move.38

37 Riordan, R., “Results of Survey of 56 Houses in the KwaNobuhle

Resettlement Area”, unpublished mimeo, 29.10.86. 38 Riordan, R., “Results of Survey of 20 Households in KwaNobuhle

Resettlement Area”, unpublished mimeo, 29.10.86.

Despite this mounting evidence, Administrator Barry Erasmus refused to concede that there was any deviation from his instructions to policemen and officials involved in executing the removal to avoid force at all costs. The central core of his view reflected the national security ideology of the day when he said in a court affidavit:

“It also appears that one of the main reasons why most of the residents of the disputed area did not want to move initially was the intimidation exerted upon them by members of the ‘comrades’ organisation who were trying to attain their own political ends in defiance of the law. … I submit with respect that the allegations that the people in the disputed area were moved against their will are not correct. It would seem that the main motivating factors for the voluntary move by scores of people (which are still continuing) was the fact that the danger of intimidation by the ‘comrades’ organisation had, to a large extent, been reduced, and the indisputable fact that the facilities in the new area are superior and more comfortable than those in the disputed area.”39

In one sense Erasmus is correct, without the leadership the community lost the capacity to comprehend what was happening and, in particular, what the real alternatives were. Riordan sums up the steps that led to the eventual elimination of alternative courses of action that finally forced people to participate in their own removal. Initially, there were the promises of better services coupled to the implementation of court orders to demolish certain structures that were still in the process of being erected - this was undertaken loudly and publicly. The declaration of the State of Emergency followed by detentions removed the potential for organised community-wide resistance and ensured that a second level leadership would not easily emerge. The “levels of threat [then] rose massively, and the psychological impact of loudhailers at night, earth moving equipment and a new police station at the ready, combined with the odd threat with a gun, the odd threat

39 Quoted in Riordan, R., “The Langa/Despatch Removals: Forced or Voluntary?”, unpublished mimeo, n.d.

of physical abuse, the odd emergence of dogs, throwing of stones onto houses, and the kicking down of doors all led a demoralised group into fear”. Whereas 100% of the households surveyed experienced threats of force and 50% perceived force being used against others, only 10% to 25% actually experienced direct force. Then came the threat that if people chose to move later, they would not have free transport, and finally they signed papers (that they never understood) conceding that they were moving voluntarily.40

These processes graphically reflect how effective the instruments of power that were used by the authorities really were. Instead of dealing with the community as a collective via their leaders, after ‘taking out’ these leaders, the authorities were able to fragment and isolate individuals and without using large-scale bodily physical coercive violence, were able to force people to act individually in ways that they could have resisted collectively. To this extent, the removal was a remarkable example of what Steven Lukes defines as the “third dimension of power”, namely the use of symbols and ideology by the powerful to manipulate perceptions of power relations in a way that averts open conflict while simultaneously ensuring that the powerless do what the powerful want.41 This is why Erasmus could not afford to concede even the slightest deviation from his rigid construction of events.

By the end of October there were around 6,000 families in Tyoksville. Taking advantage of the momentum of intimidation and Emergency-induced fear, the authorities went beyond removing shack dwellers in Langa and turned on the black African families living in the coloured area adjacent to Langa called Blikkiesdorp - one of those ‘mixed areas’ that Uitenhage’s officialdom had wanted to ‘purify’ since the 1950s. Squatters from Despatch’s Old Location, and from squatter areas in Port Elizabeth and Kirkwood were also removed to Tyoksville.

Contrary to the promises made to residents who moved, Tyoksville was not a fully developed site-and-service scheme.

40 Riordan, R., “The Techniques of Coercion - Langa 1986”,

unpublished mimeo, Operation Real South Africa, Port Elizabeth,

n.d. 41 Lukes, S., Power: A Radical View, Hong Kong, MacMillan, 1978, p.24.

Most residents received water from motorised water tankers and there was no water-borne sewerage. It was mid-winter and there was frequent rain during the September-October period. Numerous people found themselves sleeping on the wet ground because the tents that were provided had no ground sheets. An “inspection team” of liberal professionals and politicians visited Tyoksville on 17 October. They issued a report wherein the doctors on the team described the area as a “time bomb” and if nothing was done, they feared “disastrous consequences”. The report argued that water provision was inadequate; night soil buckets were not being removed in sufficient quantities and therefore people were excreting in the bush and emptying their buckets there; emergency services were not operating; communications systems were non-existent; no provision for washing clothes and person; conditions conducive to the spread of typhoid were prevalent; the cramped living conditions in the tents facilitated the spread of tuberculosis and other contagious diseases; spreading gastric diseases were in danger of fatally infecting children; there were no means to take people in need to hospital.42

The removal had devastating economic consequences for the individual households. A survey of 56 households revealed that 39% had no household income, 9% earned between R0 and R50 per month, 16% earned between R51 and R100, 11% earned between R101 and R200, 9% earned between R201 and R300, 16% earned between R301 and R400, and 0% earned above R401. Out of 56 households, only 23% derived income from someone employed in the formal sector. If these 13 households are removed from the sample, then what emerges is that 43 households had an average of R61.60 per month per household.43 With a minimum living level for households of around R800 per month, the poverty that this statistic reveals is staggering. It is in this light that the effects of the removal on household assets should be assessed because the goods and materials that went into building up their crude shack shelters in Langa represented an investment over time. A local architect estimated that R100 was needed on average by each

42 Correspondence from Andrew Savage, Member of Parliament for

Walmer, to Minister of Constitutional Development, 30.10.1993. 43 Riordan, R., “Results of Survey of 56 Houses in the KwaNobuhle

Resettlement Area”, unpublished mimeo, 29.10.86.

household to make good the damage to materials caused by the removal.44 One story captures the tragedy:

“One man (elderly) suffered from asthma and was not physically able to rebuild his home. He is living in a tent in which there are two beds and the children are sleeping on the wet ground (the tent has no bottom sheet). All the belongings from their Despatch home were going to rack and ruin in the rain and sun. One metallic cupboard which had been bought in August 1986, was rusting through and they still owe R300 on it.”45

On 22 October, Andrew Savage and Rory Riordan - both of the liberal parliamentary Progressive Federal Party - had a meeting with Barry Erasmus, Eddie Coetzee and a third official called Basson. For every point raised by the delegation to demonstrate their opposition to the forced removal, the officials had an answer that was either a straight denial or a long and contorted argument supported by some empirical evidence, e.g. the fact that people signed affidavits saying that they were not removed.46 As far as services were concerned, Erasmus was adamant that 1,073 sites out of a total of 6,000 were fully serviced, i.e. there were roads, stormwater and toilets were in the process of being connected to the sewerage pipes. However, two tenders were going out that would ensure that all 6,000 sites would have waterborne sewerage, a toilet, a wash hand basin, stormwater drainage, and built gravel roads. In addition, two schools would be built and would be ready by January and up to six health clinics would be erected as soon as possible.47 However, Erasmus admitted that there were insufficient sites for all the residents, that not all sites could be serviced because of inadequate sewerage treatment capacity available to the KTC, and that water pressures were too

44 Ibid., p.2. 45 Ibid., p.2. 46 “Minutes of the Discussions held on Wednesday 22 October 1986

at 10h00 in the Town Clerk’s Office, Matanzima Road, KwaNobuhle between the KwaNobuhle Town Council and a Delegation from the Office of the MP and the P.F.P. Port Elizabeth”.

47 Correspondence from R. Riordan to Erasmus, 27.10.1986.

low to enable water to reach those sites situated higher up in the mountain.48

Besides the material hardship that encountered the newly settled Tyoksville residents, the most devastating consequence of the removal was the brutal destruction of the rhythms of collective daily survival and bonds of solidarity that had built up in Langa. In the process of building Langa themselves, the shack dwellers also built a well-integrated community. The removal, however, dislocated people by settling them without regard to natural relationships49 and in so doing transformed what was a rather self-reliant community into a bunch of disaggregated individuals dependent on meagre state-provided services. From a developmental point of view, this is the worst possible situation. Zoe Riordan, a Port Elizabeth-based psychologist, had this to say after a visit:

“Despite considerable anger at having been moved - and indeed, everyone we saw was most determined that he / she had been moved against his / her will -no attempts to organise the people (who are no longer a community in any sense) were apparent. Clearly, the sheer effort involved in such basic tasks as getting enough water, or keeping dry, makes any further work beyond the capability of those we saw. If the intention was to quash community organisation, this succeeded magnificently. Despair characterised the conversations; neglect and deprivation characterised the physical appearance of the dwellers.”50

Nevertheless, all the officials involved and Le Roux were of the view that the removal was a tremendous success. Le Roux boasted that it was “good footwork, smart officials, no red tape, and having the law on your side” that ensured success51 - these

48 Correspondence from B. Erasmus to R. Riordan, 31.10.1986.

49 This was more systematically analysed by Frescura, F., “Tyoksville, Eastern Cape: A Survey of the Housing Needs in a Transitional Settlement Area”, in Urban Forum, 1, 1, 1990, p.57.

50 “Visit to KwaNobuhle: Notes by Dr Zoe Riordan, Clinical Psychologist”, in Riordan, R., “The Langa/Despatch Removals -ORSA Initiatives in this Regard”, unpublished mimeo, n.d.

51 Interview with Mr D. Le Roux MP, 4.11.1987.

being the values and approach that were most highly regarded by the “securocrats” that ran the National Security Management System. In the end, the whole operation cost the taxpayer R13,487,782.62,52 just R7,5 million less than the cost of upgrading Langa as estimated by the PLANACT report.

Soon after the removal, the Uitenhage Municipality took control of the Langa area and plans were put together to turn the whole of Langa into a coloured group area.53 Barry Erasmus

-who was Uitenhage’s Town Clerk before he became the KTC Administrator - frequently reiterated after the removal that the removal now made two things possible, namely the development of Langa as a coloured area and the transformation of KwaNobuhle “into a model township for black people, an example for others to follow”.54 Finally, the 1940s vision of T.B. Floyd looked set to become reality.

But even then, there were individuals who defiantly stood up against the Orwellian machinations of the KTC and the police. Didi Allah and his wife Virginia Matiso were living at 246c 6th Avenue and were one of the 426 who contested the KTC application to the court to remove them. They tell a story that reflects the kind of spirit that must have kept Langa going for nearly a century and a half:

“On Tuesday 15 July the Law Enforcement Offices … came to the house opposite mine and I heard them discussing removal to KwaNobuhle. I approach the officers and asked them where people were expected to go if they demolished their houses. The officers then grabbed me, gave me a few slaps and said that they were taking me to their base camp …. At the base camp I was questioned by a white officer who asked me ‘who are the comrades who

52 Written reply by the Minister of Constitutional Development and Planning to questions put by Andrew Savage in parliament. 53 Interview with Roger Matlock, Director: Urban Foundation, Eastern Cape, 25.3.87.

54 “Minutes of the Discussions held on Wednesday 22 October 1986 at 10h00 in the Town Clerk’s Office, Matanzima Road, KwaNobuhle between the KwaNobuhle Town Council and a Delegation from the Office of the MP and the PFP Port Elizabeth”, p. 5.

are telling people not to move to KwaNobuhle’. I denied any knowledge of such ‘comrades’. I was then told that I would be moved to KwaNobuhle. … I was allowed to take all my property out of the house; this was loaded onto the truck. My car, which was alongside the house, was hitched to the back of the truck and the truck left for KwaNobuhle taking me with my possessions and my car in tow. … I was given a tent and my possessions were unloaded at the tent. I stayed in the tent until Saturday night when I removed all my possessions back to my home in Langa where I am still residing. At about 9h00 on Sunday … certain officers … told me that I must move myself, my possessions and my home to KwaNobuhle on the truck provided for that purpose or a bulldozer would be brought to demolish my home. I was informed by neighbours in the area that they had been told the same. After this threat a number of people began demolishing their houses. I did not demolish my house and I am still residing at the aforesaid address.” 55

The Violence of Counter-Organisation

At about 5.30 a.m. on Sunday 4 January 1987 a group gathered at the house if Kelman Befile on the corner of Ponana Tini Road and Laurence Vinqi Drive in an area known as ‘Khayelitsha’(see map 9.2). Escorted by the police, the group marched through Khayelitsha and then dispersed into smaller groups that spent the rest of the day engaged in an orgy of violence aimed at the persons and property of leading ‘comrades’ and activists.56

55 Affidavit, Parcla Didi Allah, in the Matter Between Michael Mali and Others and the KwaNobuhle Town Council, Supreme Court of South Africa, South Eastern Cape Local Division, Case No. 1889/86, my emphasis.

56 The reconstruction of the 4 January events and what led up to them has been done using affidavits and statements provided in a confidential dossier prepared by Riordan, R., “The Events in KwaNobuhle, Sunday, 4th January 1987”, unpublished mimeo,

22.1.87. This dossier contains no narrative or analysis, simply a set of maps and 27 statements obtained by Riordan.

Map 9.2: Events of 4th January 1987. (Source: Riordan, R. The

4th

Events in Kwanobule, Sunday January 1987, unpublished mimeo, 22.1.29187)

Like similar police-supported demonstrations of counter-power in places like Crossroads in Cape Town, the events of 4 January in Uitenhage hit national headlines because they provided a very clear example of how the CRW strategists were implementing their grandiose security strategy that was premised on the following principle:

“any governing power can defeat any revolutionary movement if it adapts the revolutionary strategy and principles and applies them in reverse. [The purpose is] to defeat the revolutionaries with their own weapons on their

own battlefield.”57

Given the assumption shared by the security establishment that the revolutionaries arrived at where they did through coercion, applying this in reverse meant using the same means but for opposite ends, i.e. to defend the state rather than overthrow it. Its application in the KwaNobuhle area just several weeks after the completion of a brutal forced removal highlighted how determined the security forces really were to bludgeon Uitenhage’s black community into submission. What led up to the events of 4 January and how the violence was orchestrated helps to reveal the dynamics of CRW - dynamics that complemented the WHAM strategy that led to the forced removal and state-driven urban development.

By January, a cauldron of fractious tensions existed in KwaNobuhle that resulted from the combined impact of the Emergency and removal on the one hand, and misguided overzealous oppositional strategies on the other.

As far as removal was concerned, Tyoksville was created on the outer perimeter of KwaNobuhle in the largely unserviced Extensions 6, 7 and 8a, with some of those who were moved living in a serviced area defined as Extension 4c. These extensions, in turn, surrounded Extension 4, which were newly constructed houses (built in 1984-85), some of which were owner-occupier contractor-built houses, i.e. the relatively newly settled who could afford non-rented housing because they were employed workers with employer subsidies and guarantees. In other words, over a very short period of time, three settlement types were created in close proximity to one another: about 3,700 houses in Extension 4 for stable employed workers; about 1,000 serviced sites in Extension 4c for many people who moved from Langa before the removal and from other parts of KwaNobuhle; and then about

57 Anonymous, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary Warfare, n.d. (my

emphasis) The authenticity of this booklet was verified by the

author during political trials of people accused of furthering the

aims of Umkhonto We Sizwe when I used it in my capacity as an

advisor to the defence council.

6,000 sites in Extensions 6,7 and 8 for very poor people, many of whom had been forcibly removed from Langa.58 Each of these groups had their own internal dynamics that the security and local government officials cynically exploited in a bid to recruit allies for WHAM and to harass oppositional tendencies.

Kelman Befile was once a businessman in Langa where he used to live and own shops. He was associated with the Peacemakers. Although never proven in court, hearsay evidence suggested that he killed a youngster whom he caught stealing, but with the collusion of the police, he was never prosecuted. Instead, rough “people’s justice” was meted out by the amabutho who burnt his shops down and chased him and the group around him out of Langa - actions that were to be interpreted by Befile and others as ideologically motivated anti-Africanist attacks. Befile moved to Extension 4c in 1985 where he found a house and opened some shops from which he prospered.59 The houses in this extension were originally designated for the Langa squatters that the KTC tried to entice over to KwaNobuhle - when they refused, the houses were allocated by the KTC to people who suited the patronage interests of the KTC’s Councillors and who were, therefore, not surprisingly uncomfortable about who would make counter-claims later on the houses that they occupied. Most of the people who received these houses came from Old KwaNobuhle and were said to be people who wanted to escape from those areas controlled by the “comrades”. There were, however, a significant number of Volkswagen employees who benefited from employer housing finance packages, who also lived in the area. They occupied contradictory positions: while they were part of NAAWU whose leadership was increasingly allied with the UDF camp, in the community they came under attack from amabutho squads who lumped them together with the AmaAfrika group (see below). This was to have very negative consequences later on.

Befile formed alliances with a motley crew of excouncillors, out-of-uniform black policemen, criminals, Africanist elements, disaffected ex-UDF supporters and unionists

58 Some of this information was gleaned from Frescura, F., op. cit.

pp.53-54. 59 Riordan, R., “The Events in KwaNobuhle…”, op. cit., pp.2-3.

who were opposed to mob rule by aggressive youths,60 all of whom were antipathetic to the “comrades”, amabutho and UDF groupings who had harassed and attacked them in the past. Since his arrival in Khayelitsha (Extension 4c), he and his group had been party to ongoing skirmishes with UDF activists living in Old KwaNobuhle, namely Extensions 1 and 2. However, when the forced removal from Langa began in earnest in 1986, Befile was faced with the prospect of an entire community that had alienated him landing up on their doorstep. As far as many others living in houses in Extension 4c were concerned, they shared his anxieties because they were well aware of the politicised nature of the new arrivals. Not surprisingly, he decided to organise some armed protection for himself.

The security and local government officials were well-aware of the danger that Tyoksville could have become a seething mass of discontent that could have turned against the entire removal scheme and headed back to Langa under the banner of a “Return to Langa Campaign” about which there were already murmurings. Not surprisingly, they actively supported the formation of a “counter-group” called AmaAfrika. Made up of old Peacemaker elements, this group established its “Headquarters” in the heart of Tyoksville in Sgcawa Street. It formed an alliance with Befile’s group and with active support from the security forces, enforced its authority through force and patronage -force by way of vigilante rule and patronage by being seen as the conduit for goodies handed down by the state. Their main job was to keep the “comrades” out of the way.

Out of the murky shadows of the kind of black politics that WHAM/CRM strategists ‘allowed’ to operate during the Emergency, there emerged a mysterious pro-state Africanist called together by the Reverend Ebenezer Maqina. He was the self-proclaimed leader of AmaAfrika and by 1987 he was headquartered in Port Elizabeth’s Court Chambers, the exact same offices that

60 For example, Sam Matshaka - the brother of an ex-councillor, and

Vuyisile Jonas, former member of Save the Starving Community,

were both prominent leaders of AmaAfrika and participants in

the 4 January assaults; see statement 6 in Riordan, R., “Events in

KwaNobuhle…”,p.18 and Interview with Roger Matlock, 25.3.1987.

were the UDF / MACWUSA / Black Sash headquarters during the pre-Emergency days when these organisations operated from ‘above ground’ offices.

Maqina was born in 1937 and was brought up in Port Elizabeth.61 He studied to be a teacher but his interest in the traditionalist churches led him into a movement called the African Independent Churches. It was in this capacity that he came into contact with the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). He fraternised with Steve Biko and other BCM leaders in such organisations as the Black People’s Convention, but insists that he remained an Africanist rather than an adherent of BC. Although never clear, by this he meant his attachment to traditional African values and practices - a worldview that he described as “traditionalist”. By the early 1980s he was identified in Port Elizabeth with the BC-oriented Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO), although he and AZAPO said that he was never a member of this organisation. It was, however, as a representative of AZAPO in committees trying to resolve the schools crisis in the mid-1980s that he first came into contact with the UDF - a contact that was conflictual from the start because of his refusal to support any kind of boycott action to meet popular demands and to the fact that intolerant UDF activists and amabutho took it upon themselves to violently attack him and the large group of AZAPO supporters that congregated at his house during 1985.

Befile’s base in the owner-occupied housing in Khayelitsha formed a link with Maqina and adopted the ideological framework of his strange brand of Africanism. In essence, the logic of this framework was as follows: the real issue is the war for the repossession of the land; until this moment, people need services which, in turn, must be provided by the local government; those who use housing and services and the like for their own political purposes, only make the hardships of the people worse and this, in turn, induces violent conflict amongst the African people; it is therefore a “red herring” to worry about local politics. In other words, Maqina had the remarkable ability to couch a collaborationist anti-oppositional strategy in an extremely

Maqina’s biographical data is taken from a transcript of an interview with him conducted by Herman Giliomee, 28.1.1986.

radical and populist language that connected emotively to land dispossession and the need to prevent anyone from undertaking anything that made people’s lives more difficult - the latter included the increasingly resented and interminable school and consumer boycotts.62

The conditions for intense violent conflict were therefore in place: on the one hand there were the “comrades” or amabutho who were leaderless because of the detention of the political leadership and deeply angered and frustrated by the way that they had been targeted during the Emergency. They were also embedded in the community that was forcibly removed from Langa and they were allied to those in Old KwaNobuhle that had fought running battles with the newly settled groups in Khayelitsha. The declaration of an indefinite poorly organised consumer boycott in July 1986 to protest against the State of Emergency was coercively enforced by the amabutho despite dwindling support. In addition, there was also a more or less indefinite school boycott underway with no leaders around to negotiate an end to it. This, Freddie Magugu and other activists argued, alienated many who previously supported the UDF organisations in Uitenhage.63

On the other hand, a growing group of disaffected elements coalesced around an equally aggressive group that had a radical populist Africanist ideology that managed to justify collaboration with the authorities to “minimise immediate hardships” - an ideology that suited those who benefited from new housing developments and were threatened by the creation of Tyoksville on their doorsteps. Add in the tacit and overt support that AmaAfrika received from the security forces during the intense rivalries for political support of the newly created constituencies in KwaNobuhle64, and the picture of conflict emerges.

The triggers that led up to the events of 4 January were twofold. Firstly, prominent UYCO leader Lindile Mente was shot

62 Interview with Ebenezer Maqina, 10.9.87, Port Elizabeth. 63 Interview with Freddie Magugu, op. cit. 64 AmaAfrika, municipal police and SAP collaborated in interrogating

and torturing people at the KTC offices, see Statement 22 in

Riordan, R., “Events at KwaNobuhle…”, op. cit., p.40.

and killed as he knocked on the door of his home after returning from work on the night of Thursday 14 November 1986.65 Although this triggered a series of counter-attacks by the amabutho, the most prominent incident was on 31 December1986 when Befile’s car was burnt out and his brother “Kid” abducted after Kid was stopped by comrades on the road. This was followed by the brutal public beating in Tyoksville of youths who Befile accused of abducting Kid, including dragging one of them behind a bakkie through the township.66

The plan for 4 January was very clear:67 gather at Befile’s house, March through Khayelitsha to Old KwaNobuhle with a police escort, break up into groups to hit certain targets while the police patrolled the outskirts to “catch” those who get flushed out. The conspirators were the core AmaAfrika leadership, the SAP, and municipal police.

Ntsokolo Moss, a Volkswagen employee who lived on 12 Pilane Ntsiko Street, Khayelitsha, was woken at 5.15 a.m. on Sunday 4 January by a large crowd armed with sticks. They called on him to accompany them to a meeting at Befile’s place.68 Another VW employee, one Bongolozi, was woken at 3 a.m. and went around encouraging others to join the crowd to meet at Befile’s place. When he arrived there, four masked men told him and others to join the group to “go and clean out old KwaNobuhle”.69 The meeting was addressed by Mandla Nkonki, another VW employee. He informed the crowd that they were going to march to KwaNobuhle and “we know what we want there”.70

The group then marched down Ponana Tini Road, collecting more people and growing bigger along the way. The police in Hippos and trucks hung around on the outskirts. The march went through Khayelitsha, past Zamile Motors at about 6.30 a.m.71 and

65 Eastern Province Herald, 15.11.1986. 66 Riordan, R., “Events in KwaNobuhle…”, Statement 23, p.41. 67 This plan emerges very clearly from a close reading of the

documentation contained in Riordan, R., “Events…”, op. cit. 68 Ibid., Statement 16, p.32. 69 Ibid., Statement 3, p.14. 70 Ibid., Statement 16, p.32. 71 Ibid., Statement 18, p. 35.

entered KwaNobuhle at about 7.15 a.m. By this stage, the police were in vehicles at the back of the march and two Citi Golfs and a van were in front of the march. SAP officers encountered along the way simply stood by and watched, seemingly unsurprised by what they saw. The group then split up and different groups headed in different directions, sometimes directed by policemen standing on vehicles gesturing to the leaders of the crowd to turn up certain streets.72

As the march wound its way through Khayelitsha, people in Old KwaNobuhle stood on roofs and cars to see what was happening. News spread and various activists phoned one another to warn of the oncoming danger. Most chose to flee out of the township and into the “bush”. However, a helicopter that circled overhead could track the terrified activists. Mbulelo Mlali of 8 Peta Street and also a VW employee, was one of those who fled into the bush. But he was quite relieved to come across a Hippo and 2 Land Rovers because “it was better to be arrested by the SAP than killed by the gangs in the streets”.73 Along with others who had been driven towards the police vehicles by the helicopter, Mlali was taken to the SAP temporary base where there were police informers (and later Befile and Kid) who identified people as “comrades” or not. All those identified as “comrades” were put into one group and sent to the cells, while the others were allowed to go free.74

In the meantime, the violent free-for-all across KwaNobuhle continued throughout the day, with the last assaults taking place at 9.30 p.m. Riordan’s statements record 15 distinct attacks, but there were obviously numerous others. The pattern was similar in most cases: groups of between 7 and 500 - but mostly 50 to 100 - would converge on a house; the leaders were invariably identified as AmaAfrika leaders like Befile and Matshaka; the windows would be smashed after which the contents of the house would be taken out onto the pavement, smashed with sticks and axes and then set alight; invariably, the activists who lived in the targeted houses were either in detention

72 Ibid., Statement 16, p.32. 73 Ibid., Statement 17, p.34. 74 Ibid.

or had already fled, thus leaving the rest of the family to be assaulted, abducted and in at least two instances killed ; the police would then arrive shortly after to see how it had all gone, after which they would leave without the slightest indication that they regarded what had happened as a crime. One black policeman who was part of a larger group that visited the aftermath of the attack on Sipho Sotyelelwa’s house on 18 Relu Street was heard to say:

“O ha-ha, we’ve got this rubbish. Look how beautiful is his

house. It looks beautiful like our houses.”75

It was clearly a day for these black policemen to revenge what had happened to them during and after the attacks on Kinikini nearly two years earlier. In fact, one member of a group that attacked a house told the parents of an activist who had fled that if they found him they would kill him in front of his house, “just like Kinikini”.76

On Monday 5 January the security police visited a number of the houses that had been attacked. When they arrived at Stetch Qhayisani’s house (who was a storekeeper who had been detained the previous year), one of them said to Stetch’s wife: “You see, the boycott Stetch started has caused all this. You must take your clothes and go as these people will return and put a tyre around your neck.”77

According to Ms Lena Loom, grandmother of a 20-yearold boy who was hacked to death by the vigilantes, one of the Citi Golfs that had led the march on Sunday 4 January was driven by AmaAfrika leaders through the township’s streets on Monday 5 January proclaiming through loudhailers that “there was no more UDF, it was dead, and they were going to take over. He claimed that if they can’t get the children, they will take the parents and burn them at the stadium.”78

On Tuesday 6 January, the police released a statement saying that the events in KwaNobuhle had “nothing to do with

75 Ibid., Statement 5, p.15. 76 Ibid., Statement 2, p.9. 77 Ibid., Statement 4, p.15. 78 Ibid., Statement 14(b), p.30.

the unrest whatsoever”. This meant that the press was free to report the events without reference to the official version put out by the Bureau for Information, the only agency that was allowed in terms of the Emergency regulations to put out a report on “unrest incidents”. Local policemen and people involved were also allowed, therefore, to compile their own versions of what happened and these could be reported without restriction. In short, “normality” had been restored. Or, in the words of Major Everson of the SAP: “The marchers felt things had gone on for long enough and wanted to return to normality”.79 The clear intention was to present the events as a “political process” whereby a legitimate “community group” (complete with mass action) decided to “get hold of the troublemakers”, as one local policeman put it.80 As an exercise in well-managed terror, the operation was clearly a great success. The security forces must have revelled in the way that they had managed to use “the revolutionary strategy and principles of the revolutionaries” and applie[d] them in reverse. The fact that the real leadership that was by then languishing in detention built up hegemony using very different tactics escaped the unsubtle minds of the CRW warriors.

Conclusion

The linked strategies of detention, removal and counterorganisation discussed in this chapter were implemented by the local authorities, security forces and white political leadership in a bid to overcome the contradictions that pre-Emergency negotiations were attempting to tackle. These negotiations were beginning to give shape to a new potentially post-apartheid urban system that international capital, the trade unions, community groups, liberal support groups and even certain central government Ministries could have lived with. However, the sacrifice of white support and conceding that “revolutionary groups” should be officially recognised as legitimate development partners, was the price that the local state, security forces and reactionary elements in black society would have had to pay. It was at that stage much too high a price. When the WHAM/

79 Evening Post, 7.1.1987 80 Evening Post, 7.1.1987.

CRW strategies were adopted at national level by the state and implemented via the State of Emergency in 1986, this provided the ideal framework for an alliance of forces that wanted to forcibly remove once and for all the urban vision that was articulated by the Langa anti-removal movement. It was a framework that empowered them to detain the negotiators, destroy through relocation the community that had struggled for this vision, and then to impose through managed terror a new leadership whose radical apocalyptic discourse and exclusive Africanism was no threat to a regime that measured its chances of survival purely in terms of how successful it was in eliminating its “enemies”. As the policeman said, this was “normality”. For Le Roux and Erasmus who chose to collude with the security forces instead of keeping their word by continuing to negotiate, to this day they have blood on their hands and should be haunted by the suffering endured by thousands whose lives were totally disrupted when they betrayed Weza Made and his comrades.

But the empty contrived quiescence that set in after 4 January 1987 did not survive very long. By 1989-90, local processes began to intersect with national transition dynamics that finally culminated in the realisation of the dreams of generations of African Uitenhagers who had struggled for so long to secure for themselves the right to a decent way of life on that small patch of land adjacent to Uitenhage’s Central Business District that they had always known as Kabah or Langa. When President Nelson Mandela was granted ‘Freedom of Uitenhage’ on 14 September 1995 he included the following in his speech:

“It was here that one of the first forced removals of a great number of people took place during the sixties. But you defied racism and returned to your land. It was that organised defiance that the apartheid regime sought to suppress in the Langa massacre ten years ago, followed by yet another large-scale forced removal. They did not succeed, and today we can gather here together, free and united.”

What the white residents of Uitenhage - and the local officials who defended their interests - could not have known in 1986 is

that theirs was a pyrrhic victory: by 1988, PW Botha’s men were negotiating with Nelson Mandela - a reflection of the fact that the ruling political elite had finally reached the conclusion that white minority rule was no longer a politically viable project. The forced removal of Langa was the last major forced removal of black people before the end of the apartheid era. It was also the first forcibly removed community to benefit from the democratic transition by regaining the land that it had lost even before the election of a democratic government in 1994. This was the great achievement of the Return to Langa campaign. The vision that brought so many together in that Church Hall on May Day 1986 was finally realised. Uitenhage, renamed Kariega in 2021 after the Kariega River, was never to be an all-white town again.

Introduction

Unlike the bustling shacks that used to surround them, Langa’s church buildings were not destroyed by the bulldozers in 1986. One of them, the Order of Ethiopia Church, was perched on a hillock on the corner of Maduna Road and about where 13th Avenue used to be. On 11 August 1991, grassroots activists and rank-andfile members of the Return to Langa campaign congregated in this Church Hall to workshop the principles and plans that became the basis of one of South Africa’s first community-based development projects, namely the re-development of Langa. The proposed development had been accepted in principle by the Uitenhage Municipality (UM) and was to be financed by the state-created Independent Development Trust (IDT). Unifound, an Urban Foundation-linked non-profit developer, wanted the community to be a joint partner in the planning and implementation of the project. The workshop was called so that the community could take their century-old struggle that they had waged against all those who had prevented the development of Langa, into a new phase where they would participate directly in the re-making and development of their living environment. This marked the

Representations to the Group Areas Board with Regard to the Investigation into the Proclamation of the Remainder of the Langa Black Residential Area and the Disestablished Portion Thereof as Group Areas for the White and/or Indian and/or Coloured Groups under the Group Areas Act, 1966 (Act No. 36 of 1966) to be Held at Uitenhage Town Hall on 15 March 1989.

beginning of a new era of development and reconstruction, an era that would not have been possible if the transition to democracy had not begun.

In short, the Return to Langa campaign had achieved its goal of returning the people who were forcibly removed to their rightful place at the centre of the city of Uitenhage. This chapter will describe how this happened and provide an analysis of the local developmental processes that emerged in the context of the overall transition to democracy that began in 1988 when PW Botha, via his representatives Neil Barnard, Minister Kobie Coetzee and others began negotiating with Nelson Mandela, who was still in prison. On 18 January 1989, PW Botha had a stroke, paving the way for FW de Klerk to take over from the Acting President, Chris Heunis, to be inaugurated as President in August 1989. The formal start of the democratic transition was in February 1990 when FW de Klerk announced the unbanning of the liberation movements and the release of political prisoners. Five and half years after PW Botha’s Rubicon Speech in 1985, Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster prison and delivered his famous first public speech as a free man on the Grand Parade in Cape Town on 11 February 1990.

On 11 August 1991, Weza Made – also now a free man -walked onto the podium at the mass meeting that took place in the Order of Ethiopia Church Hall to discuss the implementation of the Return to Langa Campaign and the upgrading plans that PLANACT had compiled. Dressed in a crisp, neatly ironed lose-fitting white shirt tucked into his dark blue jeans, he seemed larger than life as he looked for a moment across the expectant crowd in front of him before welcoming them all to a meeting that he never dreamed was possible when he wrote that letter to me from prison back in those dark days of 1986 when all hope seemed to have been extinguished.

Liberalisation, Democratisation and Urban Transition3

It was widely assumed for a very long time that the white minority regime would never voluntarily relinquish power. From this flowed the implication that change would only be possible by way of a revolutionary seizure of power. In reality, neither was quite true. When the “revolutionary upheaval” – to use Neil Barnard’s words - of the 1980s forced a powerful group of senior government officials and politicians to realise as early as 1985 that there was a certain inevitability about negotiating a political settlement with the liberation movements and mass democratic movement, this cannot be depicted as a voluntary surrender of power. This realisation was forced upon them by the dull compulsion of the events and circumstances of the times. Nor was there a revolutionary seizure of power. Mandela did not arrive in Pretoria on a tank, nor was there a mass uprising resulting in the equivalent of the storming of the Winter Palace or mass occupations like in Tahrir Square that forced the Egyptian Government to quit. The end result, undeniably, was a negotiated settlement. Back in 1990 I published an article that argued that the South African regime incumbents concluded during 1989-90 that the costs of preventing the transition were greater than allowing it to begin.4 There were essentially six aspects of the local and global context that gave rise to this strategic conclusion:

First, the failure of the State of Emergency to both suppress resistance and install a legitimate moderate black leadership willing to accept the retention of white control as agreed at the Sterrewag meeting of the National Party leadership.

Second, the increasingly powerful international anti-apartheid consensus, coupled to the collapse of communism in

3 I was heavily influenced in the 1990s by the influential literature

on transitions to democracy that is now somewhat outdated,

but still nevertheless profound in revealing the micro-dynamics

of democratic transitions – see O’ Donnel, G. et. al. (eds.),

Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, Baltimore and London, Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1988. 4 Swilling, M., “Political Transition, Development and the Role of

Civil Society”, Africa Insight, 20, 3, 1990.

Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, eliminated potential allies in the West that the regime could have relied on and removed the “red threat” that the regime had always used to justify its security strategies.

Third, changes in the balance of power in Southern Africa, including military defeat in Southern Angola, the independence of Namibia and an increasing consensus amongst Southern African states that the region could no longer afford to sustain the armed struggle against the powerful and brutal South African regime, which, in turn, forced the ANC to become increasingly conciliatory.

Fourth, deepening economic recession coupled to the conclusions reached by big business and leading economic planners in the Department of Finance and academic think tanks that a political settlement was a precondition for resolving the economic crisis.

Fifth, severe divisions within the white power bloc between various factions of ‘hard-liners’ and ‘soft-liners’, with organised business, professionals, intellectuals and sectors of the state lining up behind the ‘soft-liners’ – and now, with new evidence, splits between different factions of hard-liners within the security establishment, and competition for influence between different ‘soft-liner’ factions (e.g. NIS versus Department of Constitutional Development and Planning); and

Sixth, the effectiveness of the intermediaries who managed to mediate between the leading regime incumbents and the primary regime opponents both externally and within South Africa.

After FW de Klerk became President, the divided security and intelligence establishment lost control over Executive power that it had enjoyed during the Presidency of PW Botha. Those within and close to the National Party leadership who had since 1985 been pushing for a negotiated settlement were able to openly express their views and push FW de Klerk over the line. This culminated in the February 1990 announcement that the liberation movements were to be unbanned and political prisoners released.

Like in all non-revolutionary regime transitions, the essential reason why regime incumbents agree to allow transitions to begin and why regime opponents agree to participate in them, is that both conclude that the rules of the transition are such that they stand to gain more from a negotiated outcome than from prolonging conflict. This, both sides conclude, can best be accomplished by trying to gain control of the terms of the transition and in so doing determine the end result. This captures the dynamic that was at the heart of the South African transition dynamics. As argued in the previous chapter, the 1986 State of Emergency was an attempt to seize control of the terms of the transition. This strategy failed dismally, forcing the conclusion that was apparent to many close to the centre of power in 1985 that a negotiated settlement was the only alternative to a revolutionary seizure of power from below. They tried and failed to influence the direction of PW Botha’s Rubicon Speech. There is no evidence that the liberation movements and the mass democratic movement were fundamentally weakened by the State of Emergency, because in essence their strength was never about military might, but rather mass political legitimacy. WHAM and CRW both failed on their own terms.

What is not appreciated in the mushrooming South African transition literature on the democratic transition is how much of the struggle to control the terms of the political transition has revolved around spatial dynamics. I argued in the early 1990s that the intensity of the extremely complex multifaceted struggles to re-define the form and content of urban space was intimately tied up with the struggles over the future constitutional structure of the post-apartheid state.5 This remains true to this day. The reason for this is that local government sits at the point of intersection between the urban system and political power. It is, therefore, impossible to restructure the latter without impacting on the former, and vice versa. The result is that

See Swilling, M. and Shubane, K., “Negotiating Urban Transition: The Soweto Experience”, in Lee, R. and Schlemmer, L., Transition to Democracy, Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1991: and Swilling, M., “Deracialised Urbanization: A Critique of the New Urban Strategies and Some Policy Alternatives from a Democratic Perspective”, Urban Forum, 1, 2, 1990, pp.15-38.

unlike most of the non-revolutionary regime transitions, the South African transition is not simply a constitutional transition with the limited goal of creating a political democracy. Because apartheid was so thoroughly systemic in its application, the South African transition was, in fact, a transition at three levels, namely citizenship, industrial time and space: the constitutional negotiations were about citizenship and involved the state actors and the liberation movements; the corporatist economic negotiations between the state, organised labour and capital at national and regional levels were about the control and value of industrial time; and the myriad local-level negotiations in the towns and cities of the country were about the form and content of (in particular) urban space.

The penetration of the transition dynamic beyond simply the question of political democracy is due to the complex nature of the anti-apartheid struggle which did not simply revolve around liberation movements bent on re-defining citizenship and state form (as was the case in most African decolonisations), but also involved powerful trade union movements that systematically focussed on the restructuring and democratisation of the workplace, as well as coalitions of community-based organisations that have consistently struggled against race-based urban controls and generated their own conceptions of urban space. Uitenhage provides one of the better-known examples of this latter process. It was where the last apartheid-era forced removal occurred, and the Langa residents were the forced victims of forced removals to get their land back.

Recognising the importance of space in the transition, on the advice of the business-funded Urban Foundation, the state moved quickly to create a body called the Independent Development Trust (IDT). The IDT was given R2 billion from public funds and instructed to mount an ambitious urban development programme. The basic principle was that the IDT would spend R750,000 of its funds to provide homeless people with a R7,500.00 subsidy to purchase a serviced site that they were supposed to use as a basis for building their own homes. Only those projects that enjoyed community support qualified for the subsidy. Although heavily criticised by NGOs and community-based movements on the grounds that the IDT was only interested in financing a preconceived product and not, therefore, products that were generated by the communities themselves, the liberation movements and their allies decided to participate in the Board and sub-structures of the IDT. This effectively legitimised the IDT and empowered this newly created institution to trigger off South Africa’s first community-driven development movement.

The state coupled its investment in urban development to the systematic removal of urban apartheid from the statute book. Besides much of the petty apartheid, the central pillars such as the Group Areas Act were summarily scrapped in 1991-92. Although the massive racially structured local government machinery was only dismantled towards the end of 1993, it was as early as mid1990 that the government announced its opposition to race-based local government.

The scrapping of urban apartheid, however, was no panacea for the urban poor. This began to become apparent when local community-based organisations involved in development projects aimed at the urban poor began to realise that the combined costs of land, services and housing in inner city areas prohibited for affordability reasons the large-scale transformation of the urban system in the interests of the urban poor. Instead, because of land costs in particular, IDT subsidies ended up in site-and-service projects located on the urban periphery where land was cheap. The focus of the struggle, therefore, shifted from race-based urban controls to the economics of development projects, in particular urban land. Langa once again found itself at the centre of this struggle.

This was the changing national context that faced Uitenhage’s local white and black leadership by 1989-90. It was a context that relayed to them two messages: urban apartheid was finally dead, and the struggle for Langa was about to recommence, but on very different terms.

Toying with Free Settlement

The transition from urban apartheid to deracialised urbanisation was by no means direct. For a brief pre-transition moment that lasted from the end of 1987 into late 1989, the state toyed with a bizarre attempt to apply consociational principles to urban spatial ordering. The result was the passing of the Free Settlement Areas Act in 1988. This Act provided for the creation of “nongroup” group areas, i.e. urban spaces that were not proclaimed to be either coloured, black African, Indian or white. Reformists argued that this was a legislative route to deracialisation because as communities voluntarily declared themselves “free settlement” areas, they would also be eligible for non-racial local governments.6 The opposite side of this coin was that those who wanted their areas to remain mono-racial group areas would be allowed to do so.

Like many urban areas that had suffered forced removals

(e.g. Cato Manor, District Six), the Langa land was unused from the time of the removals in 1986. It could have only been developed if it was reproclaimed either coloured, Indian or white by the Group Areas Board. Not surprisingly, the machinery began to grind into motion after the removals, but by the time that the necessary notices were issued in early 1989 announcing that Group Areas Board hearings were about to take place to determine whether Langa should be proclaimed coloured, Indian or white, the Free Settlement Areas Act of 1988 was already on the statute book. So although the notices never referred to the area being defined a “free settlement area” as a fourth option,7 this was now a legal possibility. More significantly, although the notion of a ‘free settlement area’ was conceded to recognise the de facto ‘greying’ of a number of inner-city areas where middle class black people had been allowed to purchase property, it ironically also

6 See Cloete, F., “Greying and Free Settlement”, in Swilling, M., et.

al. (eds.), Apartheid City in Transition, op. cit., pp.91-108. 7 See Departement Van Ontwikkelingsbeplanning, “Uitenhage:

Ondersoek na die proklamering can die restant can die Langa

swartwoongebied en die afgeskafde gedeeltes daarvan as

groepsgebiede vir die blanke en/of indier en/of gekleurde groepe

kragtens die wet op Groepgebiede, 1966 (Wet no. 36 van 1966),

13 February 1989.

provided a legislative loophole for the Return to Langa campaign to realise its objectives. In other words, like in many other areas of life where the apartheid system began eating its own tail during the last pre-transition moments, the legislative framework that would have been required to reproclaim Langa either coloured, Indian or white in terms of Floyd’s 1940s racist dream for Uitenhage, was beginning to crumble and in so doing created contradictions that were easily exploited.

The notice called on parties to submit written recommendations by 15 March 1989. The coloured House of Representatives in the national tri-cameral parliament proposed to the Group Areas Board that the whole area should be proclaimed coloured.8 Although initially supported by the Uitenhage Municipality, the municipality changed its tune after coming under pressure from the Midlands Chamber of Industries who, in turn, had been approached by COSATU unions on the matter.9 In a letter to the Legal Resources Centre signed by the Town Secretary of the Uitenhage Municipality, it is conceded that the possibility of turning the whole area into a “free settlement area” should be investigated.10

In a paper that circulated amongst progressive organisations in Uitenhage, a set of key dilemmas were highlighted. Firstly, although the Return to Langa campaign wanted the people who were forcibly removed to be relocated back in Langa, this could not be achieved by recommending to the Group Areas Board that Langa should be proclaimed black African for two reasons: this would have disadvantaged the coloured people still living in the area, and it would be “contrary to their organisations’ constitutions which called for the promotion of non-racialism”. Nor did they see their way clear to recommend that it be proclaimed a “free settlement area” because this would have legitimised state reform policies. Nevertheless, it was decided to brief human rights lawyers to make representations

8 Eastern Province Herald, 22.6.1989. 9 “Minutes of Meeting Between Langa Anti-Removals Committee

and the Midland Chamber of Industries, 4th August 1989.” 10 Letter from G.P. Rosouw, Town Secretary of UM, to Legal

Resources Centre, 24 April 1989.

to the Group Areas Board - a pragmatic interventionist strategy that Uitenhage’s community and union leadership were very familiar with.11

The Port Elizabeth-based Legal Resources Centre (LRC) was contacted and requested to coordinate the submissions of the trade unions, church groups, sports bodies, business associations and community organisations that represented township constituencies. In essence, the LRC proposed that Langa be proclaimed a “free settlement area”, a proposal that was eventually supported by the UM and the Indian Management Committee.12 In addition, the LRC obtained support for its proposals from Members of Parliament, the Urban Foundation, and liberal human rights groups like the Human Rights Trust and Black Sash.13

During the hearings in March, the LRC and Rory Riordan of the Human Rights Trust led argument in favour of Langa becoming a “free settlement area”. In his final statement, Riordan concluded with the drama that he is particularly fond of:

“Commissioners, you have Langa in your hands, but your arms are in the calabash. All you need do, to get your freedom, is to release Langa, and negotiate its future with those who have been born in it, died in it, been massacred in it, been forced from it, and yet still long for it.”14

In August, the reconstituted Langa Anti-Removals Committee (including John Gomomo of COSATU) led by the intrepid Weza Made met the Midlands Chamber of Industries to discuss a

11 Anon, “Proposed Basis for Discussion Paper”, unpublished

mimeo, n.d. 12 Eastern Province Herald, 19.4.1989. 13 See “Representations to the Group Areas Board with Regard to

the Investigation into the Proclamation of the Remainder of the Langa Black Residential Area and the Disestablished Portion Thereof as Group Areas for the White and/or Indian and/or Coloured Groups under the Group Areas Act, 1966 (Act No. 36 of 1966) to be Held at Uitenhage Town Hall on 15 March 1989.” Also Letter from Kobus Pienaar, Legal Resources Centre, to the Administrator, Province of the Cape of Good Hope, 28 March 1989.

14 In “Representations to the Groups Areas Board….”, op. cit.

joint strategy. Recalling the mandates and agreements reached during the 1985-86 negotiations, the meeting quickly reached an agreement on the need to pressurise the authorities into agreeing that Langa should be a “free settlement area” and on the need to draw up a detailed development plan (using the PLANACT report as a point of departure) that could be put on the table as a basis for negotiation with the UM. Uppermost in the minds of both Gomomo and Weza was the danger that Uitenhage may be proceeding with plans to turn Langa into a middle-class residential area by building houses that were not affordable to the urban poor.15 These early concerns about the new class-based instruments of exclusion available to the UM were to be confirmed later on when finance became available for development.

In the meantime, the unions and community organisations went into ‘campaign mode’, complete with mass meetings, press statements, lobbying and networking. It was the organisational energy that went into these activities that provided the basis for constituting the Langa structures into the Langa Development Committee (LDC), the structure led by Weza Made that was to take the struggle into its next phase - a phase that brought the word “development” into everyday language and into the goal statements of every community organisation with a constituency.

Enter The IDT And Developers

Although the Return to Langa Campaign and the LDC were at the forefront of the various struggles, the organisations that were at the core of these activities had no experience or knowledge of the highly complex technical processes involved in bringing to fruition a proper development project. Nor were there service organisations in the PEU area that could have provided this kind of support. The first one, the Port Elizabeth-based Urban Services Group (USG) was established in early 1991 with the assistance of PLANACT.

So while the social movement mobilised support for a nonracial community-based development strategy, the UM requested

“Minutes of Meeting…”, op. cit.

the Urban Foundation (UF) in February 1991 to assist with the formulation of a redevelopment plan for Langa.16 The UF brought in Unifound, a UF utility company responsible for managing the implementation of UF development projects. The UM, UF and Unifound officials began meeting and corresponding intensively from 9 April through to 14 May. At the end of this process, the UM agreed at a meeting on 14 May to appoint Unifound as the developer to coordinate the redevelopment of Langa, with the UF responsible for managing the community consultation process. The UF agreed subject to the project receiving widespread community support and that the development be structured “on a non-racial basis”.17

On 15 May, the day after agreements were reached with the UM, the UF convened a meeting with representatives of the ANC, Uitenhage Residents Civic Organisation (URECO), LDC, ANC Youth League, Kleinhuisies Committee, and Uitenhage and Despatch Traders Association.18 The UF informed the representatives of the proposed plans for the redevelopment of Langa and requested their support for a strategy that these organisations had no part in formulating, nor adequately understood.19 After developing a fully-fledged development plan for submission to the IDT, the UF sent out letters during May requesting endorsements for the project from the Uitenhage chapters of the following organisations: Pan Africanist Congress, Pan Africanist Students Organisation, Azanian Youth, African Women’s Organisation, ANC, ANC Women’s League, ANC Youth League, South African National Students Congress, URECO, Tinarha Child Welfare, National Education Crisis Committee - Uitenhage Branch, Self Help and Resources Exchange, Legal Resources Centre, COSATU, South African Black Taxi Association, Kleinhuisies, LDC, Congress of South African Students, Order of Ethiopia, South African Communist Party, Volkswagen Community Trust, Young Christian Society, National Olympic Sports Congress, National Union of

16 Unifound Housing, “Capital Subsidy Scheme: Project Application

for Langa, Uitenhage”, Urban Foundation, Port Elizabeth, 1991,

p.20. 17 Ibid., p.21. 18 Ibid., p.22. 19 Personal correspondence with Weza Made, 15.5.91.

Metal Workers of South Africa, Azanian People’s Organisation, Ministers Fraternal. A number of these organisations provided letters of support.20

In line with pre-determined criteria laid down by the IDT, the UF / Unifound application was for just over R6 million to finance the construction of 802 serviced sites in a section of Langa located just below the old formal built houses beyond 22nd Avenue in the old Langa. Each site was supposed to have waterborne sewerage, a water tap and a water meter, the bus routes were to be tarred, minor roads were to have gravel surfaces, stormwater drains were to be installed, and no electricity was provided. The area included sites for two schools and seven community facilities of one kind or another. Significantly, the newly developed area was to fall under the UM and not the KwaNobuhle Town Council.21

As far as planning and implementation of the project was concerned, Unifound proposed that it would put up the development capital for the servicing of the sites. After construction and occupation, the IDT would pay off Unifound. After that, Unifound would establish an NGO as a joint venture with the community organisations that would, in turn, be responsible for “consolidation”, i.e. the construction of housing and social amenities.22

Towards Community-Driven Development

After the application to the IDT was submitted, the LDC called a workshop for 8-9 June 1991 to discuss the proposal. The workshop was facilitated by myself, representing PLANACT, and a representative of the newly formed Urban Services Group (USG). The workshop began by workshopping a set of “development principles” which were, in turn, used to evaluate the Unifound / UF plan and served as a basis for the development of an alternative plan. The following principles were generated:

20 Unifound, op. cit., pp.22-23. 21 Unifound, op. cit. 22 Unifound, op. cit.

The development principles were used as a basis for an assessment of the plan. The following problems emerged:24

23 PLANACT, “The Urban Foundation’s Application to the Independent Development Trust for Development in Langa: An Assessment”, unpublished mimeo, June 1991, pp.1-2.

24 PLANACT, op. cit., pp.3-8.

First, because the people of Langa were dispersed across Uitenhage by forced removals and therefore did not constitute a “community”, it was felt that this community needed to be reunited as a precondition for successful development - the consequences of people getting the sites who had not been removed were seen as potentially very divisive.

Second, the project-driven approach limited the planning process to the amount of resources available for the project, rather than allowing the planning process to reflect the extent of community need as a basis for a phased approach to meeting this need.

Third, because the project was not located in a larger development strategy geared to meet a wide range of community needs, it was seen to be exclusionary and, therefore, contradictory to the commitment to ‘community participation’, i.e. if the starting point was a general inclusive development strategy with the 802 sites as the first project, then a sense of exclusion could have been avoided

Fourth, whereas the UF / Unifound were satisfied with community support for a project which the community had no say in formulating, the LDC was of the view that there should be much greater community participation in the planning and implementation of the project, as well as direct control of the project by a properly structured community-based organisation.

Fifth, the LDC wanted to ensure that the first phase of the plan was linked to subsequent phases because it had information that the UM was planning a middle and upper income residential development for the area between the proposed UF / Unifound project and the white suburb of Levyvale, including the construction of a large new road to separate Langa from Levyvale

-a strategy that the LDC regarded as “another form of apartheid”.

Sixth, there was also concern that only the area to be developed, and not the whole of Langa, would fall under the UM.

Seventh, as far as the proposed layout plan was concerned, the workshop observed that it completely contradicted the type of layout that had previously existed; the community was not consulted on the layout, and the layout did not locate the proposed schools on the sites where schools previously existed.

Eighth, the existing brick houses needed to be upgraded and there was no clear link between the proposed site-and-service project and the upgrading of the existing area.

The June workshop formulated a strategy that included the following elements:

It was on the basis of the above principles that a series of workshops took place with representatives from all areas where there were people who wanted to return to Langa.25 Gradually a shared understanding of development began to emerge as well as a strategic vision for what should happen to Langa as a whole. This formed the basis for a new plan that differed substantially from the UF / Unifound plan in the following respects:

First, it was a development plan for the whole of Langa, but starting with a R6 million project in the area closest to the brick houses.

Second, the planning concept that was developed was not a monotonous row concept as proposed by the UF / Unifound, but rather a community concept built around open public court yards, cul de sacs, pedestrian access corridors and user-friendly

25 The results of these workshops are reported in Urban Services

Group, “The Development of Langa: ‘The Community on Top

with Planners on Tap’”, unpublished mimeo, August 1991.

yard spaces that could be used in various ways depending on affordability levels.

Third, the creation of a Community Development Trust as the primary development vehicle that was, in turn, accountable to a broad community development forum inclusive of all the political, union and community organisations.

Fourth, the establishment of a joint project team comprised of a Unifound project manager and a community liaison officer appointed by the LDC to handle the community organising process, with the latter (like the former) paid out of the projects funds.

These were the essential elements of the kind of community-driven development projects that mushroomed across the country during the 1991-92 period. They built on the culture of self-organisation within civil society, but accepted the necessity for development partnerships with private and public sector bodies to ensure that there was the necessary capacity for effective delivery.

White Resistance, Capitalist Pressure

After much negotiation, the UF / Unifound accepted the LDC’s new development strategy and undertook to sell it to the IDT and the UM. The IDT accepted the new concept, but the UM found numerous reasons for delaying its decision. Its main concern was the way the LDC wanted to link phase 1 to future phases in a way that undercut plans to create a buffer strip of middle- and upper-income housing between Levyvale and the site-and-service area.

The imminent redevelopment of Langa triggered reactionary responses in Uitenhage’s white community. Although the UM was by no means a strong supporter of the development, it was under heavy pressure from Volkswagen, the Midlands Chamber of Industries and the alliance of business interests represented on the Eastern Cape board of the UF. No such pressures were of concern to the racist white ratepayers whose urban imagination had been moulded by generations of race-based urban planning. The conflict between pro- and anti-development camps dominated the election campaigns of National Party and Conservative Party candidates that contested a by-election for a UM Council seat on 13 November 1991. Much to the consternation of the NP, the CP’s Coen Potgieter won the election. This resulted in a 50-50 split in the Council, i.e. out of 10 councillors, 5 were NP and 5 were CP, with the Mayor having the casting vote. At that stage, the Mayor was NP.

The 13 November by-election was the second one that had increased the size of the Conservative Party caucus in the UM, with the first having taken place in May. Substantially buoyed by their growing electoral support, the CP went on the offensive and in so doing split the NP caucus between those who perceived the Langa development as the source of their downfall as a party and those who were still open to business pressure. Eventually, on 25 November four CP councillors managed to call a special council meeting to debate the matter. The motion put to the council by the CP stated that the project area should not be transferred to fall under UM’s jurisdiction, a separate structure plan for the whole area should be developed in conjunction with the KwaNobuhle Town Council, and the proposed Unifound / LDC agreement should not be signed. At the end of the debate, seven voted in favour of terminating the development project and three voted against the motion,26 i.e. two NP councillors supported the CP position.

The UM decision hit nation-wide headlines because it provided very early on in the transition a clear insight into the contradiction between the continued existence of racially structured local government and the initiation of non-racial community-driven development. It also brought down onto the UM the full weight of the IDT and central government politicians and officials. Business also mobilised pressure to complement the mass action campaigns that community and union organisations began putting together. The most powerful weapon available to the black community was, of course, the land invasion. Although the UM decision caused political temperatures to rise, the onset of the festive season in December provided a much-needed

26 Eastern Province Herald, 27.11.1991

breathing space. It was clear to all that the UM decision was by no means the final word on the matter. In particular, NP councillors began to realise that an uncontrolled land invasion would be more of a headache than a controlled development project. The spectre of Langa in the mid-1980s loomed large in their imaginations.

Matters came to a head early in the new year. Following demands by black leaders to meet the full Council of the UM, a historical meeting took place in the Council Chamber between a delegation led by Weza Made which included representatives from the ANC, PAC and AZAPO, and the NP and CP members of the Council. After nearly breaking down at the outset because the CP representatives refused to speak English, the meeting proceeded with Weza Made addressing the Council on the consequences of its decision to oppose the development project. After heated debate, it was resolved that another special meeting of the UM would take place where the matter would be discussed again. By all accounts, besides being the first meeting of its kind in Uitenhage, this meeting also changed the minds of the two key NP councillors.

On 7 February, a CP-convened mass meeting attended by 278 white ratepayers voted in favour of a motion calling on the UM to stop the Langa development. Only 10 people at the meeting voted against the motion. One of the demands of this meeting was for a local referendum on the Langa development amongst whites. Then, on the 8th, a special council meeting took place that reaffirmed the original decision to approve the proposed Unifound / LDC project. This time the decision went in favour of the proposed development, thanks to the pressure that was brought to bear on those NP councillors that voted against the development in November.27 The Council agreed, however, to hold a referendum.

An application to the Supreme Court by the Uitenhage Ratepayers’ Association to obtain a court ruling restraining the UM from proceeding was dismissed with costs by the Court on 26 February.28

27 Evening Post, 7.2.1992; Eastern Province Herald, 8.2.1992. 28 Eastern Province Herald, 27.2.1992.

On 4 March, Uitenhage’s white ratepayers went to the polls to vote for or against the development of Langa - probably the last time that they were to be afforded the opportunity to have a say in whether they wanted apartheid or not. In an advert in the local newspapers placed by the Midlands Chamber of Industries, Uitenhage Sakekamer and the Uitenhage Chamber of Commerce, the case for and against the development was laid out for prospective voters to “weigh up”:

The advert ended off by warning that in the case of a vote against the development “all citizens will lose”, whereas in the event of a vote for the development “all citizens will win”.

In the event, in a 14,1% poll, 1,624 voted against the development, while 205 voted in favour.29

The full council of the UM met at 5.00 p.m. on 5 March 1992 to consider two motions: one that recommended that the Langa project should not go ahead, and the other that it should go ahead. In both cases, five voted in favour and five voted against both motions. Mayor Cronje, therefore, was required to exercise his right to cast his casting vote which he did in favour of the motion that called for the implementation of the project.30

The Administrator gave his approval for the project in a letter to the UM dated 31 March 1992.31

29 Eastern Province Herald, 5.3.1992.

30 “Minutes of the Proceedings of the Town Council, Special

Meeting held in the Council Chamber, Uitenhage, 17:00. On

Thursday 5 March 1992.” 31 Correspondence received by the author from Robin Williams,

Town Clerks UM, 25 November 1993.

The Project Begins

In accordance with its approach, the LDC sent out “applications for participation in the Langa development project” between August and December 1991. Just over 2,000 applications were returned from many of the areas where members of the Langa “Diaspora” (as it was called) lived. In addition, 104 applications were received from shack dwellers who were still living in Langa

-people who had either refused to move or who had already moved back. These 104 were given privileged access to the project by being granted sites on application. The rest were invited to a large mass meeting on 17 December 1991 at Thembani Stadium in Langa. All the applications were put into a large barrel donated by Volkswagen and two children were selected to draw out the applications. About 700 were drawn which, together with the 104, made up the project participants. This was the group that was to participate in the planning and implementation of the project.

Eventually, after extensive negotiations, the linked back-to-back agreements were in place. The Land Availability Agreement and the Design and Construction Agreement entered into between Unifound and UM on 4 December 1991 and 7 February 1992 respectively could now be implemented. An agreement with the IDT on the terms of the capital subsidy was concluded and Unifound entered into an agreement with the newly created multi-stakeholder Uitenhage Development Forum (UDF), the all-party consensus forum that effectively represented “the community” as a whole. Weza Made, the chief organiser of both the LDC and the UDF, was appointed the community Liaison Officer for the project and given an office on-site alongside the office of the Unifound Project Manager.

The contractors began construction in April 1992 and the first sites began to be completed in November / December 1992. The first occupants occupied their sites in December 1992, with the rest following during the first months of 1993. By the end of 1993 90% of the sites were occupied.

Negotiating the New Urban Meaning

As argued at the outset of this chapter, urban transition is intimately bound up with political and social transition. The fact that it was an urban development project rather than constitutional restructuring that brought Uitenhage’s black leadership face-to-face for the first time with the elected white leadership was not simply a coincidence. Apartheid was premised on spatial separation of race groups and in so doing “imagined communities” (to use Benedict Anderson’s words) were created that supported the racially exclusive democracy. It is not surprising, therefore, that the non-racial challenge to apartheid was inevitably resisted by “imagined communities” whose interests lay in defending the urban system that guaranteed their privileges. But national and local processes were afoot that were steadily undermining these interests.

Similar to the 1980s when the unionisation of black workers ensured that race ceased to be a source of white worker privilege in the workplace, race was being removed by both resistance and national transition as the primary organising principle of urban spatial ordering. This, however, did not automatically guarantee access for the urban poor to the urban system. In fact, local officials soon realised that class-based planning systems could prove to be effective instruments for protecting at least certain aspects of the apartheid urban form. The leaders of the social movement, however, were wise to these tactics and quickly adjusted to this new threat to their hard-won access by presenting a vision of a future for Uitenhage that disenfranchised poor and working people had struggled to achieve for over a century. In this sense, therefore, what was only to be enshrined when Uitenhage’s first non-racial municipality was established in 1994 was effectively won on the dusty barren slopes of Langa nearly two years earlier. A new post-apartheid urban meaning had been achieved by the impact of the urban social movements that combined community- and workplace organisation and power to defend the right of black Africans to live in the centre of Uitenhage.

Conclusion

The Langa Massacre and the Return to Langa Campaign mark the bookends of the story that this book aims to tell. When Lt Fouche gave the order to open fire on the unarmed crowd heading for a funeral on 21 March 1985, he knew that he stood at the vanguard of the full might of the apartheid state. His mission, he said, was to prevent the white community in Uitenhage from being attacked. When the first people who had been forcibly relocated to KwaNobuhle returned to their historic home in central Uitenhage in late 1992 as the wider democratic transition unfolded at national level, this was proof that it is possible to shift the balance of power through crowd action from below while the full military and security might of the state remained intact. White rule had ended at the national and local levels. The community-workplace alliance that was quickly assembled in Uitenhage after the democratic transition began was strong enough to resist a class-based redevelopment plan for Langa that would have suited the white community. Instead, through mass organisation and skilful negotiations, the civic-cum-union leadership managed to win back Langa for all who had lived in it over the previous century.