Resistance and liberation movements¶
How should the township revolt, UDF, ANC, Black Consciousness and rural resistance be interpreted?
Works engaging the debate: 17
Positions¶
- Grassroots origins vs ANC direction of the UDF (Seekings, Suttner)
- Race vs class in liberation theory (BC vs Charterist)
- Rural resistance as decisive vs marginal
- Mass action vs armed struggle
Evidence base¶
The debate on the township revolt and the liberation movements rests on a thin and largely qualitative base. The nearest thing to quantitative evidence is a small set of Labour Monitoring Group (LMG) surveys reused in Swilling (1985a) and Swilling (1985b). The first is a 71-factory survey of unionized Transvaal establishments for the November 1984 stayaway, only nine of which had significant migrant workforces. The second is an employer survey of Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage firms drawn from the Midland Chamber of Industries Directory, which yields absence rates of 90% in PE industry on 18 March 1985 and 98% and 97% in Uitenhage on 21-22 March. To these are added press-reported strike and working-days-lost counts for 1982-84 (Rand Daily Mail, 11 March 1985), aggregate stayaway estimates of 300,000-800,000 workers and some 400,000 students, and the Riekert Commission and Black Local Authorities Act 1982 as the policy frame. Swilling (1987) adds the UDF affiliate list (exhibit D7 in State v. Ramgobin), a 1984 Natal UDF meeting transcript, movement pamphlets and discussion documents, and the 1984 HSRC and Schlemmer attitude surveys. At township scale, (Seekings (1990)) is unusually well sourced for Duduza 1978-85. It combines the Baleka treason-trial transcript, East Rand Administration Board (ERAB) budget estimates for 1979-80 to 1982-83, Government Gazette rent notices, Hansard Questions and Replies for 1983-85, the Sowetan and Rand Daily Mail, the 1976 Census of Manufacturing for Nigel, and interviews with civic leaders, councillors and unionists. Bozzoli's Alexandra study, known here only through (Tilly (2005)), rests on three blocks of material: the Zwane trial records, interviews with Mayekiso trial defendants, and TRC Alexandra hearings. The ANC-UDF relationship is argued in Suttner (2004) from the reviewer's own interviews in the 1980s and 2002-04, read against ANC strategic texts: the 1979 Green Book, Tambo's 1984 Mayibuye interview, January 8 statements and Radio Freedom.
The ideological and rural strands are documentary and oral rather than serial. Gibson (1988) reads Black Consciousness after 1977 through AZAPO policy documents, Frank Talk (1981-87), the BCMA journal Solidarity, National Forum papers, and a handful of interviews (Saths Cooper, an anonymous unionist, Gerhart's Biko and Alexander interviews). Drew (1994) reconstructs socialist views of the peasantry from CPSA, WPSA, CLSA and NEUM programmes and from 1987-88 interviews with Tabata, Gool, Alexander, Jordaan and Dudley. Its only quantitative inputs are Van der Horst and Natal University College figures on reserve population and male absence. Schirmer (1994) is the strongest archival rural case. It uses Native Affairs Department (NTS) files and Beaumont, Stubbs, Native Economic and Tomlinson Commission evidence for four or five Lydenburg black-spot farms between 1943 and 1961, plus interviews conducted about forty years later. The mass action versus armed struggle question is argued almost entirely from secondary compilations. Zunes (1999) relies on Leonard's 1981 force figures, Karis's estimate of 14,000 ANC personnel, Kuper's Defiance Campaign participation counts, and Frederikse and Smuts & Westcott for strikes and boycotts. Cronin (1994) works from press commentary, an ANC/SACP/COSATU report on the Eastern Transvaal consumer boycott, and Adam and Moodley's count of 43 informal Ramaphosa-Meyer meetings. Peripheral works supply background series. Bonner (1995) uses a Johannesburg pass-record survey of roughly 20,000 workers (1936-44) and municipal Non-European Affairs reports. Switzer (1990) codes a random sample of 22 Imvo Zabantsundu issues (368 items, 1919-29). Johns (1994) draws on Schoeman's constituency vote tallies.
Contested evidence¶
The grassroots-versus-ANC-direction dispute turns less on contradictory data than on different evidentiary windows. Swilling (1987), (Seekings (1990)) and Bozzoli via (Tilly (2005)) all reach locally rooted, from-below explanations, but each does so from the local end. Swilling (1987) works from a chronology of local struggles in South African Labour Bulletin and South African Review accounts. Seekings (1990) grounds Duduza grievances in broken removal-era promises and ERAB fiscal pressure. Bozzoli traces Alexandra militancy that the ANC 'sought to catch up with'. Suttner (2004) reads ANC strategic texts and activist self-understanding to conclude that the UDF was neither created nor directed by the underground, yet activists saw themselves as executing ANC policy. He also attacks Seekings's organisation/confrontation dichotomy as a conceptual rather than an empirical error. Court records are a shared but double-edged source. Both the Baleka transcript in Seekings (1990) and the Ramgobin exhibits in Swilling (1987) come from trials in which the state alleged centrally directed conspiracy. Defence testimony therefore had incentives to stress spontaneous local grievance, a bias (Seekings (1990)) concedes for its retrospective testimony. Tilly (2005) adds that the TRC hearings Bozzoli uses themselves manufactured a unified ANC-aligned community narrative. The same LMG stayaway data are read in Swilling (1985a) and Swilling (1985b) as evidence of urban-social-movement solidarity. However, a non-random survey of unionized employers cannot distinguish solidarity from intimidation, and these two entries are essentially one study, so its weight should not be double-counted. On black local authority collapse, (Swilling (1985a)) gives election poll figures and counts of resignations without sources, and Wittenberg (2003a) asserts fiscal unviability without data. Only (Seekings (1990))'s ERAB budget estimates and rent notices supply actual fiscal evidence, for a single township. On race versus class, (Gibson (1988)) and Suttner (2004) rest on incompatible material. Gibson's BC documents and BC interviews describe an autonomous post-1977 BC trajectory. Suttner's interviews with Pityana, Mgijima and Serache are used to deny a pre-1976 'BC vacuum' and assert Congress continuity. Swilling (1987) invokes the 1984 HSRC and Schlemmer surveys to show ANC/UDF dominance over AZAPO while himself calling them unreliable. On rural resistance, (Drew (1994)) claims reserve protest was more self-sustaining than urban protest, relying on Mbeki and Tabata's participant accounts and Beinart and Bundy. Yet his own differentiation figures for 1946 undercut their picture of rural unanimity. Schirmer (1994) supports the importance of rural movements but only for a handful of farms viewed through official NAD files. On mass action versus armed struggle, (Zunes (1999)) and Cronin (1994) both credit mass action, but through counterfactual reasoning and selected episodes. Zunes's trade and investment figures ($13bn trade, $30bn investment) are unreferenced. Swilling (1987)'s headline rent boycott figures (54 townships, about 500,000 households, at least R40m per month) are likewise asserted without a source.
Underused and missing sources¶
Any re-examination would therefore start from acquisition rather than reanalysis. Beyond these, the evidence ledgers repeatedly identify sources that would settle disputed points but are never used. The first is UDF, civic and affiliate organisational archives, which would allow systematic sampling of affiliates across periods rather than reliance on exhibit D7 or a few interviews. The second is security police and Department of Law and Order files, which bear on ANC direction, on people's power, and on intimidation versus solidarity in stayaways. The third is event-level protest data by township: rent boycott, stayaway and unrest incidents. The fourth is official strike and stoppage series from the Department of Manpower, to replace press-reported counts. The fifth is township fiscal records: Administration Board and BLA accounts, council minutes, rent and service-charge ledgers, and Auditor-General reports. These would test the fiscal-crisis mechanism beyond Duduza. Also missing are worker-level surveys of stayaway participants on motive and coercion. For rural resistance, the gap is magisterial, police and Native Affairs Department records that would permit systematic comparison of the duration, scale and participation of reserve and township protest. Lydenburg farmers' association minutes and ICU/ANC branch records would also help. For the armed struggle, no work uses MK operational or casualty data, or trade, investment and sanctions series. For earlier traditions, runs of Inkululeko, The Guardian, Abantu-Batho and Umteteli on microfilm, and CPSA archives and Advisory Board election returns, are noted as available but unconsulted.
Strength of key claims¶
| Basis | Share of key claims |
|---|---|
| Systematic data | 3% |
| Partial data | 50% |
| Illustrative or anecdotal | 31% |
| Asserted | 16% |
Comparative figures for all debates are on the Literature overview.
Best-evidenced works¶
Seekings (1990), Swilling (1985b), Schirmer (1994), Swilling (1987), Bonner (1995), Switzer (1990)
Most-used primary sources¶
Holdings are matched by machine against the archive's file manifest; a dash means no match was found, not that the project certainly lacks the source.
Works and their positions¶
| Work | Position |
|---|---|
| Bonner (1995) | Heterogeneity and parochialism fragmented 1940s politics, but stabilisation, rent rises and pass laws produced a common identity by the late 1950s. |
| Cronin (1994) | Sides with Slovo's tactical point on negotiated compromise but says he still hints at a 'culminating point'. Criticises Jordan for ruling out protracted revolutionary reform. Holds that insurrection was unrealistic, citing Bisho and Bophuthatswana. |
| Cronin (1994) | Denies that teleology, vanguardism and substitutionism are defining features of liberation movements. Argues the ANC's practice contradicts Ottaway's pessimism and that it should not turn into a 'normal political party'. |
| Crush and Namasasu (1985) | Holds that rehabilitation schemes are coercive, exclude peasants and tend to trigger rural protest, as in South Africa (Bundy and Beinart, Beinart), with Lesotho's response so far mainly apathy. |
| Drew (1994) | Argues that neither fits South Africa. State-enforced stabilization of migrant labour as a permanent class cut against capitalism's usual link between urbanization and proletarianization. The 'tribal proletariat' idea anticipates Wolf's point about migrants transmitting ideas but neglects differentiation. |
| Drew (1994) | Holds that in the 1950s reserve-based uprisings showed more capacity for sustained rebellion than the fragile urban protests, which challenges the orthodox urban-primacy view. |
| Drew (1994) | Judges the Comintern version inadequately grounded in South African conditions because it treated Africans as a homogeneous peasantry. It acknowledges that the thesis pushed Communists towards rural work. |
| Drew (1994) | Finds that all sides assumed too much peasant consciousness or ignored the agricultural proletariat and the differentiated migrant population. A flexible 'Land and Liberty' line could have reconciled them. |
| Gibson (1988) | Gibson rejects the collapsing of race into class and the grafting of 'scientific socialism' onto BC. He favours a dialectic of race and class grounded in Marx's humanism and Biko's subjectivity. |
| Gibson (1988) | He holds that BC was a new philosophic point of departure, not a passing phase, though one left underdeveloped. |
| Gibson (1988) | He criticises crude, Stalinist 'diamat' materialism and argues that reading Marx as a mere materialist is a poor reading. |
| Gibson (1988) | He notes that the independent union movement has been decisive and kept itself apart from both BC and the UDF, but he does not analyse it in depth. |
| Johns (1994) | Notes the debate in the AAC and CPSA after 1935-36 and that Basner, Mofutsanyana and Marks persuaded the party to participate. Johns does not adjudicate it and says the question became especially contentious around Cape Town. |
| Johns (1994) | Reports that all four authors consider the campaigns worthwhile. He relays Lazerson's view that white candidates speaking for Africans was 'problematic', and he does not offer his own verdict. |
| Schirmer (1994) | Supports Bonner et al. that small-scale acts of non-compliance were decisive. Argues that removal resistance was a social movement that exposed the coercive state and indirectly contributed to apartheid's end. |
| Schirmer (1994) | Holds that ANC, ICU and Communist Party links radicalised resistance and introduced democratic ideas. These movements did not lead the struggle, and their impact cannot be separated from pre-existing rural cultures and determination to keep land. |
| Schirmer (1994) | Rejects cultural determinism. Collaboration was shaped by material rewards and power, and even collaborators (Thorometsane, James Mabowe Sekhukhune) modified state policy. |
| Schirmer (1994) | Finds that open, radical resistance provoked state force and failed in the short term. The tactful, isolated Manok strategy retained the land by denying the NAD grounds to call the community 'unreasonable'. |
| Seekings (1990) | Rejects reading pre-1984 quiescence as contentment; sees it as powerlessness and the prevalence of non-confrontational political action (drawing on Gaventa). |
| Seekings (1990) | Argues that common structural conditions were mediated by locally specific experiences (here, the forced removal and the broken promises), which shaped the timing and form of protest. |
| Seekings (1990) | Applies Thompson and Moore: moral outrage was bound up with material and political factors; the emphasis on state promises reflects powerlessness, not belief in a paternalistic state. |
| Suttner (2004) | Suttner rejects both the claim that the ANC 'set up' or ran the UDF and the claim of ANC-underground direction. He accepts underground involvement and affiliates' self-perception as carrying out ANC mandates, but stresses local interpretation and autonomy. |
| Suttner (2004) | Suttner regards these as misplaced counterpositions. He sees organisation and insurrection as complementary, and liberation as a precondition for rights, while conceding that the rights/liberation distinction may help explain later Coloured and Indian voting for the NP. |
| Suttner (2004) | Suttner challenges this. He argues that ANC underground structures were rebuilt and that BC and Congress forces both contested and co-operated in the late 1960s and 1970s, which explains the later Congress hegemony. |
| Suttner (2004) | Suttner argues it was qualitatively new, with prefigurative democracy and self-empowerment, and criticises Chikane's 'holding the fort' view. |
| Suttner (2004) | Suttner argues there was more continuity between them than is usually allowed. UDF structures also practised democratic centralism and intolerance, and exile was probably less uniformly top-down than is claimed. |
| Swilling (1985a) | Treats the question as hard to settle. He notes evidence of substantial factory support for collective action alongside fear of the consequences of not striking, and presents the community and union interpretations side by side. |
| Swilling (1985b) | Finds evidence of substantial shop-floor support for collective action but concedes that workers also feared the consequences of not striking, and says the truth is hard to ascertain. |
| Swilling (1987) | Argues the revolt came from below, from local organisations. The UDF gave it a national identity and articulated common demands, apart from the 1984 election boycott. |
| Swilling (1987) | Rejects the critique. Leaders are mostly working class or of working-class origin, local affiliates are entrenched in poor communities, and the organisation links community and workplace issues. |
| Swilling (1987) | Defends the Charterist national-democratic, multi-class front. He treats AZAPO as largely middle class and not a mass movement, and says the nationalist-socialist split cannot be reduced to the internal colonialism versus racial capitalism debate. |
| Swilling (1987) | Holds that recession and the illegitimacy of Black Local Authorities fused economic (collective consumption) and political demands. |
| Switzer (1990) | Argues that class boundaries were fluid and that the petty bourgeoisie was fragmenting downward. It sometimes made common cause with workers and peasants, but the eastern Cape elite and its press stayed constitutionalist and condemned popular resistance. It warns against ascribing fixed class-based meanings to these texts. |
| Switzer (1990) | Treats Cape African liberals as faithful to Trapido's 'small tradition'. They relied on white trusteeship and the Joint Councils, which were led by whites and accommodated segregation, while the African press grew increasingly disillusioned with white parties. |
| Tilly (2005) | Reports Bozzoli's view that militancy was indigenous and the ANC was catching up and co-opting it. He does not adjudicate the point, saying he cannot judge the accuracy of her reconstruction. |
| Tilly (2005) | Sceptical. He argues that dramatic form distorts explanation when complex, indirect mechanisms actually drive events, and he asks for comparison and attention to networks and resources. |
| Van Schoor (1986) | Rejects reformism, liberal trusteeship and participation in segregated bodies. He argues for independent organisation and Non-European unity. |
| Wittenberg (2003a) | Differences in administrative regimes (freehold, tribal authority, township) shaped interests and conflict; Gwala's 'bureaucratic entry points' is incomplete, and state security-force involvement is stressed. |
| Zunes (1999) | Treats labour militancy since 1973 as the most important trend toward successful non-violent action, moving from economic to political strikes. |