The Communist Party of South Africa in the fight against apartheid
by Giuseppe Sini
The day following the death of Joe Slovo, which took place on January 6, 1995, the New York Times published an article on the figure of the former secretary general of the South African Communist Party (SACP), as well as an executive of the African National Congress (ANC) and the its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, Spear of the Nation , or "Spear of the nation"); the article, although it tried to give a balanced portrait of it, already from the title revealed the priorities of the US press in reconstructing the South African events: "Joe Slovo, the anti- apartheid Stalinisthe disappeared at 68 ”. The text, the work of a well-known journalist, who later distinguished himself for his vociferous support for the US aggression in Iraq in 2003, is obviously full of references to the doubts of Slovo and his wife, Ruth First - cited coincidentally only by the way, to the detriment of the anti- apartheid commitmentthat would cost her her life - about the Soviet Union. After all, these were years in which Nelson Mandela, whenever he set foot in the United States, was plagued by insulting grievances about his unwelcome acquaintances in Washington; complaints to which he responded with admirable impassivity, as when to Reagan's lackey Kenneth Adelman, who challenged his applause for Arafat, Gaddafi and Castro, he replied that those whom the US identified as enemies were not necessarily so for its cause.
Later, in the Western media, the tendency to sweeten the history of the struggle against apartheid prevailed., presenting it - similarly to the case against segregation and civil rights in the United States - as a sort of harmonious march towards freedom resulting from a generic non-violence; his incarnation, that same Mandela not many years ago insolent because of the allies considered unpresentable, now reduced to the pathetic figure of a wise and benevolent grandfather to be revered and with whom to be portrayed in a photo. Leader of the ANC counted, it is always good to remember him, together with other members of the same organization, in the grotesque "terror watch list" of the USA until a few years ago; but also pointed out by some reactionary press as to whether or not he actually belongs to the South African Communist Party, a very sterile debate considering the close relations between the latter and the ANC.
This paper, therefore, wants to be - on the basis of a previous article on Communists and the liberation of African Americans - a re-enactment, without any claim of completeness or objectivity, of some events and figures of the South African Communist Party, in the context of the battle against ' apartheid , not ignoring its contradictions and ambiguities, especially at the beginning; without neglecting the role that the armed struggle and internationalism played in it, that is the Soviet Union and China, but also the anti-colonial movements and governments of Africa and Cuba [1].
AT THE ORIGINS OF APARTHEID: COLONIALISM, SLAVERY AND SEGREGATION
Although known to the Portuguese and the English, the area of the Cape of Good Hope was first colonized by the Dutch, as part of the activities of the Dutch East India Company, consisting in procuring slaves, raw materials and other goods to what, in the first mid-17th century, it was the dominant European maritime power in Southeast Asia; and right on the way to the eastern Dutch possessions was the Cape of Good Hope, colonized starting from 1652 to serve as an outpost for the Company's trade, but above all as the base of a colony founded on the exploitation of slaves. Slaves mainly imported from Indonesia, India, Ceylon, Madagascar and Mozambique to work in the service of the Boer settlements, which would progressively expand far beyond the Cape, to the north and east,
When the British took possession of the Cape Colony in 1795 they found a society in which white settlers were united in exploiting the labor provided by slaves and native populations, but divided between the interests of merchants and farmers in the Cape area and the trekboer- immigrant Boer breeders - constantly expanding north and east at the expense of indigenous communities; regained control of the Colony in 1806, after the brief reassignment to the Dutch with the Batavian Republic, the British in turn began the expulsion and devastation of the indigenous populations and the settlement of settlers. With the British would come the abolition of the slave trade first and the emancipation later, through intermediate steps for various forms of servile work up to wage, without this substantially diminishing the oppression of the black population. The expansion of the British would have clashed with the hostility of the Boers to be annexed and the revolts of the Africans, aimed at recovering the lands stolen from them as well as rejecting the "civilizing" claims of British imperialism. Meanwhile, during the second half of the nineteenth century the English entities were consolidated, namely the Cape Colony and Natal, and the Boer entities, or the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, which - all characterized by white supremacy and surpassed the hostilities that resulted in the two Anglo-Boer Wars - they would have formed the South African Union in 1910.
Meanwhile, the development of the mining industry, in particular diamonds and gold, was accompanied by a structuring of the industrial workforce on a racial basis, in which white workers enjoyed privileged conditions compared to black ones, subjected to forms of segregation in every area of life; a system that guaranteed huge profits not only to local capitalists, but also to investors residing in the imperialist metropolis, Europe and the United States. The same white population differed among Afrikaners, descendants of the Boer settlers, mainly based in rural areas, and nineteenth-century immigrants, mostly English, to which were added Germans and Eastern Europeans, mostly Jews; in addition to the linguistic and religious differences between the two groups, there were the economic-social inequalities transversal to them, in terms of ownership, income, qualifications, education and therefore class. The other part of the population was also very diverse, not only in origin - including descendants of natives and slaves imported from Indonesia, Madagascar and other parts of Africa - but also in occupation, religion and, in the case of native blacks, greater o less attachment to traditional forms of society superficially identified by whites as "tribal"; finally, the presence of a large Indian community should be mentioned, the result, especially in Natal, of the immigration of workers favored by the government. Parallel to the growth of the mining industry, the suppression, with more or less violent methods, of the remaining native communities and their attempts at rebellion - in particular the uprising of the Zulu in 1906 - communities already devastated by over two centuries of contacts with the colonizers was completed. whites [2].
BIRTH OF THE AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY
The constitution of the South African Union as a dominion of the British Empire, the result of a convention that met starting in 1908 in Durban - made up of only men, all white - created a unitary state on the British model, of which the four colonies constituted the provinces, with a lower house, a senate, and an executive accountable to a majority in the former; in all four founding entities the voting and eligibility rights were severely limited (Natal and Cape Colony) or completely forbidden (Transvaal and Orange Free State) for those who were not white, which did not actually change in the Union . Precisely in the context of these discriminations and to oppose them, the South African Native National Congress was born in 1912, forerunner of the ANC, whose leaders - like other organizations such as the African Political Organization - had a Western background as lawyers, clerics or publicists, and pursued a reformist policy aimed at persuading whites to meet their grievances, achieving little and failing to mobilize the black masses. More radical was the activity of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), founded by the black Clements Kadalie - a native of present-day Malawi, at the time Nyasaland - who was the protagonist of strikes of a certain importance between 1919 and the early 1920s. , clashing with the harsh repression of the authorities and the strike-breaking of white workers.
Among the first movements to explicitly refer to Marxism, the International Socialist League (ISL-Jhb), formed in Johannesburg in 1915 following a split between the ranks of the South African Labor Party, regarding participation in the First World War ( SALP), an advocate unlike the latter, firmly deployed in defense of the privileges of white workers, of mobilization on a class rather than racial basis. On similar premises, but in Cape Town, from a split of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) the Industrial Socialist League (ISL-CT) was born which, animated mainly by militants of Jewish origin, practiced a sort of revolutionary syndicalism in the wake of 'Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and enthusiastically welcomed and supported - like ISL-Jhb - the October Revolution. Both organizations, however, while advocating solidarity between black and white workers, entrusted the latter with the leading role. Starting from 1920 the two acronyms would have given rise to several and concurrent attempts to affiliate with the Communist International (Comintern), in particular the ISL-CT and one of its branches in Johannesburg, the Communist League , merged into a premature Communist party of South Africa . Finally, on July 30, 1921, with the convergence of ISL-Jhb and other formations, a handful of delegates - all white and English-speaking - gathered in Cape Town founded theCommunist Party of South Africa (CPSA); the influence of ISL-Jhb in the newborn party was evident in the appointments, respectively, to secretary and treasurer, of two of its representatives, WH Andrews and SP Bunting.
The Manifesto approved on that occasion called for "all South African workers [...] black and white, to join [the party] in promoting the overthrow of capitalism" and yet for several years to come black militancy in the party it would have been the subject of bitter discussions; accompanied moreover by unfortunate choices, such as support and participation, albeit marginal, in the so-called Rand Revolt of 1922, a strike by white miners which quickly turned into an armed insurrection in the mining area of the Witwatersrand. Triggered at the end of 1921 by the decision of the Chambers of Mine - taken in the context of the economic difficulties following the First World War - to end the agreements that guaranteed the privileges of white workers, the uprising,National Party (NP), spokesman for the Afrikaner grudge , would have resulted, before being quelled, in real pogroms against blacks. Among the consequences of the story, also the unleashing of the anti-communist paranoia, conveyed by the police, the army, the press and the government, with Prime Minister Jan Smuts who pointed to the racists Labor and National Party as a cover for the Communists, giving rise to the unfounded conspiracy that saw the rebellion as orchestrated by Moscow; a lesson also for today on how counterproductive, as well as execrable on the level of principles, the ambiguity even if only tactical on issues such as that of racism [3].
THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL
The III Congress of the Communist Party, in 1924, was animated by the debate between those who continued to attribute to white workers a prominent role - first of all WH Andrews - and a wing, especially young militants like Eddie Roux, convinced of the strategic importance of organization of black ones; this second orientation was imposed with the rise to the top of SPBunting, which together with another former member of ISL-Jhb, David Ivon Jones, had already been advocating it for some years also at the Comintern. Among the first blacks to join the Communist ranks, TW Thibedi, skilled organizer and educator, would train numerous future black militants and cadres, Albert Nzula, John B. Markx, Moses Kotane, Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana, all four who joined the party in the late 1920s and early 1930s would later become secretaries, John Gomas, Johannes Nkosi and James La Guma. In addition to sharing almost all proletarian or peasant origins, some had formal education as teachers, others had alternated with various jobs - from miner to tailor, passing through housework - training as self-taught and in party schools, as well as trade union and political activity. Meanwhile, the ephemeral collaboration undertaken with the ICU in order to exploit its mass potential among blacks, a collaboration sanctioned by the presence in its National Council of some members of the CPSA, including La Guma and Gomas, expelled in 1926 from organization of Kadalie following the latter's anti-communist turn.
In 1927, the "League Against Imperialism" (LAI) was launched in Brussels during the anticolonial World Conference and, for South Africa, JT Gumede of the African National Congress - name taken by the South African Native National Congress - participatedstarting in 1923 - and James La Guma of the CPSA; the two were able to travel to the Soviet Union where La Guma came into contact with the leaders of the Third International, an occasion on which the so-called thesis of the native republic emerged. Similar to the one on self-determination for African Americans in the US states where they constituted the majority, that of the Native Republic called for - in the resolution on the South African question adopted after the VI Congress of the Comintern in 1928 - an "independent native South African Republic, as a step towards a worker and peasant republic with full and equal rights for all races ”. This slogan met with opposition from part of the CPSA, in particular Bunting and Thibedi: some feared it might alienate the party's sympathies from white workers and that - in Roux's words,
However, the line that emerged at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern was eventually accepted by the party during its VII annual conference, held from December 1928 to January 1929, and implemented by increasing the number of black militants in its ranks and at the top, up to the appointment of Albert Nzula as secretary in 1929. Nevertheless, during the 1930s the internal conflicts between the CPSA and between a part of the latter and Moscow did not abate, leading to the expulsion of Bunting, and the brief rise of Lazar Bach , a communist of Latvian origins initially supported by the Comintern, an advocate of the removal of elements considered to be right-wing, mostly critical of the native republic, but who also ended up hitting its promoters such as La Guma. Even relations with the ANC - which strengthened starting from 1927 under the leadership of Gumede, favorably impressed by the USSR and the openness of the CPSA towards blacks - they deteriorated; on the one hand, in 1930, the emergence at its top of a conservative faction led to the ouster of Gumede, on the other hand attacks by the Communist side, as well as embarrassing those who militated in both organizations, such as Moses Kotane, would have made collaboration difficult throughout the decade. A decade during which the CPSA did not fail to fight for the rights of black workers, in particular against in addition to embarrassing those who militated in both organizations, such as Moses Kotane, they would have made collaboration difficult throughout the decade. A decade during which the CPSA did not fail to fight for the rights of black workers, in particular against in addition to embarrassing those who militated in both organizations, such as Moses Kotane, they would have made collaboration difficult throughout the decade. A decade during which the CPSA did not fail to fight for the rights of black workers, in particular againstpass law - a series of rules introduced since the 18th century - which limited the movement and residence of the black population, also strengthening the control exercised by the white bosses; just during an anti- pass campaign in Durban, on December 16, 1930, Johannes Nkosi, one of the first black leaders of the party, was assassinated by the police [4].
REORGANIZATION, BANNING AND RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PARTY
The transition from the 1930s to the 1940s was marked by efforts to reorganize the party, in which Moses Kotane, secretary since 1939, played a leading role, managing the CPSA during the Second World War and taking action to restore good relations with the ANC, in which new recruits such as the young Mandela made their way. Important years also for the emergence of figures such as Hilda Watts, elected to the Central Committee like Betty Sacks, former editor of the party newspaper The Guardian, Rachel ("Ray") Alexander and, among the black militants, the trade unionist Rahima Ally, Dora Tamana and Josie Palmer. All involved, as well as in party activity, in trade union activity on a multiracial basis - in particular with the Food and Canning Workers' Union(FCWU) founded by Alexander in 1941 - and in the fight against segregation, for example by participating in the aforementioned anti- pass campaigns , as well as cooperating with other progressive women's organizations and thus contributing to the birth of larger movements, such as the Federation of South African Women (FSAW) founded in 1954.
Meanwhile, 1948, with the electoral victory of the National Party (of explicit Nazi-Fascist sympathies), started almost half a century of intransigent reaffirmation of white supremacy, with the consolidation of the already drastic forms of segregation: the Population Registration Act of 1950 allowed the racial categorization of people into white, colored , Indian and black people, the Proibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act(1949-50) raised the color barrier for interpersonal relationships. To the de facto elimination of the right to vote and eligibility was added the transformation of the reserves, in which part of the black population languished, into so-called Homelands designated as independent areas of a separate development, actually placed under white protection and destined for underdevelopment and exploitation.
In 1950, a CPSA already overwhelmed by repression due to the role played through the African Mineworkers 'Union , led by the communist exponent and ANC member, JBMarks, in the great African miners' strike of 1946 - mobilizing in the Witwatersrand, otherwise since 1922, thousands of black workers - was banned under the Supression of Communism Act ; after the strike of 1 May called by the party and repressed in blood, with 18 strikers killed, the leaders pronounced themselves in favor of the dissolution, believing that there were no conditions to go underground. The ANC and the South African Indian Congress(SAIC), resolutely opposed to the ban, allowed numerous non-white CPSA militants to pursue legal political activity; ANC that was radicalizing itself, overcoming the mistrust of some members, such as Mandela himself, regarding communists and Marxism, opting for civil disobedience and thus proving its ability to mobilize in the "Challenge Campaign", organized in 1952 together with SAIC. Meanwhile, despite the initial exclusion of clandestinity, some communist militants worked to reconstitute the party: in addition to Kotane, among them there were men and women who would have played a decisive role in the fight against apartheid , such as Joe Slovo, Ruth First and Bram Fischer; the result of this activity was the constitution, in 1953, of theSouth African Communist Party (SACP) with Yusuf Dadoo - son of Indian immigrants, party member since 1939 with solid international relations, in particular with the Indian National Congress (INC) - as president and Kotane secretary.
1953 during which the Colored People's Organization (SACPO), later renamed Colored People's Congress , was founded, also thanks to the initiative of SACP militants such as the writer Alex La Guma (son of James) , in order to mobilize non-whites against the erosion of their right to vote; the same year the Congress of Democrats (COD) was formed , a small but influential group consisting mainly of white Communists. In the trade union field, anti-communist legislation and conservative leanings regarding organization on a non-racial basis led to the exit of white unions from the South African Trades and Labor Council in 1954(SATLC); the other organisms making up the latter, mixed and hegemonized by the SACP, formed the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) the following year . The organizations mentioned, together with the ANC and the SAIC, met in 1955 in the Congress of the People , giving life to the Congress Alliance and adopting the Freedom Charter as a programmatic manifesto, an inevitably generic document, but still relevant as the result of cooperation between forces heterogeneous. It obviously called for the elimination of all “ apartheid laws and practices", Equal rights in terms of voting and eligibility regardless of race, color and sex" and, among other things: the "transfer to the people as a whole of mining wealth, banks and industry", the end of "Racial restrictions on land ownership" and its "redistribution" among those who worked it, "free, compulsory and universal education", housing policies to guarantee the right to housing and "free care".
All this would have led in 1956 to more than a hundred arrests and to a trial for treason - which ended in 1961 with the acquittal of the accused - against, as well as Mandela, other members of the ANC and the SACP, such as Lilian Ngoyi, Walter Sisulu , Moses Kotane, Joe Slovo and Ruth First; in the course of the trial the prosecution defined the Freedom Charter as communist, accusing the accused of conspiring to overthrow the South African government and foment the conflict between whites and blacks [5].
THE PASSAGE TO THE ARMY STRUGGLE, THE SUPPORT OF THE USSR AND CHINA
In 1959, as a result of an internal break in the ANC, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) was founded , close to the ideas of the former communist militant, who became an important theorist of pan-Africanism, Geoge Padmore; the movement intended the national liberation of Africans as a process independently managed by the latter and this, in the South African case, translated into a harsh criticism of the ANC's alliance policy. Just on the occasion of a dispute against the passesorganized in 1960 by the PAC in Sharpeville, not far from Johannesburg, the police opened fire on the demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding over 180; to the massive protests following the massacre, also severely suppressed, the Pretoria regime reacted with a state of emergency and a ban by the ANC and the PAC. The following year, with a referendum passage, the government converted the Union into a Republic, abandoning the Commonwealth following the criticisms of apartheid made by its African members supported by Canada and India. 1961, in the context of repression following Sharpeville, also marked the abandonment, sponsored for the ANC first of all by Mandela and, for the SACP, by Michael Harmel, of non-violence as an almost exclusive instrument of struggle; in particular Harmel, in his documentSouth Africa What's Next? , considered the absolutization of this principle "futile" and even "insidious" in that phase of the country's history. The new political line, overcoming the internal resistances of the ANC, especially of President Albert Lutuli, and of the SACP, primarily Kotane, materialized with the constitution of Umkhonto we Sizwe(MK), whose command included Sisulu, Slovo and Mandela; according to the latter, the fledgling formation opted - excluding, both for practical reasons and for possible negative consequences, the open revolution, guerrilla warfare and terrorism - for sabotage. In December 1961, in ways aimed at minimizing the possibility of civilian casualties, a series of bombs exploded in government offices and infrastructures, in conjunction with a propaganda campaign to publicize the formation of MK.
In 1962 the ANC, also via a tourof Mandela, established links with governments and movements of the continent: from Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana to Ethiopia, passing through Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Guinea, Liberia and Tanganyika, some of which would later provide training for MK; China and the USSR also contributed to the training of recruits sent by the SACP, in training camps located near Nanjing and Odessa, the Soviet Union which also supported a number of movements - such as the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), the Union People's African People of Zimbabwe (ZAPU) and the People's Liberation Movement of Angola (MPLA) - allies of the ANC. On the other hand, the United States, despite the Kennedy administration's rhetoric on human rights and a flimsy embargo on military supplies to the South African government, opposed, like Britain, to any imposition of sanctions against Pretoria, due to the considerable economic and strategic interests of US imperialism in the country and in Africa in general, also expressed by the close relationship between the respective secret services. The CIA was probably no stranger, in August 1962, to the arrest of Mandela, who the following year was co-accused, along with nine other ANC and SACP militants, in the so-called Rivonia Trial, with charges ranging from sabotage to violation of theSupression of Communism Act , passing through the conspiracy aimed at fomenting a violent revolution; in the team of lawyers was Bram Fischer, who was given some credit for taking the accused, eight of whom sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, to the death penalty. Fischer - a staunch communist and staunch opponent of apartheid , despite being a member of a well-known Afrikaner family and which, according to Mandela, could have aspired to the office of prime minister - after a brief hiding was also sentenced to life imprisonment, dying in 1975 a few months after his release from prison due to serious conditions of health.
In 1963, JB Marx and Joe Slovo left South Africa, the latter did not return for nearly three decades, while Ruth First, who left the following year, and whose engagement would have intertwined academic and political activity between England and numerous countries Africans, was murdered in Maputo in 1982 by an agent of the South African regime. In 1969, partly due to the harsh criticism of Chris Hani, a rising militant of the SACP and MK, of the failed joint operation MK-ZIPRA ( Zimbabwean People's Revolutionary Army) aiming to establish a base in Rhodesia and thereby create a corridor for South Africa, the ANC called a conference in Morogoro in Tanzania. Among the decisions taken there - in addition to the opening of the ANC, limited to its external mission, to whites and Indians - the creation of a Revolutionary Council, aimed at preparing and executing MK operations, with a strong communist presence; nevertheless, the transition from the 1960s to the 1970s was characterized by difficulties in establishing a presence both in South Africa and in the surrounding countries, as well as by tensions with hitherto hospitable ones such as Zambia and Tanzania. Years in which moreover new subjects emerged within South Africa, such as the Black Consciusness Movement(BCM) which, following the need for political autonomy advocated by the pan-Africanist PAC in the emancipation of blacks, accompanied - on the basis of Fanon, Black Power USA and Malcolm X - the insistence on overcoming the psychological and cultural factors of oppression. Perspective to which the students were referring, which would also be joined by many workers, protagonists of the Soweto Uprising which began in 1976 and bloodily repressed by the Pretoria regime, also responsible the following year for the death in detention of Stephen Biko, a leading exponent BCM plan [6].
THE CUBA INTERVENTION AND THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE APARTHEID
1974, with the fall of Caetano in Portugal, paved the way for the rise of MPLA in Angola, opposed by Washington and South Africa through the support of Jonas Savimbi's National Union for Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) , as well as the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA), also backed by Mobutu's Zaire. The movement led by Agostinho Neto, on the other hand, could count on the decisive military support of Cuba which, materialized between November 1975 and April 1976, helped to stop the advance of Pretoria - which, in October 1975, had invaded the former Portuguese colony - and US interference. The independence of the other Portuguese colony, Mozambique, the difficulties in Namibia, due to the guerrillas of the People's Organization of South West Africa (SWAPO),apartheid of many hitherto sympathetic neighbors; instead bringing to power or strengthening movements on good terms with the ANC and the SACP and therefore with MK, whose main training camp, Novo Catengue, would find its headquarters in Angola with Cuban and Soviet instructors. Furthermore, in 1978, a delegation led by the ANC president Oliver Tambo and including, in addition to the commander of MK Joe Modise, also Joe Slovo, arrived in Vietnam having the opportunity to consult with General Giáp ; the enhancement promoted by the latter of the political aspect of the operations, favored over their exclusively military success, had a certain influence on the reworking of the MK strategy, summarized in the so-called Green Paper, largely the work of Slovo.
From 1980 MK therefore carried out a series of attacks - planned by the Special Operations Unit, an entity conceived by Tambo and Slovo, in fact under the leadership of the latter - with whom it went to hit targets within the South African territory, thus demonstrating its recovered ability to operate within the country. Pretoria's reaction, in addition to a campaign, also amplified by the US press, aimed at portraying the raids as the work of a terrorist group dominated by white communists, materialized with the killing in Mozambique carried out by South African commandos of numerous MK paintings, in addition to frequent infiltrations, the result of heavy aftermath, among the ranks and even at the top of the armed wing of the ANC. In this context, in 1983, MK units commanded by Chris Hani among others assisted, albeit with mixed success, the MPLA against a series of attacks by UNITA, which continued to enjoy the support of the US Congress; the same assembly, in 1986, would have decided to override Reagan's veto on sanctions against South Africa which, moreover, could count on Israel's continued violation of the arms embargo imposed on it by the UN in 1977.
The first half of the Eighties was a troubled period for the apartheid regime also in domestic politics, in particular the two-year period 1984-85 was characterized by numerous strikes - especially those of black miners - frequent clashes with the police in the urban as well as rural areas, boycotts of schools and transport. The government's brutal repression, while putting it in a bad light internationally, did not deter Margareth Thatcher from trying to prevent concrete action against apartheid by Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries.
South Africa continuing its dirty war against its unwanted neighbors Angola, Botswana and, as it emerged in 1986, in open violation of the Nkomati agreement with which it had pledged not to operate in the former Portuguese colony, Mozambique ruled by FRELIMO under the leadership of Samora Machel, against whom Pretoria supported the self-styled Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO). That same year, Joe Slovo took over as party secretary, replaced at the top of MK by Chris Hani. But the fate of the apartheid regimethey decided once again in Angola, the scene of a battle, between 1987 and 1988, during which MPLA forces besieged at Cuito Cuanavale managed, with the decisive contribution of Cuba, to contain the joint forces of UNITA and South Africa. Although the outcome of the military operations is the subject of debate, the consequences clearly constituted a political-symbolic defeat for Pretoria, summarized as follows by Mandela: "it destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor [...] South Africa […] Cuito Cuanavale was the turning point for the liberation of our continent - and of my people - from the scourge of apartheid"; in practice, South Africa withdrew completely and definitively from Angola, also losing the de facto control hitherto exercised in Namibia, which reached independence in 1990.
The apartheid regime by now increasingly isolated internationally, as well as unable to put an end to internal tensions - in 1987, despite the state of emergency in force since the previous year, 250,000 black miners were on strike for three weeks - was forced to first contacts with ANC leaders in prison or in exile; between the second half of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the laws constituting the formal framework of segregation, such as the Population Registration Act , were repealed and in 1990 the ban against the ANC and the SACP fell [7].
1)
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2) Hosea Jaffe, South Africa. Political History , Jaca Book, 2010, pp. 39, 41-73; Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa , Yale University Press, 2001, pp. xix, 33, 45, 51-52, 54-55, 112-113, 117-132; Charles H. Feinstein, An Economic History of South Africa. Conquest, Discrimination and Development , Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 14-16, 97; J. Vansina, Les Mouvements de populations et l'émergence de nouvelles formes sociopolitiques en Afrique , in Histoire generale de l'Afrique , vol. V, Éditions UNESCO, 1999, pp. 76-77, 83, 92, 1088; Ngwabi Bhebe, Les Britannique, les Boers et les Africaines en Afrique du Sud , 1850-1880, in Histoire Generale de l'Afrique, vol VI, Éditions UNESCO, 1996, pp. 173-209; THR Davenport and Christopher Saunders, South Africa. A modern History , Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, pp. 240-242, 270-273; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa , Verso, 2018, pp. 179-182.
3) Thompson, 2001, pp. 149-153, 159-160, 174-177; Davenport and Saunders, 2000, pp. 262-264, 275-276, 283; Jaffe, 2010, pp. 208-209; Wessel Pretorius Visser, The Star in the East: South African Socialist Expetations and Responses to the Outbreak of the Russian Revolution , in South African Historical Journal 44, May 2001, pp. 40-71;
https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/ch ... -1918-1921 ;
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/19 ... ers-strike ;
https://www.marxists.org/history/intern ... native.htm ; Apollon Davidson, Irina Filatova, Valentin Gorodnov, Sheridan Johnes (edited by),South Africa and the Communist International. A documentary History , Vol. I, Frank Cass Publishers, 2003, pp. 80-83;
https://www.marxists.org/history/intern ... ifesto.htm ; Jeremy Krikler, White Rising. The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa , Manchester University Press, 2005, pp. 109-110, 130-150; Steven G. Marks, "Workers of the World Fight and Unite for a White South Africa": The Rand Revolt, the Red Scare, and the Roots of Apartheid " , in The Global Impacts of Russia's Great War and Revolutions , Book 2, Part 1, The Wider Arc of Revolution (Bloomington, Slavica, 2019), pp. 195-226.
4) Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba, Comrades Against Apartheid. The ANC and the South African Communist Party in Exile , Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 15-20; Allison Drew, Bolshevizing Communist Parties: The Algerian and Sout African Experiences , in International Review of Social History 48, 2003, pp. 189-193; Oleksa Drachewych, The communist International, Anti-Imperialism and Racial Equality in British Dominions , Routledge, 2019, pp. 75-97; Davidson, Filatova, Gorodnov, Johnes (eds), 2003, p. 12; brief biographical portraits of the above blacks can be found at militants
https://www.sahistory.org.za/ ;
https://www.marxists.org/history/intern ... unists.htm ; Akim Hadi, Pan-Africanism. A History , Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 67-71;
https://www.marxists.org/history/intern ... intern.htm ; Allison Drew, Betwen Empire and Revolution: A life of Sidney Bunting , 1873-1936, Pickering & Chatto, 2007, pp. 149-165;
https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/do ... -july-1928 ; Thompson, 2001, p. 166; Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, Johannes Nkosi and the Communist Party of South Africa: Images of "Blood River" and King Dingane in the Late 1920s-1930 , inHistory and Theory , Vol. 39, No. 4, 2000, pp. 111-132.
5) Ellis and Sechaba, 1992, p. 21-28; Cherryl Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa , Monthly Review Press, 1991, pp. 97-100, 153-235; Peter Alexander, Workers, War and the origins of Apartheid. Labor and Politics in South Africa 1939-48 , Ohio University Press, 2000, p. 41; Thompson, 2001, pp. 187-191; Silvia C. Turrin, The Black Awareness Movement in South Africa. From the origins to the legacy of Stephen Biko , Erga Edizioni, 2011, pp. 32-47; Claude Meillassoux, The last whites. The South African model , Liguori editore, 1982, pp. 16-17; T. Dunbar Moodie, The moral Econmy of the Black Miners'Strike of 1946 , in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, October 1986, pp. 1-35; Nelson Mandela, Long Path to Freedom. Autobiography , Feltrinelli, 2004, pp. 105-106, 113, 118-123, 129-134;
http://asq.africa.ufl.edu/johns_fall07/ ; Alan Wieder, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid , Monthly Review Press, 2013, pp. 65-68, 92-93; Arianna Lissoni, Yusuf Dadoo, India and South Africa's Liberation Struggle , in Anna Konieczna and Rob Skinner (eds), A Global History of Anti-Apartheid. “Forward to freedom” in South Africa , Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 203-238;
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/so ... tion-sacpo ;
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/so ... ocrats-cod ;
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/so ... ions-sactu ; William Freund, Organized Labor In South Africa: History and Democratic Transition , in Jon Kraus (ed.), Trade Unions and the Coming of Democracy in Africa , Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 206;
http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/ ... 1-jpeg.pdf ; Helen Joseph, If This Be Treason , Andre Deutsch, 1963, pp. 13-20.
6) Turrin, 2011, pp. 70-76, 80-92, 140-141, 182-196;
https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/fu ... ary-1959-0 ; Thompson, 2001, pp. 188, 209-210; Stephen R. Davis, The ANC's War Against Apartheid. Umkhonto We Sizwe and the Liberation of South Africa , Indiana University Press, 2018, pp. 4-14; Wieder, 2013, pp. 119-120, 127, 142-143, 250-253; Thula Simpson, Umkhonto We Sizwe: The ANC's Armed Struggle , 2016, Penguin House Randome
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https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/abram-bram-fischer .
7) Piero Gleijeses, Conflitting Missions. Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959-1976 , University of North carolina Press, 2002, pp. 246-346; Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom. Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 , University of North Carolina Press, 2013, pp. 87-89, 186, 237-238, 289-296, 393-502; Wieder, 2013, pp. 217-220, 231-239, 286-287; Davis, 2018, pp. 17-19; Thompson, 2001, pp. 228-230, 232,239; 246-247.
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