Langa Massacre and SA in 1985 — Vignettes for resisting global authoritarianism

“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.” – Sydney Ntlanjeni, resident of Langa, Uitenhage, giving evidence to the Kannemeyer Commission of Inquiry into the Langa Massacre that occurred on Sharpeville Day, 21 March 1985. Forty-seven people died that day, 35 were shot in the back.“And there was a bicycle which was also moving along Maduna Road. I cannot say where it originally came from. […] The policeman on top of the white truck made a sign to the person riding the bicycle to move between the two vehicles. […] The bicycle was […] in front of the crowd. I saw that the policeman on top of the white prisoner truck shot at the one riding the bicycle and as he was hit, he was almost thrown into the air and I saw that he was shot through the head.” – E Thembani, giving evidence to the Kannemeyer Commission. “At no stage until I left the scene was there a bicycle on the scene.” – Warrant Officer Pentz of the South African Police, giving evidence to the Kannemeyer Commission. The boy on the bicycleThe story of the boy on his bicycle who was shot first on 21 March 1985 is the very centre of the story I tell in my new book, 1985: The Langa Massacre and the Ending of White Rule in South Africa (University of Johannesburg Press). What follows are excerpts from the book that graphically tell the story of 1985 and why it was a historic turning point that many in our increasingly authoritarian world can learn from.All the policemen who gave evidence at the Kannemeyer Commission in 1985 confirmed Pentz’s story. They assumed the boy on the bicycle had died and therefore there was no chance of their story being contradicted. Moses Bucwa was that boy on the bicycle.“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. […] 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.” Even Judge Kannemeyer was forced to concede that if their evidence-in-chief was questionable, not much else they said was believable. Moses Bucwa“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 any suspicions about his true destination, he gave a clenched fist salute. As he did so, he was shot in the back of the head. Bucwa said that there was no warning shot nor were there any warnings. The strike-breaker became the first target.”The policemen“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 14 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. 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.’ 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.” Lieutenant Fouche, known to his friends as Smokes, gave the order to shoot a few minutes later. He later told the journalist Riaan Malan that he had no regrets and would do it again.” The Langa Massacre was the most well-known of the many massacres that took place as mass uprisings rolled across South Africa from 1983 through the declaration of the national state of emergency in 1986, and beyond.Langa was an apartheid “black spot” and rapidly expanding informal settlement that had been the focus of multiple attempts to forcibly relocate the residents to KwaNobuhle on the opposite side of Uitenhage. The Langa Massacre brought these conflicts over urban land to a head, and what followed was what the late Mono Badela, the great Eastern Cape journalist, referred to in a Weekly Mail article as Uitenhage’s “three weeks of rage”. On 23 March the first “necklacing” took place – the victim was the mayor of KwaNobuhle and his close associates.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.”Guilty according to the doctrine of ‘common purpose’“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.”After contextualising the build up to – and the aftermath of – the Langa Massacre within the history of other massacres from different contexts and epochs, I concluded that many of the most historically significant massacres were decisive political turning points because often they exposed the incumbent regime’s extreme political weakness, rather than manifesting strength. Indeed, the Langa Massacre occurred during a year of decisive shifts in the South African balance of power that led directly to release of political prisoners, lifting of the state of emergency and direct negotiations between the apartheid state and the liberation movements five years later. 1985 state of emergency“In response to the escalation of mass protests after the Langa Massacre, a partial state of emergency was declared in July. This move reflected the failure of the regime’s ‘counter-insurgency’ strategy to crush the nationwide rebellions. The first ‘necklacing’ took place two days after the Langa Massacre. […] The existing economic crisis was deepened when American, French and British investors sold off R11bn 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. […] 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). 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 krokodil’, had envisaged.” Niel BarnardNiel Barnard, former head of the National Intelligence Service, opens his biography Secret Revolution with the following story, which must have occurred in the President’s Office at Union Buildings overlooking Pretoria sometime before the declaration of the state of emergency on 12 June 1986. “It’s sometime in 1986 and I am reporting to the president on the latest events and developments. Parts of the country are in flames and are rapidly becoming ungovernable. PW is despondent, which is most unusual for him. ‘Things are getting out of hand,’ he says. ‘Louis le Grange says the police have everything under control, but we all know this is not true. We are in deep trouble. I don’t know what we should do.’ He sits quietly for a long time, staring out of the window. ‘Doctor, you know what I think …? I think we must be hardegat. If we go under, we go under hardegat.’Not long after this the State Security Council, which had become the primary centre of state power by 1985/6, decided to approve Botha’s decision to declare a national state of emergency rather than accept proposals from the group of senior civil servants involved in Operation Skrik Vir Niks to commence negotiations with the ANC immediately. One of the very first targets was Langa township. Bringing to an end a period of intense negotiations between the Langa leadership, local authorities and business to find an upgrading solution that would allow Langa to remain, shielded by the state of emergency and National Security Management System, the security forces took control and executed one of the largest – and the last of the – apartheid forced removals. Forty-eight thousand people were forcibly removed to a tent town in KwaNobuhle, usually in the dead of night at gunpoint. Within months, the social basis of the mass march that resulted in the Langa Massacre was eliminated.Weza Made“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 attitude towards us, they really hate us. One detainee here asked to see a doctor because he was beaten by police. […] I’ve heard of what happened to my township […].” – A letter from Weza Made, leader of the Langa anti-removal movement, smuggled out of the prison where he was detained without trial in 1986 while his township was destroyed.With the political leadership in detention, it was the so-called “amabutho” who took over leadership of the resistance. “I was not given his name. He was introduced to me as ‘the General’. We were in a shack in Langa […]. The General, I was told, was the leader of the amabutho. He was tall, lean, neatly dressed in blue jeans and khaki-coloured shirt. He wore a Fidel Castro-style cap in camouflage colours. There was a haughtiness about him, but also a quiet confidence beneath a steely almost disconcerting attentiveness. It felt like he was coiled to bolt out the room at the slightest sign of danger. He was soft-spoken, never boasted about himself or his role, and mainly responded to questions. He obviously did not believe in wasting many words. The relationship between the amabutho and the civic structures, he insisted, was similar to the relationship between Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and the ANC – just like MK follows the political leadership of the ANC, so too do the amabutho respect and follow the leadership of the civic structures. He defined himself as a ‘soldier’ and his job, he said, was to defend the community from attacks by the security forces. It was hard for me to imagine the violence that this man must have experienced growing up in Langa; but in particular when leading amabutho squads into attacks on the security forces without any weapons. It was not hard to imagine him sitting around a fire at night with his ‘soldiers’ at what he called ‘camps’ that had been established in the bush on the outskirts of Langa, discussing their skirmishes with the security forces that day and plans for the day after.” Theory of changeBy 1986, Neil Barnard was PW Botha’s most trusted adviser. His theory of change was simple: counter-revolutionary warfare (CRW) plus winning-hearts-and-minds (WHAM). The former was about applying brute force to weaken what he referred to as the “revolutionary upheaval” (detentions, torture, assassinations), and WHAM to put in place reforms to undermine the political support for the liberation movements.“But within two years [after the 1986 state of emergency], 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 50 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. […] [T]he 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 among 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.” Return to Langa Campaign“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 loose-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 dreamt 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.”The decisive shift to the right across many world regions is just beginning. I have travelled widely in recent years, often speaking to people who must now gear up to resist authoritarianism. In the Introduction to the book I explain why I wrote the book. “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.” Struggles, we now know, that culminated in a negotiated settlement and a transition to democracy. ConclusionsI conclude the book with reflections drawn from Christopher Clark’s remarkable book about the European revolutions called Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848–1849. “In his magisterial popular history of the way that enraged crowds catalysed the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Christopher Clark refers to the ‘intermediate plane of causation’ to describe the events that matter when it comes to understanding how revolutions unfold – an approach that mirrors my own. He argues that when it comes to understanding revolutionary upheavals our attention is drawn to ‘[…] 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 […]. Between the remote and the proximate is an intermediate plane of causation: the accumulation of political tension, the hardening of language, the collapse of consensus and the exhaustion of compromise, the emergence of tripwire issues – a political dynamic that lives neither in years nor in hours, but in months and weeks.’ “Measured in months and weeks rather than years, it is on this intermediate plane of causation that the outcomes of revolutionary upheavals are determined. And this is where the new wave of authoritarian populism will need to be resisted, rolled back and replaced with more democratic modes of governance. This is the lesson that can be drawn from the story related in this book. In many ways, South Africa in 1985 was when we found a way to dislodge an authoritarian state on that intermediate plane of causation that is now more relevant than ever for the world that we now live in.” DM1985: The Langa Massacre and the Ending of White Rule in South Africa by Mark Swilling is available for purchase from UJ Press.