The United Democratic Front existed for less than a decade, from 1983 until 1991 (for much of that under severe legal restrictions), but its short life left a powerful impression on South Africa’s history. It consolidated numerous organisations opposed to the then regime, doing a great deal to make the system unworkable.
In reality, the UDF was one factor among several that brought South Africa to its transition, and not necessarily the most important. It has, nonetheless, generated a particular mythology (careful of romanticising this), one that presents the movement as an organic, democratic, on-the-ground ‘people power’ movement that righteously reorganised a country.
The recent commemoration of the UDF’s fortieth anniversary puts this into focus.
The theme of the event was ‘Building active citizenship for accountability and transformation’. Speakers bemoaned the state of South Africa and the undermining of its constitutional order, pointed to the disappointed hopes and referred (unsurprisingly) to the UDF as a model for dealing with all of this.
The UDF, in this telling, represented all that was best about South Africa’s political traditions. It embodied selfless, altruistic activism. Declaring himself a ‘child of the UDF’, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba appealed to the frustrated population and particularly the youth: ‘We can understand your disillusionment, we understand why you are opting out of politics and public life. But that is not the answer to our crisis. That will not secure you and your children’s future. No, the answer to our crisis is for you to roll up your sleeves and make the New Struggle a new struggle for a new generation.’
‘People’s power’ ̶ the clarion call of the UDF in the 1980s – was much on the minds and lips of those in attendance.
Even President Cyril Ramaphosa was there to express his dismay at the turn things had taken and to invoke the UDF’s legacy. His address contained the standard lament for the failings of the state he heads (with a curious sense of dissociation from any personal responsibility for it), but it also touched on an unexpectedly fraught topic, this being the sense of alienation among South Africans of the country’s minority racial groups. (For the sake of accuracy, it should be noted that he also referred to similar sentiments by women and the youth.)
‘Many coloured and Indian compatriots who were the backbone of the UDF feel excluded from our nation’s political life, and point to their under-representation in decision-making structures as evidence of this. Many white South Africans wrongly believe there is no place for them in South Africa today, and some have drifted towards laager-style politics and a siege mentality.’
Ethnic chauvinism, he added, had supplanted the cross-racial solidarity that the UDF had striven to build, ‘even within our liberation movement’.
There is certainly some truth to all this. Whatever may be said of the UDF – and it’s important to remember that the pleasant hagiography on display at its anniversary event is necessarily a very partial and partisan picture – it took the issue of non-racialism seriously. Its first executive committee comprised twelve Africans, five coloured people and eight Indians. White people were of course relatively sparsely represented in its affiliates and structures, but they were certainly present.
Curtis Nkondo, deputy president of the UDF, said in a 1987 interview published as part of the collection A Question of Survival, that the whole question of minority rights was misplaced, since in a non-racial society, race and ethnicity would be of no political importance. The UDF, frailties and all, tried to live that conviction.
As Ineke van Kessel, a Dutch academic, wrote in her generally sympathetic account of the UDF, “Beyond Our Wildest Dreams”: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa: ‘One of the UDF’s vital contributions was the forging of a broad South African national identity. Regional and ethnic chauvinism, so prominent at the beginning of the decade, had dwindled into insignificance, or so it seemed in the exuberant mood in the first months of 1990.’
But non-racialism was never a universal assumption within the liberation movement. It bears noting that the ANC itself restricted its membership to Africans until 1969, and only permitted members of all races to sit on its National Executive Committee in 1985. Both of these openings post-dated by years the Freedom Charter’s statement that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’, while the latter followed two years after the UDF had been founded.
The approach of the ANC subsequent to its unbanning and particularly after the 1994 election became increasingly ambivalent towards non-racism. The notion of colour-blindness was disposed of in short order. And while it tried to present itself as dedicated to representing a broad definition of the ‘hitherto oppressed’ – black in a generic sense – this also rapidly fell out of favour. Describing its mission in variations of seeking the ‘liberation of Africans in particular and black people in general’ made it clear that its priorities would follow a racial pattern. Think of this in relation to the term ‘our people’, which the President himself uses on occasion.
Add to this resentment on the part of the ANC that minorities had opted for the opposition, its sometimes bombastic racial nationalism – at times, even towards those with impeccable political records within its ranks, such as Jeremy Cronin, twice damned by his nominal comrades as a ‘white messiah’ ̶ not to mention stresses created by race-coded policy amid a foundering economy and incapable state, and the elements of that alienation are quite apparent.
There had been a forewarning of this in the period between the ANC’s unbanning and the UDF’s dissolution less than two years later. The decision to disband was opposed by Dr Allan Boesak – who’d been the key speaker at the organisation’s launch. He felt that for the Coloured population in the Western Cape, the continued existence of the UDF with an appreciation for local dynamics was important; this was lacking among returning exiles and newly-released political prisoners. Dr Boesak was not invited to the UDF’s final conference. (Ultimately, though, he saw his way clear to the ANC and stood as its candidate for Western Cape provincial premier in 1994.)
It’s important to remember that while 20 August 2023 marked the 40th anniversary of the founding of the UDF, it also marked the 28th anniversary of its dissolution.
The relationship between the ANC and UDF is an important historical question. While it may be overstating the case to regard the UDF as a mere surrogate for the ANC, the links between the two made them effectively inseparable. Jeremy Seekings has noted that of its first executive committee, all but (possibly) one member were associated with the ANC’s underground.
In truth, much of the UDF was committed to the ANC as the natural leader of a free South Africa. Murphy Morobe, a senior member of the UDF, in the late 1980s put this in stark binary terms: ‘After all is said and done there can only be two parties at the negotiating table: the leaders of the present minority government, the NP, and those of the democratic majority led by the ANC.’
The ANC’s unbanning saw many of the UDF’s prominent representatives declaring their allegiance to the party publicly, and vesting their aspirations in it until the UDF had little evident rationale left.
This is a background that should not be ignored as the legacy and example of the UDF is appealed to.
The UDF’s activists can take pride in the challenge they mounted to the state. But intrinsic to this (or at least widespread within it) was a belief that a post-apartheid order would be overseen by the ANC. ‘People’s power’ can be understood against this background. It need not refer to the agency of a community as a whole, still less the outcome of pluralistic processes. Van Kessel noted that while ‘the people’ could be seen as rejecting the limits imposed by group-based thinking (though, as noted above, this had its own adherents in the liberation movement), it did not inherently suggest a universal application: ‘Often “the people” were more narrowly defined, with political loyalties as the decisive criterion. In another widely held interpretation of “the people,” the term refers exclusively to ANC adherents.’
This is the idea of hegemony. A political formation – in this case, the ANC – has an entitlement to power. It alone has the appropriate moral authority and historical mission to preside over society. Where other groups and interests exist (the notion that they are truly competitors is inconceivable) they should position themselves within the hegemon’s frame of reference. (As Roelf Meyer once put it, opposition parties’ success depended on being ‘in the ANC’s slipstream.’)
This is a powerful view for those who hold it, whether they exercise the hegemonic power or regard themselves as subject to it.
It helps to explain the remarkable longevity of the ANC’s incumbency, even in the face of some deleterious policy decisions, such as Thabo Mbeki’s stand on AIDS and antiretrovirals. A revealing extract from a 2004 paper by Steven Friedman and Shauna Mottiar on the Treatment Action Campaign states: ‘Senior officials acknowledge that, while the TAC has endorsed the role in the ARV “roll-out” of the ANC-NNP Western Cape government, taking the same stance would have been very difficult – perhaps impossible – if the province was governed by the Democratic Alliance.’
Much the same could be said for those in the media or the analytical community – and many within the ANC who might have been expected to know better – who acquiesced as the ANC undermined the constitutional demands for a professional, non-partisan civil service through its cadre deployment initiative.
Today, South Africa’s public administration is broken, unable for the most part to serve even its minimal purposes, let alone to be the developmental catalyst of government thinking – or for that matter, that activists in the 1980s might have imagined.
President Ramaphosa states, correctly: ‘What matters most to the South African people is that they want a better life for themselves and their children. They want to lead lives of dignity, in security, and to have decent work.’
Given the record and rhetoric of the party, and the President’s administration, one could be forgiven for questioning whether he really believes this. A poisonous mix of party-centric political behaviour and counter-productive policy has deferred this outcome into the perpetual future. Besides, one could be forgiven for questioning whether the government really shares the view that these are priorities, since successive ideological policy drives consciously undertaken – employment equity, race-based empowerment, expropriation without compensation – have made the prospects of achieving them more remote.
Anthony Butler has written: ‘When explaining the current travails of the movement, ANC leaders sometimes turn to history. Their preoccupation with the past is not merely a form of escapism. It is upon claims about the past that assertions of legitimate power today depend.’
Commemorating the UDF provides both a legitimation of the ANC’s incumbency – and the promise of a solution to the maladies that this has created – while avoiding the obvious issue: that it is the nature and orientation of the ANC itself, leading directly to its pathologies in office that has brought the country to this point.
It is this last point that needs to be taken on board if anything is to be drawn from the experience of the UDF, and if the calls for civic activism are to be taken seriously.
South Africa today is not the South Africa of the 1980s. Civic activism that places citizens and their agency at the centre of things cannot co-exist with an assumption of party hegemony or come-what-may party loyalty. Demanding responsive, competent government in a democracy will mean that no lawful sanctions for government failure can be off the table – including, nay especially, electoral ejection from office. Civic power in a constitutional democracy is intimately linked to electoral power.
Likewise, demanding respect for constitutional governance requires holding incumbent parties to account for breaches of the divide between party and state. The ANC has shown contempt for this, and the President himself has repeatedly defended cadre deployment (lest it be forgotten, he chaired the deployment committee during the height of state capture, a willing accomplice to former president Zuma).
A culture of civic activism requires recognising the diversity of civil society. This means accepting the valuable contribution of activism, even where it is not to one’s own ideological taste. The UDF sought to mobilise disparate groups and their activities into overarching political work, and so was necessarily not open to all civil society. Indeed, this placed it in conflict with particular community interests, a matter that seems to have been of considerable importance among Coloured and Indian people.
The work of defending a constitutional democracy is broader and must be more inclusive; the UDF model is not adequate for the task. Civil society is far more than leftist intellectuals and groups representing the downtrodden or dedicated to ‘fighting poverty’. Groups like AfriForum or the Solidarity movement have done exceptional work in mobilising citizens to assert their interests within the country’s constitution, whether one sympathises with them or not. They should be seen as part of the solution here. Much the same could be said for the left-wing shack-dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, which has had severe conflict with the ANC and the post-apartheid state (and for that matter is something of a polar opposite of AfriForum).
And finally, citizens must recognise their mutual responsibilities to one another before any loyalty to any political party. This means rejecting the unconscionable stoking of racial and ethnic divisions and accepting those of different beliefs as fellow South Africans, not as enemies. This, an affirmation of citizenship, needs to apply to all, equally, without qualification.
One wonders if the UDF veterans who recalled their pasts and proclaimed the need for new activism in the present are up to this. Inviting the incumbent President to deliver a keynote address about the importance of civic activism hardly says so. But perhaps this activism is best left to a new generation.