Black masses revolt against South African apartheid

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SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 1985 13 The Black townships of South Africa have been in a state of open rebellion against the apartheid regime for the last 10 months. The police have responded with whips, tear gas, rubber bullets, and shot guns. They have killed over :200 Blacks since last September. But they have failed to beat the majority Black population into submission.

On the contrary, funerals for the victims of police massacres become occasions for mobilizing the oppressed and raising their spirit of defiance ever higher. On July 20 in Cradock, in the Eastern Cape region, over 40,000 Blacks attended a funeral for four members of the United Democratic Front who were murdered last June.

Meanwhile armored personnel carriers patrolled the white areas of Cradock and police officers with shotguns stood at street corners. White residents of the town said they had armed themselves in case any clashes spread to areas set aside by law for whites only.

Strikes also broke out at Volkswagen, Ford, and General Motors plants in the Eastern Cape region. A Black consumer boycott was reported to be biting sharply into white businesses in the region. [See editorial on page 1.] The boycott was called by Black trade unions and other groups to support their demands for a freeze on prices, the withdrawal of military personnel from Black townships, and the dismantling of Black local governments.

Explosion in Soweto

In mid-July police reported 41 incidents of rioting in Black townships covering a belt of South Africa 560 miles long. Outside the coal-mining town of Witbank, east of Johannesburg, police fired shotguns at a crowd of over 1000 protesting Blacks. Tens of thousands of students in the Johannesburg area are boycotting classes to protest inferior schools.

On July 16 the huge Soweto township of 1.5 million exploded as students and other youth stoned tourist buses, set fire to homes of collaborators, and taunted police. The police resorted to shotguns, mobile tear gas machines, and Cossacklike charges on horseback in order to break up the crowds of defiant youth.

The crowds would scatter, only to form again. By nightfall the police declared Soweto "unmanageable."

In desperation the Botha government on July 20 declared a state of emergency in Pretoria, Johannesburg, and 36 cities and towns in the Eastern Cape region. The decree suspends all civil rights for both Blacks and whites. Newspapers are forbidden to report any action the government wishes to keep secret.

Hundreds of anti-apartheid activists have been rounded up and detained without charges.

Anti-apartheid organizations said the state of emergency decree will not end the turmoil. Blacks have been living under virtual state-of-emergency conditions, subject to arbitrary search and seizure, for decades. But this has not stopped them from openly defying the Distributors of Socialist Action in Canada:

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Substandard education and raises in rent were the original focus of Black township uprisings. Now a more basic issue has been raised. Black cops make up 40 percent of South Africa's police force and Black council members and mayors administer white laws in the Black townships. These collaborators and intermediaries enable the white regime to control the ghettos without coming face to face with the oppressed.

Militants have called on the Black mayors to quit and collaborators to resign their seats on township councils. They have added emphasis to their demands by burning the homes and businesses of council members who continue in office. Black cops and informers have been killed or driven out of town.

More than 250 council members have resigned and only five of the 38 councils are still able to function. When elections were scheduled to fill 10 vacancies in Lekoa township in the Eastern Cape region, not a single resident was willing to run. This means the apartheid regime must administer these hotbeds of resistance themselves.

Residents of Langa township, where the council has resigned, found another solution. They formed street and area committees to run local affairs themselves. This presents a serious challenge to Prime Minister Pieter Botha, who cannot tolerate any Black formation he cannot control.

Police garrisons

Despite its overwhelming military strength, the minority white regime reacts with a sense of fear. The Afrikaner-controlled government believes that every concession to the non-white population is a break in the dike that will drown it in a sea of vengeful Blacks.

Today the regime has 7000 armed men rushing from township to township putting out fires that burn ever fiercer. With the facade of "independent" Black councils collapsing, the regime APARTHEID BUSTER will have to garrison every township with police and soldiers.

The Botha government is learning from the Israelis. They believe relentless military force must be exerted regardless of international law. On June 11 South African commandos invaded neighboring Botswana and murdered 16 people at 10 locations in the city of Gaborene. The victims included a six-year-old girl.

The murdered people were members of the banned African National Congress (ANC), Botha charged.

The apartheid regime is also learning from the dictatorships in Latin America. Black trade unionists and other activists are disappearing. The resemblance to the activities of El Salvador's death squads is ominous.

There are critics among whites of the tactics, if not the aims, of government repression. A medical panel recently Emergency (continued from page 1: “Nicaraguans rebuff U.S. 'terrorism' lie”) expected to escalate its measures of repression.

The revolutionary proletarian methods of struggle mounted by the South African masses differ profoundly from the "unfair lists" published by U.S. unions. Such boycotts and strikes—carried out without organized, prepared, mass participation of the union ranks— remain ineffective.

Workers in the United States have much to learn from the South African Blacks.

U.S. "neutrality"

A new stage has arrived in the fight for freedom by the Black nation of South Africa. The mass mobilizations of the Black movement are threatening to shatter the entire apartheid regime.

Under these conditions, White House spokesman Larry Speakes felt compelled to criticize the current state of emerimprisoned Black Consciousness leader Steven Biko to be be taken on an 800mile ride in a truck after being severely beaten by police in 1977. The panel charged that the ride hastened Biko's death.

Another official inquiry accused police of shooting 10 demonstrators in the back without provocation during a funeral procession on March 21 at Langa township, near Uitenhage. The procession, which coincided with the 25th anniversary of the Sharpesville massacre, had attracted 30,000 people to commemorate martyrs of another police killing earlier in the year.

The Human Sciences Research Council, a university research group funded by the government, has released the results of a four-year study of apartheid. The report effectively calls the apartheid policy a disaster and warns the government that "catastrophe" looms unless there are fundamental changes.

Whites who criticize the tactics of the Botha regime are caught in a dilemma. Some believe that the apartheid system must be modified before revolution erupts. They are prepared, if necessary, to share some power with other races. But they believe whites-although less than a quarter of the population-must maintain control. Few have advocated the democratic principle of "one man or woman—one vote."

A program of action The crisis in South Africa will be resolved by Black people in alliance with their Coloured and Indian brothers and sisters—and white people who support their struggle. Although banned by the government, the ANC is prominent in the leadership of the fight. In a statement issued April 25, the Black organization called for a program of action that would make the townships ungovernable.

The statement said, "The historic conditions which are necessary to ensure the collapse of the apartheid system ••• are beginning to take shape in a greater measure than ever before in our history. Yet much remains to be done."

The ANC pointed to recent political strikes in the Transvaal and the Eastern Cape regions and called on the trade union movement to prepare "a longlasting national work stoppage."

The statement urged the formation of "people's committees on every block" to replace the collapsing urban councils and to make every township a "no-go area" for isolated collaborators or police. It called on Blacks in the armed forces to stop shooting their brothers and sisters in defense of white rule.

The road to freedom will be a long and bloody one, but the oppressed people of South Africa have shown they are determined to follow it to the end.

gency and the "excesses" of apartheid. But the Reagan administration reiterated its refusal to impose sanctions on South Africa.

In addition, a spokesperson for the State Department asserted, "We hope sincerely that the unrest will abate rapidly, permitting the South African government to remove those measures and get on with the urgent business of reform."

The developing anti-intervention movement in this country now has a deeper urgency. International solidarity with the South African struggle for freedom dictates our making every effort toward organizing large protest actions this fall.

We can build the broadest possible movement around the four slogans carried by over 125,000 people last April 20: no U.S. support to apartheid; no U.S. intervention in Central America and the Caribbean; freeze and reverse the nuclear arms race; and jobs and justice, not war. L

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major university center, however, their student group