Almost 14 years ago to the day, former president Nelson Mandela told journalists that press freedom would never be under threat in South Africa for as “long as the ANC is the majority party”.
That was on November 19 1997, but now all that looks set to change, with political parties, media organisations, civil society groups and trade unions saying the ANC’s feared Protection of State Information Bill will stifle the right of the media and whistle-blowers to expose corruption.
The ANC is expected to use its majority in the National Assembly today to pass the bill, which makes provision for the classification of state information and imposes stiff penalties, potentially of up to 20 years’ imprisonment, on journalists who divulge classified information.
Ahead of the vote this afternoon, opposition to the bill has reached fever pitch.
Editors from around the country are in Cape Town to join a picket by the Right2Know campaign – a nation-wide coalition of individuals and organisations opposed to the bill – outside parliament.
The National Press Club’s campaign calling on South Africans to wear black in protest at the bill had gone viral on social networks by last night.
The SA National Editors’ Forum sent a letter to all MPs this morning, urging them to vote against the legislation.
The letter stated that, despite important work on the bill in the past 18 months, there were still “serious remaining flaws” in it. Chief among these was the lack of a public interest defence. “In its current form, the bill represents an attack on principles of open democracy that are deeply embedded in our Constitution and our national life,” read the letter.
Prominent human rights activist Rhoda Kadalie lashed out at the ANC yesterday, saying it had confused what was in the best interests of the public with what was in the best interests of the party.
“When liberation democratic parties feel threatened, they go for the judiciary, they go for the media and they go for freedom of speech,” said Kadalie.
The SA Municipal Workers’ Union added its voice, saying the bill would “disadvantage whistle-blowers and workers who are fighting corruption”.
The union called on all unions “to ensure that the secrecy bill does not become law”.
The coalition had planned protests in Johannesburg, Durban, Pretoria and Cape Town.
A joint statement, issued by activist groups Equal Education, the Treatment Action Campaign, Section27, the Social Justice Campaign and Ndifuna Ukwazi, said that they all oppose the bill, and if it became law “members of parliament will be saying to South Africans that it is okay to punish the people who disclose and write about corruption and mismanagement in government and the corporate sector”.
Dene Smuts, the DA spokesman for justice and constitutional development, said yesterday that she still hoped that there would be further discussions on, and amendments to, the bill.
The ANC has defended the bill in its current form, with chief whip Mathole Motshekga’s office yesterday saying that the lack of a public interest defence was in line with “international best practice” and that a “serious country” would not “compromise the security of its citizens for the sake of a scoop for the media”.
- Sapa reports that Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu lashed out at the bill, which he described as ”flawed”. “It is insulting to all South Africans to be asked to stomach legislation that could be used to outlaw whistle-blowing and investigative journalism … and that makes the state answerable only to the state,” he said in a statement.
Credit to: Times Live (Charl du Plessis)
This is definitely Communism and proves once more that the ANC cannot be trusted and are acting like
real Black supremists and oppressors. This Law, is also a form of slavery.
Freedom of Information, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Choice & Association are all fundamental, basic Human and Civil Rights and they are therefore violating it too.
With reference to their immoral and illegal Secrecy Bill, they had been praciticing already, as per their corruption and theft of my over 300 Land & Houses Claims in 2000, becuae I had refused in 1997, to agree to their evil intention [plans] and then actions to the effect, with their evil, gangster-like ‘lawyer’ Peter M………….., who also shouted “you can go and fight with your family” and said “You must redo all of your Claims”.
Also, we have to note that the Chief Land Restitution ‘Commissioner’ at that time was Wallace Mgoqi,
who was given R1,4 million per annum to sit in that office of power abuse – who only replied to my letters immedaitely AFTER they had given their hilda & chris du pont from Swaziland, a cheque for an abritary amount for 48 off my Claims – that i am aware of, staing among other words “………your Claims have still not been settled”.
These thugs think the truth will not prevail and their having paid the wrong person is not my problem, but theirs and theirs alone, due to their criminial and immoralness.
whatever the devils do in secret, does eventually come out in the open.
IF My Claims were of Normal Inheritances and IF i had NOT have to fight & politic for them since 1990, discovered my proofs in 1993 and were not My Idea [ Intellect ], then I would have had to had been given the largest share with any other – but it is not, morally, ethically and legally speaking!
What this Government and ‘Commisiion’ is stating is that, to WORK hard and be honest does not pay, but to be sly, deceiptful, jealous, gangster-like, bribing, criminal, thieving, lying…….is the right way, this is why there is so much corruption, violence and crime in South Africa, because it is eviden from the top down as in my Case for example and in the other Coloured peoples cases too.
The people can all see what had in fact happened and they can judge for themselves and as I have not been paid yet, My Claims are still Due to Me!
The ANC are common liars, thieves and murderers.
Why have they not paid Claudine Fourie when she had fought on her own, non-violently and
manged to get the NP Government to relinquish the Native s Land Act aswell as the Group Areas Act and then they even instituted the Land Restitution Act – all due to her hard work at this.
Then the ANC etc jumped onto her band-wagon and gave more Compensation to over 80,000 Blacks
while she is kept waiting still. The blacks came from North Africa and have NO Rights to Land in Southern Africa at all, as a matter of Historical fact.
They cannot even look after the land and farm in North Africa and Black majority Rule has never worked anywhere in the world, yet they used their evil terrorism since 1950′s to greedily, savagely and lazily Rule, Abuse and Oppress others racially and violently, with their incomptence, corruption and crime culture of third world regimes.
Why did they tell her “to go and fight with your ‘family” – is this the typical terrorist way of rule and oppression?
Pay her her money, because she had earned it, unlike your thieving selves who wanted power just for your own self-enrichments like Mugabe and the following SECRET of another Black African Terrorist Despotic leader of self-enrichment as we all saw on Television – then his very own people finished him off nicely, because he was an evil leader:
How Gaddafi helped
Posted on April 18, 2011 by Editorial Team
Lest we forget: When former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to allow sanctions against then apartheid South Africa and used to call Nelson Mandela a terrorist, Col Gaddafi was embracing him and funding his fight against apartheid by training ANC fighters, arming them and paying for their education abroad.
No wonder this photos shows how President Mandela appreciated what Col Gaddafi had done for South Africa.
While the world press continues to bring to our TV screens and in newspapers the atrocities being committed in the Libyan Arab Peoples Jamahiriya, writer Jean-Paul Pougala continues today with his second part of his analysis on Col Muammar Gadhafi’s leadership. He expounds the qualities of the Libyan leader, especially the role he played in helping African liberation movements attain independence. We are publishing his opinions for our readers to make your own minds as to whether to believe him. Comments are most welcome. Read on.
For most Africans, Gaddafi is a generous man, a humanist, known for his unselfish support for the struggle against the racist regime in South Africa.
If he had been an egotist, he wouldn’t have risked the wrath of the West to help the ANC both militarily and financially in the fight against apartheid. This was why Mandela, soon after his release from 27 years in jail, decided to break the UN embargo and travel to Libya on 23 October 1997.
FAKE SCHEMES & THE TRUTH ABOUT THE ANC-SACP SECRETS & PRESS……SENSORSHOPS
The biggest ones of all are the ANC-SACP who have still not yet settled the Restitution Claims of Claudine Fourie – Albertsville, Boksburg/Germoston, which she had lodged, discovered her prooofs thereof, fought non-violently & worked at since 22 years ago – 1990, which the racist Black Apartheid, corrupt regime has still not settled with her.
Why did they sell off the many of her Claims that were still in the State’s name as she had also Discovered and it was the Duty & Job of the over-paid Gauteng & Chief ‘Commisioners’ and their over-paid ‘researchers’ to do – but failed to & Claudine had repeatedly demanded in writing too, that they could then transfer those over to her as Compensation and that is what the Act stipulates too, but they refused to do so?
By not paying this woman, they are just proving that they are all liars, jealous, lazy, incompetent, overpaid, useless, corrupt, thieving, terrorist that they were and still are – the high corruption and crime rates is of Black culture and history. A complete miscarriage of Justice!
They have since 1995, paid Billions to over 80,000 Black people who come from North Africa anyway, were given compensation by the NP government at the time and homelands too, which they could not even farm…..in, but are now being paid and given ANC-SACP stolen land to merely over-populate as that is all that black people can do – just look at the useless black regimes in Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe…..with the ‘King’, ‘politicians’ and ‘Presidents’ all become enriched at the expense of others.
They are simply jealous, incompetent, lazy, stupid, corrupt, thieving, evil, terrorists just as they were and still are – hence these high crime rates.
_____________________________________________________________________
Various Documents on the Stalinism of the ANC
This article by Baruch Hirson was first published in “Searchlight South Africa” No.5 in July 1990. It exposes the authoritarianism at the heart of the African National Congress – an organisation that became fully Stalinist during the Cold War and which continues to operate with a toxic mix of paranoia and authoritarianism.
INSIDE QUADRO
End of an Era
The first-hand testimony by former combatants of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) about the ANC prison regime, together with press reports that began to appear in Britain in March this year, are an event in South African history. Never before has such concentrated factual evidence been presented about the inner nature of the ANC and its eminence guise, the South African Communist Party.
If people wish to understand the operation of the ANC/SACP, they must look here. This is the view behind the proscenium arch, behind the scenery, where the machinery that runs the whole show is revealed in its actual workings.
The ANC/SACP did a very good job in preventing public knowledge of its secret history from emerging, and the testimony of the Nairobi five shows how. (Two other South Africans, both women, are with the five in Nairobi at the time of writing, but they have not yet gone public about their experiences). Those who survived the Gulag system of the ANC/SACP did so knowing that to reveal what they had been through meant re-arrest, renewed tortures and in all probability, death. They had to sign a form committing them to silence.
As they repeat in this issue, the ex-detainces in Nairobi have revealed that other prisoners, including Leon Madakeni, star of the South African film Wanaka, as well as Nomhlanhla Makhuba and another person known as Mark, committed suicide rather than suffer re-arrest at the hands of their KGB-trained guardians. Madakeni drove a tractor up a steep incline in Angola, put it into neutral and died as it somersaulted down the hill (Sunday Correspondent, 8 April).
The ex-guerrillas in Nairobi displayed immense courage in speaking out publicly, first through the Sunday Correspondent in Britain on April 8 and then in the Times on April 11. It was another indicator of the crack-up of Stalinism internationally: a snippet of South African glasnost.
Their courage might have contributed to secure the lives of eight colleagues who had fled Tanzania through Malawi hoping to reach South Africa on the principle that better a South African jail than the ANC ‘security.’ This group, including two leaders of the mutiny in the ANC camps in Angola in 1984, arrived in South Africa in April, were immediately detained at Jan Smuts Airport by the security police for interrogation, and then released three weeks later. The day after their release they gave a press conference in Johannesburg, confirming the account of the mutiny published here.
This regime of terror, extending beyond the gates of the ANC/SACP `Buchenwald’ of Quadro, was a necessary element in the total practice of repression and deception which made the Anti-Apartheid Movement the most successful Popular Front lobby for Stalinism anywhere in the world. No international Stalinist-run public organization has ever had such an influence and shown such stability, reaching into so many major countries, for so long,
In its thirty years’ existence, the AAM put international collaborative organisations of the period of the Spanish Civil War and of the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill alliance to shame. Extending to the press, the churches, the bourgeois political parties, the trade unions and the radical, even the `trotskyist’ left, the AAM has been an outstanding success for Stalinism, as the review of Victoria Britain’s book in this issue shows.
Vital to its success has been a practice of open and covert censorship now blown wide open, in which individuals such as Ms Britain have played a sterling part. The ANC’s prisoners were its necessary sacrificial-victims.
2.The KGB in Africa
The prison system to which they were subject goes back to the late 1960s. It was the successor and the complement to the prison system on which blacks in South Africa are weaned with their mothers’ milk. In 1969 one of the editors of this journal met two South Africans in London who said they had fought in the first MK guerrilla operation in mid-1967 – a disastrous fiasco across the Zambezi River into the Wankie area of Rhodesia, along with guerrillas from the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), then led by James Chikerema. (The ZAPU president, Joshua Nkomo, was in detention). The two men described how they had eventually succeeded in escaping from Rhodesia, and how their criticism of the operation had led to their imprisonment in an ANC camp in Tanzania. An article on the theme appeared the same year in the British radical newspaper Black Dwarf then edited by Tariq Ali.
The revelations by the Nairobi five indicate how little has changed. In his book on black politics in South Africa since 1945, Tom Lodge, (Black politics in South Africa Since 1945, Ravan, 1987), writes:
In 1968 a batch of Umkhonto defectors from camps in Tanzania sought asylum in Kenya, alleging that there was widespread dissatisfaction within the camps. They accused their commanders of extravagant living and ethnic favouritism. The first Rhodesian mission, they alleged, was a suicide mission to eliminate dissenters. In political discussions no challenge to a pro-Soviet position was allowed (p300).
From 1968 to 1990, nothing basic altered in the ANC’s internal regime in the camps, except that in the high noon of the Brezhnev era it operated para-statal powers under civil war conditions in Angola, where a large Cuban and Soviet presence permitted the ANC security apparatus to ‘bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.’
From the account of the ex-mutineers, ANC administrative bodies ruled over its elected bodies, the security department ruled over the administrative organs, and KGB-trained officials – no doubt members of the SACP – ruled over the security apparatus. Umkhonto we Sizwe functioned as an extension in Africa of the KGB. Its role in the civil war in Angola was to serve primarily as a surrogate to Soviet foreign policy interests, so that when the ANC rebels proposed that their fight be diverted to South Africa this counted as unpardonable cheek, to be ruthlessly punished. Over its own members, the ANC security apparatus ruled with all the arrogance of a totalitarian power.
There is a direct line of connection between the ANC reign of terror in its prisons – which a UN High Commission for Refugees official described as more frightening than Swapo prisons – and the ‘necklace’ killings exercised by ANC supporters within South Africa, especially during the period of the 1984-86 township revolt, but now once again revived against oppositional groupings such as Azapo. (The ANC’s’ necklace’ politics was also a definite contributory element provoking the carnage in Natal). Two former ANC prisoners, Similo Boltina and his wife Nosisana, were in fact necklaced on their return to South Africa in 1986, after having been repatriated by the Red Cross (letter from Bandile Ketelo, 9 April 1990).
This is the significance of the `Winnie issue.’ When on 16 February last year, leaders of the Mass Democratic Movement publicly expressed their ‘outrage’ at Winnic Mandela’s ‘obvious complicity’ in the abduction and assault on 14 year-old Stompie Mocketsi Seipe, leading to his murder, this was in response to very widespread and very well-founded revulsion among Soweto residents – especially ANC supporters such as members of the Federation of Transvaal Women (Fetraw). They were enraged by the jackboot politics of the so-called Mandela United Football Team, whose ‘coach` – to the satisfaction of Fetraw members – has been convicted of Stompie’s murder.
This squad of thugs, based in Mrs Mandela’s house, acted within Soweto in the same way that the ANC/SACP security acted abroad, in Angola, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Uganda. (According to the ex-detainees, the KGB-apparatus in the ANC even sent its troops to Rhodesia in 1979 to fight against the guerrillas of the Zimbabwe African National Union, ZANU, which was not a Soviet client).
For this reason, the integration of certain members of MK into the South African army and police – as the MK commander, Joe Modise, and his second in command, Chris Hani, are seeking – should not present any serious problems. They speak the same language, they are ‘all South Africans.’ The welcome of Captain Dirk Coetzee, head of the regime’s assassination squad, into the arms of the ANC is an indication of the future course of development, as is the decision by the new Swapo government in Namibia to appoint a number of top South African security policemen, including the former chief of police in the Ovambo region, Derek Brune, to head its secret organs of coercion.
The South African prison system was replicated in the ANC prisons even into everyday terminology, above all at Quadro. This is a name that requires to become common currency in political discourse: it is the Portuguese for `No.4′ the name used throughout South Africa for the notorious black section of the prison at the Fort. Sneers by warders at soft conditions in ‘Five Star Hotels’, the common description of punishment cells as ‘kulukudu’ (Sunday Correspondent, 8 April) and the whole atmosphere of brutal crassness is quintessentially South African, spiced with the added sadism of the Gulag. The ANC prison system combined the worst of South African and of Russian conditions fused together, and it is this new social type – as a refinement and augmentation of each – that is now offered to the people of South Africa as the symbol of freedom.
Beginning of an Era
In returning to South Africa, the ex-ANC detainees have the advantage of the Namibian experience before them. They need an organization of their relatives, along the lines of the Committee of Parents in Namibia, and an organization of former prisoners themselves, such as the Political Consultative Council of Ex-Swapo Detainees (PCC). The ex-detainees who returned to Johannesburg in April have already mentioned that they intend to form an association of ‘parents of those who died or were detained in exile’ (Liberation, 17 May).
These young people – the Nairobi five are aged between 28 and 33 – represent the flower of the generation of the Soweto students’ revolt. This was the beginning of their political awakening. The experience of Stalinist and nationalist terror at the hands of the ANC/SACP represents a second phase in a cruel journey of consciousness. A third phase is now beginning, in which these young people will be required to discover what further changes in society and thought are needed to bring a richly expressive democracy into being in southern Africa.
Compared with the Namibian experience (see Searchlight South Africa No.4 and this issue), South African conditions are both more and less favourable. Unlike in Namibia, the churches in South Africa are not absolutely glued to the torturers. A letter from the group in Nairobi was sympathetically received by the Rev Frank Chikane, secretary of the South African Council of Churches. Archbishop Desmond Tutu met the ex-detainees when he was in Nairobi early in April and arranged for them to get accommodation at the YMCA there, paid for by the All-African Council of Churches. (Up to that time they had first been in prison in Kenya, since they had arrived absolutely without documents, and had then been living rough). The Archbishop later took up the mutineers’ demand for a commission of inquiry with the National Executive Committee of the ANC. He got no response.
We join with these ex-detainees in demanding that the ANC set up an independent commission of enquiry into the atrocities perpetrated in the Umkhonto we Sizwe camps.
Mandela’s statement acknowledging that torture had taken place was in any case very different from the ferocious silence of President Nujoma, the chief architect of Swapo’s purges. The ex-detainees’ demand for action against top leaders of the ANC, however, goes way beyond what the organization is likely to be able to concede. Therein lies its radical character.
These positive currents, however, are negated by the convergence of very powerful capitalist and Stalinist interests which together aim to fix the future with the utmost Realpolitik. The leaders of the unions, previously independent and now politically prisoners of the SACP, have become the engineers of the SACP/capitalist fix, and the workers – even when eager for socialism – are disoriented.
It is likely that there will be a very violent period as the ANC’s drive for its supposed target of six million members gets under way, through which it aims to wipe the floor with rival groupings that accuse it of sell-out. It is possible that the methods of Quadro will become part of the daily metabolism of South African life. Future capitalist profitability requires in any case that a massive defeat be inflicted on the workers. The Young Upwardly Mobile (Yuppy) stratum of black petty bourgeoisie will ruthlessly attempt to enforce and secure the conditions for its material advance.
Under these conditions, the ex-detainees will need to find the route to the consciousness of the workers, both to win a base of support for their own defence (even survival) and to help speed up the process of political clarification about the nature of the ANC. In the meantime, defensive alliances need urgently to be made: with the left wing of the unions, socialist political groupings of whatever kind, opponents of the new capitalist/ANC autocracy, concerned individuals in the press, the universities and the legal system; and not least, with the ex-Swapo detainees in Namibia.
As a yeast in which the fermentation of new ideas can develop, the ex-ANC detainees on their return to South Africa will prove one of the most favourable of human resources for a democratic future. They know the future governors of South Africa from the inside. They need the greatest possible international and local support to protect them under very dangerous conditions of life in the townships.
They too will need beware the siren voices of their KGB-trained persecutors, who seek to persuade them that the Brezhnev wolf in Angola has been transformed into a Gorbachev lamb in South Africa. In particular, they will need to inquire whether Joe Slovo, the scourge of Joseph Stalin in 1990, and general secretary of the SACP, is the same Slovo who was chief of staff of MK in the glory days of Quadro. What did he know? When did he know it? And what did he do about it?
A MISCARRIAGE OF DEMOCRACY:
THE ANC SECURITY DEPARTMENT IN THE 1984 MUTINY IN UMKHONTO WE SIZWE
Bandile Ketelo, Amos Maxongo, Zamxolo Tshona, Ronnie Massango and Luvo Mbengo
Prelude to Mutiny
On 12 January 1984, a strong delegation of ANC National Executive Committee members arrived at Caculama, the main training centre of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in the town of Malanje, Angola. In the past, such a visit by the ANC leadership – including its top man, the organization’s president, Oliver Tambo -would have been prepared for several days, or even weeks, before their actual arrival. Not so this time. This one was both an emergency and a surprise visit.
It was not difficult to guess the reason for such a visit. For several days, sounds of gunfire had been filling the air almost every hour of the day at Kangandala, near Malanje, and just about 80 kilometres from Caculama, where President Tambo and his entourage were staying. The combatants of MK had refused to go into counter-insurgency operations against the forces of the Union for Total Independence of Angola (Unita) in the civil war in Angola and defied the security personnel of the ANC. They had decided to make their voice of protest more strongly by shooting randomly into the air. It was pointed out to all the commanding personnel in the area that the shooting was not meant to endanger anybody’s life, but was just meant to be a louder call to the ANC leadership to address themselves afresh to the desperate problems facing our organization.
Clearly put forward also was that only Tambo, the president of the ANC, Joe Slovo the chief-of-staff of the army and Chris Hani, then the army commissar, would be welcome to attend to these issues. An illusory idea still lingered in the minds of the MK combatants that most of the wrong things in our organization happened without the knowledge of Tambo, and that given a clear picture of the situation, he would act to see to their solution.
Joe Slovo, now secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), had himself risen to prominence among the new generation as a result of the daring combat operations which MK units had carried out against the racist regime. In 1983 the SACP quarterly, the African Communist had carried an article by Slovo, about J.B.Marks, another of the ANC/SACP leaders, who had died in Moscow in 1972. That article, emphasizing democracy in the liberation struggle, was a fleeting glance into some of the rarely talked-of episodes in the proceedings of the Morogoro Consultative Conference of the ANC, held in Tanzania in 1969. It might have been written for a completely different purpose, but for the guerrillas of MK it was a call for active involvement into the solution of our problems.
Chris Hani was one of the veterans of the earliest guerrilla campaigns of the ANC in the Wankie area of Rhodesia, against the regime of lan Smith, in 1967. He had had his name built by his ‘heroic’ exploits by claims that he escaped ‘assassination attempts’ against him carried out by the South African regime in Lesotho, where he had been head of the ANC mission. Despite these claims it is doubtful whether he could have survived over a decade in Lesotho (1972-82) if he had posed a threat as serious as those sometimes portrayed. Hani, it must be stressed, never carried out any major operations in South Africa, and there are no operations carried out in his name in the whole of MK combat history, unlike Joe Slovo for instance.
The guerrillas in Angola levelled their bitterest criticisms against three men in the NEC of the ANC, men who had had a much more direct involvement in the running of our army. The first was Joe Modise, army commander of the ANC since 1969. He was looked down upon by the majority of combatants as a man responsible for the failures of our army to put up a strong fight against the racist regime, a man who had stifled its growth and expansion. He was above all seen as someone who engaged himself in corrupt money making ventures, abusing his position in the army.
The second was Mzwandile Piliso, the chief of security. He was then the most notorious, the most feared, soulless ideologue of the suppression of dissent and democracy in the ANC. The last one was Andrew Masondo, freed from Roben Island after twelve years of imprisonment, who had joined the ANC leadership in exile after the 1976 Soweto uprisings. In 1984 he was the national commissar of the ANC, and was therefore responsible for supervision of the implementation of NEC decisions and political guidance of the ANC personnel. Masondo was to use this responsibility to defend corruption, and was himself involved in abuse of his position to exploit young and ignorant women and girls. He was also a key figure in the running of the notorious ANC prison camp known to the cadres as ‘Quadro’ (or four, in Portuguese). It was nicknamed Quadro after the Fort, the rough and notorious prison for blacks in Johannesburg, known to everybody as ‘No.4.
Such was the situation when Chris Hani together with Joe Nhlanhla, then the administrative secretary of the NEC and now chief of security, and Lehlonono Moloi, now chief of operations, arrived in Kangandala under instructions from the NEC to silence the ever-sounding guns of the guerrillas. Chris Hani was suddenly thrown into confusion by the effusive behaviour of the combatants as they expressed their grievances, wielding AKs which they vowed never to surrender until their demands were met. What were these demands?
First, the soldiers demanded an immediate end to the war by the MK forces against Unita and the transfer of all the manpower used in that war to our main theatre of war in South Africa. Secondly, they demanded the immediate suspension of the ANC security apparatus, as well as an investigation of its activities and of the prison camp Quadro, then called ‘Buchenwald’ after one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps. Lastly, they demanded that Tambo himself come and address the soldiers on the solution to these problems. All that Chris Hani could do in this situation was to appeal for an end to random shootings in the air, and to appeal to the soldiers to await the decision of the NEC after he had sent it the feedback about his mission.
The Beginnings of Quadro
The demands mentioned above had far-reaching political implications for the ANC, which had managed to win high political prestige as the future government of South Africa. But for anyone to appreciate their seriousness, one must go back to the history of the ANC following the arrival of the youth of the Soweto uprisings to join the ANC. This historical approach to the mutiny of 1984 is more often than not deliberately neglected by the ANC leadership whenever they find themselves having to talk about this event. More than anything else, they fear the historical realities which justify this mutiny and show it to have been inevitable, given the genuine causes behind it.
The mainspring of the 1984 mutiny, known within the ANC as Mkatashingo, is the suppression of democracy by the ANC leadership. This suppression of democracy had taken different forms at different times in the development of the ANC, and it had given birth to resistance from the ANC membership at different times, taking forms corresponding to the nature of the suppression mechanisms. We shall confine ourselves to those periods that had become landmarks and turning points in this history.
The first such remarkable events of resistance to the machinations of the ANC leadership were in 1979 at a camp known among South Africans as Fazenda, but whose actual name was Villa Rosa, to the north of Quibaxe, in northern Angola. The majority of the trained personnel of MK had been shifted from Quibaxe in November 1978 to occupy this camp, where they were expected to undergo a survival course to prepare for harsh conditions of rural guerrilla warfare. With the promise that the course would take three months, after which the combatants would be infiltrated back into South Africa to carry out combat missions, everybody took the course in their stride and with high morale. After the first three months and the introduction of a second course, it became crystal clear that we were being fooled, to keep us busy. Voices of discontent began to surface in certain circles of the armed forces. The main cause of discontent was the suppression of our uncontrollable desire to leave Angola and enter into South Africa to supplement the mass political upsurges of the people. Alongside this were also complaints about inefficiency of the front commanders and suspicions that they were treacherously involved in the failure of many missions, leading to the mysterious death of our combatants in South Africa.
Mzwandile Piliso was accused of over-emphasizing the security of our movement against the internal enemy, at the expense of promoting comradely relations among the armed forces. He was promoting unpopular lackeys within the army while suppressing those who fell to his disfavour, branding them as enemy agents who would ‘rot in the camps of Angola’. Most of those lackeys defected to the racist South African regime whenever they found it opportune. Such was the case with the most notorious traitors in MK like Thabo Selepe, Jackson, Miki and others, all of whom wormed their way up in the military structures assisted by Piliso.
The late Joe Gqabi [assassinated in Harare in 1981, while ANC representative in Zimbabwe] attended one such explosive meeting and cornmended the soldiers for their spirit of openness and criticism. Fazenda was getting out of hand, and the feeling of discontent began to spill into certain nearby ANC bases.
Something had to be done to stamp down this resistance. The security organ of the ANC, which till then had just been composed of a few old cadres of the 1960s, began to be reorganized in all of the camps. Young men from our own generation who had recently undergone courses in the Soviet Union and East Germany were spread into all the camps. It was during this time that construction of a prison camp near Ouibaxe was speeded up, which later took the form of the dreaded Quadro. ANC general meetings, which were held weekly, and had been platforms for criticism and self-criticism, were now terminated.
The very first occupants of Quadro prison were three men from Fazenda: Ernest Mumalo, Solly Ngungunyana and Drake, who had defiantly left Fazenda to go to Luanda, where they hoped to meet the ANC chief representative, Max Moabi, to demand their own resignation from the ANC. The ANC did not accept resignation of its membership [still the same ten years later, in January this year, after the authors of this document had presented their resignations]. Worse still this was in Angola, a country where lawlessness reigned. After being beaten in a street in Luanda by ANC and Angolan security, they were bundled into a truck and taken straight to Quadro. Solly was released after two years, Ernest in 1984 and Drake’s end is still unknown. The camp remained highly secret within the ANC. Everyone sent to work there as a security guard undoubtedly had to have proved his loyalty to Mzwandile Piliso, and was expected not to disclose anything to anybody. Even among the NEC, the only ones who had access to Quadro were Mzwandile Piliso, Joe Modise and Andrew Masondo.