Projecting Peace in Apartheid South Africa (original) (raw)

This article analyzes what it meant to pursue "peace" in apartheid South Africa, and shows that a clear and coherent strategy of achieving "peace with justice" was pursued-in the 1980s-by a network of non-governmental organizations which were seeking to build a non-racial democratic South Africa by building the future in the present. This approach added to the orthodox repertoire of non-cooperation and defiance, and played a crucial role in making a democratic South Africa possible. "[O]n the organisational level we must ensure that all organisations we work in. .. prefigure the future."-Richard Turner, The Eye of the Needle, 1980. 1 Given that apartheid policies entrenched "race" as the basis for access to power and resources, the conflict in South Africa was seen as an increasingly polarized racial one, with "Blacks" and "Whites" as the conflict parties. 2 The two-party "race-relations" model of conflict, with a "black majority" facing a "white minority," was not easily challenged, as it was taken to rest on the "objective facts" of the situation. In the apartheid years not only did there appear to be no other real contenders for power, but few were in a position to act as a third party. The Soweto Uprising of 1976 and its subsequent repression made it clear that peaceful change was not on the agenda. On the one hand, the National Party came more and more to rely on its security forces and the spread of extreme fear to maintain its authority (South Africa was under a State of Emergency from 1986 to 1990), and on the other hand, the African National Congress, having experienced the ineffectiveness of passive resistance against discriminatory and exploitative social policies, and the intensification of security legislation geared to crush such opposition, in 1961 had turned (following its banning in 1960), to armed struggle through its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Within South Africa, membership in the ANC became illegal, and the movement went into exile (the ANC was unbanned in 1990).