INTRODUCTION
The sound of breaking glass interrupted the night. A bottle filled with petrol, sand and Sunlight soap came smashing through the window and exploded with an abrupt bang in the house of Constable Jeremiah Matshola of the security branch in Zone 13, Sebokeng, an African township in the Vaal Triangle south of Johannesburg.Footnote 1 Within seconds, the smell of burning curtains mixed with the pungent odour of petrol filled the air. Flames started to engulf the house and reduced its interior to a charred ruin. According to an interviewee, several houses of African policemen were burned down that night.Footnote 2 It was 26 June 1985, the day of the annual commemoration of the Freedom Charter and less than a month before president P. W. Botha was to declare a state of emergency to curb mass protest and reinstate ‘law and order’.Footnote 3 Seven years earlier, in 1978, Matshola's house had gone up in flames for the first time. As the house was catching fire, a newspaper report described, a person came out of the house ‘screaming and shouting’.Footnote 4 While the attack in 1978 was a rare exception in the Vaal Triangle, by 1985 incidents of arson had become widespread.
The petrol bombing of Matshola's house was by no means an isolated incident. From late 1984 onwards, groups of black youth waged a war of attrition against policemen and informers as well as anyone who was regarded as collaborating with the regime.Footnote 5 Interviewed policemen claimed that the targeting of members of the African security branch in particular became a major issue for the police as they could no longer protect their members living in the townships, on whom they depended for access to knowledge and information.Footnote 6 Between January and June 1987, for example, the police recorded thirty-eight incidents of petrol bombings and arson, thirty-one incidents of ‘intimidation’ and thirty-nine stonings in the Vaal Triangle.Footnote 7 In addition, units of the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA) admitted to killing ten policemen in Sharpeville in 1986 (Lodge Reference Lodge2011: 298).Footnote 8 On a national level, between March 1984 and November 1985, approximately 500 houses of African policemen were allegedly burned down (Cooper et al. Reference Cooper, Shindler and McCaul1986: xxxiii).
Arson was but one strategy that underwrote the matrix of conflict during this period. Between 1984 and 1986, townships across South Africa were engulfed in widespread uprisings that reflected the moulding of a more militant political culture and increasing political mobilization, as well as the failure of the regime to implement meaningful reforms. The period was marked by an upsurge in older repertoires of protest, including strikes, boycotts and public protests, and more militant forms that promoted the use of political violence.Footnote 9 Starting in Tumahole in the Northern Free State in July 1984, it was in the Vaal Triangle, a highly industrialized area, where popular protest turned into an uprising that recast the die.Footnote 10 The insurrectionary period profoundly altered power relations and heralded the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime.
At the forefront of both non-violent and violent protests were black ‘youth’. Although the uprisings and mass protests were supported across generations, black youth came to play a vital role as the ‘shock troops’ of the struggle.Footnote 11 In the context of South Africa in the 1980s, the category of youth, as Jeremy Seekings points out, usually denotes political activism (Reference Seekings1993: xi). In his book on youth politics, Seekings argues that much of the literature on the generation of young activists in the 1980s portrayed the so-called ‘young lions’ or ‘comrades’ either in an apocalyptic manner – associating them with violence and destruction – or as liberators of the country, glorifying their sacrifices and bravery. The truth lies somewhere in between (Seekings Reference Seekings1993: xi–xii).Footnote 12
Furthermore, as Kumi Naidoo argues, ‘in the liberal and media usage, “youth” tended to signify anyone who was engaged in “unrest”, mostly younger than thirty, and unemployed. Its failure to disaggregate the category led to unproductive generalizations’ (Naidoo Reference Naidoo1991: 144–5). Their actions, as Ari Sitas summarizes, were often portrayed as resulting from high levels of unemployment that led to frustration, which eventually led to violence and aggression (Sitas Reference Sitas1992: 629). African youth in particular were associated with erratic violent behaviour that was seen as an aberration of the norm and a transgression of accepted political and social behaviour (Sitas Reference Sitas1992).
Such an approach, as Sitas notes, is unhelpful in understanding the roots, causes and incentives of strategies of violence. Thus the reasoning, beliefs, strategies and principles that guided the youth who engaged in political violence warrant greater attention.Footnote 13 Following Sitas's critique, this article argues for an analysis of political violence of the 1980s as a productive strategy that aimed to forge a new political order and reconstitute moral and social boundaries of township communities. Based on interviews with former youth activists as well as on archival evidence, the article analyses the meaning and strategies of violence and situates them within a context of emerging communal conflicts. Hence, as patterns of resistance in the Vaal took an increasingly violent form, it is important to link violence to complexities of political agency and the formation of new subjectivities.
The first section of this article pays attention to the historiography of violence. The next section examines the emergence of politicized African youth in the Vaal Triangle. The development of a political consciousness was influenced by the intersection between immediate, subjective experiences and ideologies of freedom, liberation and justice. As I will demonstrate, young people who engaged in acts of collective violence did not simply represent a ‘lumpen’ element; instead, I outline how a small group of high school students adopted political violence as a productive strategy for change. They had been politicized in the school and the streets and were inspired by the ideology and strategies of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile and anti-colonial literature more broadly. Their strategies, albeit influenced by anger and frustration, were therefore shaped by social and political ideals.
The percentage of active participants in organized political violence during this period remains unknown. It is important to stress that they represented a small minority of politically active youth and youth more broadly. Although the 1980s saw an increase in contingent confrontations between police and youth that frequently led to cycles of violence and retaliation, the percentage of those who participated in organized, premeditated forms of violence was comparatively low. The voices of youth activists in this article are therefore not representative of the experiences of youth in general. Thus, while great numbers of black youth were affected by the conflict, violence was but one strategy to counter oppression. As William Beinart elucidates: ‘While much (though not all) public violence stems from conflict, by no means all conflict results in violence. Violence requires particular forms of agency, and the actions and predispositions of those agents were not simply created by broader lines of conflict’ (Reference Beinart1992: 473).
The beginning of the Vaal Uprising on 3 September 1984 constituted a clear break from previous patterns of conflict. Sparked by protests against rent increases, poor service delivery and an illegitimate and defunct local government, the African townships in the Vaal were rapidly engulfed in violent confrontations between the security forces and the local population. The matrix of the uprising provided the context in which contingent protests took on the character of an insurrection, as the third section of this article stresses. While violent confrontations between representatives of the regime and members of local communities had been spontaneous prior to the uprising, they became increasingly premeditated from 1984 onwards.
The last two sections finally explore the meaning and form of the violence. In the aftermath of the uprising, violence as a strategy to enforce change became more widespread. Contrary to state and media discourse, the use of political violence was often neither random nor ‘senseless’ but served a number of clear purposes: firstly to enforce control over the boundaries of the community; secondly to promote ungovernability by undermining the information network on which the state relied to order the African townships; and thirdly to protect communities from assault and state violence.
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE IN SOUTH AFRICA
Understanding the roots, causes and impact of violence and its many manifestations is notoriously difficult and poses a series of empirical and ethical challenges. To analyse the event of violence itself as a moment of ‘social interaction’ is even more difficult (Thornton Reference Thornton1990: 218). Violence always comprises a moment of rupture that necessitates new narratives to explain and make sense of lived experiences and social relations: it ‘comes to constitute social forms and meanings’, as Robert Thornton stresses (ibid.).
Within South African scholarly literature, violence was hardly ever analysed in its own right until the late 1980s, when the intensification of violent confrontations necessitated new ways of understanding and reflections on the origins of patterns of violence (Manganyi and du Toit Reference Manganyi and du Toit1990; Beinart Reference Beinart1992; Bonnin Reference Bonnin2000; Marks Reference Marks2001; Foster et al. Reference Foster, Haupt and de Beer2005; Kynoch Reference Kynoch2005).Footnote 14 Violence spawned by the state, collective violence against anyone associated with the apartheid regime and violence by right-wing vigilantes, as well as the proliferation of gang activities, reached unprecedented levels from 1984 onwards as contending forces were engaged in a deadly struggle over control, power, territories and networks of knowledge. The transition period of the early 1990s that led to a new democratic order saw a further exacerbation of the nature and scope of violence. A special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies, published in 1992, questioned the old frameworks for examining political violence in South Africa and offered new modes of explaining the roots, complexity and history of such violence (Beinart Reference Beinart1992). André du Toit (Reference Du Toit1993) advocated the need to pay attention to the multiple roots of violence and emphasized that violence during the transition period was related to localized conflicts between various groups.
More generally, this need to take seriously the variety of cleavages shaping a conflict is further advocated by Stathis Kalyvas, who has explored a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies from across the world. Tracing the diverse allegiances and conflicts during civil wars, he stresses the need to examine the complexity of violent confrontations and to eschew a strict distinction between ‘private’ and ‘political’ violence (Kalyvas Reference Kalyvas2003: 476). In Kalyvas's analysis, violence therefore has multiple roots that cannot be treated as discrete entities. In other words, violence towards individuals and groups can be inspired by both political motivations and private reasons, including personal grudges or material aspirations and benefits.
Violence as a strategy for change can not be disentangled from the broader context of apartheid South Africa but needs to be seen as ‘but one of the many forms and varieties of endemic violence’ (Manganyi and du Toit Reference Manganyi and du Toit1990: 6). The many aspects and layers of violence thus constitute a web of violence where certain expressions and forms overlap and others are discrete. In their anthology Violence in War and Peace, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philip Bourgois speak of a continuum of violence, arguing that violence reproduces violence. However, the meaning of violence is not always clear. Violence, as Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois argue, can be ‘productive, destructive and reproductive’. It can be ‘necessary’ or ‘useless’, ‘legitimate’ or ‘illegitimate’, ‘senseless and gratuitous’ or ‘utterly rational and strategic’ (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois Reference Scheper-Hughes, Bourgois, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois2004: 2). Violence can be contingent or premeditated but always emerges within a particular political and social context; it hence neither simply erupts nor is a mere by-product of broader political dynamics.
Another body of literature that emerged interrogated the relationship between the ANC's strategies and the proliferation of violence in the townships. During the height of the township uprisings in 1985, the leadership of the ANC met in Kabwe, Zambia, where it adopted a strategic position that saw the promulgation of a People's War (Barrell Reference Barrell1993). The idea of shifting the focus to a protracted revolutionary war with armed bases inside the country had gained prominence in the aftermath of a visit by a delegation of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the ANC to Vietnam in October 1978. However, contrary to Anthea Jeffery's claim that the ANC in exile orchestrated the township uprisings and instigated violence, this article argues that violent strategies were often rooted in localized understandings of conflict and community (Jeffery Reference Jeffery2009). Furthermore, the relationship between violent and non-violent strategies was not necessarily clear to either the strategists or the participants in the struggle.
Instead, as Janet Cherry points out, violent and non-violent strategies to oppose the regime were ‘complementary at tactical level, but not at the strategic level’ (Cherry Reference Cherry, Sapire and Saunders2013: 159).Footnote 15 Cherry hence argues against a nationalist view that regards the proliferation of political violence as being orchestrated and guided by the ANC in exile. My own research confirms Cherry's analysis. The ANC, as Thula Simpson and Howard Barrell, among others, have noted, failed to seize the momentum and did not possess the organizational capacities to stir and guide the uprisings inside South Africa (Barrell Reference Barrell1993; Simpson Reference Simpson2009). Instead, it provided ideological support. To this day, there is a lack of information on the perceptions, experiences and strategies of those who engaged in violent protest during the final decade of apartheid.Footnote 16 This article contributes to the filling of this gap.
COMMUNITY AND CONFLICT: THE RISE OF THE COMRADES
Politics in the Vaal Triangle has a distinctive character. Although it followed the broader impetus of emancipatory politics elsewhere, it was shaped by local understandings, debates, experiences and practices. The area has been etched in popular memory for its violent conflicts, including the infamous Sharpeville shootings of 21 March 1960.Footnote 17 On this day, the police shot sixty-nine protestors who had gathered outside the police station in Sharpeville to express their opposition to the pass laws that severely curtailed the liberties of the African population.Footnote 18 The Sharpeville shootings and subsequent state repression of political opposition created a climate of fear and an expectation of violence that influenced the collective psyche and discouraged local residents in the African townships of the Vaal Triangle (of which Sharpeville was a part), and perhaps South Africans at large, from confronting the state. By the early 1980s, as Tom Lodge argues, a ‘culture of mutual distrust’ pervaded the area and local residents were still hesitant to talk about the fateful day (Lodge Reference Lodge2011: 334). As one of Sharpeville's residents recalled, people were ‘still crying within’.Footnote 19 The local communities’ expectations of violence thus shaped local politics to a significant extent.
In 1976, as student protests rapidly spread through Soweto, Alexandra and other parts of the country, young people in the Vaal Triangle were discouraged by their parents from participating.Footnote 20 BB, who was part of the first generation of the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) in the Vaal and later went into exile to join Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, the armed wing of the ANC), recalls the attitude of parents when student protests gained momentum in 1976: ‘They say “No! I don't want to see. You were not there my child. I was there.”’Footnote 21 Apartheid rule had – at least to some extent – led to the internalization of repression. The fear of being subjected to psychological and physical harm, as well as fear of retrenchment and forced removals, was pervasive, and the hegemonic project of the apartheid state was temporarily and partially successful.
The collective memory of state violence was arguably not the only reason why local political mobilization only began in earnest in the early 1980s. The continuous removals that disrupted the social fabric, the partial exodus of politicized students to high schools in Soweto and the social geography of the region all contributed to a sense of unsettlement that hindered the formation of political networks. In contrast to Soweto or Alexandra, in the Vaal Triangle local student and civic organizations struggled to attract committed members.Footnote 22 However, by the 1980s a new generation had grown up with no direct experience of the Sharpeville shootings. It was this generation that was at the forefront of student and youth politics during the 1980s. As most of the politically conscious African youth had attended rallies and meetings in Soweto, they felt the time was right to form local student structures in the Vaal. A former student activist recalled that: ‘Most of the time we find that we are the culprits who are being arrested in somebody's backyard. While our yard is not organized.’Footnote 23
The local branch of COSAS – a Charterist organization that was in line with the ideology of the ANC – was formed on 21 March 1980.Footnote 24 While some of the youth had a clear idea that they wanted to become politically active in relation to apartheid as a whole, others joined COSAS as a more specific platform for their student grievances.Footnote 25 However, most students conceived their struggle as going beyond localized issues experienced in schools. It was the structure of society and political oppression and socio-economic injustice more broadly that shaped the daily experiences of young people in the African townships.Footnote 26 Most members of COSAS whom I interviewed came from a poor, working-class background and were male. Although COSAS comprised a significant percentage of female members, leadership positions were mostly occupied by male comrades. With the increasing shift towards political violence, women were further marginalized (Seekings Reference Seekings1991).Footnote 27 As in 1976, students’ demands rapidly transcended narrow boundaries and COSAS could tap into the financial and organizational networks of the United Democratic Front (UDF), established in 1983 as an umbrella organization to channel popular mobilization, and the ANC. Interviewees claim that the formation of COSAS was influenced by the strategies and mandate of the ANC in exile.Footnote 28
According to one of the founding members, the Vaal branch of COSAS did not function well in these early years.Footnote 29 It lacked funding for sustained activity; its membership was small; and its main activities were restricted to the organization of commemoration services as well as a series of protests against rent increases.Footnote 30 Members led protest marches in the early 1980s as no civic structure existed that could take up the issue of rent increases.Footnote 31 From 1983 onwards, the ranks of COSAS began to swell as socio-economic and political grievances among the African youth intensified. A younger group of students – born between the mid- and late 1960s – began to occupy the political space. It was this younger group that later partly espoused political violence and formed clandestine units from 1985 onwards, as a latter section will discuss.
Rent increases were among the key grievances of local African residents as early as 1977. The introduction of Community Councils in 1977 and Black Local Authorities in 1983 had partly decentralized apartheid power, with dire consequences for both local and national government (Seekings Reference Seekings1990). A weak fiscal basis and lack of revenues led to a series of increases in rent, service tariffs and levies between 1977 and 1984. At the forefront of the emerging conflict were the newly elected African councillors, who were perceived to be violating the social contract with those they were supposed to serve. They were seen to engage in corruption and nepotism and they further alienated local communities by failing to implement their election promises and by adopting aggressive and antisocial behaviour. African councillors and local communities were therefore pulled apart by ideological differences but also by different interests and personalized grievances. This discourse was further influenced by the formation of underground cells of the ANC in around 1982 (Rueedi Reference Rueediforthcoming).
Epithets including ‘stooges’, ‘sell-outs’ and ‘puppets of the regime’ placed them outside the imagined boundaries of township communities. In his book on the Zanzibari revolution, Jonathon Glassman examines the formation of violent subjectivities that were at the core of communal violence (Reference Glassman2011). As he observes, rumours of impending attacks and anticipated violence contributed to a collective mindset that made violence against certain groups imaginable. This demarcation of conflicting identities can be observed in the Vaal Triangle as well.
Blamed for the socio-economic misfortune of local residents, councillors came to be widely regarded as obstacles to meaningful change. From 1980, public meetings with councillors led to frequent hostilities and violent confrontations. By 1984, as BH, a political activist from Sharpeville, pointed out, ‘layers and layers of anger’ existed towards councillors and ‘around the ways they conducted themselves’.Footnote 32 Violence and expectations of violence had become ingrained in expressions of conflict. Until 1984, violent confrontations between local communities and representatives of the regime were contingent and reflected localized processes of conflict.
MOVING TOWARDS MILITANCY
The conflict eventually exploded on 3 September 1984, when thousands of local residents staged a stay-away from schools and work and marched to the offices of the Orange Vaal Development Board.Footnote 33 Their aim was to protest against rent increases and to demand the resignation of councillors. Organized by the Vaal Civic Association – an organization that had been formed in 1983 to provide a platform for socio-economic grievances and to promote mass mobilization – the march was meant to be peaceful. By the time the protest march set off, violence had already begun. However, it was neither a by-product of mass mobilization nor did it simply ‘erupt’. Media discourse in particular often conflated mass mobilization with political violence; violence in this discourse was a consequence of popular politics and erupted at certain moments in history. Such an analysis is not useful as it de-historicizes political violence as a strategy and concept that was promoted by particular groups. Premeditated violence, including arson and stonings, was rooted in competing perceptions of how to achieve political change. Militant groups regarded a peaceful protest march as an insufficient strategy to confront the state.Footnote 34 Hence, the matrix of the uprising provided various groups with the opportunity to pursue their own agendas and more militant forms of protest.
Arson was a clear show of strength that asserted the role of the mostly young activists. As William Beinart argues, ‘violence does not appear as a single phenomenon but as an expression of a wide range of conflicts, crises or catharses. Much public violence is an assertion of political power – either an attempt to monopolise coercion and control, or to break that monopoly’ (Reference Beinart1992: 457). It was also a highly public way of expressing anger with a government that refused to listen.Footnote 35 Arson thus exposed the deep fissures that existed within the communities regarding the legitimacy of violence. The use of violence marked, to a certain extent, the end of uncertainty and the drawing of clear boundaries (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1998). The Vaal Uprising and the high degree of violence thus constituted a shattering of normality and a moment of rupture (Bozzoli Reference Bozzoli2004). It warranted new narratives to give meaning to events and to explain what had happened. It also enforced a renegotiation of roles, identities and social relations.
However, part of the violence was spontaneous and resulted from hostile interactions between crowds, police and councillors. The killing of councillors appears to have been contingent and resulted from the antagonism between them and the protesting crowds. Violence by both the police and councillors led to retaliation and cycles of violence, further exacerbated and inflamed by rumours of wanton police conduct. A popular uprising had begun that claimed the lives of the dozens of people who were shot by police and the four councillors who were killed by crowds.
An analysis of the buildings attacked on 3 September shows with great clarity that arson and stonings were not random but were targeted at government buildings and the shops, vehicles and houses of councillors, and, in some cases, those of policemen. The burning of the property of councillors, members of the Orange Vaal Development Board and policemen was a clear attack on apartheid symbols, as interviewees argued.Footnote 36 While petrol bombs had been used during past protests, the burning of buildings on this date constituted a more public spectacle that required both actors and an audience – in this case, the police and township communities. There was thus a theatrical element involved in the petrol bombing of buildings and the theatricality of protest was a defining feature of the township uprisings during this period, as Belinda Bozzoli demonstrates (Reference Bozzoli2004).
The uprising reflected the perception of militant youth groups that the South African government could be brought to its knees only through a combination of older repertoires of protest, such as strikes, boycotts and public protests, and more militant forms that included the use of political violence. The relative ‘success’ of the Vaal Uprising had demonstrated that attacks on councillors resulted in their leaving the townships, while the government had to make certain concessions such as the scrapping of rent increases. Councillors were relocated to a secure complex on the outskirts of Sebokeng and a number of them resigned in fear for their lives.Footnote 37
In the aftermath of the Vaal Uprising, with the deployment of troops on 23 October 1984 during Operation Palmiet and the heavy presence of police, the townships became embattled areas. For many, the presence of troops in the townships was an open declaration of war by the apartheid regime. The government employed an iron-fisted approach to curb the protests and to quell the uprising. The struggle between liberatory forces and the apartheid regime was one over the collective psyche of the population in the townships as well as over power, control and access to and the production of knowledge. Belinda Bozzoli notes that the youth of the 1980s not only fought against the regime but for a new moral order and control over space (Reference Bozzoli2004). Youth were digging trenches in the streets to prevent armoured vehicles from moving around while roads were blocked with burning tyres and rocks.Footnote 38 To stop the police from identifying houses, house numbers were frequently painted over; although such strategies did not protect people from detention and harassment, they delayed the process and made policing increasingly difficult.Footnote 39 The creation of ‘liberated areas’ where no police, informers or members of the government could go was at the heart of making the townships ungovernable.
Furthermore, increasing repression and brutality by the security forces, together with years of deprivation and oppression, contributed to a state of mind among many young black people that was marked by anger, frustration and impatience. The experience of violence spawned by the state thus created new political subjectivities (Das et al. Reference Das, Kleinman and Ramphele2000).Footnote 40 Meanwhile, the ANC's call to make the country ungovernable and apartheid unworkable coalesced with the – albeit limited – infiltration into South Africa of cadres of Umkhonto we Sizwe and weapons. The ANC's Radio Freedom and the circulation of the organization's pamphlets and literature inspired young activists. Ungovernability became one of the ANC's key strategies during this period.
Although a few arms, such as rifles and hand grenades, started to be brought into the area in around 1985 by MK units, the majority of weapons youth could access in the immediate aftermath of the Vaal Uprising were stones and petrol bombs. Such weapons were easily accessible: stones simply had to be picked up from the street and petrol bombs were easy to make, cheap and effective in destroying buildings. CA, another youth activist, recalls that: ‘We couldn't take hammer and chisel.’Footnote 41 Although the ANC provided instructions on how to produce petrol bombs through Radio Freedom or underground printed literature, many youths taught each other.Footnote 42 All that was needed was an empty bottle, petrol – which was supplied voluntarily or involuntarily by local petrol stations or motorists – sand and Sunlight soap to ensure that the petrol would burn longer and be adhesive. A piece of cloth, pushed into the neck of the bottle, served as a fuse. The lids of garbage bins served as makeshift shields to protect youth during their street battles with the police.
This upsurge of militancy is described by the word siyayinyova (loosely translated as ‘we are defiantly fighting’ or ‘we will destroy’), which implied an expectation of (often violent) confrontation with the security forces, willingness to challenge the regime and a sense of trepidation. It was less a reflection of premeditated forms of military warfare by the liberation movements, and more an expression of spontaneous forms of collective action. Siyayinyova became one of the rallying cries of African youth in particular and it reflected both their determination to continue the struggle against oppression and a new mindset that was shaped by overcoming internalized repression and fear. And it summed up the anger towards the regime and its representatives as expressed by the politically active youth of the 1980s.
THE MEANING OF VIOLENCE
The apartheid regime's heavy reliance on intermediaries, including African policemen and other state officials, as well as informers to provide the access and knowledge necessary for the ordering of the townships, produced fragile power relations. Councillors, policemen and informers were thus the first to be attacked by groups of youth. Policemen, as Frantz Fanon famously stated, were the bringers of ‘violence into the home and into the mind’ of the oppressed (Reference Fanon and Fanon1963: 38) – a sentiment expressed by youth activists. Their age and the conditions under which they became politicized made the new youth leadership impatient. Colin Bundy characterizes youth politics of this period as ‘immediatism’, marked by ‘an impatient anticipation of imminent victory, a hubristic assessment of progress made, and a naïve underestimation of the resources of the state’ (Bundy Reference Bundy1987: 322–3). Their perceptions and strategies were shaped by subjective experiences of oppression and violence and influenced by the strategies of the ANC. The concepts of ungovernability and the promotion of a People's War resonated especially with the political understandings of youth. Some lacked political education, as CE recalled, and they expanded their knowledge on history and politics during their time in prison.Footnote 43 Others had been politically educated by older activists and had participated in debates with their peers. But many of those who were very young lacked experience, exposing them to police surveillance and repression.
The presence of police in the townships infuriated local residents and youth in particular. One activist remembers: ‘Now what happens is that every time we saw police then we saw people that killed people. You know. We would always react when we see them. But we were young then! We enjoyed, it was almost a game to us.’Footnote 44 CF recalls: ‘They were not even allowed to get in the townships. Because [as long as] people could see them … it will always be war.’Footnote 45 He thus emphasizes the widespread perception that the presence of police in the townships further inflamed the conflict.
Challenging Casspirs full of heavily armed policemen with stones was not for the faint-hearted: bravery, courage and physical prowess were key.Footnote 46 The years after 1984 were therefore marked by a new and to some extent militaristic political culture that prevailed among the young African comrades: toyi-toying and the use of songs in particular aimed to instil courage, to scare the police and to urge the comrades on. The toyi-toyi – a form of dance originating from Zimbabwe – came to be associated with the public protests of the 1980s. Mass protests and street battles with the police followed an internal logic that may not have been apparent from the outside, with targets clearly defined and selected. An advance towards the police was usually accompanied by slogans to which the group would respond. CC, who emerged as one of the youth leaders in the region and who was involved in the Vaal Liberation Movement (VALIMO), an underground youth unit, recalls the role and importance of songs as follows:
Ja and whenever we went to general meetings or we march, we always sing ‘Phambili … phambili.’ So it means that we are going forward. Whether they kill us, whether they chase us away. We are going forward. And then there was this song, revolutionary song that was called Siyaya ePitoli [We are marching to Pretoria]. Ja. And so then when we sing those songs, people become very militant. Ja ja.Footnote 47
As many interviewees recall, they felt they had to continue the struggle for freedom from within the country instead of joining Umkhonto we Sizwe in exile.Footnote 48 Besides the unplanned street battles with the police, organized violence was increasingly regarded by some as the most efficient strategy to achieve freedom and to bring the government to its knees. CE explains that:
We became more daring because that group of young people it is the group that was not scared to confront, you know, but also it was because of our lack of political education. You know we thought that everything would be solved through violence. You know we wanted this freedom so so much that we were impatient, we did not want to listen and we were convinced that through violence we'd solve everything.Footnote 49
CE's explanations further reflect the shift in the mindset of young people. His generation, as he points out, was no longer prevented by fear from participating in the struggle against the regime.
CF, another former COSAS member, argues that freedom could be gained only by making the country ungovernable. Ungovernability, according to him, would be achieved through violence: ‘The plan was so simple. That we will mobilize people to be violent in the country … To make sure that the political violence leads to a situation whereby all councillors resign.’Footnote 50 Although only a minority of councillors resigned, local authorities were struggling to fill the vacant seats. The Lekoa town council, one of two local councils in the Vaal, never entirely collapsed but elections remained difficult for years to come as candidates feared for their lives.Footnote 51 A 1988 situation report from the security branch, for example, outlines information the police had received regarding youth in Sharpeville and Sebokeng, who allegedly planned to attack candidates with petrol bombs.Footnote 52 Hence, while Stephen Zunes demotes the role of violence in hampering effective control and governance, my empirical data suggests otherwise.Footnote 53
Government authorities such as councillors and policemen were regarded as hampering the struggle for freedom, as CF remembers: ‘People wanted their liberation not to be postponed. They wanted it now. And the police were barriers.’Footnote 54 Besides their houses being burned, policemen were beaten up and in a number of instances disarmed. A majority of interviewees recall that their intention was not to kill policemen but to enforce their departure.Footnote 55 Petrol bombings and other attacks formed a deliberate strategy by clandestine youth groups to rid the townships of any form of government authority.Footnote 56 Interviewees claim that attacks were usually planned and discussed beforehand.Footnote 57
Besides the conceptual strategy to make the townships ungovernable, attacks on government buildings and houses belonging to state representatives also aimed to express anger and dissent.Footnote 58 It was a way to ‘emphasize our action’, as CC remembers.Footnote 59 Some youth believed that they needed to ‘put sense into the white government’.Footnote 60 Others saw it as a means to defend their communities against police brutality.Footnote 61 Furthermore, the burning of houses created a spectacle that sent a message and warning to other state officials, impimpis (informers) and the broader community. It was a public demonstration and assertion of power and a clear drawing of boundaries of the community. By that stage, policemen were no longer regarded as being part of local communities.Footnote 62 Violence against perceived collaborators was hence a form of social and political control. While the social and political identities of ‘collaborators’ had become increasingly bounded during the years prior to the uprising, the violence in late 1984 further crystallized them. Violence was a means to enforce the ‘symbolic borders of belonging and exclusion’, as Belinda Bozzoli demonstrates (Reference Bozzoli2004).
From 1985 onwards, the threat of violence against anyone associated with the apartheid regime produced anxiety and fear among those who were perceived to be violating the moral and social contract and the political ideals of the young activists. Although militant comrades in favour of political violence were not in a position to collectively punish large masses of people, the threat of violence aimed to deter residents from cooperating with the police. Punishment of perceived collaborators was a public event and hence assumed a spectacular function. The use of arson through petrol bombings of houses or the infamous necklace as well as public floggings and beatings affected not only those who were punished but also a broader audience of township residents who directly or indirectly witnessed such events and their consequences.Footnote 63 The publicity of punishment was therefore an important aspect in the struggle over the psyche of the township populations. However, as Nokuthula Mazibuko notes for Soweto, the use of violence was controversial as arguments arose that it alienated people instead of encouraging them to join the struggle (Mazibuko Reference Mazibuko2006: 33). It also created generational tensions, as CE recollects: ‘You could see fear in our parents’ eyes. So you have that breakdown in the family system. And you have a situation where the young people sort of take control.’Footnote 64
THE ORGANIZATION OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE, 1985–86
Thula Simpson distinguishes between ‘organised violence with sophisticated weapons’ and ‘local outbursts of unplanned rioting conducted with rudimentary arms’ (Reference Simpson2009: 174). Contrary to his distinction, I would rather suggest that, although the level of sophistication varied, the goals were often similar – namely, to take the armed struggle into the African townships. In contrast to Soweto, for example, where petrol bombings occurred prior to 1984 and a clandestine group called the South African Suicide Squad was engaged in a widespread campaign of violence against African police and councillors from early 1984 onwards, newspaper reports of that time describe few similar occurrences for the Vaal Triangle. One exception was the petrol bombing of Constable Jeremiah Matshola's house on 7 December 1978. As outlined earlier, from early 1985 onwards, petrol bombings became more frequent. Targets included classrooms and principals’ offices as well as the houses of policemen, informers and other buildings associated with the apartheid regime. While the targeting of houses of policemen and informers followed the logic of ungovernability and the reconstitution of moral, social and political boundaries, the burning of schools aimed to enforce student demands.
One report among the papers collected by the defence lawyers for the trial State v Baleka and 21 Others (popularly known as the Delmas Treason trial) demonstrates that principals’ offices were mostly attacked from January 1986 onwards.Footnote 65 Usually, the victims were those principals who were seen to be aiding the police and who were unpopular. On 11 January 1986, the principal of a higher primary school in Sebokeng was replaced by a particularly unpopular new principal.Footnote 66 Students appeared to be aggrieved by the lack of consultation and a few days later the principal's office was burned down. A month later, on 15 February, a female teacher was severely injured after being stoned by a group of students. Another teacher was reported as having been stabbed. Accusing them of being collaborators, some students allegedly bundled the staff of the school into a room and threatened to set them alight; however, they were eventually released. During the following months, more schools were stoned and burned down. Most incidents appeared to have occurred in Zone 7 and Zone 12 in Sebokeng, coinciding with the areas from which organized and clandestine youth units were operating. Other incidents that were reported included the stoning and robbing of delivery vehicles.
Confrontations between the police and local residents intensified as well. A cycle of violence began between council police and local residents around March 1986, after the council police shot a priest and a student.Footnote 67 Established in 1985, this group had rapidly become unpopular due to its trigger-happiness and its role in enforcing evictions and attempting to break the rent boycott that had begun in 1984. In April 1986, houses of local political leaders in Sharpeville were attacked and rumours began to circulate that the assailants had been driving a vehicle owned by the Lekoa town council. Subsequently, houses of council police officers were burned down while some policemen were stabbed and assaulted. On 23 May, a student aged twenty-two was shot dead by council police. Local residents alleged that his death was an act of vengeance for the petrol bombings of policemen's houses. The sequence of violence clearly suggests the retributive nature of the attacks, but exactly who was involved in this violent conflict remains unclear.Footnote 68 Besides the council police, members of the security branch were also targeted.
In 1985–86, two clandestine youth groups were formed in Sebokeng.Footnote 69 As argued in the introduction, they did not represent the unemployed but rather high school students who had become politicized through their involvement in student politics. Their political consciousness was influenced by the straddling of experiences of oppression and violence and broader ideologies of the banned liberation movements, the ANC in particular. Members of the two units had mostly joined COSAS in the early to mid-1980s. As Monique Marks examines in her thesis on youth politics in Diepkloof, groups involved in planning and executing acts of violence were by no means beyond the control of formalized structures (Marks Reference Marks1993: 264). My own research confirms this claim. Membership between above-ground groups such as COSAS and underground units often overlapped, yet formalized structures were careful not to be associated with violence.
Both groups shared an understanding that the townships had to be rid of the police and informers – the councillors had already left by that time – but varied in their degree of militancy. The Vaal Liberation Movement (VALIMO) owed its birth to two events. After being tear-gassed by the police during two meetings in autumn 1985, some COSAS members decided to take more drastic action, as CH recalls:
So after then that meeting was disrupted there was a feeling within the leadership that we cannot forever continue to have our meeting disrupted without us responding. And if we had to respond in terms of marches and all other things we'll be exposing ourselves further into another harassment into [sic] the police. And you must remember at that time some of us had already started to listen to Radio Freedom. So a decision then was taken that we have to begin a campaign of driving security police outside the township. And the very same evening we went on to burn houses of security police. Matshola's house was one of them.Footnote 70
CB, another founding member of VALIMO, recalls the incentive behind its formation as follows: ‘I think the idea started from jail. Said no, man, this MK is wasting time. We can't fight in England.’Footnote 71 According to him, the structure of VALIMO was modelled after Umkhonto we Sizwe cells. To avoid infiltration, the organization was kept decentralized. CC, another member of VALIMO, recollects that nobody knew how many people were actually involved in VALIMO: ‘Because everybody was having a responsibility in terms of their unit. Look, if you're ten. You have your own five that we don't know. You account to us what is happening.’Footnote 72 Despite the organization's decentralized nature, members were supposed to follow strict discipline and anyone who did not comply was reprimanded and eventually thrown out.Footnote 73 Another two incentives cited by former members for the establishment of VALIMO were the need to defend communities against state brutality, while CB stressed its importance in fighting ‘a proper war’.Footnote 74 Most members of the group were detained in 1985 for public violence, arson or intimidation.
A second clandestine group, Ace Mates, was established a few months after VALIMO. While the members of the two groups knew each other and occasionally collaborated in planning their actions, their degree of militancy differed. CC recalls that Ace Mates were more radical. Ace Mates included very few members and had been formed in 1985 as a clandestine unit that regarded itself as part of Umkhonto we Sizwe. By this time, the boundaries between formal MK units and clandestine youth groups had become increasingly blurred. The formation of the group was inspired both by the ANC's call to form armed units inside the country, popularized through Radio Freedom, and by the daily experiences of violence, police brutality and oppression youth were experiencing. Based in Zone 7 in Sebokeng, the group was known for its militancy and came to be widely feared by those associated with the apartheid regime for its promotion of political violence against informers and policemen in particular. BC, a civic leader and ANC underground activist who was already in hiding by then, recalls the reputation Ace Mates had in Sebokeng, and particularly in Zone 7:
It was an open secret. It was not something that you see, you'll only hear from comrades but you'll hear people talking. Proudly so to say, ‘Yo yo yo. Ay. I want to join Ace Mates.’ They were feared! Feared in Sebokeng. In Zone 7. Anyone who was associating himself with the police or the system we call it, any impimpi, sell-out, they will attack every … that's what they were doing. So you see, anything you do is against the community you know, [CI] will be with you. Ace Mates will be with you.Footnote 75
While VALIMO was mainly involved in the burning of policemen's houses, Ace Mates went a step further. Their political strategy included three levels of ‘operations’: first, petrol bombing houses of policemen, informers and anyone else associated with the apartheid regime; second, attacking General Jan Smuts High School in Vereeniging; and third, attacking police stations. Just off Voortrekker Road, which leads into Vereeniging, surrounded by a vacant strip of open field, General Smuts High School had been selected by Ace Mates as a target around September 1985.Footnote 76 Attacking the school, members of Ace Mates believed, would shake the government and ensure that South Africa's white population had to experience the same trauma of having to bury their children in large numbers. CI, the leader of the group, recollects the planned attacks as follows:
We must ensure that whites also bury in mass [sic]. Same as the blacks in the township. Because each and every weekend, each and every weekend during that time we are burying, we bury the people in mass. Each and every, each and every week. We decided that now we must ensure that even the white community, they must do the same thing. We got that idea. That if we can maybe kill white students in mass, even if we'll be killed, the message will be clear.Footnote 77
CJ, another member of the group, a young woman who was sixteen years old at the time, explained that the purpose of the planned attack was ‘to get the government down’. She further argues that: ‘To get the government down we have to go and hit them.’Footnote 78 The plan, according to its leader CI, was simple: the group would walk into the morning assembly, shoot as many students as possible and finally throw in hand grenades.Footnote 79 Expecting to be killed ‘in action’, Ace Mates had prepared letters explaining their motivation for the attack. CJ explains the reason for the letters: ‘Our mothers and our fathers they must know we are fighting for freedom!’Footnote 80
Youth groups such as Ace Mates were not entirely divorced from broader MK and ANC networks. Although the incentives for developing particular political strategies did not come from exile, Ace Mates cooperated with local ANC veterans who facilitated the link to Umkhonto we Sizwe. They had been given weapons by a former Robben Islander who had close contact with the ANC in exile and who provided basic training on handling them.Footnote 81 The group expanded its weaponry by disarming police – a common practice among not only clandestine youth groups such as Ace Mates but also APLA.Footnote 82 Training, however, never went much beyond the basic handling of rifles and hand grenades and thus the group operated in a perhaps naïve manner as it openly displayed its weapons in Sebokeng. This lack of professional training and the carelessness with which members treated issues of secrecy and security added to their exposure to the police.
The day before the scheduled attack on General Jan Smuts High School, CI was arrested. His mistake, CI recalled, was that he visited Jordan High School in Evaton where he was a student to rally support for Umkhonto we Sizwe and to encourage other students to go into exile.Footnote 83 The rest of the group was arrested during the following months. In the aftermath of their arrest, members of Ace Mates were brutally tortured as the security branch tried to uncover where the weapons had come from.Footnote 84 A few months later, on 26 March 1987, one of the group, Benedict ‘Tina Turner’ Mashoke, was found dead in his cell in Burgersfort in the Eastern Transvaal where he had been taken for interrogation. Police alleged that he had ‘hanged himself’.Footnote 85 Members of Ace Mates, however, suspect that he died as a consequence of his torture. The circumstances of his death remain unclear to this day.
CONCLUSION
The period from 1984 to 1986 was marked by widespread uprisings in many South African townships. Strikes, boycotts and public protests challenged the apartheid regime in unprecedented ways. The intersection between everyday experiences of oppression and violence and the increasing influence of the cultural and political symbols of the exiled liberation movements moulded a new and militant political culture among young activists that aimed to overcome fear and internalized repression. Street battles with police shaped the everyday life of many black youths, and violence as a conscious strategy to oppose the regime gained momentum from 1985 onwards when clandestine youth units were formed. Certain sections of mobilized youth developed an understanding that apartheid could be dismantled only by using violent strategies. The incentive for the units’ formation was rooted in localized understandings of conflict and inspired by the ideology and strategies of the ANC in exile. The Vaal Uprising had demonstrated the capacity to gain certain concessions from local authorities and had led to the departure of councillors from townships.
Their aim was to promote ‘ungovernability’ by driving members of the African police force as well as alleged informers out of the townships. The petrol bombing of houses had three main aims: it was a means to rid the townships of local intermediaries who were facilitating the flow of information and knowledge. Furthermore, it was an embodiment of difference that redrew the physical and imagined boundaries of community. And finally, the spectacular character of violence by means of fire was a clear assertion of power directed at the state and its intermediaries. Hence, while violent action never militarily threatened the apartheid state, it was an important component in undermining consent and collaboration in the townships. Arson sent a signal to others not to collaborate with the regime. Collective violence was therefore also a form of punishment against those who stepped outside the boundaries of the social contract that was perceived to exist between members of a community.
Attacks on police stations in particular aimed to mark the presence of organized political resistance, further highlighting the incapability of the security forces to protect their own buildings. And although both groups mentioned in this article were ephemeral and had few members, they caused major headaches for the police. From mid-1985 onwards, attacks on African policemen and informers created a context in which the police's access to information and their ability to control the townships were increasingly undermined.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Florence Bernault and Jan-Georg Deutsch for commenting on earlier drafts of this article and William Beinart for his generous advice and input.
