Protesters Plan Bolder Tactics in South Africa

Campaigners against South Africa’s policy of apartheid are adopting new protest tactics that could lead to widespread civil disobedience by the country’s 24 million blacks and confront the minority white regime with an even graver crisis than it now faces from continuing unrest.

After strictly limited and usually suppressed protest for a quarter-century, activists opposed to the nation’s system of racial separation have in the last two weeks marched on Parliament in Cape Town, demonstrated in front of police headquarters in Johannesburg, paraded outside Durban’s central prison and invaded the offices here of Citibank, the American banking giant, denouncing it for “financing apartheid.”

‘Into the Streets’

On Sunday, the United Democratic Front, a multiracial coalition of roughly 650 anti-apartheid groups with more that 2 million members, announced plans for a high-visibility campaign of mass action to challenge the government through demonstrations, strikes and other protests.

“We will go into the streets time and time again,” Patrick Lekota, the front’s publicity secretary, said of the group’s intended “fresh level of assault.”

He went on: “We will challenge on issues that demand immediate action. . . . Each time there is an issue, we will go out in mass action and not simply issue statements.”

Popo Molefe, the front’s general secretary, said: “We do not want to trail the people, but to lead them. The masses of our people want action.”

‘Channel the Anger’

Steve Tshwete, a member of the front’s new 16-member executive committee, declared earlier: “We want to channel the anger of the (black) townships--the anger that boils up again and again in violence--into effective political measures that force real change.

“Black passivity has definitely ended, but we need more than just inchoate rage,” Tshwete said. “We must ensure that our actions are effective. . . . Nonviolent protests that confront the government again and again are one of the tactics that can do this.”

This is much more than a tactical shift, the front’s leaders said, because the new protests will represent the first real effort in 25 years to mobilize South Africa’s blacks, not just in opposition to apartheid but for specific political changes.

Anti-apartheid activists--white as well as black, well-known veterans and grass-roots leaders barely heard of outside South Africa’s black townships--hope that this will mark a turning point in their fight. If they fail, they fear, the result will be greater repression and greater violence.

“If we allow the current situation to continue, it can only end in an escalation of violence, in chaos and anarchy,” said the Rev. Beyers Naude, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches. With the current unrest, he said, the country has “entered a situation of civil war.”

Naude, who was arrested while leading the march on Parliament in Cape Town, has called for a campaign of civil disobedience. “The only answer to young black militants is to demonstrate a peaceful alternative that nonetheless is effective,” he said.

The heart of such a strategy, according to black political observers, must be to make the country ungovernable, not through greater violence in which most of the victims would be black but through increasing refusal to recognize state authority until apartheid is ended.

The goal of the protest should be the release of jailed black leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, and the return of those in exile to “negotiate a new future for the country,” Naude says.

But he warns that the protests must be kept strictly nonviolent if they are to succeed, that precautions must be taken to prevent their slipping into violent confrontations with the police and that whites must be won over, not antagonized into bitter reaction. The duty of Christians to oppose and not obey unjust laws must also be stressed, Naude said.

Parley on Objectives

However, on Sunday, United Democratic Front officials emphasized more immediate goals after a three-day strategy conference at Krugersdorp, 25 miles west of Johannesburg.

“The struggle must be placed in the hands of the people, and the issues to be taken up will involve the people more and more,” said Lekota, listing housing, education, unemployment, higher taxes and forced resettlement as the most immediate concerns of blacks.

The front, a loose, often disjointed organization, hopes to develop deeper community roots through such issue-oriented action and intends to focus on the short and medium term in its campaign.

It also hopes that as the protests draw more whites to support fundamental reforms, international pressure will be increased on South Africa to end apartheid.

The government may decide, however, that to allow further demonstrations such as the recent ones would be to invite even more protests, a high-ranking official said over the weekend, and thus it may move quickly to prevent new campaigns from gaining momentum.

Those planning the new protests are aware that the white administration, already alarmed at its loss of control in many black townships around the country, may move strongly against the protesters--outlawing the United Democratic Front and other organizations, detaining their leaders and authorizing harsher police actions. They also risk a white backlash, increased rivalries among black political factions and manipulation of the campaign by outsiders.

Yet they believe that coordinated, nationwide protests should help develop the blacks’ political muscle and their potentially formidable weapons--the consumer boycott and the general strike.

Mistakes Will Be Expensive

“The question in my mind is whether we have the courage to undertake such actions and men wise enough and capable enough to lead us,” a black political activist in Cape Town said. “A campaign that is botched would cost us dearly--in lives, in momentum, in spirit. . . . We must not fail in what we now undertake.”

Such frequently expressed caution stems, among other things, from the memory of the Sharpeville massacre in March, 1960, when South African police opened fire with rifles and machine guns on blacks protesting the country’s pass laws, the pervasive system of regulations that requires all blacks to obtain permits to live or work in urban areas and to carry them at all times.

Blacks are also mindful of the power of the state, the ruthlessness of its security forces and the determination of the ruling, Dutch-descended Afrikaners to retain political power.

“People who fought as hard as the Afrikaners have to get this land and keep it are not going to give it up because we are marching in the streets,” a black Anglican priest from Soweto, Johannesburg’s sister city said.

“We must be prepared for resistance from the whites,” he said, requesting that he not be identified. “The harder we push, the harder they will push back. It is like a law of physics.”

Then, there is the unresolved dispute sharply divides black politicians here over what the country’s future should be--a multiracial democracy with a free-market economy or a black socialist state--and thus what strategy should be pursued to get there.

Things Already in Flux

But anti-apartheid activists, assessing possible strategies after more than eight months of unrest, have concluded that fundamental political shifts are already under way here and that they should seize the initiative with a new protest campaign.

A key factor in their analysis is that, for the first time since it came to power in 1948, the ruling National Party does not have a pre-ordained solution for the country’s problems--and that the avowedly reformist government of President Pieter W. Botha is dealing with issues on an almost day-to-day basis, sometimes yielding, sometimes cracking down on dissent.

The reforms being introduced by Botha under the maxim “adapt or perish” are regarded, at best, as too little too slowly, or as simple reformulations of apartheid. Still, they offer an opening that was not there before.

“When you stop saying, ‘No, never,’ and start saying, ‘Maybe this, maybe that,’ you have opened the questions of who, what, how and when,” a black newspaper editor here says. “We need new tactics that take advantage of this opening, widen it. . . . We need specific goals that we can accomplish, one by one, with our protest.”

Anti-apartheid activists have concluded that the previous failure of black protests to achieve much resulted largely from the lack of a national conscience to which to appeal, to the lack of constitutionally guaranteed civil rights for blacks and to few restraints on the police.

While these obstacles remain, they have been substantially offset, the activists believe, by a willingness of liberal and moderate whites here, including businessmen, to press the government for change, by the concern of much of the rest of the world (especially the United States), and by the increased participation of whites in the protests.

This change was marked by the march on Parliament led by Naude, the Rev. Allan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and a patron of the United Democratic Front, and other clergymen to protest the fatal police shooting of 19 blacks near Uitenhage last month.

Hundreds of people, whites as well as blacks, joined the march through Cape Town, and more than 250 surrendered themselves for arrest on charges that might have led to jail sentences under the country’s Internal Security Act. It was the first such large-scale act of civil disobedience in this country since Sharpeville.

Tutu, Unionists Join In

Last week, Bishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace laureate, and two other Anglican bishops led 30 priests through central Johannesburg to police headquarters to dramatize their demand for the release of a colleague detained nearly six months ago and held without charges in solitary confinement under South Africa’s security laws.

And more than 500 jubilant union members marched the same day from Johannesburg’s courthouse back to union headquarters when charges of subversion were dropped against their leader, Moses Mayekiso, Transvaal provincial secretary of the Metal and Allied Workers Union, for his role in organizing a successful two-day general strike here in November.

A day earlier, about 40 members of the United Democratic Front and its union affiliates, including Leah Tutu, the bishop’s wife, demonstrated at the Johannesburg offices of Citibank to demand that it take a more forceful role in opposing apartheid. Front officials said that other American and West European companies operating here would probably be “targeted for their indifference” in later demonstrations.

On Good Friday, the Anglican and Catholic bishops of Durban led 300 other clergy and laymen to the city’s central prison, where 16 leaders of United Democratic Front and affiliated trade unions are awaiting trial next month on charges of high treason. Outside the prison, they prayed for the men and sang hymns--and the prisoners could be heard joining within the walls.

Most such demonstrations are illegal under South African law. Outdoor political meetings are banned for a year at a time, and indoor gatherings are also frequently prohibited by government order.

Tea for Tutu

But the authorities so far have treated the protesters gently: Bishop Tutu was given tea at police headquarters; minimal charges of parading without a permit were filed against those arrested in Cape Town; no action was taken at Citibank, where officials discussed the whole issue of foreign investments with the demonstrators. But President Botha warned earlier in a special address to Parliament that his government will not tolerate a campaign of protest or civil disobedience.

“No person or institution (is) above the law or will be allowed to act as if this were the case and go unpunished,” Botha said. Nor would his government permit anyone to “choose to obey only those laws . . . he considers to be just and equitable.”

Whatever reforms this society wants in its political, social and economic system, he said, will have to come through legally established procedures.

On Sunday, Botha spoke at the 75th-anniversary celebration of the Zion Christian Church, at Moria in northeastern Transvaal. He praised members of the black evangelical denomination for their acceptance of “law, order and authority” and their “positive attitude” toward his government.

Botha said he wants to find solutions to the country’s problems through negotiation, not confrontation, and that whites and blacks must begin to listen and talk to each other.