Rebel Strategist Seeks ‘Least Bloody Course’ to End Apartheid

Joe Slovo is the man most feared by white South Africans, the man whose calls for greater “revolutionary violence” seem intended to plunge the country into chaos, the man whose dreams of a Communist South Africa give them nightmares.

As the longtime chief of staff of the African National Congress’ military wing, Slovo, who is white, has planned its guerrilla struggle against continued white rule and ordered the terrorist attacks meant to bring that campaign home to the country’s 5 million whites.

As the general secretary of the South African Communist Party, he personifies the socialism and Soviet influence that even many opponents of apartheid believe an ANC-led government would bring to the country.

But Joe Slovo, 61, a one-time Johannesburg lawyer, today talks increasingly about the ANC’s desire for a negotiated resolution of the South African conflict, about a peaceful transition to majority rule there, of a mixed economy that encourages private enterprise, of ways to reassure the country’s white minority, of socialism as a long-term goal.

“The starting point must be: What is the preferable way out for our movement?” he said, sketching his views in a long interview at the ANC’s headquarters here. “And the preferable way must be to choose the least painful, the least bloody course for the country.

No Choice but Violence

“Violence for us was not a question of choice but the result of there being no other way, literally no other way. . . . At the moment, no reasonable peaceful option is open to us, but we are working to create it. If a real alternative to violence were to arise, we would clasp it with both hands, but it must be a real alternative.”

The African National Congress has declared that it cannot agree to President Pieter W. Botha’s demand that it end its armed struggle as a precondition for participating in proposed negotiations on a new political system for South Africa. Instead, it has suggested unconditional talks that could start with the question of ending all violence in the country.

“We cannot be expected to abandon violence unilaterally as a precondition for negotiation,” Slovo said. “There is no example in history of a liberation movement going to the negotiating table having abandoned unilaterally the very weapon that may have compelled the other side to talk. . . .

“The Botha regime has by its recent actions tried to curb opposition rather than seek accommodation. It is unfair to put the onus now on the ANC to make the gesture while Botha neither has the will nor the sincere desire to move toward negotiations.”

But the ANC says that it hopes for talks nevertheless and will strive to build support for them within South Africa and abroad.

“No movement, except one of crazy lunatics or anarchists, rejects negotiations,” Slovo said, “and the pattern of liberation in Africa has been to settle at the negotiating table.”

Need to Avert Civil War

Slovo goes further and talks about the need to avert a civil war that could easily turn racial, about efforts to broaden the struggle against apartheid to include more whites, about the desire to assure them that they will be secure, even “comfortable,” under majority rule, about the compromises that will be required within the ANC and his Communist Party to keep post-apartheid South Africa politically stable and economically strong.

“The starting point for dialogue can only be the acceptance of majority rule in a unitary, democratic state,” Slovo said. “Once this is accepted, however, there is a great deal that can be tossed about, discussed and agreed, including mechanisms for safeguarding individual rights, relations between social (state-owned) and private property, the language and cultural rights of various groups such as the Afrikaners. . . .

This is the reasonable Joe Slovo, a man who may have mellowed with age and whose responsibilities as a member of the ANC’s national executive council and general secretary of the Communist Party are now broader than the armed struggle that he led for a quarter-century. But this Slovo arouses suspicion among most white South Africans.

Communist leaders at critical stages of many revolutions, the government contends, have sounded reasonable as they tried to build support among “useful idiots” for their “united front,” only to seize control later of the new government and then establish one-party rule.

ANC’s Intentions Questioned

The ANC’s long alliance with the South African Communist Party is a good reason, many opponents of apartheid say, to question the ANC’s intentions and sincerity, particularly its commitment to a multiparty democracy and a mixed economy.

That alliance, which goes back half a century, has been essential, however, to the ANC’s survival after being banned in 1960 and its resurgence in recent years. Communists have provided many of the ANC’s leaders in exile, done much of its ideological work and planning, helped it organize black trade unions, played a key role in the armed struggle and brought it greater access to foreign funds and arms.

ANC President Oliver Tambo, who opposed Communist influence within the ANC when he joined in the early 1940s, denies that it is Communist-controlled today and says that he sees no difference in the positions taken by Communists and other members of the group’s leadership.

“The Communists are loyal ANC members,” Tambo commented in an interview last year, “and that is what we expect of them.”

For Slovo, the question of the Communist role in the African National Congress is an old issue. The “special relationship” between the ANC and the Communist Party is far from that of “the comic-book image of a stereotyped Commie and how he deviously manipulates mass organizations,” Slovo said. Party members accept ANC leadership unconditionally, Slovo asserted, and ANC policies prevail whenever they conflict with party decisions.

Close Ties to Soviets

Still, the Communist Party of South Africa has always had close ties to the Soviet Communist Party, and Slovo, who has traveled to the Soviet Union many times, was awarded a Soviet medal on his 60th birthday for promoting friendship between the two peoples.

South African authorities said last year that all but seven of the 28 members of the ANC’s national executive council were either party members or supporters. The U.S. State Department in a report to Congress on Communist influence in the ANC said in January that “roughly half” of the committee members were known or suspected Communist Party members.

Slovo said there were “not that many,” but he refused to identify them. “We are an illegal, underground organization,” he said, “and we do not name our members.”

Slovo’s stature within the African National Congress is beyond doubt. His long years as chief of staff of its military wing made him one of the ANC’s principal strategists, and in 1985 he was the first white elected to the organization’s national executive council.

A Communist from his youth, Slovo helped found the ANC’s military wing, Spear of the Nation ( Umkhonto we Sizwe , in Zulu), in 1961 after the ANC was outlawed. Like other ANC leaders, he argues that there was and is no alternative to violence.

“What do you do when every single avenue to democracy is blocked by the government?” he said. “To quote Nelson Mandela, ‘You either submit or fight.’ ”

Architect of Struggle

According to South African authorities, Slovo has been the architect of the ANC’s armed struggle, and has been largely responsible for building up the ANC’s guerrilla forces over the past decade and for the upsurge in their military campaign since 1984.

He is also regarded as the planner of many of the ANC terrorist attacks, including the 1983 car bomb that killed 19 people and injured many others outside air force headquarters in Pretoria. And he is described in government propaganda as a colonel in the KGB, the Soviet intelligence and security service.

“An evil genius,” one government publication called him. “Slovo is a dedicated Communist, a Marxist-Leninist without morality of any kind, for whom only victory counts, whatever the human cost, whatever the bloodshed.”

For South Africa’s militant black youths, however, Slovo is a hero, ranking with Tambo just after the organization’s imprisoned leaders, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu.

What is surprising perhaps is that Slovo is not only white but that he left South Africa in 1963, years before most of those black youths were born.

“Like Nelson Mandela, Comrade Joe Slovo is a symbol of the vision we have of what we want our country to be and of the dedication required to achieve it,” Rapu Molekane, general secretary of the South African Youth Congress, said in Johannesburg recently. “Everyone is aware of his tremendous contributions to our struggle.”

Mild-Mannered Man

Slovo, for all this, is a mild-mannered man. With his bushy eyebrows, tousled gray hair and eyeglasses perched precariously on his nose, he seems more like a misplaced professor than a hardened revolutionary.

Slovo was born in Lithuania and went to South Africa in 1935 as a boy of 9. His parents immigrated along with many other Lithuanian Jews in search of work in the gold mines around Johannesburg.

He dropped out of school at the age of 13 and started to work as a clerk in a pharmaceutical company. In 1944, he joined the South African army, after convincing the recruiting officer that he was 21, and served first in Egypt and then in Italy in the closing days of World War II. He studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg after the war.

His politics were always radical. Strong currents of socialism were prevalent in South African politics throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and a black co-worker introduced Slovo to the new Communist Youth League in 1942. When he came back from the war, he joined the Communist Party, which was then legal, and in 1949 married Ruth First, the daughter of the party’s treasurer and the author of some of the first journalistic exposes of the cruelty of apartheid.

Slovo and his wife were among the first 600 people to be named in 1950 under the new Suppression of Communism Act, which outlawed the party and restricted the political activities of suspected Communists. He was a founding member of the Congress of Democrats in 1953, helped plan the 1955 Congress of the People at which the Freedom Charter, still the basic manifesto of the ANC, was adopted, and in 1956 was charged with treason but acquitted two years later.

Slovo left South Africa in mid-1963 to get arms and financial support for the planned guerrilla war, and he remained abroad when police arrested much of the ANC leadership at their headquarters on a farm north of Johannesburg.

Lived a Furtive Life

His has been a furtive life of frequent moves, clandestine conferences and traveling incognito as he has tried to remain in the background--and safe from South African agents.

In 1981, South African commandos, disguised in Mozambican army uniforms, attacked three ANC homes on the outskirts of Maputo, the Mozambican capital, where Slovo had his operational headquarters; 13 people were killed, but Slovo escaped.

The next year, however, his wife, Ruth, was killed by a parcel bomb addressed to her at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, where she worked as research director of a Marxist institute.

Further raids on suspected ANC offices in Maputo followed, and when Mozambique signed the 1984 Nkomati Accord with South Africa, one of Pretoria’s conditions was the ouster of Slovo and most other ANC members from the country.

Slovo has retained the quick mind and sharp debating skills that won him honors as a law student and then made him one of the city’s top defense attorneys in the 1950s. ANC colleagues say his analysis is generally the soundest and most realistic when they assess their strategy in internal discussions. But Slovo’s one-time rivals, who have since quit the party, recall him as a man who would accept no criticism, whose mind was closed to the arguments of others.

With “political mass struggle” the main effort of both the African National Congress and the Communist Party, Slovo resigned as the ANC’s military chief of staff in February to concentrate on strengthening the party, particularly among black workers.

‘Preparing the Ground’

“We are now doing what any revolutionary movement must do--preparing the ground, readying all our forces, establishing the framework for the radical transformation that is coming,” Slovo said. “We are organizing our people and stimulating them to organize others, we are building our armed forces, we are supporting the development of mass organizations at local, regional and national levels. And, in time, we expect that powerful forces, political and economic, will create the kind of crisis we can take advantage of.”

But neither the ANC nor the Communist Party has a scenario that will bring down the present government in Pretoria and replace it with one based on the principle of one person, one vote.

“If you are looking for a master plan, a blueprint of exactly how in time and content we will storm Pretoria, you won’t find it, because we don’t have it,” Slovo said.

“This is a brittle situation. The (black) community that has assured the stability and prosperity of South Africa has become, from a civil point of view, ungovernable. From the military perspective, it can still be controlled, but the regime cannot continue to run the country by occupying the people on whom the economy depends. . . .

“Partial and even general insurrections will play a part (in bringing change). There will be uprisings in urban and rural areas, now here, now there. We will see general political strikes by millions of workers, the emergence of areas of real ungovernability, the emergence of alternative forms of power.”

Hopes to Attract Whites

But Slovo also talks increasingly of a broad “united front” under ANC leadership that could bring more whites into the struggle against apartheid and increase the chances for negotiations.

To the ANC’s critics, such a front would be Communist-dominated and lead, as similar groups did in Hungary and Bulgaria and later in China and Vietnam, to a socialist system. But Slovo says that he and other Communists, although committed to socialism as “the only rational form of social organization, the only system that really completes the process of national liberation,” recognize that in terms of practical politics, socialism is years away in South Africa and will differ greatly from the Soviet and Chinese models.

Redistribution of Wealth

“It is too late to unravel the struggle for national liberation from capitalism,” he argued. “Liberation cannot just be political liberation; it must be economic liberation as well. There is no way that ownership of 99% of the country’s wealth can be left undisturbed in the hands of a few people in a truly liberated South Africa. . . .

“But I don’t believe it is possible to pole-vault into socialism--that is a mistake that too many countries have made. There will be a phase, probably a lengthy one, in which private enterprise and public property coexist.”

Although not a revolutionary who idealizes violence as “purifying,” Slovo disputes little of his image as “the Communist mastermind” behind the ANC’s armed struggle. For him, the fears of South Africa’s whites are both a measure of the ANC’s growing strength and a crucial factor in hastening what be believes will be its ultimate victory.

“Revolutionary violence has created the inspirational impact that we had intended, and it has won for the ANC its leading position,” Slovo said. “There is only one thing that has distinguished the ANC from every other anti-apartheid movement in South Africa: the fact that over time, it showed a ‘no surrender’ attitude and continued to risk its members. It was the combat activity of the ANC that has made the difference in South Africa and brought the struggle to the point where it is today.”