S. Africa Guerrillas Now ‘Non-Racial’ : Outlawed ANC Welcomes Flow of White Recruits

Jeff is a different sort of soldier: He deserted from one army and now fights against it in another.

Once an infantryman in the South African army, he is now a cadre in Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the outlawed African National Congress, and one of a small but steadily growing number of whites who are joining the ANC.

Trained by the South African government to combat ANC “terrorists,” Jeff, 32, who uses that appellation as a nom de guerre for security reasons, now employs many of those military skills to help realize the ANC’s vision of an apartheid-free country. It is a future that he believes will have to be won with the gun rather than the ballot box, as most white liberals in South Africa believe.

“The ANC was offering a view that made sense to me then, and it was doing something and going somewhere, not just protesting,” he said, explaining his decision to desert in 1976 and subsequently to join the ANC.

To the vast majority of white South Africans, however, the ANC remains a small, ruthless, Communist-led terrorist group fighting to overthrow the government in Pretoria and using the wide opposition to apartheid--the country’s system of racial separation and minority white rule--as a rallying point in a campaign meant ultimately to establish a one-party socialist state.

Even for most white liberals, becoming a member of the ANC, particularly its military wing, is stepping beyond the bounds of acceptable anti-apartheid militancy and into an arena where violence, sabotage and terror are seen as the necessary means toward the goal of a new political system.

“Liberals still have a great deal of trouble understanding the position of a person like myself, that only in a free and democratic South Africa is their future assured,” Jeff said, “and that is perhaps because the next issue is how they themselves will participate in the struggle to achieve that future South Africa. . . . Only through participating in this struggle can white South Africans assure their place in that new society.”

An increasing number of whites, most of them liberals from academic and business circles but some from the working class, are taking another look at the ANC, its policies and its goals, and making their own assessments. With growing frequency, they also are meeting with the group, both inside the country and here in exile.

From these recent contacts, ANC officials say, has come a stream of new white recruits, the largest number since the predominantly black organization was outlawed in South Africa 28 years ago.

‘Not So Terrible’

“To know us is not necessarily to love us,” Thabo Mbeki, the group’s information director, remarked in an interview at ANC headquarters here, “but most people find that we are not so terrible, certainly not the villains and murderers that the regime has described. . . .

“For whites, this sometimes is such a revelation that they go back and question everything they believed about us, about apartheid, about the struggle against it. . . . Often they come to the conclusion that what we want for South Africa--a country for all the people who live in it, a democratic and just political and economic system--is what they want and that, consequently, they belong with us. And, when they come, we welcome them.”

Mbeki put the number of whites in the ANC, founded in 1912 as a black nationalist movement but now avowedly “non-racial,” at “several hundreds, including those inside the country and out, and maybe even a thousand.”

But that is a guess other ANC officials think could prove low. Although its exile membership has surged recently to more than 20,000, according to sources here, the ANC does not keep records by race, and its decentralized structure means that the headquarters here does not have a full roster of members.

“There is a new wave of whites in the ANC who have come in the ‘80s, and it’s a big wave, greater in numbers than ever before,” said Patrick FitzGerald, a former student leader who was recruited a decade ago in the wake of the 1976 Soweto uprising.

‘Get Down to Real Work’

“In the 1970s, there was open talk among many of us in the student movement, whites as well as blacks, that the ANC was the way forward, but it was an intellectual sort of thing. Then a friend got hold of me, sat me down in a shebeen (an illegal bar in a black township) and told me quite seriously, ‘Look, this isn’t a situation for chitchat--we’ve got to get down to real work,’ and that to put things on a proper basis I should join the ANC underground.

“That’s when I got my mental ANC membership card, and I was very proud. If you are a democratic activist, that’s a big moment: If things are going to change, you are going to be part of it.”

Like Jeff, FitzGerald, 34, left South Africa, where he had been employed as a public relations specialist at the Chamber of Mines, rather than fight again as an army reservist in neighboring Angola. He deserted while on a weekend pass in 1979, driving across the border into Botswana, where he worked for the ANC for five years. A poet and playwright, he is now in the ANC’s arts and culture department here.

Whites have long been active in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. The ANC itself formed an alliance decades ago with the South African Communist Party, and Umkhonto we Sizwe (Zulu for “Spear of the Nation”) was established in 1961 as a joint operation by the ANC and the party.

Whites Put on Trial

Both moves brought whites into ANC ranks informally, and whites were among the defendants in most of the major treason trials of the 1950s and 1960s. But their numbers were small, and until recently were diminishing as the old Communists and trade union organizers died off.

But many black ANC members were uncertain what role whites should play in an organization whose stated goal was the liberation of South Africa’s oppressed black majority. The issue was a major factor in the expulsion a decade ago of eight senior ANC members who opposed a white role in the organization.

Only in 1985, after a prolonged debate throughout the ANC, were whites allowed to hold elective offices.

“This was an important question for us to face, and not just because we wanted to bring more whites into the struggle and into our ranks,” a senior ANC official commented, asking not to be quoted by name. “How could we say we were fighting for a non-racial democracy when we, as a matter of policy, discriminated against white comrades? How could we lag behind the mass democratic organizations inside the country where whites were playing active roles?

“And how could we persuade whites that there was a place for them in a free South Africa of the future if there wasn’t an equal place for them within the ANC today? Still, it was hard for many to accept that the ANC might possibly have a white president one day.”

Whites in Mid-Level Spots

In the end, Joe Slovo, who was the longtime chief of staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe and is now general secretary of the South African Communist Party, was elected to the ANC’s policy-making national executive committee. Whites today hold a number of important mid-level positions within the ANC and in its military wing.

But it is far from an easy decision for even the most liberal white to join the ANC, with its goal of majority rule in South Africa, its low-level armed insurgency against the white-led government, its alliance with the South African Communist Party--and the dedication and sacrifice it requires of members.

“ANC was a whispered word 10 years ago,” Angela Brown, 37, said, recalling her entry into “a very hidden, almost cloak-and-dagger world. Just thinking about it, most whites believed, might get you 10 years in prison. There were far too many barriers then for a white to make a decision to join such a group.”

Also a member of the ANC’s arts and culture department here, Brown, a false name she uses to protect family and friends in South Africa, recounted how she had moved through student activism, art and drama circles, black education and liberal politics looking for a way to promote change.

Finally Accepted Violence

“I went through the classic stages--coming from a strongly anti-racist family, working for the Progressive Federal Party and doing all the liberal things, going a bit further and joining more activist groups--and slowly I realized that none of this was going to get us very far,” Brown said.

“But the ANC was not my immediate answer. It took me some time to accept the armed struggle. That was hard, very hard, but finally I realized that this is the only language that the Boers (the politically dominant Afrikaners) will ever understand.”

More than 20 court cases over the last decade have highlighted the growing role of whites in the ANC.

Marion Sparg, 30, a former journalist, was convicted of treason and arson and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 1986 for planting bombs in three police stations.

Barbara Hogan, now 36, was convicted of treason in 1982 and sentenced to 10 years for setting up ANC communications routes, organizing boycotts and other protests and compiling anti-government pamphlets.

Carl Niehaus and his fiancee, Johanna Lourens, were convicted in 1983 of treason for helping plan sabotage attacks and making bombs.

And Helene Passtoors, a Belgian, was convicted of treason in 1986 for establishing dozens of weapons caches for the ANC around South Africa.

Students, Clergy

Other whites have been convicted of terrorism, belonging to an outlawed organization, helping plan ANC sabotage and guerrilla attacks, gathering classified information for it, furthering the political aims of the ANC, distributing ANC publications and smuggling weapons into South Africa for ANC guerrillas. The defendants have ranged from youths avoiding the draft and students in their 20s to university professors and members of the clergy.

Police searched for a young Afrikaner, the son of a prominent university professor and former editor of a National Party newspaper, in connection with a car bomb that killed three people and injured 20 others outside Johannesburg in March, and they have charged the daughter of a university president with planting bombs in the Cape Town area over the last two years.

Sparg, testifying at her trial in Johannesburg in November, 1986, summed up the motivation of most of those whites who have joined the ANC and support its armed struggle.

“I believe that even as a white South African I do not owe loyalty to the government, which is clearly not based on the will of the people,” she declared. “I can only adhere to a government based on the will of the people.”

But Judge P. J. Van der Walt, in giving Sparg one of the heaviest sentences any ANC member has received short of the death penalty in recent years, told her that being white was an aggravating circumstance; had she been black, he implied, he might be able to understand why she had joined the ANC.

The willingness of an increasing, although still small, number of whites to join the ANC, however, has persuaded the organization’s leadership to intensify its “appeal to whites” to support its goals and, if possible, to join its ranks.

This ANC campaign, part of a broader strategy shift nearly three years ago, was undertaken with the hope of not only enlarging the organization’s ranks but of extending its influence within anti-apartheid groups and broader academic, business and political circles inside South Africa and fragmenting the government’s power base.

Most ANC recruits come, however, from the ranks of such anti-apartheid groups as the United Democratic Front, the End Conscription Campaign, the National Union of Students of South Africa and the Johannesburg Democratic Action Committee.

With the increased number of white recruits, however, have come more South African government agents, some of them members of the security police and intelligence service but others recruited from university campuses or infiltrated into leftist organizations.

Most whites joining the ANC today go into Umkhonto we Sizwe, which trains them in Angola and sometimes in the Soviet Union and East Germany and sends many back to South Africa where security forces find them harder to detect than black guerrillas.

Parks recently completed a 3 1/2-year assignment as The Times’ Johannesburg bureau chief.