Fight or Talk? Black Youths in S. Africa Take Hard Line

Down the street from Nelson Mandela’s home, the prospects for a negotiated peace in troubled South Africa seemed especially dim one recent rainy afternoon.

“Now is no time to compromise with the enemy,” 17-year-old Freedom Kwinana was telling two young friends. “If a person treats you badly, don’t show him you are fair. You show him you are radical.”

Briefcases are replacing bombs as the weapons of liberation for Mandela and other seasoned leaders of the African National Congress. And the world eagerly awaits today’s start of the talks between the ANC and the government, hoping for the first black-white negotiations in the history of South Africa.

But in the poverty-stricken townships, and even on Mandela’s own middle-class block in Soweto, hundreds of thousands of black youths are angry and impatient. Hardened by daily clashes with the police, they doubt the professed good intentions of a white government that has oppressed the black majority since long before they were born.

Now Mandela’s ANC faces the difficult task of trying to persuade these disgruntled youngsters that the time has come for talking--and, yes, even compromise--with “the enemy.”

ANC leaders admit privately that the country’s peace depends on it.

“The youth we have to contend with out there, and the ordinary people too, are completely cynical about this government’s intentions,” said Cheryl Carolus, a leader of the United Democratic Front anti-apartheid coalition.

“These youth are not ultra-leftists. They’re the people against whom the might of the state is still being unleashed,” added Carolus, 33, the youngest ANC delegate to today’s talks. “Peace is quite an alien concept for our young people.”

President Frederik W. de Klerk has abruptly changed the political climate in recent months by removing restrictions on black activists, and he has invited his government’s enemies to the negotiating table.

Mandela, freed in February after 27 years in prison, says he has been impressed by De Klerk’s initiatives, and he and other ANC leaders are willing to talk with the government about the ANC’s conditions for negotiation.

But for many young radicals who see nothing changing in their townships, this sudden willingness to talk seems premature.

“The African National Congress used to say it would never return to this country to talk to the government--only to liberate us,” complained Abel Zwane, 19, who attends high school on Mandela’s block. “But now they are coming back to talk. And liberation is no nearer.”

Zwane and Kwinana have joined the ANC rival Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), whose no-compromise approach to the government’s entreaties is appealing to increasing numbers of young blacks.

Mandela, the 71-year-old dean of anti-apartheid activists, “is like a father to us, and we respect him,” Zwane said.

But children don’t always obey their fathers.

“We thought when he came out of prison everything would change,” Zwane explained. “But so far we see nothing.”

South Africa today is dotted with signs of youthful distrust of the government and discontent with the pace of change.

“Viva No Surrender,” reads the freshly painted graffiti on one of the concrete walls ringing the expensive white homes in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs.

A few miles away, in the township of Tembisa, an ANC-aligned youth organization announced the other day that it was reintroducing so-called people’s courts, the notorious neighborhood tribunals born in the bloody township unrest of 1984-86.

A private survey of 18- to 25-year-old blacks earlier this month concluded that the ANC’s willingness to talk to the government “could pose credibility problems” for it.

Many of those surveyed said they distrust whites and want De Klerk to step down, something he has refused to do. And some said they identify more closely with the hard-line position of the PAC than the more moderate ANC.

The black youth of today were in the front line of the ANC’s violent grass-roots struggle during the 1980s, when thousands died as ANC followers used limpet mines, street committees and people’s courts to defy Pretoria and try to make the country ungovernable.

That uprising was quashed by the South African government, which used an emergency decree to break up thousands of political gatherings, detain thousands of black activists for months and even years without charge and put hundreds on trial.

By relaxing those clamps on anti-government protest, De Klerk has released but not cooled the sense of frustration in the townships, where the legacy of 42 years of racial discrimination is readily apparent.

Millions of blacks have marched to protest poor living conditions, high rents, unequal education and corrupt Pretoria-supported town councils. Several times in recent weeks, police have opened fire on those demonstrators, and more than two dozen activists, most of them in their teens, have died.

ANC leaders deny any loss of faith among the younger generation of activists. But the nation’s primary anti-apartheid movement has yet to complete the massive task of re-establishing itself inside South Africa. And disorganization at the top, with many leaders suddenly out of jail and exiles preparing to return, are making the job more difficult.

Mandela and the older generation are urging the youth to remain disciplined and refrain from undirected violence while at the same time trying to reassure whites of the ANC’s commitment to peace.

But Mandela’s accommodating statements contrast sharply with the fiery rhetoric of the ANC’s young radical leaders, who support the ANC decision to open lines of communication with the government but show little faith in negotiation politics and speak often of stepping up the war.

“The only thing to negotiate is the transference of power from the minority regime to the majority,” Michael Dube, an 18-year-old leader of an ANC-affiliated students organization in Soweto, said recently.

“And the only way to do that is to shoot and talk,” Dube added.

ANC youth leaders say police killings of black protesters in recent weeks are undermining their attempts to win young people over to the idea of negotiations.

“If you want negotiations to be successful, you must get the people to support you,” said Peter Mokaba, president of the ANC-aligned South African Youth Congress. “But how do you get people to support you when they see the people you want to talk to firing guns at them in the streets?”

Mokaba recently told a cheering throng of supporters that now is the time “to wage peace in the communities and wage war on the enemy.” Many youngsters in the crowd carried replicas of AK-47 rifles, carefully carved out of wood and branded with the name of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).

The rival PAC contends that support for the ANC is slowly draining away among young people. The PAC’s student organization, formed six months ago and known as PASO, now claims 45,000 members nationwide.

“We are not opposed to negotiations in principle,” said Lawrence Nquandela, 24, the secretary general of PASO. “But at this juncture we feel the enemy is very strong militarily, and we do not believe any capitalistic government will voluntarily negotiate itself out of power.”

De Klerk’s reform initiatives “are just a ploy to get rid of international pressure,” Nquandela added. “And you mustn’t lie to the young people.”