Do violent groups that operate independently of a nonviolent movement or on its fringes increase or decrease the likelihood of success of the civil resistance movement? This talk focuses on the South African anti-apartheid struggle and examine how simultaneous campaigns of civil resistance and organized military violence against apartheid interacted with each other. It shows a complex and paradoxical relationship and argues that the ANC’s almost exclusive focus on armed struggle between 1961 and 1979 severely undermined civil resistance. Ironically, it also held back the development of armed struggle itself, and retarded the achievement of ending apartheid. The talk concludes that civil resistance inside South Africa led by the United Democratic Front (UDF) eventually far surpassed armed activity as a force for change in South Africa in the 1980s.

1. A violent flank that fired a blank
Civil resistance and armed insurgency in
the struggle against apartheid
Howard Barrell
Delivered: Fletcher Summer Institute, June 2013

2. Southern Africa, 1984: ANC military infiltration route
ANGOLA
ANC military
training
camps
Main ANC
military
infiltration
route
ANGOLA
Ronnie
Chris Hani

3. Along the ANC‟s main guerilla infiltration route…
.
…on a hill
outside
Manzini,
Swaziland,
March 1984

4. .
.

5. Civil resistance and political-military relationship 1.
Erica Chenoweth, Kurt Shock and Maria Stephan* find:
• surveyed 233 insurrections, of which 106 involved civil resistance
and 48 simultaneous campaigns of violence;
• Found nonviolent resistance campaigns more than twice as likely to
succeed as violent resistance campaigns;
* See Chenoweth, E. & Stephan, M. (2011) Why civil resistance works. The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict, Columbia University
Press; and Shock, K. & Chenoweth, E., (2011) „Radical Flank Effects and the Outcomes of Civil Resistance Movements‟, paper
delivered at the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict, June 2011.

6. Civil resistance and political-military relationship 2.
Moreover, Erica Chenoweth, Kurt Shock and Maria Stephan find that:
• when civil resistance and violence deployed in same struggle,
– violent campaign has no positive effect on outcome of civil
resistance struggle – i.e. no positive violent flank effect;
– instead, simultaneous violence has negative effect on civil
resistance, although this is „not statistically significant‟; and
– their findings suggest power of nonviolent resistance struggles
lies „in their ability to promote widespread support and
mobilisation‟ whereas violence „is often polarizing and makes
all forms of protest riskier‟. So, presence of violence
„decreases likelihood of broad-based mass mobilization‟.

7. Civil resistance, South Africa, 1912-1960
• Gandhian tradition
• ANC develops base
• Defiance campaign
• Freedom Charter
• Treason trial
• Sharpeville massacre
• Resort to arms, 1961

8. Early ANC thinking on armed struggle 1.
• Ambiguous:
– Defensive
– Offensive (Guevarist)
– The gist of Guevarist strategy
• Key issue in armed revolutionary struggles:
relationship between political and
military forms of struggle
• Other choices in its new strategic discourse:
– Trotsky-Lenin insurrectionary model
– Attempts to export insurrectionary model
– Led to Mao‟s protracted people‟s war model
– But ANC chose Guevarist model which said
military means could politically organise people
politically.

9. Early ANC thinking on armed struggle 2.
• 1960 et seq ANC
disregards political struggle
by political means
• ANC-SACP smashed inside
country by end-1965: only a
handful of people active.
• 1968-69 Wankie, Sipolilo
campaigns
• 1969: ANC says armed
struggle “only” way
• 1965-1976: No armed
struggle inside SA
• But pol. organisation is possible.
Black Consciousness
Movement, black trade unions
Zambia
‘SWA’
Bona
Sipolilo .
Wankie
South Africa
‘Rhodesia’
( )

10. The Soweto Uprising, June 16 1976

11. 1976 uprisings: military frustrations…
• Thousands of youths leave country;
put in ANC military training camps;
• Armed struggle stays at very low
level of intensity;
• Politico-military commission;
• Vietnamese response: must revisit
issue of relationship between
political and military struggle.
…but political advances…
• Militants inside South Africa
organise politically .
…as ANC leadership argues

12. ANC leadership arguments continue
as people form united front
• Chronic arguments in ANC leadership over relationship
between political and military and shape of operational
structures
• But ANC leadership agrees role of political mobilisation
is ultimately to serve military campaign.
• Anti-Republic campaign, 1981.
• Formation of UDF, 1983
• Character of UDF
– Umbrella
– Strong local organisation
– Organisation around concrete issues
– Provincial leaderships
– Small, mobile national leadership
– National political focus

13. Perpetual mass action,
1985-1990
• Forms:
– Demos, local + general strikes
– Rent and service boycotts
– Students‟, womens‟, other protests
– Mass rallies, leafletting, etc., etc.
• Iconography of violence at UDF
rallies (see right)
• Enormous economic, diplomatic
and security costs for government
• States of emergency declared
• UDF outlawed, UDM formed
• SA intelligence calculates options
• ANC leaders recalculate options:A.S.
• „Signals‟become talks
• ANC unbanned, 1990

14. Violent flank and civil resistance in SA
Paradoxes:
1. The ANC‟s obsession with armed struggle from 1960s to 1979 undermined
its ability to mount not only civil resistance; it also subverted the ANC‟s
ability to mount armed struggle itself!
1. Civil resistance in South Africa displaced and supplanted an armed struggle
of which, powerful political forces intended, that civil resistance should be a
mere tributary.
2. An iconography of violence did, at a particular point in the South African
liberation struggle – between about 1983 and 1989 – help advance the
struggle being waged by non-violent means.
3. It is possible for an organisation that has exhibited at some point an
unrivalled will to struggle against an unjust opponent, such as the ANC did,
eventually to win power on the back of energies and organisations it had only
a tangential role in generating.

15. North East KwaZulu-Natal