for a take-over of power. Expressed briefly, this is to say: Go – organise.
From this point of departure, the two-part essay on “Good Organisation: The Key to Success” proceeds in the accents of the Port Elizabeth veteran. It is worth looking more closely at how the argument develops. Mbeki begins by posing the problem in the most general terms. If oppression and exploitation are man-made by minority interests, what must the majority do to turn things in their favour? The collective organisation of a beehive or ants’ nest is driven by instinct, but in human society consciousness can be sharpened and harnessed by a political movement. The process focusing on political consciousness involves “two closely related pillars”, building an organisational machinery and rallying mass support.
From these general precepts, the essay shifts to concrete, practical illustrations. In South African conditions, operating underground, “it is a hard and exacting exercise” to recruit a strong, closely knit membership into an organisational machinery. Mbeki spells out the value of working to a schedule, meeting tasks and targets. He stipulates different approaches to various sectors – labour, educational institutions, sports organisations, professional bodies, and churches.
The second half of “Good Organisation: The Key to Success” shifts the focus from urban to rural areas, and concentrates on the challenge of creating an organisational machinery in the Bantustans. Suggestions are made about organising in migrant workers’ hostels and about establishing a presence in rural areas (both to create supportive structures and to recruit and train military cadres). The essay concludes with detailed practical advice. Cadres must produce a news sheet in the vernacular; compile a mailing list by obtaining names and addresses from migrant workers; and despatch small parcels of the publication wrapped in “as many calendars, catalogues, sales promotion bills as they can lay their hands on”. The essay closes with these words: “Difficult? Yes. But if the job has to be done, it must be done.”
Another striking essay is the three-part study on “The Rise and Growth of Afrikaner Capital”. Part I is a tour de force: a historical analysis of “the process of capital accumulation by the Afrikaner operating consciously as a group within the overall framework of the development of capitalism in this country”. Summarised thus, it will remind many readers of one of the most influential “revisionist” monographs by a Marxist scholar – Dan O’Meara’s Volkskapitalisme. This book was published in 1983; but Mbeki produced his study, on Robben Island, in October-November 1981.
He begins by identifying the proletarianisation of significant numbers of Afrikaners in the early years of this century, and links to this the role played within Afrikaner nationalism by an emergent intelligentsia. Then, in a passage which adumbrates O’Meara, Mbeki traces the emergence of “business enterprises which were to be the main pillars around which in the future large concentrations of Afrikaner capital were to take shape”. He details the particular benefits extended by Hertzog to unskilled Afrikaner workers, to manufacturing enterprise, and to farmers. This provided a launch-pad from which, after 1940, “the phenomenal growth of Afrikaner capital and its widely spreading tentacles” took place.
Part II deals with the “socio-political-economic effects” of the rise of Afrikaner capitalism, and specifically with the responses by the oppressed peoples. Mbeki looks sternly at “petit bourgeois misconceptions”: the attempts by an emergent black middle class to cushion themselves against the blows of apartheid. Their basic error is to assume that they can replicate the success story of the Afrikaner petit bourgeoisie and clamber up the ladder of capitalist success. They fail to recognise that the objective conditions favouring the growth of Afrikaner capitalism are absent for the black middle class. The alternative response advocated it to mobilise “all available forces to engage actively in a struggle to rid the country of the cancer of apartheid”. The paper concludes with a survey of the various forces that might be knitted together in a broad front.
Part III (written in February or March 1982) is in effect an analysis of the Botha administration’s reformist initiatives and its attempted co-option of black middle class groupings via the new constitution. (“A new dispensation! Power-sharing! Words. Words.”) He concludes that the new constitutional proposals are “like a diseased foetus” that must be rejected. What did this mean in practical terms? Mbeki distinguishes between short-term and longer-term aims. In the short term, if tricameral elections were to take place, “the task of the progressive forces” would be to mount a mass boycott so as to render hollow any claims to representivity by those elected. Long-term objectives are summed up in the slogans, “Overthrow the fascist dictatorship. Set up a democratic people’s republic.” In a telling sentence, the essential dynamics of the mid-1980s are identified – in advance. “Inevitably, the new phase of the birth of the UDF will fuse with the ongoing politico-military struggle conducted under the ANC-SACP alliance.”
Finally, there are the writings concerned with theoretical issues and generated by theoretical disputes. In various places, there recurs an explication of the relationship between the ANC – usually referred to as Inqindi (“the first”) – and the Communist Party. In “Economic History: South Africa” Mbeki is mediating between positions taken in two other documents circulating on the Island. He argues that while the basic contradiction in capitalist societies is that between opposing classes, the imperialist epoch introduced a “complementary contradiction”, that of national oppression. The immediate project of the liberation movement led by the ANC, he argues, is to concentrate upon the complementary contradiction.
“A Discussion Document” and its companion, “3/B: A Supplement”, were also written in response to formulations by others. At the heart of the exchange was the issue of what kind of society would be ushered in by an implementation of the Freedom Charter. Govan’s adjudication works at several levels. It identifies practical political problems raised by a theoretical clash: he urged that the existence of conflicting views must not allow them to become rallying points for factionalism, and stressed the need to follow agreed procedures. He then sets out the two positions – which he summarises as envisaging “Bourgeois Democracy” or “People’s Democracy”, and then comes down firmly in support of the latter. He marshals a number of arguments against the proposition that the Freedom Charter would permit a flowering of African capitalists. “Can anyone realistically expect”, he asks at one point, “the bourgeoisie to man the scaffold to hang themselves by nationalising banks, monopoly industries and finance houses?” And he spells out a vision of People’s Democracy as a “national democratic republic”, and a transitional phase towards a socialist society.
Many, today, might disagree with Govan’s radicalism. He would respond, one suspects, much as he did on Robben Island. Here are my positions, and here are my arguments in support of them. You may not accept them; there may be differences of view, but let them be discussed. “If anything, there should emerge at the end a clearer understanding . . . In that way the discussion will have borne fruit” (“Discussion Document”). What is certain is that the issues under debate, and their outcome, are not less important today than when the exchanges took place on Robben Island.
Govan Mbeki’s prison writings – the lessons from Robben Island gathered in this publication – offer to historians and political scientists valuable raw material for any study of the ideas and ideology of the ANC-SACP alliance. They provide activists with a distillation of practical lessons about political organisation, learned in the most testing conditions. They include extended historical, political and economic analyses that must be read alongside Mbeki’s other writings in any assessment of the intellectual history of the South African left. And they are pages in a truly international literature – a record throughout the ages of the creativity and indomitability of people imprisoned for their beliefs. These prison essays mark a victory in the continuing contest between the pen and the sword.
ENDNOTES
1Govan Mbeki, interviewed by Colin Bundy, in Port Elizabeth, 1988. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations by Govan Mbeki in this Introduction are taken from a series of interviews conducted in 1988 and 1989.
2Fort Hare, founded in 1916 as