Scandal has strengthened the ANC’s hand. The government of President F. W. de Klerk has been embarrassed by disclosures that it secretly funded Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha, the Zulu-dominated movement whose followers have repeatedly battled ANC supporters in the black townships outside Johannesburg. Citing what they described as de Klerk’s credibility crisis, ANC leaders last week called for a summit meeting of all the country’s political parties to establish a multiracial interim government during a transition to majority rule. But de Klerk will try to undercut that proposal by focusing on the ANC’s Communist ties. “A form of coalition with the ANC would be easier [without] that linkage,” says newly appointed Defense Minister Roelf Meyer. “That rules out that possibility.”
ANC officials have warned Pretoria that they will reject any attempt to make them jettison their Communist friends. “There is not a chance in hell that the ANC will ever accept that,” said the group’s information chief, Pallo Jordan. A move to dislodge the SACP would eviscerate the ANC hierarchy: active party members make up about one third of the ANC’s 26-member national working committee, and a newly appointed commission in charge of talks with the government includes Slovo and another prominent Communist. (ANC duties have so sapped the SACP that last week the party’s rising star, Politburo member Chris Hani, asked to be allowed to concentrate solely on party affairs.)
The two groups go back a long way. Forged in 1950, the alliance initially aroused strong opposition from noncommunists like Nelson Mandela and Sisulu. But the SACP was the only other group in South Africa to brook no compromise on apartheid. Mutual interests bred familiarity. By 1955, the ANC’s Freedom Charter featured calls for the nationalization of mining, banking and “monopoly industry.” Even though the 15,000 SACP members form only a small grouping within the 700,000-member ANC, Communists have dominated the command structure of the congress’s guerrilla army. When Winnie Mandela flew into Havana with her husband last month, she hailed Castro’s Cuba as “our second home.” Even now, ANC supporters prefer to address one another as “comrade.”
Mainline ANC members were never comfortable with the SACP’s support of the Soviet Union, particularly during the invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979. At home, the party displayed what Jordan, one of the ANC’s leading non-communists, described as a “spirit of intolerance [and] petty intellectual thuggery.” Now, the decline of Soviet communism has triggered a vigorous internal debate over whether the SACP is still Marxist-Leninist. “A strong lesson is that socialism doesn’t work without democracy,” says SACP Central Committee member Jeremy Cronin. In a frank assessment, the ANC’s outgoing secretary-general Alfred Nzo acknowledged last month that the Communist link had hindered the ANC’s efforts to recruit not only whites, but also Indians and mixed-race Coloreds.
The alliance has created problems for the ANC overseas: during a debate earlier this year over a $10 million aid package earmarked for black political groups in South Africa, some conservative U.S. congressmen tried to block any funds from going to the ANC. Western leaders like German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher have also criticized the alliance, and many Western firms will be reluctant to invest in a post-apartheid South Africa if they believe the SACP will play a major role. The ANC has exacerbated the issue by refusing to disclose which of its officials are Communists. “I wouldn’t join the ANC for that reason alone,” says David Welsh, a political- science professor at the University of Cape Town. “One is entitled to know who has what agenda inside the ANC.”
The names of all ANC leaders who are Communist will be revealed in December. Until then, it will be unclear whether the ANCSACP link is an alliance of independent political organizations or, as de Klerk has suggested, a “scrambled egg,” with party and liberation movement blurred into each other. Mandela may have had those concerns in mind when he recently looked ahead to a time when the alliance with the Communists would end. “Their cooperation with us is only up to the point of the overthrow of the apartheid state,” Mandela told The Christian Science Monitor last month. “After that they take their own line … which we will not follow. " But by his own reckoning the destruction of apartheid is a long way off. In the meantime the party and the ANC are likely to remain comrades in arms.
