On 8 April 1960, the National Party (NP) government, which had assumed power in South Africa in 1948 on the ticket of apartheid, banned the African National Congress (ANC) and other political formations. This broke the back of black political opposition in South Africa, if only temporarily. In exile, the ANC grounded its opposition against the NP’s apartheid government on four pillars of struggle: the armed struggle, international solidarity, mass mobilisation, and underground work . A sizeable body of work has been produced on the role of the first three pillars, but very little is known about underground work. This is largely due to its covert nature. Yet underground operatives played a significant role in helping to revive open political opposition in South Africa that led to the defeat of the NP government. This article explores the impact that underground work had on oppositional politics inside South Africa by examining activities in the Eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga Province), particularly areas in the Lowveld region.
Many people in South Africa are unaware of the pivotal role played by the ‘freelance’ underground operatives, particularly women, in the struggle against apartheid. ‘Freelance’ underground operatives were people who supported the ANC but were not necessarily members of the ANC for security reasons. Their participation in underground operations involved clandestine work. The individuals and organisations participating in such work were not meant to be known; their identity and actions were kept a secret from the police and the public. Even other political activists, those operating both underground and aboveground, were not privy to some of the operations. Raymon Suttner, who was himself an underground operative in the 1970s, writes that underground ‘refers to actions by individuals or organisations that are meant to be outside the public eye, though they may be designed for a public impact’.
The Eastern Transvaal was strategically positioned during the struggle for liberation. Many areas in the Lowveld shared borders with two independent countries, Swaziland (now Eswatini) and Mozambique. Mozambique had been involved in a liberation struggle against the Portuguese until 1975 when it gained its independence. More importantly, Lowveld inhabitants had close connections with Swaziland and Mozambique because they had familial links, intimate relationships, or religious connections with people in these countries. What also distinguished the Lowveld was that its inhabitants were fluent in the languages spoken in Swaziland and Mozambique, which are IsiSwati and Xitsonga (or Shangaan), respectively. These characteristics differentiated the residents of the Eastern Transvaal from other areas of South Africa, enabling them to operate effectively underground without being easily detected by the country’s security personnel and their informers.
The banning of the ANC left its members with no choice but to operate underground throughout the country. In the Lowveld, the ANC’s underground structures were effective until 1984 when the NP government and the Mozambican government signed the Nkomati Accord. The Accord pressurised the Mozambican government to force the leadership of the ANC in Mozambique to leave the country, including Jacob Zuma and Sue Rabkin. This leadership had over a period of time managed to create reliable underground networks inside the country, especially in the Lowveld. Its departure meant that those who remained behind in Mozambique had to establish their own network of underground operatives in the Lowveld. It was in this context that ‘freelance’ underground operatives were identified and recruited.
As Suttner has suggested, ‘freelance’ underground operatives were not necessarily individuals who had no formal links with the ANC structures. But some, for security reasons, deliberately avoided being associated with the ANC. Other ‘freelance’ underground operatives were not members of the ANC nor associated with it. They were instead individuals who supported the struggle for liberation by carrying out instructions from members of the ANC or the members of the latter’s military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK, The Spear of the Nation). ‘Freelance’ underground operatives were involved in a variety of clandestine activities, ranging from harbouring MK soldiers who had infiltrated the country to carry out military missions, to smuggling in weapons and banned literature meant to be distributed to ANC members and supporters inside the country, to feeding MK cadres.
To clearly comprehend the role played by ‘freelance’ underground operatives in the Lowveld region, Glory and Virginia Sibitane serve as a good example. The following narrative is drawn from interviews I conducted with Glory and Virginia as part of my project on underground work in the Eastern Transvaal. Glory was born on a farm in Tenbosch, in the Eastern Transvaal. Her family was forced to move from one farm to another to escape the bad treatment they endured from white farm owners. Following the death of her parents in 1976, Glory relocated and settled in a village called Goba, next to Mbuzini (this is where the plane carrying Samora Machel, the Mozambican president, crashed in 1986). Many residents of Goba village were Xitsonga-speaking, a language akin to the Shangaan language spoken in Mozambique. Glory had 10 children, including Virginia who was born in 1970. After Glory’s husband died in 1983, she was forced to raise her children single-handedly. She survived by carrying and selling wood close to the border between South Africa and Mozambique.
Glory fell in love with a chief living in a village in Mozambique, and she spent more time in Mozambique with her new partner, introducing her children to him. In 1986, during the height of resistance to apartheid in South Africa, the youth of Goba, including two of Glory’s children, mobilised other young people from the surrounding villages. This attracted police attention and, to escape arrest, some of the youth, including Glory’s children, fled the country into exile. Glory’s children and some of their friends first lived with Glory and the chief in Mozambique. The chief introduced them to the ANC. It was at this stage that the new leadership of the ANC in Maputo, Mozambique, under the command of Keith Mokoape and Mathews Phosa, identified Glory and her teenage daughter, Virginia, as potential underground operatives. At that time, the pair were not members of any organisation, let alone the ANC.
Their first task was to smuggle the ANC’s banned literature into the country. Banned propaganda material such as Sechaba, the ANC’s official organ,was used inside the country to inform political activists about the ANC’s activities to challenge the NP government and to politicise new recruits. Without the efforts of underground operatives, it would have been very difficult to infiltrate such material inside the country.
Remembering how they were recruited, Virginia recounted:
‘Then Mathews Phosa continued coming and giving us food and to see us. He would come with pamphlets which had to cross the border into South Africa. He would ask us how we were going to get the pamphlets to South Africa because we were already wanted inside the country.’
Glory came up with a strategy by soliciting the help of some of her friends who lived in Goba village but could easily cross into Mozambique. Recalling this time, Glory explained:
‘Mathews Phosa gave me a bulk of them. Maria and some women agreed that they would take the documents out. They used to smuggle them using pots. They would put the documents inside the pots and take them out to Mbuzini. … A certain teacher used to transport the documents. The women used to smuggle them. They were helping me because I asked them to assist’.
To hide the ANC’s propaganda material from being detected by the police, Glory used a simple plan:
‘I had a drum in the bush. I would take the boxes there and then opened them and put the documents in the drum and close. I’ll place stones on top of it. And when the women arrived, we would go and take them and bring them into the house. They would then put them in their pots’.
This was not the only task that Glory and her daughter, Virginia, carried out as ‘freelance’ underground operatives. Because of her knowledge of the area, Virginia performed reconnaissance work along the border between South Africa and Mozambique. Virginia described her task as follows:
‘Because comrades used to cross to carry out underground work inside South Africa, they needed to find a way of entering the country. They couldn’t just use any place or spot to enter. What I used to do when I knew that they were coming was that I would go and search for the place where there were no soldiers and police so that they could get a space to enter. When they came back, I would tell them which areas they should use’.
Without the efforts of ‘freelance’ underground operatives like Glory and Virginia, it is possible that it might have taken South Africa longer to gain its independence. Though the ANC starting using underground work before the mid-1980s, its activities were not effective. Its underground operatives, many of whom were known to the police and the state’s informers, were arrested – and this debilitated the ANC’s oppositional politics inside South Africa. However, when it changed its strategy and began to recruit ‘freelance’ underground operatives, particularly women, the ANC’s fortunes changed. The latter were effective in helping the ANC escalate its opposition against the National Party government. The state’s security personnel and its multitude of informers were oblivious to their identities and their activities; they were not openly associated with any political organisation; and they used simple strategies to carry out their underground work. In the case of Glory and Virginia Sibitane, their command of the Shangaan language used in Mozambique and familiarity with the area bordering Mozambique and South Africa in the Lowveld region made them ideal and effective underground operatives for the ANC.
While the notion of “underground operatives” in the struggle against apartheid makes perfect sense, particularly after the banning of anti-apartheid organisations in the 1960s and as part of the ANC’s four pillars of struggle, the notion of “freelance” underground operatives is potentially problematic as it can also suggests that not all South Africans wanted nor were responsible for liberating their country because only members of formal liberation movements had this obligation and goal and therefore enlisted other citizens in the work to liberate the country. It is potentially disempowering people to think of them as “freelance operatives” in their own liberation struggle.