As a historic declaration of purpose for peace through negotiation, Groote Schuur was a shining moment in South African history. On the face of it, it had not yielded anything sensational, but the very fact that it had taken place laid a public cornerstone for South Africans’ desire to cross the Rubicon together.
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Less than two months later, on 24 June 1990, Mac Maharaj sent a strictly confidential and coded message from Johannesburg to Siphiwe Nyanda in Durban. It referred to ‘pieces’ (the codeword for firearms) that had to be stored by the ‘outfit’ under ‘Ntaba’ (the codename for Jacob Zuma).
Jumbled references to the fact that these weapons were currently in the hands of a ‘hostile group’ that was planning ‘Madiba’s assassination’ followed. One of these weapons, according to ‘Ntaba’, had night-vision capability; Maharaj commented in response: ‘I am attracted to borrowing one of these pieces if it is suitable for use by us, even if on a temporary basis’.1
A few weeks later, Nyanda was taken into custody for his alleged involvement in Operation Vula. The car in his possession was found to have hidden storage compartments. In one of these was a .45-calibre sub-machine gun, complete with silencer and night-vision equipment.
Was it part of a planned attack on Mandela’s life? Did radicals in the ANC believe that murdering Mandela would spark a revolutionary takeover of the country?
Earlier that same year, Nyanda had written in the ANC mouthpiece, The African Communist, that ‘a single spark can start a veld fire’ and referred to a call upon the masses to ‘trigger a chain of events leading to insurrection.2
Operation Vula went back as far as 1987, when certain members of the executive committee of the ANC – most of whom were also members of the central committee of the Communist Party – set up the so-called President’s Committee. This committee would carry out the ANC’s secret operations under the codename ‘Vula’, and had an internal and external branch. Mac Maharaj, Ronnie Kasrils and Siphiwe Nyanda directed matters in the internal branch.
Two years later, Maharaj and Kasrils entered the country illegally and unnoticed; they then helped to establish Operation Vula’s underground structures. Once peace talks had commenced and the Groote Schuur Minute had been signed, they quietly slipped out of the country again, so that they could re-enter – openly and officially. However, this was not the end of their plans.
Early in July 1990, based on information in their possession, the security police swooped on certain houses and other places in Durban and surrounds and, later, also in Johannesburg. In addition to firearms, explosives, limpet mines and components for manufacturing car bombs, they also seized sophisticated communication equipment, about a thousand pages of documents, and about four thousand pages of computer printouts detailing extensive plans for a violent takeover of the country.3
Following classic communist doctrine, underground bases would be formed that would lead to the creation of a people’s army – which, in turn, would be trained and given the logistical support necessary for leading a people’s revolution. According to the documents, the training of cadres, similar to that undergone by MK members in countries such as Angola, Tanzania and East Germany, had already begun in May 1990.
On 7 May, a highly secret consultative conference of the SACP was held in Tongaat in Natal where individuals such as Kasrils and Slovo expressed their determination to utilise the freedom of movement (the ‘space’, according to the teachings of Mao Zedong) that the announcements of 2 February had created.
In Kasrils’s words: ‘Taking the thesis seriously, we should be wary that we do not think that now with negotiations, we have arrived in Babylon. The legal space now creates the possibility of this kind of uprising much more than ever before …’4
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Although Mandela swore that he was unaware of Operation Vula, we should take his and the ANC negotiators’ uncomfortable denials with plenty of salt. This was simply not how the ANC’s decision-making processes worked. Oliver Tambo, president of the ANC, was himself a member of Vula’s external branch.5
If the police had been more autonomous, proceeded ‘by the book’ – which they were certainly entitled to do – and arrested some of the negotiators and destroyed some of MK’s ‘safe houses’, the negotiations could have been derailed even before they began in earnest. It is to the credit of De Klerk and the security forces that they realised that the ANC was trying to take extra precautions to make sure that the ‘Boers’ did not outwit them.
Another minute and an accord
The next round of discussions between the government and the ANC was the outcome of the Groote Schuur consultations three months earlier. This time, the venue for the talks – held on 6 August 1990 – was the presidential guesthouse in Pretoria. The two teams of negotiators were smaller than at Groote Schuur; the pressure on both sides to perform well was thus appreciably higher.
The core dilemma, the elephant in the room, loomed large: violence and peace are irreconcilable. Political science teaches us that violence sometimes leads to peace. However, this kind of peace is usually the outcome of conflict from which one party emerges as the clear winner. This was definitely not the case in South Africa during the negotiations in Pretoria.
The question about the use of force as an instrument for reaching a political goal stalemated the government and the ANC. The government, which had to wield the power of the sword to maintain law and order, was accused by the ANC of making shameful misuse of this function to deny the black population its legitimate claim to full democratic political rights.
The ANC’s dilemma, on the other hand, was that it could not negotiate for peace even-handedly and continue simultaneously with its terror campaign to enforce a settlement process that had already begun – and to which, at Groote Schuur, it had morally and contractually committed itself.
Added to this, the ANC did not trust the government and felt that ending the armed struggle would mean giving up its only powerful handle on the negotiations. For the ANC, negotiating without continuing the armed struggle would be a matter of peace at all costs, which could well lead to its losing the negotiations and the peace.
One needs to understand the fear that the formidable South African Defence Force, supported by other sympathisers in the security forces as well as far-right white reactionaries, was capable of launching a ‘coup’ on an unarmed ANC. It cannot be denied that, in sections of the security forces and among those of the far-right political persuasion, there was vehement resistance to the negotiations and that, in these circles, plenty of talk of a coup was being bandied about.
After intense and lengthy debate, it was finally agreed at Pretoria that the ANC’s armed struggle would be suspended immediately, but not ended.
This represented vital progress and a win–win situation for both parties. The government could claim it had gained an important concession from the ANC and that South Africans could continue their lives with greater peace of mind; the ANC could assure its followers that it had not abandoned the struggle, and could fall back on it if necessary.
This decision, which formed a core part of the Pretoria Minute, was a brilliant coup that released both the government and the ANC from the grip of a stalemate.
The minute, as had been agreed at Groote Schuur, dealt in more detail with indemnity against prosecution, the release of political prisoners and the return to South Africa of members of previously banned organisations. Time frames were