'Armed and Dangerous': My Undercover Struggle Against Apartheid
By Ronnie Kasrils
Heinemann, 1993. 374 pp., $15.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
When Ronnie Kasrils touched down at Johannesburg airport in 1989, he had chalked up 30 years of clandestine struggle against apartheid. A leading member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and of the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), Kasrils was disguised once more as a respectable business figure, and "the Red Pimpernel", as he was popularly known, proceeded again skilfully to evade the clutches of the South African security police.
Kasrils and other returning MK heroes were feted by the opponents of a now besieged and crumbling apartheid. As recounted in Kasrils' autobiography, the MK cadres had earned their plaudits — for the suffering and hardship they had endured for 30 years of war with the minority, racist National Party government, for the bravery of their armed actions, and above all for the "enormous psychological importance" of MK's role in helping "to demonstrate that apartheid rule could be challenged", especially during the '60s and '70s, when severe state repression had put the brakes on ANC activity in South Africa.
Kasrils was of white, Jewish background, more bohemian than political in his passive opposition to apartheid, until the massacre of 70 black people protesting against the hated pass laws outside the Sharpeville police station in 1960 angered him and propelled him into anti-apartheid activity and the SACP.
He was invited to join MK, which Mandela and the SACP had established in 1961 following a state of emergency which had "closed all avenues of democratic advance" for black political activity.
The next three decades for MK were filled with sabotage against the political, economic and military pillars of apartheid (but never the taking of life except in self-defence), the training of MK fighters in the Eastern bloc, the establishment of base camps in the recently independent Front Line states. Retaliatory action by the National Party government included murder in police detention, torture and assassination.
MK's function was always primarily political rather than military because South Africa lacked the large peasant base that was essential to the successful guerilla campaigns in Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Kasrils recognised that MK's campaign of controlled sabotage could never develop from armed propaganda into mass armed struggle. As a communist, too, Kasrils regarded mass mobilisation as the key element in South Africa's liberation.
When the masses did explode in the mid-'80s, the effects were more spectacular than all of MK's homemade bombs.
MK was prominent froth on a wave of popular protest by the late '80s. Apartheid was now in severe crisis, its foundations cracked by the battering rams of massive black resistance in the townships and powerful union organisation. Apartheid's defenders in the international business community had deserted the fort because of the political instability and attendant risky investment climate.
In 1989, a reformist wing in the National Party and ruling class around the "affable", "smiling" F.W. de Klerk (of whom Kasrils does not hide his disdain) replaced P.W. Botha and the failed hardline policy of brute force.
In 1990, the ANC and SACP were unbanned, Mandela was released, and a political settlement with the ANC was on the cards. Kasrils argued, against the moderates in the ANC, that attempts by the politically weak but militarily strong de Klerk to "control the pace of change and confine it within acceptable boundaries" had to be answered by mobilisation of the people. This happened and apartheid was no more.
At the same time, Kasrils made his last triumphant evasion of his Special Branch hunters. The Red Pimpernel had come in from the cold.
Kasrils' book skims over a theoretical consideration of the relationship between the anti-apartheid struggle, South African capitalism and socialism. Political trends which rejected the strategy of negotiations with the apartheid regime are abruptly dismissed. The issue of the inequalities that existed in pre-apartheid South Africa before 1948 is touched on, but they are not considered in post-apartheid South Africa from 1994.
Kasrils' book is rather a thrilling tale of counter-surveillance, disguises, double agents, invisible ink, the use of condoms as timing devices in MK's bombs. Politics, however, is never far away. The justice of its cause gave MK political integrity, the commitment to the abused black majority of South Africa gave the cause nobility, and their sacrifice, often paid in blood, gave the MK cadres a purity of spirit that helped to cleanse South Africa of the evil of apartheid.
As Kasrils taxied down the Johannesburg runway in 1989, he was still declared "armed and dangerous" by the apartheid state. "I considered that an honour", he writes. So should we agree.