When I was a teenager, I was torn in my loyalties between the liberals and the communists. I knew a number of people from both these two parties and they were often admirably selfless and wonderfully brave. There was, in either case, no doubting their sincerity or their utter commitment to the anti-apartheid cause – which was, in those days, the heart of the matter.

Both the Liberal Party and the communists were tiny organisations but they both sought to befriend and influence the African National Congress (ANC) which, potentially at least, had mass appeal.

Thus, initially both liberals and communists had been enthusiastic about the Congress of the People in 1955. It was only as it became clear that the communists were organising the Congress and spawning endless front organisations to maximise communist control of it that the liberals withdrew. Sure enough, the Freedom Charter produced by the Congress was largely the work of communists.

While Albert Luthuli was the ANC leader, the liberals felt they had a chance – Luthuli was committed to non-violence, believed in the rule of law, and was a fervent Christian, all things that he shared with men such as Alan Paton and Peter Brown. The communists were well aware of this: Ruth First referred to Luthuli as “a silly old fool” and she and Joe Slovo groomed Nelson Mandela as his successor.

In the end the communists engineered the effective coup in which the armed struggle was launched – initially without ANC agreement – and Mandela, then a member of the Communist Central Committee, displaced Luthuli.

This tipped the balance completely. The ANC, following the South African Communist Party (SACP), now said that it wanted a revolution and great stress within the movement was laid on “being a good revolutionary”. The liberals dissented completely: they thought a revolution was neither desirable nor possible.

It became normal to hear ANC people and even many Pan Africanist Congress supporters say that they had no time for white liberals. The liberals might say they were against apartheid, their argument went, but they weren’t revolutionaries. They weren’t willing to risk their lives in the armed struggle in the way that the communists were. Many insisted that this meant that the liberals were hypocrites and that their real interests lay on the apartheid side. This wasn’t true but as propaganda it was very effective.

Never Came Close

The armed struggle never came close to achieving any of its goals and the large majority of recruits to the armed struggle remained in camps in other African countries, never seeing armed action within South Africa. The fact was that the leadership didn’t know what to do with them.

They knew they were no match for the South African Defence Force and that any attempt at mass infiltration would end in disaster. So they were held back and mainly used to “prove” that the ANC was a liberation movement and that it was doing something. The whole situation was farcical.

Once the great powers achieved a deal over Angola and Namibia the ANC was forced to relocate its uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) forces to camps in Uganda and Tanzania – further and further away from South Africa. By the time of FW de Klerk’s great turning point of 2 February 1990 the notion that MK was a serious factor in the situation was simply laughable.

Nonetheless, the era of “armed struggle” and of exile had strengthened the ANC’s slide into the communist camp. The Soviet Union and its East European satellite states were the main source of the ANC’s financial and military support, and this strengthened the SACP within the Congress movement. Indeed, the exiled ANC’s policies became virtually indistinguishable from the SACP’s.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Party withered and in 1968 it disbanded rather than accept the government ban on its having a multiracial membership.

Yet although the communists had clearly won the contest for influence over the ANC, the exiled ANC still depended in no small measure on the anti-apartheid activities of the Progressive Party and its liberal allies. Much of the propaganda put out by the exiled ANC depended on information winkled out of the apartheid government by Helen Suzman’s searching parliamentary questions and on the research work carried out by liberal NGOs such as the South African Institute for Race Relations. For within South Africa the only legally permissible anti-apartheid activities were those carried out, despite much harassment and persecution, by liberals of various stripes.

Contact

By the 1980s this situation led the Prog leader, Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, to seek contact with the exiled ANC, arguing that although the two parties disagreed about the role of violence and the armed struggle, they nonetheless shared a sincere anti-apartheid commitment and, at the least, ought to talk to one another. Naturally, the communists remained hostile to any liberal attempt, as they saw it, to influence the ANC but the party nonetheless decided that it would be politic to cooperate at least to some degree with Slabbert’s approaches.

The results were the high-profile meetings between liberals and the ANC at Dakar, Leverkusen, Lusaka, and elsewhere. These were always billed as meetings with the ANC, though in fact all the key decision-takers within the ANC were communists, as were most of the ANC delegates to such meetings.

But whereas Slabbert genuinely wanted as much interaction and cooperation as he could get, the SACP (and thus the ANC) merely adopted a “charm offensive” approach, attempting to use the contacts as a way of improving the liberation movement’s fearsome image among South African whites. But the party was determined not to let the Progs or other liberals derive any political benefit as their privileged interlocutors.

So while the SACP/ANC milked these contacts for favourable publicity, they insisted that there was little scope for any actual cooperation while the Progs remained part of a “whites-only” political system. The frustration caused by this ban ultimately resulted in Slabbert’s resignation as the leader of the Progressive Federal Party (PFP).

While Slabbert continued to maintain contact with the ANC via his new NGO, the Institute for Democratic Alternatives in South Africa (IDASA), the ANC merely used these contacts to break the ice. Their real target, which was progressively realised during the 1980s, was much broader contact with South Africa’s business community, its universities, churches, and civil society, and with representatives of the apartheid regime’s intelligence services, and ultimately with the government itself.

Through such contacts the SACP/ANC thus again became a recognisable and prestigious presence within South Africa’s domestic political system and no longer just a frightening threat in exile. These contacts thus prepared the path for the ultimate “historic compromise” between the ANC and the National Party, which was finally unveiled in 1990.

Deceived

Slabbert and some other liberals continued to believe that the friendly relations that they had established with a number of ANC/SACP leaders would lead to proper cooperation, but this was never really on offer. Slabbert himself continued for some years to believe that Thabo Mbeki, with whom he thought he had become a close friend, would invite him to participate in a post-apartheid government. Only very slowly did he realise that this vista of brotherly cooperation was a chimera.

In his later years, Slabbert sadly concluded that he had been played for a fool and that he had merely been a “useful idiot”. Similarly, other liberals who had thrown in their lot with the ANC usually ended up disappointed and wondering, like Alec Boraine, quite why everything had gone wrong.

In fact, it is impossible not to conclude that many such liberals had been deceived by the aura of the Mandela period and by Mbeki’s friendly style into believing in a much rosier version of the ANC than actually existed. As became increasingly clear, the ANC felt far more affinity with authoritarian regimes and with revolutionary or terrorist movements than it did with liberal democracy. Cuba, Iran, Russia, China, Maduro’s Venezuela, Assad’s Syria, Vietnam, even North Korea were its friends – plus, of course, many similarly dictatorial regimes in Africa, starting with Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

What the ANC/SACP wanted was cooperation and solidarity with fellow revolutionaries, not with liberals. Moreover, the ANC, once in power, clearly cared little for human rights, and nor did it care that so many of its friends were deeply corrupt – and it had little sympathy for the South African poor. Over and over again, the ANC turned a blind eye to rigged elections in Africa and elsewhere and happily congratulated the “winners” who had rigged the results.

Irony

The irony was that history had proved the liberals right. The armed struggle had led precisely nowhere and there had been no revolution, merely a peaceful agreement. Yet the communists had won the propaganda struggle. When the ANC returned home in triumph in 1990 it did so as “revolutionaries”, all happily celebrating a revolution that hadn’t happened. This language, with its associated claims, style and motifs, endured far into the contemporary period, although it was fundamentally bogus.

For in power the ANC proved to be just as corrupt, even criminal, deeply cynical and almost completely unconcerned for the national interest – in just the same way as many of the foreign regimes that it supported. Only a small black elite benefited from ANC rule and the movement’s long-claimed concern for “the masses” simply evaporated. The masses won political equality and the dissolution of apartheid’s barriers, but their gains were quickly over and soon they were suffering from the trebling and quadrupling of unemployment.

No one who had studied the history of African “liberation movements” should have been much surprised by any of this but virtually no South African liberals had such a comparative perspective. As a result, they were deeply naive and had little idea of what was in store for them.

Meanwhile, the SACP and ANC underwent a complex evolution. By 1996 Mbeki, alarmed that the ANC’s massive unbudgeted spending spree, the Reconstruction and Development Programme, would bankrupt the new government, introduced a much tighter financial discipline in the shape of the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution programme, known as GEAR.

This was attacked by the ANC left and the SACP leadership, which had been alarmed that this major policy turn had been taken without their being consulted and without their consent. Hence the SACP attacked GEAR as “the 1996 class project”, though in fact many communists such as Alec Erwin and the Pahad brothers continued to support Mbeki.

Jacob Zuma (like Mbeki, a long-time communist) led a wide coalition of forces against Mbeki, notably including the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) – and a strong strain of Zulu nationalism. This led the SACP and COSATU to be deeply implicated in Zuma’s disastrous “state capture” presidency. At length they recoiled from Zuma’s evident corruption but only after great damage had been done both to the party and the labour movement. Ultimately, this had issue in the shape of Zuma’s own political movement, the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), launched in 2023.

On the one hand the SACP’s Marxist ideology was now spread across the ANC, and its breakaways, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the MKP. On the other hand, the EFF was essentially Julius Malema’s personal vehicle and reflected his personal whims while the MKP – Zuma’s personal vehicle – also adopted a bizarre mix of Zulu chiefly traditionalism along with its revolutionary rhetoric. And both the EFF and MKP were just as corrupt as the ANC.

The result was a process of generalisation and dilution so that Marxism in South Africa was now mainly a matter of rhetoric and opportunism.

Liberal resistance

However, the liberals who had resisted the ANC’s embrace and who supported the Democratic Party (DP), and then the Democratic Alliance (DA), were in electoral competition with the ANC and had a much clearer view of what the ANC was really like.

Despite the fact that many of them felt affection and respect for Mandela, they were increasingly concerned by the ANC’s hegemonic and state-centred approach and felt that all-out opposition to it was essential if democracy and a market economy were to be preserved.

The great dividing line was Tony Leon’s “Fight Back” campaign in 1999, which made the more pro-ANC liberals like Slabbert deeply uncomfortable but which galvanised the anti-ANC liberals, carrying the DP from 1.7% of the vote in 1994 to 9.6% in 1999 and making it the official opposition. Slabbert angrily insisted that Leon had “painted himself into a corner” with no way ahead.

But the truth was the opposite: the DA then began its long climb upwards which, a generation later, has seen it overtaking the ANC in most of the country’s major cities. In reality, it was the pro-ANC liberals who had painted themselves into a corner: their continuing sympathy for the ANC yielded no practical results and merely alienated an electorate increasingly angry at ANC corruption and incompetence. They found themselves in an ever-shrinking political space. To all intents and purposes this tendency has simply ceased to exist.

Instead, the election of May 2024, in which the ANC lost its majority, saw the inauguration of a Government of National Unity (GNU), essentially an ANC-DA coalition leavened by the inclusion of numerous smaller parties. This had been foreshadowed in pre-election polls in which ANC voters (and voters overall) had named the DA as the preferred governmental partner should the ANC require a coalition. But when the ANC selected the DA as its principal coalition partner, many within the ANC rebelled. For the ANC was now divided between constitutional realists and those still more attracted by revolutionary slogans.

“Neo-liberal”

Ever since 1994 the ANC and SACP had attacked any centrist deviation from their own radical policies as “neo-liberal”. Thabo Mbeki, Trevor Manuel, and latterly Cyril Ramaphosa were all castigated for their “neo-liberal” attitudes and policies. But this has had little effect.

No one identified as a neo-liberal, after all, and for many a person in the street the term was confusing and little understood. The rise of the MKP suddenly thrust the ANC into a coalition with those despised and avowed liberals – yet the result has actually been popular not just with the electorate at large but with ANC voters too.

But the real drama of the GNU was not just that it revived the old antagonism between the SACP and the liberals, but it created a point of no return between the SACP and the ANC. Ironically, the SACP had so shrunk in importance that it is doubtful whether the DA leaders who negotiated with the ANC even considered the fact that they were dealing a mortal blow to their old communist enemy. The larger truth is that the lines of political division now ran within the parties, not between them.

The SACP tried as hard as it could to stop an ANC-DA deal, clearly preferring an ANC-EFF-MKP coalition. That meant trying to reconstitute the coalition which had brought Zuma to power in 2007 – and it meant junking the Constitution and Ramaphosa.

The ANC remained deaf to such suggestions. It was clear, after all, that the MKP wanted both to re-absorb the ANC into a Zuma-led coalition, while the EFF was also clearly an unreliable partner. And the prevalence of looters with both the MKP and EFF also threatened a replay of Zuma’s state capture.

The ANC’s refusal of such a coalition was a major defeat not just for the SACP but the whole leftist family of the SACP-EFF-MKP, though the picture was blurred by the continuing participation in government of several SACP ministers and by the continuing presence of many SACP cadres within the ANC’s structures.

The major fact was, however, that the ANC had rejected the calls for the unity of all left forces, preferring its deal with the DA – and this was popular with the majority of public opinion. And despite attempts to build an alliance of “progressive forces”, the left is now fragmented and dispersed. The SACP railed frantically against the ANC’s effective option for a centrist alliance, which it characterised in straightforwardly racial terms, demanding instead a progressive alliance with “the black parties”.

The reasons that the DA was now a more desirable partner for the ANC were not just that it was the second-largest party and that its votes in Parliament were essential if Ramaphosa was to continue as president. The DA also brought with it the bulk of the business community, most of the three racial minorities, and a large part of the South African middle class.

These were crucial to the ANC which, because its own radical policies had done so much economic damage that it found itself leaning more and more on the business community to achieve key reforms.

Moreover, an ANC deal with the DA also increased business confidence, strengthened the currency and ultimately helped interest rates to fall, making the national debt more affordable. These were all crucial advantages that liberals had not been able to offer during the apartheid period and which, even in the contemporary period, no other party could offer. As these positive effects took hold it became increasingly difficult for either the ANC or the DA to imagine breaking up their partnership, for that would mean forfeiting the improved economic climate. The effect has been to strengthen the realists within the ANC with more radical voices gradually falling silent.

Major Threat

The result is that the DA has become a major threat to the SACP. For many years the SACP has functioned as the ANC’s strategic brain and a great deal of what passes for ANC policy actually originated during the apartheid period as SACP proposals. But if the current coalition with the DA becomes a long-term arrangement – let alone if the DA overtakes the ANC as the biggest party – the DA could replace the SACP as the main originator of reforming ideas. Already the DA’s continued presence in the GNU has seen the SACP decide to run candidates against the ANC – a sign that the SACP feels it is being forced out of the old Tripartite Alliance. Inevitably, the ANC has responded by demanding that activists must now decide between their commitment to the SACP and their allegiance to the ANC.

But the SACP may have left a bid for independence too late. Ever since the 1950s it has enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the ANC and that has provided its leaders with power, position, and income as a result of their placement in senior positions within the Congress movement.

If the SACP really does now wish to stand on its own feet it is not clear how much of the party’s leadership, organisation, and following will find that a comfortable option. Many will want to cling to their positions within the ANC and certainly within the wider ANC patronage network.

As it is, the GNU has created a partial split in the ANC, with its Gauteng section refusing to countenance a provincial deal with the DA. However, the ANC’s Gauteng section has not flourished as a result and looks likely to sustain a major defeat in the approaching local elections. The overall effect is likely to strengthen the hand of the ANC realists.

The SACP’s uncomfortable position has obvious implications for COSATU, most of whose leaders are SACP members. It is already clear, however, that COSATU has no wish to follow the SACP in a fratricidal and self-damaging struggle with the ANC. There is talk of a yet further breakaway movement to the left of the ANC – a further stage in the ANC’s fragmentation, which has already seen the movement sub-divide into the United Democratic Movement, EFF, MKP and leftist fragments like the African Transformation Movement.

It must be remembered that before the advent of apartheid the ANC struggled with difficulty to achieve any degree of unity and that only the struggle against apartheid allowed the movement to unite. Now that apartheid has gone it is not surprising that cracks in the monolith have re-appeared. But it is deeply ironic that left unity has again fractured on the rock of liberalism.