African National Congress Builds a Middle Ground Balanced Between World Powers

The Soviet Union is placing increasing pressure on the African National Congress, which it has supported for many years, to be more open to a negotiated settlement with white South African leaders.

While this may seem ludicrous in the face of the P.W. Botha regime’s recent banning of the most important black opposition groups, we should not overlook the possibility that Soviet foreign-policy makers are sensitive to the respectability the ANC has gained partly as a result of Pretoria’s resort to increased repression.

Soviet analysts may believe that the white regime’s ruthless suppression of internal black protest and its inability to implement any viable program of democratic reform provide an opportunity for the ANC to gain considerable diplomatic victories.

Several Soviet experts insist that Moscow’s current orientation toward South Africa neatly converges with the general direction of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost and they regard economic pressures as a major incentive for Soviet support of a peaceful settlement in South Africa. The Soviet leaders may have decided to assess their southern Africa policies in the face of costly insurgency by the Pretoria-backed National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), and the Mozambique National Resistance, dissident movements that are battling the governments in Angola and Mozambique.

But it would be a mistake to couch the Soviet Union’s commitment to the ANC only in terms of money. Since the 1920s, Soviet policy makers have argued that white domination should be terminated by first establishing a non-racial democracy with socialism only as a future possibility.

For its part, the ANC, despite its often hard-line rhetoric, has never totally dismissed negotiations with the white regime nor insisted on socialism as the only route to a post-apartheid South Africa. For many years, the ANC called for a national convention that would include all genuine popular representatives as a means of introducing democracy.

The scholars who advised the Kremlin on Africa policy, some of whom I met recently during a visit to the Soviet Union, are aware that continued ANC leadership depends on its ability to influence the diversity of groups that make up the popular-based opposition to apartheid.

Black movements within the country take as much interest in the ANC’s controversial relationship with the Soviet Union as do Western observers. In 1982 a leading South African trade unionist perceptively commented that a major problem of ANC strategy was that the organization had to “locate itself between major international interests.” ANC spokesman Thabo Mbeki has stressed that while there may be socialists in the ANC, the ANC is not a socialist organization.

The more vociferous criticism of the relationship between the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the Soviet Union has always come from organizations committed to black leadership and socialism who consider Soviet influence as a threat to African self-determination. These rivals of the ANC include non-collaboration with Pretoria as a major tenet of their position but do not criticize ANC’s use of political violence against the apartheid regime. Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, chief of the Zulu-based Inkatha, advocates a nonviolent, multi-racial reform agenda, yet his organization has been engaged in a bloody war over control of some black townships.

Within the broader black political movement, the Soviet suggestion that the ANC reconcile with Buthelezi’s Inkatha and abandon the demand for immediate nationalization of enterprises will prove as controversial among some youth and trade unionists as advocating a negotiated settlement with Pretoria.

In a sense, the Soviet leaders are merely encouraging the ANC to dominate the center of the black political spectrum. Non-racialism is central to the South Africa policy of the Soviet Union and it is also the official position of the ANC. The ANC’s participation in the much-publicized meeting in Dakar, Senegal, with a group of liberal Afrikaners highlights the fact that the organization wants to involve as many whites as possible.

Soviet pressure on the ANC to be more politically flexible may appear self-serving or even against the interests of South African liberation. However, given the numerical superiority enjoyed by black South Africans, genuine democratic reforms will ultimately favor the majority. Pretoria’s awareness of this reality may explain its recalcitrance on negotiations and its preference for reform without democracy while repressing township militants and trade unionists as it has now done on an even greater scale.

Soviet Africanists contend that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has crucial strategic interests in southern Africa and they consider apartheid in large measure a Western problem. From their point of view, the real dilemma is the inability of Western powers to reform Pretoria’s repressive behavior or to “deliver” the regime to the negotiating table.