The self serving history of the ECC
I completed military national service during 1978 to 1979, spending sixteen months of it "on the border" and afterwards studied history at the University of Cape Town. I did not love the SADF and responded with great reluctance when called for a "township camp" during 1986-87. Around UCT the ECC had a high profile, but I did not support it, although I disagreed strongly with its crude harassment by the state.
I have a lucid memory from around mid-1986 of sitting next to a young "fashionably-lefty" girl in a UCT lecture hall, watching an overseas news video showing a black, supposed "informer," being burnt to death by a petrol filled tyre placed around her neck. Members of the mob kicked at her flaming body; a barbaric scene that would have fitted well with the worst human right abuses in human history. She related that such actions did not morally concern her; that she "supported" the "execution" of collaborators.
"Necklace" homicides constituted phenomena exemplifying the grimmest and darkest features of human behaviour, but many ECC old girls and boys would probably prefer not to recall their sometimes tepid reactions to such atrocities. For alternate voices that criticized the murderous recklessness amongst the so-called township "young comrades," suggesting that their criminal attacks on all forms of state authority and opponents might have future dire consequences, were generally scathingly dismissed by ECC types.
Where the ECC was particularly weak, was its blindness in assuming that amidst the violence of 1980s South Africa only the state's forces carried any moral blameworthiness. ECC members never really understood the cynicism where mobs loosely associated to the ANC, perpetrated township and rural violence against opponents in a pattern that also served an expedient agenda related to the seizure of political power.
Where the ECC was undoubtedly strong, was that it included a few men who cited their Christian, pacifist, political and other reasons to justify defying their call-up instructions. Such moral strength displayed by Ivan Toms and others, meant they did not just attend meetings and parties, but they actually went to prison. Nobody can dispute that took courage.
But the ECC was also an organization top-heavy with women members, not facing military call-up, who displayed scant balanced insight into the complexity of military culture and its undeniable unique attraction to a certain kind of male. Feminist and pacifist critiques predominated amongst them, yet in contradiction many idealized the ANC MK "soldiers" and township "footsoldiers" as noble Che Guevara" guerillas and sans culottes. While the ANC and its UDF front supported a loose strategy to intimidate their black opponents, from Crossroads to the Natal valleys, ECC members explained the violence with an easy and ignorant detachment, largely innocent concerning the ghoulish horrors coldly euphemized as "the struggle."
The more politically hard-eyed ECC members despised the troopies in Angola, not because the "apartheid frontline" actually lay between UNITA and FAPLA, but because the SADF was in combat against ANC allies. But the student bars of Rondebosch were a long way from Lombe River or Quattro camp.
During the 1980s, there was no easy path towards containing township violence, with the police thinly stretched and comprising numerous individuals unsuitable for any form of law enforcement, let alone riot control. The presence of the army in the townships demonstrated that significant state force was still available and the circumstances demanded it.
It is not really accurate, as Laurie Nathan claims, that the SADF was the "last line of apartheid defence". That is just an old ECC cliché, devoid of real empirical substance. If the country had indeed become "ungovernable" as was called for by the ANC NEC in April 1985, what entity existed which could have restored some semblance of order?
For all its deviousness and dishonesty, the NP government was grasping for some way out, which inevitably had to shift towards a National Convention-type situation. We know now, that the ANC attended the initial secret negotiations, because they were also conscious of this potential incendiary national fragmentation, over which any new government would with great difficulty assert state authority.
But conscription also meant the SADF's white manpower were mostly part-time soldiers; a mixed bunch like the communities they originated from. Unlike the police they did not have a collective history of harsh riot control. Their total reliance upon citizen-soldiers also precluded the SADF from historically directing national politics. ECC members would have experienced a really brutal state had they practiced their activism as Chilean, Brazilian or Argentinean citizens, where during the 1970s, the large regular armed forces assumed direct and draconian political roles.
With no disrespect intended to Toms and others, no ECC members were shot dead or hurled out of planes over the sea. At worst, the SADF's role can be vaguely compared to that of the Polish military during the early 1980s, where the armed forces acted internally in order to stave off possible Soviet invasion. This would have torn Poland in two, even possibly extending into a general European war. And who knows what implications would have been for Africa had South Africa imploded.
Once the April 1994 election was held, the citizen-soldiers in their vital finale comprised the SADF's national presence and deterred most men of violence from wrecking the future. General Meiring personally cautioned AWB leaders not to interfere. He bluntly responded to their taunts of turning Afrikaners on Afrikaners by warning that English-speaking citizen force regiments would be mustered against the right-wingers. The SADF served likewise as a watchdog facing the MK, Apla and Inkatha wild men.
The youth and idealism amongst the ECC members invoked and ensured tremendous moral courage in individuals like Toms. But the organization also encouraged a reluctance amongst its supporters to be more discerning regarding the realities of township violence and the SADF's policing role. ECC members lapsed into the old failing of the self-righteous political zealot, where culpabilities for social injustice are viewed in stark terms of good and evil. Unfortunately, as perhaps ECC veterans might ruefully acknowledge, the "revolutionary heroes" of those student days are now dreadfully tarnished.
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Comments
Who, or what is a Rodney Warwick when it's not sprouting apartheid apologia here?
by Jean Racine on November 13 2009, 15:21
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... my lucky stars the ECC made it easy for me to miss boot camp and shooting black people because our Apartheid made them believe in Communism.
by Piet Pompies on November 14 2009, 08:30
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And I would do my two years over again under EXACTLY the same circumstances. The true heroes were the 18 and 19 year olds who fought in Angola, who daily protected train stations and townships, and who lost two years of their lives fulfilling a duty to . .more
by Peter on November 15 2009, 22:09
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If the ANC had come to power BEFORE the wall fell, this country would really be in a mess now. The SADF held the ANC and Commies back for long enough.
by pietie on November 16 2009, 06:29
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Conscription was morally reprehensible. Young white men's morals were brutalized by killing black people as if they were animals. Many committed suicide in the barracks. BTW, Conscription ended in 1993 so they weren't there for the 1994 elections.
by Ex- SADF on November 21 2009, 12:59
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Don't be silly now Ex-SADF; the SADF Citizen Force soldiers were called out in mass to watch over the 1994 elections. All were ex-conscripts. So, national service formed an important service in guarding that process from those who would have wrecked it. . .more
by Rodney on November 21 2009, 15:06
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