It was midnight in West Africa when news of the Soviet-American ultimatum to South Africa had come through. At the Presidential palace in Lagos Captain Mayo had been lying sweating on his bed. The electricity had been switched off just before midnight so there were no fans, the air-conditioning had broken down weeks before, and there were of course no lights. But he was still able to listen on his battery-operated shortwave radio to the BBC World Service news at midnight. Moments after he heard Michael Aspel reading out the ultimatum Mayo's phone rang and a correspondent of SCAN asked very politely if the president had any comment to make on the announcement. Captain Mayo told him to call back in 15 minutes.489Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPUAQkHOLCx
President Ayotunde had heard the news from the same source. He told Captain Maya that he would give guidance for a statement, but it should not be attributed to himself. Apparently the superpowers now felt the could organize the world at their pleasure, under the shield of their nuclear superiority. "They will try it on us, either to get our oil or to prevent us from depriving them of South African metals. We must act fast." He told Mayo to put across the point, so obvious to him as a soldier, that nuclear weapons were of no military value to the West in their struggle with Africa. They could only be used as a deterrent to similarly armed advanced powers; they were meaningless and useless against the poor masses of Africa whose limited capacity for nuclear response wiht its unsophisticated means of delivery could not be easily destroyed---unless the superpowers were prepared to destroy the human race, themselves included.
Mayo carried out his instructions effectively and the statement he gave to SCAN was read around the world within 1 hour. In Western capitals it was cited as proof that African attitudes to global problems were "naïve and dangerous." But liberal public opinion, especially in the US and the UK, was moved. In the West the gap between the perceptions of the establishment elites and informed public opinion was widening.
When Mayo returned to the president's room Ayotunde had already planned his next move. Now was the time to strike in southern Africa, he said, while the foolish superpowers were squabbling with their principle enemy, South Africa, about its racial policies. Mayo must communicate at once with his men inside the Republic of South Africa and alert them to their opportunity.
By 2.00 A.M. the southern campaign of Ayotunde's African war had begun.
President Ayotunde and the High Command of the Black Hand left the tactics of terror to the African National Congress (ANC) in the Republic, but during November, 1985 it had been agreed that the time was ripe for opening a campaign strategically designed to cripple the Republic economically and undermine the morale of its white masters. The ANC was confident that the white regime, though brutal and strong, lacked both courage and confidence in their ultimate survival.
"If they are hit hard they will collapse like punctured tires," said Oliver Tambo, the key man in this operation. He was born in village of Nkantolo, Bizana, eastern Pondoland, in 1917 and had been a militant since his days at the University of Fort Hare when, in 1940, he, along with several others (including Nelson Mandela) was expelled for participating in a student strike. In 1943, Tambo, Mandela and Walter Sisulu founded the ANC Youth League, with Tambo becoming its first National Secretary and a member of the National Executive in 1948. In 1955, Tambo became Secretary-general of the ANC after Sisulu was banned by the South African government under the Suppression of Communism Act. In 1958, he became Deputy President of the ANC and in 1959 was served with a five-year banning order by the government.
In response, Tambo was sent abroad by the ANC to mobilize opposition to apartheid. He settled with his family in Muswell Hill, north London. His exile took a toll on him seeing his wife and three children, but his wife Adelaide supported the ANC at home by taking in ANC members arriving in the UK. In 1967, Tambo became Acting President of the ANC, following the death of Chief Albert Lutuli. He sought to keep the ANC together even after he was exiled from South Africa. Due to his skillful lobbying, he was able to attract talented South African exiles.
On 30 December 1979 in Lusaka, Zambia, Tambo as President and Alfred Nzo, then Secretary-general of the ANC, met Tim Jenkin, Stephen Lee and Alex Moumbaris, ANC members and escapees from incarceration at Phillip Kgosi prison as political prisoners. Their presence was officially announced by the ANC in early January and Tambo introduced them at a press conference on 2 January 1980.
Tambo was directly responsible for organizing active guerilla units. Along with his comrades Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo, and Walter Sisulu, Tambo directed and facilitated several attacks against the apartheid state. He gave final approval for the May 20, 1983 Church Street bombing, which resulted in the death of 19 people and injuries to 197-217 people. The attack was orchestrated by a special operations unit of the ANC's Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), commanded by Aboobaker Ismail. Such units had been authorized by Tambo as President of the ANC in 1979. At the time of the attack, they reported to Joe Slovo as chief of staff.
The ANC's submission said that the bombing was in response to a South African cross-border raid into Lesotho in December 1982 which killed 42 ANC supporters and civilians, and the assassination of Ruth First, an ANC activist and wife of Joe Slovo, in Maputo, Mozambique. It claimed that 11 of the casualties were SADF personnel and hence a military target. The legal representative of some of the victims argued that as they were administrative staff, including telephone operators and typists, they could not be considered a legitimate military target.
Ten MK operatives, including Ismail, applied for amnesty for this and other bombings. The applications were opposed on various grounds, including that it was a terrorist attack disproportionate to the political motive. The TRC found that the number of civilians versus military personnel killed was unclear. South African Police statistics indicated that seven members of the SADF were killed. The commission found that at least 84 of the injured were SADF members or employees. Amnesty was granted by the TRC.
At the time of the Black Hand decision to intervene in the RSA he and a select group of operatives had been active well inside South Africa for more than a year, living in Soweto with proper documentary credentials and cover jobs. Tambo was a bicycle messenger for a wholesale firm, and had already been commended for his conscientiousness by a manager who had no idea that his chief messenger was a known guerilla leader.
The attack plan of the Black Hand was to disrupt transport, power and communications, disperse security forces, and destroy the productive capacities of the most important mines. As a calculated outrage against Afrikaner sensitivities, three major shines were also to be blown up---the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, the Afirkaans Language Monument in Paarl and the Blood River Monument in Natal.
The South African section of the Black Hand was a newly-constituted elite strike force composed mainly of the younger elements of the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress, and militants of the Black Consciousness Movement. It was thus, in some measure, a successful implementation of what many had sought for a long time---the unification of the three diverse liberation movements.
The differences had not been enormous. All three shared a determination to remove apartheid and into introduce some degree of socialism into the running of the country's economy. Both the BCM and the PAC were strongly Africanist, believing that only black initiatives under black leadership could implement what was essentially a black campaign to overthrow white minority rule. The ANC, in contrast, made a special point of welcoming whites into its ranks and had a more radically socialist program for the post-apartheid phase.
The other two groups challenged the ANC's commitment to multi-racialism, suggesting that it catered more to communist whites than to those generally opposed to apartheid, and they made much of the ANC's past support for the Soviet Union---now clearly identified as belonging to the enemy camp.
Tambo's personality overcame these differences. The compromise was that the three groups would merge under the leadership of the ANC. Tambo's leadership of the new group was confirmed by secret ballot, with two of his chosen lieutenants as leaders of the PAC and BCM.
These younger men were different from their seniors in the banned movements. Their confidence, style and panache symbolized the contrast between them and the older, less effective leaders of the era when the movements muddled together along with little effective aid, weaponry or training. In the early 1960s when leaders of the banned movements went underground or into exile (like Tambo did), there followed years of frustration, disarray and ineptitude. Few countries would or could supply the scale of aid necessary to enable the ANC and the PAC to strike effectively at the Pretoria government. Those who wanted to--the newly independent black countries of Africa---did not have the resources, and those who had resources, such as the Soviets, supplied such limited aid in money and arms that many suspected the USSR of preferring ferment and spasmodic upheaval in southern Africa to a clear end to apartheid.
It was only in the early 1980s that the movements began receiving serious aid from black Africa and Asia, specifically from Nigeria and China, and rigorous training in modern guerilla warfare at the same time. Now the cadres had received on average five years of expert training with the most modern weapons and techniques. When Oliver Tambo emerged to lead the African National Congress strike force (which was given the traditional ANC name of Umkhonto weSizwe, "spear of the nation") it was no longer a matter of shadow guerillas going through the motions of training for an all-out invasion; there were 15,000 highly-skilled and motivated fighting men inside the Republic, from whom Tambo could choose an elite force of 1,000 for the Black Hand assignments.
The Black Hand had an advantage over other insurgents and guerillas in that it could stand back from the area of conflict, looked coolly at the strengths and weaknesses of the apartheid regime, and objectively select a strategy that could mercilessly strike at the weakest spots. In devising and refining their strategy, Black Hand had the further advantage of the advice and experience of freedom fighters throughout the developing world. The Chinese, in particular, offered much advice that lay outside African experience. Furthermore, being anxious to demonstrate their solidarity with Africa's war against oppression, the Chinese made available supplies of the highly sophisticated miniaturized weapons they had produced in their new Japanese-constructed factories in Manchuria.
The Pretoria Government didn't have the advantage of discussing their strategy with anyone in the modern world. Cramped by their racial fears and prejudices, which had effectively cut them off from the continent in which they had lived, they sought safety in isolation. Their military planning was aimed solely at repelling invaders from across their borders, and sometimes bullying the weak states on those borders to discourage guerilla activity. It was in the hope of strengthening this military posture that the Royal Navy had been invited to Simonstown. But by now the best trained guerillias were back inside the country with headquarters in New Brighton township, Port Elizabeth, and with that perfect cover in a country of 25 million blacks---a black skin!
Even had Pretoria's military strategy been based on correct premises, its success would have been short-lived and questionable. South Africa has 2,600 miles of border with black Africa and about as much shoreline. Fewer than 5 million whites were just not enough to maintain indefinite control. Air Vice Marshal Sir Cole John, after a guest inspection of the South African Air Force capacity and the borders to be patrolled, had reported to his RAF colleagues that "those borders are not defensible---nuclear weaponry notwithstanding." And as the veteran West German right-wing politician Franz Josef Strauss had remarked during a visit to South Africa: "It is a question ultimately of mathematics."
But while Pretoria closed its eyes to the math, the ANC and the Black Hand had carefully analyzed the manpower figures of the white enemy that they were to meet. The conventional wisdom was that there were 4.5 million whites ready to fight to the death for their way of life. in fact, while none of them were dedicated foes of apartheid, many of them had sufficient distaste for it and its style not to want to fight, die, or risk a nuclear holocaust on its behalf. Examination of some of the figures given in the South African military magazine Paratus showed that as early as 1981 4,000 white adolescents had refused the draft, though this meant facing prosecution or exile, and more than 90% of these had British surnames. Today, Paratus reported that the figure for draft dodging was now up to 15,000 per annum---a full 1/3 of the draft---and that the proportion of British surnames was now up to 95%. Most of these young men had followed the logic of their action and emigrated; their first preference was for Australia, then America, New Zealand, the UK and Zimbabwe.
Of the whites remaining in the Republic, more than 1/2 were women and children, and while black women and children were fully involved in fighting, not only in historical but in modern uprisings such as Soweto, white culture in South Africa had always rejected the concept of women and children as combatants.
It was therefore not a case of 4.5 million whites fighting for the continued control of 25 million blacks; there were, at most, 1.5 million committed to fight for the white cause at least vocally, and possible no more than 1 million who would translate that into action if war broke out. Black Hand strategists knew that this was far too few, however well equipped, to guard a territory of nearly half a million square miles. "Strike the enemy where is and you are not, from the base where you are and he is not," advised the Chinese, quoting Chairman Mao.
The first assignment given by the Black Hand to Oliver Tambo was the easiest---the disruption of transport between the widely separated white centers of population. One shoulder-launched missile, fired by a single operative somewhere along the 1,000-mile route of the South African Airways Boeing 747 from Johannesburg to Cape Town sufficiently damaged the aircraft to cause the airline to ground all domestic flights, until a defiant statement by Ben Schoeman, Minister of Transportation, indicated that the government would not be intimidated by such terrorism, and a flight of three Mirage jets thereafter accompanied flights along that route. But the ANC simply switched its attention to the eastern routes and brought down within a single day the Johannesburg to Durban and the Durban to Port Elizabeth flights. In addition, the international South African Airways flight inbound from Heathrow with the first crop of winter tourists was severely damaged, though it landed at an airport in Botswana. In all, 120 people were killed in these incidents and four planes totally destroyed.
As travelers quickly re-booked by rail a "Notice for Passengers" was delivered by one of several bicycle messengers who pushed letters through the mailbox of the South African Railways building. It was in fact Tambo himself. The Notice was a warning to passengers against traveling on the segregated system of the SAR. The authorities nevertheless insisted that normal services must be maintained and issued an order to supervising personnel to "take all precautions."
"Tall all precautions? What bloody precautions?" exploded the SAR's chief administrator Townes Vandersloo. "The only precaution is to stop all trains! We can't guard 4,000 miles of track. There are millions of places the bloomin' heathens can strike at the line."
Vandersloo was right. The derailing of trains was all too simple, since most of South Africa's railroads run over sparsely-populated veldt. On the 1st day the luxury express, the Blue Train, was derailed in the Karoo while traveling at top speed. 30 people were killed, 200 people were injured. Two days later the Orange Express was derailed only 20 miles outside of Kimberley, with fewer casualties.
Travel in South Africa via public transportation was becoming impractical and dangerous, but that vast country could not function without it. The government, desperate now, patrolled the railways with troops stations 1/2 a mile apart, and at the same time they required the airlines to follow the line of rail so that the soldiers could also watch for any missile launchers. This operation was hailed as a great success; for a whole week no missile was launched against any aircraft and there was no sign of any attempt to derail a passenger express.489Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYI0pogLcyt
The Black Hand cadre waited for the troops to get thoroughly dug in their isolated posts; then they struck again with riots in Langa (Cape Town), Soweto (Johannesburg), Mdamtsane (East London) and New Brighton (Port Elizabeth). All erupted on the same evening. The government was frantic; it had never had so many calls at once upon its security forces for uprisings in the townships, and at the same time they were having to patrol 4,000 miles or railroad tracks as well as those borders, where Pretoria feared a major external attack might be mounted at any time. As the result of Tambo's skillful tactics South Africa was wholly inadequately policed at every point. Infiltration across the borders and around the coast was so easy that the Black Hand kept up a steady flow of modern weaponry. Attacks on aircraft and derailments of trains were resumed, and the withdrawal of black labor from white areas spread rapidly.489Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfzzLYBqj4Q
Workers refused to deliver even the most basic commodities---bread, milk, water, groceries, gasoline---and routine services such as trash collection ceased. In the final analysis it was this relatively non-violent strike campaign that was most effective in breaking white supremacy in South Africa. It was fully realized for the first time that the country had not one single white milkman, postman, water worker, nuclear worker or courier, and that not even crack squads of anti-riot troops, let alone a pampered civil population, can function without food and water for long.489Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjHwlSNhIFu
Any illicit broadcasts of the Black Hand that could be picked up, whether they were directed towards Europe or Africa, were now listened to clandestinely by the great majority of the white population. With growing trepidation they heard the Black Hand's escalating demands on the industrialized world, accompanied by ever more horrendous threats if the demands were not met. The South African Government, by now even more scared than its electorate, turned all the public relations effort that krugerrands could by persuading the United States, Britain and to a lesser extent, Europe, that an attack on the RSA was really an attack on Anglo-Saxons everywhere. They represented themselves as the only outpost of Western civilization in Africa and the only remaining source of certain scarce metals which were vital to modern advanced technology---from jet planes to missiles.489Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPHzAeTn62w
But they could not fail to realize that their desperate please fell on the deaf ears of equally desperate people. No one could help them. Britain, South Africa's mother country, for instance, was far too preoccupied with its own race struggle to care very much about a much more hopeless case nearly 3,000 miles to its south.
The question now was: would South Africa use the Bomb?
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