Hashemite's South African History/Politics Thread

[Hash]

African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) The ACDP is a Christian fundamentalist social conservative party. The party, led by Reverend Kenneth Meshoe, was established a bit before the 1994 elections. It peaked at 1.6% and 7 seats in 2004, after winning 0.5% (2 seats) in 1994 and 1.4% (6 seats) in 1999. It lost most of its seats in 2009, taking only 3 seats and 0.8% of the vote. Interestingly, the party’s electorate seems fairly multi-racial.

The ACDP’s platform is based on strict Christian and biblical norms and the party has usually been seen as focusing its energies on moral issues (which are not major issues in South African politics). The ACDP was the only party to vote against South Africa’s very socially progressive constitution in 1996 because it banned discrimination based on sexual orientation (a clause whose wording led to a 2006 court decision which legalized gay marriage) and legalized abortion. The party is opposed to abortion, prostitution and homosexuality (it is also rather homophobic, in the ‘I hate gays but I pray for them’ sense). It also promotes an abstinence-only policy and opposes the use of condoms to prevent HIV transmission.

The party is strongest in the WC, where it won 1.6% in 2009. It briefly participated in the DA-led municipal coalition in Cape Town between 2006 and 2009.

[Hash]

United Christian Democratic Party (UCDP) The UCDP is a small regional party founded in 1997.

The party’s founder was Lucas Mangope, the president of the ‘independent’ homeland of Bophuthatswana between 1977 and 1994. Mangope was Pretoria’s dream conservative black puppet leader. He was a Tswana ethnic nationalist who defended an ethnically exclusive vision for his homeland, he collaborated actively with the apartheid regime (to the point where the SADF intervened to protect him against a coup) and he was strongly opposed to the ANC. Along with Oupa Gqozo’s Ciskei, he was one of the homeland leaders who resisted reintegration into South Africa and threatened to sabotage the transition process. On this front, Bop and Ciskei found common ground with Buthelezi’s IFP and the white far-right including the KP. However, this alliance of odd bedfellows quickly foundered. Mangope was unable to resist to a general strike in March 1994 and his military soon deserted him, the AVF/AWB intervention ended as an embarrassment for all involved.

Mangope did not participate in the first elections in 1994. He created the UCDP in 1997. It won 0.8% and only 3 seats in 1999, with 78% of its vote coming from the North West province - where it won 9.6% in the provincial elections and formed the small official opposition to the hegemonic ANC. In 2004, the party won 0.75% and held its 3 seats; it also managed to hold on to second in the NW (with 8.5%). In 2009, however, the party fell to 0.4% and won only 2 seats; in the NW province it was surpassed by COPE and the DA, managing fourth place with only 5.3% (2 seats out of 33) in the provincial election.

The UCDP is a right-wing party with fairly conservative positions on economic matters. It also claims to be inspired by conservative Christian principles. Not sure, however, if any actual ideology should be ascribed to the party given how it has functioned as a Mangope’s personal political vehicle and how it plays on some weird kind of homeland/Bophuthatswana nostalgic-nationalism.

Interestingly, however, Mangope was expelled from his own party in 2011 and the party’s leader is now a nobody.

As mentioned above, the UCDP is a more or less regional party. In 2009, 66% of the party’s votes came from a single province, the NW, which includes most of the former Bophuthatswana. The UCDP took 4% in the province in the general election; the only other province where it got more than crumbs was the Northern Cape (1%) – which includes one of the seven old enclaves of the former Bop. The party differs from the two other regional parties – the UDM and the IFP – in two senses: its support does not correlate very closely with the boundaries of the former homeland, and it never gained the IFP or the UDM’s level of support in the former homeland. In 1999, the UCDP got 10% in the homeland and 7% in the NW province outside the homeland. Bop’s makeshift borders had been quite fluid and the Tswana population it was envisioned to be the homeland of continued living on both sides of the border in the present-day NW province. At that point, it won 33% of the vote in Mafikeng, which included the former Bop capital of Mmabatho. The UCDP, which peaked at around 10% in the NW, never got the IFP or even the UDM’s level of support in either Bop or the province as a whole. This is largely because Mangope left office in 1994 with no legitimacy whatsoever (unlike Holomisa, who was not a useless tool like him; or Buthelezi, who was much more effective at gaining actual support than any other  puppet leader) and with only limited popular support in the former Bop (Mangope never really enjoyed widespread support, unlike Buthelezi).

[Hash]

Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) The PAC is a small far-left party which has been reduced to a one of many also-ran parties in South African politics; but at one time, the PAC was a powerful force and the ANC’s main rival for mass support and mobilization against the apartheid regime.

In the 1950s, the broader anti-apartheid movement was divided into two main factions. On the one hand, the ANC, influenced by the Communist Party (SACP), endorsed a multiracial society with equal franchise. The Congress of the People and what came out of it - the Freedom Charter (1955) - represented this multiracial/non-racial tradition. The ‘black’ ANC was only one actor in the Congress of the People, alongside rather influential anti-apartheid white left-wingers (mostly white Communists), Indians and coloureds. On the other hand, the ‘Africanists’ within the ANC - influenced by Kwame Nkrumah’s pan-Africanist ideology - opposed the ANC-SACP’s multiracialism and the active participation of whites in the struggle. Driven by the view that all white South Africans - and not just the white government - were the oppressors - they saw the presence of whites in the movement as a sign that the ANC had been co-opted by the white ruling class. They recognized that individual whites could play a role in the struggle, but they could not hold leadership in the movement. The Africanists supported African continental unity, represented by the slogan “Africa for the Africans.”

The PAC was founded in April 1959 by the ANC’s Africanist faction, led by Robert Subokwe. At the outset, the PAC posed a strong challenge to the ANC for the control of the anti-apartheid movement and the support of the country’s black masses. The PAC, like the ANC, had its own armed movement, the APLA, which targeted white civilians - especially in the waning days of the apartheid regime. The PAC spearheaded the peaceful anti-pass campaign which led to the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960, when 69 unarmed black civilians were mowed down by the apartheid regime. Following the Sharpeville massacre, Sobukwe was arrested. He was finally released in 1969, but remained under house arrest until his death in 1978.

Sobukwe’s death and the exile of many of the PAC’s major leaders weakened the organization. Infighting between the PAC, its armed wing and the various factions in both erupted after Sobukwe’s death in 1978. Opposition to the SACP’s influence over the ANC had been one of the causes behind the PAC split in 1959, but the PAC itself moved towards Maoism in the 1970s. The intense infighting, the lack of any solid leadership and the absence of any real organization weakened the PAC in the 1980s.

The PAC was unbanned in 1990. The party boycotted the transition process and APLA attacked white civilian targets, the bloodiest of which was the St. James Church bombing in Cape Town (in 1993), which killed 11.

The 1994 election was a disaster for the PAC, which won only 1.3% of the vote and a mere 5 seats. The PAC’s radical and racial rhetoric (‘one settler, one bullet’) alienated many black voters who were eager for peace and reconciliation. The party was unable to improve its standing after 1994, in fact it has lost votes in every election since. In 1999, it won 0.8% and 3 seats. In 2004, it won 0.7% and 3 seats. In 2009, weakened by the split of the African’s People Convention, it won only 0.3% and held a single seat.

The PAC, once a powerful rival to the ANC, has become an extremely marginal force which poses no real threat to the ANC. The PAC has a far-left program, supporting nationalization and land redistribution.

[Hash]

Minority Front (MF) The Minority Front is a small ethnic regional (KZN/Durban) party.
The MF claims to represent all ethnic minorities in South Africa, in reality its support stems almost exclusively from the Indian minority in Durban, which has the largest Indian population of any major city in South Africa - making up roughly 18% of the city’s population, forming a large majority in Chatsworth and Phoenix.

The party functioned as a vehicle for its leader, Amichand Rajbansi, until his death in 2011. Rajbansi was an Indian community leader in Durban who was coopted by the NP regime in the 1970s and 1980s and played along with Botha’s tricameral scheme. He formed the National People’s Party (NPP) in 1981, and the NPP competed in the 1984 and 1989 elections for the Indian House of Delegates - elections which were, by and large, boycotted by the Indian population. The NPP won a majority in the 1984 election and Rajbansi served on Botha’s cabinet (minister of Indian affairs) and chaired the ‘Indian cabinet’. However, his rule was controversial. In the late 1980s, he was found guilty of various charges of bribery and glaring misadministration by parliamentary commissions and was subsequently dumped by Botha in 1988. Andrew Feinstein described Rajbansi as a “prominently bewigged gentleman with a charming lack of self-irony.”

The MF was founded in 1994 as a successor to the NP. It won only 0.07% in the first free elections in 1994, but with 1.3% in the provincial election in KZN it did qualify for a seat. Its national support increased to 0.3% in 1999 and 0.35% in 2004, winning one seat in the National Assembly in 1999 and gaining a second one in 2004. In 2009, the party’s support declined to 0.25% and it lost its second seat. The MF is a regional party which does not run in provincial or local elections outside KZN. In the 2009 GE, 89.6% of its votes came from a single province (KZN), where it won 2.05% in the provincial election (2 seats) and 1.1% in the general election. The few votes it won outside KZN came mostly from Indian neighborhoods such as Lenasia in Johannesburg. Its support in KZN provincial ballots has oscillated between 2.9% (1999) and 2% (2009). In 2009 (GE), the MF won 2.5% in eThekwini (Durban) and 3.5% in uMdoni (Scottburgh), located south of Durban and 14% Indian. In the 2011 local elections, the MF won 5.3% in Durban, and won 11 seats including 6 wards. It won 6.5% in uMdoni and one ward. There is increasing overlap between MF and DA support, with the MF losing a number of its voters to the DA. In direct races between the ANC and the DA, the MF’s supporters tend to back the DA by large margins.

Having been a personal vehicle for Rajbansi until 2011, the MF has no real ideology besides vague ethnic nationalism/Indian minority rights. Rajbansi’s widow took the party leadership after his death in 2011.

Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) AZAPO is a small black far-left, similar to the PAC. AZAPO is the main political front of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM).

The Black Consciousness Movement was founded by Steve Biko, a black student leader, in the mid-1960s, following the marginalization and weakening of the ANC and PAC following the Sharpeville massacre and the arrest or forced exile of most of the ANC and PAC leadership. Like the Africanists, Biko’s BCM rejected the ANC’s moderate multiracial approach and its focus on extending civil rights to the entire South African population. Biko resented the strong influence of white liberals/left-wingers in the anti-apartheid movement, particularly in the student movement (the NUSAS). He attacked what he saw as traditional white values especially the 'condescending' values white liberals and the ‘white monopoly on truth’. The BCM wanted blacks to find their own way out of apartheid, a uniquely ‘African’ way.

The BCM was the catalysing force behind the Soweto uprising in 1976. Steve Biko was arrested in Port Elizabeth in 1977 and murdered by his captors, probably in the back of a pickup truck while he was transferred from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria. Biko’s death weakened the BCM, especially as the ANC regained its leadership of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s with the organization of various domestic civil society organizations - including some close to the BCM - under the UDF.

AZAPO did not participate in the first free elections in 1994. In 1999, the party won 0.2% and a single seat. It increased its support to 0.25% in 2004 and fell back to 0.22% in 2009, holding its single seat in both those elections.

AZAPO is a scientific socialist/far-left party. It defines itself as anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist and has focused its campaigns mostly on increasing black economic power. It sees the class struggle as being expressed in racial terms.

African People’s Convention (APC) The APC is a small black far-left party founded by a split in the PAC in 2007. The party was founded during the third and last floor-crossing period in 2007 by Themba Godi, a PAC MP and the party’s deputy leader. The split must have been the result of a personality clash incomprehensible to outsiders. Indeed, the APC’s ideology is basically the same as the PAC: pan-Africanism, continental unity, socialism.

The APC won 0.2% in the 2009 election, enough for a single seat. Incidentally, it was the smallest party (in terms of votes) to win seats in 2009.

--

I'll start with some analysis of the post-94 situation next.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Please get back to this sometime, hash!

[Oak Hills]

Okay, I just found this thread and read it in its entirety tonight and I have two questions:
1)How does the presidential election in South Africa work? I think I've read that the Parliament elects the president, but I'm not exactly sure how this works. Also, how can the president be removed from office before his term is up? Is it similar to a vote of no confidence in Westminster systems?
2)How do you know so much about South Africa?