Five Solidarity Vignettes from the South African Anti-Apartheid Struggle
In 1981, the Technical Committee of the African National Congress (ANC) started experimenting with computer programming and the automation of encryption to counter the oppression, violence, and surveillance of the apartheid regime. The goal was to find a way to speed up underground communication between freedom fighters in exile and those on the ground in South Africa. Since at least 1948, the apartheid regime had stifled the social, economic, political, technological, and cultural emancipation of the majority, but it could not fully restrict and constrain their agency, mobility, resistance, hopes and dreams. Over the course of seven years, the ANC Technical Committee experimented with both old and cutting-edge technologies to come up with a means to communicate secretly and transnationally to support the South African liberation struggle.
To do so, the ANC recruited comrades in exile from Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC, in addition to activists from Europe, and North America. Their tasks were to test and operate a tricontinental underground communication infrastructure, host laptop computers and freedom fighters in safe houses, and when needed to move parts (encryption disks, computers, etc.) across borders. Encrypted messages between freedom fighters started flowing between them and the senior leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) based in Lusaka, Zambia, via London, in the spring of 1988. While the initial communication nexus was between Durban, London and Lusaka, the communication system would later be operated from major cities in South Africa, namely, Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg as well as from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, York and Bristol in Great Britain, TallCree in Alberta, Canada and Harare in Zimbabwe. South African rank and file amateurs, Dutch, and Canadian women and men who had never used computers before dedicated part of their lives to making this secret communication infrastructure work and outwit the apartheid regime.
Below, I present five short narrative vignettes that allow us to understand how transnational solidarity became infrastructural in the struggle against South African apartheid. The weaving together of these vignettes help reveal several dimensions needed to operate and maintain an underground communication infrastructure under conditions of oppression and scarcity: technical know-how, technological equipment, masquerading and subterfuge, international solidarities, risk taking, and above all dedicated people.
Vignette 1 - The Technical Aspect of Setting Up a Secret Communication Infrastructure
To set up a secret communication infrastructure, an interest in and willingness to develop a technical culture and know-how is paramount. The Technical Committee of the ANC consisted of two main developers Ronnie Press, a South African chemistry professor in exile in Bristol, and Tim Jenkin, a South African hacker exiled in London. The technical know-how they were to develop over many years and their access to technological equipment and tech trade fairs were to give them a leading edge. The UK was a good environment for experimenting with technologies as the British Post Office had been researching and investing in a technology called telematics (phone + computers) since the 1960s, the system the ANC Technical Committee would end up using. Summarizing their vision of the secret communication infrastructure they would successfully develop, Jenkin said, “Victory over Leviathan requires another approach: create, don't fight. Create something new without announcing it and quietly get on with developing an alternative that is out of sight and that they cannot imagine!” (T. Jenkin, personal communication, February 4, 2019).
While Press and Jenkin were working day and night to open a safe and secure line of communication, Ivan Pillay and Mac Maharaj, two leading South African resistance figures, were looking to recruit sympathetic activists to support this endeavour. They travelled to Great Britain, Zambia, the Netherlands, and Canada to find funding for the project, to test the communication system from Lusaka, and Johannesburg and to recruit activists to support the struggle.
Vignette 2 - The Intimacy of an Underground Communication Infrastructure
An underground communication infrastructure requires deep trust, a common political commitment and nurtured relationships among activists and freedom fighters for it to function. One of these intimate bonds, that expanded the communication infrastructure to an Indigenous reserve in Canada’s Prairies, was between two South African exiled brothers. Joe Pillay was in Canada while Ivan Pillay was in Zambia. Their exile stories are intricately linked to the violence of apartheid. On February 17, 1981, Joe Pillay was abducted. Four individuals who worked for the South African police force broke into his house in Manzini, Swaziland saying: “You're a terrorist. You're a communist. We've come to take you” (Roskam & Dittrich, 1990, p. 19). Three weeks later, after being tortured, he was released and brought back to Swaziland where he would stay for another four years before asking for refugee status in Canada. Together with his Canadian partner, Barbara, they settled in TallCree, an Indigenous reserve in northern Alberta where they became teachers at the local school. In 1987, Joe was visited by his brother Ivan Pillay, now very active in the liberation struggle and based out of Zambia. After an anti-apartheid conference held in Toronto, Ivan flew to Alberta to see his brother. “Ivan asked me to take part in a secret operation that he was coordinating from Lusaka which aimed to liberate South Africa from apartheid” (J. Pillay, personal communication, October 31, 2018). After he had bought all the necessary computer equipment in Edmonton, Tim Jenkin visited him in TallCree for computer training.
From TallCree, Joe Pillay regularly sent and received messages to inform the movement about lobbying the Canadian government to divest from apartheid, to recruit sympathetic Canadians to the cause, and to feed all necessary information to the leadership in Zambia. The intimacy of this solidarity infrastructure is revealed in the messages that were exchanged between freedom fighters, including Joe and Ivan, asking news about their families, friends and comrades, and sending messages of love to them. The intimacy also comes to life with Joe who came to develop a deep and detailed knowledge of how to encrypt messages and use this secret communication infrastructure, hiding its existence even from his wife Barbara. It is thanks to this bond between brothers, their respective political commitment to the struggle and their trust in the encrypted nature of the system that a new spoke in the communication infrastructure was established.
Vignette 3 - Using One’s Privilege to Create an Underground Communication Infrastructure Work
In apartheid South Africa, the whiteness of activists could be used to the advantage of the struggle. This is how Rob and Helen Douglas, a Canadian couple involved in the Vancouver-based Southern African Action Coalition (SAAC) came to be recruited. Mac Maharaj was visiting the country with the express purpose of recruiting Canadians for a special mission he was commanding. Maharaj was looking for white Canadians who were willing to set up safe houses in the white areas of South Africa to host operatives, computer equipment, and money. After spending three days with Maharaj, Rob called his wife Helen from Toronto and asked her if she was willing to commit to going to South Africa. She agreed. In March 1987, Rob flew to Johannesburg with a 6-months tourist visa and with his golf clubs, pretending to be a good tourist. Helen followed a few weeks later in May.
Rob and Helen manned a safe house which provided infrastructural and emotional support for clandestine operatives who were under high pressure, far away from family and friends, and needed to use a computer to type, encipher and decipher messages. In their day-to-day life, they pretended to be friendly to the apartheid regime by creating a whole new persona, but when in the safe house they revealed who they really were. In this context, the safe houses acted as an infrastructure of intimacy, providing respite, proximity and relative safety and security for brief periods. Rob and Helen were also in need of genuine human relations as they were isolated in their own work, pretending to be people they were not.
Vignette 4: Feminist Politics of International Solidarity as Essential to an Underground Communication Infrastructure
Dutch feminist activists wanted to support the South African liberation struggle by any means necessary. They abhorred the racism of the apartheid regime and felt strongly about South Africa as a former Dutch colony. For them, South Africa was a feminist, decolonial question which they needed to join to fight against an overarching structural system of oppression. During one of his trips to the Netherlands Mac Maharaj asked Conny Braam, the president of the Dutch anti-apartheid movement (AABN), to help support a special operation he was commanding. She had to recruit Dutch actors to train South African operatives who were going back to their country on how to develop a new persona. Braam recruited a Dutch dentist who made false teeth to change the facial appearance of operatives, wig and makeup artists who helped with disguises, and a photographer who prepared the false passport photos. Braam also recruited Antoinette Voegelsang, a KML flight attendant who regularly flew between Amsterdam and Johannesburg. Voegelsang brought the necessary computer material down to South Africa. She also enlisted Lucia Raadschelders, a Dutch anti-apartheid and women’s rights activist who had been working for many years for the AABN in Amsterdam. Before being deployed to operate the communication system from Lusaka, Raadschelders went to London to receive training on how to use it. Tim Jenkin was responsible for training operatives before they were dispatched. This was the first time Raadschelders used a computer.
Decentering the innovators’ role in the communication infrastructure reveals the impressive and complex human network that was required to enable a solidarity infrastructure to develop and function. By doing so, the roles and contributions of women who were operators, recruiters and logistical officers are made visible. The following vignette expands on the internationalist feminist politics from the situated knowledge of a South African woman.
Vignette 5: Taking Risks as Imperative to the Functioning of an Underground Communication Infrastructure
It is without a doubt the South African women and men on the ground who took the greatest risks. Many of them decided to enrol in MK, the ANC armed wing, after the Soweto massacre where many of their student peers were assassinated by the apartheid regime. Susan Tshabalala was one of them. She left Soweto after the 1976 uprising. She was trained in Angola as an MK soldier. After operating undercover in Botswana for a few years, Tshabalala was called back to Zambia at the end of the 80s. She was asked to go to South Africa to operate a communication infrastructure from Durban. When she arrived in the province of KwaZulu-Natal after her disguise training in Amsterdam, she was taught by other South African women how to use the encrypted communication system. For more than two years, Tshabalala sent daily briefings back to Lusaka through London regarding logistical and organizational information. She also received publications such as ANC newsletters that were produced in London for circulation in South Africa. She was arrested and jailed by the apartheid police in July 1990 when the safe house in which she was working was busted. A few months later she was released and given amnesty with many of her comrades.
Conclusion
This short narrative exemplifies a few essential dimensions needed to sustain an underground communication infrastructure developed during the struggle against apartheid. This infrastructure was not only secret, it was also ephemeral since it was meant to last only as long as necessary. There was never the intention of commercializing it or making it a state project. It was to be used until it was deemed no longer relevant.
The significance of this anti-apartheid communication infrastructure and the people behind it lie in the politics of possibility it enables, cross-generationally. In every era when faced with infrastructures of domination and containment, infrastructures of resistance and solidarity can be developed to remind people that alternatives to domination and catastrophe can be created and lived and that an alternative world can be crafted.
Literature
Roskam, K. & Dittrich, B. (1990). The crime of kidnapping: Abductions by South Africa from the frontline states. Amsterdam, NL: Anti-Apartheids Beweging Nederland (AABN). Retrieved from http://psimg.jstor.org/fsi/img/pdf/t0/10.5555/al.sff.document.nizap1018_final.pdf
Toupin, S. (2021). Technically subversive : encrypted communication in the south african national liberation struggle (dissertation). McGill University Libraries.
