Last Sunday I had the privilege of participating in a webinar commemorating the United Democratic Front (UDF). Panellists were Aneeka Jacobs, Professor Jeremy Seekings, Tony Karon, Zou Kota-Fredericks and Trevor Manuel and what a delight they were. As you may know, the UDF was launched in Mitchells Plain, Western Cape, in 1983 in direct response to the brutal apartheid system. This memory project was organised in this, our Heritage Month, by a new organisation in the Mitchells Plain area, a non-profit calling itself the Mitchells Plain Development Action Collective (MPDAC). 

It was established out of necessity by former and current activists at the start of our Covid-19 pandemic in an attempt in some small measure to effectively deal with the mass starvation the people of Mitchells Plain are experiencing — this being a direct result of the pandemic and its devastating consequences on such communities.

One of the interesting lessons I could take home from the webinar which is of relevance, I thought, to our contemporary political situation was the fact that the UDF in those days placed a premium on organisation building, broad unity and resilience politics (courage). Allow me to elaborate: it seems to me that people are fed up with big government and feel their plight is best served locally, from people within their ranks who share common “shared values” and concerns with them. Many global and local activists nowadays call for localisation of our politics — and in the absence of credible opposition parties as well, what to do?

Our people are always hopeful, of course, and as such we hear hope from our president, but his government bureaucracy and his party don’t support him, so what to do indeed? 

It seems to me that the old adage, “think global, act local” must find resonance again in our communities. Community activism and grassroots politics must become the order of the day. How? Organisation building. We must encourage the formation of local organisations to tackle local problems. In other words, we must empower our communities. As for organising in local areas where race, class and cultural diversity is ever-present, Trevor Manuel told us that during the UDF days it was equally difficult, but they were always guided by the principle of broad unity. 

Manuel said that he and other comrades travelled all over the country to mobilise our communities under the banner of the UDF and frequently had to deal with diversity and ideological differences. This, he says, they overcame because they had agreed on a few basic principles around which they could mobilise and organise our people. At that time it was the anti-apartheid Struggle because after all, it was a crime against humanity, advancing non-racialism, non-sexism and democratic values. Very few could argue against supporting these basic principles and as such some of the membership of the UDF were as diverse as various sporting clubs throughout the country — the New Brighton Ballroom Dancing Association, trade unions that subscribed to different ideological approaches, among others.

Some of these common and basic principles these days would naturally be to organise our people around our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, basic human rights and, of course, transitional justice. 

Food sovereignty and water remain the basic building blocks of any society and in order to end hunger and end thirst, we must organise locally, but think globally.

The ideological underpinning of the UDF was national liberation through Marxism and this was applied to everyday bread-and-butter issues. The realm of reproduction in South Africa was brutalised and thus, trying to understand people’s wider lived reality, in order to organise them properly, is a must. Agreed, we would have to find our new ideological underpinnings, and we can.

I think for example that if the president organised local people and organisations in the fight against mass starvation and hunger, he would have managed through local inputs to have had a much better national response plan than the current non-plan. Understanding the triple exploitation of our South African women, exploitation based on gender, being a worker and being black, would stand us in good stead in tackling gender-based violence and femicide, as is being attempted by organisations like MPDAC.

Food sovereignty and water remain the basic building blocks of any society and in order to end hunger and end thirst, we must organise locally, but think globally. We are of course already experiencing solidarity fatigue from all manner of funders, but the struggle must go on nonetheless. We must remember that the local can be transformative, although local programmes must be located within a larger programme to avoid becoming too parochial in outlook.

This is why I’m sure MPDAC has other programmes to address other social ills they want to tackle in Mitchells Plain. Projects around crime and gangsterism, for example. The dual challenge of high crime rates and the structural embeddedness of gangsterism as part and parcel of the social fabric within the Cape Flats continues to wreak havoc on plans to develop these areas. Here, Mitchells Plain is no exception and it suffers the twin ills of gangsterism and the rampant illicit drug trade.

At the community level, there are loosely four key motors of violence which may appear local, but rely on external inputs: first, the power that gang culture has to entice an alienated, frightened and hopeless youth to join its ranks; second, the desire to control drug turf and the profits they generate, control of which then gives gangs the power to buy guns, which are the third driver. And last, territorial control, enforced by gun violence, generates further competition over extortion profits and money-laundering opportunities from local businesses.

Another programme revolves around substance abuse. Over a decade, the Western Cape has been contributing more than a third of cases to the country’s drug-related crime. The 2018/19 financial year was no exception. A total of 81,344 (35%) of drug-related crimes in the country were recorded in the Western Cape. According to the 2016/17 Victims of Crime Survey, 44% of households in South Africa believed that the need for drugs was the main reason perpetrators committed crime.

Mitchells Plain is an area plagued by drug abuse. According to police crime statistics for the period 1 April 2014 to 31 March 2015, Mitchells Plain was ranked the worst policing precinct in the country for drug-related crimes, with more than 4,000 arrests made in this period. The Mitchells Plain and Kraaifontein police precincts recorded the highest number of drug-related crimes, at 3,475 and 2,972 respectively, in the 2018/19 financial year. 

Next is gender-based violence and femicide: the Western Cape occupied fourth position in the country in terms of sexual offences for 2018/19 with a rate of 105.3/100,000 population. Nationally, sexual offences — including rape, sexual assault, attempted sexual offences and contact sexual offences — increased by 4.6%.

Rape alone accounts for about two thirds (66%) of sexual offences. Lisa Vetten (2014) argued that the sexual offences figures reflected in the police crime statistics were lower than the reality. These low levels of reporting are not unique to South Africa. Other countries experience the same challenge. She argues that the reasons for not reporting sexual offences outweigh the reasons for reporting it.

Trevor Manuel reminded us that the repression over the eight short years of the UDF was indeed the last kick of a dying horse. Those last days of the apartheid system were violent and brutal — you only have to ask these very comrades in MPDAC, for they had their fair share of the above.

At the centre of the reasons not to report sexual offences are fear of being ridiculed, accused of lying and fear of the legal process. Most victims of sexual offences know the perpetrator. In this context, she argued that the unanswered question is whether police rape figures, for instance, measure a reduction in the number of rapes reported or a reduction in the incidence of rape.

There are other projects, but time doesn’t allow me. The point is that localisation, it seems, is the future for our politics in the country. Solidarity economies, zero-waste economies and post-carbon living must become the future of our political landscape.

Tony Karon reminded us that were it not for the UDF, he would have neither appreciated nor understood the need for international solidarity politics — why it was of utmost importance to support the Palestinians in their quest for freedom, why we had to support the Cubans in their quest for sovereignty, Western Sahara and other peoples’ struggles around the world. He emphasised the constant political education and ideology training embarked on in the UDF and its member structures.

No wonder the youth, students, community leaders and trade union types were of such a different calibre those days. Their commitment and understanding of why they participated in the Struggle were never in doubt and hence their resilience was exemplary, even under the most repressive conditions of torture, arrests, imprisonment and death. 

Trevor Manuel reminded us that the repression over the eight short years of the UDF was indeed the last kick of a dying horse. Those last days of the apartheid system were violent and brutal — you only have to ask these very comrades in MPDAC, for they had their fair share of the above.

In short, localisation means we shouldn’t necessarily call for an alternative political party, nor for the governing party to lose the next elections, but simply to organise our people locally through organisation building, embracing broad unity and remaining resilient — becoming change agents so that these communities, in that way, can hold the government and the governing party accountable — but at the same time, take charge and control of their own development.

In the end, it was the closing words of Trevor Manuel, quoting Gramsci, that really summed it up and gave us all a new purpose and lease on life: “you must build hegemony amongst the governed”. DM