South Africa

By William R. Doerner

As the leading opponent of South Africa's system of racial apartheid, the African National Congress has become the embodiment of the hopes and aspirations of the country's blacks. Yet even some of apartheid's opponents harbor lingering reservations about the ANC, mainly because of its longstanding and unapologetic ties to Communists. ANC President Oliver Tambo has repeatedly said he does not know or care how many members of his national executive committee are party members. As the ANC's critics see it, the ! organization runs the danger of becoming, wittingly or not, the vehicle through which Communism could eventually gain power in any change of government in South Africa. Exhibit A for this argument is usually Joe Slovo, 60, a man whose prominent shock of wiry gray hair supports many hats. A lawyer by training, he became in 1985 the first white to serve on the executive committee of the ANC, whose dedication to the abolition of apartheid has made the organization illegal in South Africa. Slovo is also chief of staff in the ANC's military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), a position that puts him in the cockpit of the ANC's campaign of terrorism.

But the hats do not stop there. Slovo is also chairman of the South African Communist Party and is believed by some Western intelligence agencies to have close ties to the KGB, the Soviet secret police. Slovo has called that claim "part of a misinformation campaign" waged against him by South African security forces. But there is little doubt that his involvement with Moscow, if not formal, is at least fervent. Says Craig Williamson, a former South African security agent who infiltrated the party from 1971 to 1980: "Slovo is the classic South African Communist that the Soviets like -- tough, down the line, disciplined and utterly dedicated."

In a rare interview with TIME last week, Slovo spoke freely of the unity of purpose between the ANC and the Communist Party. Said he: "There are no differences in our common objective to destroy racism and to achieve a united democratic South Africa." But, he added, South Africa's Communists make no secret of their conviction that a democratic revolution will eventually lead to a second, socialist phase. Any suggestion that the ANC serves as a Soviet puppet, however, Slovo insists is a "slanderous insult."

Slovo, a native of Lithuania whose parents emigrated to South Africa in 1935, exemplifies the connections that have grown up over the years between the ANC and the country's Communists. He joined the party before it was declared illegal in 1950 and helped write the Freedom Charter, the document that in 1955 became the ANC's political program. Slovo was accused of sabotage in 1963 in the same trial that resulted in lifetime prison sentences for Nelson Mandela and five other ANC leaders, but Slovo had managed to flee South Africa a month before the others were arrested. He has lived in exile ever since. In 1982, his wife Ruth First, also a prominent Communist, was killed by a parcel bomb allegedly planted by Pretoria's agents.

In the U.S., the question of the Communist role in the ANC has lately become more than an academic matter. In the debate last summer concerning economic sanctions against South Africa, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms charged that the ANC, which favored the punitive measures, was "the chief instrument of the Communist movement today in South Africa." While the sanctions bill passed, it contained a stipulation, inserted at Helms' insistence, requiring the State Department to study the matter further. The department report, released in January, found that the South African Communist Party's influence within the ANC is indeed considerable and estimated that as many as 21 of the 30 members of the ANC's executive committee also belong to the party. The study concluded, "The SACP continues to view its historical alliance with the ANC as its main hope for winning power in South Africa."

Others are less certain as to who is using whom. In an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Thomas G. Karis, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, concedes that in the past, ANC leaders placed heavy reliance on Communist support because, as Mandela once said, "Communists were the only political group . . . who were prepared to eat with us, talk with us, live with us and work with us." But Karis points out that in recent years the ANC has established ties with non-Communist groups, notably the 500,000-member Congress of South African Trade Unions. Karis maintains that the ANC's anticapitalist outbursts are not as surprising as its enduring hopes for support from the West. "Despite much of its rhetoric," he says, "the ANC historically, politically and culturally is more attuned to the U.S. and the West than it is to the Soviet bloc." While not even ANC officials claim they are close to gaining power in South Africa, the distant prospects of an ANC-sponsored coalition in which the Communists hold a share of power is not attractive. Yet Secretary of State George Shultz, no friend of Communism, has conceded that the ANC has "emerged as an important part of the South African political equation" that must be acknowledged. In January he met with President Tambo in Washington. But as long as the ANC fails to put more distance between its agenda and that of its Communist associates, the U.S. will watch the black liberation movement warily.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg