The Mass Action Campaign of 1992: The Ciskei Crisis and the African National Congress in Transition (Part 1)

The politics of South Africa’s transition to democracy played out beyond the negotiating rooms. In the Eastern Cape’s Border region, where democratic mobilisation faced violent repression by the Ciskei bantustan regime throughout the transition years (1990-4), a confrontation escalated which cast national politics into stark relief. By 1992, this developing crisis came to expose the uneasy compromises being made at CODESA; the complex politics of homeland reincorporation; and the disconnection between national negotiations and social realities on the ground. The dramatic and fatal march on the Ciskei’s capital of Bhisho on 7th September, often understood as a pivotal moment of the transition, had a long backstory. No isolated flashpoint, this march marked the culmination of a long local campaign to oust the Ciskei’s repressive military ruler, a struggle which was belatedly supported by the ANC’s national leadership to clarify its own mass action campaign and to evidence the organisation’s mandate to negotiate. The politics surrounding the crisis in Ciskei, and the ANC national leadership’s efforts first to rein in and then to harness the local campaign, reveal the tensions at play as leaders sought to transform the organisation from its disparate strands into a party prepared for multiparty elections.