Amandla!

CRIES OF "Amandla"--"freedom now"--echoed around South Africa last month as millions of Black South Africans celebrated their victory over racism and oppression.

From the sprawling Black townships, from the desperately poor rural areas, from the factories and the mines, workers and their families exploded into the streets when the results of the voting were announced.

Nomsa from Soweto told Socialist Worker, "It is like waiting for the sun to rise, the sun of hope and freedom. We have come from jail. We have humbled the regime. They cannot stand against us any longer. This is our moment of power!"

The fact that Black people have voted for the first time is a victory against the vile apartheid system, which denied basic rights to Black people for almost 50 years.

It is a victory against the right-wing murderers and the conservative Inkatha Party that tried to stop the elections and intimidate people from voting.

Winning the right to vote, through years of struggle, was a leap forward. The African National Congress' (ANC) victory is a blow to racists everywhere.

The election reflects some of the joy at the defeat of apartheid and the determination to build a better future. Hundreds of thousands of people have attended victory celebrations.

Prior to the election, the ANC organized rallies of workers. At one meeting in a Johannesburg hospital, 2,000 workers met to cheer ANC speakers and pledge their support for the defeat of apartheid.

Regina, a cleaner, told Socialist Worker, "We have fought for so long and at last we have a taste of freedom...It is a most precious thing to have thrown off the white regime and to have won our dignity."

Mosotho, a porter, said, "There has been so much suffering. We must never allow anyone to forget the agony of apartheid, and we must sink it deep by throwing out the people who organized the torture and the racism."

The National Party, which introduced and ran apartheid for 46 years, ran a racist campaign trying to whip up fears that there would be violence and chaos if the ANC won.

There is no tyranny so strong that it can withstand protest from below. This election is a victory for all of us.

BLACK WORKERS have inspired socialists across the world with their struggle against the apartheid system.

They will provide an even greater lesson if they continue to fight against capitalism with equal determination. One hopeful sign in the struggles that have burst out recently in the weeks running up to the last month's elections.

Bosses at the Anglo-American mining group complained that "a pre-election mood has led to stoppages. Some people seem to think that because they can vote, they no longer have to show work discipline."

Over 5,000 workers at the Rustenburg Platinum mine started an illegal strike a week before the election. It grew to 8,000 strikers within a few days.

The biggest strikes were in the former "homelands--the fake states created by apartheid and headed by puppet leaders.

In Transkei, 12,000 nurses struck for higher wages and job security. Union leaders urged them to return "in order not to disrupt the elections."

But strike coordinator Sisa Bhelu replied, "We are tired of people who are telling us to go back to work instead of ensuring that our demands are met."

In the Lebowa "homeland," 30,000 civil servants struck and forced the resignation of chief minister Nelson Ramodike from the ANC election list.

One striker said, "Why should he be a candidate for the liberation movement when he has been doing the job of apartheid for years."

The fear of increasing workers' action was a strong element in Chief Buthelezi's last-moment decision to take his conservative Inkatha movement into the elections.

Inkatha is responsible for the township war that has seen over 14,000 people butchered since 1990. Buthelezi insisted he would disrupt the vote unless he was given more concessions.

But as thousands of civil servants started a strike in Ulundi, the capital of the KwaZulu "homeland," Buthelezi feared he might go the same way as Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana. In March, Mangope was drive out by strikes that turned into an uprising.

The new National Peacekeeping Force mutinied. Hundreds of its members refused to fire on ANC supporters and locked their commander in his vehicle.

At the same time, hundreds of prisoners burnt their mattresses and started a hunger strike to protest the government's refusal to allow certain categories of prisoners to vote.

More than 400 police and prison wardens in the town of Standerton began a strike demanding that members of the Nazi AWB be banned from the streets.

With the victory of the ANC in the election, two competing moods in the working class are emerging. Many union leaders will try to persuade workers not to fight because there is a Black majority government, which must be "given time."

On the other hand, millions of workers will want to see their political victory turned into better wages, an end to layoffs and equality with white workers. This could mean a great increase struggle.

Strikes and protests must continue after the election if workers are to win real freedom.

The ANC has conceded a constitution that will limit its power to change society.

Every party that gets more than 5 percent of the vote will be part of the post-election "Government of National Unity."

The ANC won a landslide victory and will hold over 60 percent of the seats in the new parliament. But it fell short of the more than two-thirds majority needed to set the terms of a new constitution in two years time.

De Klerk's National Party won a mere 20 percent of the seats in the elections, but is certain to have a role in the new government. Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha party will a also hold a seat in the cabinet.

Furthermore, Inkatha won a bare majority of the seats in the regional KwaZulu government. And the National Party won control of the Western Cape regional government on the basis of is appeal to mixed race voters.

However, the sharpest battle may not be over constitutional matters but the issues of jobs, homes and poverty.

The ANC promises to build one million homes in the next five years, to electrify 2,5 million homes and to redistribute 30 percent of agricultural land.

But the scale of the poverty and the gap between white and Black means these targets are very modest.

Nearly half of the Black population are unemployed all or most of the time. Over one-third live in a shack or hut. Millions have no home at all.

The whites own 90 percent of the country's land and 85 percent of the businesses. Six huge corporations control 90 percent of the companies listed on the Johannesburg stock exchange.

Just 5 percent of white South Africans own 88 percent of the country's wealth.

This level of inequality requires complete charge in South Africa. It requires a frontal assault on companies like Anglo-American, Debeers, Rembrandt and Anglovaal.

The ANC proposes nothing like this. Its economic documents have ruled out large-scale nationalization and have given assurances to foreign and local businesses,

The ANC's head of economic policy has already pledged to the International Monetary Fund that public spending will be carefully controlled. It is believed--the documents are secret--that he promised to hold the budget deficit to less than 6 percent of gross domestic product.

This would be less than the deficit run by the present government. The ANC has already confirmed that the present finance minister and the director of the reserve bank will stay in their posts.

ANC sources have told newspapers like the British Financial Times that workers will have to accept wage increases below inflation for several years "to build up the economy."

The great danger is that the ANC will attack workers for "asking for too much" and that union leaders, most of whom support the ANC, will try to hold back struggle after the elections.

South Africa's Black population has waged a heroic struggle for democracy and against capitalism. They need more than a reformed bosses' system where arrogant white rulers are replaced by Black ones.

South Africans have not suffered and died to give strength and prestige to a group of Black yuppies while remaining poor and powerless themselves. They need genuine a socialist movement committed to taking over the country's wealth and running it democratically in the interests of all.

When millions of Black South Africans voted last month, it was a victory for all of us. It was a blow to the racists and the giant companies that supported the apartheid system of racial segregation.

It was a system of terror and inhuman cruelty where everything from jobs to political power to what toilet you could use was based on skin color.

The whites, one in seven of the population, were the only people with votes and rights.
For 45 years, children were subjected to humiliating examinations--of the curliness of their hair or the shape of their fingernails--in order to assign them to "racial categories."

Up to six million people were forced from their homes and expelled to distant townships or the countryside because they lived in the "wrong" area.

A government directive stated, "No stone is to be left unturned to achieve the settlement in the tribal homelands of unproductive Bantu [Black person]."

In areas around the big cities, women, children, the old and the sick--all of whom were called "superfluous appendages" by a cabinet minister--were rooted out and shipped away.

Over 2,000 people have been hung for fighting apartheid. Hundreds of thousands have been imprisoned and millions arrested.

Apartheid was not broken by kind words or pressure from other countries. Apartheid was broken by struggle.

For many years, it seemed impossible that the vast and ruthless South African war machine could be challenged. But the very success of South African capitalism created the class that has destroyed apartheid.

Whatever the crazed theorists of apartheid might say, millions of workers could not all be bused hundreds of miles to and from factories every day.

Despite 10 years of unparalleled harassment of Black people, by 1970, not a single town or city in the country had a white majority. Over five million Black Africans lived in "white" towns and millions more in surrounding townships. The factories, townships and schools became centers of struggle.

Capitalism created a relatively skilled working class that could strangle profits. Changes in the economy and society created opportunities for resistance. But people's determination to fight was crucial.

The apartheid state used the most brutal methods to try to crush resistance. Sometimes it managed to win a few months or years of peace. But the struggle would rise up again.

Eventually, white bosses feared that without change, revolution was possible. First, the authorities tried to create and buy off a Black middle class and set up "homeland" leaders as alternatives to the genuine opposition.

When that failed, the government was forced to negotiate with the ANC and others.

The women and men who have led and taken part in the struggles over 45 years are the real heroes of the South African movement.

Their battles and their victories are one of the greatest achievements of the working-class movement.

Their battles and their victories are one of the greatest achievements of the working-class movement. They have shown that there is no tyranny so strong tat it cannot be toppled by the struggle of workers.