At a Glance
Soweto and the Making of an Organiser
Popo Molefe grew up in Soweto — the vast township southwest of Johannesburg that the apartheid system had created as the residential area for the African workers whose labour the city required and whose presence it simultaneously needed and resented. Soweto in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a community of extraordinary political vitality beneath the surface of its enforced ordinariness: the ANC's underground was present in it even after the organisation's banning, the Black Consciousness movement was developing in its schools and youth clubs, and the generation that would rise in June 1976 was forming its political consciousness in its streets and classrooms.
The political culture of Soweto — the inheritance of ANC tradition, the energy of the Black Consciousness movement, the experience of the 1976 uprising and its aftermath — shaped Molefe in ways that were specific to the township. He learned to organise in a community where organisation was both necessary and dangerous, where every political gathering was a potential security risk and where the continuity of organisational life depended on the maintenance of community trust rather than on formal institutional structures that the security apparatus could destroy by arresting their leaders. This experience gave him a political education that was concrete and community-grounded in ways that distinguished him from activists whose formation had been more institutional or more academic.
His election as UDF general secretary in 1983 reflected the recognition within the broader liberation movement that his combination of Soweto community experience, organisational skill, and political commitment made him the right person for the role that the UDF's administrative heart required. The general secretary of a federation of four hundred organisations needed to be simultaneously a political thinker, an administrative manager, a relationship builder, and a person whose personal authority and community credibility could hold together the diverse coalition that the UDF represented. Molefe was that person.
The UDF's Administrative Architecture
The United Democratic Front was not a single organisation but a coalition — a federation of more than four hundred separate organisations that had affiliated to it, ranging from local civic associations and street committees to national trade unions and the revived Indian congresses. The challenge of making this coalition function as a coherent political force was primarily administrative: developing the systems and the procedures through which four hundred organisations in different parts of the country with different political cultures and different organisational capacities could coordinate their activities in ways that produced collective impact rather than dispersed noise.
This administrative challenge was, in the context of the mid-1980s, inseparable from a security challenge. The UDF was operating under conditions of escalating state repression — the partial state of emergency of 1985, the nationwide state of emergency of 1986, the detention of thousands of activists, the restrictions on organisations and individuals, and the extra-legal violence of the security apparatus's hit squads and its Inkatha proxies. Building and maintaining the UDF's administrative infrastructure in these conditions required constant adaptation — developing communication systems that were resistant to interception, maintaining organisational continuity through the repeated arrest and detention of officials, and finding ways to sustain the UDF's national presence when many of its most prominent figures were in prison or in hiding.
Molefe's work as general secretary was the work of building and maintaining this infrastructure under conditions that were designed to prevent exactly that. His effectiveness in the role was reflected in the fact that the UDF remained a functioning national force through the worst years of the state of emergency, continued to coordinate the campaigns that maintained the pressure on the apartheid state, and emerged from the emergency period with enough institutional capacity to play a significant role in the Mass Democratic Movement's defiance campaigns of 1989.
The Delmas Trial: The State's Attack on the UDF's Leadership
The Delmas Treason Trial — named for the small town in the eastern Transvaal where the pre-trial hearings were conducted — was the apartheid government's most ambitious attempt to use the judicial system to destroy the UDF's leadership. The prosecution charged a group of UDF leaders with high treason, alleging that they had conspired with the banned ANC to overthrow the state through the organisation of the township uprisings of 1984 and 1985. The accused included Molefe as UDF general secretary, Terror Lekota as UDF national chairman, and several other prominent UDF figures.
The trial was a marathon proceeding that began in 1985 and produced its first convictions in 1988. Molefe was convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment — a sentence that, if served in full, would have removed him from the political mainstream through the entire transition period. The subsequent appeal resulted in the sentence being reduced, and he was eventually released, but the years he spent in prison were years in which the UDF and the MDM continued to organise without him in his formal role.
The Delmas Trial and its convictions were a measure of the threat that the apartheid government perceived in the UDF's leadership. The charges of treason — the most serious charge available under South African law — reflected the government's assessment that the UDF's organisation of the township resistance constituted not merely political opposition but an attempt to overthrow the state. The convictions were a pyrrhic victory: the UDF continued to function despite the imprisonment of its most prominent leaders, and the mass democratic movement that emerged in the late 1980s demonstrated that the movement's organisational capacity was too widely distributed to be neutralised by the arrest of any leadership group.
The MDM Defiance Campaigns and the Path to Transition
The Mass Democratic Movement that emerged in the late 1980s — the informal coalition that continued the UDF's political work when the formal federation's structures were increasingly suppressed — organised the defiance campaigns of August and September 1989 that were among the final significant acts of the internal resistance movement. The campaigns involved coordinated acts of civil disobedience across multiple sites simultaneously, deliberately violating emergency restrictions in ways that demonstrated the movement's continued organisational capacity despite years of emergency repression.
The MDM's defiance campaigns contributed to the political climate in which FW de Klerk, newly installed as State President, made the announcements of 2 February 1990 that unbanned the ANC, the SACP, the PAC, and other organisations and committed the government to negotiations. The causal relationship between the defiance campaigns and de Klerk's decision is complex and contested — there were many factors in the decision — but the internal resistance's demonstration of continued vitality was among the signals that contributed to the government's assessment that the apartheid order was not sustainable.
Molefe's role in this final phase of the internal resistance was shaped by his imprisonment — he was in prison for part of this period, exercising influence through the networks he had built rather than through direct participation in the MDM's activities. His release and the democratic transition that followed brought him back into the active political mainstream at a moment when the administrative and organisational skills he had developed as UDF general secretary could be deployed in the very different but equally demanding context of democratic governance.
Premier of Gauteng: The Organiser as Administrator
Popo Molefe's election as Premier of Gauteng Province in 1994 — the first premier of the newly constituted province that encompassed Johannesburg, Pretoria, and the surrounding Witwatersrand area — was the institutional recognition of the organisational capacity that had characterised his entire career. The Premier of Gauteng was the chief executive of the province that contained South Africa's economic heartland: the gold mining industry, the financial centre, the manufacturing base, and the largest concentration of the country's population and its political institutions. Managing it required exactly the combination of administrative skill, political judgment, and relationship management that Molefe had been developing since his Soweto organising days.
The challenge of post-apartheid provincial governance was in many ways the most difficult phase of Molefe's career — not because it required less courage than the liberation struggle had, but because it required a different kind of skill. The liberation movement had been built on the mobilisation of community energy against an oppressive state; the post-apartheid government had to convert that energy into institutional capacity, to translate the movement's political commitments into administrative practice, and to do so within the constraints of limited resources, a civil service inherited from the apartheid era, and the expectations of a community that had been promised that liberation would transform their material conditions.
Legacy: The Administrator of Liberation
Popo Molefe's legacy is the legacy of the organiser who understood that political movements are only as effective as their administrative infrastructure — that the inspiring speeches and the mass mobilisations and the acts of individual courage that fill the historical record of the liberation struggle were possible only because someone was managing the logistics, maintaining the communication systems, developing the organisational procedures, and doing the unglamorous administrative work that kept the movement functional.
He was the UDF's general secretary — the person who built and maintained the administrative backbone of the most important internal anti-apartheid coalition in South African history. He was the Delmas trialist who was convicted of treason for doing that work and who served years in prison rather than abandon it. He was the post-apartheid premier who applied the same organisational capacity to the different but equally demanding challenges of democratic governance. His career traced the full arc of the liberation generation's contribution: from community organiser to liberation movement administrator to political prisoner to democratic leader — the path of the people who made the movement and then made the country it had been fighting to build.