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Thoughts on the New South Africa
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Thoughts on the New South Africa by Neville Alexander
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First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2013 10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa +2711 628 3200 www.jacana.co.za Š The Estate of Neville Alexander, 2013 All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-4314-0586-2 Also available as an e-book d-PDF ISBN 978-1-4314-0587-9 ePUB ISBN 978-1-4314-0588-6 mobi ISBN 978-1-4314-0589-3 Cover design publicide Set in Ehrhardt 12/16pt Job No. 001889 See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za
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Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Part 1: Strands of struggle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1. Rhythms and patterns of history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Reflections on the Unity Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 3. Azanian moments and meanings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Part 2: Continuities and discontinuities – transitional questions . . . . . . . . . . . 37 4. The elephant in the room . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 5. Education in crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 6. Language in the new South African university . . . . . . . 74 7. Language, class and power in the new South Africa . . . 87 Part 3: Nation building on a dying culture – rainbow or Garieb? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 8. On ‘race’ in South Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
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9. Affirmative action and black economic empowerment in post-apartheid South Africa. . . . . . . 10. Has the rainbow vanished? The meaning of national unity in the new South Africa . . . . . . . . . 11. Afrophobia and the racial habitus in the new South Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12. Enough is as good as a feast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
132 156 172 189
List of abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
vi
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Introduction
Introduction
Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the supposed end of the Cold War, for reasons I discuss towards the end of this book, human beings have been thrown into a situation where almost everything, from religion to politics to economic systems to what we refer to as values, has to be revisited, reconceptualised and re-articulated in a language that frees us from the clichĂŠs and shibboleths of the 19th and 20th centuries. The essential principles of what facilitates egalitarianism, as opposed to unequal social conditions and life chances, have not changed. But societies and the global village have changed so radically that to continue to analyse and describe things as though we were still living in 1848 or 1948 or even 1984 is to be woefully blind and self-defeating. The ecological disasters we are facing are the bottom line. Humanity either takes these seriously as a starting point for conceiving of and working for a different world, or we all go lemming-like over the abyss. South Africa is a microcosm of our modern world. It is one of a few countries where the relationships, proportions and vii
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dispositions of the population reflect the global proportions, dispositions and possibilities for human interactions. For this reason, though it is ‘an ordinary country’, as I have written elsewhere, it is one where hope for a better world remains alive. Indeed, the main reason I have felt it necessary to publish in book form these essays and talks, many of which were first presented in recent years (in slightly different versions) in public forums such as newspapers, journals and public debates, is that I genuinely believe that it is not too late to change course in the new South Africa. As one who has not merely observed the transition to a democratic polity but has been involved in many different ways and at many different levels in bringing this new South Africa into being, I make bold to claim that my thoughts about developments at the time they actually happened, as well as the intentions of my intellectual, scholarly or journalistic interventions, are worth recording and worth revisiting, in order to act as a possible launching pad (one among many) for a national rethink and dialogue about where we are heading as a society and where we think we ought to be heading. The title of this book makes a direct reference to a marvellous book – Thoughts on South Africa – by a remarkable South African, Olive Schreiner, which I read in prison on Robben Island and which had an enormous and lasting impact on me. My sincere wish is that readers will consider these thoughts, take a step back and try to get a perspective on what has actually been happening since 1990, when the new South Africa began. Even more optimistically, I hope that such a rethink will inspire the reader to want to find a point viii
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Introduction
of engagement, with a view to initiating or becoming part of trajectories that can lead to that other country most of us had in mind during the years of Sturm und Drang, especially during the 1980s.
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Introduction
Part One Strands of Struggle
How did the events of 1990–1994 come about? In this first section, I look at the historical background to our struggle for national liberation and against the system of racial capitalism. I attempt to identify the patterns of social development that have shaped South Africa as a polity, an economy and a society. Because of many distortions and, sometimes, conscious falsifications of the history of our struggle, I have chosen to focus in these chapters on two strands of the national liberation movement, properly so called, with which I have been intimately involved, and discuss their contributions in an elegiac tone and in a biographical mode. My concentration on the Unity Movement and the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) rather than on the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) is, in this sense, part and parcel of my own political biography.
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rhythms and patterns of history
Rhythms and patterns of history 1
rhythms and patterns of history
There has been at work a mole of history of a special kind. It is a species of rodent that seems to be more myopic and blinkered than your common or garden mole. Whether intended or not, one of the most reprehensible outcomes of its burrowing and sniffing around has been the virtual blocking of all channels of memory that do not in one way or another relate to the historic activities of the Congress Movement. In order not to be misunderstood or, more likely, misrepresented, it is essential that I make it clear that the struggle for national liberation in South Africa was, and is, a multifaceted process in which the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies came to play a dominant and even a hegemonic role. By way of helping us to understand the forces at work in this struggle, a brief sketch of the historical background is desirable. In South Africa, the period of primary resistance can be said to stretch from that fateful day in the first week of February 1488 when the first Khoe herder threw the first stone at the Portuguese buccaneers commanded by Bartolomeu Dias in the 3
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Bahia dos Vaqueiros (probably Mossel Bay) until – more than 400 years later – the day on which Chief Bambatha was killed in April 1906.1 However, beginning in April 1652, the specific modalities of the colonising process and of the penetration of capital led over a period of some 250 years to a contradictory and uneven process of resistance, accommodation and collaboration on the part of the indigenous people across the sub-continent. Thus, for example, by the end of the 17th century, when the children of the first slaves and the conquered Khoe clans were well on the way to becoming enforced subjects of the Dutch colony, beyond the Hex River mountains virtually all of the indigenous people were still living in independent, if fragile, sovereign political entities. Many of them continued to do so until the second half of the 19th century when, as the result of the discovery of diamonds, gold and other minerals, they were rapidly and forcibly subjugated and dispossessed. The patriarchal racial-caste system of the pre-capitalist period provided the sociological materials from which the subsequent system of racial capitalism came to be fashioned. If we take as given these 250 years of the evolution of the modern capitalist system in southern Africa by the time the Union of South Africa came into being in 1910, it suffices that we characterise the resultant social formation with broad brushstrokes. The negotiated settlement between the British government and the defeated Boer generals created or, in some respects, reinforced the template upon which political dynamics over the next century would be shaped. In brief, the socio-political system of segregation and of its successor, 4
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apartheid, was established in laws derived from the blueprint contained in the Report of the South African Native Affairs Commission of 1903–5, which met under the chairmanship of Sir Godfrey Lagden.2 The most decisive recommendations of the Commission were the macro-apartheid scheme of territorial segregation by which blacks in the rural hinterland would be ghettoised in ‘native reserves’ subject to control by hereditary and government-appointed chiefs, who had the power to allocate land, and into urban locations (today’s townships), ‘influx’ into which would be regulated by means of a system of pass laws. Political segregation was recommended along the lines that black people who fulfilled certain literacy and property requirements would be represented in parliament by whites.3 All of these recommendations formed the strategic matrix that generated the hundreds of segregation and apartheid laws for more than 60 years after 1910. These measures were notoriously justified in terms of social Darwinist and other so-called ‘scientific’ racism (including Nazi) ideologies. Bluebeard’s Castle and the shattered dream The struggle for national liberation, that is, the political and cultural as well as the organisational response of the oppressed black majority section of the population to these strategies of the white supremacist administrations, had been shaped by the acceptance by the ‘mission elite’ and other incipient middle class individuals among the oppressed groups in the course of more than a century that the attainment of freedom and equality within the emerging system was not only necessary 5
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but also possible. In this regard, the hegemony of the Christian mission and of the politics of liberal philanthropy had become etched very deeply into the consciousness of the prospective leadership of the political movements of the oppressed. Elsewhere, I have described in detail how the caste consciousness of this leadership gave rise to the notion of four ‘national groups’, three of which (Africans, coloureds and Indians) – in the words of the ANC Youth League in 1944 – were ‘oppressed’ and three of which (whites, coloureds and Indians) were ‘minorities’.4 Each leadership cadre struggled for the improvement of the status and prospects of ‘their’ community although, on occasion, they would form ‘alliances’ for joint action against particularly onerous measures. This happened, for instance, at the time when the Act of Union was being discussed in London (1908–9) and, much later, during the Defiance Campaign of 1952–3. The belief that British ‘fair play’ and liberal-democratic principles would eventually allow the oppressed to ‘go inside’5 was a tenacious delusion in the ranks of this middle class leadership, one that can only be compared with the tragic allegory of Bartok’s operatic version of Bluebeard’s Castle, as narrated inimitably by Derek Bell in order to explain the unending quest of the civil rights activists in the USA.6 In retrospect, apologists for this gradualist and pacifist strategy would argue that the cumulative effect and moral impact of their approach bore fruit, even if it did take the best part of a century. Such a claim, however, abstracts from important details, besides eliding the fact that the authors of the strategy clearly intended to get immediate relief from the oppressive 6
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measures in each case. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to maintain that in the South African case, until the beginning of the 1970s, the curve of attainment in human rights terms was a downward-sloping one. Previous ‘achievements’, such as the limited racial franchise of the 1910 Constitution and the limited access to university education and to apprenticeships for certain categories of ‘non-Europeans’, were systematically dismantled through the repeal of the relevant legislation by the apartheid regime. It is also a fact, one which explains the set of dispositions referred to here, that with episodic exceptions the movement for national liberation accepted the international legality, but not the legitimacy, of the South African state. The key to synchronising these two spheres lay in the attainment of the franchise for all adult male (later also female) South Africans. The territorial integrity of the South African state, as defined in 1910, was never questioned seriously by any tendency within the movement, although the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in the early 1930s briefly floated the idea of a Southern African Federation of Independent Soviet Socialist Republics based on linguistic-ethnic criteria. If truth be told, it is doubtful whether even the collaborationist Bantustan leaders of the 1970s and 1980s seriously believed in the gratuitous ‘independence’ that they had thrust upon them and ‘their’ peoples. Non-collaboration and non-violence Until 1960, when the massacre of Sharpeville removed the blinkers from the eyes of the entire pro-democracy political 7
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leadership of the oppressed people, non-violent approaches to the attainment of reforms and improvements – ranging from abject petitioning of the relevant authorities by respectful delegations of prominent black people, to consistently militant tactics of boycotting racially defined political institutions of government on the basis of the principle of non-collaboration with the oppressor – were the stock-in-trade of the movement for national liberation, taken as a whole. In spite of profound philosophical and strategic differences, a range of non-violent methods of struggle, which included street protests, passive resistance and defiance campaigns, strikes, boycotts, petitions, mass meetings, conferences and memoranda, were tried in many different contexts and for many different purposes, some excessively opportunistic, others hopelessly rigid and selfdefeating. But, before 1960, there was seldom any serious talk about armed revolution or insurrection, even though on the Left there was much rhetoric about ‘overthrowing the state’. Even those, such as many members of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), who accused the leaders of the Congress Movement of being ‘pacifist’ and ‘compromisist’, at best believed that one fine day a general strike would lead to the implosion of the racist regime. Political programmes The fact of the matter is that after 1949, with many detailed tactical exceptions, the strategic differences between and among the different (African nationalist, socialist, communist and pan-Africanist) tendencies in the liberation movement were hardly significant in practice, simply because the 8
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overwhelming might of the apartheid state limited the strategic options available to the forces of liberation. The ideological terrain on which the struggle for national liberation was conducted can be sketched briefly. In South Africa, as elsewhere, the advent of the Russian Revolution and, after 1945, more markedly, the Cold War left an enduring imprint on the ideological dynamics within the movement as a whole. The entire spectrum from the liberal-democratic centre to the extreme socialist Left was represented in this political landscape.7 Though there were numerous variants within each of these political milieus, and the ever-changing perception of the salience of ‘race’ complicates any analysis in terms of class position, it is possible and, at a certain level, permissible to generalise. Essentially, all these movements accepted the basic legacy of the ‘rights of man’ which had become an integral component of all political discourse in all the colonies of Europe, especially after 1945. However, the socialist Left and the CPSA considered these demands for equality and liberty to be ‘minimum demands’ rather than the end of the struggle, since socio-economic rights were either never articulated in the numerous variants of the bourgeois democratic programme, or they tended to be hobbled by explicit acceptance of the right to private property in the means of production – that is, any redistributive trajectory was obstructed at the outset. Between the non-Communist Left and the CPSA (later the South African Communist Party (SACP)) there was, generally speaking, a deep disagreement about whether the struggle for the attainment of the civil and political rights associated 9
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with the ‘minimum programme’ implied a segmentation of the national liberation struggle into two stages, in the first of which the minimum programme would be realised; following on that, the second stage of struggle (for socialist democracy) would be conducted in a relatively peaceful manner. For some tendencies within the non-Communist Left (for example in organisations such as the NEUM), the right to the land was ‘the alpha and omega’ of the struggle. Because the ‘peasants’, that is, the rural and migrant workers, would be unable to buy the land on the morrow of the bourgeois democratic revolution, even though they would have attained the right to buy and sell land, that revolution would remain ‘incomplete’. This fact would serve as the pivot on which the bourgeois democratic revolution would ‘grow over’ into the socialist revolution. Put differently, for these tendencies in the national liberation movement the struggle for national liberation was – nominally – an aspect, not a stage, of the socialist revolution. Real historical developments have rendered much of these axial debates of the 1940s and 1950s irrelevant. However, besides the fact that the debate on ‘the land question’, among many others, demonstrates an acute awareness of the difference between substantive notions of democracy and mere procedural or minimalist understandings of the concept, they were all clearly informed by the global divide between radical and liberal notions of social transformation.8 More important, however, is the fact that in all these discussions there was invariably the assumption that democratic rule would necessarily be ‘black majority’ rule. Of course, the conservative tendencies took it for granted that this would be 10
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a secular process, the tempo of which would be dictated by the speed with which ‘the white man’ would jettison his racist beliefs and practices. Thus, beginning with the seminal discussions in the CPSA about the ‘Black Republic’ towards the end of the 1920s, it was assumed as a matter of course that – in the earlier male chauvinist discourse – ‘one man one vote’ was the goal of the struggle. Group rights hardly featured as a point of discussion, except in the mid-1950s, around the time when the Freedom Charter was being debated in the Congress Movement (between ‘Charterists’ and ‘Africanists’). Even clause 2 of the Charter, ‘All national groups shall have equal rights’, is generally interpreted as referring to the right of individuals to live out their social and cultural preferences within the social category with which they identify. Besides revealing the hegemony of the individualist liberal paradigm, the main reason for this way of seeing reality was undoubtedly the fear of playing into the hands of the apartheid strategists and ideologues. Indeed, it can be said that one of the major challenges facing the post-apartheid dispensation is the creative resolution of the tension between the historically evolved ethnic and racial consciousness (race thinking) of the population and the intuitive aversion to group affiliation in the political sphere because of the ways in which segregation– apartheid had imposed and abused such racial and ‘ethnic’ categories in order to further the divide-and-rule agenda of successive white supremacist regimes. The promotion of national unity, a national identity and social cohesion more generally, with due regard to the contradictory and often 11
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conflictual potential of these goals, will depend ultimately on how this fundamental issue is approached in the future. Whatever the particular interpretations of the various programmatic documents of the South African struggle,9 the inarticulate major premise of most of them was, and is, that a democratic South Africa would inevitably be framed in terms of a non-racial ethos, a system in which ideas and practices based on the concept of ‘race’, whether viewed through the discredited lens of biology or through the more realistic lens of sociology, would tend to wither away because of the demographic reality of a black majority that had been brutally oppressed on precisely the basis of these notions of ‘race’. It is, therefore, pertinent to note that it was the Congress Movement, with its multiracial focus based on the undoubted social reality of the four ‘races’ (African, white, coloured and Indian), that became the heir to the apartheid regime, rather than any of the other tendencies that stressed their ‘nonracial’ orientation explicitly. The dilemmas and ambivalences of different organisations about these critical ideological issues became particularly manifest in the 1970s and the 1980s when the BCM set out to create a unifying paradigm for the liberation movement as a whole, one that was to be based on the paramountcy of the interests and independence of ‘the black man’ but was also intended to inaugurate a ‘non-racial’ dispensation after the expected demise of apartheid. The mobilisations of the 1980s under the banner of the National Forum and, much more prominently and enduringly, under that of the United Democratic Front appeared to have shifted the focus of the oppressed people decisively towards the non12
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racial traditions of the movement, but it was clear to more perceptive analysts and commentators that the focus could easily be changed, depending on the balance of political forces. At the time of writing, there is no doubt at all that this focus has indeed shifted ‘back’, as it were, towards the contending multiracial traditions. The fact that the relationship between an unavoidable national South African identity and the possible sub-national identities continues to constitute the stuff of political contestation in post-apartheid South Africa today demonstrates clearly how tenacious the hold of history is on the consciousness of the masses of the people. The most optimistic conclusion we can draw from a consideration of this ongoing contestation is that it is continuing, that no ‘end of South African history’ is in sight.
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reflections on the Unity Movement
Thoughts on the New South Africa 2
reflections on the Unity Movement
Against the background of the patterns and rhythms of modern South African history I have sketched in Chapter 1, and by way of recalling the contributions of certain strands of the national liberation movement to this history, I have chosen to write about two specific individuals in the NonEuropean Unity Movement (NEUM) who had a profound influence on my own political development, and whose lives were totally dedicated to the struggle. The short recollections I reproduce here are intended to demonstrate in a concrete manner the social and individual psychological impacts that this movement had on generations of South African activists. In 1953 I had joined the Teachers’ League of South Africa (TLSA), an affiliate of the NEUM, as a 17-year-old student associate, and I was to receive my introduction to the politics of the liberation movement by dint of participating in meetings and discussions and, above all, reading with great care the literature of that unique organisation of dedicated 14
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professionals who, in their own minds, constituted ‘the vanguard of the struggle’. The TLSA, as far as its specific political and professional concerns went, was, like so many organisations in colonial and neo-colonial contexts, lamentably parochial. However, it was led for some three decades by men and women – some of whom had studied in Europe for short periods – who, because of their paranoically masked Marxist, indeed Trotskyist, leanings, were intent on being all the more visibly ‘internationalist’, that is, cosmopolitan. As a consequence, its members were regularly regaled with copious references to international, especially European, events and literature. This had a magical impact on the readership and membership of the organisation, since it projected onto our unschooled minds a kind of Vygotskyan zone of proximal development, an aspirational space, which was electrifying as a source of motivation. It was in this context that, among other things, I read about and came to discuss the implications of the famous Brown v. Board of Education case in the USA.1 The killing off by judicial fiat of the myth of ‘separate but equal’ that this case brought about, a myth which was, rhetorically, the raison d’être of the policy of apartheid, was for black South Africans (we called ourselves ‘Non-Europeans’ in those days) an event of profound emotional and spiritual significance, in spite of our deep-going reservations about the political dynamics of the civil rights movement in the USA. The effect of this case was particularly manifest in the organisations of teachers and students. 15
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Livie Mqotsi Comrade Livie (Livingstone) Mqotsi, together with an entire generation of men and women in the ranks of the NEUM, such as R.S. Canca, Ali Fataar, Jane Gool, Tshutsha Honono, Ben Kies, Joyce Meisenheimer, Leo Sihlali, I.B. Tabata, Dora Taylor, Wycliffe Tsotsi and Willem van Schoor, was one of the main formative influences in the lives of the post-World War II generation of activists who came immediately after them. Contemporary South African history has evolved along paths many of which Livie and his peers in the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA) and the New Unity Movement (NUM) predicted on the basis of acute Marxist analysis of our history and our society, but few of which they were able to travel on during their lifetime to the successful destination of a revolutionary socialist dispensation. (Of course, in the famous words of a Chinese Communist Party leader, it may still be too early to tell!) Livie Mqotsi was one of those modest, erudite people on whom one could always rely for his clarity of vision and elegant way of formulating the most appropriate approach to solving the many problems we are confronted with daily. His generosity of spirit, tenacious commitment to principle, and open-hearted embrace of all who opposed racism and capitalism – including, let it be noted, leaders of rival but allied organisations such as Comrade Chris Hani and others in the SACP, the PAC, the BCM and ANC – all these qualities made him the wonderful role model that he was, and remained, to the last. The work he did in the Eastern Cape before he was forced into exile, especially his home-grown journalistic 16
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ventures (Indaba yase Monti, Ikhwezi Lomso, among others) played a pivotal role in raising the political understanding of the youth, especially those of us who were members of the Society of Young Africa (SOYA). Minnie Gool In thinking back on those days, I realise that few people have had such a lasting impact on my life as the late Mrs Fredericks, the name I always used for Minnie Gool because of my own conservative upbringing and ingrained respect for her. I was not the only one to do so. Indeed, a whole generation of us, born in the mid- to late 1930s, cut our political teeth in or near Mrs Fredericks’s presence and came to see her as a kind of mother figure to the youth in the ‘Tabata’ faction of the NEUM during the later 1950s and the early 1960s. The outstanding features of Minnie’s being were for me (and for many others) her tremendous courage, her flaming passion, her inspiring activism and unerring, penetrating and single-minded, almost visionary, focus on the task to be accomplished, her seemingly bottomless generosity and hospitality, and her capacity for genuine love for people. As an immature 16–17-year-old student at the University of Cape Town, a ‘country bumpkin’ from Cradock in the Eastern Cape whose command of the English language was always somewhat suspect, these character traits constituted a kind of comfort zone for me. ‘Nurse’, as the people of District Six invariably referred to her, was always prepared to listen to our naïve stories of glory and disappointment. She had the human touch which other, more well-known political figures in the 17
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Unity Movement also had in large measure but never had the time to demonstrate, except in rare moments of personal or organisational crisis. Somehow Minnie, in spite of heavy familial and professional responsibilities, always found the time to indulge us, to make us feel special and worthy of being listened to with seriousness. In retrospect, I have no doubt that she must have laughed secretly to herself at the thought that we fancied that our stereotypical juvenile and youthful ‘problems’ were somehow different from and more important than any other young person’s, merely because we were involved in formal political struggle. If she did, she certainly never let on, and to this day I thank her for having smoothed my transition from juvenility to manhood by simply allowing me to tell her about my political, and often also my personal, understandings of life and society. She was, above all, an inspiration to the young men and women, girls and boys, who came together in 1956–7 to form the Cape Peninsula Students’ Union (CPSU), amid much controversy between the factions of the Unity Movement about whether or not it was ‘reactionary’ to form such a students’ association. I know that she was as much inspired by our spontaneous and naïve commitment to mass organisation and mass struggle as we were by her mature activism and controlled passion. She had much of her brother Goolam Gool’s penchant for the dramatic, even the melodramatic, and this impressed us as youngsters no end. Together with Mrs Brecker, Mrs Jardine, Mrs Fataar and many others, she formed the Parents’ Committee of the CPSU, and many were the times that we called on the committee to assist with 18
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fundraising or to give advice on organisational matters or to mediate useful contacts for mundane but essential matters such as the printing and distribution of our newsletter, which was called simply The Student. In this and in many other ways, they helped us to remove the grit from the lubricating medium of our youthful organisational machinery. Many of these parents, besides being proud of the political commitment of their children and young relatives, were happy that these young people were finding constructive outlets for all their pent-up energy and social and even academic frustrations which derived directly from the politically and culturally repressive apartheid policies. The high point of this trajectory was undoubtedly the day we took over the streets of District Six with a procession that had as its theme the Great French Revolution, ending with the showing of the inspiring Soviet film Trio Ballets in the National Theatre in William Street. It was one of the first and also one of the most successful demonstrations of the power of cultural political agitation in the mode of Bertolt Brecht and the Expressionists of the 1930s in Germany. For the first time in more than a decade, we saw an entire community coming out in open and proud support of their children, the student and worker youth, the new generation referred to in our ‘Students’ Song’, which was modelled on the ‘Song of the Komsomol’ and which we sang with great gusto at the drop of a hat. And Mrs Fredericks was the coordinating brain and heart behind this great spectacle, an event that has remained with me as one of the epiphanies of my life. Like us, Mrs Fredericks was determined to see to it that 19
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Thoughts on the New South Africa
the CPSU, within the Unity Movement context, maintained its autonomy in its sphere of operations, even though it was taken for granted that we would consult the leadership of the Movement if any major policy crises were to arise. On this score, I recall vividly how I.B. Tabata told me and a few other young CPSU members that we need not come to them on every point of interpretation, since he was more than satisfied that we understood the politics of the Movement and that we would do the right thing. For a while, there was some tension between Milan Street (where I.B. and Jane Gool held court, as it were) and Balmoral Street, where Minnie was Queen. The tension was never about policy, but rather about priorities and methods. Minnie’s natural exhibitionism, in the best sense of that word, galvanised us youngsters and we trooped after her on numerous occasions to go and extort ‘donations’ (liberatory taxes, as we understood these forays) from shopkeepers and department stores. Some of these approaches were not altogether orthodox but they appealed to us, and in retrospect I have to say that we should have done much more of that kind of thing. Minnie’s boldness, and her realisation that the youth had much to offer and should, therefore, not be constrained in respect of the ways in which they wanted to express themselves politically and organisationally, positioned her very close to our hearts. Her stories about the years she had spent in the CPSA and about all the personalities that had shaped the liberation struggle in South Africa were a fund of knowledge and experience that, at that time, we were unable to get anywhere else. There was a strange, but in the circumstances understandable, reticence 20
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Reflections on the Unity Movement
on the part of the political leadership to speak freely, or at all, about the radical roots and history of the NEUM. However, we knew without any doubt that it was in the works of people like I.B. Tabata, W.P. van Schoor, Jane Gool, Goolam Gool, B.M. Kies and others that we would find the intellectual and political weaponry with which we would have to fight against the challenges of the herrenvolk generally, and the liberals in particular. My close association with Minnie Gool was all too short in terms of time, but as an experience it has endured through all of my life hitherto. And I know that this is true of my contemporaries, many of whom speak with unqualified admiration and love of her and of the inspirational manner in which she touched our lives. We took her political commitment and her total living out of her ideas of social justice and equality completely for granted. Her closeness to the working class, and the modest dignity that she displayed in all interactions with them and with us, the young students sprung from that class and from the upwardly mobile radical middle class, came to inform my entire orientation to South African political organisation. If the Unity Movement provided the taproot of theory and paradigmatic clarity, it was the likes of Minnie Gool and Johnny Gomas who helped me to become rooted deeply and widely in the matrix of the working people. My last two meetings with Minnie, shortly before her death – which was unexpected in spite of her advanced age, because she continued to radiate wellness and happiness until the last – will stay with me as moments of the most profound joy and satisfaction. All her most endearing qualities rose to 21
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Thoughts on the New South Africa
the surface, and the manner in which she spoke about her children and her life, her grandchildren and her ‘extended (political) family’, showed very clearly that she continued to believe in a future of socialist equality and opportunity for all, the one goal that had shone as a lodestar throughout her life. With her, a great part of our tradition and of the most admirable aspects of the history of the Left in South Africa has passed on. It is important that we try to put on record as much of that tradition, and keep revealing as many of the aspects of that history, as we can. Otherwise, falsification and the invention of spurious traditions will continue to distort what actually happened. One of the most insightful and profound tenets of the Cape African Teachers’ Association, of which Livie Mqotsi was such a prominent member, was the biblical aphorism ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish’. Who can doubt that this is precisely what we are witnessing today? ‘No vision’ simply means that we are being forced to move towards the destinations predetermined for us by the international and national bourgeoisie. For it remains a fact that, as we would say today, If you have no plan, you are carrying out someone else’s plan.
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azanian moments and meanings
Azanian moments and meanings 3
azanian moments and meanings
I never met Steve Biko, even though I had ample opportunity to do so at one of the turning points in contemporary South African history. That fact is an integral part of the story I want to tell. I am motivated to do so because I believe that we should review our recent past in such a manner as to foreground the complexity of the historical process, and to counter the impression that there was some inevitable trajectory, one predetermined by some unknown, transhistorical ‘intelligence’, leading us to the situation in which we now find ourselves. A moment of national reflection Anyone who sets out to recount a segment of contemporary history has to accept that his or her version of events will be challenged, denied or corrected in various ways. When the events recounted refer to periods of violent political contestation, the danger that such an account might be condemned as deliberately falsifying is very great. If one is as 23
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thoughts3 1
2013/02/14 10:06 AM