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Sordid elements of the liberation struggle revealed
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November 26, 2009
Inside Quatro: Uncovering the exile history of the ANC and Swapo
by Paul Trewhela
Jacana R180
Review by James Mitchell
Heroic struggle for liberation, or just one load of thugs trying to displace another mob of thugs? Neither, of course, but wouldn't it be so much simpler if we had clearly defined goodies and baddies?
Alas, real life's not like that.
In a review (see below in this article) of the new biography of Chris Hani, Leon Marshall zeroes in on the "What if...?" factor. What if Hani had not been shot? What if Hani was alive today? What if Hani led South Africa? As Marshall writes, "intriguing scenarios" follow therefrom.
This author (who, by the way, writes like a gem): Paul Trewhela is, above all, a true believer.
He's not like polemicist RW Johnson... a believer who converted to another faith; instead he seeks the ideal. Never mind that this ideal may have been as exploded as the belief in a flat earth; Trewhela's still there, preaching the cause.
He was a member of the SA Communist Party, imprisoned from 1964 to 67, then exiled. (He also, poor chap, reported for The Star, but was dismissed in 1962.)
Trewhela left the party because it proved not to be what it claimed. In "The problem of communism in Southern Africa" he writes that this "problem... is in turn central to the dictatorship in Zimbabwe, the sordid farce of its electoral system, collusion with this dictatorship by the government of South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki and the humiliating spectacle of the leaders of the Southern African Development Community in a phalanx of agreement with President Robert Mugabe, their old and young grey heads as fixed and corpse-like as the Politburo of Soviet Communist Party lined up on Lenin's tomb in Moscow in days of yore".
Mbeki's glad-handing of Mugabe was as blind and immoral, Trewhela suggests, as the manner in which another South African willingly served as an apologist for Stalin's murderous collectivisation policy.
Trewhela describes how two young Rhodes scholars (Oxford 1931) travelled on a four-week Intourist journey to the Soviet Union in 1932. One, New Zealander Geoffrey Cox, saw and understood and described the "State-enforced famine in the Soviet Union (which) brought about the death of millions and gave a massive stimulus to the Gulag: the state-enforced system of slave labour and working to death, most horribly in the frozen goldfields at Kolyma in eastern Siberia, where millions of famine victims were deported under armed guard, to work and die". The other - South African Bram Fisher - saw it as "the only method whereby a world communist existence could be brought into being".
The end, in other words, justifies the means. As Trewhela sums up: "Advocacy of terroristic state behaviour has a long history in southern Africa."
All but one of the essays and articles in this book come from Trewhela's writing over half a century. The exception is the piece A miscarriage of democracy, by Bandile Ketelo, Amos Maxongo, Zamxolo Tshona, Ronnie Masango and Luvo Mbengo, describing the 1984 MK mutiny, its causes and aftermath, including the details of torture and public execution.
That was Hani's time. In The ANC Prison Camps: An Audit of Three Years, Trewhela notes how Hani later presented a facade of openness, while doing his best to minimise the horrors of Quatro. At no point did he come clean. And yet, "the more the evidence is studied, the more it appears that Hani has adapted himself chameleon-like to every terrain".
Can there be any doubt that, far from being the ascetic, principled leader of a new South Africa, Hani would have headed for the fleshpots in the same way as, say, the SACP's Blade Nzimande? (Flashback: "In 1968 a batch of Umkhonto defectors... accused their commanders of extravagant living...")
Alternatively, that he would have become "an impressive and indefatigable bureaucrat... genial, hardworking, ruthless, shrewd". Oh, sorry, that's from a description of Nikolai Yezhov, aka "the bloody dwarf", who served as head of the NKVD and Stalin's butcher. It comes from a book about Yezhov by J Arch Getty, a US professor, and NI Naumov, deputy chief of Moscow's Communist Party archives.
The possibilities are endless. But reading Trewhela, you realise that corruption of soul and spirit is everywhere.
Hani: A Life Too Short
By Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp
Review by Leon Marshall
When the name Chris Hani comes up, the first thought is: What if...?
I never got to meet Hani, but as a political writer during the 1970s and 1980s I was acutely aware of his reputation as a liberation fighter. By the time the transition processes started in the early '90s, there was no doubt that he was going to feature prominently in the new scheme of things.
News of his assassination on April 10, 1993 came as a terrible shock for the way it snuffed out the life of an evidently remarkable individual and for the frightful implications it held for a country then so delicately poised between peace and calamity. I remember sensing the same dread I had felt as a youngster when told of John F Kennedy's assassination. Fear of somebody pushing the nuclear button was not far-fetched in those Cold War times.
With these thoughts in mind I started reading. I was curious how the authors, former journalist colleagues of mine, would handle the subject. A problem with Struggle history writing is that ordinary mortals on the side of the victors so easily get turned into mythological heroes. There are examples of that preceding the ANC.
The authors did not have the advantage of a close personal acquaintance with Hani. They had to reconstruct his personality and political role, and assess his character, through the eyes and minds of relatives and close associates. Not surprisingly, there is not much by way of a critical look into the Hani persona, which was a thought that kept niggling.
It is a rivetting read nevertheless, providing insights into the life and times of a remarkable individual who could have gone on to make who knows what imprint on a democratic South Africa.
It says something about the family Hani grew up in that he got taught to read even before he went to school, and that reading apparently remained a love, and often an escape, from the harsh realities of the violent world he got caught up in.
He studied law, though the more philosophical disciplines of anthropology and sociology were his aspiration. His marks were not good - hardly surprising, considering how his mind got filled from early on with thoughts about the indignities suffered by his compatriots and the conviction that socialism was the surest way out of their plight.
Then there was the robust side to his character, which got him incarcerated first by the apartheid establishment, then in Botswana where he fled, and later in Lesotho. It saw him emerge as a key figure in the Umkhonto weSizwe campaign to dislodge white minority rule through violent means. It is this aspect, perhaps, that defines Hani best of all. It forms the bulk of this story about him.
He comes across as the dedicated soldier to whom fitness and discipline were of prime importance, and who led fearlessly from the front. It is said he was not flamboyant, contrary to popular perceptions. That he was charismatic is undoubted. Many remember him as warm and kind, and from just about everything said about him, leadership came to him naturally. Therein lies the intriguing part.
The book in large part chronicles the Struggle, which is enlightening in itself for the thorough manner in which it places events in time and space. It puts into unexpected broader perspective the attitudes and goings-on that plagued the liberation army and the ANC's exile movement from within and that brought on the horrors perpetrated at places like its infamous Quatro detention centre in Angola. It goes into fair detail of how perilously close Hani came to being executed for no other reason than that he, with a group of fellow guerrillas, dared criticise the MK and ANC exile leadership.
What irked Hani and his fellow signatories is telling when considered in light of some of the party's present-day travails. They objected to the leadership's detachment from the foot soldiers and the good life they were making for themselves rather than directing their efforts at the Struggle. They spoke of "the rot" manifesting itself in things like "secret trials and secret executions", "careerism", "mysterious business enterprises", leaders keeping cars and getting allowances, and a commander-in-chief who has "a posh and militarily irrelevant car at his disposal".
The criticism was considered a grave offence. A military tribunal voted in favour of executing the signatories. It was only thanks to the intervention of the "legion of admirers" the young Hani had that the death sentence was commuted to suspension. He described the experience as a painful moment.
As I read on, still wondering what role Hani might have played in a democratic South Africa, it struck me how often references were made to his easy association and empathy with the rank-and-file. He seemed to harbour a considerable disdain for the apparatchicks who dictated the Struggle from the safety of their offices.
It seems that he was a committed communist, to the point apparently that he refused to accept that its failure in the Soviet bloc necessarily meant that it would fail in South Africa. But he was a populist as well who believed the ideology should serve the people and not be there for the comfort of the bureaucrats. It was this, in addition to his reputation as a liberation fighter, that made him the popular figure he was, to the point that he got noticed wherever he went after his return from exile.
It was this, too, that made him the prime enemy of the Nationalist regime and which, more so following his election as leader of the SACP, must have contributed to his assassination.
In the mind of Janusz Walus and his handler, Clive Derby-Lewis, his vilification as a communist hardliner would have caused him to grow into the prime evil threatening white society.
What would have been interesting is to have seen more about the relationship between Hani and Thabo Mbeki. They were opposites in character in the roles they played in the Struggle, and to an extent in the transitional negotiations.
Hani, given his status and popular appeal, would no doubt have figured prominently in the new government. That presents intriguing scenarios.
The authors could not be expected to answer the "what if...?" Nobody can. But what one gets to understand about Hani from this excellent book is that he might not have been the kind of government minister who would have turned up in a top-of-the-range BMW to address the masses living in squatter camps.
Hani: A Life Too Short is published by Jonathan Ball at R190.
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