— 02/08/2008 Thoughts on the commemoration of Robert Sobukwe
'RUSSIANS' AND 'AMERICANS' IN PUBLIC LIFE IN SOUTH AFRICA
Paul Trewhela
One of the most major leaders of resistance to the apartheid system from fifty years ago - now almost invisible, the outcome of a process of 'deliberate selective remembrance…a concerted effort of a blackout or load shedding,' in the words of the director of the Pan African Foundation, Thami Ka Plaatjie – is being commemorated in South Africa this year on the thirtieth anniversary of his death. (City Press, 2/2/2008) Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was the first president of the Pan Africanist Congress, which formally broke away from the African National Congress in 1959 and initiated the campaign of pass-burning that culminated in the massacre of 69 African demonstrators at Sharpeville in March 1960. When he completed a prison sentence in 1963, the apartheid regime kept him in total isolation from normal human contact on Robben Island for a further six years, and under severe restrictions until his death in 1978. The Pan African Foundation will host a number of activities in Sobukwe's memory. The first will be at Orlando, Soweto, on February 28, at which speakers will include Dr Nthato Motlana, Lybon Mabasa and Dr Mohau Pheko. The second event will be held at the Cape Technikon, where speakers will include Mlamli Makwethu. Another will be a visit to his grave in Graaff-Reinet (his birth-place) on March 21, the anniversary of the massacre at Sharpeville. In partnership with the Foundation, Sobukwe's alma mater, the University of Fort Hare, will host a seminar in his honour in April.
The fate of the PAC, once it was crushed inside South Africa
Once a major force in South African resistance to apartheid, which for a few years threatened the political pre-eminence of the ANC - led within South Africa in the early Sixties by Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Govan Mbeki - the PAC was hugely repressed by the apartheid regime in the early Sixties with jailings and hangings, and largely fell apart in exile, though it had a major influence on the Black Consciousness movement which grew up in South Africa after the PAC had itself been crushed. In exile, the PAC lacked the organising structure of a global superpower to hold it together, provided to the ANC by the Soviet Union in the form of weapons, funds, military training, political education and a world-wide network of propaganda support. On Robben Island, PAC members faced the worst prison conditions of all political prisoners prior to the arrival of the ANC contingent in 1964 headed by Mandela. As described by one of the PAC prisoners of that time, Moses Dlamini, in a little-known but shocking autobiographical account, Hell-hole Robben Island (Spokesman Press, Nottingham, Britain, 1984), young members of the PAC were dispersed in the collective cells of the most brutalised and brutal criminal prisoners in South Africa, who were organised in gangs which carried out murders inside the prison, and where they were threatened with homosexual gang rape.
The hidden ordeal of the PAC prisoners on Robben Island
This was a conscious attempt by the apartheid state to crush the PAC through agency of the criminal gangs. The novel Robben Island by DM Zwelonke (pseudonym of one of the young PAC prisoners, published in Britain by Heinemann in 1973) evokes the plight of a young PAC prisoner who kills one of his criminal assailants in the cells, in self-defence. No subsequent convicted political prisoners faced such a terrible ordeal. The ANC prisoners, led by Mandela, who arrived afterwards in June 1964, had a powerful international legal defence network that the PAC entirely lacked. No serious attention was provided to the appalling situation of the PAC prisoners on Robben Island, or to the lifelong isolation of Sobukwe, by the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, controlled as this was in exile by the ANC and in particular by the South African Communist Party. In one of the most shaming scandals of South African political life of the past half century, all the more for concealing as it does the very lowest depths of Robben Island as a safe deposit box for political dissent, the PAC was kept shrouded from public attention. Paradoxically, its all but total eclipse as the ANC strode unchallenged into government after 1990 has permitted its later sympathisers a little space for dissent - for critical thought, and intellectual independence - as the ANC morphed overnight into a colossus of nepotism and self-advancement. There is a possibility here of a more healthy civic culture in the future.
The place of Russia in modern South African political life
It is not yet possible to make a proper estimate of the full damage inflicted on South African public life by the despotic history of the Russian empire, as this shaped itself in grotesquely totalitarian form in the 20th century as the Soviet Union. The great model for a majority of exiled leaders of the ANC as they formed the first post-apartheid government in 1994 was a state where there has never been more than the merest whisper of democratic institutions. South Africa's fate, despite the liberal elements in its Constitution of 1994, was to pass from a regime modelled on a residual respect for Adolf Hitler to one modelled on a residual respect for Stalin. There now seems little room to doubt that the first act of ANC government from its first days in office (probably without knowledge of the elderly President Mandela, whose role was primarily symbolic anyway) was to seize the state to fund itself. That blur between Party and State which characterised the Soviet Union was implanted in South Africa by the ANC. The presence within the ANC of the SACP – a presence that grew stronger and stronger every decade until 1990, under the principle of 'dual membership' - was exactly what Sobukwe and the PAC had objected to in the late 1950s, alongside a racialised objection to the influence of whites and 'Indians' on a political party then restricted to black Africans. The force of the PAC's suspicions about the role of Russia in South African political life, represented very actively and effectively by the SACP within the ANC, can now be reviewed more objectively from the vantage point of the ANC’s record as government.
The arms deal and 'the Second Coming of Jesus'
The arms deal of 1998/99, which seems to have been in preparation from almost as soon as the ANC took office, appears to have had the primary purpose of arming the ANC for government in perpetuity. Its primary object was to fund the ANC for election victory in 1999. Then followed the Imvume Oilgate scandal, with the aim once again of funding the ANC out of public taxation, through state bequest of money to the party in readiness for the elections of 2004. The Eskom energy crisis suggests that once again, provision of public funds to the ANC through government contracts awarded to itself in the shape of the Chancellor House coal-supply company, was a predominant motive in the combination of sleaze and inertia that has brought South Africa to its most severe economic crisis in decades. [See 'Economic meltdown in South Africa' (7 February 2008)]. Government incompetence does not exclude competence in funding itself at public expense. We are talking here of arrogance so supreme it is almost funny. The ANC elite really does seem to believe, in the words of its president, Jacob Zuma, that it was born to rule ‘until the Second Coming of Jesus’. This is a disorder of the head, a kind of political reality problem, which appears to accord with the mindset that put in motion the arms deal and all the other subsequent deals to fund this party, previously funded over decades by the Soviet Union and other state donors.
'South Africa belongs to us'
No wonder this party has shown it cannot run an economy. Neither could the Soviet Union. The Eskom energy disaster follows the pattern of statist economic and human calamities from Stalin's collectivisation of the peasantry, to Mao's Great Leap Forward and his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to Pol Pot's extermination of the intelligentsia and professional classes, and so on, and on. What more than anything characterises the ANC elite is its unbounded belief in its own infallible right to govern. 'A History of South Africa: South Africa belongs to us' - that actually is the title of a supposedly serious history of South Africa by the late Dr Francis Meli, published by the Zimbabwe Publishing House, Indiana University Press and James Currey in London in 1988. It will not be appearing in a second edition. Dr Meli (it was his exile 'travelling name') earned his doctorate from the University of Leipzig in the former German Democratic Republic, was a member of the ANC National Executive Committee and a senior member of the SACP in exile; and was editor (though alcoholic) of the ANC monthly journal, Sechaba, edited in London. He was also a spy for the apartheid state's Directorate of Military Intelligence, before dying in South Africa (very probably from poison) in 1990, shortly after his return. South Africa belongs to us! There Meli, a commissar among ANC troops at Nova Catengue camp in southern Angola in the late 1970s, told an unwanted truth. Those five words reveal the rationale of the ruling party in South Africa, as much as they reveal the rationale of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or the Socialist Unity Party of Meli’s student years in the GDR: those failed states.
A disease of the brain, Sovietitis
It suggests a congenital inability to govern honestly, rationally and with minimal competence. There's too much Sovietitis of the brain. An almost religious faith of this elite in its own right to govern, as a Chosen Elect - a form of dissociation from ordinary reality - brings a train of disasters in its wake. It is the other side to what Thami Ka Plaatjie of the Pan African Foundation, writing in City Press about the occlusion of Sobukwe in modern South African history, calls a 'tragedy of selective remembrance'. It is so refreshing, then, to read South African writers who have learnt and dared to think for themselves, out of the box, outside the prison-of-the-mind of the ANC’s Sovietitis. A number of these writers come more or less loosely from the tradition of the PAC, rather than that of the ANC. What they also have in common to a greater or lesser degree has been an education in the civic and democratic political tradition of the United States, where a number have spent time as mature students. Two generations of ANC leaders tutored themselves in Russian despotism, taking lessons from a nation in which a fraught and compromised democracy has as brief and fragile an existence as in South Africa. The younger writers educated themselves in a more open and civic parliamentary tradition.
Inconsistencies in the tradition of Pan Africanism
The Pan Africanist tradition was itself compromised by inconsistencies in its relation to the Soviet Union, while not receiving its material benefits. George Padmore (1903-59), the 'leading theoretician of Pan Africanism,' as he was described by a former Robben Island prisoner from its worst days, was a leading Communist official in Moscow from 1930 to 1933, when he broke with the Communist International over the change in Stalin's policy towards French and British colonialism. But his major study, Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa (Dobson, London, 1956), uncritically preserved important elements in the ideology and practice of the Soviet Union when he advocated a United States of Africa based upon state control of the 'main sector of the national economy' (p.377). This, and the motto of Padmore's leading intellectual pupil, the first President of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah – 'Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added onto you' – lead straight to the abuses now plain to see in South Africa under ANC government. Alongside this, the exiled PAC's decades-long attachment to Maoism in China asserted merely Stalinism in another form. Effectively, the PAC advocated politicisation of the state and the economy in the interest of the 'big men' of the ruling party, together with a long-standing advocacy of the one-party state, no less than did the ANC. In recalling the PAC leader Peter Raboroko's description of Sobukwe as the 'sea-green incorruptible', Thami Ka Plaatjie writes: 'Corruption is not only petty theft but also the selling away of a people's birthright to land.' This gives no guidance as to how a ruling political party may be stopped from milking the economy and the state in its own interest, as has happened in country after country in Africa following independence, not least in Zimbabwe.
A new generation of public intellectuals that refuses to kowtow
What is new in South Africa, though, is a generation of public intellectuals who are not prisoners of the old statist certitudes which afflicted both ANC and PAC. In his response to criticism from the SACP secretary general and kingmaker of the Zuma presidency, Blade Nzimande, the words of Mathatha Tsedu, editor of City Press - 'We are not going to bow to the new gods' - recall the best spirit of the journalism of fifty years ago, when Nat Nakasa, Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba, Alex La Guma and other writers defined their own conscience in opposition to the apartheid state. [See "Brave response to Communist Party leader's 'apartheid-style intimidation'" (8/2/2008)]. Dr Mohau Pheko, who will be speaking at the commemoration of Robert Sobukwe in Soweto at the end of this month, wrote vividly this week about the threat of political vigilantism in South Africa: a threat from a tradition nourished on Sovietitis as if its mother's milk. [See 'Political vigilantism' (5/2/2008)]. A new book published by Dr Xolela Mangcu, chairman of the Platform for Public Deliberation, similarly asks the crucial questions. [See 'To the Brink: Fate of Democracy in South Africa' (5/2/2008)]. All three have studied in the United States. Alongside these educators of South Africa in a better civic practice than the country has ever so far experienced, the courage of the editor of the Sunday Times, Mondli Makhanya, of columnists such as Justice Malala and of investigators of the calibre of Ferial Haffajee and Sam Sole (editor and journalist on the Mail&Guardian) is a precious gift of freedom. South Africa is free to choose in which air it prefers to breathe. Despots actual and potential should be warned: it is not an easy country to tyrannise.