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Tribute to Chris Hani
By: Blade Nzimande and Jeremy Cronin (SACP General and
Deputy General Secretaries)
Ten years ago,
the serving general secretary of the SACP, Chris Hani was gunned down
in his drive-way. South Africa appeared to be teetering on the brink.
For some three years, the multi-party negotiations had stumbled along
at the World Trade Centre, not very far from Hani's East Rand home. By
early April 1993, the talks had been stalled for months. The De Klerk
regime had still not come to terms with the inevitability of an ANC-dominated
democratic government.
Looking back on the period of 1990 to 1994, many commentators
now hail our "peaceful" negotiated transition. In fact, deaths
and injuries in political violence had soared to unprecedented levels
in the very midst of the negotiations. Death squads were unleashed on
commuter trains and townships. War-lords with IFP and police connections
were escorted into ANC-supporting squatter camps to shoot and plunder.
This was the case in Boipatong, hostels in Soweto, Thokoza, Shell House,
during the 7-day war in Pietermaritzburg, and in trains in Gauteng. Key
ANC and alliance grass-roots leaders were systematically targeted and
eliminated. The apartheid regime was negotiating, in a stop-start fashion,
but a bitter "low" intensity conflict was part of its negotiations
strategy.
Those who assassinated cde Chris admitted to the TRC that
they intended to provoke a violent racial back-lash. They calculated that
random revenge killings on whites would escalate into a racial civil war,
putting a definitive end to any prospect of negotiations, and therefore
of majority rule.
The assassination of cde Chris achieved precisely the opposite.
The assassination of one of the most popular of all South African political
leaders sent shock-waves through our country and throughout the world.
It provoked huge waves of popular mobilisation. Many observers at the
time noted that it was precisely in the days following cde Chris's death,
on the streets of South Africa, that de facto power in our country shifted,
finally and definitively, from the National Party government to Nelson
Mandela's ANC.
While for days a speechless FW De Klerk "was attending
a protracted family function" in Steynsburg, cde Mandela was anxiously
shepherded onto what was still an apartheid-dominated SATV to appeal to
the nation for militant calm, for resoluteness, and for a definitive date
for one-person one-vote elections in our country. On the 26th of April
1993, the National Party government finally caved in, agreeing to a firm
election date one-year hence. The rest is history.
All of the above is well known. But it is critical that
we never cease remembering and re-telling it. How we go forward into our
future is very much determined by how we recall our past. And make no
mistake, the democratic transition to which cde Chris contributed so much,
including his own life, is a transition whose meaning is constantly threatened
by a fog of re-interpretation.
We are told that it was a "peaceful" transition
- which is an insult to cde Chris, and thousands of others who died in
those years. The idea of a "peaceful" transition cloaks the
regime's low intensity conflict strategy in a convenient silence, and
it belittles the courageous work performed by cde Chris and others in
setting up self-defence units in hundreds of communities. These SDUs,
so scoffed at now, were the difference between survival and death in hundreds
of ANC communities. In the face of brutal and often random attacks, they
gave communities some hope, and indeed, the negotiations some prospect.
We are told that our transition was a "rainbow miracle"
- as if democracy descended from on high without struggle. In fact, our
democratic breakthrough was the outcome of protracted struggle over many
decades, if not centuries. Democracy was not a "miracle" but
the outcome of a hard fought-for change in the balance of forces.
The transition is often reduced to an agreement between
"wise men", obscuring mass mobilisation and struggle. In this
re-reading of our past, MK's armed struggle is reduced to a "failure".
Mass struggles are portrayed as blind and uncontrolled anarchy. We are
told that the leading slogan of the 1980s was "no education before
liberation", which is both an untruth and an insult. It insults the
constructive, bitter struggles fought for the transformation (not suspension)
of education in schools, colleges and universities; it insults the education
that happened in MK camps, in apartheid prisons, and in underground cells.
We are told that our struggle was against "racism",
an ideology, (which it was, partly), but this conveniently forgets the
capitalist growth path and system that underpinned it. Many perpetrators
have been exposed, but beneficiaries of the apartheid years still strut
about board-rooms and parliament, as if their inordinate present-day wealth
and power had no linkage whatsoever to the past. We are told that the
"whole world" isolated the apartheid regime, forgetting the
active support afforded to the regime, until very, very late in the day,
by all of the leading imperialist powers. Even the change in the attitude
of the leading imperialist countries was as a result of mass mobilisation,
public pressure and lobbying by progressive in those countries.
Those who distort our past, hope to disarm and demobilise
us in the present. They want us to forget the reality of imperialism,
the persisting legacy of capitalism, the complicity between today's "modern"
economy and the ongoing crisis of underdevelopment for the great majority.
They want us to forget collective struggle. Cde Chris Hani's life and
death, his beliefs and his deeds are a massive antidote to all of these
attempts to rub out the memory of the real struggle that was actually
fought and eventually won. To go forward, we need to remember and honour
this legacy.
Tembisile Martin Hani was born into abject poverty in Sabalele
village, in the Cofimvaba district. His father, Gilbert, was a migrant
labourer and his mother, Mary, like so many other rural African women,
carried the burden of scratching some kind of day-to-day survival out
of a devastated and overcrowded landscape. Infant mortality was the norm,
and in the Hani family, the first three children did not survive infancy.
The three last-born did survive, and included Tembisile and his younger
brother Christopher (whose name he later adopted as his MK nom-de-guerre).
The young "Chris" Hani's intellectual sharpness
could not escape the attention and admiration of the mission school teachers.
He won bursaries to further his schooling and incredibly matriculated
at the age of 16. He graduated in law from Fort Hare, aged nineteen, and
moved to Cape Town to work as an articled clerk, but he soon joined MK,
and was amongst the earliest wave of young militants. Sent out of the
country for training, he spoke up against what he considered to be timid,
ineffective leadership in the exile MK camps, and he was detained by his
own organisation for a period. He was commissar of a joint MK/Zipra group
in the 1967 Wankie campaign, an incursion into northern Zimbabwe (then
Rhodesia). The group was detected by the Rhodesian security forces some
seventeen days after crossing over the Zambezi, but they fought bravely
in a series of protracted skirmishes, inflicting casualties on the Rhodesians,
despite their superior fire-power. After nearly two months of skirmishing,
Hani successfully led the survivors of his group into Botswana. In the
1970s and 80s, Hani was infiltrated many times in and out of South Africa.
He soon became a key target of the apartheid security forces. He survived
several assassination attempts.
By the time of the unbanning of the ANC and SACP in 1990,
Chris Hani had become a legend in villages, townships, factories, schools
and universities throughout our country. Opinion polls conducted in the
early 1990s showed that he was easily the second most popular politician
(after cde Mandela, of course) in our country.
By this time he had risen to the number two position in
MK, chief of staff. Much to the surprise of those who did not know him
well, in December 1991 he left this position, and accepted election as
the SACP's full-time general secretary. Several newspaper columnists considered
this to be a "surprising career move". But Chris was never a
careerist. His first love was the Communist Party, and he wisely understood
that building a mass-based, working class party and nurturing thousands
of young communist cadres was a critical task, not least for the sake
of the longer-term survival of the ANC itself.
Cde Chris had many positive personality traits. He was brave,
unflinchingly leading comrades while under enemy fire, or speaking up,
without fear, against errors and anomalies within his own organisation.
He was always intellectually alert, and loved literature, quoting long
passages from Shakespeare by heart. He was a tireless organiser. In the
last two years of his life, he moved, week in and week out, from one obscure
rural village to another, organising, listening, recruiting. While the
speeches made at the CODESA talks (and some of them were very long-winded
and boring) are all to be found in the contemporary press reports and
archival records, the dozens of speeches Chris was making almost every
day in those last years of his life went largely unreported. But in villages
all over South Africa, people still remember them.
Of all his qualities, perhaps the one that is most remembered
was his empathy. Cde Chris was gifted with a very natural, a completely
genuine passion for understanding and identifying with other people. He
listened with a compelling eagerness to other people's concerns and aspirations.
There was nothing fake about this. Born into the ranks of the poorest
of the poor, he never forgot his origins. One of his biographers, a comrade
who spent time with him in MK camps in Angola, says of him that Chris
was a military leader when comrades needed a military leader, a father
when a father was needed, and (an entirely appropriate non-sexist observation)
"a mother when a mother was needed". Indeed, many women comrades
remember his natural, and unassuming non-sexism.
In the past week, in the run-up to 10th anniversary commemoration
of cde Chris's death, the SACP has been asked by some journalists where
would Chris be today if he were alive. "Would he be a senior member
of cabinet?", one journalist has asked, remembering Hani's own insistence
in the early 1990s, that he had no intention whatsoever of becoming a
minister. "Would he be labelled an ultra-leftist?", asked another.
Maybe, maybe not.
These questions are entirely hypothetical and it would be
idle speculation to try to answer them. However, two things ARE certain:
One: If he were alive today, in or out of cabinet, Chris
Hani, the communist, would be a loyal, active and campaigning supporter
of the ANC government, a government of the people for which he fought
and died.
Two: If he were alive today, in or out of cabinet, Chris
Hani, the communist, would speak up, without fear of being labelled, against
weaknesses, mistakes and illusions within government, within the ANC,
and within the SACP itself.
Let us cherish his memory, let us take forward his communist
struggle!
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Chris
Hani, born on 28 June 1942, in Cofimvaba, Transkei. General-Secretary
of the SACP since December 1991 and ANC NEC member since 1974. Matriculated
at Lovedale, 1958; Universities Rhodes and Fort Hare - 1959/61, BA Latin
and English. Joined ANC Youth League 1957. Active in Eastern and Western
Cape ANC before leaving SA in 1962. Commissar in the Luthuli Detachment
joint ANC/ZAPU military campaign 1967, escaped to Botswana, returned from
Botswana to Zambia 1968, infiltrated SA in 1973 and then based in Lesotho.
Left Maseru for Lusaka in 1982 after several unsuccessful assassination
attempts. Commissar and Deputy Commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, armed wing
of ANC. Chief of Staff, MK 1987.
The following brief autobiographical account was
written by comrade Chris Hani in February 1991:
I was born in a small rural town in the Transkei called
Cofimvaba. This town is almost 200 kilometres from East London. I am the
fifth child in a family of six. Only three of us are still surviving,
the other three died in their infancy. My mother is completely illiterate
and my father semi-literate. My father was a migrant worker in the mines
in the Transvaal, but he subsequently became an unskilled worker in the
building industry.
Life was quite harsh for us and we went through some hard
times as our mother had to supplement the family budget through subsistence
farming; had to bring us up with very little assistance from my father
who was always away working for the white capitalists.
I had to walk twenty kilometres to school every five days
and then walk the same distance to church every Sunday. At the age of
eight I was already an altar boy in the Catholic church and was quite
devout.
After finishing my primary school education I had a burning
desire to become a priest but this was vetoed by my father.
In 1954, while I was doing my secondary education, the
apartheid regime introduced Bantu Education which was designed to indoctrinate
Black pupils to accept and recognise the supremacy of the white man over
the blacks in all spheres. This angered and outraged us and paved the
way for my involvement in the struggle.
The arraignment for Treason of the ANC leaders in 1956
convinced me to join the ANC and participate in the struggle for freedom.
In 1957 I made up my mind and joined the ANC Youth League. I was fifteen
then, and since politics was proscribed at African schools our activities
were clandestine. In 1959 I went over to university at Fort Hare where
I became openly involved in the struggle, as Fort Hare was a liberal campus.
It was here that I got exposed to Marxist ideas and the scope and nature
of the racist capitalist system. My conversion to Marxism also deepened
my non-racial perspective.
My early Catholicism led to my fascination with Latin studies
and English literature. These studies in these two course were gobbled
up by me and I became an ardent lover of English, Latin and Greek literature,
both modern and classical. My studies of literature further strengthened
my hatred of all forms of oppression, persecution and obscurantism. The
action of tyrants as portrayed in various literary works also made me
hate tyranny and institutionalised oppression.
In 1961 I joined the underground South African Communist
Party as I realised that national liberation, though essential, would
not bring about total economic liberation. My decision to join the Party
was influenced by such greats of our struggle like Govan Mbeki, Braam
Fischer, JB Marks, Moses Kotane, Ray Simons, etc.
In 1962, having recognised the intransigence of the racist
regime, I joined the fledgling MK. This was the beginning of my long road
in the armed struggle in which there have been three abortive assassination
attempts against me personally. The armed struggle, which we never regarded
as exclusive, as we combined it with other forms of struggle, has brought
about the present crisis of apartheid.
In 1967 I fought together with Zipra forces in Zimbabwe
as political commissar. In 1974 I went back to South Africa to build the
underground and I subsequently left for Lesotho where I operated underground
and contributed in the building of the ANC underground inside our country.
The four pillars underpinning our struggle have brought
about the present crisis of the apartheid regime. The racist regime has
reluctantly recognised the legitimacy of our struggle by agreeing to sit
down with us to discuss how to begin the negotiations process.
In the current political situation, the decision by our
organisation to suspend armed action is correct and is an important contribution
in maintaining the momentum of negotiation.
Chris Hani,
February 1991
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