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Two decades later: It’s time to mobilise – but for healing

Bo Mbindwane is a business executive with experience in mining and other sectors. He has past experience in public administration and is an indepedent mining analyst. On twitter: @mbindwane

Struggle veterans know that we got to democracy by mobilising the masses: waging a “People’s War” and empowering people on the ground. Perhaps it’s time to do that again, but this time, with the sole purpose of peace and healing in mind. Our country desperately needs it – liberation not from an oppressor, but the pain of our past.

Spoiler alert: In this column, I write about the ‘yawn’ subject of our past, Apartheid. I am hoping readers will indulge me, and not switch off. At least this once.

President Zuma has said the country still needs healing from the violence of the past. He described Apartheid as a brutal system that used violence to reign people and that people had to use violence to defend themselves. Zuma went on to say perhaps it was a mistake to think people would just move on from their anger when democracy dawned; that there had to be a programme of healing.

 

“There is a lot of anger, and a propensity to use violence in our society – we need to do more to fight racism and promote tolerance… we need to be cured of this sick behaviour. We need a psychological cure,” said Zuma.

Apartheid crimes against humanity, various massacres, imprisonments, tortures, rapes and other acts of violence are well documented. How did the ANC counter these to protect the people and also wage a liberation struggle?

It will be impossible to do the healing if we do not trace the history back. The ANC’s document, Strategy and Tactics, provides a glimpse of the past that could likely assist to magnify another colour on this mosaic.

In its Document adopted at the Morogoro Conference, the ANC, meeting at Morogoro, Tanzania, 25 April to 1 May 1969, The Strategy and Tactics, the armed struggle was made the most urgent and significant item. This was to be coupled with a deliberate mass political struggle. The strategy was to get state power, reconstruct the state into a democratic one and finally engage in economic emancipation.

This May 1969 document also was adamant that whites belonged in South Africa as equal citizens and that those who were promoting a struggle premised on race were not welcome inside the ANC. In essence, they would be no mass evacuation of whites out of South Africa. Many found themselves expelled from the ANC for pushing a narrow Africanist agenda.

In Strategy and Tactics, the idea was to have a mass guerilla war, which would see the entire black populace engaging in popular armed resistance, a ‘People’s War’. To achieve this, radicalisation and political education of the masses had to be executed.

The ‘People’s War’ fitted the type of training most of the ANC armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, (MK) cadres had been undergoing in the Soviet Union, which included military combat work (MCM) with components of creating and leading mass underground networks. Algeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Ghana and Morocco also offered MK combat and guerilla war tactics and weapons knowledge.

The ANC also had its MK cadres trained as trainers, who then conducted training in its camps in Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique and others. Soviets also sent their trainers to the ANC camps to conduct training.

Most of these courses, especially those conducted in the Soviet Union, were highly specialised and focused on guerrilla warfare and creation of underground structures and movement.

In 1985, our current Minister of Defence, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, together with her husband, Mr Charles Nqakula and Chris Hani, all attended officers’ training, dubbed the ‘brigadier course’, in Moscow, in sharp preparation for governing. Other key components of the course work were intelligence and military combat work.

Most ANC MPs and leaders are familiar with the territories of Ukraine that are currently seeing civil war. In the Crimean village of Perevalnoye in Sevastopol there was a specialised camp the Soviets built for the ANC. In the southern city of Odessa, many MK cadres studied and trained there; of course Moscow too, where many got their tertiary training at the Lenin School. A few also went to Cyprus, Finland and Poland. Many have heard of these areas in news recently.

The People’s War component of the Struggle led to the formation of the UDF.

With the People’s War entrenching slowly, the ANC expanded its strategy of total control of thought in townships, instructing that Street Committees be established and pull in the legally learned to assist in setting up ‘People’s Courts’. These were to exercise people’s power and consolidate it. Soon, ‘necklacing’ of spies and enemy agents spread, as a result of the ‘People’s Court’ activities. Weapons were already in the country and at a very young age, after seeing a hand grenade at a bioscope, I actually touched a real one from a small arms cache of someone known as ‘Caleb’.

Caleb had come from nowhere to open a shebeen in our neighbourhood; he was worldly, smart, and clean, and always had a book in hand. Months later, at a Marx night class, I learnt that Caleb was an underground operative.

The ANC cadres, like former Deputy Minister of Defence, Thabang Makwetla, had been trained as fighter jet pilots. Others were engineers, naval officers, communications officers, like former Communications DG and now ICT businessman, Andile Nqaba. The ANC meant business and the Nationalist Party was getting this intelligence. Equally, the ANC had eyes and ears throughout the South African Defence Force, ‘SADF’, from Simonstown to Waterkloof. A few key senior white ‘Afrikaner’ officers had been turned and were sharing intelligence with the ANC from within.

These included Apartheid Naval Force Officers like Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, who was eventually caught out by the SADF and jailed for assisting the ANC with SADF army intelligence, mapping and surveillances. Not only did Commodore Gerhardt assist the ANC with military plans of the SADF, but also the dirty tricks and Nationalist corruption deals, which included details of business transactions: Anglo American, in diamonds, cash and oil, as well as others, who were conducting their business via the army to burst UN sanctions. He also gave the ANC information on the Apartheid nuclear secrets. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave the Commodore amnesty.

The ANC was well prepared for war; through the People’s War and People’s Court, the country immediately become hard to govern, with over 10,000 riots per month. The United Nations kept putting pressure on the Apartheid government too.

All this was, however, leading to the radicalisation that saw KwaZulu-Natal and the former Transvaal on fire. The anger remained and needed an outlet.

Had the ANC not organised people in this way, the results would have been mass murders and chaotic civil war. Street Committees and MK operatives underground were able to control matters and protect people when the need arose.

When the Commander of MK was released from prison in 1991 and urged the end of the war the majority complied. Nelson Mandela urged people to “throw weapons in the sea”. What of decades of anger and dehumanisation?

There were now Street Committees, People’s Courts, People’s War structures left in the air, aside from formal demobilisation of the formally trained. All were radicalised and bitter over Apartheid mass murders and general human right abuses. The terror Apartheid had unleashed was now manifesting itself in counter-terror, through mass action.

These were people who had been oriented in military combat work, ‘MCM’ and Joe Slovo’s abridged ‘Planning the People’s War’ document.

Likewise, Bantustans were still organising themselves and arming against the people. There was violence everywhere. The birth of the ‘third force’ was as a result of the Apartheid government teaming up with Bantustan black leaders to oppress the people via states of emergencies and hit squads.

The general South African story is not a miracle in itself; there was blood. The miracle is that blacks were immediately obliged to snap out of it overnight and they did, en masse, and complied. The question is: how do people who had been subjected to such long term brutality wake up to forgive the perpetrators and proceed to beg for forgiveness for being oppressed? Blacks were not weaned off from slavery to freedom.

The “rainbow nation” was a concept first introduced to the United States by Reverend Jessie Jackson in his 1988 Speech at the Democratic National Convention. Jackson called the gathering “black, white and brown, a rainbow coalition”.

Desmond Tutu latched onto this, adapting it to “rainbow nation”. Nelson Mandela agreed. This attempt to restore honour and create a nation has been a dismal failure. As Isithwalandwe Andrew Mlangeni recently described it to me, “South Africa is only on its hard road to being a nation, we are a people”.

The attempt to plaster the wounds and the “sickness” Zuma refers to is now getting costly and can no longer be ignored, or mislabelled.

Although as masses we are not armed with weapons, we are armed with unresolved pain, disappointment, rejection, post traumatic stress disorder and related suffering. This “sickness” cuts across races, ethnicities, strata or kind.

The last time South Africa spoke openly about Apartheid was during The Felicia Mabuza-Suttle Show. Nowadays it’s a yawn, a get-over-it subject and an annoyance.

Whilst forgiveness was necessary for healing as it provided mental peace and health of mind, remnants of resentment and hatred have manifested because ‘matters of Apartheid’ are not talked about. Blacks have forgiven, whites have chosen to blame and protect their interests in the main.

The belief in what had worked since mid-1970s has remained with us. In 1976, it was a normal thing to just shoot and kill schoolchildren wearing school uniform protesting against a language. Violence. We have learned all these beliefs and tendencies as instilled from our earliest days, and so have passed these onto our children. The manifestation of violence and its influence causes us to be the femicide capital of the world and a capital of baby rapes by adults. Most murders are committed among people who know each other; so is rape. Our response to all this is verbal violence towards government, as though we are calling for ‘NSA’ prism-style spying to be installed in our kitchens and bedrooms.

As president Zuma said, “It doesn’t make sense that a community will demand water by burning a brand-new library down or stopping their own children from going to school”.

As we trace our steps back, we may need to ask whether it’s not about time we recreate the Street Committees, this time not for war but for healing. After all, we have all this training to organise the masses. Let us have Street Committees that will act as Healing Stations, where we can release, cry about the past, talk about it and work on moving on. Often, I find myself wishing I could talk to someone. Often, I cry alone in bed or in the shower, remembering the personal traumas of Apartheid as a scared little boy to a young man. Often, I am reminded of that which was planted in me, as I sow in my subconscious mind, I reap in my environment. We need mass healing that must be embraced by our white compatriots. We need to train and deploy thousands of social services peace monitors of the 1994 type. People need urgent help, or else radicalisation is the only option.

Dr Zach de Beer, the Parliamentary leader of the then-Democratic Party, said after the famous De Klerk speech in 1990: “The announcement came as no surprise, but was nevertheless a moment of enormous symbolic and psychological [emphasis mine] significance. The stakes are desperately high; if whites are selfish or blacks are vengeful, we shall endure decades of misery. But if whites are generous and blacks are forgiving, the sky is the limit for South Africa.”

He was correct. DM

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