The president of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, has positioned himself at the confluence of the imperial interests of China in southern Africa and those of a faction in the ANC, indicating the possibility of a new Cold War in the sub-continent.
In a speech at Colesburg in the Northern Cape on Saturday, Malema repeated previously made threats to white-owned and western property interests in South Africa and added that "if investors were to leave, the Chinese would come in. 'The Chinese will work with anybody,' he said".
This adds a sharp focus to Malema's positioning of himself as the political representative in South Africa of the regime of Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, which is in debt economically, politically and militarily to China.
Should Malema's drive to set the policy agenda of the government succeed, this ‘Mugabe turn' in the ANC would represent a massive threat to the sovereignty, economic welfare and democratic heritage of South Africa, and to the continent.
It represents a radical widening in the fault-line that has opened up within the ANC, between an Africanist tendency represented by Malema (backed by the ANCYL) and that of the South African Communist Party (backed by the Congress of South African Trade Unions, Cosatu): a division which is fundamental to the survival or collapse of the Tripartite Alliance between the ANC, the SACP and Cosatu. In its turn, the SACP now faces the most severe challenge to its leading influence within the ANC (in terms of the 'dual membership' of CP members within the ANC) since the breakaway of the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959, fifty years ago.
The matter can be understood with a brief historical review.
The SACP became the most powerful single organised force within the ANC from the mid-1950s, following the banning of the old Communist Party of South Africa by the apartheid regime in 1950 and the secret recruitment to the SACP, its successor, in 1955 of Walter Sisulu (former secretary general of the ANC, and before that a leading member with Nelson Mandela and Anton Lembede of the ANCYL), followed by his appointment in 1956 to the CP Central Committee. (See Elinor Sisulu, Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In our Lifetime, David Philip, 2003, pp.180-182)
Nelson Mandela's secret recruitment to the SACP, and to the Central Committee, followed a few years later. This lasted until mid-1962, when the Central Committee agreed on Mandela's cosmetic withdrawal from formal membership of the CP immediately after his return from his illegal journey to Britain and several independent African states, when African political leaders expressed concern over the ANC's close relation to the CP. (See Padraig O'Malley, Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, Viking/Penguin, 2007. Note, p.63)
The relation between the two parties grew even stronger however when the SACP and the ANC embarked jointly on a violent struggle against the apartheid regime in 1961, following the massacre at Sharpeville the previous year. Becoming ever-closer, the ANC's connection to the SACP placed it in a strategic relationship to Russia as a world power, in terms of funding, global political support, armaments and military training. This relationship had already provoked a breakaway of the Africanists in the ANC, beginning in 1958, who accused Mandela, Sisulu, Duma Nokwe (a relatively recent member of the SACP), Govan Mbeki (a long-standing member of the old CPSA) and Oliver Tambo (never a CP member, but an ally) of forfeiting the independence of the ANC to a foreign power, and also of subordinating it to white and Indian leaders of the CP.
From its formation in 1921 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union seventy years later, the CPSA/SACP never once separated its political line from that of the governing party of the Soviet Union, that is, of the Russian state. That political line, with its emphasis (however flawed) on non-racial political organisation, became the most important advocate of civil polity in South Africa, and was crucial to the settlement and Constitution of 1994.
With its supreme expression in Mandela's policy of reconciliation between the races, this conception is now under threat.
The new turn by Malema and the ANCYL recalls a previous crisis of orientation affecting the SACP and the ANC. Until the outbreak of acute political conflict between the ruling Communist parties of the Soviet Union and China that began about 1963, the illegal SACP had been emboldened and strengthened by the alliance between these two huge Stalinist states, forged after the military triumph of the Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong in 1949.
Sisulu and Nokwe together visited the Soviet Union and China in 1953, the year of Stalin's death, while Sisulu was secretary general of the ANC.
Six members of the SACP were then sent to China in September 1961 for military training at Nanjing Military Academy as part of preparation for the launch of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), lasting about six months, during which time they were visited by Mao Zedong for a discussion about the prospects for guerrilla warfare in South Africa. This was the first formal group sent abroad by MK for military training. No evidence about this military training in China emerged in the subsequent Rivonia Trial of Mandela and his colleagues, however, even though two of their co-accused (the late Raymond Mhlaba, first commmander of MK, and Andrew Mlangeni) had been members of the delegation sent to China, as well as one of the witnesses for the prosecution, Abel Patrick Mthembu (later assassinated by MK).
The outbreak of the Sino-Soviet split, which took place soon after the secret return of the delegation to South Africa, forced the SACP to sever all ties with China. Leading members of the SACP who refused to conform, such as Vella Pillay (in London, an official at the Bank of China) and Rowley Arenstein (in Durban ), were expelled. The ANC and MK similarly cut off ties with China.
This then offered up an opportunity to the PAC, which turned to China for funding, political support, arms and military training. In exile, the PAC foreign representative, Ahmed 'Gora' Ebrahim, was jubilantly present in 1967 at the burning of the British embassy in Beijing by Red Guards supporting Mao Zedong's faction in the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which convulsed China at that time, at the cost of many lives.
There then followed a political and military line-up in southern Africa which took the following form:
PRO-SOVIET. (South Africa) SACP and ANC, with their military arm, Umkhonto we Sizwe, in a strategic alliance with (Zimbabwe) the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU: mainly isiNdebele-speakers, under the leadership of Joshua Nkomo, with its military wing ZIPRA armed and trained by the Soviet Union ). [See a critical appraisal of the PAC by the ANC published in 1998.]
PRO-CHINESE. (South Africa) The PAC, with its military arm, the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA), in sympathetic alliance with (Zimbabwe) the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU: mainly Shona-speakers, led by Robert Mugabe, with its military arm, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, ZANLA, armed and trained by China). [See RW Johnson, "How Mugabe came to power", London Review of Books, 22 February 2001].
In 1991, after 30 years central involvement in southern and central Africa, Russia suddenly ceased to play any further meaningful role when the Soviet Union came to an end, following the downfall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The end of the Cold War, involving the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola and of Soviet and East German military advisers, led simultaneously to the unbanning of political organisations in South Africa, the release of political prisoners and return of the exiles, the dismantling of apartheid, the drawing up of a democratic Constitution in 1994 and the accession of the ANC to government as the hegemonic political authority in the country.
Over the same period, the Communist Party of China scrapped its failed statist economic programme while retaining a totalitarian political dictatorship over the whole country, permitting China to develop capitalistically but despotically into a premier world power. Its massive and sudden capitalistic development as a global economic power transformed its previous political and military interest in central and southern Africa into a major economic interest. This took the form of Chinese investment in its own direct production of mineral and other natural resources for export to China , and of acquisition of a further regional market for Chinese manufactured goods.
China's long-standing political and military relationship with ZANU and ZANLA in Zimbabwe - more than 40 years in existence - now placed it in a prime position to extend credit to the Mugabe regime as an essential lifeline for its survival, in addition to provision of weapons and political support. In return, Mugabe appears to have offered China first choice for plunder of the country's natural resources such as diamonds, with labour relations conducted by the regime through massacre and the helicopter gunship and by the destruction of Zimbabwe 's elephants for ivory
When, for the first time, the Chinese embassy in Harare hosted the geriatric dictator's 86th birthday party last month, the ambassador and his staff delighted Mugabe with a rendition of the Zimbabwean national anthem - 'Simudzai mureza wedu weZimbabwe' - sung "in flawless Shona", with a trail of government debt reportedly stretching "all the way to China ". Entering a foreign embassy for the first time in 30 years, the beaming birthday boy said: "We treasure this friendship. It's not really the relations that count, but the love, alliance and understanding".
In a manner characteristic of 19th century imperialism rather than the national liberation discourse of the last century, China - with no forum for an independent public opinion of its own - ruthlessly pursues its own economic and political interest in southern Africa through the brutalism of the Mugabe regime, now held up for emulation in South Africa by Malema and the ANCYL. In their assault on the influence of Western economic interests, parliamentary practice and civic culture in South Africa, Malema and the ANCYL conceal from the audience which they set out to excite both the extent of mass impoverishment in Zimbabwe and its rule by massacre, as in Matabeleland during the Gukurahundi of the 1980s and at the Chiadzwa diamond fields, where hundreds were killed two years ago.
Their repudiation of the previous culture of the ANC entails a war to the death with its earlier ethic, which entailed its founding revulsion at tribalist bloodshedding and a respect for the non-racial vision in which Umkhonto we Sizwe was founded. Seeking a reversal of loyalties in South African political culture, the ANCYL and Malema adopt the psychology of the totalitarian regime in George Orwell's classic, 1984, which proclaimed: "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH....WAR IS PEACE.... FREEDOM IS SLAVERY", and which instructed every citizen: "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU".
Their rancour and ressentiment, their anti-intellectualist demagogy and rubbishing of the best traditions of the ANC - in tones reminiscent of the climate of European fascism - serve as a warning of the possibility of a new Cold War in southern Africa. Every institution and political current will be put to the test.
There is a choice.
Either the ANC, as the party of government of South Africa, takes active steps to bring its traditional approach to bear on the character of government in Zimbabwe, perhaps best summed up in the concept Mhlabazihlangana (unity of the peoples) as taught by the prophet Ntsikana among the amaXhosa in the early 19th century, and fundamental in the founding ethic of the ANC a century later.
Or ZANU-PF, as the tribalist and racially-driven party of state in Zimbabwe, brings its own politics of tribal oppression, race hatred, economic ruin, state violence and loss of sovereignty to South Africa.
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