Thulas Nxesi's excuse for keeping a sick old man in jail
Comrade Thulas Nxesi's essay on the need to keep Chris Hani's assassins in prison forever boils down quite nicely to a single claim. Here it is:
"It is generally accepted that Hani's killing was part of a vast political conspiracy which, in all probability, involved more than a Polish immigrant, Yanus Walus, and Clive Derby-Lewis of the Conservative Party. The two culprits have, over the years, steadfastly refused to fully disclose the scale and scope of this conspiracy, or to reveal the other parties involved."
Was there a conspiracy? Several legal inquiries into the Hani murder have found no evidence of any such thing. On the contrary: the facts unearthed by a trial, an appeal, protracted TRC amnesty proceedings and several parole hearings show that the case is actually very simple: Hani was assassinated by an Anglophile militarist with a double-barrel last name and a Pole bent out of shape by a nasty childhood behind the Iron Curtain. Motive: they wanted blacks to seek indiscriminate and bloody vengeance, thereby forcing the white masses to get off the fence and join the right wing in a fight to the death against the liberation movements.
Communists (and their lawyer Bizos, otherwise known as a human rights activist) are reluctant to accept this because it diminishes their cause and their hero. They believe history is driven by vast impersonal class forces, not individuals. It follows that Hani, as a leader of the proletariat, was surely murdered by mighty imperialist enemies, not by two ordinary men with lowly racial motives and no discernible connection even to the apartheid state. Hence their need to imagine "a vast political conspiracy" and to keep Walus and Derby-Lewis in the dungeons until they name names and disclose details.
I knew Mrs. Gaye Derby-Lewis several years ago. To me, she seemed like the wife of a 15th century Spanish Jew, doomed to spend the rest of her life twisting in the wind at the whim of irrational religious fanatics. I said, "Why not just give them what they want? Tell them that you and your husband represented the CIA in an international assassination plot managed by Pretoria's secret services and designed to clear the way for neo-liberals to take over the ANC and betray the revolution." (As we know, this is the only story that will satisfy the Communist inquisitors.)