Keynote presentation by Blade Nzimande at the Mzala Nxumalo memorial lecture, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 13 February 2016
CPUT’s VC Dr Prins Nevhutalu; all alliance partner leaders present; academics present; representatives of SASCO, the Young Communist League and the ANC Youth League; comrades; ladies and gentlemen,
Revolutionary greetings!
Comrades, on Friday the 4th of December 2015 we marked a significant milestone in the South African political, cultural and education calendar; this in the form of the formal launch of the Mzala Nxumalo Centre for the Study of South African Society in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal.
On that day I declared with pride that the date marked a significant milestone in the historical, intellectual and scholarly development of a democratic South Africa. I said that the launch of the Mzala Nxumalo Centre was a revolutionary moment in that, apart from celebrating the life of a dedicated cadre of the liberation movement, it also served to shine the spotlight on a largely ignored and marginalised yet particularly significant developmental aspect of our democracy – left-wing thought.
Exactly who is Mzala Nxumalo?
For most South Africans the name Mzala Nxumalo remains a total enigma. This is unsurprising as Mzala was never a celebrity thinker nor a self-aggrandizing personality. To his credit, notwithstanding his outstanding intellect, Mzala remained a very self-effacing and unassuming character – until he opened his mouth to speak or sat down to write on his favourite subject, Marxist thought.
Mzala became a prominent theoretician and writer in the movement at the time when most intellectual prowess both in the movement and in the left formations in general was associated with the white left.
To be more precise, Jabulani Nobleman “Mzala” Nxumalo was an ANC and SACP activist, soldier, intellectual and writer. He died at the young age of 35, just as his intellectual activity was starting to flourish and reach maturity.
Born in the small northern KZN town of Dundee in 1955, Mzala attended school at Louwsburg (eNgoje), then Bethal College in Butterworth and later matriculated at KwaDlangezwa high school. By all accounts, Mzala was a brilliant student whose intellect stood out in all his classes. In 1972, at 15 years of age, Mzala was detained without trial for his role in a school boycott. The following year he was arrested again and charged with public violence for his part in student and worker strikes.
After completing his matric, he studied law at the University of Zululand, oNgoye, where he became a passionate fighter against injustice and hypocrisy. He was active in the South African Student Organisation (SASO). His participation in the countrywide upsurge following the Soweto Uprisings of June 1976 made him a marked man. The same year, along with a number other comrades Mzala left South Africa to join the ranks of the people’s army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK).
Mzala was an avid reader. From the time he went into exile, he read voraciously the literature that became available to him, particularly the works of Marx, Lenin, as well as the political literature and history of the ANC, the SACP and various writings of the movements’ leading intellectuals.
In the Soviet Union, Mzala received training in politics and other specialized subjects. As usual, he excelled in all the training courses that he took. Mzala rose to important positions in the ranks of MK, later serving in Swaziland and Angola and was part of the famous June 16 MK detachment.
While absorbed in the work of the underground, Mzala would make time to read books on a wide variety of topics and engage in heated and controversial debates. In the midst of his training and organizational responsibilities, he was always intellectually active.
In 1979, Mzala was deployed to Lusaka, where he acted as coordinator of commissariat structures. The following year, he was sent for advanced ideological and political training in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
In 1983, disguised as a reporter “Jabulani Dlamini”, Mzala was deployed to Swaziland where he worked for the Swaziland Observer but was detained by the Swazi police. Following his release, he left Swaziland – returning in December of the same year, with a new identity. This time he lived in the Shiselweni district in the south of the country. He served as commissar for the Natal rural machinery, a network that was later to become central in the establishment of Operation Vulindlela.
While in Shiselweni, and out of his own initiative, Mzala crossed the border into KwaZulu-Natal to set up an MK unit at Ngwavuma. In 1984 he was again arrested by the Swazi police and deported to Tanzania where he worked for Radio Freedom and the Amandla Cultural Group.
Throughout, Mzala had a reputation as an independent thinker, unafraid to differ sharply with leaders or ordinary comrades while always remaining fiercely loyal to the ANC and the SACP.
Mzala Nxumalo was also a prolific writer. The African Communist, Sechaba, and Dawn all contain numerous articles of his contributions, published under various pen names including Khumalo, Sisa Majola, Alex Mashinini and, of course, Mzala.
If one looks at his articles over the years, one can trace his philosophical, ideological and theoretical development. Much of his writing focused on the national question and the unfolding revolutionary process in South Africa. He also wrote and lectured extensively on the relationship between the national and class struggle in South Africa. He asserted that the aim of the South African revolution was to end inequality between the nations; he believed this could only be achieved under socialism.
In 1977 Mzala was working on a simplified book on Marxism-Leninism in isiZulu. The text seems, unfortunately, to have been lost but his interest in making Marxist thought available to ordinary people remained. I worked extensively and very closely with Mzala, and he in fact recruited me to the SACP. In fact, when he recruited me to the SACP, one of the first tasks Mzala gave me was to translate the SACP’s 1989 programme, The Path to Power, into isiZulu.
Mzala Nxumalo’s major work was his book Gatsha Buthelezi, Chief with a Double Agenda (Zed Books, 1988). This was a damning critique of the role played by Buthelezi and Inkatha as junior partners and collaborators with the apartheid regime.
In 1987, Mzala was deployed to Prague as the South African Communist Party representative on the World Marxist Review, but his health began to falter, and his stay in Prague only lasted two months. Unfortunately, he took ill and left Prague for medical treatment in London in 1987. In London he worked for the international committee of the SACP and enrolled to further his studies. He registered for a doctoral degree at the University of Essex and the Open University, researching issues around the national and class question in the South African revolution. His premature death came before he completed his thesis.
Mzala was probably the most prolific writer of the “Soweto generation”, his writings offering insight on the liberation struggle in South Africa and revolutionary strategies against the apartheid state. He combined his writing – which was both theoretical and polemical – with the life of a practical, hard-working, revolutionary soldier and politician.
His life is an inspiration to young academics and intellectuals who are committed to honest intellectual endeavour, rigorous research and socio-political analysis that can contribute centrally to the total liberation of South Africa – and indeed all countries.
Therefore nothing could be more appropriated than the establishment of a Centre for research, reading and writing, and the promotion of debate and dialogue on the issues that were close to his heart – which is exactly what we are doing.
I am particularly happy about the resurging interest in Mzala Nxumalo and his contribution as a theoretician of our struggle. The Mzala Nxumalo Centre for the Study of South African Society in Pietermaritzburg is established mainly to undertake research and analysis on various subjects in the South African transition. The Centre is also to provide research training and assistantship to students as well as to be a key left-wing think tank, both on national and global issues. Mzala’s ‘national question’ has been a subject of engagement and research by both the Chris Hani Institute and MISTRA. Proceedings from these engagements and colloquiums have will be published in a book edition, edited by Prof Eddie Webster.
In retrospect, unfolding developments over the last year do highlight the need to revisit and engage with Mzala’s work and many others, in our endeavor to decipher these and provide appropriate revolutionary direction. First, the ongoing outbursts of racism and racial polarisation in South Africa definitely require us to return to Mzala’s theorisation of the national question and the racialised nature of class formation in South Africa.
Certainly, part of the persisting arrogance of a racist section of whites in South Africa stems from a persisting position of class privilege. This arrogance and a sense of impunity of racists reflect persisting levels of race/class privilege of a white/rich class, at the expense of masses of poor/black working class families. Revisiting Mzala’s work will enable us to interrogate the continued articulation of race/class dynamics in South Africa, as well as advance the revolutionary project to undo this historical misnomer. Persisting articulation of white/bourgeois privilege also provides a further indictment to the failure of the neoliberal 1996 class project in advancing the NDR and the eradication of racism and privilege thereof.
In our push in the second phase of the transition, that is economic transformation, works of Mzala and others will remain a useful resource in our theorising of the current conjuncture.
Education
Education was one of the key areas of interest for Mzala, especially the transformation of our educational system to resemble and nurture the values of democracy, including the development and empowerment of the whole person and of communities to define their own lives. Emanating from this frame of conceptualising education as an avenue for deepening democracy, human development and community engagement was a theme that developed in the mid/late 1980s called “people’s education for people’s power.”
Current developments, especially around university education – which commenced as #Rhodesmustfall, then evolved to #decolonisationofuniversity or #africanisationofunivesity, then later in the year into #feesmustfall, have given us enough issues and points to ponder and apply our minds to. These give us an opportunity to revisit the 1980s’ popular phrase of ‘people’s education for people’s power’, in the context of claims for a ‘new’ theorisation asserted by proponents of the ‘decolonisation’ and Africanisation of education mantra.
Does Ngugi wa Tiongo’s literary inclined notion of decolonising the mind, which has been borrowed and expanded on by another literary scholar (Achille Mbembe), then concocted with pan-Africanist and BCM epithets, really represent ‘new’ and revolutionary conceptualisation of university education? Besides sloganeering, what is the substantially new and revolutionary contribution of these claims that requires that we jettison the language of transformation?
For instance, while university struggles respond to genuine problems at many of our universities, these struggles have completely neglected other equally significant players in post-matric education, for example TVET Colleges, SETAs, community colleges and others.
In fact, within the university education sector alone most of the developments and demands made do not even include challenges facing Historically Disadvantaged Institutions, or HDIs. There is a need for a balanced analysis, and we believe that Marxist-Leninist frame and ideas and the articulation in the Freedom Charter best represent a starting point for engaging with how we transform our education system in ways that address systemic vestiges of race, class, gender and all other forms of societal cleavages. The last thing we want is a university system that only substitutes exclusive white privilege with exclusivist black privilege. Neither do we need a hybrid of the two.
One of the pertinent challenges of struggles post-1994, especially in the post post-2000 period, has been a widening gap between student struggles and those of workers. In some of the cases these struggles have pitted one against the other. Part of the challenge for forging alliances on campuses between student and worker formations has been the inability of trade unionism, for instance, to mobilise and organise university workers in sectors characterised by increasing externalisation of work in the last 10 to 15 years. But this is a broader challenge facing the progressive trade union movement in particular and trade unionism in general – the challenge of organising casualised or outsourced sectors of the workforce.
For instance, at the end of 1995 NEHAWU organised almost all staff components at universities besides academics, who were mostly organised in academic staff associations later to become NTEWU. When universities began externalising the so-called non-core services from 1996, resulting in outsourcing and sub-contracting, NEHAWU lost almost all its members as outsourced and subcontracted workers lost the employment security that had enabled them to join trade unions.
Furthermore, externalisation changed the identity of workers in relation to space/place of work. It also redefined what was meant by economic sectors, and, consequently created new problems to sectoral organisation. Workers, who used to constitute part of the university community by virtue of working and operating at the university space daily, after externalisation were no longer considered as being part of the university community. Even their grievances were externalised. While many continued to work at the university five (sometimes six) days a week, their employer relations were no longer with the university, but with an outsourced subcontractor. Overtime, this also changed relations between direct university workers and outsourced workers on the one hand and, on the other, between workers in general and students. An organising and solidarity distance opened up in particular between outsourced workers and students.
Struggles for in-sourcing at several universities will thus open up opportunities for progressive trade unionism, in particular NEHAWU, to mobilise and organise these workers, as well as afford opportunities for the PYA to re-establish alliances with worker formations on campuses.
Unity is sacrosanct
Finally, but very importantly, as we head towards local government elections, it is vitally important that we keep in touch with the realities on the ground. These realities are that the struggle of the working class is currently in a very grave danger of being eroded even further than it has been until now, especially here in the Western Cape. All around us we day-in and day-out witness the emergence of reactionary forces intent on eroding, and in fact to completely obliterate both our revolutionary gains and movement.
In memory of Comrade Mzala, we must develop clarity of task in relation to our current phase of the national democratic revolution – that is the second, more radical phase of our project of social transformation.
The national question is not yet resolved, despite the massive progress we have made since our democratic breakthrough in April 1994. We still have a lot of work to do to towards completely resolving it and thus take forward the revolutionary work of Mzala Nxumalo.
Taking our cue from his revolutionary example, this means that we must go back to the root and grasp the matter from its foundations. That is where the changes we seek to achieve must reach in order for us to uproot the problem in its entirety, continue to build and properly guide the development of the new society that we seek to achieve in the place of the old one.
There is no doubt that in order to address the national question we must completely eliminate the legacy of the problems of racist national oppression. But we must also address the problems of patriarchy. We must deal with all forms of false consciousness and identity problems which were created and exploited as part of the colonial and apartheid capitalist strategy of divide and rule used to maximise profit for the ruling class.
The importance of dealing with class exploitation – the foundation upon which national oppression and gender domination, but as well as other forms of false consciousness were erected – cannot be overemphasised. We must deal a decisive blow to all other measures such as patronage that were used to manufacture consent from those who were privileged on the basis of race and gender under the social ladder of apartheid advantages while those who were forced on the lowest rung were systematically disadvantaged.
As we said at the Cosatu national congress last year, one of the greatest achievements of the ANC since its founding in 1912 was that of uniting the oppressed from different backgrounds. But as history teaches us, nothing is permanent. The very same important achievement of unity can be rolled back or undermined in various ways. Some of these have recently expressed themselves or seek to rear their ugly head.
For example the geography of voting patterns shows that some of the achievements we have made on building broad unity during our liberation struggle pre-1994 leading to our democratic breakthrough have been weakened. The post-1994 voting outcomes increasingly indicate that there is reproduction underway of particular political dynamics that the apartheid regime sought to achieve through its policies of racial segregation.
It cannot be denied that a trend indicating that there is a process whereby “minority” communities across all classes and strata are politically being turned against the ANC and the whole of the alliance has emerged. The forces behind this agenda have been cementing and deepening it for their own profit.
However, it is important to also examine the totality of the conditions that have made it possible for them to reproduce such apartheid-type political divisions. This would require more time than we have today, save to say the problem must be understood first and foremost in its historical context through a thorough examination of both the objective and subjective factors.
An extensive examination is therefore also required, of the consequences of the apartheid social ladder and the political implications of the perceptions that have been forged from the gradual collapse of certain privileges of the past in the course of social transformation. On the other hand, it is important to examine the way in which the conduct of things within our own movement, and by extension in governance, has played into the hands of the apartheid agenda that thrives on the mobilisation and consolidation of the so-called minority fears.
In addition, it is important to reflect on the hyper competition that has emerged for resources including opportunities in the form of jobs and tenders associated with the state that is manifesting itself through a destructive contest for positions within our movement. Especially the problem is acute in certain provinces at the provincial, district and branch levels. The political, ideological and organisational implications this has are huge both for the ANC and the alliance. We must deal with this problems and address its material basis in the challenges facing our economy.
From all of the afore-mentioned challenges, it is important to underline that where the ANC has previously lost elections, it is not just the ANC the organisation that lost but the rest of our alliance and supporting organisations. Such is the case with the Western Cape, Cape Town and other areas, all with serious consequences. The rest of South Africa has for the past 22 years been undergoing systemic decolonisation while the Western Cape has been held back, for example.
It is very important to underline therefore that what happens in the ANC electoral processes, including the selection of candidates, is not a matter only for the ANC. Our alliance platform of the ANC-led electoral strategy was established in the best interests of the unity of the primary motive forces of our struggle. When something goes wrong in the ANC or its electoral processes the entire alliance is affected and not just the ANC alone.
It is therefore important to place emphasis on the fact that the ANC is not just a leader only of its members. As it correctly states in its Strategy and Tactics document, the ANC is the organisational leader of our national liberation movement. It is important at this point to emphasise that in its Strategy and Tactics document the ANC defines our national liberation movement not just as itself alone but as an array of forces organised to achieve political freedom.
This has taken the form of the alliance, the mass democratic movement and other sectoral forces, led by the ANC, says the ANC Strategy and Tactics document. It is this national liberation movement, encompassing all the primary motive forces of the national democratic revolution that overthrew the apartheid regime and laid the foundations for the development of democracy and the advancement of social transformation in our country.
Any departure from this dialectic of unity of purpose will cause serious problems in the current phase of our struggle. Immediately ANC electoral processes are not handled in a proper manner, but are seen or allowed to be handled as if they were an exclusive preserve of the ANC in isolation from the alliance, such problems will entrench to the peril of the rest of our alliance and revolution.
It is very important for ANC electoral processes to be understood in their proper context as not just ANC but alliance processes, led by the ANC. The alliance must therefore be reflected both in the execution of this processes and in its outcomes. We must unite!!
This is not the time for division. It is the time for unity; for without unity the resolution of the national question, which Comrade Mzala paid close attention to, will be postponed for a long time to come.
This is the time for all progressive forces to set aside their differences and unite under the banner of our alliance as led by the ANC and fight to reclaim all lost ground, including Cape Town, and ultimately the Western Cape.
The resolution of the national question requires that we deal decisively with and uproot the legacy of the internal dimension of colonialism of a special type in its entirety and new manifestations. And this is not the only task we are facing. We still have a formidable task to deal decisively with the legacy of the external dimension of colonialism, continuing imperialist domination and guarantee our democratic national sovereignty.
Without this it will be difficult to achieve radical economic transformation – the central task of the second radical phase of our democratic transition towards completely resolving the national question. It is inconceivable that we will sail successfully in the troubled waters of the formidable external dimension of the problem we seek to resolve if we fail to deal with the internal dimension.
We must fight to overcome all forms of divisive strategies and tactics that are being used to weaken the alliance and its components. We need to all go out and organise to bring about unity within the alliance, while bringing in new recruits to strengthen our struggle. Only by doing this will we be able to return this province to the decolonised fold in order to march forward together as one, as we engage in the second radical phase of our democratic transition.
I thank you.
People’s education for people’s power
Mzala Nxumalo Memorial Lecture, Cape Peninsula University of Technology: Additional Notes during discussion: Heavily indebted working class and lower middle class households
The #Fees must fall campaign (its internal contradictions and contradictory character notwithstanding) is also not disconnected from the broader class struggles in, and the capitalist nature of, the South African society. Co-incidentally, the almost simultaneous struggles of the working class over their pension funds and the current student struggles over access to higher education, capture a deeper reality that is facing South Africa’s working class and lower middle classes.
South Africa’s working class and the lower middle classes are deeply indebted largely as a result of the absence, or inadequacy, of a social wage, especially for the working class. It was to this matter for instance that the Taylor Commission focused its attention upon, thus proposing a comprehensive social security net.
The core of the working class (including nurses, teachers, police, factory workers, etc.) does not benefit from the ‘RDP’ housing subsidy of government. At the same time a large section of the working class and lower middle class strata do not qualify for housing bonds from the private banks. Even those who have access to such bonds are currently experiencing massive bank repossessions and evictions. This has reached the same levels as during the height of Group Areas Act evictions under apartheid!
Similarly, the same class strata do not benefit and often fall through the cracks from the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) meant to assist students from needy families. The majority of children from the working class come from families that are above the NSFAS criteria, and yet cannot afford to finance especially university education.
The working class and lower middle classes also suffer from the costs of the absence of safe, reliable and affordable public transport. Many workers spend up to 40% of their monthly income on (unsafe and unreliable) public transport.
The absence of an affordable and quality health care system, for instance a National Health Insurance, further places additional burden on these families, thus erodes their income. A huge percentage of working class and middle class families rely exclusively on the expensive private health care system through their (inadequate and yet very costly) medical aid schemes.
On top of the above expenses, many workers and middle class professionals have to look after unemployed or aged family members (“the black tax”), which puts further strain on wage and salary earnings.
All the above are manifestations of the legacy of colonialism of a special type, a variant of bourgeois rule that had been based, and continues to be based, on deep levels of the black working class that suffer from a heavy burden of this legacy.
Given the above, it is therefore also very important to understand student struggles from the standpoint of the failure of capitalism to finance (especially higher) education for the working class and the poor. For example, the next possible bubble in the United States after the housing bubble of 2008, is that of student debt, currently estimated at about $1.2 trillion US dollars.
Arising out of the misery of the 2008 capitalist crash, many families and young people took loans for education with the hope that as the US picks up from the 2008 crash they will be able to get better jobs. The creation of better jobs is taking a long time, thus exacerbating student indebtedness and inability to pay.
Without by any means abandoning the struggle for free higher education for the working class and poor who cannot afford, it is however important to understand that what we may be dealing with here is the state being asked to bail out capitalism from its crisis, including its failure to fund (higher) education for student from families that cannot afford.
For all these reasons it is important that we intensify our financial sector campaign together with the struggle for a comprehensive social security net. Much more importantly is for Cosatu to earnestly take up the campaign of where and how workers’ pension and provident funds are invested.
People’s education for people’s power
The ANC 2016 January 8th statement appropriately declares the year 2016 as the year of advancing people’s power. This call is the most appropriate especially coming in the wake of student struggles in higher education, the deepening social distress in working class communities, as well as being the year of the local government elections. Indeed the many challenges we face call for the mobilisation of people’s power, with the working class at the centre. It is therefore important for the SACP and the working class as a whole to ensure that this does not become just a slogan, but a reality
In fact the very corporate capture of the state that the SACP has strongly come out against can only truly be reversed and defeated through the mobilisation of people’s power.
In our analyses of the student struggles at our last Central Committee in 2015 we noted a number of positive aspects of this campaign, amongst which was its potential to politicise many students for the first time, as well as putting pressure on our movement to implement its own resolutions.
However there are many negative aspects and other lessons to be learnt out of these struggles. For example whilst internet based mobilisation is can be powerful weapon, but the internet cannot provide leadership to such mass struggles as shown by the collapse and defeat of a number of promising Arab Spring struggles in North Africa and the Middle East
The 2015 student struggles have taken place against the background of a weakened ANC/SACP presence in our campuses, lack of unity and cohesion in the Progressive Youth Alliance, as well as the absence of concrete articulation of the perspectives of our movement on education, especially the concept of ‘people’s education for people’s power’ and its further elaboration after two decades of our democracy.
The participation and support to the student struggles by some of our own comrades have more been about advancing their narrow factionalist interests to attack the SACP and the working class rather than a principled support for genuine student struggles and the transformation of higher education.
Therefore there has been very little theoretical and strategic guidance given to our student formations along the lines of our strategic perspectives of people’s education for people’s power.
It is absolutely essential for the SACP to play a leading role in the concrete elaboration of our perspectives in order to guide these struggles ideologically along the lines of driving the second, more radical phase of our transition, with the broader perspectives of the national democratic revolution.
It is also absolutely imperative that we strengthen Young Communist League structures in our university and college campuses as well as building strong SACP structures in these campuses and strengthen the Progressive Youth Alliance.
It is important also for the SACP to extend and invite SASCO leadership and cadres to its joint political schools, especially those with NEHAWU and SADTU.
Dr Blade Nzimande is SACP General Secretary, ANC NEC member and Minister of Higher Education and Training
This article first appeared in the SACP’s online journal, Umsebenzi Online.
