From Sharpeville to Novocherkassk: Thula Bopela and the response to Archbishop Tutu

"Who does this bishop really speak for?" asked Thula Bopela in his attack last week on Archbishop Desmond Tutu (6 October). Even before the Archbishop's cry of outrage at the African National Congress for its government's blockage of a visa to the Dalai Lama on the occasion of Tutu's 80th birthday, Mr Bopela's article provides an insight into a perverse method of argument.

Tutu insisted on his desired guest's civil right under the Constitution to be granted a visa to visit South Africa. The Dalai Lama is not a criminal. He has no hostile intent to South Africa's national security. He should have been awarded a visa, the same as any other prospective tourist, eminent person or Nobel Prize winner in ordinary good standing. That was the sum of Tutu's argument.

The Archbishop's rage at its blockage was in good part a cry of despair at South Africa's slideaway from the mainly liberal intent of its Constitution, drafted under the aegis of Emeritus President Nelson Mandela, and over which the Archbishop's spiritual leadership had been a guiding light. 

Thula Bopela's argument poured scorn on this notion of rights. It argued the self-interest of the leading poitical faction in the state, in subordinating South Africa to the Diktat of a rising global economic, political and military power: China. For reasons A, or B, or C, or D - economic investment is cited - the government of China should not be slighted, and it was perfectly appropriate that the Archbishop's eminent intended guest should be refused a visa. Thus Bopela's argument.

All of this preceded by the suggestion - "Who does this bishop really speak for?" - that Archbishop Tutu speaks not on his own behalf, in terms of his own understanding of what the behaviour of a constitutional state should be, but as the implied secret agent of some hidden,demonic, enemy power.

This was not the first time that Mr Bopela has used this method of the Witchfinder- General.

In an article "Friend of Jacob Zuma: An abuse of Parliament", posted on Politicsweb on 2 February 2009, I attempted to address a similar argument by Mr Bopela.

Bopela's method of argument, I wrote, showed "political paranoia of a classic Stalinist type." It consisted of menacing "accusations about 'imperialists', 'counter-revolutionaries' and local politicians who are 'orchestrated from beyond our shores... engineered, financed and masterminded  from overseas capitals'."

Here was the same sense as in his rhetorical inquisitor's question: ""Who does this bishop really speak for?"

What Bopela expressed here, I wrote then, was a "revival under ANC government of the tyrannical mindset of the ANC Security Department (iMbokodo, the grindstone) in its camps in exile, characterised by former members of Umkhonto weSizwe as an 'internal-enemy-danger-psychosis'."

The "most Stalinist element" in his article, however, lay in the attribution immediately beneath it. There it stated: "Thula Bopela is a Head: Security Management at Parliament, and member of the media & communications team in the ANC Jhb region." A previous posting on the Friends of Jacob Zuma website described Bopela as "Chief of Security in Parliament".

I asked: "What does that tell us about the 'security' of Parliament, when a civil servant who is 'Head: Security Management' in Parliament can with impunity write an article that makes such ferocious aspersions against certain members of Parliament and members of political tendencies with whom he disagrees? Where is the neutrality of the civil service, in matters affecting different political tendencies, especially where the civil servant occupies such a sensitive post?"

I concluded: "The destruction of the constitutional process so painfully put in place [in the negotiations leading to the first democratic elections in April 1994] threatens now to unleash again the dogs of war."

As I pointed out in 2009, Mr Bopela has an honourable history in the struggle against the former racist dictatorship. He belonged to the first generation of recruits to Umkhonto we Sizwe, now represented by the Luthuli Detachment of Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA). Following military training at the Odessa Military Academy in the Soviet Union, he fought in MK's military engagement in 1967 alongside the forces of the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), led by Joshua Nkomo and James Chikerema, in the Wankie and Sipolilo areas of Zimbabwe - then still Rhodesia - against the military and security forces of the white-rule regime of Ian Smith.

In the course of combat, he was "captured by the military forces of the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia and was sentenced to death, a sentence commuted to life imprisonment in 1969. He was released after 13 years in prison when Zimbabwe became  independent under Robert Mugabe, receiving further education in Africa, Europe and the United States, and graduated with an MA in marketing from Webster University in 1991. On his return to South Africa he became national electrification planning manager at Eskom...".

In the months immediately preceding the general election in April 1994, I pointed out, Mr Bopela played a crucial role in helping to put an end to the low intensity civil war in KwaZulu-Natal, for which he deserves the eternal gratitude of South Africans. This was when he made possible a meeting between his fomer comrade in MK in the Wankie campaign, Daluxolo Luthuli (who had subsequently become commander of the Caprivi military forces on the side of the Inkatha Freedom Movement, headed by Prince Mangosotho Buthelezi), and their former MK colleague, Jacob Zuma, who held a senior position in exile in command of MK forces in KZN in opposition to Inkatha. A subsequent meeting of reconciliation between Daluxolo Luthuli and Emeritus President Nelson Mandela made possible the peaceful character of that historic general election.

In this sense, Thula Bopela is one of the unsung architects of South Africa's present constitutional structure, which provides a forum through which the conflicts of the country may be resolved peacefully.

His book, Umkhonto we Sizwe: Fighting for a Divided People (Galago, Alberton, 2005), co-authored with Daluxolo Luthuli, remains one of the most important firsthand memoirs of the military and other conflicts of those decades. As they write, their efforts - together with those of Jacob Zuma and Nelson Mandela - put an end to a period of acute danger, when the country "teetered on the brink of full-out civil war". (p.255) At the time of the publication of their book, Luthuli was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the SANDF.

Already in 2009, however, as a leading media spokesman for President Zuma in the period before and after Zuma's defeat of former President Thabo Mbeki at the Polokwane conference of the ANC in December 2007, leading to Zuma's ascent as President of the state, Mr Bopela crossed the line between having been a creator of the Constitution and its destruction.

His military training at the Odessa Military Academy in the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s took place in a totalitarian state, and it infected him, as it did hundreds of other exiles, with the ideology of dictatorship.

Unlike the massacre at Sharpeville in March 1960, which was instantly communicated by a free press across the world, the massacre of striking workers at Novocherkassk in the Soviet Union in June 1962 remains a closed book to almost every South African. There is an account in the Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, by David Remnick (Penguin, 1994. pp.414-19). A great deal of Remnick's account of what happened at Novocherkassk comes from the retired Major General Matvei Shaposhnikov, a Hero of the Soviet Union and leader of a tank division in the bloodiest fighting of the Second World War, who suffered suspension from his post and loss of pension when he refused to obey the Communist Party's order that troops under his command should open fire on the workers.

As Remnick writes, "The strike in June 1962 against price rises and wage cuts at the city's Electric Locomotive Works was the first workers' uprising in Russia since the fitful years immediately after the Revolution. At Moscow's orders, the military turned its machine guns on the unarmed demonstrators in Novocherkassk. At least twenty-four were killed, dozens more injured. Not long after, the Kremlin's judges ordered the execution of seven 'ringleaders' who had survived. Within three days, all mention of Novocherkassk disappeared from the state-controlled press. Even Western specialists knew almost nothing of the bloody affair". (p.414)

Not one word penetrated to the ANC cadres at Odessa, who could not have failed to compare and contrast what happened at Novocherkassk with the massacre at Sharpeville, had they been provided with even the smallest scrap of information by their Soviet tutors. The total nature of political control of the Soviet Union prevented this. Yet it is the pernicious heritage of this state and its ideology which now again threatens to drive South Africa on the road to dictatorship - albeit, in homage this time to another totalitarian power, which in its massacre at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June 1989 proved itself again an eager pupil of Joseph Stalin and the machine-gunners of Novocherkassk.

As General Shaposhnikov put the matter, "The Party has turned into a car which is steered by a reckless, drunken driver who is always breaking the traffic rules. It's high time to take away the driver's license and prevent a catastrophe. ...It is necessary that people learn to think." (Remnick, p.418)

"Who does this bishop really speak for?" - the very title of Bopela's attack on Archbishop Tutu on 6 October speaks the same language of "internal-enemy-danger-psychosis" which the ANC learnt from the machineguns of Novocherkassk, and which characterised Bopela's abuse of his own position as an officer of the National Assembly.

Listen to his tone, writing about Archbishop Tutu: "He chaired the TRC, that exercise where officers of the apartheid police were being granted forgiveness, while they apologized yet smiled at us?"

Yet the torturers of iMbokodo received identical idemnity from the TRC, and well-paid posts in the new state - a point not mentioned by Mr Bopela.

A Kragdadiger tone of menace from the apartheid era appears again in the following words, echoing the coarse remarks of that era about a whole generation of troublesome priests:  "I believe we have more pressing problems in this country than the granting or not of visas to monks. The trade with China may not be an important consideration to the Bishop and his liberal friends, but a relationship that promises to bring more investment to our country is more important than any number of bishops and Da Lai Lamas."

For Dalai Lama, read Archbishop Huddlestone, the Reverend Michael Scott, Bishop Ambrose Reeves and numerous others....

The shadow deputy foreign minister for the Democratic Alliance, Stevens Mokgalapa, was not wrong to state that the Zuma government has "allowed China to dictate foreign policy" and that the government has made a breach of sovereignty by "bowing to pressure from a foreign power."

Thula Bopela's apartheid-era response merely confirms the justice of Archbishop Tutu's outrage.

Once again - in defiance of the ideals of its founding fathers - the ANC has shown its predeliction for dictatorship.

And once again, Archbishop Tutu has provided moral and spiritual guidance to the country.

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