There is a serious problem with the recently published biography, Chris Hani: A Life Too Short (Jonathan Ball, 2009), written by Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp. Sello M Alcock hints at the problem but does not identify it in his review in the Mail & Guardian (16 October), when he notes that they "manage only to gloss over" certain complex episodes in Hani's life in exile.

The authors are senior journalists in South Africa, which makes the matter more disturbing.

Smith is an executive editor of The Star, the premier daily newspaper in the country and the leading media organ of the Independent News & Media group. Tromp is a senior reporter on The Star. This year he won the Mondi Shanduka Newspaper Journalist of the Year award, the CNN African Print Journalist of the Year award and the Vodacom Regional Print News Journalist of the Year award.

Their biography of Chris Hani fails on a most basic criterion, however: integrity to sources.

The result is that complexities in Hani's life are obscured, and not made properly accessible to the reader.

The crucial chapter concerns Hani's relation to the mutiny of about 90 percent of the trained troops of Umkhonto we Sizwe in Angola in 1984, the incarceration of leaders of the mutiny in Quatro prison camp, and their subsequent fates.

Hani's role in suppression of the mutiny in 1984 - though he was not responsible for the public executions at Pango camp in May that year - and in suppressing democratically elected committees representing ANC exiles in Tanzania in December 1989 sits oddly in contradiction to his own near-execution at the hands of Joe Modise in 1969, after he and six others survivors had criticised Modise for shortcomings of leadership in the Wankie campaign. As Hugh Macmillan has put on record, Hani's memorandum criticised "secret trials and executions" and "extremely reactionary methods of punishment in MK".

As a result of their failure to confront these complexities with candour, the biography by Smith and Tromp falls below the criterion set in political biographies by Stephen Clingman (writing about Bram Fischer), Padraig O'Malley (on Mac Maharaj) and William Gumede and Mark Gevisser in their biographies of Thabo Mbeki.

I pointed out some of the ambiguities of Hani's life in a supplementary obituary published in the Independent (London) - the flagship newspaper of the Independent group internationally - on 24 April 1993. It is available on the net.

In the ANC in exile in Africa by the late Seventies, I wrote, there was "explicit control of opinion by a Stasi-type political police, the ANC security department, which built a string of prison camps across the continent. These came to house mainly dissident members of MK, as well as some South African spies. Torture and deaths, as Amnesty has found, were routine.

"MK recruits admired Hani for his courageous role in a 1967 campaign in Zimbabwe, as well as for organising the underground from a base in Lesotho. In 1984, however, a full-scale mutiny took place among MK troops in Angola, directed at repression by the security department and their apparent diversion from combat in South Africa itself. It was the ANC's most severe crisis in exile.

"Hani played a vigorous part in suppressing the mutiny. By his own account, 18 or 19 ANC members were executed. As the most senior figure on the spot, he did not countermand these acts. Nor did he mitigate Gulag conditions for the mutineers.

"In 1989 he personally abolished representative committees in ANC camps in Tanzania to which former mutineers had been elected.

"A process of mythology came to surround Chris Hani. His heritage in South Africa - by which Soviet methods of command served non-racial ends, and the ‘armed struggle' came to serve negotiations - is more complex."

Smith and Tromp fail to cite essential first-hand sources, though their book shows they had knowledge of one of these.

They write: "In Comrades against Apartheid (1992), Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba tried to lay some of the blame for what had happened [at Quatro] on [Hani], and to suggest that Hani was not only witness but also party to violence and torture." (p.187) They give no direct quotation from Ellis and Sechaba, however, and no page references, so the reader can rely only on this unsourced assertion.

Professor Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba (the pseudonym of Oyama Mabandla) make it plain, by contrast, that they are relying on a first-hand source in their writing. They follow academic practice, and give their source. Their account states:  "The following passage relies heavily on the account by a number of former ANC guerrillas in Searchlight South Africa No.5, July 1990." (Ellis and Sechaba, Comrades against Apartheid: The ANC and the South African Communist Party in Exile, James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1992. p.128. note 3).

They also provide two further citations from the same source, a first-hand history with the title "A Miscarriage of Democracy: The ANC Security Department in the 1984 Mutiny in Umkhonto we Sizwe", which I secured for publication nearly 20 years ago. They cite also a first-hand interview with one of its five authors.

Smith and Tromp make no reference to this published first-hand source, despite it being provided to them by Ellis and Sechaba. First-hand evidence is neglected, in favour of a vague and tendentious reference to a secondary source.

Published in exile in London by the late Dr Baruch Hirson and myself, Searchlight South Africa had been banned for commercial distribution in South Africa by the apartheid regime, including the issue which contained "A Miscarriage of Democracy", and the journal remained banned for several subsequent issues. Yet it was available to subscribers, and copies are present in several university libraries in South Africa.

In addition, the article "A Miscarriage of Democracy" was placed on the internet at two sites nearly ten years ago. Well over a year before the publication of Smith and Tromp's book, all issues of the journal became available also on the website of the Aluka Archive.

The article "A Miscarriage of Democracy" had been circulated also in South Africa in the form of a pamphlet headed "Mutiny in the ANC, 1984", and had been republished in a book having limited circulation in South Africa: Bob Myers (ed), Revolutionary Times, Revolutionary Lives: Personal Accounts of the Liberation Struggles, Index Books, London, 1997.

Smith and Tromp neglect also another first-hand source: a full length book by a further first-hand participant in the mutiny and prisoner in Quatro camp, Mwezi Twala. Their book does make a reference to him under his ANC exile "travelling name" of Khotso Morena, but his book, Mbokodo: Inside MK. Mwezi Twala - A Soldier's Story, written with Ed Benard (Jonathan Ball, 1994), is not even cited in their bibliography. (Twala's book gives acknowledgement to "A Miscarriage of Democracy", which he states, "reveals our shared experiences", p.6)

Here are two mutually supportive first-hand sources which Smith and Tromp do not make available to the reader.

They do, however, make wild and generalised aspersions about "the writings of disgraced former ANC cadres", and about supposed comments concerning Hani by unnamed "anti-ANC former cadres" - for which no identifying references are provided. (p.199) "These same sources" (again unnamed, and with no references given) are then supposed to have made other "claims", creating a "legend" about the murder in Umtata in 1990 of a former bodyguard of Hani (and subsequently, Quatro prisoner), Sipho Phungulwa. (p.200)

These are the methods of innuendo and slur, not of the biographer or historian. They are unworthy of the authors' profession.

Readers seeking a more reliable understanding will soon be able to compare their book with the article "A Miscarriage of Democracy", as it appears in my book, Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO, to be published by Jacana Media later this month.

This will be the first time for many readers in South Africa to have access to this first-hand account of a decisive period in South African history, in print form, in the ordinary way: through bookshops.

On the ambiguities in Chris Hani's life in exile, and other matters, readers will be able to judge for themselves.

Note: A shorter version of this article appears as a letter in the Mail & Guardian, 23 October 2009.

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