Harry Gwala’s (R.I.P) 100th birthday (30 July 2020).
The Communist wing of the ANC has declared 2020 as the year of celebrating the life and contribution to the struggle of former Natal Midlands SACP and ANC leader, Harry Gwala. Let me share my insights and personal experience of Gwala’s involvement in the violence in the Natal Midlands from around 1980 to 1996.
From 1974 I was an elected Natal politician. While MP for Pinetown (1974-77) I was involved in efforts at finding a resolution to the strikes at some of the Philip Frame factories in the Durban area. I was the MP for Maritzburg North from 1981 to 1987. I served on the Estcourt/Wembezi Peace Committee in the 90s. I was close to Harry Gwala’s foot prints. I had met Gwala’s primary school teacher sister. She taught in Edendale.
I knew a family who fled Edendale and emigrated to Canada because they feared that Gwala would kill them because he had decided that they were “impimpi“(informers). I was in a meeting in the Weenen Town Hall where he was present. His aura (mthunzi in Zulu) brought a palpable tension and fascist aggression into that space and in a way, it was re-inforced by his sad physical disability. He declined to go for treatment to the three perfectly good Provincial hospitals in Pietermaritzburg but preferred to live with the contradiction of a Communist using expensive private hospital care.
In the Midlands, the ANC was usually the instigator of violence. That was my overall conclusion as I observed, from very close quarters, the violence in Wembezi and in Natal in general. The IFP responded (buyisana - retaliating) and there was a war.
Anthea Jeffrey of the IRR has written a magisterial account in her “Peoples’ War: Light on the Struggle for South Africa”. It effectively challenges the narrative which the ANC wants South Africa to believe -- that Communist revolutionaries were innocent victims of state sponsored violence.