In June 1979 I travelled to Botswana to meet with members of the African National Congress (ANC). On a koppie outside Gaborone I met with the late comrade Billy Matsetla, and other members of the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). I joined not only the ANC, but also insisted that I must join MK, and that I wanted to be involved in the armed struggle against the apartheid regime.

I think the comrades I met were somewhat taken aback by the insistence of the young Afrikaner to take up arms against what they considered to be my ‘own people’. However, my uncompromising insistence was allowed, and so it turned out that I became part of the armed resistance against apartheid.

In the years that followed, from 1979 to 1983, I helped to bring arms into South Africa, established arms caches, planted several limit mines at police stations in the old Western Transvaal (now known as the North West Province). I also planted a bomb at the South African Defence Force (SADF) recruitment office in the Carlton Centre, and identified and carried out reconnaissance for targets such as the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), and the Johannesburg Gas Works.

There were many more actions, but I only refer to what became publicly known, because these are the actions that I was found guilty of, as activities that I carried out on behalf of MK, during my Treason Trial in late 1983. For my membership of the ANC, and these armed struggle activities, I was found guilty of so-called ‘High Treason’, and given a fifteen year sentence.

I was certainly not a bloodthirsty, crazy, young man when I embarked on this armed struggle course, that I had chosen so consciously and deliberately. At the time when I took these decisions I was studying theology, in order to become a priest, and was a member of the Church Council of the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa congregation in Alexandra township.

My ultimate, very deliberate decision, to choose for violence, and to take up arms against the apartheid regime, was something that I agonised about for more than two years. I had long discussions with two of my closest comrades and political mentors, Dr. Beyers Naude and Mama Helen Joseph.

Both of them introduced me to the writings of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a leading member of the ‘Confessing Church’ in Germany. Initially Bonhoeffer believed in peaceful, pacifist, resistance against the Nazi Regime of Adolf Hitler, which he abhorred. However, over years he came to the conclusion that the violent evil of Nazism was so overwhelmingly terrible, that it could only be ended by counter violence.

In having come to that conclusion he developed the theological theory of the ‘lesser of two evils’, arguing that violence to bring an end to the evil Nazism that represented, was the only effective option. Having come to that conclusion, Bonhoeffer participated in no less than three attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler. One of those attempts was to smuggle a bomb in a briefcase into Hitler’s Command Bunker, the bomb injured and killed several of Hitler’s closest allies, and he was also injured, but unfortunately not killed.

Some of Bonhoeffer’s fellow brethren in the Confessing Church betrayed him, and so it turned out that the Nazi’s apprehended, and incarcerated him, for over two years.

Eventually they executed him on the 9th of April 1945 at the Flassenburg concentration camp, in an extraordinary act of brutal vengeance barely a month before Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied forces.

During the period that Bonhoeffer was incarcerated he wrote a Christmas Essay, ‘After Ten Years’, and numerous letters to his fiancé, Maria von Wedemeyer, which was published as, ‘Letters and Papers from Prison, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’. I was first introduced to these writings, together with one of his most seminal books: ‘The Cost of Discipleship’, by Mama Helen Joseph.

Every Christmas Day Mama Helen would hold a very poignant ceremony, at her modest home at 35 Fanny Avenue in Norwood, remembering all the political prisoners incarcerated on Robben Island, and in prisons throughout South Africa. Exactly at twelve noon Helen, and all her guests, would silently stand up and jointly raise glasses of champagne, while Helen would say: “To our absent friends”. Only those four words, but they would speak louder than any long political speech could.

Among the guests at Helen’s regular Christmas parties would be Winnie Madikizela[1]Mandela, Albertina Sisulu, Amina Cachalia, Ilze Fischer (the daughter of the legendary Braam Fischer), Ilze Weinberg (the daughter of Ellie Weinberg), and several other family members of political prisoners. I used to attend, not knowing that I would soon also be imprisoned, and that from Christmas Day 1983 onwards, be one of the “absent friends”, that Helen and her guests would collectively be lifting their glasses to.

Immediately after this ceremony Helen’s guests would depart, and she used to withdraw into her house to spend a couple of hours in prayer. Usually she prayed alone, but I was privileged to have been invited a couple of times join her. On a simple wooden table she had a cross made of palm leaves, and a black and white photo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (After Helen passed on I inherited that photo, and it is still hanging here above my desk in my office).

Every time she invited me, she asked me to read Bonhoeffer’s poignant prison poem, ‘Who am I?’, in which he described himself as walking out of his prison cell, accompanied by his Nazi wardens, asking himself:

“Who am I? …
Am I only what I know of myself, restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath,
as though hands were compressing my throat …
trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation,
tossing in expectation of great events, powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making;
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?”

I got to know this poem off by heart, and later when I was myself imprisoned I would walk in the barren cement and brick courtyard at the Pretoria Maximum Security Prison reciting it. I would remember not only the immense courage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed shortly after he penned these words, but also how in 1981 the day after Christmas day, what we sometimes ironically call the ‘Day of Goodwill’, I found Mama Helen - who was then already 76 years old - crawling on her bleeding knees, that had been cut by the broken glass all over her lounge floor trying, trying to sweep up shards of glass …

The lounge and bedroom walls were puckered with bullet holes from several rounds that had been fired at her house the night before from an R1 automatic rifle. Helen was shaking with rage. When the attack started she rolled off her bed, and crawled underneath it where she spent the night, not sure whether her attackers had left. I still remember her words, her voice trembling: “They can imprison us, they can shoot at us, and even kill us, but they will never break and defeat us”. This is the kind of abuse and violence, and worse, that we learnt to live with ….

Exactly eleven years later, on Christmas Day 1992, Mama Helen passed on shortly after twelve noon, in the then Hans Strijdom Hospital, which was subsequently renamed the Helen Joseph Hospital. I was at her bedside when her last breath passed her lips.

Sadly, Mama Helen died an angry woman. She was very angry with the way that President Nelson Mandela treated his wife, and her longstanding friend, Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and divorced and betrayed her. Mama Helen felt that the negotiations that the ANC was then engaged in, were totally going the wrong way. In her last days she kept on telling me, “Carl, Nelson is selling out! He is allowing the wrong decisions to be taken by these negotiators led by Ramaphosa. He and Joe [referring to Joe Solvo] are betraying us!”.

Looking back today, more than thirty years later, those prophetic last words of Mama Helen ring in my ears. Yes, indeed they betrayed us!

Those negotiations ultimately resulted in this terribly divided and exploitative country that we live in now, where the majority of black, especially African, poor are worse off than ever before, and a small super rich black compradore class - led by the very same Cyril Ramaphosa - in co-hoots with white monopoly capitalists and international imperialist exploiters, are looting and destroying our country.

Why is it important for me to narrate this history in an article entitled: WHY I SUPPORT HAMAS? Because the critical issue that we need to address - the proverbial elephant in the room - is the issue of betrayal.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested, and eventually executed, because he was betrayed by some of his closest associates in the Confessing Church, who informed the Nazi’s that he was involved in the assassination plots against Hitler. I was imprisoned because I was betrayed by some of the comrades that I worked the closest with in the MK underground.

Mama Winnie was betrayed but her own husband. Mama Helen Joseph died on Christmas Day feeling deeply betrayed by some of those very comrades whose memory she so courageously kept alive while they were imprisoned and exile. As a South African nation we have been betrayed by the very same people...

The people of Palestine were betrayed, as long ago as the 2nd of November 2017, with the Balfour Declaration, by the then government of the United Kingdom (UK), when they gave support to the establishment of an illegal colonial Zionist state. The consequences of that act of wanton betrayal continue to viciously, and violently, impact on the people of Palestine up to this very day.

In order to understand why on the 16th of December 1961 the first acts of armed resistance to the apartheid state took place - and the Umkhonto we Sizwe Manifesto, was issued stating that: “The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight” - we have to appreciate the centuries long history of violent colonial oppression and land dispossession (sheer land theft!) that the indigenous people of South Africa had been subjected to.

The armed struggle was not suddenly conjured up out of nowhere, there was a long history of non-violent failed efforts to address the injustices of colonialism and apartheid, that led up to the eventual decision to take up arms. Similarly, the armed resistance against Apartheid Israel had a very long geneses. It finally came about, after over more than seven decades of colonial occupation, land dispossession and violence by the Zionist Apartheid Israel State.

Thus, it is historically incorrect to treat the armed resistance attack undertaken by Hamas on the 7th of October, against illegal Zionist settlers on Palestinian land, as if it had no reason, or historical background.

It is rightwing lies, and propaganda, of the reactionary USA and Western mainstream media to call Hamas a ‘terrorist organisation’, similar to the lies and Stratcom propaganda that were deployed to call those of us who, as MK soldiers, took up arms against the racist apartheid regime here in South Africa, ‘terrorists’.

President Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey was absolutely correct when he told a massive pro-Palestinian rally, on Sunday the 29th of October 2023 in Istanbul, that Israel is an illegal occupier, and that Hamas is not a terrorist organisation, but a liberation organisation fighting to protect Palestinian land, and the Palestinian people. He was also correct to say that the main culprit behind the terrible massacre in Gaza, is the USA and the West.

There is no substantial, legal or material, difference between the inalienable right that we in South Africa had to take up arms against the apartheid regime, and the right that the Palestinians now have, in terms of international law, and the numerous United Nations (UN) Resolutions (including the 1961 General Assembly Resolution in favour of the right to self-determination of all nations), to defend themselves.

Understanding this undeniable clear similarity between our liberation struggle here in South Africa, and the struggle of the Palestinian people, and the personal conversion that I went through in having decided that the armed struggle was inevitable and necessary, clarify for me why I now also have to support the armed struggle of Hamas, and Hisbollah, and the Palestinian people in general.

Anything less would be inconsistent and lacks moral integrity. It will indeed be a betrayal of everything I have stood for, suffered for, and was imprisoned for. If I turned out to be such a weakling and turncoat, Mama Helen if she was still alive, would have been absolutely correct to lump me in her outrage together with Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo, and of course the über sell out, Cyril Ramaphosa, as a betrayer.

I would have stood condemned by the question of Bonhoeffer’s prison poem, ‘Who am I?’. I would no longer be “trembling with anger at despotisms and humiliation”. NO, I would have been a spineless worm, a pathetic sell out, betraying my whole life, and those great ikons of our liberation struggle like Mama Helen, Mama Winnie and Oom Bey, who mentored me with the examples of their dedicated lives.

No!, I can never do that! Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I must say that I am prepared to say farewell to all of the life that I love, and rather die!

This is the foundation of my outrage against the insincere sell outs in the ANC, who are so pathetically personified by Cyril Ramaphosa. Not only have they betrayed our South African liberation struggle, but they make a sick mockery of their so-called ‘support’ for the Palestinian people. Like the serpents that they are, they talk with split tongues about their so-called support for the Palestinians, while they still support that totally discredited farce of a so-called ‘two states solution’.

Neither do they close the embassy of Apartheid Israel and severe diplomatic ties, nor do they stop trading with Israel. In fact Ramaphosa’s Shanduka is known to have close business ties with several Jewish owned companies, who are professed Zionists, and are some of the biggest donors to Apartheid Israel.

Ramaphosa, and the ANC NEC parading around with Palestinian keffiyehs, is a disgusting mockery of the struggle of the Palestinian people, and the terrible suffering and genocide that they are being subjected to. To add insult to injury, that perpetual blower of hot air and enfant terrible Secretary General of the ANC, Fikile Mbalula, had the temerity to denounce the armed liberation attacks carried out by Hamas against illegal colonial settlers. These people have no shame! Everything they do lacks integrity, and is rotten to the core!

Dr. Allan Boesak is absolutely correct to have denounced them in the strongest possible terms for hosting the United States of America’s African Growth and Opportunity (AGOA) Forum for 2023, from the 2nd to the 3rd of November. Over and above the fact that AGOA is a very bad idea for our own economic independence, and international positioning with regards to our BRICS membership, in a fast changing multi-polar world, it is beyond comprehension that we will be hosting Joe Biden, or one of his Administration’s most senior representatives (most likely the USA Secretary of State, Antony Blinken), who was just the other day meeting with the butcher Ntanyahu, and defended the genocide being committed in Gaza by Apartheid Israel to the hilt in the UN Security Council!

Dr. Boesak is correct to ask why is South Africa going to play host to the USA as the most ardent supporter of Apartheid Israel, whose weapons, and billions in military aid, have kept the occupation and wars of extermination going for over 75 years?

After all, the USA, since the very beginning, has been the main funder and political protector of the Zionist project in the land of the Palestinians, and is together with Israel, responsible for the slaughter of children we are witnessing right now. Only a week ago Joe Biden’s regime vetoed a resolution at the United Nations, which called for the bare minimum: A ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid to get through.

While uttering entirely insincere mealy-mouth “sympathies” for Palestine, the butcher of Marikana is eagerly readying himself to shake the bloodstained hand of the butchers of Gaza!

Together with Dr. Boesak I must ask: “Why are South Africans putting up with a President and government who would rather openly stand with racist occupiers, settler-colonialists, war criminals and those who commit genocide, than with the brave, suffering people of Palestine engaged in a struggle for the right to live with justice, peace and dignity? Is this spineless, unprincipled, shameless stand to be the reflection of the character of our people in Palestine’s darkest hour and greatest need?”

Yes, indeed! Why are we putting up a day longer with these horrible people?!

As South Africans we should rise up, and not allow the AGOA Forum to continue. Beyond that, we should also - for the very sake of our own dignity and humanity - rise up in support of the people of Gaza and their children.

Together with our true revolutionary ancestors, Mama Winnie, Mama Helen, Oom Bey, Commander Chris Hani, and other true ikons of our liberation struggle, we must ask ourselves Bonhoeffer’s seminal question: “Who am I/we?”.

HOW will we be able to live with ourselves? HOW will we be able to get up in the morning, and look at ourselves in the mirror, when we allow this outrage to continue not only in Palestine, but also here in our own country?

It is in this context that I support the armed struggle of Hamas against the genocidal butchers of Apartheid Israel, and also draw my clear conclusions for what it ultimately means for the butcher friend of the butchers of Gaza/Palestine, who leads this neo-apartheid regime here in my own beloved country.

As I have said, I have long ago figured out what is the lesser of two evils … Ay’khale!

Ambassador Carl ‘Mpangazitha’ Niehaus is the President of the African Radical Economic Transformation Alliance (ARETA)