The recent death of General Magnus Malan, the former head of the SADF and later Minister of Defence, brought to mind two interviews I conducted with him.
The first was in the grim winter of 1986 just after the declaration of a general state of emergency and with no end in sight of the unrest, which had broken out in September 1984. I was writing at the time for the somewhat left leaning quarterly, Die Suid-Afrikaan, and had miraculously secured an interview with the minister.
In certain circles of the University of Cape Town, where I was a lecturer of political studies, he was regarded as even more of a political demon than President PW Botha. It was speculated that he was behind the militarization of South Africa and was planning to turn the regime into a military dictatorship, through the imposition of martial law followed by a military coup.
My first question in the interview of 1986 was whether the winning of "hearts and minds" was as important, for the combating of racial unrest, as it was in a war where insurgents had to be fought. Malan's answer was surprising: "The state must satisfy the expectations of the masses, who have huge needs. The radicals want to exploit this situation. I have on my desk Mao Zedong's red book - go read it. This is how the enemies of South Africa are driving their assault."
In that period it was generally accepted that the top rung of the ANC was a coalition of nationalists and communists, all strongly inspired by the writings of Karl Marx. Cosatu was also seen as an organisation relying upon Marx rather than Mao. But Malan did not think that it was, in the first instance, a class struggle that was being fought in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Rather it was a case of a revolutionary elite using poor people, living in dreadful circumstances, to take to the streets on their behalf against a state authority. In South East Asia it is still Mao rather than Marx on whom revolutionaries rely upon for guidance in trying to mobilise the poorest of the poor.
Magnus Malan was a member of the first white military generation that received an academic training in military studies He went to university during the 1950s when revolutionary war increasingly displacing the conventional kind. In the thirty years after receiving his BSc Mil in 1953 at the University of Pretoria, one revolutionary war followed another: Malaya, Algeria, Vietnam, the Portuguese colonies in Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe.