Blade Nzimande, the general secretary of the South African Communist Party - whose first language is Zulu - points to an important subject in an article on the SACP by S'thembiso Msomi in City Press July 9 2007.
As quoted by Msomi, Nzimande stated that the party's membership had increased from 19,000 at its previous congress in 2002 to a current membership of 51,874 paid-up members. According to Msomi, KwaZulu-Natal ‘provides the highest number of members (12,000)'. That would give this Zulu-speaking region more than double the average SACP membership for the nine provinces combined, and slightly less than a quarter of the total for the country as a whole. That is a matter that requires some elaboration, given that the last three presidents of the ANC (the last two of them, also presidents of the state) were Xhosa-speakers: Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. (There are 10,677,305 Zulu-speakers in South Africa, as against the next most populous group, the Xhosa - 7,907,153).
The Mabhida legacy
During the exile, it was sometimes remarked by members of Umkhonto weSizwe (the ANC's Spear of the Nation) that while the ANC - despite its increasingly non-racial remit - was a vehicle above all for Xhosa interests, the SACP to a high degree was a vehicle for Zulu interests. This was particularly so during the lifetime of Moses Mbheki Mabhida (1923-86), the SACP general secretary during the main period of fighting by Umkhonto weSizwe in Angola, and a former vice vice president within South Africa of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu), which was allied to the ANC.
Oliver Tambo, the ANC president in exile (and a Xhosa-speaker), made a specific point of stressing Mabhida's status as a Zulu-speaker at his colleague's funeral in Maputo, Mozambique, on 29 March 1986. There he stated:
‘What an experience it was to listen to Madhevu [an affectionate nick-name] as he spoke in Zulu, drawing on our heroic past to fire the timid with enthusiasm, encourage the brave and correct those who had erred! The images he vividly portrayed were of a Shaka and a Dingane - great giants, who if they were alive today, would be with us as commanders of the people's army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and not arrogant local government functionaries of a regime that despises everything African.'
The Soviet model
A statement issued by the SACP in 2002 stated that Mabhida had grown up in the district of Pietermaritzburg ‘of peasant stock.' One of his teachers at school was the subsequent leader of the Communist Party of South Africa and die-hard Stalinist, Harry Gwala, who ‘explained to him the vital role played by the Soviet Union during the Second World War. In December 1942 Moses Mabhida joined the Communist Party.' He was then aged 19, at a time when Stalin was a wartime hero to the communist parties of the world and beyond, across a very wide political spectrum. The figure of Gwala remains central in the history of the SACP and the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal, as does his undeviating Stalin-era persona: a subject to which any study of the SACP and the region must return.
After the Defiance Campaign of 1952, the SACP statement continues, the Pietermaritzburg district committee of the party (then illegal) suggested that Mabhida should ‘give up his job and start working full-time' for the trade union movement. He started with the Howick Rubber Workers' Union and the Chemical Workers in Pietermaritizburg, Durban and other parts of Natal, in both of which Gwala - who had left teaching for organising trade unions - was active.
At Sactu's founding congress in Johannesburg in March 1955, Mabhida was elected one of four vice-presidents. He served as secretary of the Pietermaritzburg branch of the ANC in the mid-1950s, and as the office of the (ANC-held) premiership in KwaZulu-Natal noted at the time of his celebratory reburial in Durban last December, had a ‘close working relationship' with the revered then ANC president and later Nobel Prize-winner, Chief Albert Luthuli (also a Zulu-speaker). Mabhida became a member of the ANC's National Executive Committee around 1956, and in 1958-59 became acting chairperson of the ANC in Natal.
Umkhonto weSizwe
He was sent abroad by Sactu in 1960 to represent the organisation internationally, a week after the declaration of a state emergency by the apartheid government. For the next three years he was based in Prague at the headquarters of the Soviet-controlled World Federation of Trade Unions, organising solidarity activities. In 1963 he was asked by Tambo to ‘devote himself to the development' of Umkhonto. Following military training in the Soviet bloc, he became chief political instructor of new military recruits and later served as commander of Umkhonto, sitting on its highest bodies.
In 1969 he was ‘instrumental in setting up the ANC's department of Intelligence and Security'. He was appointed general secretary of the SACP in November 1979, replacing the Moscow-educated Moses Kotane, who had died the previous year. Mabhida continued to work for Umkhonto during the 1980s, based at various times in Lesotho, Mozambique and Swaziland (all focused on underground work in the Natal area), until he suffered a stroke in Havana, Cuba, in 1985, dying in Maputo the following year.
Senzangakhona kaJama kaNdaba
A dispute continues in Kwa-Zulu Natal as to whether a new stadium being built for the 2010 soccer World Cup will be named ‘Senzangakhona Stadium' or ‘Moses Mabhida Stadium.' This matter of a name is not a small one, since Senzangakhona kaJama kaNdaba was the father of King Shaka, founder of the Zulu empire in the early nineteenth century, and the epitome of the monarchical principle among the Zulus.
Between the opposed polarities of a Stalin-derived Soviet-type republicanism and the traditional hereditary principle of Shaka kaSenzangakhona kaJama kaNdaba, a harsh low-intensity civil war raged in KwaZulu-Natal in the late 1980s and early 1990s which shook the whole country, and killed many. The presence of such a high proportion of Zulu-speakers in the SACP today touches on this still raw wound, as does the treatment by the Mbeki presidency of the Zulu-speaking deputy president of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, who helped to mediate an end to the conflict.
Inescapably, the ANC presidential succession battle bears upon the issue of Zulu and Xhosa in South Africa, and upon the issue Quo Vadis? - which way forward? - for the SACP. Ensconced as the Communist Party remains within the not so capacious bosom of the ANC, with its Xhosa presidency through descent of Tambo, Mandela and Mbeki, it might appear to Zulu-speakers inside and outside the SACP that they - the largest single linguistic grouping in the country - would be better placed to defend their interests through a political vehicle of their own. Within the tradition of resistance to the apartheid state, rather than of collaboration with it (the fate of the traditionalist Inkatha FreedomParty, bitter enemy of the SACP and the ANC in that low-intensity civil war among the Zulus), it might be that the SACP presents itself as the best available vehicle.
The tradition of Harry Gwala
It is here that the tradition of Harry Themba Gwala (1920-1995), known as ‘Mphephetwa', deserves attention.
As President of the country, Nelson Mandela said at Gwala's funeral in July 1995 that "umunt' omdala" (the old man) had been a "great ‘political teacher' who taught generation after generation of the struggle." Many leaders of the younger generation, including Moses Mabhida, who predeceased his teacher, had, as Mandela said, drunk ‘from the deep well of Mphephetwa's political wisdom.' The ANC magazine Mayibuye commemorated him as ‘Teacher, people's tribune, man of steel' - that last phrase recalling his hero, Stalin (‘steel').
Mandela had known this man well, from Gwala's eight years on Robben Island as a member of Umkhonto (1964-72) followed by a life sentence passed after a further arrest in 1975. Gwala was finally released not long before Mandela himself, and immediately became the lion of the SACP, the ANC and Umkhonto in Natal. There were many conflicts on Robbben Island between Mandela's more conciliatory approach (not least towards his own relatives in the Thembu aristocracy, then running the Transkei Bantustan) and that of the intransigent Zulu Soviet republican, Gwala. Mandela recalled him as an honest comrade ‘whose tongue was as sharp as his agile mind,' a man of single-mindedness and a stout heart who was ‘sometimes too blunt' and ‘at times too harsh.'
A cold front of fear
He was one of those individuals, said Mandela, who ‘do not fear to differ' and ‘do not wilt at the slightest sign of divergence', a man equally honest and blunt in disputing with colleagues as he was ‘brave and blunt' against apartheid. This was a formidable man. ‘Personally I was fortunate to cross swords with him on many an issue, both in prison and outside,' Mandela recalled. ‘I would naturally insist that I was right, as Harry would definitely insist that he too was right.' Gwala's illegal organising for Umkhonto in Natal after his release from prison in 1972 had taken place at ‘the most difficult period in the struggle', recalled Mandela. ‘A cold front of fear was sweeping across the country', when ‘the brave could only whisper'. In later years, disability as a result of motor neurone disease did not deter him.
This was the man who as SACP Central Committee member and NEC member of the ANC was the main organiser and warlord of SACP/ANC forces in the civil war with Inkatha in KwaZulu-Natal in the final period of apartheid: something never far from the mind of Mandela - who played a major role in ameliorating the conflict - when considering the Zulu nation. As he stated at Gwala's funeral, ‘To recount the history of Mphephetwa is to invoke the obvious, yet easily distorted and forgotten truth: that KwaZulu/Natal is one of the crucibles of the freedom struggle' - a matter to which Mandela has been more sensitive than his successor, Thabo Mbeki.
The candidate Jacob Zuma
Jacob Zuma (born 1942), like so many others in Natal, was one of Gwala's younger followers and comrades. As the child of a very poor family whose father died when he was young, he received no formal schooling but struggled hard to learn through his own efforts. His official biography states that he became involved in politics at any early age, ‘heavily influenced by a trade unionist family member', and joined the ANC in Natal in 1959. He became an active member of Umkhonto in 1962, was arrested the following year while seeking to leave the country illegally for military training, and received a ten-year sentence which he served in full on Robben Island, over much the same period as Gwala in his first prison term. It was in prison that Zuma acquired his elements of formal education. He, like Gwala, after their release, then helped re-establish ANC underground structures in Natal between 1973 and 1975, when he left the country illegally to work in ANC and Umkhonto structures abroad.
Before the ANC's coming to office in South Africa in 1994, Zuma was a member of the SACP. On 24 March this year he delivered the Chris Hani Memorial Lecture to the Young Communist League at the University of Limpopo, at which he said: ‘Not only does the Communist Manifesto provide the most accurate analysis of society as it evolves, it also provides the agenda for socialist formations the world over.' The deputy secretary of the YCL, Mazibuko Jara - since expelled byNzimande - published an article in November 2005, ‘What colour is our flag? Red or JZ?' as a critique of his organisation's uncritical attitude towards Zuma. There he described Zuma as ‘a former communist who lost confidence in socialism' and who had ‘left the Party at a time of ideological crisis as part of an ANC leadership which questioned the relevance of socialist strategy, analysis and organisation.'
For all that, the divergence of Zuma from the power circle around President Mbeki has provided occasion for the first significant opening of political opposition within the mass black polity in South Africa, since the overwhelming victory of the ANC in the 1994 general elections. The arguments within the SACP, Cosatu and the ANC Youth League, and among Zuma supporters, for greater stress by the ANC in government on ‘worker and poor' resonates with a major chord of Zulu-speaking history within the ANC over the past sixty years, in the legacy of Gwala and Mabhida.
The SACP national conference
There is no way of predicting the direction that may be taken by the SACP at its 12th national conference this month, as discussed by Stanley Uys in 'Crunch time for SA Communist Party' (ever-fasternews, 9 June). Its place within the Congress Alliance is deeply cherished. Membership up to the highest level within the ANC by SACP members of all races was fought for politically over a very long period, and will not be given up lightly. While the Soviet Union remained in place, ‘dual membership' within the ANC was a cardinal principle, in keeping with the SACP theory of the ‘national democratic revolution.'
After the downfall of the Soviet Union as a crucial source of funds and material support of all kinds, the SACP would need an extraordinary surge of self-confidence to go out into the cold on its own, through cutting off the lifeline of patronage from the post-apartheid state as part of the Alliance - even if this dwindled to a trickle. There is no indicator as yet as to whether the party has found an alternative source of funding from outside the country. The pragmatic argument will remain strong for remaining inside the tent, instead of out.
Zulu expression through SACP?
That said, the urge among Zulu-speakers for a greater say in South African public affairs may well find expression through the SACP, as a means of challenging a perceived Xhosa-speaking hegemony in the political firmament. The Zulu-speaking heritage of Gwala and Mabhida is a resource that will be drawn upon. A principal theme would be the argument 'worker and poor'. This may provide one thread of inquiry into the motivation, history and drive of SACP general secretary Nzimande, in his recent purge of party members critical of too close an identification of the party with its former member, Jacob Zuma, as Stanley Uys reports.
In the war of succession of the ANC presidency, Uys speculates that 'Mbeki's intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils may be the only Central Committee member to escape expulsion' on account of his seat in the Mbeki government. If this indeed is true, it could well be because - like Gwala, Mabhida and Zuma himself - Kasrils (white, and with no factional base of his own) is a Natal boy from the birth period of Umkhonto weSizwe in the early Sixties. This could be a further indicator of the 'Zulu heritage' in the present strife in the party.
[Post-script, mid-May 2009: In the event, Kasrils was swept away with all the other current and former leaders of the SACP - the pillars of the exile - who remained loyal to Mbeki's government. The purge of Communists and former Communists within the ANC and government between December 2007 and September 2008 was as complete and thorough-going, if not as ruthless, as when Stalin purged his erstwhile comrades in the Bolshevik party in Russia , Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Bukharin, and many, many more. They had effectively been characterised as compromisers, and traitors to the cause of Communism.
At the time of his inauguration as President on 9 May this year, Jacob Zuma had achieved the most complete political unification of isiZulu-speakers in South Africa since King Cetshwayo in 1879, with reverberations among people of Zulu descent as far north as the Ngoni of Zambia. This is a great fact of southern and central African political life. Simultaneously, the SACP further strengthened its place as the most powerful political organiser in South Africa, operating very successfully both within the ANC and Cosatu, with its isiZulu-speaking secretary-general, Nzimande, in Cabinet position as Minister of Higher Education, at the head of a powerful tranche of Communist Party ministers and deputy ministers.
As the most powerful isiZulu-speaker in South Africa since the days of King Shaka, as a former member of the Politburo of the SACP and chief of intelligence in iMbokodo while it operated its prison camp Quatro in exile, Jacob Zuma stands at the head of a formidable political power.
The heritage of Moses Mabhida and Harry Gwala has never been stronger. - PT].
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This article was first published on http://www.ever-fasternews.com/ July 11 2007 (see here)
