Address by Malusi Gigaba presenting the Solomon Mahlangu Lecture at the Bellville Campus of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, April 6 2011
327 years after the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck and his first horde of invaders and colonisers, and as if to spill his blood in a sort of satanic celebration of that occasion that was historic both to the natives of South Africa as well as the invaders themselves, the most reactionary colonial-minority in the history of our country hanged one of the fighters for the freedom of the natives, Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu.
For 327 years the natives had waged a persistent, heroic, stubborn and unrelenting resistance to colonial invasion.
Solomon Mahlangu had inherited and imbued the unconquerable bold spirit of his African warrior-predecessors who had refused to be subjugated from the early history of interactions between the Khoisan of the Cape and Portuguese travelers around 1500 AD, in what were uneasy trade relations sometimes turned fatal as the Khoi Khoi grew discontented with the imposition and cunning of the travelers.
In the 1969 Strategy and Tactics, the ANC said:
"From the time alien rule was imposed there has been - historically speaking - unbroken resistance to this domination. It has taken different forms at different times but it has never been abandoned. For the first 250 years there were regular armed clashes, battles and wars. The superior material resources of the enemy, the divided and often fragmented nature of the resistance, the unchallenged ascendancy of imperialism as a world system up to the beginning of the 20th century, the historically understandable absence of political cohesion and leadership in the people's camp; these and other factors combined to end the first phase of resistance against alien domination. But the protracted character of this resistance unequalled anywhere else in Africa is underlined by the fact that the armed subjugation of the indigenous people was only really accomplished the beginning of this century."
From the time of the first arrival of the colonial settlers in South Africa around 1487, when a ship captained by Bartholomew Diaz made it around the Cape of Good Hope and sailed up the eastern coast of Southern Africa as far as Algoa Bay, right through the time of Vasco da Gama, Jan van Riebeeck and up to 1994 when apartheid-colonialism finally succumbed, our people had never accepted both colonial invasion as well as their subjugation in the centuries that followed their defeat in the disparate wars of resistance.
In the protracted period that lasted for centuries, spanning the epochs of anti-colonial wars as well as modern political resistance after the founding of the ANC in 1912, the oppressed in South Africa had picked up the cudgels of the struggle to fight against colonial invasion and for national freedom.
When Bartholomew Diaz and his men landed in the Cape, the Khoi engaged in skirmishes with them, and the first of the casualties of those wars perished.
Throughout the entire period of political subjugation accompanied by the most extensive economic plunder, the regime knew that to keep itself in power, it had to rely on the use of force, without for a moment hesitating to summon and deploy maximum force against unarmed people, women, the elderly and even children.
Solomon Mahlangu followed in the proud tradition and footsteps of the Khoi militants who waged the very first resistance to Bartholomew Diaz and lost their lives in that battle; Autshumao and subsequent leaders and masses of our people who dared to rise up, whether by the use of arms, the petitions or even the non-violent defiance campaign, to defend our humanity; those successive waves of African generations who perished in the course of the pursuit of our freedom, who were exiled, jailed or forced underground.
These tensions culminated in 1659 when Dutch expansion was intolerable to the Khoi who paid the ultimate sacrifice for their decision to revolt against land dispossession.
This crucial moment which was to be the indelible African moment and quite possibly the root of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid uprising is noted by Professor Nigel Penn who wrote:
"It was on the frontier that the truly vital issues were decided in a short space of time: issues such as who should own the land and under what conditions, and who should work for whom and under what conditions".
It was a race against time, where the "losers" would lose more than just their rights to live as dignified citizens of this beloved land, but also ultimately lost their free will as they were trampled upon by those who regarded themselves as "kings", "queens", "leaders" and "guardians" of human kind and modernity.
These great Khoisan warriors chose to rather face death instead of allowing themselves to be subjected to the oppression and exploitation that was to unfold as colonisation deepened its grasp of a once free southern Africa.
Jan Van Riebeeck had said that in defeating the Khoisan, the settlers had won the right of conquest and the indigenous populations had lost all rights to determine and thus be masters of their own destiny.
It was for this reason that in the 1969 Strategy and Tactics, centuries later, the ANC said that: "Our people have suffered more than national humiliation".
The bold unwavering and unconquerable spirit of proud Africans recurs throughout our history with strong similarity and more daring at every instance.
Just as the Khoisan stood against the wave of social injustice in 1659, so did the Zulu in the battle of Insandlwana and the Bambata uprising; just as the Xhosa did throughout the 9 Frontier Wars and the brave armies led by Kings Sekhukhune and Moshoeshoe, in wars that reflected the convictions of collectives who stood face on against the threat that would dissolve their African social fabric.
When they hanged him in 1979, 357 years after the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck and his horde of invaders and colonisers in 1652, South Africa had been through the tumultuous events of June 1976 when the youth had taken it upon themselves to revitalise the struggle and inject it with a new purpose and energy, implanting in the masses of the people courage and the conviction that the regime was not as invincible as it had portrayed itself and that the masses themselves were not heartless cowards that the regime had tried to portray them as.
The masses needed to be re-injected with a belief in the correctness and superiority of their course and in the formidability of their militant united action so that they could not be cowered into submission by the regime's organs of repression.
This generation redefined the content of the struggle out of the confusion in which it had been plunged by the decade-long banning of the liberation movement, the exiling of its leadership while others were in prison or the underground.
They interpreted the new conditions of the struggle emerging internationally and locally, in the period that followed the Durban workers' strike, the heightening of repression and general retreat of the liberation movement.
They gave a new impetus to the struggle, and through their intervention and struggles, proved a lie to the notion that the regime was invincible and that our people were too subhuman to revolt against racial tyranny.
They re-energised the struggle by injecting it with new tactics which changed its course in the years that were follow, leading to the mass uprisings of the eighties as well as the unprecedented mobilisation of the international community.
In a very real way, the mass uprisings of the eighties owed a lot to the intervention of this generation of the youth of the seventies, who laid the ground for the formation of the popular students organisations, COSAS and AZASO in 1979, on exactly the same year as Solomon Mahlangu was hanged, and as a response to his callous murder.
To understand these events, as well as Solomon Mahlangu's cowardly and callous murder, we must first remember that the seventies were the second decade of that period of extreme reaction that had started in 1960 following the Sharpeville Massacre, characterised by brutal and naked violence, the banning of the liberation movement, the exile of the leadership and mass cadres of the movement and the imprisonment of others.
In response, the liberation movement, both the ANC-led Alliance and the PAC had launched the armed struggle in order to be able to meet the regime's violence with arms, as it became clear during the Sharpeville Massacre that the regime had come to a point where it could no longer understand the language of peaceful resistance.
During the seventies when the youth led the revolt against apartheid, our people had seemed to have been totally demobilised by and succumbed to the regime's repressive machinery.
The generations of youth of this protracted period that spanned this whole period between 1944 and the 1980s, when freedom was achieved, can be said to have lived in the future and by their deeds taught us what it meant to be youth, and how a youth generation should conduct itself in respect of their responsibilities as a generation in relation to their nation.
In 1947, Anton Lembede, who was the ANC Youth League's foremost thinker on African Nationalism, was to coin the slogan, "Freedom in our Lifetime", and thus defined for his generation and those that were to succeed them a mission from which could then be drawn their tasks.
This perspective was to guide generations of youth afterwards, during the next difficult decades of the struggle when one generation of youth after another joined in the struggle in pursuit of freedom.
Each generation of youth, be it that of the forties that led the defiance campaign, or of the fifties and sixties that ultimately became the first combatants of Umkhonto WeSizwe, or that of the seventies that led the mass uprisings that started in Soweto, to which Solomon Mahlangu belonged, or that of the eighties that led the unprecedented mass uprisings that became the final assault on the bastions of apartheid, had to abide by this mission of "Freedom in our Lifetime" until freedom was achieved.
We are correct today to regard their contribution of these youth generations to our struggle as having been extra-ordinary, not because they themselves were extraordinary, but because whilst they were as ordinary as we are, yet their actions exceeded the bounds of the ordinary and became extra-ordinary.
In all what they did, what stands out is their remarkable bravery and clarity of thought.
Decades earlier, in a different period and struggle, but virtually similar context, an Algerian revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, had said:
"Each generation must, out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it".
Later, responding to the challenge he had coined for his generation of Algerian youth, he said that:
"As for us who have decided to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to sanction all revolts, all desperate actions, all those abortive attempts drowned in rivers of blood".
Accordingly, they regarded it as their generation's mission "to sanction all revolts, all desperate actions, all those abortive attempts drowned in rivers of blood", of course to "break the back of colonialism".
Indeed, the right to revolution has always been a recognised birth-right of the all the oppressed.
Every generation of youth has therefore contended with these urgent and pertinent questions: What is our mission?; What are the tasks attendant to this mission?;indeed, What are the revolts they are prepared to sanction?
Out of those generations emerged powerful leaders whose names became household names in our struggle for decades, exemplars of all that was best among the fighters for freedom, moral forces up to which all our people looked.
The leadership that came from people like Solomon Mahlangu in this context was a break from the melancholy acceptance of inferiority.
Leadership, in this context, was far from an offer of prestigious position, accolades and rewards; it was a guarantee of victimisation, subjugation and brutality, where there always loomed large the possibility of a brutish end.
Leadership in the regressive political battlefields of the past was in itself a life-limiting option.
Theirs are stories of leadership and heroism that are not known to many of today's beneficiaries of their selfless sacrifices, receding into the past with passing time.
But their dreams live on, refusing to die, surging us still onward ever to carry on the march to a better future.
These leaders, whether celebrated or forgotten, proposed more than what was given to them by society; they were pioneers of today's reality; they captured the true sense of leadership by fearlessly refusing to conform to the proposition of their predicaments.
They challenged the imposed proposition that they were inferior beings and undeserving of the opportunity to pursue happiness and self fulfilment. They rejected the devil's offering that because immorality was the order of the day then, therefore they too had to be immoral and subscribe to the lowest-common moral standards.
Leadership is at its best when it is not guided by comfort and favour but motivated by conviction, principle and the unrelenting belief that better and humane conditions are achievable, that what we can become need not be confined to what we are due to fears and hostility, indeed, due to the conditions that define our physical existence.
Theirs was a leadership for a better world that rose in face of brutality; that transcended the conditions of their limitations to reach a pioneering and iconic level; a leadership that, according to Albert Luthuli, "rises with danger".
But, of course, the vision, fearlessness and leadership of such as Solomon Mahlangu were cut down before their prime by a regime that feared the force of their moral example and influence.
The youth of today are both the inheritors of yesterday as well as the builders, the midwives of tomorrow. They constitute a critical bridge between the past, present and future.
Time and again, young people become the catalysts of the progressive change we seek, and through their death-defying daring, they help to make history.
The whole world has observed with awe the bravado and epoch-making feats of the youth of Egypt and Tunisia over the last few months, turning their reality and that of their peoples and the world upside-down, showing once more that nothing is in this world is permanent and absolute; all that we know today is only transient - it shall come to pass.
The mass uprising we have witnessed in North Africa, in which the youth played a catalysing role, must speak to us not only of the importance of democracy, but also of the important need to invest in young people as agents for progressive change.
We now know that the youth are a vital force for the future and that conditions permitting, they shake off their complacency as well as that of their nations to provide the most requisite leadership to their societies, today!
As we pondered some of the critical challenges of our sixteen-year old democracy, we have come to the conclusion that job creation through economic transformation ranks as a top priority.
Mistakenly, some have coined a slogan of "economic freedom in our lifetime", saying that the struggles of the past, and the mission of the previous youth generations, were about "political freedom".
I am certain that the generation of Anton Lembede which originally coined the slogan, "Freedom in our Lifetime", would disagree with this proposition that when they set their generation that mission, they were referring to "political freedom".
From the moment our movement, the ANC, was formed, we have understood it that our political oppression was closely linked with land dispossession, economic exploitation and plunder, the transformation of black labour from human beings to beasts of burden, cheap labour, the denial of our history, humanity and rubbishing of our culture as a people in order to dehumanise us and complete our oppression, pursuing it with an unnerving totality.
Solomon Plaatjie, the ANC's first Secretary General, was to say at the Second Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1921, that:
"It will thus be seen that white exploiters of Native labour are determined that the South African Native as a class shall remain perpetually insolvent".
Later, in an article written for the Diamond Fields Advertiser in 1924, he said:
"It is, indeed, hard to be a Native of South Africa, outside the Cape Province, for perplexed and outlawed by the acts of Parliament in the land of his fathers, he has hardly a place on which to rest the hollow of his foot".
We can already see here at the beginning of the 20th Century the intricate interplay of political repression and economic plunder in the most extensive system of racial oppression ever invented by racial bigots.
It was for this reason that Anton Lembede said in the forties:
"Unless Africans achieve national freedom as early as possible they will be confronted with the impending doom and imminent catastrophe of extermination; they will not be able to survive the satanic forces economic, social and political, unleashed against them... Now the panacea of all these ills is National Freedom. In as much as, when Africans are free, they will be in a position to pilot their own ship and, unhampered, work toward their own destiny and, without external hindrance or restriction devise ways and means of saving or rescuing their perishing race."
He proceeded to argue that:
"Freedom is an indispensable condition for all progress and development. It will only be when Africans are free that they will be able to exploit fully and bring to fruition their divine talent and contribute something new towards the general welfare and prosperity of Mankind; and it will only be then that Africans will enter on a footing of equality with other nations of the world into the commonwealth of nations; and only then will Africans occupy their rightful and honourable place among the nations of the world."
Later in 1955, in adopting the Freedom Charter, the ANC tied the pursuit of political freedom with that for fundamental social change as the Charter argued that:
"We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:
- that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people;
- that our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality;
- that our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities;
- that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief;
- And therefore, we, the people of South Africa, black and white together equals, countrymen and brothers adopt this Freedom Charter;
- And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing neither strength nor courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won."
Then in 1969, at the Morogoro Conference, the ANC stated that:
"In our country - more than in any other part of the oppressed world - it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not represent even the shadow of liberation.
"Our drive towards national emancipation is therefore in a very real way bound up with economic emancipation. We have suffered more than just national humiliation. Our people are deprived of their due in the country's wealth; their skills have been suppressed and poverty and starvation has been their life experience. The correction of these centuries-old economic injustices lies at the very core of our national aspirations.
"We do not understand the complexities which will face a people's government during the transformation period nor the enormity of the problems of meeting economic needs of the mass of the oppressed people. But one thing is certain - in our land this cannot be effectively tackled unless the basic wealth and the basic resources are at the disposal of the people as a whole and are not manipulated by sections or individuals be they White or Black."
It was for these reasons that the President said on January 8th this year, that:
"We must make the decisive shift to meaningful economic transformation and set in motion a very deliberate programme that will ensure that the benefits of our political liberation are shared amongst all our people. Our people have struggled selflessly for freedom from oppression. We cannot fail them when it comes to the struggle for the elimination of poverty. To this end the ANC will be in the forefront of engaging with every role player in this economy and marshal our forces towards the goal of achieving an eradication of poverty.
This will include the deepening of empowerment of black South Africans in general. We have to live the promise of the Freedom Charter, which states amongst others, that all our people will share in the wealth of the country. Political emancipation without economic transformation is meaningless. That is why we have to commit ourselves to economic freedom in our lifetime, and the ANC must continue to be in the forefront of that transformation."
Surely, when the President spoke of "economic freedom in our lifetime", he did not mean it in the context of different and distinct stages of the struggle where hitherto we struggled for political freedom, now it is economic freedom, and in future it will be women emancipation, then cultural freedom and so on.
I am sure that these debates have arisen as the youth ponder their mission post-1994.
I guess if we accept my proposition that freedom is indivisible and that the struggle for freedom was itself a single whole, an unbroken process for total social emancipation, we will then want to proceed from the premise that in pursuing fundamental economic transformation, we are not pursuing a new stage of the struggle as distinct from that of "political freedom".
In this regard, there can be no doubt as to the importance of education for the pursuit of economic transformation and total emancipation.
This is because upon the people's victory over the system of racial bigotry, the actual ask of building and living in the national democratic society will belong to the younger generation of society, which is the only generation that can start to work under the new condition, in a situation in which relations based on the oppression and exploitation of one racial group by another are beginning to disappear.
The youth in the transition from apartheid to national democracy are faced with a far more complex task than that faced by those whose task was to dismantle the system of racial tyranny.
Yours is a task of construction which can only be accomplished by assimilating all modern knowledge, science and knowledge in order to master modern technology and culture and transform them to serve our people and the new national democratic society evolving.
From an African Nationalist perspective, we should contend that the hitherto oppressed masses need to attain higher levels of education in order to achieve equality for themselves with the white racial groups in terms of skills and free their culture that was deliberately suppressed and denied by successive years of apartheid-colonialism.
Once we understand the importance of education in the unfolding revolutionary process post-apartheid, only then will we then appreciate the absolute urgent necessity to ensure that the African and black child is properly educated to achieve the same levels of education and skills as their white counterparts.
Accordingly, we will become intolerant of all tendencies, often pretending as militancy, that keep teachers away from school, and children away from their desks and thus reduce the amount of time they spend learning and imbuing and conquering new information, knowledge, skills and culture.
Our teachers, especially those that belong to progressive unions, must understand their historic calling and vocation at this juncture of our revolution in relation to the pursuit of the agenda for the restoration of the pride and dignity of the black and African masses.
They, more than anyone else, need to understand their national and class calling, not merely in relation to their own salaries and right to strike, but in relation to the pursuit of the unbroken struggle for total emancipation, because, as the President said it on January 8th - "Our people have struggled selflessly for freedom from oppression. We cannot fail them when it comes to the struggle for the elimination of poverty."
Of all the ills with which our education system is beset, the greatest is our failure to achieve better results with the resources we have at our disposal, and on each occasion, to search for credible and preposterous excuses to explain away what in large measure are subjective deficiencies.
So, may be OBE was wrong choice; but then it was not OBE that kept the teachers out of classrooms, not teaching, and reduced the teaching hours for black learners to roughly a mere 3 hours a day when better-performing schools spent more than 5 hours teaching.
It is also for these self-same that the President announced drastic measures to increase support provided to students at universities.
The challenge is to ensure that students themselves seize these opportunities of democracy and study hard, bearing in mind the historic revolutionary responsibility they have to study, to pass, to work and to build their nation.
The problem with our activists is that their much-mouthed class consciousness is limited only to demanding more salaries and not doing the work that would help the revolution they often half-heartedly refer to.
Our overzealousness to pursue personal material benefits and gratification is certainly at the heart of some of the most intractable moral dilemmas that many of our activists, especially the young, are facing.
For so long, we have been bemoaning the new culture of conspicuous consumption, naked and crass materialism.
It is when we, as political leaders and activists, associate with these appalling activities that we give credence to them and thus threaten the moral fibre both of our revolution and our society.
I know many youth who say they want to be billionaires by the time they reach 45 years and retire.
We have seen the numbers of young people who want academic careers dwindle, as the numbers of PhD students have also dropped.
People are in a hurry to work, to become rich quickly and by all means necessary, to sell their souls to the devil in order to achieve that instant wealth and gratification, and nobody wants to just do an honest day's work anymore.
Youth cannot afford to surrender their role as the midwives and builders of tomorrow.
We can halt this trend and restore the moral values of our movement and revolution.
We owe it to those such as Solomon Mahlangu to defeat this encroaching culture which makes our movement seem vulnerable and gives the likes of the DA an opportunity to take cheap shots at it.
We must work hard to restore the ANC's leadership of the community of the Western Cape, and thus rescue the Western Cape from the clutches of this reactionary, racist DA.
The ultimate condition for the success of our endeavours is the unity of our movement, and the end of all bickering.
Only a united ANC can unite Coloureds and Africans in the Western Cape, and ultimately united the people of the Western Cape under its leadership.
Now that the provincial conference has passed, whatever its outcomes and however each individual might have felt about its outcomes, we must unite behind the banner of the ANC, bearing in mind that it is the ANC and not any conference that leads society.
We cannot hang on to conference outcomes and neglect our political duties to our movement and our people.
You, as young activists, on this, the 32nd Anniversary of Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu's state-sanctioned murder, must step up to your responsibilities as the guardians of our future and define a vision that negates the encroaching tendencies of crass materialism, naked corruption and moral degradation, to re-affirm the best values of our struggle and our movement.
If you did so, Solomon Mahlangu would have not died in vain and his words that his blood would nourish the tree of our freedom would come alive.
Taking the cue from the words reputed to be Che Guevara's last words before he was killed:
"I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man."
The noble ideals to which Solomon Mahlangu dedicated his youth were not lost when he fell. It is for the realisation of these ideals that we should continue to strive.
The cowards who murdered him only killed a man.
His noble ideals live on today, long after the cowards killed a man.
I thank you very much.
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