South Africa’s ambassador to Ivory Coast, Zolani Mtshotshisa, once shared a little vignette with me about Peter Jones that he had heard from Mzwandile Mbilini, one of those little-known foot soldiers of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). Bra Zwai, as we called him in our Eastern Cape township, Ginsberg, summed up his days with Steve Biko and Jones thus: “I had Jones on my left and Biko on my right and we had the country on our shoulders.”
When I heard of Jones’s death I was reminded to correct a commonplace about him that has come to be etched in our collective memory: that he was the last man to see Biko alive. Though well-intentioned, this characterisation is a disservice to his leadership role in the BCM, reducing a long life of leadership to one moment.
He was not a footnote to Biko’s story or his helping hand or part of the background furniture. He was his peer and contemporary – they were almost the same age, with Biko born in 1946 and Jones in 1950.
He was Biko’s alter ego. They were like two feet, walking in step with each other. So, please, no more talk about the last man to see Biko alive.
Biko’s spiritual mentor, Aelred Stubbs, best described Biko’s leadership style: “Whereas other leaders tend almost insensibly to become leaders with a capital L, I never saw any sign of this at all happening with Steve.
He remained to the end on all fours with us, an example of what we all could be.” Until the very end, Jones also remained on all fours with the people.
Jones also shared with Biko the highest of all virtues — courage. He was one of only a handful of leaders in the Azanian People’s Organisation whom I tried to avoid because he was always up to some dangerous mission that could get us arrested. The others were my beloved Muntu Myeza, Lybon Mabasa and Saths Cooper (whom I could not avoid because we lived in the same dormitory at Wits).
Their gung-ho militancy frightened me, but that was what the times called for. Leaders are nothing if not a response to the call of their times.
Jones’s fateful trip to Cape Town with Biko is an example of this daring spirit. In my study of leadership I have found a natural division of labour between daring and deliberative leaders. Rare is the leader who can achieve a balance between the two. Such a balance is usually brought about by some extraneous circumstance such as imprisonment or a banning order.
As Nelson Mandela’s ghost writer Richard Stengel put it: “Nelson Mandela had many teachers in his life, but the greatest of them all was prison … prison taught him self-control, discipline and focus.”
Biko was even more reflective under his banning order in Ginsberg, but that did not stop him from taking daring and dangerous missions.
One way to think about this division of labour is by recourse to Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality, shorn of his obsession with the sexual drive. For Freud, the human personality consisted of the id (our basic instincts), the superego (the conscience that acts as a brake on those instincts) and the ego (the balanced personality).
Political leaders tend to occupy one or the other end of this Freudian spectrum. Walter Sisulu was the political superego to Mandela’s gung-ho id. Robert Sobukwe was the superego to Josias Madzunya’s nativist militancy. Barney Pityana was the superego to Biko and Jones’s political id. Bayard Rustin was the superego to Martin Luther King Jr’s id.
Jones was there for Biko when he was isolated in Ginsberg, but ready to do what needed to be done. The Cape Town trip was an example of that role. It was Jones’s idea that they should go, mainly to deal with divisions in the Western Cape branch of the movement but also to rope Unity Movement leader Neville Alexander into discussions about a united front of all the liberation movements, including the ANC and the PAC.
Jones’s other virtue was his authenticity. In Julius Nyerere’s definition of leadership, he was “at one with the people”. He was a local hero in Ginsberg, perhaps more than Biko. Biko was already known to the locals but Jones was a sensation, especially among two groups — children and tsotsis.
He was a local hero in Ginsberg, perhaps more than Biko
What added to the allure, at least for us kids, was that he was “coloured” and defying the forced removals we had just witnessed.
Even though apartheid laws barred him from staying in Ginsberg, he was for all intents and purposes a resident of the township. Little did we know then that the BCM rejected such terms as “coloured” and “Indian” and that Biko had developed a political definition of blackness that included both groups.
In the township Jones hung out with the people Frantz Fanon called the “the wretched of the Earth”. He befriended feared and tough guys such as Bra Skuru or Skurubayi. With his urging, these men who had been counted out by society became the foot soldiers of the movement.
Castro was the name they gave Biko and they called themselves “the Cubans”. They would do anything to protect the leaders of the movement. When the police came to arrest Biko, the Cubans would fight them in order to create a diversion for him.
Third, Jones never stopped being a community builder. He carried in him the spirit of the black community programmes he started with Biko in the 1970s.
No political movement in South Africa had made community development the centerpiece of its programmes. The last time I visited Jones and Ingrid, his wife and partner of three decades, was at their home in Somerset West more than a decade ago. He had started a community development organisation called Isibaya focusing on housing development, if memory serves.
Here was a man who could have sold his name to the highest bidder, just like the grifters who call themselves our leaders. Instead, he chose to go back to serve the people.
Finally, leadership for him meant sacrifice, not self-aggrandisement. He laid his life on the line for our liberation. When Ingrid informed me about the stroke he’d suffered , I could not help thinking it must have been a result of the accumulation of the torture he was subjected to in jail.
After all, the body too has memories, sociologically speaking. While the mind’s memories are individual property, existing only in the private lair of the skull, the body’s memories are a shared experience, certainly for those who endured apartheid’s horrors.
When we pay homage to our fallen heroes we often forget that they were not just comrades. They were human beings with families, relatives and friends. Jones was not just Biko’s comrade and they did not sit all day speaking politics.
They had fun – sometimes too much for their own good. They had gumbas (parties) at Zanempilo Clinic, the clinic outside King William’s Town that Biko established and ran with Mamphela Ramphele.
I was only 11 years old when I attended Biko’s funeral in our hometown of King William’s Town so some memories are vague, but a friend told me another poignant story about the connection between Biko and Jones.
A group in the packed stadium broke into a call and response chant: “Uphi u Mama ka Peter Jones?” (where is the mother of Peter Jones?).
My friend remembers the call but not the response, not that it really matters for what I want to say, which is that JonesP was always on the people’s minds.
You plodded on my dear brother, friend and comrade in this dry desert of hopelessness and dearth of leadership. But in our hearts and minds you shall remain forever the servant of hope. Go well my broer, totsiens.
• Mangcu is professor of sociology and history at George Washington University in the US
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