In his new book, Out Of The Dark Night: Essays On Decolonization, the redoubtable political theorist Achille Mbembe quotes a disturbing vignette from the exalted German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: “The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it we must give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas — the category of Universality.
"In Negro life, the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realisation of any substantial objective existence — as for example, God, or Law — in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realises his own being ... The Negro … exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state.
"We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality — all that we call feeling — if we would rightly comprehend him. There is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.”
I read this passage late at night, and it gave me nightmares. The only antidote to the nightmare was the summoning of resistance memory. A remembrance that it was this type of racist condescension which had led to the Berlin Conference of 1885 that licensed the balkanisation of our continent to the various European powers as its disparate colonial fiefdoms.
This would unleash the liberation struggles fought all over Africa to rid us of this incursion, imposition and importuning. In that dreamland state — a nightmare tussling with resistance memory — Chris Hani surged to the fore of my consciousness, or was it my subconscious? So did Steve Biko.
These were sons of our soil who had implacably interposed their entire beings against this colonial contumely. Both of them lost their lives in this liberatory enterprise. It is their martyrdom and meaning that served as a wellspring for the attenuation of my nightmare.
I attended Biko’s funeral, a rollicking carnival of song and defiance, with my dad and younger brother Nkululeko, as a 14-year-old.
And three years later I was hounded into exile and the warm and protective bosom of Hani, who would be my mentor and guide in the labyrinthine struggle against the apartheid monstrosity and its vicissitudes and discontents. He remains deeply embedded in my heart and soul.
He has been gone from this temporal realm for the last 30 years, a victim of a bullet that punctured his life and with it our possibilities as a nation.
Does anyone believe we would be in this sordid mess as a country were Hani alive? Would we be wading through this putrefaction if Biko still walked amongst us? Nada. It is difficult to capture in words the singularity, power and significance of Hani in a truncated piece like this one.
What does one say about his love of Roberta Flack and Abdullah Ibrahim? Or his passionate ruminations on Homeric epics like the Iliad and The Odyssey. He deserves a book.
I had heard from an ANC princeling that there was a desire to commission Zakes Mda to write the definitive biography on Hani. It seems those plans faltered due to opposition from some ANC personages, infected with censorious and sectarian inanities, who felt that Mda did not come from the same “political tradition” as Hani, and would thus be unable to capture the fullness of the man’s essence. And over a decade later, none of these refuseniks has stepped up to do the honours.
Thus Hani’s dazzling intellect, moral and physical courage and animal magnetism remains inaccessible to many South Africans at a time when the nation could do with an imbibition of Hani’s inspiring example. Few could have done a better job in rendering Hani to life as Mda. Mda is a brilliant novelist, playwright and memoirist, with a doctorate in literature.
Does anyone believe we would be in this sordid mess as a country were Hani alive? Would we be wading through this putrefaction if Biko still walked amongst us?
At a minimum his training equipped him with the discipline and rigour to undertake as complex and exciting a task as writing Hani’s opus.
One needs only to read his novel The Sculptors of Mapungubwe, a riveting portraiture of pre-colonial life in the Venda/Shona civilisation. This was not Mda’s cultural hinterland, but because of his prowess as a researcher there is nothing that he sets his mind on that he cannot write captivatingly about.
This is a mark of a true scholar, who is also capaciously imaginative as a novelist. I am also not even sure what is meant by Mda not coming from the same tradition as Hani.
Mda was born into an ANC family, a scion of AP Mda, the founder with Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo of the ANC Youth League, who knew Hani during their exilic sojourn in Lesotho.
His father, AP, had joined the breakaway Pan Africanist Congress, but Mda’s primordial connection to the ANC never sundered. A distinctive feature of Hani’s persona was his willingness to pay the highest price for our liberation.
Fresh out of the University of Fort Hare, where he graduated with a degree in classics at the tender age of 19, Hani had joined the nascent revolutionary army Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), rising to its command in the Western Cape.
After skipping the country in 1963, he had undergone military training in the Soviet Union. Returning to Tanzania a few months after the Rivonia catastrophe and the banishment of Madiba and his comrades to Robben Island for life, he itched to return home and pick up Madiba’s fallen weapon.
He exhorted the ANC leadership to allow him to lead a group of men who would enter Zimbabwe with Joshua Nkomo’s Zipra forces and “ hack their way home”.
This was to eventuate in the famous Wankie Campaign in 1967, which became MK’s baptismal of fire. Many fine liberators died in that campaign, including Patrick Molloa, the last president of the ANC Youth League before its banning in 1960; the charismatic UCT student Basil February; and Gandhi Hlekani, a product of the Anglican cleric and erstwhile ANC secretary-general Canon James Calata, who together with ANC president Dr AB Xuma is credited with rescuing the ANC from near-death after the ravages visited on it by ironically its founder, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, during his disastrous reign in the ’30s.
Short of ammunition, food and other critical supplies, Hani had led his forces in retreat into Botswana, where they surrendered their weapons and were imprisoned for entering Botswana under arms.
On release he would pen the famous Hani memorandum. The memorandum, which laid bare the rot at the heart of the ANC in exile, was met with biblical fury from powerful ANC potentates, leading to his rustication and near execution.
But for the intervention of leaders like Ray Simons, a mother figure to Hani from their Cape Town days, the much-maligned Mzwandile Piliso, the first black pharmacist in this country and my father’s first cousin, and Tambo himself, the South African freedom struggle could have been robbed of the incomparable contribution of this liberation hero.
He would be co-opted into the national executive committee(NEC) and the Politburo of the South African Communist Party in 1974 at the age of 32. He soon saddled up and charged into battle to rebuild the shattered ANC underground, that very year.
He would be based around Johannesburg for a few months before establishing himself in Lesotho, home to the love of his life, Limpho Sekamane. Buoyed by the ferment generated by Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement and reconnecting with a legion of recently released ANC cadres from Robben Island, he would conduct one of the most audacious and sophisticated campaigns to defeat the evil monstrosity that was apartheid rule from that mountain redoubt — the land of Moshoeshoe.
The Boers would make many attempts on his life, one of which came a couple of months before my arrival at his home in November 1980.
An older brother of mine, recently arrived in exile, was caught up in that bomb blast. A son of a prominent Methodist cleric, he was found in the aftermath of the blast frozen on his knees, mouthing incoherent platitudes to God.
Interestingly, he would soon thereafter swap Jesus Christ for Karl Marx, becoming a communist, a creed he confesses to to this very day. After his forced departure from Lesotho in May 1982 owing to pressure from the Boers, he would lead the military campaign against Unita in Angola the following year. An NEC member fighting alongside his underlings.
He shared the hazards of battle with his troops, eyeballing death unblinkingly, something that bound him to the rank and file of our movement in an indestructible and loving bond that subsists to this day.
They do not make them like Martin Thembisile Hani. He was sui generis — our answer to Che Guevara
They do not make them like Martin Thembisile Hani. He was sui generis — our answer to Che Guevara.
It was thus a tragic irony that someone who had survived death in the theatre of battle many times, from Wankie to Lesotho to Angola, would be cruelly and cowardly taken away from us after the cessation of hostilities.
Our sadness over the loss of this luminous struggle prince, a son of Madiba and Tambo, remains unappeased owing to this perversion.
But Hani can never die. He lives in our dreams and aspirations to make this democracy worthy of the sacrifice of people like himself; Victoria Mxenge, Nokuthula Simelane, Barney Molokoane, Mangaliso Sobukwe and countless other unsung compatriots who fell in the struggle for the reclamation of our humanity.
The challenge to all of us is not to marinate sentimentally in remembrance of Hani, but to parlay our loving memory of this giant into an abiding quest for justice, dignity and a better life for all our people. Sweeping out of the Augean stables the jive-ass punks — Imigodoyi — hell-bent on subverting our inheritance and promise.
• Mabandla is chair of the Council of Advisors at Mistra
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