There are thousands of anti-apartheid activists who died in the service of the liberation struggle, yet very few are remembered every year like Chris Hani.
There may be no public holiday to commemorate the life of the late SACP and ANC leader, but April 10 is an important date on the South African political calendar.
Around this time of the year, it is not uncommon to hear people asking each other where they were when news broke that Hani had been assassinated.
Who can forget that sunny Easter weekend in 1993?
For most of us, especially in the black townships and informal settlements, this was a particularly violent year that had left many uncertain about the future: were we headed for the freedom generations before us yearned for or were we doomed to go through the kind of civil war that had broken the backs of so many other post-colonial societies?
The Easter weekend seemed to be bringing some relief, with multitudes of people taking advantage of the long weekend to visit relatives in the rural areas while others travelled to religious gatherings.
Political activity had died down and so had the violent rhetoric of some of the politicians.
And so it came as a total surprise and a complete shock to the system when the news broke that the popular former uMkhonto weSizwe chief of staff had been killed outside his home in Boksburg.
Justice Malala reminds us in his new book, The Plot to Save South Africa — see pages 11 and 12 — of just how close to a civil war the country came following Hani’s death.
But it is not just the dramatic manner in which he was killed, nor that his assassination forced the Nationalist government to finally agree to a date for the first democratic election, that makes Hani remain in the memory so many years after Janusz Walus pulled the trigger.
Hani is fondly remembered primarily for what he stood for both as a freedom fighter and as one of the important political figures redefining the country’s future in the period after the unbanning of anti-apartheid organisations.
As our country goes through yet another period of political uncertainty and turmoil — this time as a result of misrule, rising corruption and the political dispensation’s failure to break apartheid development patterns — it is not surprising that many are looking back to the likes of Hani for answers.
To remember Hani is not to engage in a useless game of speculation on whether he would have made a better president or not, it is to remember that there is no messiah who’d rescue us from the morass
Would we be in the current mess had he lived longer than he did? We turn to the internet’s search engines for quotes to support our views of what Hani would have done differently had he lived to see freedom and democracy.
“The perks of a new government are not appealing to me. Everybody would like to have a good job, a good salary ... but for me that is not the all of struggle. What is important is the continuation of the struggle ... the real problems of the country are not whether one is in cabinet but what we do for social upliftment,” we quote him as saying to illustrate how many of those who called themselves his comrades have betrayed his ideals.
Those of us who are frustrated by the slow pace of social transformation and are fearful that the own goals scored by the democratically elected government on an almost daily basis may soon unravel the gains made since 1994, turn to Hani to justify their preference for a more radical path towards change:
“We have a highly-politicised black population. We have got well-organised and militant trade unions in this country. Those trade unions are not going to allow themselves to be assimilated even by a nonracial government. They have opposed the present apartheid regime, they have fought the capitalist forces, and I can tell you, if there’s no definite march towards the solution of the problems of the workers and the poor ... those workers are going to come out into the street and even demonstrate against the ANC government.”
Even though he did say all these things, there is no way of saying for certain how Hani would have behaved as a leader in a free South Africa.
The quote about trade unions, for instance, may suggest that his belief in an independent labour movement means he would have backed the mineworkers who took on both their employer and the ANC government in Marikana, but it is important to remember that among the people who agitated for draconian state action against the strikers were individuals he died calling close comrades and friends.
While appreciating his fear, as expressed in an interview six months before he died, that the liberators would “emerge as elitists” who “use the resources of this country to live in palaces and to gather riches”, we should acknowledge that this was an apprehension shared by many of his comrades. He was not alone.
Yet this didn’t stop some of them from turning into that same greedy elite, some even using their election into power to turn the Union Buildings into a business facilitation agency for their rich friends and associates.
To remember Hani is not to engage in a useless game of speculation on whether he would have made a better president or not, it is to remember that there is no messiah who’d rescue us from the morass. If we learn anything from his life story and the public statements he made before his life was violently taken away, it is that our collective fate as a nation is always in our hands.
Happy Easter.
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