They’ve shot my daddy, I saw it was a white man …
Nomakhwezi Hani
How do you kill a Communist? You hit him with a Pole.
AWB spokesman
It’s time we told the ANC leadership enough is enough and now’s the time to hit back so that Chris Hani will not have died in vain.
MK spokesman
Florida is a trim moribund all-white suburb, a sloping expanse of street after street of nice houses in nice gardens. It seems to exist in a state of suspended animation. Silent adults motor to and from work at regular hours; one never sees or hears neighbours chatting or children playing. During weekends the unnatural silence – unnatural where so many dwell together – is occasionally broken by the excruciating scream of gadgets used to manicure miniature lawns. When I go shopping on foot – the characterless commercial centre is a mile or so away – I meet only a few black servants who, if greeted, go into shock. Here whites don’t walk – and carrying heavy bags too! – nor, it seems, do they acknowledge the presence of blacks. In these suburbs, as in the dorps’ residential areas, apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare.
At 11.30 a.m. I answered the telephone and heard a friend’s agitated voice. ‘Tell Margaret Hani’s been murdered, just now – an hour ago, in front of his daughter. A white shot him at close range.’
Margaret was watering the garden. When I had broken the news we sat drinking tea in the kitchen, listening for hours to frequent special news bulletins. The first said, ‘Former Umkhonto we Sizwe Chief of Staff, member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC and General Secretary of the SACP [South African Communist Party], Mr Chris Hani, has been assassinated in the driveway of his house in Dawn Park, Boksburg.’
The assassin’s choice of target was shrewd, certain to create another long-drawn-out tension-building crisis, something this already unstable country can ill afford. Next to Mr Mandela, and not far behind, Chris Hani was the most beloved and respected black leader. And how better to provoke the townships’ Lost Generation? (So called because they are uneducated, unemployed and increasingly uncontrollable.) Their anger is always smouldering, their impatience mounts as the weeks and the months and the years pass, and still there is only talk … Within the Tripartite Alliance – the ANC, the SACP and COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) – Chris’s reputation as a courageous and resourceful guerrilla fighter was unrivalled, though rather inflated. Thus the youth idolized him. He was the only leader they fully trusted, seeing him as their special protector, the one Big Man who hadn’t been distracted from their miseries and frustrations by the highfalutin rituals of inexplicable constitutional negotiations.
In my Devon hotel, thirty-six hours before his murder, I saw Chris’s last television appearance: a Lester Venter interview on the Agenda programme. Unlike most politicians, he gave straight answers to straight questions. Asked if the ANC was fully in control of MK he replied, ‘People have come back as individuals. They are not in camps, they have gone to their homes. As a movement not yet in government, it’s very difficult for the ANC to monitor the activities of each individual. We try our best to control the situation, but there are instances where we admit the Comrades have really gone out of control. Some have been involved in bank robberies.’
As Joe Slovo noted today, this admission ‘could have cost Chris popularity but he didn’t care two hoots about popularity. He just wanted to get things right.’ A week ago Chris suggested the formation of a Peace Brigade, under the aegis of the National Peace Accord, to engage the energies and aspirations of the Lost Generation in a disciplined and constructive way. Throughout yesterday afternoon (only yesterday!) he had been developing his Peace Brigade ideas; on the desk in his spartan office notes were found headed ‘Peace Corps’.
By now the townships are in turmoil, which may give the AWB et al. their longed-for excuse to shoot blacks by the hundred, thus ending negotiations for the foreseeable future – the assassin’s motive. As one radio commentator put it, ‘South Africa is sitting astride a tinderbox.’ In consequence, the interregnum is suddenly over – that uncertain, ambiguous three-year ‘twilight of the Nats’ that began in February 1990. This evening, Mr Mandela flew back from his Transkei home to address the nation (black, white, Coloured, Indian – the nation, not just his own ANC following) and all SABC TV and radio channels were made available to him though the SABC remains under government control. Exactly twelve hours after the murder of his close friend, he took over not only the airwaves but the leadership of his country. This is not, after all, just one more tension-building crisis. It marks the de facto end of white rule: now President de Klerk is irrelevant and only Nelson Mandela has the moral authority to avert chaos.
By this morning the details were known. On at least four occasions last week, neighbours saw a red Ford Laser sedan parked outside the Hani home. The driver seemed to be looking for an address; late on Good Friday afternoon he drove past the house more than once. That evening Chris insisted on his bodyguard, Sandile Sizani, taking Easter Saturday off to be with his family.
At about 9.30 yesterday morning Chris and his 15-year-old daughter, Nomakhwezi, drove to a nearby supermarket. As they arrived home, half an hour later, an Afrikaner neighbour, 36-year-old Mrs Retha Harmse, on her way to the same supermarket, realized that she had forgotten something. In her own words:
I turned back and, as I drove towards Mr Hani’s home, I saw the red car parked behind his in the driveway. I saw the red car’s door open and a tall thin blond man get out. He walked to the front of the open door and I saw him lift a gun. Mr Hani had just gotten out of his car. The blond man pulled the trigger twice. By that time I had just gone a short way past the house. I stopped the car and watched the blond man walk over to Mr Hani as he lay between the garage door and his car. He calmly lifted the gun again and, at almost point-blank range, pulled the trigger twice. I can still hear the shots ringing in my ears. At first I thought it was a security man shooting at a burglar. But as I watched in my rear-view mirror I saw the blond man walk back to his car, get in and begin reversing out of the driveway. I do not know what possessed me, but I reversed my car towards him. I did not even think that the killer might start shooting at me. All I did was look for the registration number. As the car got closer I saw it. I kept repeating it over and over so I wouldn’t forget. I sped home. I was so upset. I had just seen a man being shot down in cold blood. It all seemed like a movie that I was somehow caught up in. I ran up my driveway screaming out the registration number. Within seconds I had told the police the make, colour and number of that car.
At 10.35, ten kilometres away, Janus Waluz, a 40-year-old Polish immigrant, was arrested in his car, still in possession of the gun that killed Chris. It had been among a large consignment stolen from the South African Air Force (SAAF) headquarters in Pretoria on 14 April 1990; then Chris himself had foretold that those weapons would be used to murder ANC leaders. No doubt they were ‘stolen’ in the sense that British Army weapons are ‘stolen’ by Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland; there is considerable overlap between AWB, SAP and SADF membership.
South Africa has reason to feel grateful for Mrs Harmse’s courage. The instant capture of the white assassin, because of a white woman’s ‘rapid response’, is being used by both Mr Mandela and Tokyo Sexwale in their efforts to calm black rage. Much now depends on the ANC’s ability to impose discipline. Will it be able to control the numerous mass rallies and protest marches that must quickly be arranged as safety-valves?
Quotes from today’s newspapers:
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has pleaded, ‘Please, don’t let them manipulate us. Don’t let this tragic event trigger reprisals. It is what somebody wants to see happen. I’m devastated.’
From Benoni, one E. Stark wrote to the Sunday Times: ‘While Chris Hani may have been a popular leader among certain segments of society, he was roundly hated by many others. Many will agree that he merely got what he deserved. He died as he had lived – by violence.’
Dr Antonie Gildenhuys, chairman of the National Peace Secretariat, said, ‘Our organization found in Hani a strong ally in our search for peace.’
The Boere Weerstandsbeweging saluted Janus Waluz as: ‘A soldier and freedom fighter for the Boer people.’
A white Boksburg woman said, ‘It’s sad. Chris Hani was a father. He had a family. His neighbour, a white man, is terribly upset by his death.’
Several newspapers have reprinted an autobiographical sketch written by Chris Hani in February 1991:
I was born on 28 June 1942 in Cofimvaba, a small rural town in the Transkei, the fifth child in a family of six. Only three of us are still surviving, the others died in infancy. My mother is completely illiterate and my father semi-literate. He was a migrant worker in the mines and our mother had to supplement the family budget through subsistence farming … I walked 20 km to school on weekdays and the same distance to church every Sunday. At the age of eight I was already an altar boy in the Catholic Church and quite devout. After primary school I had a burning desire to become a priest but this was vetoed by my father. In 1954 the apartheid regime introduced Bantu Education designed to indoctrinate black pupils to accept and recognize the supremacy of the white man over blacks in all spheres. This angered and outraged us and paved the way for my involvement in the struggle … In 1957 I joined the ANC Youth League, but since politics were proscribed at African schools our activities were clandestine. In 1959 I went to the University of Fort Hare and became openly involved in the struggle as Fort Hare was a liberal campus. Here I was exposed to Marxist ideas and the scope and nature of the racist capitalist system … In 1961 I joined the underground SACP as I realised that national liberation, though essential, would not bring about total economic liberation … In 1962 I joined the fledgling MK … and fought with Zipra forces in Zimbabwe in 1967 … In 1974 I went to Lesotho, operated underground and contributed to the building of the ANC underground inside our country … In the current political situation, the decision by our organisation to suspend the armed action is correct and an important contribution to maintaining the momentum of the negotiations.
In April 1962, aged only 19, Chris graduated with a degree in Latin and English. He would have liked to be an academic; in retirement he planned to write a history of his own Xhosa people. This leader of the SACP, who admitted to not having read Das Kapital, always carried pocket editions of Homer, Shakespeare and Shelley. Liszt was his favourite composer. There was no resemblance between the real Chris Hani and the primitive sadist projected by Pretoria’s propaganda.
Today on television we saw one of the safety-valve protest marches. Some 20,000 township youths, armed with axes, home-made spears, pangas, knobkerries and sharpened wooden staves, converged on the Hani home, chanting and waving placards. A scary sight, it has to be said, and the ANC Youth League president, Peter Mokaba, did nothing to calm the atmosphere. ‘Do not let Hani die in vain! Now the Young Lions must not only bark and roar but you must bite!’ said he – getting his sound metaphors slightly mixed. He warned that if the police attempt to disrupt planned mass actions ‘We will not restrain ourselves.’
Meanwhile, in Natal, Winnie Mandela was addressing a rally and blaming the government for Hani’s death, accusing it of attempting a cover-up by arresting Waluz. This contradicts her suggestion, quoted in yesterday’s London Sunday Times, that a power-struggle within the ANC may have been behind the killing.
This evening a CP (Conservative Party) leader, Dr Ferdi Hartzenburg, quoted from a BBC interview in which Winnie Mandela stated that Hani had definitely been murdered from within the ANC. Why, he demanded, had the two ANC officials implicated by her not been arrested?
Poor Mr Mandela! It astonishes me that even supposedly responsible media folk continue to interview his wife.
Dr Verwoerd’s 1954 justification of the Bantu Education Act and Mr Mandela’s 1964 peroration from the dock on being sentenced to life imprisonment must be rivals for the position of South Africa’s most-quoted speech. Dr Verwoerd eloquently defended this keystone piece of apartheid legislation, designed by himself.
The school must equip the Bantu to meet the demands which the economic life of South Africa will impose on him … Until now he has been subject to a school system which drew him away from his own community and misled him by showing him the green pastures of European society in which he is not allowed to graze … What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is absurd.
A quarter of a century later, the South African Atomic Energy Board complained that the Republic was short of 17,000 engineering technicians. Only 3,000 were being trained annually, ‘widespread efforts to attract suitable technicians from overseas have borne little fruit … One solution to the shortfall is to train blacks as technicians.’
There followed many more public admissions that South Africa’s prosperity was being threatened by a lack of skills; some 100,000 jobs could not be filled. Dr Verwoerd had catastrophically miscalculated ‘the demands which the economic life of South Africa will impose on him [the Bantu]’ and in 1982 Vista University was hastily founded, under the aegis of the Broederbond, for the educational upliftment of blacks.
Margaret lectures at Vista’s Soweto campus (there are five in all) and this morning we set off to attend the students’ Hani memorial gathering in the university hall. Several of Margaret’s white colleagues had rung her to question the wisdom of entering Soweto just now but she is made of tougher stuff. However, I won’t claim either of us felt completely relaxed as we sped down the motorway past the Rand’s distinguishing feature: long, high, smooth, symmetrical mine-dumps, dully glowing. These old dumps have an odd, unexpected sort of beauty – shapely monuments to Mammon.
Vista’s campus, on the edge of Soweto, is dominated by Orlando’s cooling towers just across the road. A nearby wooded ridge provides an illusion of rural calm. Wide green lawns, planted with spindly saplings, provide an illusion of academic calm. (In fact this institution is a snake-pit of racism, suspicion and dissension.) An uninspired Broederbond architect designed the several red-brick, red-roofed buildings, one, two or three storeyed, the interiors bleakly functional.
In the university hall – a new grim, gaunt building, not yet officially open – posters of Comrade Chris covered the walls and tensions criss-crossed the atmosphere like invisible electrified wires. Margaret explained the interacting of the two main factions: ANC Youth League/SACP and PAC. Few other whites were present though the majority of the staff is white. By far the most impressive speaker was a sturdy young woman – ex-MK, wearing jungle fatigues – whose personal distress was obvious as she recalled Chris Hani’s commitment to what is now known as ‘gender equality’. Not surprisingly, female MKs were expected not only to be good guerrillas but to do traditional things – washing clothes, cleaning tents, cooking … Chris, however, campaigned against this by washing his own uniforms, cleaning his own tent and cooking his own food. While the Hanis lived in Lesotho, his wife Limpho worked as manager of the National Tourism Department and he did more than his fair share of baby-minding and household chores. Many male comrades were puzzled by one of his favourite sayings: ‘Anyone who does not respect his own wife cannot be a revolutionary.’ Last Saturday morning he wanted to go for an early run but his teenaged daughter would not let him leave the house until he had made his bed. South African women of all colours need more champions like Chris.
The other speeches exposed a comical ignorance of Communism. One attributed ‘War is a continuation of politics by other means’ to Lenin. Another vehemently asserted that Communists never use or condone violence unless forced to do so by capitalists. A third argued that things went wrong in the Soviet Union only because it never became a true dictatorship of the working class. My eyes wandered to the posters: ‘Chris Hani died for Freedom, Justice, Democracy’. It’s all very sad: these confused young people represent the ‘found’ of the Lost Generation, now embarked on an academic career for which their schooling has not prepared them. Last year only a minority of black pupils passed their matric (the South African equivalent to A levels) and, of those, many were later discovered not to be fully literate. This year the matric failure-rate is certain to be even higher. For months there have been student strikes protesting against the payment of exam fees and teacher strikes protesting against retrenchments – and now this upheaval …
Halfway through the last speech – in Xhosa – the PAC contingent began to toyi-toyi and the few other whites hurriedly left. Soon after, the commemoration concluded with the singing of The Internationale in Xhosa and Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika – the latter sung with much more feeling than the former. Yet The Internationale is peculiarly appropriate to the present situation of South Africa’s blacks: ‘Tis a better world in birth …’
This evening Mr Mandela again addressed the nation, still seeming close to tears:
This is a watershed moment for all of us … Tomorrow, in many towns and villages there will be memorial services to pay homage to one of the greatest revolutionaries this country has ever known … Chris Hani was a soldier. He believed in iron discipline. He carried out instructions to the letter. He practised what he preached. Any lack of discipline is trampling on the values that Chris Hani stood for. Those who commit such acts serve only the interests of the assassins and desecrate his memory … To the youth of South Africa we have a special message: you have lost a great hero. You have repeatedly shown that your love of freedom is greater than that most precious gift, life itself. But you are the leaders of tomorrow. Your country, your people, your organization need you to act with wisdom. A particular responsibility rests on your shoulders.
Tomorrow much will hinge on the response to Madiba’s heartfelt plea. What do the Young Lions make of this courtly, gentle-voiced, reasonable, conciliatory leader who was imprisoned before they were born? As a legend, was the invisible hero-martyr of Robben Island perhaps more powerful than in his present role? Inevitably many youngsters have been brutalized by the violence that was and is part of daily life in most townships. And Madiba is not a communicator in the sense that Chris Hani was. While Chris was in exile, dealing all the time with uprooted and difficult young men and women – often very difficult, in the MK camps – Mr Mandela was cut off from the world. Moreover, he is not ‘of the people’. And most township youngsters are too alienated from their own culture to feel the respect for his birth that would otherwise come naturally to them.
I like some of South Africa’s idiosyncrasies. Anywhere else the holding of hundreds of church services in memory of the leader of an atheistic political party would seem incongruous; here it seems perfectly normal. Nor does anyone think it odd that the Hanis chose to send their three daughters to a convent school.
Since the assassination, President de Klerk has faded into the background – he might not exist – while Mr Mandela and other ANC leaders broadcast repeatedly. The frightened whites realize that their fate is now in black hands – which may, if things go well, help to resign them to black rule.
Today my innate urge to participate at worm’s-eye level had to be repressed. ‘Participating’ whites don’t help already overstretched ANC marshals, Peace Monitors and the SAP. Colonel Dave Bruce, the Witwatersrand SAP spokesman, broadcast a warning this morning – ‘Events are likely to be emotionally charged, so the fewer outsiders the better.’ This nationwide Day of Mourning (really more a day of homage) is not government sanctioned. It is ANC sanctioned, which tells all about South Africa’s rump parliament.
Like many other whites, I attended the midday ecumenical service at the Central Methodist Church, accompanied by Jennifer – a very un-nunnish Dominican nun who, during my tick-fever interlude, taught me an immense amount about the significance of ubuntu. We walked into the city centre through streets Sunday-quiet; all shops and most offices were closed. Jennifer seemed to know everyone in the mainly black throng around the church and as we were queuing to be frisked by ANC marshals only the heavy SAP presence generated unease. A Xhosa beside me muttered, ‘Why they come around with all that tear-gas? They’re not here to protect us. If the AWB came they could shoot first and be arrested after – like in Vanderbiljpark!’ He was referring to the shooting dead last Sunday of two black men, and the serious wounding of two others, by a middle-aged right-winger. Under the noses of the police, this CP member fired into the crowd from his bakkie during an orderly Hani protest march.
We were early enough to get seats close to the altar-podium. Then tension rose, as everyone realized there was no room for half the would-be congregation. A frustrated crowd, either forcing its way in or seething on the street under the eyes – and guns – of the SAP, was not a good idea. At such moments leaders have to think fast. Immediately it was decided to hold a repeat service for the excluded in an adjacent park; each speaker, having said his say to us, would go out and say it again to the overflow.
Senior clergy of all colours and denominations, with a preponderance of magnificently robed Roman Catholic bishops, gave the proceedings an air of solemn respectability far removed from what was going on in the places where I longed to be. Yet I was glad not to miss Dr Frank Chikane’s valediction. This distinguished theologian dealt directly with Chris Hani’s Communism and showed it for what it was: a passionate commitment to the poor, of which Christ himself would have heartily approved. (Like many others, Dr Chikane refers to apartheid as still operative: ‘In pulling the trigger Waluz has released unstoppable energy, which will destroy apartheid.’) Other speakers followed: Tokyo Sexwale, Peter Mokaba, and characters whose names were unfamiliar. But Dr Chikane’s words had so moved me I hardly took in what else was said.
Then came a stirring of the congregation and, looking around, I saw Mr Mandela beside me on his way up the aisle – walking slowly, seeming physically frail. He hadn’t come to speak, just to be there, and as he sat among the bishops, facing us, I saw his sadness and my heart felt sore. It is too easy to forget that after people have become symbols, leaders of profound significance to millions, they remain vulnerable human beings. Now Nelson Mandela, anguished by the death of his close friend, has to handle that private, common-to-us-all kind of grief while the public Comrade Mandela is sending forth his extraordinary psychic energies to protect South Africans of every sort. Here is a man, unjustly imprisoned for twenty-seven years, striving today to protect the people whose regime imprisoned him and many of whom continue to mistrust and hate him. That is greatness. That is the finest flowering of ubuntu.
Later today, Mr Mandela addressed some 30,000 – mostly young people – in Soweto’s Jabulani stadium. A tolerant mention of the Nats, now the ANC’s negotiating partners, provoked loud, prolonged and very angry booing. When Mr Mandela urged the youth to go out and make friends of their former enemies there was a sullen silence – then considerable numbers could be seen leaving the stadium. (We were watching on television.) The most enthusiastic cheering was reserved for the PAC leader, Clarence Makwetu. Today he modified his war-talk (‘One settler, one bullet!’) but everyone knows what he believes in and the crowd responded accordingly.
Meanwhile, in Cape Town, the ANC marshals had lost control and a serious misjudgement by Tony Yengeni, the radical ANC Western Cape leader, led to frenzied rioting and massive looting – R4 millions’ worth of damage, acres of broken glass but ‘only’ three killed, including a policeman shot in the head. It seems the mood in the Cape townships is at present extra-angry: on 9 April the police murdered a local MK hero.
Durban and Port Elizabeth also had their share of rioting and looting, on a small scale. And in Pietersburg Mr Nelson Ramodike was terrorized out of the stadium by an infuriated 5,000 whom the marshals couldn’t calm. However, once he had left the memorial service proceeded serenely.
When it was announced tonight that 26,000 security personnel are now being deployed to maintain law and order we wondered why the government hadn’t long ago assigned a few security men to guard Chris Hani. Despite three earlier attempts on his life, the authorities had repeatedly refused Mr Mandela’s and Mr Sisulu’s pleas for a police bodyguard for one of the country’s foremost political figures. And the police had repeatedly refused his MK bodyguards firearm licences. Yet his assassin legally held four weapons.
The tension will continue high until after Monday’s funeral. The emotion in the air is almost tangible; one can feel it plucking at one’s own nerves and sympathies.
After yesterday’s Jabulani rally an estimated 12,000 marched three miles to Soweto’s heavily fortified Protea police station, where a memorandum was handed to Major-General Braam Strauss. Moments later violence started; some Peace Monitors blame the police for driving fast through the crowd with provocative irresponsibility. The police claim they had to open fire because the mob was petrol-bombing the station. They shot four people dead. Five were critically wounded, 245 suffered lesser injuries including a BBC soundman, Lee Edwards, who was peppered with bird-shot and is now in hospital. According to him, the shooting took place after the ANC marshals had called for restraint and the marchers were dispersing. But obviously some Young Lions had planned an attack; people don’t carry petrol bombs around like handkerchiefs, just in case they might come in handy.
In this torrid political climate some disquieting plants are appearing above ground. We’ve had the ANC Youth League demanding that Waluz be delivered to ‘the people’s justice’, while the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) is specific about the form this justice should take. They favour – quoting biblical precedents – stoning to death in the street. A predilection not calculated to diminish white fear of black rule.
Amidst all the marching and praying, the rallying and chanting and toyi-toying, the fevered media speculation about what may or may not happen, personal grieving has impinged on South Africa’s public as I don’t think it ever could in the West. Those to whom Chris was close, those who have lost a beloved friend – Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Sam Shilowa, Tokyo Sexwale, Joe Slovo, the Sisulu and Tambo families – all are openly shattered, to be glimpsed in tears on TV or in press photographs. This gives a major political crisis, to which the whole world is paying attention, an intimate human quality that is strangely comforting. Here leaders are not required to be detached manipulators of mass emotion, but can share with us all their real feelings.
Illogical howls of complaint are now coming from some sections of the media. Wednesday’s violence, they predict, will drastically reduce tourist earnings. If this is so, the media’s own exaggerations, national and international, are largely to blame. One of the more pernicious TV devices is the repeated showing of the same violent scene; in many viewers’ minds this creates the illusion that there have been multiple incidents of looting, arson or whatever. In fact, as today’s responsible Star leader pointed out, ‘Nelson Mandela did not lose control over his followers … For every ten or a hundred thugs who behaved criminally there were tens of thousands who were disciplined – at more than ninety memorial services and rallies held all over the country on Wednesday.’
This point needs emphasizing because most whites, looking ahead to the weekend, are jellified. On Saturday thousands will be converging on Jo’burg for Sunday’s lying-in-state at Soweto’s FNB stadium and Monday’s funeral – in all but name a State funeral. The elaborate arrangements for these events require the ANC and the authorities to co-operate as never before. In reality we have here an involuntary dress rehearsal for the new South Africa – which in fact this whole week has been. Wednesday’s stayaway, described as the largest in the country’s history (92 per cent), was the new South Africa in action. The workers, this time, will not be punished for staying away. Nobody, this time, would dare to punish them.
Between pre-colonial Africa and Ireland’s ancient Gaelic society there are certain mysterious links, baffling to historians, concerning land tenure and cattle ownership. A contemporary link is the funeral – as a public display of solidarity with the bereaved, a social occasion far removed from the furtiveness with which the British bury (or cremate) their dead. In modern Ireland, long after wakes have been abandoned, hundreds of mourners may be observed thronging to small rural graveyards, some from other counties, other countries, even – in the jet-age – other continents. As a development of this, Northern Ireland’s ‘political’ funerals draw thousands of marchers, the mourning occasion transmuted into funeral-as-demo. In a parallel evolution here, township funeral rallies in the local stadium may be attended by fifty or sixty thousand, ANC marshals control crowds waving ANC and SACP banners, proclaiming loyalty to Nelson Mandela and singing the praises of the MK. Even when these rallies were illegal, the security forces couldn’t arrest so many ‘subversives’ simultaneously breaking the law. However, they could intervene and during the last phase of the Struggle much of the violence was provoked by police attacks on funerals – leading to more deaths, more funerals, more attacks, more deaths … A bloody spiral, the blacks now unconquerably defiant, the security forces increasingly ruthless.
In February 1986 a celebrated four-day battle took place in Alexandra between militant youths and the army and police. Thirty-one Young Lions were killed, yet their side won. Both the Pretoria-imposed black councillors and the resident black police fled from Alex, never to return. But without a formal military structure you cannot switch violence on and off. Having tasted victory, not all the Young Lions were amenable to being caged when Ringmaster Mandela gave the signal. After February 1990 they were much praised for their contribution to the Struggle. Then, intoxicated by the success of violence, some groups set up ANC Self-Defence Units, ostensibly to protect their communities. Quickly those SDUS degenerated into gangs involved in protection racketeering, car theft as a business (usually in collusion with white SAP officers) and kangaroo courts that inflicted floggings and necklacings. In July 1992 an alarmed ANC asked Chris Hani to investigate the SDUS. They were running wild, he reported, committing appalling atrocities and ‘simply had no conception of democratic tolerance’. He concluded, ‘We can no longer keep quiet about this … We must take action, not only speak out. Whether we like it or not, these SDUS are associated with the ANC.’ One can fairly assume that the booing of Mr Mandela in Jabulani stadium was led by SDUS.
Many people are now recalling examples of Chris Hani’s efforts to foster racial harmony. He worked hard at this, attempting to establish one-to-one relationships with right-wingers and to persuade them that the new government would not be hostile to any whites. Recently he addressed right-wing students in Pretoria and, incredibly, was well received by them, such was his sincerity and the power of his oratory. In his role as champion of the poor he could move everybody who met him personally. To Chris ‘the poor’ were not an anonymous mass, an underclass, a ‘political problem’ for the new South Africa. They were suffering individuals.
Making a home in hardline CP-controlled Boksburg, and encouraging other blacks to do the same, was part of Chris’s anti-racism campaign. His aged parents, still living in the Transkei, disapproved. They had feared for his safety ever since he returned to South Africa in August 1990 after twenty-seven years in exile (apart from clandestine visits). They begged him to settle in a black township – and they were right. It is certain that neither Janus Waluz nor any of his allies would have driven into Soweto or Alex, shot a black man and driven out again. Not, that is, unless they had police protection – as many white assassins have had over the years. However, Chris insisted that blacks and whites could live happily together, ‘even when the black is me, MK and SACP, bad news!’ He had proved his point before he died. Already Dawn Park is seen as a wholesome foretaste of how things can be in the new South Africa. As blacks moved in, the hardliners showed suspicion and fear. Then tolerance began to blossom. ‘Block parties’ were instituted, some black and white neighbours enjoying their braais and beers together – a scene I like to picture as a prototype. But the blacks will have to take the initiative, as they did in Boksburg.
Since yesterday, and all through the night, thousands have been arriving in Jo’burg from all over South Africa – from the Limpopo to the Cape – in buses, kombi taxis and special trains. At 11 a.m. Margaret dropped Jennifer and me at a junction on the Soweto Highway, about a mile from the FNB stadium. There was little ‘normal’ traffic; today the SAP limited it throughout the PWV area. Many other pedestrians coming from Soweto were crossing the dusty littered veld and the two elderly white females – arriving on foot! – were regarded with much curiosity, some friendliness, no hostility. Turning left onto a dirt road, we passed a grove of ancient plane trees – stately giants – and between them glimpsed the Rand’s oldest ‘residential area’, a short nameless street of seven little red-brick houses belonging to Crown Mines. This isolated (perhaps forgotten?) hamlet remained ‘mixed’ – Coloured and white – throughout the apartheid era.
Hawkers swarmed outside the stadium; for R15 I bought a red SACP Hani T-shirt. At every entrance uniformed ANC marshals stood guard; thousands are on duty today and have been given powers of arrest. Only MK cadres are ‘unofficially allowed’ to bring guns into the stadium – a phrase with an Irish flavour! At once we got lost in a labyrinth of ill-lit concrete stairways; the bowels of all big stadia are intricate. But eventually Jennifer met black nun friends who guided us out into brilliant sunshine. As yet the stadium was scarcely half-full. We sat low down, close to the ramp entrance through which the hearse would arrive, behind an enormous stage where frowning, shouting men were frantically struggling with miles of tangled electric flexes. Beside us a group of youngsters, who had travelled overnight by bus from the Transkei, were not too exhausted to sing melancholy songs – slow waves of a Xhosa funeral chant.
Quickly the seats filled and below us privileged people – richly robed clergy, choristers in black and green, altar boys in scarlet and white, primary-school musicians in yellow and blue – went to their appointed places on stage or pitch. By 1 p.m. some 70,000 had assembled – singing, talking, laughing, toyi-toying.
‘Now we will be silent,’ said the MC. And we were silent. All 70,000 of us were silent, immediately. Then the ivory-coloured hearse emerged from the underground ramp and drove very slowly onto the grassy pitch. An MK detachment bore the coffin to its stand under a yellow and black awning on the halfway line, followed by a solitary Comrade, carrying Chris’s camouflage cap on a white satin cushion. The MK, in olive-green uniforms, formed a guard of honour behind the coffin. (This was their first public parade in South Africa.) Then the family filed past: three beautiful daughters, a dignified widow, frail parents. At this point several of the MK – veteran guerrilla fighters, tough as they come – began to weep without restraint. And the silence continued unbroken, a silence I shall never forget. There is something altogether overwhelming about an absence of sound in such a vast crowd; within that silence is the concentrated essence of mourning.
For several hours an orderly line filed past the open coffin – VIPs by the hundred, from every continent, and blacks by the thousand, mostly young people. I thought, ‘What an appalling ordeal for the family, sitting there on the stage for so long, the focus of everybody’s attention!’ But Jennifer assured me this ceremony would comfort them.
We left in time to get home before dark and were wandering rather vaguely outside the stadium, unsure how to find transport back to Jo’burg, when three Sowetan women hurried to overtake us and advised not that way, which could be dicey, but this way … For us, ‘that way or this way’ was a one-off problem. For them, it is a daily concern – they live with the threat of random violence. Not only whites are at risk in the anarchic townships.
Last evening, as I sat writing the above, nineteen people were murdered, including two little children sleeping in their beds, by unknown black gunmen cruising around the Vaal township of Sebokeng. The SAP have offered a quarter-of-a-million-rand reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killers. Also, a mother was found shot dead on the veld with her baby still asleep on her back. Some say the Sebokeng massacre was a right-wing plot to destabilize the situation further and cause the funeral crowd to erupt. Happily it didn’t have this effect, though there has been tragedy enough today.
From 9 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. most of South Africa again came to a halt while television showed us the funeral service in the stadium and the burial in South Park cemetery (until recently ‘Whites Only’) near Boksburg. At least 100,000 were present in a stadium built to hold 85,000; daring youths had perched on every roof and wall, however apparently inaccessible. Soon after the opening ceremony we could detect trouble outside. Despite being safe in cosy Florida, I felt twinges of fear as menacing clouds of dark smoke billowed high above the stands. Then occasional shots could be heard through the speeches and, even on television, the rising crowd-tension was palpable. Moments later, Cyril Ramaphosa requested all doctors present to go to the first-aid tents and ordered the crowd to stay put until ‘the emergency’ was over. Everyone obeyed this order. The mourners inside were just that; the mob beyond were criminals. This contrast was a comforting reminder that South Africa’s ghastly violence is minority-generated. Well, of course, like violence everywhere. Yet here it is more taken for granted; newspapers casually report, in a brief paragraph, the sort of bloody mayhem that would be headline news in Europe.
Then came another comforting contrast: between the crowd’s welcomes for Nelson Mandela and Peter Mokaba, the ANC Youth League leader, whose current favourite slogan is ‘Kill the farmer! Kill the Boer!’ The stadium’s fabric seemed threatened by the crowd’s ecstatic stomping reception of Comrade Mandela. Mokaba was received warmly enough, but not with delirium. Wisely he had been muzzled at the last moment. On the programme he headed the list of six speakers but – ‘No time for a speech,’ he explained, starting a toyi-toyi.
Mr Mandela’s address was mainly directed to the youth. ‘Be part of the reconstruction of our country,’ he urged them. ‘Black lives are cheap and will remain so as long as apartheid continues to exist. And let there be no mistake, there have been many changes and negotiations have started, but for the ordinary black person apartheid is alive and well!’ Loud cheers.
The core of this speech went a long way to explain South Africa’s present state of instability:
No effort has been spared to criminalize both MK and Chris Hani. This has created a climate of acceptance when an MK cadre is assassinated, as dozens have been over the past few months … the hunting down of an outlaw is regarded as legitimate … Those who have deliberately created this climate … are as much responsible for the death of Chris Hani as the man who pulled the trigger and the conspirators who plotted his murder. In this regard, the Minister of Law and Order and the Chief of the Army both have a great deal to answer for.
Quite soon after my arrival in South Africa I realized that the government’s two-timing on this issue has been (apart from anything else) unfair to ordinary whites. Like it or not, they are eventually going to find themselves with SACP and ex-MK cabinet ministers, and it is now their leaders’ responsibility to calm their fears. Instead, even while negotiating with the ANC/SACP, many Nats continue to present them as threatening Commie terrorists.
The funeral programme stated: ‘The burial service at the cemetry [sic] is limited to family members only.’ Inevitably, this wish for privacy was disregarded. An estimated 30,000 bussed from the stadium to Boksburg, some youths dancing on the roofs of speeding vehicles. Astonishingly, only one fell off and was killed. Near the cemetery heavily armed AWB contingents were lined up to defend Boksburg from the swart gevaar. The more nervous whites had taken refuge elsewhere, the new black residents stood by their gates to let the crowd know whose homes are these. Despite the AWB ‘defenders’, five Dawn Park homes were robbed during the burial service, a supermarket was looted then burned and a maize-field was set alight though several ANC marshals tried to save it. No white was attacked but the SAP killed one looter. Most whites (even quite civilized specimens) take for granted the SAP’s regular killing of robbers and looters, as though death were an appropriate punishment for stealing.
On the East Rand three ANC members on their way to the funeral were killed by shots from the Inkatha Thokozani Hostel and in Katlehong Inkatha gunned down three others.
This evening ‘the emergency’ outside the FNB stadium was explained. A mob of a few hundred attacked, looted and eventually burned those seven Grown Mine houses we passed yesterday. Two white men and four dogs were cornered inside one house and roasted to death. A fifth dog was tied to a tree, petrol-soaked and set alight. The besieged men’s ordeal was prolonged; they made repeated frantic telephone calls to the police, explaining that more and more youngsters were trying to break into their home to kill them. But the police arrived only after the murderous arson had started.
The SAP knows it has an image problem. Last January a Community Relations Division was established and equipped with a Police Creativity Section Officer (whatever that may be) who said, in February, ‘Already 15,000 policemen have received awareness lessons. We teach them to realize that things are changing and they must handle it. But they must not only cope with change, they must become part of the change.’
In Washington, the South African Embassy flew the national flag at half-mast until today; not only blacks were shocked by the government’s failure to do likewise here. Even more distressing was its refusal to suspend yesterday’s sitting of Parliament. Miss Dene Smuts of the Democratic Party (DP) requested this ‘as a gesture of sympathy and solidarity’. The rejection of this request was an insult, at the end of the white era, in tune with all that has gone before.
On 17 April Clive Derby-Lewis, a member of the President’s Council and a senior CP leader, was arrested in connection with the assassination. Yesterday evening his wife Gabriella (‘Gaye’) was also taken into custody. An Australian ex-nun, it was said she ran a gay bar in Hillbrow, central Jo’burg, for several years before marrying Derby-Lewis; her first husband was an SADF officer. While the male of the species was trying to retain segregation in Boksburg, the female was running a vigorous and notably unsuccessful campaign to ‘Keep Hillbrow White’. Now people are remembering the obliquely named Western Goals Institute, led by Clive Derby-Lewis, which announced in June 1992 that it was offering ‘self-defence training’ to South Africa’s whites to equip them to protect themselves from the ‘ANC terrorist onslaught’. This training, explained Derby-Lewis, would be conducted under his supervision by professional ex-soldiers from the SADF, the old Rhodie army and the British SAS. The Institute, he added, was founded ‘to protect the Western way of life’, and had offices in Krugersdorp and London. He is also a director of the Stallard Foundation which looks after the interests of English-speaking CP members and recruits from among the thousands of right-wing European émigrés who found their spiritual home in the old South Africa. Like Janus Waluz and his brother, many of these are Eastern Europeans consumed by a pathological hatred of Communism. Oddly, no one is commenting on the double coincidence that all three charged with Hani’s murder are non-Afrikaners – a Pole, an English-speaker and an Australian – and all were brought up as Roman Catholics.*
The leaderships of the ANC, the SACP and COSATU overlap bewilderingly. Many whites, seeing the ANC clinging with one hand to the SACP, while the other beckons foreign capitalists, continue to cling with both hands to the Commie bogey they were brought up on.
‘Workers Unite for a White South Africa!’ was an early slogan of the SACP, founded in 1921. Although Moscow soon put a stop to that, the SACP leadership long remained white and its influence limited. Most politically active blacks were then committed to liberal democracy as defined by their Christian middle-class leaders.
When the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act outlawed the SACP, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo suggested expelling the few Communists in their new organization, the ANC Youth League. Only when Western governments refused to oppose apartheid were they driven to seek allies of any ideological hue. (Not long before, white South Africans had been Stalin’s allies.)
In the late 1950s the SACP leadership suggested sharing expertise and resources with the not yet banned ANC. A Kremlin-approved collaboration began in 1962 and within months the SACP’s Arthur Goldreich had persuaded Moscow to donate US$2.8 million to the new-born MK. Among the 13,000 (approximately) exiles who were eventually being fed, housed, clothed, doctored, taught, employed and armed in the ‘sanctuary states’ – Tanzania, Zambia, Angola – there was grateful support for Communists-as-generous-comrades. And the SACP officially condoned the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. But among the exiled ANC leadership, the increasing closeness of the ANC/SACP relationship and the compromising dependence on Soviet funding was causing much friction and many defections.
Yesterday, in Soweto, I met a returned exile whose parents encouraged him to leave in 1980, when he was 17, and at some risk to themselves organized the first stage of his journey, into Botswana. After five years at the ANC college (SOMAFCO: the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College) near Mazimbu in Tanzania, Musa worked in one of the ANC’s Lusaka offices: ‘My mother made me promise never to join MK, she wanted to think of me safe in Lusaka.’ (MK was then based in Angola, linked to the ANC’s government-in-exile in Lusaka but acting almost autonomously and, at times, with a barbarity that mirrored the behaviour of the SADF.) ‘My parents did well to send me away. In ’76 I was out there in front, enjoying the excitement, getting to feel it would be fun to kill a policeman. That was OK, when policemen were killing us, but by ’86 I could have been necklacing and that was bad – not justice. If some of the necklaced were real informers, others were only suspected. And beating up is enough – not necklacing!’
I asked how it was, being a student at SOMAFCO.
‘Lonely at first, wanting my family. And hard work! Most of us needed remedial courses. Primary-school kids were aged up to 19, high school up to 25. Our teachers were all ANC supporters, some from Europe and America and Australia, but most had no qualifications. The older exiles ran the place, they’d left after the banning and been living in London and all over. They worried we’d get too violent and every week we’d get lectures about ANC ideology, getting ready to work with whites after the Struggle was won. They said fighting a guerrilla war with commercial sabotage was good, killing white farmers and bombing shops and cafés was bad. Those old people were away too long, they didn’t know how things had changed since they left. Now it’s all changed again and Comrade Chris was right – more violence will only slow things up, delay the election.’
Musa’s parents want him to be a teacher, he wants to be a journalist. ‘I have a lot inside my head to say and soon we’ll have ANC papers to write in. But now I’m 30 – getting old and no qualification! In Tanzania we’d only technical training, no university chance. They said technical skills make it easier to get jobs, so now I work on vehicle repairs. Some went to Soviet universities, they gave 400 scholarships a year for ANC students. I didn’t want to go there, my parents frightened me about Communism, they knew about it. But in exile I couldn’t say that, the Soviets were helping us so much. They sent food, clothes, trucks – and to Angola weapons instructors from East Germany. Most kids didn’t understand Communists are against Christians. I had to watch it – talking against Communism is agreeing with Pretoria and they’d suspect me. Only another boy thought like me and we’d whisper together. We wished other countries like America would help but we knew they only said they were against apartheid.’
And in Lusaka’s ANC colony, how was it?
‘Very tense! We feared informers sliding in, so no mixing with others, no jolling with Zambians! But everyone said it was better than Angola, that was real heavy, all going crazy suspecting informers. Some leaders tortured – even killed – too many cadres. About 8,000 Comrades were there, armed and trained to fight but not many sent on missions so the others got restless. Now we’ve thousands of them home again but Comrade Mandela tells them, “No more fighting!” They ask why, when we’re still getting shit in the townships. The Nats have two mouths, one for negotiating, one for telling Inkatha to kill us!’
On today’s Sunday Times letters page, one Ralph Pentecost, Oranjezicht, demonstrated his incomprehension of the nature of apartheid: ‘If ten separate, independent and self-governing homelands – encompassing 16,7 million inhabitants, ideally situated within the South Africa market area and provided with an annual golden egg of R6 billion from South Africa’s tax-payers – have proved a failure even after so many years of probation, what hope for the ANC or a black-controlled homeland called South Africa?’ It is safe to assert that Mr Pentecost has never visited a homeland though he must have driven through several.
A few evenings ago on TV, Carl Niehaus of the ANC conveyed sympathy to the CP on the death of its leader, Dr Treurnicht, and invited the party to join the ANC in the negotiating process, for South Africa’s sake. Pretty remarkable, in view of three leading CP members having been charged with Chris Hani’s murder. ‘A gesture of unusual magnanimity,’ the press noted today. They also noted Eugene Terre’ Blanche’s boast that Janus Waluz has been an AWB member since 1986.
My Hani T-shirt, incorporating a large picture of Comrade Chris on the bosom, is proving an invaluable research instrument. This morning as I walked along Smit Street in central Jo’burg, nine male motorists slowed down to abuse the white woman flaunting her SACP sympathies. The vibes thus generated reminded me of my evening with the Dullstroom trio.
A week ago, in Florida station, the tall thin AWB-faced railway clerk stared at me savagely (no other word for it) and asked, ‘Are you proud of your shirt?’
‘Yes, very,’ said I, whereupon he snarled at my request for a third-class ticket (‘None left!’) and flicked me a first class.
When I appeared again this morning with Comrade Chris on my bosom he sneered, ‘First or third?’
‘Third,’ said I, causing him to lose his cool completely. Pushing the ticket towards me he shouted, ‘That’s where you belong! Yes, that’s where you belong!’
When I told Jennifer about this duel she went into a dangerous spasm of laughter – we were motoring and the humour of the situation so overcame her we might have gone off the road. Mopping up tears of mirth she chortled, ‘In Florida station! A white woman in a Hani T-shirt travelling third! Poor man, the shock! For years he’ll be having nightmares about it, you don’t know what you’ve done to him! This will become an obsession, proof of the Apocalypse, he’ll not be able to talk about anything else in his Roodepoort bar!’ Thus did Jennifer make my earnest indignation look silly: South Africa needs more of her sort. This country quite quickly defuses the traveller’s sense of humour, until someone who can keep everything in perspective comes along to reactivate it.
Given its origins, one can’t reasonably criticize Jo’burg’s charmlessness. They came, they dug, they spent. And that’s how Jo’burg looks and feels, at least to the casual visitor. There is only one surprise – the many destitute whites, always unkempt and malnourished, often drunk and/or stoned, who sit on kerbs in the downmarket areas or beg at corners, grateful for the small change of affluent blacks.
Visitors are supposed to feel a thrill because three miles down, below their feet, tens of thousands of miners are scrabbling for gold in temperatures which the Chamber of Mines coyly declines to specify. This visitor failed to feel that thrill. Nor did I kneel to worship the Carlton Centre (Africa’s highest building) or Jo’burg’s other corporate excesses – horrors belonging to a nightmare set in the twenty-second century, when genetic engineers are designing architects. This whole unlovely metropolis (population 3.5 million) is unmistakably alien; it hangs on Africa like a crude fake jewel on a beautiful woman.
If one could forget the surrounding suffering townships, it might be mildly enjoyable to ramble through Tycoonville where wide silent streets are lined with majestic trees, between which may be glimpsed the mansions of the fabulously rich – including, now, Mr Mandela. Here each electrified gateway has its warning plaque: the legend says ‘ARMED RESPONSE!’, the illustration is a cocked gun. (It is generally assumed that most criminals are illiterate.) In theory, ‘Armed Response’ is provided by your expensive security firm whose officers arrive within moments of a button being pressed. But many are the tales of buttons being pressed in vain. This living under siege has nothing to do with the new South Africa; thirty-five years ago it startled Jan (then James) Morris.
Like most Florida folk, Margaret eschews ‘Armed Response’ and relies on heavy metal gates, with complicated locks, to reinforce all doors and french windows. From her high stoep on a ridge-top the view is quite pleasing, overlooking miles of wooded suburbs. A century ago there wasn’t a tree to be seen on the dusty veld, now Jo’burg is reputed to be the most treeful city in all the world – gold talks! Yet it has never talked loudly enough to furnish Jo’burg with a public-transport system, apart from the countless trains, kombi taxis and buses that ferry black workers from and to the townships. Florida’s railway link has enabled me to reach the city centre independently – otherwise, my social life has been limited. As the residential suburbs sprawl all over the ex-veld, your dinner host may have to drive sixty miles or more between fetching and delivering. Few guests are worth this effort so not everyone on my Jo’burg list has been contacted.
Tomorrow Lear and I are being driven to Krugersdorp, some fifteen miles from Florida, where the lethal-to-cyclists metropolis ends. In this notoriously right-wing Derby-Lewis home town, feelings are now inflamed on both sides. The ANC have announced a consumer boycott by the residents of Kagiso, Krugersdorp’s township, and their demands are not calculated to lower the temperature: 1) the resignation of all Krugersdorp’s white town councillors and their replacement by a mixed-race interim administration accountable to everybody in the area; 2) the removal of all white policemen from Kagiso until South Africa’s security forces have been put under multi-party control; 3) government financing of Kagiso’s SDUS(!). This is just one of many consumer boycotts being planned countrywide.
On 26 April negotiations were resumed at the World Trade Centre. This time they must succeed – and quickly.
* On 15 October 1993, Janus Waluz and Clive Derby-Lewis were sentenced to death for the murder of Chris Hani. Gaye Derby-Lewis was released for lack of evidence.