Smith / Tromp Hani

A Life too Short
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-77619-276-2
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

'This is an excellent portrayal of the Chris I knew. Not one word of exaggeration, so large was Chris. His contribution to our freedom is inestimable.' - Mavuso Msimang, ANC veteran and former member of the military high command of uMkhonto we Sizwe Chris Hani's assassination in 1993 gave rise to two of South Africa's greatest political questions. If he had survived, what impact would he have had on the ANC government? And could this charismatic man have risen to become president of the country? In the 30th anniversary year of his murder by right-wing fanatics, this updated version of the seminal biography of Hani re-evaluates his legacy and traces his life from his childhood in rural Transkei to the crisis in the ANC camps in the 1980s and the perilous last 36 months he spent back home rallying for South Africa's freedom. Drawing on interviews with those who knew him, this vividly written book provides a detailed account of the life of a hero of South Africa's liberation, who was both an intellectual and a fighter.

JANET SMITH is a former newspaper editor and the author of Patrice Motsepe: An Appetite for Disruption. She was also a co-author of The Coming Revolution: Julius Malema and the Fight for Economic Freedom and The Black Consciousness Reader, among other titles.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Janet

Tromp, Beauregard

Leseproben

Chapter 2 Fort Hare
We lost Cleo Hani somewhere between a rash of phone-call shops – their minders huddling under zinc overhangs on a cold morning – and the open road home. Phakamisa is an extension of the sprawling townships closest to Queenstown. But we could not find her house. We kept on driving past, seeing other names on signboards until eventually a woman in a gold BMW took pity on us, spoke to Cleo on the cellphone and then drove in front of us to take us right to her door, a mere five minutes from where we had given up. It was something that seemed to happen to us quite often, as if there is a need to be searching for something in the Transkei. In a sense, there is no mystery to the landscape – but only if you know it. And in the case of the Hani household in Sabalele, there simply are no directions. The best you’re likely to get are descriptions full of misunderstandings, and a veil of adjectives. There are no streets, no roads, no names. Just rondavels, and concrete bus stops. Cows strolling wistfully across the sandy tracks, barkless dogs and sheep calling to lambs out of line. Begin the trip by taking the main tar road out of Queenstown through a landscape of gorges where the light is tremulous with expectation. Drive until you get to the pointer for Cofimvaba. You’ll probably miss it the first time; it’s a mere consolation for those who insist on signs. Turn left, or you’ll be on your way to Cathcart – if you’re lucky. Otherwise, you’ll be lost in the sadness of the heavenly Amatola Mountains. Drive down a solitary path. Look out for the post office at St Marks and turn right. Pass the church and the white swans, the custodians of the dam. After crossing numerous bridges, past dozens of ruined automobile chassis, buildings buried in reeds and the indignity of lonely long-drops in the open grass, you’ll have to ask. Some of the people living here speak Xhosa, some Afrikaans. Only a few speak English. Eventually, up a hill, left at the grey hut with the blue roof, keep going along the verge and park before you ram into a huddle of rocks. The first time we went to Sabalele, the villagers, living mostly without lights and none with running water, were still virulently pro-ANC. The party had won 82.6 percent of the vote in the 2004 election. Major General Bantu Holomisa, who gave Hani protective and political cover in Umtata after Hani’s return home in 1990, took just under 10 percent for his United Democratic Movement. The PAC got 2.19 percent. The tattered liberal conscience of the Democratic Alliance scored just over 3 percent. No contest, really. It would have been a small ballot. Most of the people living in the villages are under 20, most of them children, and there’s a negligible spike in people in their 40s. HIV and migrant labour rip the middle out – the mothers and fathers of the babies. It seems strange that statistics say there are so few old people because, as you drive, many seem to glide past on the road like ghosts, the women swaddled in blankets, multiple layers of skirts and scarves, the men startlingly fit. Cleo Hani says there are many over the age of 90. They just walk and walk, for hours, usually alone but sometimes in pairs or sometimes with old dogs, equally slow, equally determined. The anniversary of Hani’s murder always means the same thing for Sabalele: about a month or two before, shiny 4x4s arrive outside Nolusapho Hani’s rondavel, and representatives of councils, municipalities and the province discuss ‘an occasion’ to mark 10 April. Much hand-shaking and back-slapping takes place, while the villagers stand around watching the knot of ambitious middle managers in open-necked shirts who keep tucking their fingers into their belts to tug up their trousers. To mark 15 years, the new clinic would be completed and opened. A beast would be slaughtered and a ribbon cut. The last time there was this much fanfare here was when a water project named for Hani was opened by President Thabo Mbeki 10 years after the assassination. When we first met Nolusapho Hani – in widow’s weeds, her severe black scarf tight around her forehead – we were struck by her remarkable yet mysterious presence. It was as if she could not shed her smile, as if her smiles were her only expression, but also unmistakably disconnected from much of her conversation. There’s been so much sadness. The past drifts with disappointment. Her wit, a stream of consciousness preoccupied with nostalgia, allows Nolusapho to speak and laugh confidently about falling in love 50 years before, when she was a graceful little girl. Her crush was on her neighbour, Victor Hani, who revealed his charm during those rambling hours on the road to school with his younger brothers, Tembisile and Christopher. But Nolusapho’s age has also hardened her to the less idyllic life, the betrayals in the everyday political world, the cynical meaning in the completion of the new clinic. Like a conjuring trick, it had finally emerged out of the neglect of Sabalele in 2008, its flat brown facebrick and sombre, bureaucratic squareness rammed against the soft horizon of colourful one-roomed huts. As we walked back down the hill to her hut after the obligatory tour of the clinic’s two rooms, Nolusapho said it was simply too small – and what’s the use? It isn’t open every day. How will the infirm or pregnant women get up the hill? It is at the very top. With another smile, elusive in its meaning, Nolusapho noted, ‘When Tembisile died, there were lots of promises from government. We’re waiting.’ It was late when we left Sabalele that first day. Night dropped like a hood over the village, and suddenly everything around us was pitilessly dark. We were certain that if a lost cow stepped into the road, we could lose control of the hired car. Once in the thickly lined avenue of rich silver trees that lead to the sign for Cofimvaba, there are a few other cars, but only every now and then. You need patience on the main route back to Queenstown. Every few kilometres, a figure with a Stop sign, like a ghostly ferryman, steps out into the delicate dust of headlights to call you to a halt. Then, it could be a 15-minute wait, sometimes longer, before cars can move again, down a single carriageway, squeezed against orange traffic cones. No one seems to know why. No one asks. * * * Back in Johannesburg, Sauer Street has four lanes of morning mayhem. Number 54 Sauer Street is Luthuli House, the national headquarters of the African National Congress (ANC). Hundreds of taxis squall acrimoniously around it throughout the day, thousands of pedestrians darting among the minibuses. Inside Luthuli House there was a creeping sense of emergency in the months before the 15th anniversary of Hani’s death. The question, to put it plainly, was, how to honour Hani? There was already an annual Chris Hani memorial lecture, where party intellectuals – the Mbekis, Pallo Jordan and others – had paid homage. There was a Chris Hani Institute in humble COSATU House at the base of the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, although it consisted of not much more than two librarians, a few books and posters, a box of business cards and a fax machine. The biggest hospital in the southern hemisphere is situated at the teeming gateway to Soweto, where Hani had been a fugitive on and off, directing and accelerating sabotage, during the 1970s and 1980s. The hospital has been called Chris Hani-Baragwanath for many years, to the consternation of even progressive lobbyists, who insisted they could name a dozen worthy doctors who had served the ANC in the camps in Angola and elsewhere who were surely more deserving of the title. The municipality in which Cofimvaba lies was also renamed to honour its fallen hero. And the municipality in Alice has a Chris Hani Drive – a narrow strip of tar, flanked by poverty. So it goes on. Yet these bureaucratic honours have never seemed quite enough. Hani’s face is ubiquitous in salvaged revolutionary posters and old photographs in offices and corridors all over Luthuli House, and in COSATU House, headquarters of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, where there are photocopies of photocopies of pictures of Hani. In December 2007, during the midsummer of the ANC’s discontent, its top delegates gathered to spit vitriol in Polokwane, and Hani was recharged for that event, too, with the SACP, the Young Communist League (YCL), the South African Students Congress (SASCO), the MK Military Veterans Association (MKMVA), the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), everybody, wanting a piece of his monument. Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of COSATU, is succinct about Hani’s influence: ‘Our future is written in the blood of Chris Hani’. So we struggle to understand why Sabalele remains on the periphery of the collective conscience while it was always at the forefront of Hani’s imagination. * * * In the waning dark, the huts of Sabalele emerge dreamlike in the first light to lift off the mountains. A knot of cattle, already adrift from the early morning herd, are startled by people walking along the main track over the series of bridges where not much more than the memory of a river washes below. Kraals marked out in rocks punctuate the rough green scrub. From a distance, these are the crop circles of gentle hills, but those who take the road to Qamata Station – the only road in Sabalele – know the terrain to be compassionate only to stray dogs and goats. Qamata was not much more than a cheerless platform on the way to Queenstown and Stutterheim in 1956, when 14-year-old Chris Hani boarded the train for Lovedale College in Alice. The station in Alice was more substantial, a place of frequent arrivals and departures,...