A vexed question of competing loyalties
IF YOU were to find yourself in D Section of Robben Island in 1989, probability is high you would have run into an ANC cadre and progressive Christian philosopher called Comrade Bishop.
He had this uncanny ability to interpret the relevance of any biblical scripture’s message to contemporary political developments and ANC political strategy and tactics. He often spoke in deeply religious metaphor laced with philosophy-speak.
For instance, if he needed to discuss something with you that was confidential or politically controversial, he would, in passing, announce: “The gravity of this political conundrum requires that we deliberate Nicodemiusly.”
However, it was a question Comrade Bishop asked me during one such Nicodemius discussions that has come to haunt me politically today. It was: “Are you loyal to loyalty?”.
As probably was the case with many comrades who encountered Comrade Bishop’s esoteric questions, you knew they were rhetorical and expected no answer, but intended to make you think. I assumed back then he was juxtaposing loyalty to the ANC as a liberation movement with loyalty to the cause of our National Democratic Revolution. This with the understanding that these two loyalties, although symbiotically linked at that stage of our Struggle, also meant separate things in itself.
With hindsight, in asking me this question, Comrade Bishop was speaking of loyalty in the sense in which Christian philosopher Josiah Royce uses it in his treatise The Philosophy
of Loyalty (1908) when he explains loyalty as: “Loyalty is the will to manifest, so far as is possible, the eternal, that is, the conscious and superhuman unity of life, in the form of the acts of an individual self. Loyalty is the will to believe in something eternal, and to express that belief in the practical life of a human being.”
But this loyalty was not only to something spiritual in Comrade Bishop’s thinking. It was our shared politically purposed “cause” against apartheid colonialism.
Here, once again, the sense in which Royce speaks of loyalty in service of social cause:
“If, namely, I find a cause, and this cause fascinates me, and I give myself over to its service, I in so far attain what, for me, if my loyalty is complete, is a supreme good. But my cause… is a social cause, which binds many into the unity of one service. My cause, therefore, gives me, of necessity, fellow servants who with me share this loyalty and to whom this loyalty, if complete, is also a supreme good.”
Comrade Bishop did not live to see our first democratic elections in 1994. He was brutally murdered soon after his release from Robben Island by Inkatha impis in KwaZuluNatal.
Today, with the lessons of hindsight, I think I can answer that question he asked me.
Dialectically speaking, I am indeed more “loyal to loyalty”, in the principled sense in which Comrade Bishop and Josiah Joyce understood what it meant.