Hani’s words a clarion call

ON APRIL 10, 1993, a hero was assassinated in his driveway. Chris Hani was unarmed. He posed no threat, but a right-wing gunman drove to his unguarded Boksburg home and shot him.

How South Africa responded right then and in the days that followed defined us as a nation.

If there had ever been a lit match for the fuse to our much-awaited racial conflagration, then Hani’s assassination should have been it, but it never was.

Instead Nelson Mandela took to the TV that night to broadcast to the nation.

He, not president FW de Klerk, defused the anger and the hurt, held us together and created a safe space for the nation to mourn.

Today, as our country appears riven like no other time since, Hani’s death is being used both as a reminder of what he stood for and what he wanted – as different factions try to lay claim to his legacy.

The truth is that as one of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s most famous freedom fighters, and as the incumbent secretary-general of the South African Communist Party, Hani’s legacy and his political orientation is uncontested.

In an era of fake news and a pantheon of contrived legends, Hani stands apart as a true South African hero.

His legacy has shone ever brighter – the lodestar of what could have been, indeed should have been – in the decades since his murder.

As South Africa struggles at the existential crossroads of falling into the standard post-colonial African trap of kleptocracy and tyranny, or following its destiny to become the benchmark of the continent’s potential, developing its wealth for its people’s benefit, Hani’s words the year before his death ring out like a clarion call, over our mountains, across the veld and through the streets of dusty settlements: “What I fear is that the liberators emerge as elitists… who drive around in Mercedes-Benzes and use the resources of this country… to live in palaces and to gather riches.”

Whether they are a condemnation or an injunction, is for the hearers themselves to decide.