Our stalwarts have been shamed
I SPEAK on behalf of a generation that grew up directly under the worst period of the apartheid state as it sought to clamp down on a people that had decided that they would give up their lives to ensure the liberation of the people of South Africa.
This is the generation whose parents spent all their time running the ANC – because the leadership of the time compromised the Youth League that had taken over the reins of the ANC in 1943. It was a relatively youthful leadership with young families.
Balancing the incredible demand of building the ANC, organising protests, serving time under arrest, and bringing up young children was a permanent struggle.
In those days the ANC was a 24-hour occupation. I speak here of an ANC that demanded total commitment, an ANC made up of people with no other agenda but to give their lives for the freedom we enjoy. An ANC so totally different from the one we have now that Kathy and his Rivonia veterans were constantly alarmed at what we have become – all of us! (To this I will return later.)
For all of those who were nurtured and looked after by Uncle Kathy, for all of our generation whom he inspired. And all those of us who grew up in this period, we owe Uncle Kathy an incredible gratitude for being there for us.
It’s a gratitude we feel very deeply because we were never able to thank him appropriately for his amazing generosity of spirit and his influence on us.
He was a natural ally for all of us. Young enough for us to relate to, and yet old enough to be utterly responsible. He would at this point have been in his late twenties to early thirties and that’s the kind of age group any youngster would love to have as an uncle; the kind that would allow you to eat ice cream the whole day and go to bed without having the problem of having to wash. “Why,” he would argue, “they will be dirty again tomorrow any way.” Definitely our kind of hero!
Kathy was a first-generation South African, his family having immigrated to South Africa and settled in Schweizer-Reneke. He entered politics at an age when most young boys would have been playing with kites and marbles.
(Walter) Sisulu, who ran the ANC office then, is convinced Kathy was between 13 and 14 when he joined the ANC and school became a part time occupation for him.
His passion, his intellect and his youth immediately made him the “gofer’’ (American slang for someone who can be sent around for everything and anything) kind of man and therefore very much at the centre of all activity.
The downside of being the youngster in this ANC hierarchy is that all the chores the men did not want to do were given to him and so his flat became an activists’ centre plus kindergarten. I don’t know much about his private life at this point, but I can tell you my Uncle Kathy was a drop-dead handsome man.
In later life, when I studied at high school and learnt about Greek gods, especially Zeus, the god of light and the handsomest, my reference point was Uncle Kathy. I thought that’s what Zeus would look like. I adored him and I know he loved me and that makes me feel very special.
I was somewhat sad to learn from him a few months ago in an SMS he sent me that he thought of me then not as a sweet cute child but as stroppy and cheeky – but he liked that.
He thought I had learnt the right lessons from him; indeed, in large part I turned out to be what I am because he made it possible.
Fast-forward, the rest of his political life we all know, but what you might not know is the anguish he went through in his later years and how this deepened with time.
Kathy sought no special favours for the role he had played in the Struggle. He was as humble after Robben Island as he was when he went into prison.
He shied away from the limelight and even turned down positions of authority. A remarkable feat when you consider how positions are fought for now in the ANC!
When Madiba’s term as the president of the ANC ended, the older leadership were devastated when they found that he was not accommodated within the hierarchy of the leadership.
The new leadership under Comrade Thabo Mbeki felt that Madiba needed to give them space to grow. Madiba was particularly hurt by this. He felt that after all their years of struggle, there ought to be some special place where they as the elders could give counsel to the leadership of the ANC. The pain he felt was felt even more acutely by Kathy, who had an extremely protective instinct towards Madiba.
In recent years, recognising that there was merit in Madiba’s yearning for continued meaningful involvement, the ANC created special recognition for the role of the veterans as a formal structure of the ANC. The reason I am narrating this to you is to indicate the delicate space that always existed and needed to be managed between our elders and ourselves in the leadership; where our elders have felt that their value to us was only symbolic, that it only existed when we brought them out for their credibility and to get us votes, and for most of the time it is as though they do not exist.
By the time Uncle Kathy died, he had been very disillusioned, not with just one person, but with all of us. Whatever guidance he tried to give was scoffed at in public by the Youth League and other formations, and what did we do? We sat on our hands and did nothing. Did nothing to defend him, did nothing to reach out to him to assure him that we valued his concerns and views.
We, all of us sitting here, need to ask ourselves why would we allow a man who had given so, so much to go to his grave with a sore heart.
In just this year alone we have lost three sterling leaders of this community. How did they feel about us? Were they proud of us? Did they have hope for the future for an organisation they gave their entire lives to?
It has almost become a ritual. We meet to pay homage to our heroes. We extol their virtues, bemoan our loss and then we go back to the rut that we have created, we live with, and we do nothing about it.
We have become complacent and passive. We lost the City of Cape Town – we complained and explained why we had lost. We lost the entire province and we did the same, complained and found an excuse. We lost three metros in 2016 and we did not heed the call of our people.
They have now taken to marching against us and we are still in denial.
The truth that should stare all of us in the face is that if we lose in 2019, we will have completely dishonoured all those people who gave us everything. We need to regroup and rebuild the organisation.
The only honour we can give to our stalwarts is to keep their flame burning in the hearts of our people, to reignite the burning passion of leaders and capture the future until every clause of the Freedom Charter has been fulfilled.