Free us from our liberators
They helped bring apartheid to its knees, and the capital markets may once again help liberate SA — from the freedom fighters
In their brazen grab for resources, the erstwhile liberators are exceeding the low expectations of their former enemies. In the past 20 years they have stolen far more than the most corrupt of apartheid’s enforcers and Bantustan stooges — but the loot stashed at home and offshore is fast becoming worthless. The markets may yet again be the saviour.
As young black children growing up in the townships of apartheid SA, we swallowed hook, line and sinker the great tales of freedom that came in from the capitals and camps of liberated Africa.
Understandably, these stories of the heroism of fellow South Africans — engaged in an epic struggle to rid SA of the racist regime — were short on detail. In the late 1980s they acquired a romantic dimension: these were sons and daughters of Africa, fearlessly confronting the might of the continent’s strongest and best-armed force with little more than pistols.
In the little schoolboy tales we shared in hushed tones, our heroes always won the battles against our hated oppressors.
The newest slums of the country soon took on the names of the far-off cities and camps where the “fighting occurred”.
Names such as Lusaka, Harare and Tripoli were given to our newest squatter camps.
It was most boys’ dream in the East Rand township of Daveyton to “skip the border” and join the people’s army as soon as one reached the appropriate age. We wanted to be the ones who would finally “liberate Africa, from Cape to Cairo”.
We were impressed with the valour of our leaders and their battlefield exploits. The names of Chris Hani, Gebuza (Siphiwe Nyanda), Joe Modise and Barney Molokoane assumed cult status. Oliver Tambo’s word was gospel: “Victory is imminent.” The bombing exploits of uMkhonto weSizwe were the stuff of legend.
Not for us was it to question any of the information we were being fed discreetly by people who must have been ANC sympathisers.
Only some time after our heroes came back home in the early 1990s did the more sordid stories of human-rights violations, rapes, violence, looting and widespread corruption start to emerge.
And some of the fiction we grew up on become exactly that — fiction. We got to learn that the withdrawal of capital from racist SA might have been more effective than the guns and bombs of MK and the Azanian People’s Liberation Army.
We got to know about military commanders who lived large while their troops were starving. We also began to learn of would-be liberators who sentenced their comrades to death by firing squad on trumped-up charges, after less-than-fair trials in the courts of Morogoro camp, Tanzania.
Of course these great liberators were learning from the best. Their hosts — from Dar es Salaam to Harare to Accra to Lagos — had, in the short years between freedom and the 1980s, killed more people than the colonialists they had fought to defeat.
Rhodesia’s Ian Smith must have felt like a fool when the new Zimbabwe government quickly slaughtered more than 20,000 people soon after taking power from the colonial and imperial regimes.
The numerous military dictators of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria butchered more of their own people to retain power after independence than the colonialists. They stole even more.
Now in SA, as was the case back then, the capital markets may once again help save us from ourselves. The erstwhile liberators have been crippled by their own raids on the public purse to the extent that they can no longer stand up for the principles that would have driven them, decades ago. Back then they had nothing to lose. Today they have everything to lose, including money that is rapidly being rendered worthless by thieving comrades. That may just be what we need.