Cadre writes what ANC must do now
MEMOIR The People’s War is at once a political document, a history and a personal story, offering glimpses of the man – more than merely the cadre – in his setting.
In a memorable encounter, we find the returning guerrilla on a train, bound for the Cape in the late 1980s, dwelling in a reverie of nostalgia.
“It was still dark,” he writes, “when I left my compartment to catch the early breeze of the Karoo and the aroma from the herbs in that part of South Africa.”
He is bewitched by the scenery, the glimpses of the yellow blossoms of mimosas, of buck out in the veld.
He remembers his Cradock childhood – we learn later that he used to sew and darn socks to boost the poor family’s income – hankering just then for the Merino sheep tripe that was a delicacy of his earliest years. It was, he recalls, “a pleasure to be back home”.
It was also, doubtless, a perilous time to be dreaming of such things – but Nqakula survived that grim climax of conflict, and flourished in the period it delivered.
The writer started out, fittingly enough, as a journalist, covering politics in the Eastern Cape from 1966 to 1982. His focus shifted to activism in the early 1980s, when he joined the United Democratic Front, and deepened when he went into exile in 1984.
His express wish was to train as a guerrilla, in which capacity he returned to the country in 1988 to build underground cells in Cape Town. After the transition, he worked for the SACP, rising to become deputy general secretary to Chris Hani in 1991, and general secretary after Hani’s assassination in 1993. He went into Parliament in 1999, serving twice in the police and defence portfolios, was ambassador to Mozambique until 2013 and, under President Jacob Zuma, a presidential adviser and worked on African mediation efforts.
He returned to Parliament three years ago, and is chairperson of the joint standing committee on intelligence.
The People’s War, though, goes well beyond a fleshing out of his bio. Nqakula’s account, which is as much his own story as it is a tribute to those around him, draws widely on the recollections of others and sources far from the inner circles of his own activism, exile and insurgency – chronicling even the observations and experiences of white conscripts deployed in the townships at the time.
Though it is titled How Did We Get Here?, what it really asks is, where do we go now?
Nqakula writes, with uncompromising clarity, noting that the question – (which “is asked whenever small groups of serious ANC members meet and try to assess