Lessons for today in Hani’s example

THE “what if” game is popular with the media and the commentariat in South Africa. A popular example is “what if” SACP leader Chris Hani were still alive.

What, for example, would he say about the ANC?

What would he say about the state of the tripartite alliance after recent calls by both partners, the SACP and Cosatu, for President Jacob Zuma to step down?

These questions are being asked again on the anniversary this week of Hani’s assassination in 1992.

But such use of Hani’s name (and those of other fallen cadres of the liberation movement) is problematic. It seeks to isolate Hani from the movement that produced him, presenting him as an exception it can then appropriate.

A more useful exercise may be to reflect on Hani’s life, actions and beliefs, and their significance for today. In his book, A Jacana Pocket Biography: Chris

Hani, historian Hugh Macmillan argues it was Hani’s physical and moral bravery, his compassion and humanity that made him a “popular hero”. Hani helped build a culture of internal criticism in the ANC.

In 1969 he and six other commissars and commanders of Umkhonto we Sizwe signed what became known as the “Hani memorandum”.

It outlined the “frightening depth of the rot in the ANC”, accusing its leadership of careerism, corruption and persecution by party security.

Hani’s memorandum was the catalyst for one of the most significant events in the history of the ANC in exile, a conference in Morogoro, Tanzania. But it was viewed as treacherous by some within the leadership, particularly those it had criticised.

Hani and his comrades were expelled from the ANC and only reinstated after the conference.

Russian scholar Vladimir Shubin has argued that it was largely thanks to the memorandum that the delegates to the conference included rank and file MK members and not just the leadership.

The conference was a moment of self-reflection. It helped the ANC to overcome the state of crisis and demoralisation that had set in.

The ability of the leadership of both the ANC and its closest ally, the SACP, to reassess circumstances, interrogate these and themselves, and learn from past mistakes to overcome difficult moments is one of the most important lessons from their history.

This tradition of internal debate has become eroded, and criticism keeps being silenced.

Leaders like Hani were moved to act by their hearts as well as by reason.

The decision to join the liberation struggle was one of reason – a conscious rejection of apartheid oppression and inequality.

But it was also a choice informed by “revolutionary love” or a “love for the people” – shaped by a sense of justice and by compassion, as well as by a vision, the ability to imagine a different future.

As struggle veteran Raymond Suttner points out in Recovering Democracy in South Africa, what is new and alarming about many of the ANC’s current leaders is their callousness.

The plight of the poor no longer evokes compassion or empathy from a government that is supposed to represent them.

Both Suttner and Macmillan also highlight Hani’s commitment to disrupting notions of heroic masculinity.

Hani’s concern with gender issues can also be seen in his reaction to the abuse of women in MK camps. He introduced a rule that prevented officers from forming relationships with new women recruits.

By looking at the life of people like Hani, South Africans can recover the possibility of alternative and gentler types of masculinity to the prevailing models of patriarchal, machoist, militaristic and violent manhood.

At the time of South Africa’s transition to democracy Hani decided to resign from ANC structures and concentrate his efforts on building the SACP.

He understood that there would be a need to build the party for it to be a truly democratic and democratising force in a post-apartheid South Africa intent on taking the struggle of the working class and the poor forward.

While the SACP would have to redefine itself in the new South Africa, Hani believed that it should be the main agent of change.

The story of his life – and that of many others – is exemplary of this total commitment and willingness to sacrifice one’s life for an ideal.

It was ideas, a political project and the movement that counted – not individuals, because no one would have made it on their own.

It was by doing things with, and for others, as part of a collective movement that people like Hani found their self-realisation.