No Struggle hero

In your article on the proposed statue of Dr Walter Rubusana, the reporter refers to him as an “anti-apartheid” activist and a “struggle hero”. Despite Rubusana’s undeniable academic gifts, he can hardly be deemed an anti-apartheid figure because he died before apartheid was even thought of. One could consider him opposed to colonial segregation although he never did anything active to challenge this.

As for being a hero of the struggle, he was strongly opposed to the only struggle being waged at the time (namely the tribalist resistance to white conquest). In practice Rubusana was on the other side of that struggle, being a campaigner for black people to be permitted to support white political parties. As a member of a white political party he was elected to the Cape Provincial Council on a non-racial franchise, a privilege withdrawn when blacks were allocated Native Representatives instead. The Native National Congress which he helped to found was devoted to seeking modest political reforms within an overall framework of white political supremacy. This only began to change after Africans were stripped of their (very qualified) political rights in 1936, reaching fruition in the 1940s with the struggle to turn the ANC into a campaigning organisation. Let us not be anachronistic about the views of past political leaders merely because the ANC, or any other party, seeks to appropriate those leaders for its own advantage. – Mathew Blatchford, University of Fort Hare