Grim tales of ANC’s sordid past
TITLE: Fordsburg Fighter: the journey of an MK volunteer WRITER: Terry Bell REVIEWER: Mbulelo Sompetha Xolo FORDSBURG Fighter by Amin Cajee tells the story of how ANC freedom fighters disillusioned by being idle in military training camps rebelled against their own movement.
Many of the Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) volunteers were young, in their teens and early 20s, and most had little experience of the world outside of their villages or townships. Only a few, such as 21-year-old Chris Hani, were well educated.
Among the core of idealists of one kind or another, there were also activists, drunkards, thieves, criminals and opportunists, Cajee says in his book.
Many received training but, instead of being sent home afterwards, they spent years idling in military camps, unable to go back. This bred discontent, which invited punishment from commanders who tolerated no dissent. A new pain and lifetime emotional scars festered from being suppressed by their own.
Unfortunately, in post-apartheid South Africa there has been no official acknowledgement of that past. Many continue to suffer in silence but some, like Cajee, are now telling this dark episode of the liberation movement in books.
In written by Terry Bell, Cajee recounts his experiences. He and his brother Omar were the first young recruits of MK to leave South Africa in 1962 for a short stint of training in Tanzania. They left South Africa legally, using their passports, and expected they would be back in less than six months.
To their disbelief, six months became two years of military training in Czechoslovakia and the ANC’s Kongwa camp in Tanzania. Cajee later defected and moved to England.
For years there had been no serious attempt to take the struggle south to South Africa. Because of this situation, a group of comrades from Natal staged a mutiny called “Operation 29”. They were called that because that was the number of comrades who had taken the camp’s only truck and fled south from Tanzania but were later arrested and returned to base.
What the group had done was to highlight their frustration. Of course, the leadership did not take kindly to this act. The leaders of the movement decreed that the ANC was “the sole representative of the people of South Africa”. It was the “mother and father” to those who joined and any dissent was considered treasonous. This state of affairs encouraged human rights abuses in Kongwa in the 1960s.
Had the ANC learnt from this debacle, the Mkatashinga mutinies would not have taken place in Angolan camps in the 1980s.
In the book, Cajee also reveals how tribalism bred animosity among the different groups over leadership positions. These groups clashed, leaving many comrades injured. The straw that broke the camel’s back for Cajee was the seeming tolerance of corruption by the leadership.
“I found myself serving a movement that was relentless in exercising power and riddled with corruption,” he writes.
“To their disbelief, six months became two years of military training