A GOOD KHOZA
What I believe, by Makhosi Khoza
I don’t think the ANC can be rescued. The politics of patronage run too deep
ON FAMILY
My paternal grandmother was a blind woman who was gifted with handcrafts and cooking. I still can’t find anything that comes close to the way she used to cook. She was so independent even though she was blind. She had a profound influence on me.
As a kid she told me stories about times long before colonialism. She told me about this great civilisation that Africa once had, the Kush, and how this civilisation crumbled because its leaders started trading in slaves. In my grandmother’s tales, she drilled into me that if you romanticise your history you can never change.
ON BECOMING POLITICALLY AWARE
I was 12 when I knew I’d be a politician. My grandmother died in 1982 and after her death, I think probably because of that void, I started questioning a lot of things.
I grew up in Harewood [in Pietermaritzburg]. The name sounds English, you might think it’s a posh suburb, but we all lived in mud houses, most of us used cow dung. We were poor, it was how things were. I used to sell popcorn, fried fish and sweets from when I was seven. I was a young entrepreneur. When I was 12 I went to town for the first time — kids living in Sobantu, the township on the other side of Pietermaritzburg, told me I could get my stock cheaper there.
In town I saw these kids riding bicycles, white kids, and I was shocked. To me there was nothing extraordinary about walking barefoot; most of us went barefoot to school. We made our own skipping ropes using grass and plastic — we did a lot of recycling.
My house was not far from the Msunduzi River, so we used to swim there. But in town I saw these kids swimming in a sparkling blue pool and I think that’s when I started questioning, What’s going on here? At school I’d ask my teachers all these questions because something was not sitting right.
ON ACTING
I never lacked confidence. As a child I was leader of the drum majorettes and I loved to sing and act. My mother was part of a stokvel and I would put on a performance that was very popular — I played this corrupt treasurer who took the money the women were putting together and used it for her own things . . . in the play the community members would beat me up and then I repented and became this fundamentalist Christian. People loved it.
ON THE FREEDOM CHARTER
Towards the end of 1982, I became obsessed with the Freedom Charter. It was the first time I had encountered anything like it. We used to recite it: “The doors of learning and culture shall be opened . . . all shall be equal before the law . . .”
My favourite item of clothing was my T-shirt: I would walk with pride with the words from the Freedom Charter on my back. That was my signature. If there is one thing that the ANC, with all its mistakes, has done, one thing that I am still truly grateful for, it is for the Charter. Being exposed to it helped me to understand and enabled me to find myself in society.
ON YOUTH ACTIVISM
At 12 I joined the DCO Matiwane youth movement and by 14 I was in the leadership of the Natal Youth Organisation, which was affiliated to the South African Youth Congress. In 1984 we went to Transkei to attend the funeral of two shop stewards who had been gunned down. I gave a speech on behalf of the youth. We were in this rural village and for so many there I think it was the first time they had seen a young person speaking with that passion.
I was a real revolutionary. The Echo, a community newspaper in KZN, called me Lady Siyay’nyomfa — the disrupter. The youth and the women in that village were really taken aback, here was this person challenging everything . . . and so I was detained. Out of 10 buses, the police singled out just two of us.
I got out of prison and had to flee my home. I lived with [anthropologist] Patti Henderson, then Yunus Carrim [now chairman of parliament’s standing committee on finance]. Yunus always jokes about how, when I first lived in his house, he found me sitting in the dark because the electricity had tripped. Where I grew up we did not have electricity, we had candles; I did not know about trip switches. His partner Sue would buy that cheese that looks like it’s rotten. I would take it out of the fridge and throw it away.
For most of that time I lived with the family of [archaeologist and anti-apartheid campaigner] Aron Mazel, but I was really the child of everybody in Pietermaritzburg.
ON BEING A WOMAN
I became a feminist at a very young age. I challenged the way things were done at home, why I was always the one sent to fetch water, the one who did everything while my older brother did nothing. Later I was very involved in the Natal Organisation of Women.
When I was six years old I was raped. I don’t want to go into the details . . . things were resolved. It made me stronger as an adult, but also isolated. Boys were always a bit frightened of me, even comrades. They would never take advantage of me, they knew where to draw the line. Being so unavailable probably deprived me of good boyfriends. I was always cautious, I only wanted to talk politics.
ON LOVE AND MARRIAGE
When I met my husband, Ntela Sikhosana, he was commander of Umkhonto weSizwe in Angola. He came to South Africa now and again and we were very close friends, but we did not have a relationship until much later on. He was sent to Robben Island and he would write to me, but I was scared of getting involved with him while he was in prison. When he was released in 1991, we hit it off.
He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. He really shaped me. Ntela spent a lot of time in Russia, in Cuba, he was welltravelled and a very sensitive man. When I was deputy mayor he would say to me: “You know my love, I know you. You are very opinionated, and the reality is, when liberation movements become ruling parties, they change. I don’t see you surviving.”
I think it was good my husband had that foresight. But he also said to me: “I don’t want you to lose your voice. We need this voice.”
When he died I was 28. My son was nine months old and my daughter was five. I buried myself in studies. Life was so confusing. One day, when I forgot to pick my daughter up from school, she said to me: “God is unfair; you should have been the one that died.” We laugh about it now but even then I understood . . . everything crumbled after my husband died. He was my pillar of strength.
Now it is the three of us. My children and I are very close, they phone me every day. It has been a tough time for us. Not being able to go home was the hardest, but I think my children understand that I am not just doing this for them, I am doing it for the country.
ON HER CAREER
I was deputy mayor of Pietermaritzburg when I was 26, as well as chair of the executive committee, driving the policy and budget processes of the municipality.
After my husband died I went to Joburg and worked as head of public sector finance for Standard Corporate and Merchant Bank.
Later I returned and served in the legislature in KZN as chair of the standing committee on public accounts and finance. But the ANC has this tradition of upward demotion — if you are causing trouble they remove you. I was fighting against corruption in the province and so they made me chief whip — at provincial level this is very boring. So in 2012 I resigned and went back to Joburg as group executive officer for Akani Retirement Fund Administrators, but I was then voted in absentia as member of parliament.
People in KZN wanted me in the provincial legislature, because they thought I could make a difference there, but the ANC sent me to national parliament. There are a lot of MPs who have been pushed to Cape Town because the party doesn’t know what to do with them.
ON PUBLIC ATTENTION
When we had the public protector process there was a lot of pressure on the ANC and I think they reasoned that they needed somebody with credibility to manage the process. I think that’s how many South Africans probably got to know that there was somebody like that who existed in parliament.
ON RACE
As a child I never had a problem about being black because I was in isolation, so I never really bothered about what was going on, until I suddenly drew the parallels and began to question. I think our children today probably experience racism more than we did. Because we were in isolation, we were not constantly being reminded that we are black.
I think the ANC has lost its nonracial character. Every day we are breaking it. Given our past it is easy, instead of focusing on what we should be doing, to go, “Maybe I’m better off with my own, clapping with my own, maybe I will get some protection there.” Everybody starts to think in black and white, it’s us and them, especially because leadership keeps on saying this. It’s tragic.
ON CONFLICT
I have always spoken out. As a youngster I used to speak out against my own comrade Harry Gwala. He was such an angry man, he was too militant, he would sometimes release instructions that I thought were extreme, that were violent, and I would challenge him.
We were no longer on good terms and so I really appreciate the fact that before he died in 1995, he called for me and I went to see him and he said, “You are so strong. I’ve never seen somebody who is so opinionated at your age. Sometimes I would forget how young you are, that you are still growing up.” That was quite humbling. We reconciled and I was there at his funeral.
ON THE ANC
I have been going through such emotional turmoil. I have always been a child of the ANC. But I don’t think the ANC can be rescued. The politics of patronage run too deep. The ANC no longer offers us a path that is consistent and clear.
We forget that the terrain during the liberation struggle was different. It’s not that there weren’t wrong things happening even then — there were — but we all had one common enemy, the apartheid government, and all of us had this idea of a nonracial South Africa. We never thought that such a story would turn tragic.
When Gwede [Mantashe, ANC secretary-general] came to us in caucus, he tried to intimidate MPs not to vote in favour of no confidence by saying the biggest threat is the judiciary because it is replacing democracy. At no stage did he mention kleptocracy.
This idea that if we criticise the ANC we are denouncing the struggle . . . I think this is deliberate misinformation by leaders who know that they are no longer in pursuit of the ANC mission: of building a nonracial, nonsexist, prosperous South Africa for all South Africans.
If there is anyone that is really rubbishing and besmirching the liberation struggle, it’s the ANC. I think it’s convenient for them to superimpose the underground culture on the democratic constitutional dispensation, because if they don’t do so, they will be exposed. I think the ANC knows the truth, but they have run out of any credible excuse why we are keeping this man in power.
ON DEMOCRACY
Democracy by its nature is about the contestation of ideas. If it happens that you are the opposition and what you are saying resonates with members of the public, why should I disagree with you on that? This tactic of oppositional politics — “voting with the enemy”; “voting with the counter-revolutionary forces” — this is so disingenuous. We vote with them all the time when we are passing legislation. That’s the nature of democracy.
It is also so wrong to think that within a democratic dispensation you cannot disagree. I completely disagree with [EFF leader Julius] Malema — I think he’s still stuck in the old ideological orientation that has failed each time it’s been tried out. And I can disagree with the fact that the DA is premised on protecting minority rights as opposed to championing a vision for an inclusive South Africa.
I may disagree with them but in parliament, in the house, they are my fellow patriots, all of them, from all parties. They are also members of that institution and to say that such people are enemies, to call them counter-revolutionaries — that flies against democracy.
When the ANC was established in 1912 it was called parliament of the people. We have always defined ourselves as a leader of society. Now, how do you claim to be a leader of society when you take on that oppositional attitude?
On April 7, the protests moved beyond an opposition issue. It was a societal issue. If the opposition was instrumental in bringing people out to march, that means what they were saying resonated with the people.
We can’t say, no, it’s just some white monopoly capitalists, simply because the DA was part of it. The reality is that these are the South Africans that we are supposed to be leading. These are the South Africans that, when we undertook to uphold the constitution, we said we would be loyal to.
Yes, the constitution is our collective moral signature, but behind the constitution are South Africans. Without them there is no moral collective signature to speak of.