Category Archives: Paul Trewhela

The ANC and the failing of democratic governance
August 26, 2011

Paul Trewhela on the US consulate cable on Abahlali baseMjondolo

In a statement headed “Is The ANC As Democratic As It Claims?”, a confidential report by the US consulate in Durban dated 8 January 2010 – released publicly by Wikileaks on 24 August this year – stated: “The AbM movement is a test of democratic governance for the ANC…”

In its introduction, this report sent to the US State Department reads: “What began as a Durban road blockade in 2005 has become a shack-dwellers movement in South Africa. Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM, which means `those who live in the shacks’ in Zulu) now includes thousands of shack-dwellers from more than 30 informal settlements throughout the country. AbM has garnered international support and has won legal battles against the African National Congress’s (ANC) attempts at forced removal. While the ANC claims to be making efforts to clean up slums and provide the poor with adequate housing, AbM leadership claims intimidation and anti-democratic tactics are used against its members by the ruling party. AbM represents a true test of democratic governance for the ANC.”

I agree with the sense of this report. It is significant, however, that it has taken the leak of a confidential communication from a US consular official to make plain to South Africa and the world such a major threat to the country’s still young and vulnerable democracy. The full report should be read with care by every South African with a concern for the country’s present, past and future.

A major question is: Why, in such a highly politicised country, has there been such minimal attention to such a major political issue?

In the exile period through to its formation of the first post-apartheid government of South Africa, the ANC embodied both democratic and anti-democratic qualities.

Its formation in 1912, as the Native National Congress, was a profoundly democratic event. I am not aware of any other political party in Africa which so early and – generally speaking – so successfully sought a political practice that would rise above tribe and clan, and thus provide a genuine route to nationhood. One need only look to Zimbabwe, by comparison, to see how miserably this process has failed there. No other political party in South Africa was so responsible as the ANC for the winning of universal suffrage in 1994.

This was grossly disfigured in exile, however, by its behaviour as a one-party state over its own members, with democratic debate stifled by its security department – iMbokodo, “the grindstone” – and its history of abuse at Quatro concentration camp in Angola.

There was always the danger that these practices would return to South Africa once the ANC became the majoritarian ruling party, over-riding its democratic heritage.

Serious challenges to fundamental democratic elements in the Constitution, among the them the freedom of the media and the independence of the judiciary, now make this danger more acute than ever.

Nothing in post-liberation experience, however, has been closer to the totalitarian model to which the ANC looked in exile, through its client relation with the Soviet Union, than the violent assault by ANC local political structures on Abahlali baseMjondolo at Kennedy Road in Durban/eThekwini in September 2009, followed by the arrest of those who had been attacked and free license given to the attackers, followed in turn by the scandal of a trial of the innocent lasting longer than any in the history of apartheid bar the Treason Trial of 1956-61, when, as with the Kennedy 12, all the defendants – Nelson Mandela among them – were found not guilty.

The scandal is that this political prosecution was ever instituted in the first place, and that it was dragged on, month after month, by magistrates, prosecution and police without a shred of reliable evidence – with plentiful evidence, rather, of manipulation and intimidation of witnesses by the police and local ANC structures.

This was a Quatro trial, following a Quatro assault on South African democracy. The innocent were persecuted, and the guilty were – and remain – untouched.

Alongside magnificent support for the victims from the very first day of their ordeal provided by the Diakonia Council of Churches, and in particular by Bishop Rubin Phillip, as well as by fellow poor people’s organisations across the country and across the world, a further scandal though was the abysmal level of attention provided to this political prosecution by the media in South Africa. Generally, the media failed in its responsibility – a worrying signal, and a serious fall beneath the best examples of media integrity in the apartheid period.

This trial was a warning that the country is in danger, that the defence of AbM was a defence of democracy, and that defence of democracy in South Africa requires a defence of AbM.

All strength to AbM today – especially AbM at Kennedy Road – for its place at the front of the struggles of the whole of the last century.

There are further hard times ahead.

Bishop condemns “politically motivated” trial of amaMpondo in KZN

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Bishop condemns “politically motivated” trial of amaMpondo in KZN

Paul Trewhela

The Anglican Bishop of Natal , the Right Reverend Rubin Phillip – a colleague of the murdered Steve Biko in the Black Consciousness Movement of the early 1970s – has criticised a “politically motivated” trial in Durban of 12 members of the shackdwellers’ organisation, Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM).

In effect, Bishop Phillip has accused the state of staging the first major political trial in South Africa since the end of apartheid.

The first week of the trial took place in Durban between Monday 29 November and Friday 3 December, following a chain of remands after the accused were arrested at the end of September last year. They were then given a further remand until May next year, a year and a half after their arrest.

Describing the prosecution as a “politically-driven abuse of the systems of law and justice,” Bishop Phillip – who was house arrested for three years by the apartheid state in the 1970s – argued that in this trial the state was “trying to use the systems of law and justice to achieve party-political agendas.”

The 12 accused men – all amaMpondo – were arrested after a violent attack on a community of AbM members at Kennedy Road in Durban on the nights of 26 and 27 September last year, when a gang of about 40 men demolished shacks belonging to AbM members shouting: “The AmaMpondo are taking over Kennedy. Kennedy is for the AmaZulu.”

AbM reported immediately after the attack that the gang had been armed with guns, bush knives and even a sword. Two men were killed in the attack, which took place while some AbM members were taking part in the traditional Imfene dance.

The “Kennedy 12” are charged with public violence, assault and murder, following arrests made by police the next day. No member of the attackers has been arrested or charged.

In an emergency statement issued after the first night of the attack, AbM stated that it had been “planned and organised by Gumede, from the Lacy Road settlement, who is the head of the branch executive committee of the local ANC. He is a former MK soldier and is armed.”

The great-grandson of indentured labourers from Andhra Pradesh in India brought to the sugar cane fields of Natal by the British colonial authorities, Bishop Phillip issued his statement last week at the end of the first five days of the trial, which began 14 months after the defendants were arrested.

According to Bishop Phillip, no witness so far in the trial has credibly linked any of the accused to any crime they were charged with. He recalled that as early as November last year he had publicly stated: “Justice has been delayed far beyond the point at which it was clear that it had been denied. … It is patently clear that there was a political dimension to the attack and that the response of the police has been to pursue that political agenda rather than justice.”

To observers in the court, he continued, it appeared that the witnesses “were in all probability:

* pressured and lured by a police investigating team under enormous political pressure to use the tragedy of September 2009 as a vehicle to attempt to discredit an independent social movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo;

* instructed simply to point out known members of a pre-existing (and SAPS recognised) local residents safety committee (which had links with the Kennedy Road Development Committee, which in turn had links with Abahlali);

* and induced to sign statements written for them by the police.”

Immediately after the attack in September 2009, Bishop Phillip noted, AbM had called for a “full and independent Commission of Enquiry” into all the facts and circumstances surrounding the events of that night. He had supported that call, which he repeated in his statement, and had been “joined by many eminent supporters.”

As the prosecution case unfolded last week, he stated, it was clear that what had taken place was a “heartless exploitation of the poor to further the agendas of the powerful.” A political agenda had “trumped concerns with truth and justice – and it’s falling apart in court.”

Bishop Phillip also criticised the coverage of the court case in the media, in which he said that the public was “not being well served.” SAPA reports had so far conveyed “nothing of the way in which the prosecution case in fact appears to be unravelling under the inherent weight of its own contradictions and cross-examination.”

Earlier this year, the Diakonia Council of Churches – the coordinating body of Christian churches – conferred its highest award on Bishop Phillip when it gave him the Diakonia Award at a ceremony in Durban Town Hall on 12 August, noting that he had been a fighter for justice since his involvement as a young man in the struggle against apartheid in the 1960s.

An early leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, he was deputy president in 1969 of the South African Students’ Organisation – the organisation that initiated the Soweto students’ protest of 16 June 1976 – when Steve Biko was its president.

As chairman of the Durban work of the Dependents’ Conference of the South African Council of Churches, he had helped to provide material, financial, psychological and spiritual support to political prisoners on Robben Island, as well as their families.

In the 1980s, as Canon Rubin Phillip, he was involved in a successful struggle to prevent forced removal of families from Clairwood in Durban .

The citation for the Diakonia award noted that with the demise of apartheid, Bishop Phillip “did not retire from working for justice.” In the midst of all the jubilation celebrating the fall of apartheid, it stated, he prophetically saw human rights violations, corruption, and the self-enrichment of new elites “looming on the horizon.”

In April 2008 he successfully helped to obtain a court interdict preventing arms shipments from China “destined for the brutal regime in Harare , with its history of blatant violations of human rights”, from being transported through South Africa .

The same year he campaigned for the protection of foreign nationals when the wave of xenophobic attacks took place across the country, and helped to make sure that they received shelter and support from churches and civil society organisations.

He was honoured last year with the International Bremen Peace Award in the category of Public Engagement towards Justice and Peace.

Bishop Phillip was given the Diakonia Award to thank him for his “devoted service to human rights, to justice and to democracy through many long years – from the days of the struggle against apartheid to the struggle against poverty, corruption and injustice.”

Daily Dispatch: AmaMpondo under siege in KZN?

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http://www.dispatch.co.za/article.aspx?id=449203

AmaMpondo under siege in KZN?

2010/11/16

IN AN “emergency press release” on Sunday, September 27, last year, the shackdwellers’ organisation Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), based in Durban/eThekwini, published a statement about a violent affray that had taken place the previous night at Kennedy Road in Durban.

Now, 13 months later, 12 members of AbM continue to remain on trial charged with public violence, assault and murder, following arrests made by police the next day.

In an earlier article, Undermining of the rule of law in Abahlali case, (see Politicsweb.co.za), I argued that the continual postponement of this trial – always sought by the prosecution, and always agreed by the court – amounted to a denial of justice to the accused. By comparison, the Rivonia Trial in 1963/64 of emeritus President Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and their colleagues lasted only 11 months from the date on which the accused were charged to the date of their being sentenced, and involved issue of violence no less complex than those in the Abahlali trial.

I argued that the conduct of this trial “suggests a process of breakdown of law in South Africa”. It appeared likely to reveal itself as “the first and most important political trial under the post-apartheid system of government”, threatening a “breakdown of the constitutional structure of South Africa set in place in 1994”.

The most serious dimension to this matter, however, is that during the whole of the 13 months since the affray at Kennedy Road, neither the police, the prosecutorial service, the judge, nor the ANC – whether as political party or as government – appears to have taken notice of very menacing claims made in the emergency press release by AbM, instead preserving what can only be understood as guilty silence.

Over time, this issue has the potential to take South Africa into the realm of violent tribal conflict, in contradiction of the ethic on which the ANC was founded nearly a century ago.

In its statement, AbM alleged that on the night of September 26, 2009, a planned and violent tribalist attack was carried out on behalf of the ANC, as the governing party of South Africa and of the province of KwaZulu Natal.

Irrespective of its source, this allegation could not be more serious. The ANC was accused of launching a violent tribalist assault in which AbM acknowledged two people had been killed, both of them from among the attackers.

The main points in these allegations are as follows:

AbM alleged a “group of about 40 men heavily armed with guns, bush knives and even a sword” had attacked a meeting of the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC) in the Kennedy Road community hall in Durban/eThekwini.

It stated the attack had been “planned and organised by Gumede, from the Lacy Road settlement, who is the head of the branch executive committee of the local ANC. He is a former MK soldier and is armed.”

It stated further: “The men who attacked were shouting: ‘The AmaMpondo are taking over Kennedy. Kennedy is for the AmaZulu.’”

According to a further allegation made by AbM, when arrests were made the next day by the police “only members of the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC) have been arrested and not one of the perpetrators has been arrested.

“All the people who are arrested are amaMpondo.”

A number of points follow from this.

1. These allegations should have been a vital issue for clarification in South Africa. Had there been a similar issue involving whites and blacks, there would rightly have been cries of outrage. By comparison, silence over more than a year concerning allegations of a tribalist issue of this kind is very worrying.

2. This is an issue for every member of the ANC to raise in her or his branch. The truth must be established as to what did take place and what did not take place at Kennedy Road on the night of September 26, 2009. The integrity of the ANC is at stake as a political organisation founded on the principle of forthright opposition to tribalist prejudice, and even more so to violence carried out on a tribalist basis.

3. If the ANC, the government and the courts fail to take up this issue in the spirit of honest inquiry, then efforts should be made to establish an international commission of inquiry composed of independent-minded and respected jurists.

I should further add – it is no credit to themselves that not a single political organisation in South Africa appears to have taken up this issue.

Paul Trewhela was editor of Freedom Fighter, MK’s underground newspaper during the Rivonia Trial. He was a political prisoner between 1964 and 1967. In exile in Britain he was co- editor of the banned journal, Searchlight South Africa

Undermining of the rule of law in Abahlali case

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http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71639?oid=210129&sn=Detail&pid=71616

Undermining of the rule of law in Abahlali case
Paul Trewhela

Politicsweb.co.za
08 November 2010

Paul Trewhela says prosecution delays have exhausted defence funding in a “political trial”

The trial on charges of public violence, assault and murder of twelve members of the shackdwellers’ organisation, Abahlali baseMjondolo – now in its 13th month in Durban/eThekwini – suggests a process of breakdown of law in South Africa . In what could reveal itself to be the first and most important political trial under the post-apartheid system of government, what is threatened is a breakdown of the constitutional structure of South Africa set in place in 1994.

In an Emergency Press Release on Sunday 27 September last year, AbM appeared to acknowledge that its members had been responsible for the deaths of two men, however under conditions in which they themselves had been attacked by a large gang of armed attackers. The attack appears to have had a strong political character.

The AbM statement reads: “Last night at about 11:30 a group of about 40 men heavily armed with guns, bush knives and even a sword attacked a meeting of the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC) in the Kennedy Road community hall. There was no warning and the attack was a complete surprise. …The men who attacked were shouting: ‘The AmaMpondo are taking over Kennedy. Kennedy is for the AmaZulu.’ The KRDC and other community members who rushed to their aid were unarmed but tried to defend themselves as best they could. …

“The attackers…destroyed 15 houses belonging to people on or connected to the KRDC before launching their attack. They were knocking on each door shouting ‘All the amaZulu must come out’ and then destroying the shacks. …As far as we know two of the attackers were killed when people managed to take their bush knives off them. This was self defense.

“The Sydenham police were called but they did not come. They said that they had no vans available but they didn’t radio their vans to come. …This morning the police arrived under the authority of Glen Nayager and made eight arrests. As far as we can tell only members of the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC) have been arrested and not one of the perpetrators has been arrested. …[All] the people who are arrested are amaMpondo.

“We believe that this attack has been planned and organised by Gumede, from the Lacy Road settlement, who is the head of the Branch Executive Committee of the local ANC. He is a former MK soldier and is armed. There has never been political freedom in Lacy Road. Since 2005 we have been told that anyone wearing the red shirt of Abahlali baseMjondolo in Lacy Road will be killed.”

This and other supporting statements would indicate a definite political element in the trial of the 12 members of AbM. For one thing, none of their attackers appears to have been arrested and charged with an offence. Nor have the organisers of the attack been identified and charged. This itself would tend to suggest prejudice on the part of the police, the prosecution service and the court, and must tend to compromise in advance a plea of self-defence on the part of all or some of the accused.

If only because of the issue of actual or purported conflict between amaZulu and amaMpondo, this becomes a trial with a strong political character in which the highest degree of judicial probity is demanded of the police, the prosecutorial service and the court. The available evidence is that this quality of judicial integrity has been lacking from all three agencies. That would tend to suggest the character of a political trial.

There is further a well known saying in law: Justice delayed is justice denied.

In the Rivonia Trial of 1963/64, in which Emeritus President Nelson Mandela and seven co-accused were sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage, the legal process lasted eleven months from the day on which they were charged to the day they were sentenced – two months less than the current, unfinished trial of the AbM 12. The accused in the Rivonia Trial suffered no delay under the apartheid system, and justice was not denied. All those who were sentenced were in fact guilty as charged, in terms of the existing law. Given the status of the document “Operation Mayibuye” in this trial, in which a plan for violent military action in South Africa had been set out by the High Command of Umkhonto we Sizwe, directly involving several of the accused, the issues of violence in this trial were not less complex than in the AbM trial.

By comparison, the trial of the AbM 12 could as well drag on for months or years to come, with the state continuing to seek postponement after postponement, acceded to by the court in defiance of international standards and also…by the standards of the apartheid period.

This sectional and partisan character of the charges against the accused and the conduct of the court itself now increasingly appear to suggest political manipulation of the legal system on behalf of ANC structures in KwaZulu Natal, the main provincial power base of the ruling political ascendancy in the country.

It suggests a political vendetta waged against a poor people’s movement, perceived by the power elite as a threat to its own political support base among the province’s poor. There appears to be a strategy to undermine the legal process through a process of attrition, whereby the financial resources of AbM would be exhausted and with it its ability to mount a proper defence of the accused. AbM has been compelled to raise an appeal for funds – both within South Africa and internationally – to be able to continue to provide a proper legal defence of its members.

The whole matter casts a stain of shame and disgrace on the most important political narrative in the modern history of South Africa.

Nelson Mandela and his colleagues in the Rivonia Trial – Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and their ANC and Communist Party fellow-accused – would probably have been hanged, if it had not been for the funding of their trial by the Defence and Aid Fund, based in London.

Directed by exiled members of the SACP but funded through outreach activities of the Church of England, set up initially under the auspices of Canon John Collins, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the International Defence and Aid Fund was crucial for the preservation of basic structures of the rule of law in South Africa through the worst decades of the apartheid period. Especially in high profile political trials in the three decades between the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and the release of Mandela in 1990, the Defence and Aid Fund ensured that convictions in political trials in South Africa had to be grounded in evidence that would hold up in court, irrespective of the morality of the legislation that governed the courts.

This legal structure generally held intact. On the first day of the Rivonia trial, the entire prosecution case was properly thrown out by Judge Quartus de Wet, after a successful application was made on legal technicalities by the chief counsel for the defence, Bram Fischer QC, who as it happened was also chairman of the illegal Communist Party and – as his own subsequent life sentence proved – every bit as guilty as the main body of the accused. First-rate legal defence in this hanging trial was funded by D&A, as those of us who were accused in political trials in those years often called it. This funding of top quality legal defence ensured that one of Mandela’s co-accused – Rusty Bernstein – was found not guilty and acquitted, even though, as his autobiography later acknowledged, he was in fact as guilty as those sentenced to life imprisonment (but not…to death).

A whole raft of founding fathers of the legal system in post-apartheid South Africa – Emeritus Constitutional Court Judge Arthur Chaskalson, the late Judge Ismail Mohammed, Advocate George Bizos SC and many others – spent decades in defence of the accused in political trials in this way, with their work as counsel and that of their instructing attorneys funded by the D&A Fund in London.

This constituted a barrier in law that was never overturned by an oppressive state. It was the norm in hundreds of political cases. My wife and I were defended in a trial lasting eight months from the time we were charged, at no expense to ourselves, and at the sole expense of the Defence and Aid Fund, before being properly convicted in terms of the evidence. Two of our fellow accused against whom there was insufficient evidence were acquitted. There is no assurance this would have happened without the superb quality of our defence, funded by D&A.

My brother-in-law, who had received military training in China with the first tranche of members of Umkhonto we Sizwe to be sent abroad for this purpose – a group that included two of Mandela’s co-accused in the Rivonia Trial, Raymond Mhlaba and Andrew Mlangeni – was also acquitted and released at the end of a very long trial, on the grounds of insufficient evidence, all funded by the Defence and Aid Fund.

Members of the present government, and ministers under all four State Presidents since 1994, owe a personal debt to this fund, which ensured that a very important standard of jurisprudence was upheld in their own trials. The State President, Mr Jacob Zuma, is one of them. To that extent, modern South Africa owes a debt to this Fund for its Constitution, its Parliament and its system of Law, as well as for the welfare and even the lives of hundreds of political activists.

All this is now threatened.

Amnesty International, based in London, which alongside D&A provided crucial supervision of political trials and a defence of the rule of law in the decades before Mandela’s release, conducted its own independent investigation of the events at Kennedy Road on the nights of 26/27 September last year, with a statement of its findings issued on 16 December last year, the Day of Reconciliation. In this report of 11 months ago, headed “South Africa: Failure to conduct impartial investigation into Kennedy Road violence is leading to further human rights abuses” – with still no end to the trial yet in sight today – Amnesty suggested that legal procedure in South Africa was in grave deficit in this most sensitive of issues.

My own comment on the Amnesty report appeared on Politicsweb shortly afterwards.

This was nearly one year ago. By contrast with the Rivonia trial, the AbM 12 have suffered inordinate delay, in which justice has been effectively denied to them. This was understood already last May by Jeff Guy, in an article in The Mercury headed “Justice delayed and denied for 12 Kennedy Road accused”.

By contrast, to its honour, the Diakonia Council of Churches in South Africa – with exemplary guidance from Bishop Rubin Philip, the Anglican Bishop of Natal , a former colleague of Steve Biko in the Black Consciousness Movement – has provided steadfast witness, in the tradition set previously by Canon John Collins in London. This can be seen in statements such as “When liberators become oppressors” by Reverend Roger Scholtz
and “Current powers threatened by the power of the poor” by Bishop Michael Vorster.

The thinking of the ruling power in the ANC and government in relation to matters of this kind needs to be analysed. A clue can be found in the response of the National Working Committee of the ANC on 2 November to the civil society conference convened by COSATU last month, as issued by Gwede Mantashe, the secretary general of the ANC who doubles as chairman of the SACP (the same post held by his predecessor, my trial and prison colleague, Bram Fischer). In this statement, Mantashe described the “mobilization of a mass civic movement outside of the Alliance partners and the ANC” as something that might be interpreted as “initial steps for regime change in South Africa “.

Consider that phrase, “regime change”.

In terms of the Constitution agreed in 1994, South Africa is a parliamentary democracy in which government is chosen in accordance with the will of the governed, expressed in a general election. If the electorate wishes, it may replace any one party with another as the party of government, in terms of the constitutional process. This is not “regime change”. It is simply the replacement of one governing party by another. That is how governments are changed all the time in parliamentary democracies across the world, in accordance with the rule of law.

Mantashe is suggesting something very different.

In South Africa , the long period of government by white minority rule is often described with that term, “regime”, as in the phrase “apartheid regime”. Mantashe is suggesting that the hold of the ANC on government is that of a “regime”, meaning it would require a change of constitution – with all the immense expenditure of energy and life that took place up to 1994 – for the ANC to be displaced as party of government. It suggests that he and the National Working Committee of the ANC view their tenure of office in the state more as that of…a holding of power in perpetuity, as of right, as in the rule of an absolute monarch or king, from which the word “regime” derives (from the Latin word “rex”, for king). In modern political language, that means dictatorship.

This is the not-so-hidden meaning behind Mantashe’s argument that the critics of his party represent “reactionary forces” intent on “derailing the revolution”, informed by “the neo-liberal view that liberation movements in the region are too strong”.

This is indeed a non-liberal and anti-liberal view of parliamentary government, not surprising from the leader of a party (the SACP) which holds as an article of faith to the practice of “dictatorship of the proletariat”. In the same way, in associating the critics of the present administration with the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe, Mantashe and the NWC view the ANC as companion to the murderous government of ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, which they regard as a fellow “liberation” movement.

The AbM trial in Durban/eThekwini is now the most graphic faultline in the struggle to preserve democratic freedoms in South Africa.

The accused in the Rivonia Trial had the propaganda and publicity support of a world superpower, the Soviet Union, and its dependent states, as well as a global network of Communist Parties across the world. Through the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Defence and Aid Fund they had a very effective international support base in Britain for the raising of funds for their defence, extending into all the main parties in the House of Commons, the legal profession, the universities, the trade unions and throughout the society.

The Abahlali shackdwellers are by contrast in a pitifully different situation, yet facing prosecution from an equally powerfully state.

Everyone concerned for the future of civil liberties in South Africa should support their appeal for funding of a proper legal defence.

In search of light: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO

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http://respectnamibia.ning.com/forum/topics/in-search-of-light-uncovering

David Lush spoke to the author Paul Trewhela about the relevance of Inside Quatro to southern Africa today. (This is a transcript of that interview published in Insight Namibia)

While Inside Quatro documents meticulously the abuses of the ANC and Swapo in exile, there is little reflection or analysis on what implications these abuses have had for the ANC and Swapo’s governance of South Africa and Namibia respectively. Wasn’t this a missed opportunity?

PT: Primarily the book has an historical character, though with open-ended relevance to the present and the future. The two most important chapters in the book, in my view (chapters 2 and 11), are not ones written by me, but give first-hand accounts of the experience in exile in the ANC and Swapo camps. As I explain in the Introduction, all but four of the 14 chapters are from Searchlight South Africa, which was banned in South Africa. While available to academics, and quite widely cited in various publications since then, these texts have not been available to the general public until now.

My main aim was to make these texts from 20 years ago as widely available as possible to readers in southern Africa. People can develop their own interpretation of current events in the light of a more thorough knowledge of this history, which Inside Quatro helps provide.

There was, at least, some attempt by the ANC to find out what happened in relation to these abuses, to apologise to those who were wronged, and to clear the air. No such attempt has been made in Namibia. What have been the consequences of Swapo’s denial?

PT: Chapter 4 of my book provides an indication of how publicity given to issues relating to human rights abuses by the ANC in exile by agencies such as Searchlight South Africa, Amnesty International, the Weekly Mail and the Douglas Commission fed into a real struggle within the National Executive Committee of the ANC, and how Nelson Mandela came to be personally informed of the issue. The gap of four and a half years between general elections under a new constitution in Namibia (November 1989) and South Africa (April 1994) gave time in South Africa for the issue of disclosure to acquire political force. There was no possibility of this in Namibia. In this sense, South Africa was a beneficiary of earlier struggles over this issue in Namibia, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa stands on the shoulders of Namibian efforts.

There are also other crucial issues. One is that the principal political leader and president of the new state in South Africa (Mandela) had not been contaminated by responsibility for abuses carried out in exile. Had (Andimba Toivo ya) Toivo, say, and not Sam Nujoma, been the most significant leader in Swapo in the 1989/1990 period, it is just remotely possible that there might have been more scope within Swapo for a struggle leading to a decision in favour of a TRC-type disclosure. There are other differences too. As I write in the Introduction to Inside Quatro: “Swapo in government convened no Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Namibia. …It had too much to hide. The forces that might have compelled it to do so were too weak”.

A principal issue remains Swapo’s participation – however limited – in the SADF invasion of Angola in 1975, prior to the repulsion of the South Africans by the Cubans. This took place under pressure from the Zambian government and in terms of Swapo’s previous fraternal relationship with Unita in southern Angola, as I set out in Chapter 13, ‘The Kissinger-Vorster-Kaunda Detente’.

This provoked a huge wave of anger in the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (Plan) and the Swapo Youth League in western Zambia, which was then repressed with force and misrepresentation, setting in place the cycle of manic purges continuing until the return of the exiles to Namibia.

This fundamental issue of modern Namibian history places the integrity of Nujoma and the exile leadership of Swapo at that time under a very searching light, especially because they then initiated very severe repressions of their critics, describing them as “traitors”, as Nujoma said at the time.

The entire discourse of government of independent Namibia, as set by Swapo in terms of “wavering” (as in Where Others Wavered, the title of Nujoma’s autobiography), would have been put in question by a TRC-type process in Namibia.

In this sense, the issue of a TRC for Namibia is so much more radical than it was for South Africa, putting in question the integrity – and more – of almost the entire governing elite. This remains so, 20 years after independence. The issue of truth and lies, and what can be trusted and what cannot be trusted in the record of the founding fathers of the state, remains far more unsettling in Namibia than it was in South Africa. A film such as Invictus is unthinkable with a setting in Namibian political history. In this sense, issues of history remain so much more potent and topical in Namibia than they do in South Africa.

This isn’t the place to examine other very major matters that remain open for investigation concerning Namibia’s political history of the past fifty years. I’ll mention only one, relating to gender. At a seminar at Cambridge University in Britain on February 10, Martin Plaut, the Africa Editor of the BBC World Service, provided supportive evidence for the statements in Inside Quatro that women members of Swapo were detained and physically examined under accusation that alleged female “enemy agents” had hidden razor blades in their vaginas, for the purpose of murdering Swapo men. (the recording of the seminar)

Similar testimony was given by several former Swapo members to the hearings of the Internationale Gesellschaft fur Menschenrechte in Frankfurt in 1985 (see Leo Raditsa, Prisoners of a Dream, St George Street Press, Annapolis, USA, 1989). A good deal of what was said there corresponded to what I was told in Windhoek in 1990. My understanding is that rape of women Swapo members was a system in its pits in the ground at Lubango, and maybe elsewhere.

All of these are vital, living issues relating to Namibians who are alive as well as dead, which the nation can clarify only by open investigation. This need will never go away until everything is brought to the light. For me this need arising from buried trauma is the most pressing need in the whole society, and I hope my book – like Pastor Groth’s Breaking the Walls of Silence – can begin to allow in a little more light and a little oxygen.

To what extent are the governance styles of Swapo and the ANC today a reflection of their behaviour in exile?

PT: In my judgement, drawn mainly from media reports and a wide correspondence, no proper lessons have been learnt by the governing parties in either Namibia or South Africa. In Namibia this was par for the course, given the total denialism by Swapo throughout, as shown in Nujoma’s autobiography.

In South Africa, ex-Quatro detainees campaigned for Jacob Zuma before, during and after the ANC national conference at Polokwane in December 2007, which resulted in the total dismantling of the party and later state support structure for former President Thabo Mbeki. They felt that this huge overturn within the ANC – there has been nothing remotely comparable in Swapo – permitted some form of democracy and provided for a greater element of personal safety. Nevertheless, as I wrote in my Introduction to Inside Quatro, these people still constitute a “silent generation” whose members “keep their heads down. This is not yet, for them, the time to speak…”

Since I wrote these words, there has been a murderous and chauvinistic assault by ANC political structures in Durban on the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) shack dwellers movement last November, with apparent collusion by the police and judiciary. AbM members appear to be detained effectively without trial, through a farcical cycle of remands. This has been powerfully contested by the Diakonia Council of Churches, in stark contrast to the shameful silence of the churches in Namibia in the 1980s when they refused to give witness to Swapo’s detention of its members in exile.

As I wrote at the end of chapter 8 of Inside Quatro, “Advocacy of terroristic state behaviour has a long history in southern Africa”. In this sense, I do believe that it remains far too true, as your question puts it, that “the governance styles of Swapo and the ANC are a reflection of how they behaved in exile”.

About the timing of the publication of Inside Quatro: Why now?

PT: I don’t think it would have been possible for Inside Quatro to have been published earlier by a publisher in southern Africa, as Jacana has had the courage to do. I think that the removal of the Mbeki apparatus did suggest there was some space for critical thinking in the society.

Also, Searchlight South Africa was always only a two-person effort. I was working fulltime as a schoolteacher throughout, and from 1992 was a single parent to my two youngest children. After Baruch Hirson and I had brought Searchlight South Africa through 12 issues between 1988 and 1995, I just didn’t have the energy to carry a further heavy load and responsibility.

I retired as a schoolteacher in 2006, which made a stronger engagement with journalism possible again, though I can’t wait to put my major energies back into painting, after the effort needed to bring Inside Quatro to publication and to get it attention.

I’m sure attempts have been made to discredit you and your book on account of your own ‘dissident’ past (Trewhela is a former member of the South African Communist Party).

How have your own feelings about the past shaped your reporting on southern Africa, particularly given that you have lived away from the region for so long?

PT: Baruch Hirson’s insistence that only verified material be published as “fact” was a tremendous shield that protected Searchlight South Africa and my subsequent writing from being discredited. I can’t remember any public criticism of the journal from ANC sources, apart from one reference in 1992. It made more sense for them to try to kill this information with silence, given our very small circulation.

This began to change in the lead-up to the South African general election in April last year, culminating several months ago in a criticism of my writing in the Johannesburg Sunday Times by Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary general, on 13 December. Mantashe’s criticism was directed at an eyewitness account from Inside Quatro, which had been published by the Sunday Times the previous week under my name. I think it was really a tribute to what the ANC was no longer able to suppress, and proves that this history retains its vitality and relevance.

I’m not worried about “swimming against the stream”. I feel I’ve been doing it for most of my life. I would feel very worried, though, if I was living in South Africa or Namibia. In Zimbabwe a person in my position would probably have been killed. So from Britain I have been able to do what is far more dangerous for people such as Phil ya Nangoloh or Erica Beukes in Namibia, or people such as S’bu Zikode associated with Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa.

Would I be correct in describing you as a committed Marxist?

PT: I was a Trotskyist, and, yes, a “committed Marxist” through to the end of working on Searchlight South Africa. But I’m not a Marxist any longer. Marx’s conception of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” gave a licence to totalitarian dictators of all kinds, and Marxism’s economic determinism and alleged “scientific” philosophy are way off beam. I’m much more aware than before how fragile are the little shoots of civil society, and how they need nurturing, and how easily they are crushed by very ideological people who claim to have a universal panacea, usually violent. They’re the dangerous people in southern Africa, as Robert Mugabe and his regime have shown.

Source: Insight Magazine