South Africa: Moment to Recommit Ourselves to What Mama Tambo Fought for

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South Africa: Moment to Recommit Ourselves to What Mama Tambo Fought for

Business Day (Johannesburg)

OPINION
February 2, 2007
Posted to the web February 2, 2007

Aubrey Matshiqi
Johannesburg

IN THE words of a famous pop song, "It's the end of the world as we know it".

For those of us who fought in the liberation struggle, each year since 1994 has been characterised by the conflicting feelings that come with the joy of knowing you are free and the tears that come with the knowledge that the sun will set forever on yet another giant of the struggle, who will walk among us no more.

Each time we sing "Lala kahle mkhonto -- rest in peace spear of the nation" as another struggle icon descends to eternal freedom, we inch closer and closer to the end of the world as we know it. Each time a hero of the liberation struggle passes on, they take a piece of the world as we know it with them.

It is with a heavy heart and hand, therefore, that I sit to ponder the meaning of such deaths for a young nation and democracy that is still in need of the wisdom of its founding fathers and mothers.

Through their deaths, the soul of our nation is robbed of the qualities that have made many around the world who still seek freedom look at SA as an example of what the human spirit can achieve where there is hope.

The death of Adelaide Tambo is not the news I wanted to wake up to this morning. My intention was to rise and write about ancestors, sacrificing animals in their name, cultural genocide and the plight of numerical majorities who, because of colonialism and apartheid, have become a cultural minority.

But I was overcome by emotion, hence the decision to contemplate what it means for a people with our history to be orphaned in the infancy of its freedom and democracy.

This question is much more critical when it is the mothers of our nation from whose breasts we may no longer seek sustenance and refuge.

Where shall we go to hear of our proud history and learn about the values and principles that should govern our new society?

Have we remained faithful to the vision of freedom that so many celebrated and unsung heroes sacrificed their lives for?

There is concern that some of the values that are beginning to take root in the African National Congress (ANC) and society in general are inimical to the principles that should underpin the kind of society that Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu fought for.

In their struggle for such a society, women like Mama Tambo were not mere appendages to their husbands. They did not allow male conceptions of what constituted a good post-apartheid society to determine their position in that struggle.

They, in their own right, were revolutionaries who sought to rid our country of both racism and sexism. Mama Tambo was, therefore, not Oliver Tambo's wife in the sense that her political identity was not defined by her husbands surname. She and other women in the ANC stood side by side with, and sometimes led, men during critical moments in the evolution of the struggle against apartheid. But theirs is a breed of woman that did not subscribe to narrow conceptions of feminism.

They were advocates of a feminism that recognised the unique challenge of being African and black women.

Men were both allies and equals, although we must admit that patriarchy continues to be a challenge they face. Today, however, the struggle for women of Mama Tambo's ilk is to leave behind a society that values human solidarity and eschews the kind of materialism that is corroding values such as selflessness and commitment to building a new society based on the humility of understanding that SA needs us to overcome the barriers imposed by our past.

In the present, the challenge facing all South Africans is that of embracing heroes such as Mama Tambo as theirs. In doing so, we will also be able to accept the values and principles they have come to epitomise as ours. We should do more than write glowing tributes and make moving speeches that are removed from the current reality of an ANC that is at war with itself and a nation that finds it easy to retreat to the dubious and unsustainable comfort of laagers of race-based interaction with the difficulties of building a nonracial society.

Furthermore, the death of struggle icons is an opportunity for those who were in the struggle to reflect on the extent to which their conduct has become a betrayal of what heroes such as Robert Sobukwe, Steve Bantu Biko and Chris Hani stood for. When they look down upon us from the heights of that Congress of the People in heaven, they must do so with the pride of knowing that theirs was not a struggle in futility.

Lala kahle Mama Tambo.

--Matshiqi is senior associate political analyst at the Centre for Policy Studies.

Copyright © 2007 Business Day.