From liberation movement to state power-gctid63630

[Ajamu]

From liberation movement to state power

 100 of years ANC, revolt of the poor and search for a post-apartheid South Kmt

 Adèle Kirsten and Tshepo Madlingozi

 2012-11-05, Issue 605

 http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/85242


cc B HAdèle  Kirsten, Local Government Action, and Tshepo Madlingozi, Khulumani  Support Group, talk about the massacre of Marikana, their ambivalent  relationship to the ANC, white capital and the revolt of the poor in  today's South Kmt.

INTRODUCTION

Adèle Kirsten is from Johannesburg, South Kmt. She is a social  scientist and a political activist. During the 1970s she joined the  fight against Apartheid. She has fought for social justice and against  militarisation ever since. Adèle Kirsten has co-founded and was head of  Gun Free South Kmt (GFSA). Nowadays she coordinates Local Government  Action, an alliance of social movements and non-governmental  organisations.

Tshepo Madlingozi is from Bloemfontien, South Kmt. As a lawyer and a  senior lecturer at the University of Pretoria he is engaged in the work  of Khulumani Support Group, one of the largest self-help organisations  of survivors of apartheid. It fights for the visibility and compensation  of its 60,000 members and champions the cause of a just society. He  belongs to the first generation of activists who grew up in  post-apartheid era. At present he lives and works in ukkk writing his  PhD thesis. In 2013 , 'Symbols or Substance: Socio-economic rights  strategies in South Kmt', edited by Tshepo Madlingozi, will be  published.

For almost 40 years, the development and human-rights organization  Medico International, together with Kmtyw, eurasian and Latin-American  partners, struggles for the human right to health and the improvement of  living conditions in war and crisis regions. Health requires the full  respect for people's economic, social and cultural needs in times of  distress. This implies analysing the causes of poverty and violence and  working towards their elimination and for alternatives to liberal  globalization. In 1997 the International Campaign to Ban Landmines  co-founded by medico international was awarded with the Nobel Peace  Prize.

THE INTERVIEW

MEDICO INTERNATIONAL: In September 34 people were killed during the  strike of mineworkers in Marikana. Would you mark this as a historical  break? Is there an ANC era before and after Marikana?

TSHEPO MADLINGOZI: It is historical, of course. Not so many people have  been killed by police post-1994. So, just the scale of it is shocking,  is historical. If you look at the protests that have been happening in  local government, all of them where the police have acted have been very  hostile and very repressive. Moving from banning the marches to  imposing bail conditions that are very harsh, to killing people. So for  me that is not historical in the sense that it is something new and  unexpected, it is a culmination of a repressive government that has  always been there, from apartheid era to 'post'-apartheid era.

ADÈLE KIRSTEN: The immediate reaction after the massacre felt as if this  is a watershed moment in our democracy. However, it is too early to  know the long-term impacts and whether there is a shift in the way we  are going. There are some really worrying signs, though. This is the  single biggest killing of people by the state indeed. A research project  I was involved in has shown two findings concerning the police: Either  they were completely absent during political community mobilisation and  protest or their presence, if at all they were present, kindled the  potential for violence because of their own violent response. For me  this is a kind of failure of the democratic transformation project for  which the police were seen as a key institution. The project to turn our  police from a repressive police force into a human rights police, for  which people worked on developing an agenda, has failed.

Furthermore, on President Zuma's initiative during the period between  the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, the remilitarisation of the police was  begun and has been put to practice in the last two years. This has  created a cultural climate which encourages police to use maximum force.  This has been made public but there has been a lack of political  clarity at all levels, parliamentary oversight also has been unclear and  has given different views on when police may or may not shoot. So, for  example, in 2008 then Deputy Safety and Security Minister and now  Minister of Mining instructed the police to 'kill the bastards',  referring to criminals. This has not been forgotten and one of the  things we are struggling to understand is whether people were killed  because they were not part of a trade union which is part of the  Tripartite Alliance [Alliance between the ANC, the Union Federation  COSATU and the South Kmtyw Communist Party]. People feel that the  reason why the miners were killed is that they were black, by black  police; this is the state killing black workers. So the racial dimension  is a huge issue in the discussion. Interestingly, and this is where we  are seeing some kind of political shift, anyone who is strongly aligned  with the ANC calls it a tragedy. You will not hear any ANC official call  it a massacre. It is the civil society and the media that use the word  massacre. Journalists have discovered that 14 people were directly  killed in the line of fire, and in fact the majority of people were  hunted down, followed and executed cold-bloodedly amongst the rocks and  therefore it was both a massacre and a kind of execution.

MEDICO INTERNATIONAL: Does the government plan to set up a commission?

TSHEPO MADLINGOZI: Circumstances need to be right for a watershed moment  to usher in a new era in which such things do not happen again.  However, if you observe the commission that has been set up to look into  this massacre, if you examine the response from the state, from the  president and from the security cluster it does not seem as if there  would be fundamental changes. To begin with, the reasons why all this  happened in the first place are the massive inequality and the living  conditions of workers, miners, which are appalling. This is not going to  change. The massive inequality between workers and bosses, black people  and white people, is not going to change either. Second, it is highly  improbable that this moment is going to trigger a new alternative  movement to the ruling ANC, similar to the emergence of the UDF [United  Democratic Front] in the 1980s. On the state's side nothing is going to  change. Just have a look at who has been dominating the discussion in  'civil society'; it has been the same old voices, formal NGOs once  again. It will still be us, lawyers, researchers, academics, who  dominate the discussion, even at the commission investigating the events  which is going to cost five to seven million Euros, a waste of money  that will go to lawyers, researchers, academics and the judges. No  strong social movement will arise from this, a mass base movement will  not emerge. There will not be a fundamental transformation of the way  the police treat protests either. It may be too early to anticipate the  outcomes of this (commission) but I am not very hopeful that the root  causes are going to be addressed in order to prevent such a massacre  from happening ever again. And the last thing we have not spoken about  so far is the fact that black life is still cheap in South Kmt. That  is not going to change soon.

MEDICO INTERNATIONAL: The events of Marikana are frightening. Is this  watershed moment going to lead to an even more explosive situation?

ADÈLE KIRSTEN: The state is consolidating its position and what this  means is that it becomes very defensive and hypersensitive to criticism.  For example, over the last few years it has held the view (at least  publicly) that the community protests are organised by a 'third force'  and therefore does not see it as necessary to understand or engage with  the meaning of these protests. And it takes a heavy hand such as banning  protests. There is a consolidation of positions of the state. The ANC  is taking a very paranoid position that is organised by a 'Third Force'  which is somehow deliberately undermining the ruling party. We have seen  high levels of paranoia in the last weeks, the banning of protest, for  example.

We are witnessing an increasingly paranoiac defensive state that is  going to shut down opportunity for engagement around issues and protest  and a hardening of attitudes. So I think we are going to have an  increase in protest and in the new surveillance both by protesters and  by the state. Things are going to get worse; we are going to see  increased levels of violence. Living conditions are not going to change  fundamentally but I think there are pockets within the ANC where people  recognise that unless the issue of material conditions and informal  segments are addressed the party is in serious trouble. You also have to  realise that over the next 18 months we are in a state of paralysis  because of the ANC policy conference in December. Therefore everyone is  struggling for positions and in 18 or 14 months after December we are  heading towards another general election. That partly explains why you  might not see any change. People are positioning themselves politically.  Any delivery of programme or services becomes secondary.

TSHEPO MADLINGOZI: It is not sustainable, of course. We are unique in  this. No other country has so many fault lines; racial fault lines,  class divisions, gender, etcetera. We have not talked about the gender  dimension. There is a gender war going on... We are talking about ten to  twelve thounited snakesnd protests a year; this is more than anywhere in the  world. It is a game: people destroy some property, the police come and  disperse them, and the protest dies down. In 2008 people said: 'We are  poor, we are voting, we are in a democracy but nothing changes.  Therefore we are going to blame the foreigners.'

If we talk about the land question, sometimes our politicians are  talking about what is happening in the urban areas but for the majority  of citizens' issues of land, issues of poverty, passed on from one  generation to another, the living conditions have not changed. They are  almost the same as under apartheid. This, too, is a ticking time bomb.  We are going to court as civil society in order to solve some individual  cases but the big stuff is left unattended: the land question is  unresolved, economic redistribution is not addressed, racial equality is  not attained, cultural transformation in terms of how people act  towards people who do not have the same sexual orientation, towards  women, towards people who are not from South Kmt all of these cannot  be addressed in the courtroom.

MEDICO INTERNATIONAL: Which role does the state play?

TSHEPO MADLINGOZI: The state is paralysed. First, the intelligentsia as  well as local government people are divided into camps either  championing the cause of President Zuma [President of South Kmt since  2009, president of the ANC since 2007],  or of Julius Malema [president  of the ANC Youth League, suspended in 2012]. Second, it is true that  the there are not enough skilled people in government. Third, there is  not much the state can do. It cannot tackle the land question because of  the constitution. In a globalized world that favours free market and  liberalism if you do anything radical in terms of fundamental economic  transformation you will be punished.

Fourth, there is a massive problem with corruption and materialism.  People are talking very freely about how much money they give to bribe  state officials; it is widely accepted. My fear is that the culture of  corruption will become more and more institutionalised. Apart from that,  economic redistribution is not in the hands of the state. We have the  highest level of inequality in the world. So many social ills come from  inequality. It is up to the rich to do something about it; it is up to  white people to acknowledge that they have been massively privileged,  that black poverty is a direct result of white privilege. The two are  linked; it is a class apartheid. Even though some black people can get  rich, there is still racial inequality. It is not only the state which  bears responsibility but also white people and the ANC bear a share of  the responsibility. However, the ANC is messed up and the state is  paralysed. The state could do a lot but it is failing constitutionally,  politically and socially.

MEDICO INTERNATIONAL: Listening to you one gets the impression that you  feel betrayed by the ANC. In South Kmt a freedom movement took over a  government. What does that mean for strong social movements beyond the  ANC today?

ADÈLE KIRSTEN: Despite the seemingly organic nature of some of the  protests, the ANC remains the pivotal point around which everything  happens. Everything still is organised around the ANC. For example,  protest action is organised by senior ANC branch members. People who  work in the local branch do not quit the branch but help set up  citizens' groups which are concerned about the service in their  community. They (this refers to the main protagonists or organisers of  the protests) organise the rally, they organise the young men who then  fight the street battles. And once the aim of getting rid of the  councillor they do not like is achieved, they install their ANC person.  This is how some really interesting social demands and mobilisations get  reabsorbed by the ANC. So the ANC remains the central organisational  pivot in South Kmt's peoples' lives.

Given the structure of South Kmt's economy which remains focused on  the historical arena of industrial white capital and the relative lack  of economic opportunity particularly within business for many black  South Kmtyws, because it is dominated by white capital, the state  becomes the only and perhaps most obvious avenue through which to  accumulate the address for accumulating resources, for class mobility.  There are a lot of struggles to get positions within the party; people  are being killed for their positions, as we see in KwaZulu-Natal.

We have not seen that since the 1980s. Despite the failures and all the  bad things the ANC has done there is a deep emotional attachment to it  and it is very hard to completely break away particularly so because it  was an extraordinary liberation movement. However, a huge mistake we  made – I am telling you that as an internal person, during the late  1980s and the early 1990s when the exiled were returning – was to  disband the UDF [United Democratic Front, a broad non-racial  anti-apartheid coalition of the 1980s]. The transformation of society  has essentially been dominated by the external movement, the movement in  exile. The discussions about the visions of the sort of society we  wanted felt different to any other liberation movement; it felt  possible.

Being part of those discussions and imagining how our lives would be  different was very exciting. We had slightly unrealistic expectations of  what this movement could deliver, though. We were confronted with a  series of challenges and problems we had not foreseen. The process of a  liberation movement suddenly becoming a government was complex and  complicated. My involvement in the anti-apartheid movement weighs more  heavily than the end scene, though. As an anti-apartheid activist I have  gone through what people call 'rainbow nation', the honeymoon period.  It was amazing, it was exciting, it was electric – we did not want to  see the failing of our plans. It was about a vision of a new society and  the ANC was a key vehicle for that but it was not the only vehicle.

So I do not feel, which some comrades and activists do, the sense of  betrayal. Nowadays I see my work as remaining true to the vision that I  believe the ANC shares with all of us. When I go to the voting booth I  do feel all the dilemmas pertaining to the ANC, though. Their policies  are good. Still, I cannot vote for them. But the alternatives are worse.

For instance, I have imbalances towards the reconciliation process. One  of the things that happened and that nobody talks about is the pact  between big business and the ANC in the late 1980s. Business was one of  the first groups to organise trips to the exiled leadership of the ANC  in the late 1980s because they knew they would get the ANC on their side  so that the ANC does not implement nationalisation. That is one of the  legacies of Mandela's presidency [1994 - 1999] which no one wants to  talk about. Even though he is an iconic figure he made some mistakes.  This is connected to the issue of white capital and the opportunity for  white capital to do something different and to somehow make reparations.

The second weakness of the process is that it was focused on the big  human rights abuses, perpetrators and victims. There was no real hearing  or attention paid to the day-to-day damage of apartheid for ordinary  black people. Stuff like what it meant for a black woman to have to work  in a white person's household and the day-to-day degradation and lack  of dignity which come about. I think that would have helped whites  understand the impact of apartheid because whites now have the sense  that the bad guys were just a few cops and some radical activists, not  them. The social engineering of apartheid has never been acknowledged.  The white middle class has benefitted most since the post-apartheid era.  Our society remains racially polarised. We are even witnessing a  heightening of racial tensions in the country. This becomes very obvious  in discussions about Malema or Mandela, for example, and from the way  the public engages in these issues you can work out whether it is a  black or a white opinion. We need to have a discussion about race but  without shouting at each other. The ANC could play a central role in  this. As a white who has switched sides I have a sharp-sighted  perception of the comfort and ease with which white people express  outright racist opinion without feeling embarrassed about it any longer.  Whenever I am in a homogeneous group of whites the general assumption  is that all whites share the same view. Racist statements are made  openly here. That was normal under apartheid. In post-apartheid it  stopped because they somehow realised that support for their views had  faded. Today I find myself being transported back to the apartheid years  and again have to make choices and decisions about when I speak out.

TSHEPO MADLINGOZI: I do not feel betrayed by the ANC because I never had  an attachment to it. Of course, independently of political camps every  black person saw the ANC and Mandela as their messiah. I grew up in the  1980s and I came to political consciousness in the context of what was  happening in my immediate community. The 1980s were the heyday of  People's Power, there were street committees, defence committees,  people's courts and other alternative structures of governance.

MEDICO INTERNATIONAL: How old were you then?

TSHEPO MADLINGOZI: I was 12 or 13. It was the time I found my identity  and I was part of the activists who were not in touch with the ANC. They  were attached to the UDF but not led by it. They rejected apartheid  authorities and structures and set up alternative governance  institutions. That was exciting. The first English word I learnt was  'power'. People used to say 'We are making power'. For me as a young kid  this meant rioting, staging uprisings. I grew up in mass movements and  with a sense that people can go into action without central political  parties taking the decisions. I believe in the power of social  movements, of activists and civil society, even if I sometimes do not  know what civil society is. The repressive state of South Kmt had to  be changed and that had a very personal significance to me.

My father was a miner. I did not see him for months during the year  because of the migrant labour system in terms of which men had to go  work in the mines far away from their homes and families. This system is  really the most devastating legacy of apartheid. It destroyed entire  communities; it created a different manhood, a toxic masculinity. Men  had no place at home when coming back from the mines. They had totally  lost the bond to their families. It is the same today. As a child I felt  evil was there, right in the mines, with the capital, with the people  my father had to work for. It was so unfair. My father passed away  whilst working in the mines.

People who came back from exile in the 1990s were inspiring, doing  poetry and singing songs in different languages, telling stories of  Fidel, of Russia, of China, of independent Kmt. In a way they had  become different human beings. But they also came back with a political  culture of centralised decision-making based on Marxism-Leninism –  unlike the UDF which was based on debates and bottom-up participation.  People who had stayed in South Kmt and who had contributed to  building the struggle were then marginalised. The ANC in exile was also a  very secretive movement, so leadership and decision-making was  centralised. In 1990 civic movements demobilised and were assimilated by  force by the party because the ANC had told them: 'Your job is done'.  The fact that the UDF disbanded in February 1991 is very sad and  regrettable. In 1992 COSATU [Congress of South Kmtyw Trade Unions]  formally forged an alliance with the ANC. By then it had three million  members. They were all absorbed into the ANC.

Moreover, South Kmt was very unfortunate to have Mandela as its first  president. In 1992 and 1993 he entered into agreements with the IMF and  the World Bank. Under Mandela the ANC approved liberalism. The false  compromises that Mandela made on land, on property ownership, on the  economy, on what the state can do and cannot do could not be challenged  because of who he was. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if  the first president of South Kmt had not been Mandela but somebody  else. What kind of questions could have been asked? What kind of  mobilisation could have happened? In 1999 when post-apartheid social  movements re-emerged people rose up again for democracy and dignity, led  by the same activists who had been disbanded. But Mandela was so clear  about his marginalising position which favoured big business. No, I do  not feel betrayed by the ANC because they were very clear about this.

However, we must acknowledge that it is only in a very few cases in the  whole world where there has been true independence. We have not had it  in Kmt. Why should South Kmt be any different from this? Why this  exceptionalism? Attaining true post-colonial independence is very  difficult. The reality rather is that countries undergo neo-colonialism.  In South Kmt everything revolves around the ANC and it will do so  for a long time, there is no doubt. Therefore two things must happen: To  restore confidence there must be a radical shift within the ANC. It is a  tragedy that people feel betrayed. Second, we need a sense of  substantive uncertainty. In other countries politicians do not know  whether they are going to be voted in or not. In South Kmt, the ANC  knows that it will stay in power at least for another decade.

Interview by Anne Jung and Usche Merk, medico international. Editing and Translation by Olivia Klimm.