Inspiration for an era of activism

In the welter of passion and memory surrounding the decline of Nelson Mandela, a more modest commemoration slipped by a week ago that said much about the role he played as an inspiration in his long years of imprisonment, when the daily grind of struggle against apartheid fell to others who fought in his name.

It was a reminder, too, that the battle to end white rule was fought on many levels, ranging from the activism of anti-apartheid exiles here in London to a brutal shadow war in South Africa itself that offered no quarter to those seeking a new order.
The events of June 27, 1985, offered a particular insight.

On that date, a hit team of secret police officers - white and black - murdered four anti-apartheid activists from Cradock, a pinprick settlement in the remote hinterland of the Eastern Cape, ambushing their car late night before bludgeoning, shooting, stabbing and burning them to death.

In the shorthand of martyrdom, they became known as the Cradock Four, emblems of a time when the white authorities sought to dismantle such clusters of resistance through a tactic they euphemistically called “permanent removal” from society. But the killing of Matthew Goniwe, a prominent community leader and headmaster, and Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mhlauli had its own resonance.

On the same day their funerals drew a staggering 35,000 mourners and activists to the dusty soccer stadium and graveyard in Cradock - marching under emblems from the red flag of the outlawed South African Communist Party to the crosses of Christian churches - the government of P W Botha declared the first of two states of emergency.

Broadening revolt

By resorting to such powers,  Botha undermined his own legitimacy in the face of a broadening revolt that forced the authorities to negotiate with their most bitter adversaries. As  Mandela himself remarked when he visited the graves of the Cradock Four a decade later, their deaths “marked a turning point in the history of our struggle. No longer could the regime govern in the old way. They were the true heroes of the struggle.”

Once  Mandela was released in 1990, of course, his moral stature and generosity toward his erstwhile captors inspired the spirit of reconciliation that wove a common mantle for majority and minority in the much-vaunted Rainbow Nation. During his incarceration, though, it fell to others, like  Goniwe and his comrades, to bear aloft the twin torches of confrontation and resistance, feting their distant leaders in prison or in exile, and chanting the slogans and anthems that evoked such figures as  Mandela and Oliver Tambo, then the exiled head of the A.N.C.

In the current orthodoxy, said Dennis Goldberg, a white anti-apartheid activist who stood trial alongside  Mandela in 1963, there is a view that  Mandela “brought us freedom with his own bare hands, like a saviour, a messiah. But that is just wrong. His greatness is his ability to mobilise the people of South Africa for freedom.”

The recasting of South Africa’s legend has repercussions to this day.
Even now, in the figure of President Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s political elite is drawn largely from the exiles who fought from bases in southern Africa’s “frontline” states both to maintain a low-key insurgency and to pursue an international diplomatic effort to challenge the white authorities.

But figures like  Goniwe paid a high price for their commitment inside the country to resistance that blurred the lines between civic defiance and support for the violent armed struggle once advocated by  Mandela - even as the white authorities considered responses that ranged from the co-option of their foes, to surveillance and control, to brutal repression.

As I wrote in a valedictory article after my expulsion by the white authorities from South Africa in early 1987, some 2,300 protesters died and 22,000 were detained without trial in the mid-1980s in the township conflicts that set the stage for  Mandela’s release.

The battle went far beyond legality. When the state of emergency was declared at midnight on July 20, 1985, it sought to spread a judicial veneer over the authorities’ actions, offering indemnity to police officers for their actions in quelling unrest. The fruits fell finally to those like  Zuma, a former ANC intelligence chief operating from exile in countries including Mozambique and Zambia. And, in the more than two decades since  Mandela’s release, the promise of the struggle has given way inexorably to the spread of corruption and a thinly veiled lurch toward autocracy.

Some critics even detect a broader campaign by the ANC to lay exclusive claim to the defeat of apartheid. “Everyone but Mandela and the African National Congress has been airbrushed out of history,” the author Martin Plaut said. “As the old saying goes, to the victor, the spoils.”