Ladies and gentlemen, in this tribute of one of our own, our luminaries Nelson Rholihlahla Mandela allow me to recite at the outset a befitting truism of Michael Lowy, an author of a book titled the “Marxism of Che Guevara” which epitomizes the values and virtues of Nelson Mandela.
Michael Lowy writes:
“Che was not only a heroic fighter, but a revolutionary thinker, with a political and moral project and a system of ideas and values for which he fought for and gave his life for.The philosophy which gave his political and ideological choices their coherence, colour, and taste was a deep revolutionary humanism.For Che, the true communist, the true Revolutionary was one who felt that the great problems of all humanity were his or her personal problems, one who was capable of feeling anguish whenever someone was assassinated, no matter where it was in the world, and of feeling exultation whenever a new banner of liberty was raised somewhere else”.
Like Che, Nelson Rholihlahla Mandela was born in struggle, and was baptized in the revolutionary flames of the African National Congress (ANC) and the entire congress movement in South Africa, which blaze continue to rage to this day in promotion of global peace, non-racialism, non-sexism, human dignity and prosperity for all.
He is the son of the soil counted among the revolutionary thinkers and leaders of the African National Congress and the struggle for the liberation of the African people and the world.He remains a revolutionary African Democrat, an Internationalist and a global icon for freedom, rule of law, peace, justice and respect for fundamental rights.
The month of July, every year in South Africans across the length and breadth of the Republic and the world celebrate the life and times of Nelson Rholihlahla Mandela.The African continent and the peoples of the world join South Africans in the campaign to do good for humanity.This is an opportunity presented by the humankind and human spirit to celebrate the values and principles that this stalwart of our revolution stood for in difficult and challenging epochs of our National Democratic Revolution.
The 18th of July, the birthday of Tata Madiba, was declared the Nelson Mandela International Day by the United Nations (UN) in 2009 in recognition of the sacrifice made by the first South Africa democratically elected President, President Nelson Mandela, for his selfless contribution and dedication to the struggle for peace, democracy, nation building and unity.That is the meaning of Mandela!
Nelson Mandela was groomed and nurtured in the revolutionary forces of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL); which he founded with luminaries like Walter Sisulu, Oliver Reginald Tambo, Anton Lembede, Mxolisi Majombozi and many others.This period was a watershed moment in the history of the African National Congress (ANC), and its revolutionary conscious and soul.
At that given moment, the Congress Youth League, under the leadership of Mandela and others, emerged as an organized revolutionary lightning against organized structures of the white colonialist regime; and became a formidable giant organizing and mobilizing young people, not only in South Africa, but on the rest of the African continent.The Congress Youth League was in the cutting edge of the struggle against colonialism, colonialism of a special kind, hyper exploitation and humiliation.
Even before their capture in Lilliesleaf Farm, and before the events leading to the Rivonia Trial, Madiba had contributed immensely in the life of the ANC and that of the National Democratic Movement as a youth activist who trailed the ANCYL’s twin-task and the radical Programme of Action of 1949, which formed the substratum of the broader Defiance Campaign, and the ultimate launching of the glorious army of the people, Umkonto Wesizwe, up until he was captured in a roadblock in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, put on trial and sent to prison.
Ladies and gentlemen, we must remember that the trial in which the Rivonia trialists were charged for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the so-called state. That landmark speech, as we ruminate and remember the life and times of this great icon must reverberates in our ears: He orated that:
“The ideal of a democratic and free society … is one … for which I am prepared to die”.“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people.I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve”.
These are the ideal that must be a guiding light that illuminates our lives in the quest to better the many impoverished, jobless and indigent. It must be a light that pushes us forward as a people to better heights against intransigent forces and their newly found sophistication which seeks to undermine our constitutionalism, democratic gains and respect for human dignity.
Arguably, one of the biggest test of the Mandela’s political leadership and character was the assassination of Chris Hani on April 10, 1993, hardly few months after the Boipatong massacre where in both events Nelson Mandela had to serene the entire nation and assure us of the non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous future.At this time, Mandela did not spur a moment to remind the apartheid colonial regime of the necessity to possess integrity, and fast-track negotiations and effect change.
This test of a formidable character and decisive leadership was witnessed in his astute political and economic supervision of the entire period between 1990 and 1994 and the resultant first all-inclusive democratic elections.Madiba became the President of South Africa before he was even officially elected and declared President of the Republic of South Africa in 1994.Mandela presided over the most difficult and challenging period in the history of the pre-and-post-apartheid South Africa.
Indeed, the state was politically weak and economically bankrupt.The then South African Police (SAP) and the South African Defence Force (SADF) and other strategic state machinery lacked legitimacy among the ordinary people of South Africa, including the judiciary.The South African economy was in shambolic meltdown and has reproduced misery, unemployment and poverty among many, andBlacks in particular.Violence continued to unravel in the townships.White people were scared of change, and scarred by years of lies and deceit by the apartheid colonial regime. Today, despite many challenges on our horizon, we can confidently proclaim that our liberation was a watershed. I dismiss the mythology that says our freedom was a miracle. These are the voices of the minimalists who seek to undermine the sacrifices and the leadership of the ANC to peace, stability and democracy that we ushered. Our freedom, led by the African National Congress, came at a difficult sacrifice. We remained fervently firm on our strategy, but flexible on our tactics.
In celebrating Madiba’s legacy, let us all drink in his fountain of forgiveness and collectively echo his words when he opened the first democratic parliament of the Republic of South Africa in 1994:
“Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.We must construct that people-centred society of freedom in such a manner that it guarantees the political liberties and the human rights of all our citizens”.
Hence, by the time he finished his term, Nelson Mandela had twisted roughly the State machinery and South Africa’s worldwide reputation.The military forces of the state integrated.The course of merging the public service was in motion.There was a government of national unity incorporating apartheid-created homelands.He ordered free health care for children under the age of five and elders beyond the age of sixty.He fostered free education for needy children from poor families.He eventually lifted the Rugby World Cup in 1995, and the Africa Cup of Nations in 1996; and negotiated for the hosting of the FIFA World Cup by the African continent.He was there when we received the rights to host the FIFA World Cup, which he witnessed in his lifetime.He watched the first FIFA World Cup match on the African soil.
Comrades and friends, it is against this background that today we are sitting together with the peoples of the world to celebrate the Nelson Mandela month. A lot of people have delivered messages wishing Madiba a long lasting life; acknowledging his contribution he has made towards the welfare of society.
From his time as a youth leaguer, Madiba new that the national question in South Africa presented itself as the most dominant social category in our political discourse.Even when he became the first President of the democratic South Africa, Mandela knew that the national question continues to present itself as the most dominant social category in the South African polity.He knew and understood that we could not isolate the struggle against national oppression from other major social categories of class, gender and the geographic location of the masses of our people.
He knew that poverty, ignorance, underdevelopment and underemployment including unemployment are the main social factors and scourge that continue to undermine the work of the developmental state, and even continue to define the devalued living conditions of black people in general and Africans in particular.
However, Nelson Mandela also was fully aware of a tendency that attempted to dislodge the content of the National Democratic Revolution by among other things, dismissing race as less important a social category in contemplating any social progress.
At the same time, he was aware of the ultra-leftist tendencies that were aimed at uplifting pseudo-Marxist predispositions at the expense of the revolutionary recognition of the symbiotic link between national liberation and social emancipation; born out of the acknowledgement of the inter-play between the national oppression and class exploitation; in the context of the national democratic revolution (NDR).
This analogy as espoused by Nelson Mandela and many stalwarts of our revolution is based on the Colonialism of a Special Type (CST) thesis in characterizing the nature and content of our revolution in South Africa.
This thesis of the CST ought to expose interdependence of race and class; and went further to expose the subordination of the structure and logic of the South African colonial apartheid capitalist expansion to the imperialist global capitalist onslaught.This is elaborated in the main content of the National Democratic Revolution; which sought to interpret the peculiarity of the SA colonial relations in which the colonizer and the colonized are sharing the same land and geographic boundaries.
With the African National Congress (ANC) reaching its centenary in 2012; we are called upon to pause and reflect on the road traversed by millions of South Africans in the road to freedom and social emancipation.We are called upon to reflect on the challenges in the struggle for the soul of the ANC, and to ask questions what constitute the DNA of the ANC and its constituent elements.
Indeed, we were not born when the ANC was founded in 1912; however, we are compelled by history to pause and reflect by means of interpretation with a view to build on current understanding of the evolution of the struggle for freedom and liberty in South Africa and Africa.We take this courage from a river of ideas born in the belly of organic intellectuals.We derive our strength, and forward thinking from the ideological and ideational forays of the early leaders and intellectuals that came to lead the struggle of the African people; the struggle for emancipation.
This river of ideas born in tributaries of organic intellectuals that included Prixley ka Seme’s envisioning of a re-awakened Africa, Chief Albert Luthuli on the power of persuasion, Sol Plaatjie’s idea of a free land, the Gumede ideas on Black Nationalism, Langalibalele Dube’s enlightened living, education and non-racism, Julius Nyereres’ uJama, Moses Kotane on the Africanisation of the Socialist Party of South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom and Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki’s African Renaissance.
These organic intellectuals of our lifetime committed themselves to transformational dynamics of the ANC as early as 1913 right through to the 1930’s and early 1940’s.This intellectual radicalism led to the epochal rise of the youth influence that changed the character of the ANC and molded the fabric of the movement.
These intellectuals raised pertinent and piercing constructions that continue confront us today, the landlessness, poverty, concentrated wealth and marginalization. These were posits that found their expressions in the Youth League. That generation in deed achieved Freedom in their lifetime. Our pointed preoccupation to this day is not political freedom, but economic freedom.
It made a political sense for the Youth League to decide in its 23rd National Congress in 2008 and vowed to this country and the world to know that it will:
Continue with the legacy of the founding members of their organization, especially comrade Dr. Rholihlahla Nelson Mandela, and become a militant revolutionary youth movement and a disciplined militant youth organization of the ANC and that of the Republic.
This statement was made with the conviction and contention that the future of the Republic of South Africa, Africa and the world is ‘complex and melancholy’ and the future of the whole mankind is ‘literally in the hands of its youth’, as one of the forces that will have to confront the hardships of the future.
It is therefore a matter of principle and revolutionary duty for the leadership and cadres of the Congress League to ‘hold it dear in their hearts that the future and hopes of the millions of youth is in a s strong organization of the Youth League; and that the latter expect a principled and disciplined leadership and that, to them, this shall amount to the defence of the ANC and its policy ethos.
It is true that a revolution wants leaders not pseudo-intellectuals; revolutions need organic and trust-worthy leaders to lead the revolution.Masses need leaders with no double standards.They need leadership that respect the democratic character of a revolutionary movement based on principles of collective leadership, democratic centralism, unity of purpose and revolutionary discipline.
In this regard, the ANC Youth League has put forward some radical proposals that are worth considering specifically on issues pertaining to economic transformation.These include, but not limited to, nationalization of mines and a radical land reform programme.Both these radical and transformative policy articulation, the ANC has broadly endorsed to take them further for discussion.
It is evident, since the advent of democracy, that some among us seem to harbour an incorrect view that agrarian revolution and land reform is the thing of the past and were no longer pertinent in our economic transformation agenda.It is equally so when some among us push a transformation perspective when it comes to the ownership of banks and mines.
There can never be peace and stability in this country when the majority leaves in rugs, grinding poverty, marginalization with no hope. There can never be peace and prosperity when the 10% white minority continues to monopolize over 80% of the economic resources.
There can never be peace and harmony when many remain landless and leaving in squalor and crammed homesteads.
There can never be reconciliation when the means of production of this country are still dominated by the few which find see no wrong in pillages these resources and greedily exporting them to offshore economies, thus robbing our people real value of those commodities.
There can never be peace and reconciliation when many Blacks remain outside the employment fold, and with those in that fold still suffer the brutality of discrimination, abuse and poverty income. When we as a society and the progressive forces are rolling back from the public space and allow that space to be dominated by right-wing elements that seeks to foster their dose of racial polarization.
It is high time that comrades and revolutionaries to honestly engage the youth league.It is not wise for those who claim to be left or socialists and even claim to be communists to fly-around coughing insults and labeling fellow comrades demagogues without intellectually engaging their thought particularly on pressing issues in society.
We must wake up from the illusion that we are all together in the ANC and the entire democratic movement in a mission to push back the frontiers of poverty, ignorance, underdevelopment and unemployment.To others to prolong poverty to our people; you prolong their stay into positions of power; pretending as if there are the soul and chosen representative of the poor especially the working class.
We must desist and deject some among ourselves who have become the major opponents of genuine social and economic transformation in South Africa.It has proven itself in its outright attack against the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE), nationalization or expropriation, and even acquisition of land by the black majority.This is an old narrow Marxist-Workerist tendency falsely associated with the ANCs genuine social and economic transformation agenda aimed at resolving the inherent contradictions in society.
It is therefore of paramount importance that revolutionaries should soberly engage the resolutions of the 24th National Congress of the ANC Youth League.This engagement should be based on answering fundamental question:
“To what extent does the slogan ‘economic freedom in our lifetime’ links strategically to the slogan for ‘freedom in our lifetime’?”
These questions are of pivotal importance because if the entire mass democratic movement fail in its conviction to see a symbiotic link between the two slogan in this era of the NDR, and rather settle for isolating one at the expense of the other, this will, to my mind, be equal to an intellectual and ideological disservice on the side of the movement as a whole.
These realities of human strife and marginalization do not embody the persona of Nelson Mandela. These strive of poverty and greed do not epitomise the values of Nelson Mandela. These episodes of destitution and deprivation in the valley of plenty do not personify the virtues of Nelson Mandela.
Antonio Gramsci once said from his ‘Verus Quid Factum’:“How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one’s own parents:If it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures.Hasn’t this had some effect on my life as a militant – has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?”
In conclusion, there could be no better tribute or celebration of President Nelson Rholihlahla Mandela’s legacy that respond to a call for the people of the world to ‘do good for humanity’. Madiba may mean different things to different people. But for us Madiba must mean - Intellectual, cognitive, bodily and spiritual Liberty of Humankind; Freedom from anguish and agony; peace for justice and just co-existence;and Unity of Purpose: because I am because you are, and you are because I am.
Thank you!
