Chris Hani Twenty Years On
In Costa-Gavros's famous film Z, a dramatisation based on the real life assassination by a right wing junta of the left wing Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis, the martyred Z, just before he is struck down, is shown to be cheating on his wife. It is a sharp reminder that there are no such things as heroes, only heroic acts, and that today's hero may be tomorrow's coward or crook. It is as well to bear this in mind when imagining what might have become of Chris Hani who, after all, had not spent the night at home on his fatal day, 10 April 1993, because he was carrying on an affair with a Transkei Airways hostess. Had he lived, he would be approaching 71 today. The same question could be asked of any martyr.
Every year on the anniversary of Steve Biko's death we get a rash of articles about "What would Biko say today ?". Few such articles point out that Biko had been a permanent student, failing to get any degree; that he was reprimanded by Sobukwe for his hard drinking and womanising (he had children with at least three different women); and that he simply dismissed these strictures with a laugh.
Hani is interesting because at the 1992 ANC conference he topped the poll ahead even of Mbeki. Given the adulation he enjoyed among the youth, his control of the SACP and MK and his powerful regional base in the Eastern Cape, it seems unlikely that Mbeki could have overcome Hani's challenge - which, of course, was why Mbeki's enemies routinely tried to link him to Hani's assassination. So Hani might well have succeeded Mandela as president. This was clearly Joe Slovo's strategy for the SACP and ANC, sharing the same leader, would have effectively melded into one another, with the SACP holding the whip hand.
At which point we enter the world of parallel universes. Clearly, what was not possible was for Hani to turn South Africa into a Communist state - this was merely a crude misunderstanding by Clive Derby-Lewis and Janusz Walus. The most that Hani could have done would have been to tilt South Africa towards a left-wing African nationalism, perhaps, indeed, little different from what we got anyway. What is more intriguing is that early on Hani was asked what he thought of his becoming Minister of Education. He replied sharply that any such ministry would be a bed of nails in which one would be administering a failed and failing enterprise. He felt the ANC should merely take over the SABC, the Presidency, the army, police and foreign affairs. This would amount to the crude "revolutionary seizure of state power" that MK had always called for.
Such a view would soon have collapsed under the overwhelming weight of demand from ANC cadres eager for government jobs both in the executive and the civil service, places for oneself, one's family, one's mistresses, lovers and friends. Looking back, one can see that this was the one true elemental demand and that not even God Almighty, much less Mandela or Hani, could have resisted that.
The big personal question is whether Hani himself would have joined in this Gadarene rush. It's hard to argue that he wouldn't: Mandela is a very rich man, so is Mbeki and so is Zuma. The one constant about our Presidents is that they all become impossibly rich in office.
Heavens, Malema was merely head of the Youth League for a few years and that was enough to make him very rich. To argue that Hani would not have become very rich in office is to suggest he would have been different from almost every other ANC cabinet minister since 1994. That is simply not plausible.
Hani might not have "sold out", ideologically speaking. Africa has known many Marxist politicians who continued to spout Marxism while becoming millionaires - Nkrumah in Ghana, Oginga Odinga in Kenya, Ismael Toure in Guinea, not to mention our own Blade Nzimande. But Hani could not possibly have done what Nzimande does in defending and even trumpeting Zuma's gross grabbing of state funds for his new royal kraal at Nkandla.
Such feudal abuse of office would have stunk in Hani's nostrils and he was not, after all, a Zulu, which is why Nzimande feels he must praise-sing his tribal chief. (Nzimande even spoke in Parliament of Zuma having "a stroke of genius", something no one else had even thought of.) Hani would also have spared us Mbeki's Aids-denialism and his philosopher-king act.
One is forced to the Marxist conclusion that Hani as an individual could have made little real difference. He might have gone down with our ship of state while urging revolutionary purity or while filling his pockets, but he could not have reversed its direction. As Marxist theorists have recognized, some situations may be "historically over-determined". That South Africa's black elites, so long prevented from feeding at the trough, would, once this prohibition was lifted, make a great de-stabilizing rush towards the milk and honey, would appear to have been just such a situation.
This article first appeared in Rapport.
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