Confronting the gap between Mhlaba’s vision and our reality

Raymond Mhlaba’s name is often invoked together with that of Nelson Mandela. They have a history of shared experiences. Both grew up listening to stories of valiant struggles waged by legendary traditional leaders who fought British colonial encroachment.

In Mhlaba’s case, his grandfather recounted the story of King Jongumsobomvu Maqoma, who fought and ended up on Robben Island, where he met his demise. This narrative would later serve as his lodestar for the anti-apartheid struggle led by his and successive generations. The establishment of institutions such as the Raymond Mhlaba Centre for Governance and Leadership memorialises these generations for their acts of valour, for human beings do not memorialise deserters.

Mhlaba began as a student activist and later become a trade unionist and a member of the ANC. With the launch of the Defiance Campaign in 1952, Mhlaba and his generation defied unjust laws when it was not fashionable to do this.

In 1955, they gave us a landmark development in the struggle for liberation when they formulated the Freedom Charter, saying: “This far and no further.” The charter is a statement of grievances against the prolonged denial of democracy and of the rights of the majority.

Mhlaba’s generation went beyond complaining; they articulated a vision  of a democratic alternative. They set out the principles to create and organise a new society, thus presenting the other side with a spectre of its ultimate defeat. Of course, the other side pushed back. The 1956 treason trial was a manifestation of that pushback. 

The fact that the other side was unable to use its repressive instruments to prove that the Freedom Charter was a treasonous and socialist declaration, as it alleged, was instructive. But it was similarly difficult to argue that the charter was nonsocialist.

This spoke to the pedigree of our leaders at the time. They were visionary and forward-looking people. Their progressive thinking was notably not monotheistic; they were broad-minded enough to put forward the baseline sentiments of a democratic society in which the future was understood as an open destination. Their organisation, the ANC, was subsequently banned, ushering in a new phase of struggle for which they acknowledged  they were improperly equipped.

Oliver Tambo said that this period presented new imponderables. They decided that some of them would leave the country in search of skills denied them at home. Because they wanted to meet the other side on equal terms, they entered the phase of armed struggle. Mhlaba was among the early recruits of Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Mhlaba received military training in China, while the majority of his comrades were trained in the then socialist countries, primarily in Russia. Others,  such as Mandela, were trained in other parts of Africa.

Mhlaba and his fellow Rivonia treason trial accused were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. My generation did not have the privilege to meet them before they went to jail. We came to know them later by their names and reputations. But their ideas served to inspire us to continue the struggle, serving as  our lodestar. This tells you that ideas can be an important instrument for building an organisation and corralling the people into action.

When some of us became involved in the struggle as the ’76 generation, we were piloted and guided by leaders such as Nondwe Mankahla. She herself had been mentored by Govan Mbeki and Mhlaba.

Some of our contemporaries left the country to join the ANC and other organisations. In his book, ANC — A view from Moscow, Vladimir Shubin writes that when Tambo visited Moscow during the 1970s, the Soviets remarked that the crop of people the ANC was then sending to the Soviet Union for training were different to those of the 1960s. According to Shubin, the ’70s group were undisciplined and did not seem to know why they were there.

For Tambo, the problem was simple to understand because the ’70s generation grew up after the banning of the ANC. Unlike their predecessors, they had no experience of party life. This put matters in perspective for me. Those of us who did not leave the country had the privilege of interacting with some leaders who went to prison before we became involved in the struggle. These interactions introduced us to the ANC’s political culture.

So, a Mhlaba who may not have gone very far in formal education had an understanding of complexity second to none because his political formation took place in the context of party membership. The conception of the party during that time was: “This is our party; it is a collective intellectual.” This tradition continued in prison and was eternally concerned with the question: “What kind of society do we want to build when we finally come out of prison?” The commitment was to build a learning society.

Those of our generation who ended up forming the United Democratic Front and Cosatu did so because those who went before had made it possible to have a mass movement on the ground and a political underground — internally and externally — which were intertwined in a symbiotic relationship.

We face many avoidable problems today. With the legacy left to us by Mhlaba’s generation, we ought to have a more functional society. Mhlaba’s generation nominally envisioned our democratic present.

If we were living in the society envisioned in the Freedom Charter, there would not be the prevailing sense of despondency among our people. This does not mean the society of Mhlaba’s aspiration is dead. The society envisioned in the Freedom Charter is an ideal type of democracy. Actual democratic societies are a deviation from the ideal type. 

Activists for progressive change must see the task of democratisation as a permanent work in progress in search of a better future, appreciating that progression to the ideal society will not be a linear path. There will be zigzags along the way. But some of these deviations can be avoided.

We travelled the difficult journey from the ’60s to 1994 because we had visionary leadership that appreciated the need to train cadres to make up for the asymmetry that existed at the time and to give us the strength to face the other side confident of our ability to change the situation. There are two indispensable factors for success: a visionary leadership and a capable technocracy.

From 1960, the year of active African independence, until recently, the continent has had more out-of-Africa policy advisers than during the colonial period. Our institutions of higher learning need to produce quality students on whom our policymakers can rely for advice. This requires imagining the type of curriculum that equips our students to face their counterparts in the rest of the world on our own terms.

Looking through the rear-view mirror, we must ask ourselves: “How did we arrive at this point, where the discrepancy between what we fought for and what we have is so big?” The political class is congested with public representatives who are really ill-serving us.

Mhlaba lived through a period of cultural diffusion, exposed to ideas at a very high level of abstraction, and yet he kept his feet on the ground. He and his generation reined us in; they guided us. It takes a synergistic connection between a capable technocracy and a visionary leadership to create  the society  envisioned by Mhlaba.

* Mufamadi is professor of practice in mediation and diplomacy at the University of Johannesburg, national security adviser to the president, anti-apartheid activist and a founding member of Cosatu and the UDF. This is an edited excerpt of the 2nd Raymond Mhlaba Annual Institutional Public Lecture at the Raymond Mhlaba Centre for Governance and Leadership, NMMU