In exile during apartheid, the ANC used the January 8th statement as a message to inform, educate, conscientise and mobilise ordinary people, in all communities of southern Africa, behind the strategy of the liberation movement for that given year.
This tradition started being implemented in 1972, just four years after the ANC’s watershed Morogoro conference in 1969 which elevated the momentum of the anti-apartheid struggle pursued by this movement.
The ANC was banned during this period, so the January 8th statement was mostly received by the people on the ground through Radio Freedom and sometimes through smuggled pamphlets and journals as the regime banned liberation literature. Listening to it or reading about it was in essence a life threatening exercise.
The January 8th statement had a safe landing in the eyes and ears of every member of the oppressed – and it was well-written and eloquently delivered at the beginning of each year by none other than the great African revolutionary leader and longest-serving ANC president, Oliver Reginald Tambo.
But more than anything else, the January 8th statement appealed to people and caught their attention precisely because of the type of language that was used to drive the message home.
Since the 1969 Morogoro conference that elected Tambo, and all the subsequent January 8th statements he delivered, the ANC’s message was consistent, clear, crude, political and deeply embedded in the concrete issues facing the oppressed.
On basic issues such as education, labour, the economy, land, the international balance of forces, non-racialism and the gender struggle – the January 8th statements were coherent, exhaustive in detail and grounded in the people’s language that was epitomised by the ANC.
On organisational issues such as the alliance, unity, mass mobilisation, underground work and the armed struggle – the January 8th statements were even more indelicate and ideologically outstanding.
I think part of the reason why Mandela and Mbeki decided to continue with the tradition of the January 8th statement rallies post-1994 was to ensure that the language of the ANC did not get lost through the uniformity of government programmes.
Although the state obviously took much of their time, given the tasks at hand, they still wanted the linguistics of the ANC to remain echoing in people’s ears. Part of this organisation’s heritage was built on the type of dialect it utilises to interpret the domestic and international challenges facing the working class. One can call it the vernacular of the revolution.
In addition, it is through this language that it was able to package and transmit its ideas to the people in order to garner their conscious support. Through the charisma and oratory skills of its leadership, it established a deep connection with ordinary South Africans and with the different interest groups that are aligned with its progressive politics.
Cuba’s Fidel Castro and China’s Xi Jinping also mastered this connection by ensuring that the traditional language and radical politics of their revolutionary movements never got lost.
Listening to the 2023 edition of the January 8th statement on Sunday left me worried about the ANC.
The message was so enveloped in the bourgeois language of government with some shocking features of ‘NGOisation’ here and there.
Very little time was invested on elaborating on why it is politically necessary to have a stronger ANC, an ANC maybe that is more united in order to drive anything meaningful for South Africa and the world.
Those type of interventions were missing in the statement. Instead, more time was spent lamenting technical state challenges such as Eskom, municipalities, the judiciary and the economy.
Of course, a ruling party has to touch on these issues, but there is a much better and a more heightened way to table them, through the pedagogy of the ANC that resonates with a truly left and anti-imperialist movement that seeks to renew its strategy behind resolving these issues more productively.
Maybe this problem also reveals the extent to which Luthuli House has lost crucial staff and skills in the last few decades – largely due to defunding, illegitimacy and electoral decline.
Government speechwriters located in Pretoria are duplicated to rewrite for the ANC on weekends without investing time and being equipped with the necessary political training to produce high quality organisational outputs for the reception of the working-class.
When you add this risk to the other existing challenges of the ANC, such as corruption, factionalism, decaying branches, declining membership and electoral deterioration, then it might be that its political fatality will be accelerated, beginning with the demise of its language, heritage and soul.
* Dr Mzileni is a sociology lecturer at the University of the Free State
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