Long before his assassination by the racist Polish immigrant, Janusz Walus, Martin Thembisile “Chris” Hani had survived many attempts on his life. The majority of these were planned and executed by agents of the apartheid state.
But what many of our young people today may not know is that in 1969 there was a moment where the man SA would come to know and love as “Chris Hani” could have been killed by the hands of his very comrades.
Hani and dozens of other members of the ANC’s then military wing, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), had returned from a failed military mission in the then-Rhodesia disillusioned by the lack of material and political support from the liberation movement’s leadership.
The mission, which came to be known as the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns, involved working with Zipra – the liberation army fighting to free Zimbabwe – in infiltrating MK combatants into the then Rhodesia with the aim of opening a path for them to return to SA, where they would wage the armed struggle.
To cut a long story short, the mission failed when the guerillas were detected and attacked by Rhodesian and South African forces – causing some of them to die in combat and others to be arrested while the rest had to flee to Botswana.
On his return to the ANC camps, Hani and several of his comrades-in-arms wrote a scathing memorandum – which was later to be known as the “Hani Memorandum” – basically charging the ANC leadership in exile with being too comfortable abroad and abandoning the liberation Struggle.
“We are disturbed by the careerism of the ANC leadership abroad, who have, in every sense, become professional politicians rather than revolutionaries. We have been forced to draw the conclusion that the payment of salaries to people working in offices is very detrimental to the revolutionary outlook of those who receive such monies… It is high time that all members of the ANC, be they MK or not, should receive equal treatment and be judged only on the basis of their dedication and sacrifice to the cause we serve,” was but one of the statements made in the memorandum.
The party establishment was not impressed, and several meetings were held with the group.
The attitude of the leadership, especially that of the then secretary-general, Duma Nokwe, was that Hani and his comrades-in-arms were challenging their authority and legitimacy.
Nokwe was particularly incensed by that the authors of the memorandum identified as a security threat that his wife worked for an Israeli firm suspected of having links with Israeli intelligence.
Although Hani and his comrades had held several meetings with members of the ANC national executive committee about their grievances, they were surprised to learn that MK’s military headquarters had been roped in.
They were then charged by the military command and, were it not for a big fight put up by Mzwai Piliso, one of the ANC seniors at the time, they would have been executed. The crime: They had “by-passed military headquarters and violated their MK oath of secrecy” by writing to the political leadership.
Although their lives were spared, they had their ANC membership revoked and were only reinstated by the party’s national conference in Morogoro, Tanzania, in April of that year. Various ANC historians have spoken about the fact that “dungeons” had, at one stage, been dug for Hani and his comrades at an ANC farm in Zambia.
Yet, the “Hani Memorandum” is now often cited as having been the moment that forced the ANC to confront its weaknesses in exile – hence helping the organisation to recover from its moribund state and take its place as SA’s leading liberation movement.
The “Hani Memorandum” story is but one of the many examples where an individual, or a group of individuals, courageously broke rank and started speaking out about what was going wrong with their organisation. In this case and many others, the reaction of the establishment is to charge such whistleblowers for not respecting protocol.
In post-apartheid SA, no case has illustrated the power of breaking rank and speaking out more than the case of one general, Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, who, on this day last year, shook our nation to its very foundation by making serious claims against the now-suspended police minister, Senzo Mchunu, and some of the very senior officers in the SA Police Service.
A year later, SA is still reaping the benefits of Mkhwanazi’s courage as more corruption skeletons keep tumbling out of police, municipality and political cupboards.
SA criticises President Cyril Ramaphosa for many things – and rightly so, but at least in Mkhwanazi’s case the president didn’t resort to punishing the whistleblower for not following protocol – as was the case in the case of Chris Hani and his comrades.
Instead, he set up the Madlanga commission, which has done a sterling job following up on Mkhwanazi’s claims and even uncovering more evidence of the rot in the police, municipalities and the general body politic.
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