The role of revolutionary intellectuals
Comrade Mzala, an outstanding political commissar of the 1976 generation, left a lasting and inspiring legacy that we should draw on to better understand the qualities of revolutionary intellectuals, writes Jeremy Cronin.
One of the most outstanding revolutionary intellectuals of the 1976 generation, Jabulani Nxumalo (popularly known as Comrade Mzala), died 15 years ago in London at the age of 45. He was born in Dundee, Northern Natal in October 1955.(1) His parents were both school teachers, and they inspired in him a life-long love for books. Mzala attended school at Louwsburg, then Bethal College in Butterworth, and he matriculated in KwaDlangezwa in Empangeni.
In 1972, at the age of 15, he was detained without trial for his role in a school boycott. The following year he was arrested again and charged with public violence for his part in student and worker strikes. Mzala attended the University of Natal (Ngoye), where he studied law and he was active in the South African Student Organisation (SASO). In 1976, like thousands of his generation, he fled the country into exile.
He connected up with the ANC and received military training in Angola. He was part of the famous June 16 Detachment of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK).
In the midst of his training and organisational responsibilities, Mzala was always intellectually active. In 1977 he was working on a simplified book on Marxism-Leninism in Zulu. Unfortunately, The text seems to have been lost.
He was also in the habit of writing up his thoughts and pinning them on notice-boards for others to read and respond. His intellectual energies were recognised in MK and already in 1976 he was political commissar for Luanda.
In 1979 he was deployed to Lusaka, where he acted as coordinator of commissariat structures. In 1980 he was sent for advanced ideological and political training in the German Democratic Republic.
In 1983 he was deployed into Swaziland, disguised as a reporter ('Jabulani Dlamini'), working on the Swaziland Observer. Mzala was detained by the Swazi police in 1983. In December of the same year, with a new identity, he returned to Swaziland, but this time to the Shiselweni district in the south of the country. He served as commissar for the Natal rural machinery, a network that was later to become central in the establishment of Operation Vula. While in Shiselweni, and out of his own initiative, Mzala crossed over the border into Natal, and set up an MK unit based in Ingwavuma. In 1984 he was again arrested by the Swazi police and deported to Tanzania.
In Tanzania he worked for Radio Freedom and the Amandla Cultural Group. In 1987 he moved to London where he worked for the international committee of the SACP. He was deployed to Prague as the South African representative on the World Marxist Review, but his health was now beginning to falter, and his stay in Prague only lasted two months.
Throughout the 1980s Mzala was extremely active as a writer. He published regular articles in the journals of our movement - MK's Dawn, the ANC's Sechaba; and the SACP's The African Communist. He sometimes used the pen-name Khumalo (derived from his actual surname, Nxumalo), as well as the name by which he was known by most comrades in the movement, Mzala. (He acquired the name, because he was fond of addressing everyone as "mzala, mzala".) He also wrote several major articles under the name Sisa Majola.
One of his most important and polemical contributions on our armed struggle was entitled "Cooking the Rice Inside the Pot", and it was signed Mzala.
When no-one responded in Dawn, he published a polemical rejoinder to his own article! It was titled: "Preparing the Fire Before Cooking the Rice Inside the Pot", and it was signed Alex Mashinini.
During his time in London he published (as Mzala) a book, "Gatsha Buthelezi, Chief with a Double Agenda" (Zed Books, 1988). During the London period, while working for the SACP's international committee, he also contributed an excellent and regular column to The African Communist ("Africa Notes and Comment"), under the name Jabulani Mkatshwa. He was so prolific, it is quite possible there are other pen-names under which he wrote, but about which we are as yet unaware.
His death in London on 22 February 1991 was a huge loss to the SACP, the ANC, and to the African and internationalist struggle. When he wrote his articles, or when he pinned provocative notes up on the notice-board in camps in Angola, Mzala was not looking for admiration or praise. He was trying to provoke engagement, responses, debate, umrabulo. There is no better way of honouring his memory than by reflecting on the topic: "The role and importance of revolutionary intellectuals".
THE ROLE OF REVOLUTIONARY INTELLECTUALS
There are several key qualities that mark out a revolutionary intellectual.
In seeking to elaborate on these qualities I would like to draw upon the inspiring legacy of comrade Mzala.
In his writings on the national question, Mzala cites Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) writers, Black Consciousness writers, US think-tanks, and European academics. In his "African Notes and Comment" it is clear that he is tracking political events in a wide range of African countries.
Many of us will have had the experience of comrades who quote from the "classics", or use jargon, not to illuminate a point, but to display their "superior" knowledge. We will all be familiar with the dogmatic invoking of an "authority", the unchallengeable word of this or that leader, or of "headquarters" - not to assist a discussion, but to silence debate.
Everything about the way in which Mzala conducted himself challenged these negative tendencies. He sought to translate Marxism-Leninism into Zulu, so that it would be accessible to those who were not necessarily adept in English. His intellectual work was not just articles and books, but also radio broadcasts and provocative statements on notice-boards. Mzala was one of the leaders of the ANC delegation to the International Youth Festival in Cuba in 1978. When he returned, he didn't keep the experience to himself.
He moved around to all MK camps in Angola, to provide a report-back and to discuss and debate what he had learned. As we have seen, when Mzala's article in Dawn didn't get a critical response, he responded polemically (as Alex Mashinini) to his own original intervention. Mzala never imagined that his own inputs were infallible and timeless truths. The struggle against intellectual elitism and dogmatism is particularly important in a society emerging from centuries of colonial oppression.
Certain brands of Marxist elitism, for instance, can easily become very Eurocentric, and can lead to the underrating of the dialectical and revolutionary values and wisdom embedded in all of our cultures, and in our rich, collective struggle traditions. Such neglect risks becoming disdainful of the ways in which revolutionary knowledge is reproduced, not just through books and magazines, but also in the oral culture of our struggle (in songs, in speeches, and stories). Needless to say, the over-rating of certain forms of knowledge reproduction and dissemination tends also to be neglectful of the intellectual contribution of tens of thousands of women comrades.
Mzala's intellectual work was deeply embedded within the organisational traditions and discipline of a national liberation movement and of a communist party. He was always partisan to these organisations. But he did not allow this loyalty to become uncritical. He was not prepared simply to recite dogmas, or to repeat 'the line'. He would not have appreciated what we sometimes hear these days - that "the policies are all fine, we must just implement". However, if Mzala was prepared to be critical, it was never criticism for criticism's sake. He was not oppositionist, or factionalist.
Factionalism is usually dogmatism in another guise, the mechanical alignment with one side and the dogmatic rejection of another.
Getting the balance right between organisational loyalty and critical thinking is not always easy. It might be useful, therefore, at this point to consider an example of Mzala's critical partisanship. In 1988, Francis Meli published an important history of the ANC.(2) Mzala reviewed Meli's book in The African Communist ("To Whom Does South Africa Belong?", 4th quarter, 1988). The same text, but in a more extensive version, is included in a longer paper which Mzala wrote for the Open University.(3) Meli was Mzala's senior within the movement. Meli was on the ANC National Executive Committee and the SACP Central Committee, and was editor of the ANC's official organ, Sechaba. In his appraisal of the book, Mzala is appreciative of a history of the movement written from inside, and by an African comrade. Among other things, he appreciates Meli's defence of the early leadership of the ANC against attacks coming from anti-ANC writers like Mokgethi Mothlabi who dismissively claimed that in its early years the ANC was simply "a Congress of defeated people" involved in "obsequious representations and cap-in-hand deputations" to Britain. Mzala agrees with Meli that this kind of portrayal is extremely a-historical and one-sided.
However, Mzala argues that Meli goes too far in his attempt to defend the honour of the early founders of the ANC:
"[N]ot everyone would agree with Meli either when he suggests that deputations were 'part of traditional African political custom' considering the record of two centuries of uninterrupted military resistance (and not deputations) against the colonisers up to the 1906 Bambatha Rebellion... "Partisanship becomes a problem when it is no longer tempered with objective realism... blank pages in history should not be allowed. Everything should be told... Wishful thinking cannot replace the hard facts of life, otherwise an exercise at history writing is reduced to sheer political propaganda for one's organisation.
"No shame should be associated with the admission of the fact that the tactics employed by the early leadership of the ANC were thoroughly reformist, or even that their version of nationalism was somewhat cautious, timid and non-confrontationalist."(4)
These passages illustrate Mzala's critical partisanship in two ways. He is prepared to engage critically (but constructively) with his senior in the movement, and his loyalty and respect for the ANC does not lead him into believing that his organisation is above all criticism.
Maybe this sixth quality is not an essential quality for an effective revolutionary intellectual, but it helps. Since Mzala is such a wonderful example of a writer who deploys brilliant images and memorable examples, it is difficult to resist including this quality here - mainly as an excuse to quote some more from his writings.
For instance, in a polemic with those who argued that Inkatha was really in "opposition" to apartheid, he writes that Inkatha fits "into the apartheid strategy like a plug into a socket".
In an article arguing for a more effective integration of the ANC in exile with the struggle at home (a topic to which we will return below) he writes that we must "begin a process of de-exiling ourselves... we must fight our way back into our country... Yes, let us always remember that while we engage ourselves in building pyramids in Egypt, the main task is still to cross the Red Sea back into our own land."
Mzala's writings are full of striking images and examples like this. His intellectual alertness, his dialectical approach was never content with re-cycling the same old deadening phrases.
SPEAKING INTO THE CONCRETE SITUATION
In the concluding part of this paper, we will look at three key issues on which Mzala wrote fairly extensively. In doing this, we will seek to illustrate how Mzala was always trying to produce a concrete analysis of the concrete situation.
The role of Buthelezi and Inkatha
In re-reading Mzala's 1988 book, "Gatsha Buthelezi, Chief With a Double Agenda", it is important to remember the context. Mzala did not spend some two years of his life writing a book on this topic simply so he could put another publication down on his CV. Nor did he write about this topic simply because he came from Natal and had a particular axe to grind.
In part, the project (which did not enjoy support from all quarters of the ANC) was an intervention into a debate within the movement itself. There were those who believed that Buthelezi was "essentially one of us", and that he should be handled with "kid gloves". Mzala believed passionately that, whatever strategy was adopted towards Buthelezi, it should be based on the truth, and not on an opportunistic fudging of reality.
But a more important target for the book was an external audience. By the second half of the 1980s it was clear to the major imperialist powers that the end of white minority rule in South Africa was fast approaching. There was, therefore, a desperate hunt for a "credible" black leader in South Africa who could pre-empt an ANC victory. Particularly in German and US ruling circles, Buthelezi was identified as the favoured candidate for this role. As late as 1993 at the multi-party negotiations the vestiges of this strategy were still evident in the National Party's insistence on a troika of revolving presidents for a new South Africa.
It should also be remembered that in other negotiated transitions away from right-wing autocratic regimes that were threatened by popular revolt, the imperialists sometimes had considerable success in inserting a "moderate", thus pipping the progressive forces at the post. An example of this is the Philippines, where the popular movement was denied the fruits of its struggle against the Marcos regime, by the electoral victory of the US-backed Corazon Aquino.
In short, Mzala's thorough, well-researched book, which was published by Zed Press in the United Kingdom and US - to reach a wide audience - was timely and essential. It meticulously uncovered the true nature of Inkatha, with its politics of rural warlordism and patronage, and its deep complicity with the apartheid regime. No wonder Buthelezi banned it outright in KwaZulu -thus confirming the very point Mzala was making: Buthelezi was no democrat.
The National Question
In the last years of his life Mzala also devoted considerable energy to engaging with the "national question" in the South African struggle. Again, the context of this engagement is important to recall. Inside South Africa the mass struggle had thrown up two significant groupings within the broad mass movement - the so-called "workerists" and "populists".(5) The one current ("workerists") argued for the relative insulation of working-class organisations (particularly the trade unions) from popular, community-based formations. This current also tended to be suspicious of the ANC-led movement, arguing that "after independence nationalist movements always sell-out the workers". The rival tendency, argued for much greater integration of worker struggles and community struggles, and it tended to be sympathetic to the ANC.
Each tendency had its own inherent dangers. The "workerists" tended not to appreciate how much the sense of national collective grievance and of national collective power (amandla ngawethu) shared by the black majority constituted a critical revolutionary motive force. But the "populists" ran the danger of failing to appreciate the diverse class interests at play within the black majority, or within particular local communities. Mzala, like other leading theorists of the time (for example, Joe Slovo) was at pains to show the important inter-linkages between the national question and class, within the concrete situation of South Africa. He continuously sought to underline the national dimension of the class struggle, and the importance of class within the national question.
While these general points remain valid in the present, clearly our own concrete situation has shifted along considerably. However, what has become even more relevant in the present, are Mzala's warnings about a nationalism that fails to sufficiently foreground class. In criticising certain brands of pan-Africanism in South Africa, Mzala recalls that one of the early 20th century intellectual founders of the pan-Africanist current, the African-American, Marcus Garvey: "even suggested...that the development of the African bourgeoisie was the end desire of the Pan African movement. He wrote: 'Why should not Africa give to the world its black Rockefeller, Rothschild and Henry Ford? Now is the opportunity. Now is the chance for every Negro to make every effort towards a commercial, industrial standard that will make us comparable with successful businessmen of other races.'" (Mzala, The National Question in the writing of South African history).
When he quoted this passage from Garvey in 1988, Mzala was holding it up with a sense of scorn and dismissal - as if views of this kind were almost unimaginable. But less than twenty years later, from within our own movement, and from seasoned comrades who know better, we are now hearing similar things. For instance, a recent director general in the Department of Labour, and then in International Affairs, and now a businessperson, Sipho Pityana has this to say:
"In our society, there has to be space for as many seriously wealthy black individuals as possible... We must build a culture that celebrates individual financial success... and we must not allow this to be portrayed as violating the principles of the struggle." (Business Report, 12 February 2006) What Pityana (like Garvey) is conveniently forgetting is that the function of capital, the role of a Rockerfeller, Rothschild or Henry Ford (black or white), is not some socially neutral function, simple individual entrepreneurial acumen that deserves celebration. Nor is the role of a Rockerfeller open to every white person, let alone "every Negro".
Capitalist wealth is always the result of the intensified exploitation of millions of working people.
The matches, the pot, and the fire
In every decade since its launch in 1912, the ANC has confronted challenges and sometimes serious external and internal crises. It is easy to lose sight of this, imagining that the history of the ANC and its movement is simply a triumphal march from one victory to the next. This is neither accurate nor empowering for activists dealing with the complexities of the present.
In the 1980s, for instance, the ANC found itself in an exceedingly challenging situation. There were both objective and subjective problems.
The leading organisational structures were in exile. It was an exile that had been long scattered across many countries and continents (from the late 1950s), and almost always distant from home. For most of the three decades of exile our leading structures were located, at best, several countries away, and not just on the other side of a border. Tens of thousands of young (and not so young) MK soldiers, who had left the country in the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, fully expecting to find themselves back home with arms and training within a matter of months, were bottled up in camps in Angola and elsewhere. The frustrations of exile were particularly sharp given the fluidity and dynamism of the rolling wave of semi-insurrectionary struggles back home.
These objective realities gave rise to a number of subjective tendencies.
At the best of times, exile is not an easy reality - most liberation movements in exile have split and fragmented. The ANC remained remarkably united, notwithstanding the particularly complex nature of our exile. But exile creates inevitable tensions between the survival requirement of putting down roots, of establishing routines, bureaucracies, offices, and employment where you find yourself, while still trying to remain focused on the home-front. With an army dislocated from its mass base there are the dangers of militarisation and stagnation. Are you accumulating a conventional army that you will simply take out of the box once liberation has been achieved? Or is the point of a people's army to merge actively with the people's struggle? Dealing with a mass of exiles and their families, supplying food, shelter, clothing and even education, can result in bureaucratisation.
It was in this context that Mzala wrote several extremely important articles. As we have seen, he called for "a de-exiling" of the movement.
He insisted that the rice had to be cooked in the pot, that is, the struggle had to be fought primarily at home. The leading structures of the movement needed to orient themselves for this task. Mzala's articles were part of an important ferment within the movement that led to the historic 1985 Kabwe Conference, which resulted in a major overhaul of the organisation.
It was in this context, that Mzala also reviewed (at some length) Mikhail Gorbachev's book, "Perestroika - New Thinking for Our Country and The World".(6) When we remember Gorbachev now, we tend to think of him as the erstwhile general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who unilaterally dissolved his own party, and who, in the face of a serious setback for socialism opportunistically abandoned class analysis in the name of "universal" human values. However, as Mzala's review article reminds us, in the late 1980s Gorbachev's Perestroika book was received enthusiastically, almost with a sense of relief, by many militant left intellectuals in our movement. Mzala, like many others, had personally benefited and appreciated the selfless solidarity of the Soviet bloc countries. But he had also experienced, at first hand, the many signs of stagnation, bureaucratisation and administrative commandism about which Gorbachev was now so open. This is certainly part of the reason for Mzala's enthusiasm for Gorbachev's move to glasnost ("openness").
But Gorbachev's critical appraisal of the Soviet Union also had a strong resonance for Mzala and others as they thought about the challenges confronting our own movement in the late 1980s. In his review article, Mzala quotes at length from Gorbachev: "Government and Party leadership gradually became alienated from the ordinary working people; they formed an elite that ignored the opinions and needs of ordinary people. From the side of the leadership there came the propaganda of success, notions of everything going according to plan, while on the side of the working people there was passivity and disbelief in the slogans being proclaimed by the leadership...
the leadership organised pompous campaigns and the celebration of numerous anniversaries. Political life became a move from one anniversary celebration to another."
It would be entirely wrong to imagine that anything like this level of stagnation in the CPSU was replicated in the ANC of the late 1980s (or is being replicated in the ANC-led movement now). But, Mzala clearly saw warning signs in the 1980s, and it would not be wrong to see them now again in the present. The Secretary General's Organisational Report to the ANC's July 2005 National General Council is refreshingly frank in its critique of the negative tendencies in our movement.
It is also possible to recognise in some of the immediate events of the present - such as the Transnet strike, the Khutsong demarcation dispute, and the ANC local government list process - syndromes of a dislocation of our forces, of an absence of the ANC as a political movement at the heart of events - a new variation of Mzala's pot, stove and rice not being in the same place.
In the case of the Transnet strike we have comrades in the Department of Public Enterprises and in Transnet (the pot?), we have comrades in SATAWU (the stove?) leading the strike action (along with three other trade unions), and we have millions of Metrorail commuters, the great majority of them ANC supporters (the rice?). The comrade state-managers and the comrade trade-unionists are deadlocked and there is a serious break-down in communication. Millions of comrade commuters are spectators in a process that leaves them stranded at railway stations. What is our unified political vision of transport as the ANC-led movement? How do we provide political leadership to state/parastatal managers, to trade unionists and to communities? How do we unlock and unify the knowledge, expectations and aspirations of progressive public sector managers, trade unionists and communities into a common transformational programme of action for transport? We cannot do this if we conflate ANC policy with the managerial perspectives of those in the commanding heights of the state and parastatals. Above all, there is no way that we can develop a common transformational programme for transport if the ANC and its alliance partners are not actively involved in mobilising and engaging communities around the challenges of transport.
Too often we tend to think of political education as a relatively abstract lecture on the Freedom Charter, or the National Democratic Revolution. No doubt, this is an important component of political education. But equally important, perhaps the most effective way in which to develop cadres, is to weave Charterist and NDR values into the practical task of, for instance, list nominations. No doubt, coming back to a branch to explain why their favourite for ward councillor is no longer in top spot on the list can be a time-consuming and contentious business. But this goes to the heart of building political awareness and democracy.
Mzala the commissar
We have been looking at the role and character of revolutionary
intellectuals, and we have used the inspiring example of Mzala. He was,
above all, a commissar. It would be a mistake to think of a commissar only
in a military, or quasi-military, context. The commissar's role is above
all
political. It is about introducing political discussion, democratic
debate,
umrabulo, learning from each other in the midst of every situation -
whether
in an isolated camp in Angola, or a prison cell in apartheid South Africa,
or a base-camp in a cave in Ingwavuma.
Now, more than ever, our movement requires tens of thousands of Mzalas, commissars working away in state departments, parastatals, trade unions, branches and communities.
Jeremy Cronin is an ANC National Executive Committee member and SACP Deputy General Secretary. This is an edited version of a commemorative lecture on the 15th anniversary of the death of Jabulani Nxumalo (Cde Mzala) in Galeshewe, Kimberley, February 2006.
Notes
1. The biographical information is derived from Eddy Maloka's moving tribute, "Mzala: a revolutionary without kid gloves", The African
Communist, 1st quarter, 1994, p.61-66
2. A History of the ANC: South Africa Belongs To Us (Zimbabwe Publishing House, Harare; James Currey, London; & Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, Indiana)
3. The National Question in the writing of South African history. A critical survey of some major tendencies, Development Policy and Practice, Working Paper 22, The Open University, Milton Keynes.
4. The National Question in the writing of South African history, p.40
5. These were terms that were not generally used by the tendencies to describe themselves, rather they were terms that were applied polemically against each other. The so-called "populists" called their rivals "workerists". And the so-called "workerists" called their rivals "populists", in return.
6. See "Perestroika and Class Struggle. A comprehensive review of Mikhail Gorbachev's book 'Perestroika - New Thinking for Our Country and the World', by "Sisa Majola", The African Communist, second quarter, 1988, p.91ff
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