Member, National Executive Committee, ANC 1985 - present
Member of Parliament, ANC
Minister of Arts and Culture
Former Minister for Environmental Affairs and Tourism
Zweledinga Pallo Jordan was born on May 22 1942 in B Location, Kroonstad, in the Orange Free State.
His father, Dr Archibald Campbell Jordan, was the African novelist, linguist, and academic who began his career as lecturer at Fort Hare University, and later the University of Cape Town then the Universities of California (Los Angeles) and ultimately Wisconsin, in the USA. His mother, Dr Priscilla Phyllis (born, Ntantala) Jordan is a teacher, researcher and lecturer.
The Jordan family lived first in Kroonstad then in Alice until AC Jordan was appointed senior lecturer in African Languages at the University of Cape Town, where he became the first African member of staff in 1946.
Jordan's family was highly politicised. His parents were active members of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). At the age of seven, he began to sell copies of Torch, a newspaper produced by the NEUM. Following in his parents' footsteps, he also joined the NEUM. In 1960 he joined the ANC. After Jordan had finished his schooling in Cape Town, he attended various universities in South Africa, the USA and Britain. He left the country in 1962 to study at the University of Wisconsin in the US. He has acquired a number of degrees - including a post-graduate degree from the London School of Economics. Jordan worked for the ANC on a full-time basis in 1975 in the movement's London offices as a member of the research unit of its department of Information and Publicity. In 1977, he was appointed head of Radio Freedom, based in Luanda, Angola. That same year he also became involved in training programmes for new recruits into Umkhonto weSizwe, employing his academic background in history to compile a syllabus for political training.
In 1979, on the recommendation of Oliver Tambo, he was appointed director of the ANC's first internal mass propaganda campaign, The Year of the Spear, marking the centenary of the Battle of Isandhlwana of 1879. With Jordan at the helm the ANC produced a plethora of imaginative communication tools - including posters, postcards, floppy disks, cassette tapes, bumper stickers, T-shirts, comic books and news sheets - with the aim of reviving in popular memory the traditions of armed resistance to conquest and colonial domination.
He was appointed head of the ANC's Research Unit of the Department of Information and Publicity in 1980. This required him to move to Lusaka to be based at the movement's headquarters. The quality of his research work is reflected in some of his published papers. These include Review of Moses Kotane: African Revolutionary (1974); The Soweto Uprising: an Analysis (1976); The African Petit Bourgeoisie: A Case Study of NAFCOC (1984); The New Face of Counter-Revolution (1985); The South African Liberation Movement and the Making of a New Nation (1986); The Politics of the Current Conjuncture (1987) and The Politics of the National Democratic Movement (1988).
Between 1985 and his return to South Africa in mid-1990, Jordan led a number of delegations of ANC researchers and scholars to international conferences and seminars in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, the USA, Britain, and the then USSR. A paper titled The Southern Africa Policy of the Soviet Union - with Specific Reference to South Africa: Some Notes (1990) marked a refreshing departure for an ANC scholar in its critical appraisal of Soviet policy from a left perspective. In 1990 he entered into a lengthy debate on the character of the Soviet Union with SACP Chairman, Joe Slovo, in an article titled The Crisis of Conscience in the SACP - A Critical Review of Slovo's 'Has Socialism Failed?' demonstrating the diversity of opinion in the tripartite alliance. He later took issue with Slovo over the strategic direction of the negotiations process in 1983.
Jordan has occupied numerous positions within the ANC during the past three decades. When the movement was preparing for its major policy conference in Kabwe in 1985, the first after the 1969 Morogoro conference, Jordan was appointed to serve on the National Preparatory Committee. At the Kabwe Conference Jordan was elected to the National Executive Committee (NEC) and served as administrative secretary of the NEC secretariat from 1985 to 1988. From 1985 to 1989 he served on the NEC's Strategy and Tactics Committee as convenor. He has also served on the NEC's sub-committee on negotiations and the NEC's sub-committee on constitutional guidelines.In 1989 he succeeded Thabo Mbeki as director of information and publicity.
Jordan accompanied Oliver Tambo, Mac Maharaj, Chris Hani, Thabo Mbeki and James Stuart to the meeting between White business leaders and the ANC at the Kangwa Game Reserve, Zambia in 1986. He was also part of the ANC's delegations to the IDASA-sponsored Dakar (1987) and Paris (1989) conferences. He returned to the country in June 1990, after the unbanning of the ANC and other political organisations. He was re-elected to his NEC position at the movement's national conference held in 1991 (the ANC's first consultative conference inside the country in 30 years), and again in 1994. He became a well-known personality on South African television as the ANC's main media spokesperson before and during the 1994 elections. Z. Pallo Jordan was elected to Parliament in position number five on the ANC list in April 1994.
Z. Pallo Jordan was sworn in as a Member of Parliament and Minister for Posts, Telecommunications and Broadcasting on 9 May 1994 in the Government of National Unity after the April 1994 elections. He served on two Cabinet Committees, namely, Economic and Social and Administrative Affairs.
In April 1996 Pallo Jordan was replaced as Minister for Posts, Telecommunications and Broadcasting after a cabinet reshuffle. He was re-appointed to a cabinet post in May 1996, as the Minister for Environmental Affairs and Tourism. A position he held until June 1999.
October 1996