OPINION: Living in the lie in SA

When Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma visited the Moyikwa family in Grahamstown last week before the funeral of Sindile Solomon Moyikwa to express sympathy at his passing at age 59, it expressed the problem of a society “living in the lie”.

The Cape Times reported that Dlamini-Zuma “was accompanied by, among others, ANC provincial executive committee member Andile Lungisa, a staunch President Jacob Zuma supporter.

At the Moyikwa homestead, Dlamini-Zuma attended a short prayer with family members and ANC veterans. She told them: “Comrade Moyikwa was a freedom fighter, he fought for this country and we are grateful for his contribution to the South Africa we have today.”

That was appropriate, yet what was not said by Dlamini-Zuma was just as important.

Whether she knew anything or not about Sindile Moyikwa, her tribute revealed the character of a society “living within the lie”, as the Czech political prisoner and subsequent first president of the post-1989 Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, explained in his book, The Power of the Powerless (1978).

In a “dictatorship of the ritual”, Havel argued, writing about Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, “individuals are almost dissolved in the ritual”. The result was a power structure “dehumanised and made anonymous” with a tendency to “disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual. ... It becomes reality itself, albeit a reality altogether self-contained, one that on certain levels (chiefly inside the power structure) may have even greater weight than reality as such”.

What Havel meant was the almost universal, unconscious submersion of a people into the rituals of the dominant power structure that controlled them, in order to protect themselves and their families. The task of “living within the truth” was one which required immense courage.

What Dlamini-Zuma did not acknowledge was reality – the reality that, yes, Sindile Moyikwa had indeed been a freedom fighter who fought for this country as a member of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) in Angola, but also that in his opposition to the dictatorial and undemocratic character of the ANC command structure in that war he had been arrested, tortured by the ANC security arm Mbokodo (“the grindstone”) and kept prisoner for nearly five years in Quatro concentration camp. This was the harshest period in Sindile’s life, yet it was a reality not addressed in truth when Dlamini-Zuma spoke to his family.

Her omission reflected the self-interest of herself and fellow leaders of the ANC in exile from her generation, who arrogated all power to themselves. This made it impossible to acknowledge the needs and ideas of many of the MK troops: young people from the 1976 generation, whose lives had been transformed in South Africa by the teaching and influence of Steve Biko, Onkgopotse Tiro and other leaders of the Black Consciousness Movement.

Many of these young people were never trusted by their superiors and commanders, and were ruthlessly repressed when they called for democratic representation in the leadership of ANC and MK.

That was Sindile’s fate.

Born in 1958, he joined the student movement in Port Elizabeth in 1975 and was elected president of the student council in 1977.

He left South Africa illegally in 1979 via Lesotho, receiving military training at Pango camp in Angola and in the former German Democratic Republic under his MK “travelling name”, Simon Botha.

Then, deployed to the eastern front in Angola to fight against the Ovimbundu-based Unita movement led by Jonas Savimbi, he became a platoon commissar.

Extreme dissatisfaction with the character and conduct of the war – which the 1976 generation felt was not the war they had joined ANC to fight – led Sindile to become an active and vocal participant in the ANC’s Mkatashinga in Angola: its greatest crisis in exile.

This Mkatashinga – a Kimbundu word suggesting a burden, turmoil, acute pain – led MK cadres across Angola to assemble at Viana camp outside Luanda in February 1984.

Sindile (MK Simon Botha) was elected by the troops as a member of the Committee of Ten, to represent their grievances to the MK High Command. It was the most democratic mass gathering ever conducted in MK.

Instead of meeting the committee, MK leaders called in the armoured vehicles of the Presidential Brigade of the ruling MPLA party in Angola, under command of Colonel Antonio dos Santos Franca (“Ndalu”).

The MK troops found themselves encircled by massively superior firepower. Threatened with a massacre, they followed strong advice from the Committee of Ten to surrender their weapons.

The Committee of Ten – including Sindile – were then arrested with other MK troops and held in the high security prison outside Luanda, commanded by a Cuban major. There they were interviewed by members of the Stuart Commission, sent by ANC president-in-exile Oliver Tambo to investigate the causes of the mutiny.

When the commission returned to Lusaka, the prisoners were tortured by the ANC security department, Mbokodo (of which Jacob Zuma was to assume leadership in 1987).

“The prison became more often than not filled with screams from the interrogation room,” reports their earliest published account.

The Stuart Commission report stated: “Relations between administration and rank-and-file described as being of ‘master and servant’. Elitism has developed. ... The cadres are beginning to feel that there is a growing gap between them and the leadership.”

Mbokodo had become “totally isolated and alienated from the general cadreship. Their power and privileges, their lifestyles, their image and methods of work had placed this department apart from, and in appearance, hostile to those living in camps”. This was later fully endorsed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Sindile was then transferred with other arrested MK troops to Quatro prison in northern Angola, where they were held for nearly five years under brutal conditions.

In his autobiography Mbokodo (published in 1994), Sindile’s cell-mate, the late Mwezi Twala, described him as a “jocular man” who enjoyed acting, and was “good to have in the cell, because he relieved some of our misery and boredom”.

At Quatro, Twala wrote, “all actions were designed to subdue prisoners. ...We were prodded and whipped like oxen as we struggled in the heat.”

Another cell-mate, Luthando Dyasop, has made a painting, “Amaswaiman” – the song they sang – showing them dragging a 1000-litre watertank up the hill to Quatro under constant beatings from their guards.

In a 2009 article the late Professor Stephen Ellis, author of two major histories of the ANC in exile, stated in that consideration of Mkatashinga is “vital for understanding the ANC today”.

The reason for the mutiny, he argued, was the “refusal by the ANC leadership to listen to the views of its members”. This was “the connection between then and now”.

Sindile Moyikwa was released from Quatro along with other prisoners in November 1988 following the Crocker Accords which ended the Cold War in Angola. They were transferred as freed members of the ANC to Dakawa camp in Tanzania.

He remained at Dakawa for a year before getting a scholarship to study in Germany. After returning to South Africa, he worked for the Independent Electoral Commission before the first democratic elections in April 1994.

He was integrated into the SA National Defence Force and worked as an operations officer at Group Six in Port Elizabeth, later becoming assistant director of safety and security at Nelson Mandela metro.

He married Pumla Makubalo-Moyikwa, a nurse, and had a daughter, Zipho, who celebrates her father’s good humour on her website, with loving photographs of him on his deathbed.

How easy would it have been for him to explain what had happened to him in Angola? It would have been very difficult, and probably possible only to very close family.

First, there would have been the buried pain which the men of MK – men, especially – learnt as basic military training, with almost zero access to trained and sympathetic counsellors after their return home.

Far more, though, was their situation back home in a power structure dominated by “living within the lie”.

Discrimination against perceived former MK “dissidents” became almost universal in appointment and promotion in state employment, especially in the SANDF, where former Quatro and other “dissident” personnel are still generally confined to the non-commissioned ranks, with lower pay and pensions.

What not to say became almost as normal for the returned MK cadres in South Africa as in Havel’s Czechoslovakia. It was this rule of silence that Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma endorsed when she visited Sindile’s grieving family, before his burial last Saturday.

In doing so she denied the whole story of “a courageous man, a man of integrity”, the son who had represented the Moyikwa family well, said Omry Makgoale, a district commander of MK in Luanda in 1984, paying tribute to Sindile in Grahamstown last weekend.

This story of “a clever and articulate man who,” as Makgoale said, “had the ability to simplify complex Marxist theory to the ordinary cadres... who was clear about the wars of resistance among the Xhosa people, waged against colonialism under the leadership of Hintsa, Ndlambe, Ngqika and Makana... who was intolerant of mediocrity... a dedicated cadre of the movement, highly disciplined... who strived to achieve the best from his comrades” – this was not his story alone.

It is now time to speak....

• Paul Trewhela was editor of Freedom Fighter, MK’s underground newspaper during the Rivonia Trial and a political prisoner from 1964 to 1967