The letter “Axe chiefs and their pay” (DD August 14) refers. As in most times, Dave Rankin is, in this letter, not just correct but very correct.
The ANC government must stop mollycoddling and trying to mesmerise the chiefs with a view to tapping into the following the chiefs supposedly command.
And the ANC government should stop being opportunistic about the real status of chiefs.
The government must speak truth to traditional leaders.
Colonialism effectively did away with effective traditional leadership or politically legitimate native royalty.
Colonial governments in Africa – the English, French and Portuguese – turned chiefs and kings into their minions or cogs in the colonial administrative machine.
As administrative instruments of European colonialism through conquest, they were not allowed to tax their customary subjects as their customary subjects were no longer their political or constitutional subjects.
Their customary and cultural subjects became, for all intents and purposes, real subjects of colonial governments.If memory serves me well, from General JBM Hertzog up until FW de Klerk, South African heads of state were constitutionally, the effective “kings” of the natives – who later became Bantus under the crude white domination of DF Malan’s National Party and its apartheid project.
The fact is, traditional leaders have no sovereignty over the indigenous people of South Africa and citizens in general.
Only the state, the Republic of South Africa, has.
Both urban and rural indigenous people know this.
Traditional leaders know it.
The present weaknesses of the ANC are encouraging traditional leaders to opportunistically harangue and harass the ANC in a covetous pursuit of top shares from the ruling class pork-barrel.
One thing is certain, landless people of this country cannot fight and take back their land from the unfairly landed only to see the land go to royal families instead of themselves.If this happens it will happen for the first time in world history.
Without traditional leaders leading them or among them, the rural people of South Africa fought painfully against the apartheid government interfering with their land.
They fought with intensive suffering in Sekhukhuniland.
They fought in Middledrift and Peddie.
Chief Salakuphatwa, loyal to the apartheid government, died in the former Transkei.
In the dead of night – not one night – the houses of those perceived as leaders in the resistance against land interference in Cala were bent down by the apartheid government and its lackeys and flunkeys.
The climax of the resistance of the rural people of South Africa leading themselves as commoners was the 1960 Mpondo revolt.
The then leader of traditional leaders via the Transkei Territorial Authority had to flee for dear life to Natal, running away from the South African Chamber of Mine’s proletarianised Mpondos who were bellowing a fighting song “Asim’fun’umaz’phathe” (we are against dictatorship).
If traditional leaders want to control and distribute the wealth of their subjects – the land – they must indeed forego remuneration by a republican people who are not their legal or political subjects.
We give them our money by being taxed by our government.
The government does this so that these traditional leaders will assist the same government in administering its policies and projects.
We are not paying them for being born into royalty. Neither should we be paying them to be our stooges, just as the colonial and apartheid governments did.
In this respect traditional leaders cannot have their cake and eat it.
The ANC is not in power because of the support of the traditional leaders.
Traditional leaders should never delude themselves on this.
The government is mainly in power because of the support of the detribalised and Christianised African elite together with the urban-based and rural-based indigenous proletarians who have been – and are still being – workerised by the industrial development of South Africa.
From 1959 Dr HF Verwoerd, strenuously tried to revive tribalism in an ever industrialising South Africa.
This was simply a divide and conquer strategy used in an effort to extend the life of the apartheid state.
The plan failed.
The present political dispensation and their jingoists similarly attest to the dismal failure of trying to swim against the natural flow of history.
Malcolm MZ Dyani resides in Duncan Village. He was a political prisoner on Robben Island..