When Matanzima toured in the early 1960s to win supporters for his vision, he said that his most urgent task was to throw white people out of the Transkei. The magistrates, the prosecutors, the clerks in the government bureaucracy; the traders, the smattering of white farmers – all must go. And when he couldn’t get his way, he promised that whites would leave incrementally from large districts such as Mthatha, one zone after the next. His project was simple: it was to build an all-black bureaucratic bourgeoisie as quickly as possible.
Perhaps it is no surprise to see so much of Matanzima’s vision embodied in men who were once his enemies. But it does show just how low the ANC stooped in the Zuma years.
He pushed this line hard for he understood that for aspiring black professionals in a white, racist land, his vision held a certain allure. He and his cabinet ministers would make periodic trips to the Witwatersrand where they would urge Xhosa-speaking professionals to return to staff the public service. These roadshows would cause quite a stir, drawing hundreds, sometimes thousands, to listen.
The price to be paid for this vision was steep. The new class of black bureaucrats would be tasked with maintaining Bantu education and agricultural betterment schemes, two policies which, in 1960, had driven parts of the Transkei to rebel. Nor would the territory raise taxes even remotely sufficient to maintain itself; it would rely on a stingy fiscal stream from white SA. It was about as narrow a vision of black nationalism on offer anywhere. A crop of black professionals would flourish, but to believe in their world they would have to blind themselves to the future and to much of the present.
Listening to Matanzima here and now, one cannot but hear echoes of his voice in men like Ace Magashule and Jacob Zuma. Theirs, too, is a narrow black nationalism that can see only a few minutes into the future. They too wish to build an exclusively black bourgeoisie through the capture of state institutions. They too would fund their project from a wider tax base, assuming it will just keep on giving. And they too are inured to the pain of the many their project keeps out in the cold.
Perhaps it is no surprise to see so much of Matanzima’s vision embodied in men who were once his enemies. But it does show just how low the ANC stooped in the Zuma years. Less than two decades after freedom, the best it could do was borrow the spirit of one of the most compromised figures of the apartheid era.
It is a truism that history repeats itself. But this particular continuity is cause for the greatest despair.
• Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University.
Lessons to be learnt from the wrong side of history
Image: DAILY DISPATCH
People who end up on the wrong side of history get forgotten, their voices silenced by those who won. The result is that we fail to understand the ways in which they shaped our world. So it is with the founding premier of Transkei, Kaiser Daliwonga Matanzima.
If ever a man chose the wrong side of history, it was he. A scion of the AbaThembu aristocracy and a lawyer, he sold his soul to Hendrik Verwoerd, becoming the most esteemed black figure in the grand apartheid scheme. Demonised now, most of us barely know what he said in defence of what he did.
To learn that, one needs to return to the black press of the early 1960s – Drum, Golden City Post, The World – which reported the formation of the Transkei day by day. Going back to those newspapers and listening to Matanzima’s voice now is instructive and surprising, for so much of his vision lives on in a modified form.
“Matanzima hates the white man from the bottom of his heart,” Winnie Madikizela-Mandela would say of him in the 1980s. “If you don’t understand that about him, you don’t understand him at all.” She would have known. Matanzima wooed her in the mid-1950s, losing out to his kinsman, Nelson Mandela. A few years later, Winnie’s father, Columbus Madikizela, became one of Matanzima’s closest allies and a member of his inaugural cabinet. So when she said that he hated white people, she knew of what she spoke.
A backward law on the land
When Matanzima toured in the early 1960s to win supporters for his vision, he said that his most urgent task was to throw white people out of the Transkei. The magistrates, the prosecutors, the clerks in the government bureaucracy; the traders, the smattering of white farmers – all must go. And when he couldn’t get his way, he promised that whites would leave incrementally from large districts such as Mthatha, one zone after the next. His project was simple: it was to build an all-black bureaucratic bourgeoisie as quickly as possible.
Perhaps it is no surprise to see so much of Matanzima’s vision embodied in men who were once his enemies. But it does show just how low the ANC stooped in the Zuma years.
He pushed this line hard for he understood that for aspiring black professionals in a white, racist land, his vision held a certain allure. He and his cabinet ministers would make periodic trips to the Witwatersrand where they would urge Xhosa-speaking professionals to return to staff the public service. These roadshows would cause quite a stir, drawing hundreds, sometimes thousands, to listen.
The price to be paid for this vision was steep. The new class of black bureaucrats would be tasked with maintaining Bantu education and agricultural betterment schemes, two policies which, in 1960, had driven parts of the Transkei to rebel. Nor would the territory raise taxes even remotely sufficient to maintain itself; it would rely on a stingy fiscal stream from white SA. It was about as narrow a vision of black nationalism on offer anywhere. A crop of black professionals would flourish, but to believe in their world they would have to blind themselves to the future and to much of the present.
Listening to Matanzima here and now, one cannot but hear echoes of his voice in men like Ace Magashule and Jacob Zuma. Theirs, too, is a narrow black nationalism that can see only a few minutes into the future. They too wish to build an exclusively black bourgeoisie through the capture of state institutions. They too would fund their project from a wider tax base, assuming it will just keep on giving. And they too are inured to the pain of the many their project keeps out in the cold.
Perhaps it is no surprise to see so much of Matanzima’s vision embodied in men who were once his enemies. But it does show just how low the ANC stooped in the Zuma years. Less than two decades after freedom, the best it could do was borrow the spirit of one of the most compromised figures of the apartheid era.
It is a truism that history repeats itself. But this particular continuity is cause for the greatest despair.
• Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University.
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