BY DALE T. McKINLEY
JOHANNESBURG — Two years ago I sat with veteran African National Congress leader Walter Sisulu in his modest Johannesburg home to talk about his days as a youthful ANC leader in the 1940s and 1950s. Although I had briefly met Sisulu on more than one previous occasion during the heady years of the early 1990s South African "transition", this was a rare opportunity to personally engage with one of the liberation struggle's icons. I was not disappointed when I left nearly three hours later.
Sisulu passed away on May 5. More than 30,000 mourners converged on Soweto's Orlando stadium for the late leader's funeral on May 16.
Unlike so many of the ANC's contemporary politicians, Sisulu was an affable and approachable man possessing a sharp intellect, personal humility and blessed with considerable political skills. His willingness to give his limited time and energy to someone who had only a few months earlier been (very publicly and acrimoniously) expelled from the South African Communist Party — the ANC's alliance partner — spoke volumes about Sisulu's personal and political character.
Sisulu was probably the only senior ANC leader who was able, throughout his life, to straddle both "sides" of the personal and ideological divides in the broader liberation movement. Indeed, Sisulu described his own lifelong political trajectory during my interview with him as "the line of taking the middle course".
Despite his status as one of South Africa's leading political figures, Sisulu never seemed to forget his own "roots" as an impoverished young boy from the rural Eastern Cape.
At the tender age of 15, Sisulu joined the flood of migrants seeking a better life in eGoli (the city of gold) — Johannesburg. Over the next 12 years, Sisulu worked in various jobs, from domestic worker to gold miner. Despite his limited formal education (he left school in standard four), Sisulu found himself helping other workers with reading and writing and, on occasion, representing workers in labour disputes. By 1940, Sisulu was able to open an estate agency. That was also the year that he joined the ANC and met Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo.
Together with Mandela and Tambo, it was Sisulu who catalysed the formation of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL). In the context of a politically ineffective and organisationally moribund ANC, at a time of increasing political and economic repression of the black population, the ANCYL leaders sought a turn to more direct forms of mass-oriented struggle around a rejuvenated and "pure" African nationalist movement. The failures of the ANC were viewed as a result of the invasion of liberal and socialist ideas. These were considered at odds with the ANCYL's idealised vision of an African nationalism which would reclaim a mythologised African "community". They identified the enemy as the white colonial/imperialist usurper.
During my interview with him, I had asked Sisulu to characterise the politics of the ANCYL at that time. He answered: "based on the African National ideology, we did not believe in communism. So, we were in between. We were not moderates ... we were in between."
Indeed, while the ANCYL's "Program of Action" called for a more radical politics of direct action and mass mobilisation, its political content remained firmly within a capitalist, liberal-democratic tradition, albeit "Africanised". The practical goals of direct/mass action were centred on "the right of direct representation in all the governing bodies of the country" and "the abolition of all differential institutions or bodies specially created for Africans".
Sisulu, who played the role of key ideologist and strategist in the most formative years of the ANC (early 1940s to early 1960s), embodied the ANC's "in-between" nationalist politics that then provided the logical foundation for a strategy of ideological and class accommodationism. Like Sisulu's approach to his personal political life, the politics of the ANC focused on stressing "common overarching interests, while blunting and even suppressing differences" (as was noted by Hein Marais in South Africa's Business Day newspaper on September 18, 1991).
The longer-term results of such politics, in the context of a liberation struggle under conditions of apartheid capitalism, was predictable. The concept of the "people" came to be seen primarily as encompassing all social classes, the key divisions being those of race imposed by the white minority regime. The task of liberating the racially oppressed majority became strategically separated from the goal of socio-economic liberation of the poor and working-class black people, the overwhelming majority of South Africans.
While Sisulu and the ANC later adopted "non-racialism" and embraced armed struggle against the apartheid regime (which resulted in Sisulu spending 26 arduous years in jail), the strategic separation of the struggle for racial liberation from the black workers' class struggle — with the ANC's politics filling the space "in between" — ensured that powerful class forces (namely, domestic and international capital), whose self-interest would eventually lead them to seek a deracialised capitalism, would play a leading role in finding a "solution" to apartheid. It also ensured that the "victorious" ANC and its leaders would treat the interests of the black working class, the backbone of the South African liberation struggle, as secondary to winning access to power which left, untouched, the fundamentals of class oppression.
It was Sisulu's personal characteristics, however, that in the midst of all the political egotism and opportunism within the ANC over the years, made him so popular with ordinary South Africans. This was the case despite the growing disenchantment and opposition shown by those same South Africans towards the capitalist policies of the ANC in the post-1994 period. While Sisulu eschewed the positions and trappings of the ANC leadership's new-found power, he remained, until his death, a loyal and disciplined member of an ANC that has come to represent the interests of corporate capital and a new black bourgeoisie.
The ANC continues to depend on the parallel loyalty of millions of working-class poor to the (now mythologised) "liberation struggle" for its political survival. Somewhat ironically though, it was the combination of Sisulu's personal likeability and "in-between" nationalist politics that provided the ANC with ideological cover, and one of its most powerful unifying symbols, for its historic journey from "liberation movement" to bourgeois political party.
From Green Left Weekly, May 28, 2003.
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