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Chris Hani & The Myths of the Anti-Apartheid Movement
Chris Hani & The Myths of the Anti-Apartheid Movement
The story of the anti-apartheid activist who led an armed struggle in South Africa...
“My basic objective is struggle in South Africa.”
Chris Hani was born on this day in 1942, in Transkei, South Africa.
The working-class son of a Black miner, he became one of the leading anti-apartheid activists of the twentieth century.
Less famous outside South Africa than Nelson Mandela, Hani’s life and death shed light on a number of myths about the anti-apartheid struggle.
First, that its only organisational vehicle was the African National Congress (ANC).
The movement actually involved a coalition of different radical forces in South Africa and abroad.
Mandela is the household name of the anti-apartheid struggle, but we shouldn't forget all the other activists and organisers - including Chris Hani - who made this movement a success
After spending his early years as a student activist, Hani joined the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1961.
Since the 1920s, the SACP had been part of the combined struggle against racism, fascism, and capitalism in South Africa.
The Party approached anti-racism as a class matter. To be Black in apartheid South Africa almost always meant to be a worker, too.
By the 1960s, the SACP was in a close alliance with the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups.
Nelson Mandela himself joined the Communist Party, and was influenced by its anti-capitalist approach to Black liberation.
The apartheid regime also identified the SACP as a major threat.
The Party was banned in 1963, and the government used anticommunism as a stick to beat the entire South African left, just like McCarthyism in the U.S.
Several anti-apartheid martyrs were leading communists, like Ruth First, the Jewish-South African activist and scholar assassinated by South African intelligence in 1982.
The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe was one of many global figures who supported the anti-apartheid struggle
Chris Hani’s life also debunks the myth that the anti-apartheid movement didn’t involve violence.
The ANC tried non-violent civil disobedience for years during the 1950s but met with unchanging, violent repression by the apartheid state.
After the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, when South African police murdered 91 people peacefully protesting racist ‘pass laws’, it was Mandela himself who argued that the ANC should launch an armed struggle against the regime.
Mandela founded uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) – “Spear of the Nation” – as the paramilitary wing of the ANC, to put armed pressure on the government by attacking military and industrial infrastructure.
Chris Hani became a key figure in MK, joining soon after it was formed.
Hani was sent abroad for military training and to fight against South African interventions in support of reactionary regimes elsewhere in southern Africa.
Hani fought in the Black liberation struggle in Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa’s little brother, during the 1970s.
He then organised a guerrilla struggle in South Africa itself, facing near-constant assassination attempts by the government.
As the leader of the guerrilla struggle in South Africa, perhaps we can think of Hani as the Che Guevara of the anti-apartheid movement
But in 1991, Hani, like Mandela, judged that the time was right to suspend the armed struggle because there was now a strategic opening for negotiations to dismantle apartheid.
Like the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa had a more complex relationship to non-violence than is often understood.
The last myth that Hani’s life – or, rather, his death – exposes about apartheid is that white nationalists accepted a peaceful transition to multiracial democracy in the 1990s.
After Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, Hani was able to return to South Africa after almost three decades in exile.
He assumed official leadership of the Communist Party and endorsed Mandela’s new strategy of peaceful negotiations.
As a leader of uMkhonto weSizwe, Hani’s support for suspending the armed struggle was decisive in gaining popular consent for the official talks.
But this didn’t spare Hani the hatred of white extremists.
On 10 April 1993, a far right Polish anticommunist, given a pistol by a Conservative South African MP, shot Chris Hani dead outside his home in the town of Boksburg.
There was mass popular outrage, and the peaceful talks to end apartheid almost collapsed but for the direct intervention of Nelson Mandela:
“Now is the time for all South Africans to stand together against those who, from any quarter, wish to destroy what Chris Hani gave his life for – the freedom of all of us.”
The peace process survived and apartheid was replaced by multiracial democracy, thanks not only to Mandela but hundreds of thousands of others less well-known.
Who were our radical ancestors? What's the legacy we're following? To understand the present, we have to look back at our past, and that's exactly what Pete's radical history emails and blog posts do.
With so many remarkable individuals, It's impossible for Pete to choose his favourite figure from radical history, but if he had to, he'd say Sylvia Pankhurst: "She always appreciated that the struggles for feminist, economic, and racial emancipation are linked together, and she did all of her politics with that truth in mind. Also, like me, she's a Mancunian!"
