Abstract
Many of those at the forefront of the anti-apartheid campaign are being erased from South Africa’s history, argues
Despite its key role in the war against apartheid, in 2018 knowledge of the PAC’s part in the struggle is fading, its leaders are hardly remembered and some of its fighters remain in prison decades after the end of apartheid.
The party adopted a hardline stance in its submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and very few combatants in its armed wing, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, were granted amnesty for crimes which, they argued, were politically motivated. As recently as 2015, the PAC claimed that more than 100 of its members were still in prison. Some have been freed over the years, but it is not clear how many still remain behind bars.
Noor Nieftagodien, a professor of history at the University of the Witwatersrand who heads up its history workshop, said: “Between 1960 and 1963, the PAC, in the minds of some, was seen as an alternative to the ANC. Yet they were still unable to challenge the ANC’s dominance.
“Once the ANC came to power, it instituted projects that justified why it was in power. They made it seem that it was inevitable that they would (come to power).”
Explaining how new governments represent – and often misrepresent – history, Nieftagodien said: “Those who are in power want to demonstrate this in various ways. Symbolically, they want to show they are in charge. In South Africa, a lot of names, even some of a politically-neutral nature, had to go … it was inevitable. In the initial period of a new government, the party in power will try and impose its own history. But I think, by and large, we are past the renaming process.”
At one point in the late 1950s the PAC threatened to overshadow the ANC and become the dominant black-led party in South Africa. But by the time of the 1994 general election that brought the ANC to power, the once-mighty PAC was a spent force. It garnered just 1.25% of the vote and five seats in parliament thanks to South Africa’s proportional representation system.
In comparison, the ANC won 262 seats and a huge 62.6% of the votes cast. Today the PAC has only one seat in parliament after receiving just 0.017% of the vote in the 2014 general election.
In the wake of Sharpeville, the government launched a draconian crackdown, banning the ANC and PAC using the Unlawful Organisations Act. Leaders were arrested and many people fled into exile to avoid being incarcerated.
Just how much the PAC has been forgotten was illustrated by last year’s renaming of De Waal Drive, a key highway into Cape Town, after the PAC’s Philip Kgosana. As a 17-year-old, Kgosana helped avert almost certain bloodshed after a 30,000 strong march to parliament against the pass laws in March 1960 threatened to end in death.
Some complained about the name change, and it was clear that many people had never heard of Kgosana, who died a year before the renaming. Former Cape Times editor Tony Heard, who covered the march as a young reporter and who championed the renaming campaign, said: “It was important for me that we remember a brave man who played an important role in our history. History is all we’ve got, because we do not know the future. It is not only shaped by organisations and ideologies, it is also shaped by people.”
As the National Party changed names to celebrate their heroes when they swept to power in 1948, the ANC has done the same.
Name changes have been controversial and highly-contested terrain in a post-apartheid South Africa, with some people accusing the ANC of largely renaming roads and buildings in towns and cities it controlled after its own cadres.
There was outrage in Amanzimtoti, near Durban, when the ANC-led council renamed a road in the seaside hamlet after Andrew Zondo, an Umkhonto we Sizwe activist who was convicted of planting a limpet mine at a shopping centre on the same stretch of road two days before Christmas in 1985. The explosion killed five people, including children aged two, eight and 16, and left more than 40 people injured. Zondo was subsequently convicted of murder and hanged in 1986.
Instead of reflecting Durban’s long history, most of the renamed roads commemorated local ANC members, many of them unknown outside party circles. It also created confusion and, until a few years ago, both the old and the new names appeared alongside one another on road signs. Many older people still refer to these roads by their old names.
At times, the renaming process became heated and at one stage the opposition Democratic Party hauled the ANC-led eThekwini Municipality to court and successfully forced it to reverse the renaming of several roads in Durban.
The renaming process also seemed to involve no proper research outside of the ANC’s own history. For example, Edwin Swales Drive, on Durban’s Bluff, was named after a South African bomber pilot who was awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery during World War II. The road was renamed after ANC combatant Solomon Mhlangu, who was convicted of murder and hanged in 1979.
Interestingly, name changes in Cape Town, which is governed by the opposition Democratic Alliance, reflect a wide range of people from across the political spectrum. There you will find Nelson Mandela Boulevard; Helen Suzman Boulevard, named after a woman who at one stage was the sole MP representing the liberal Progressive Party in Parliament; FW de Klerk Boulevard, after South Africa’s last white president who freed Mandela and unbanned the ANC; and Robert Sobukwe Drive, after the quietly-spoken teacher who led a breakaway from the ANC to form the PAC.
Ben Turok, a former ANC MP, was one of the 90 people charged with treason alongside Mandela and other leaders of the Congress Movement. Asked if history had been unkind to the PAC, he said: “History makes a judgment; it reflects what you did and what you didn’t do. MK [Umkhonto we Sizwe] developed an army of 30,000. The PAC, in later years, just talked.
“But the PAC and Poqo [its former armed wing] deserve credit for awakening the feelings of struggle in the 1950s.”
Omar Badsha, a historian who heads up the South African History Online project, said: “History is a very powerful way of controlling and changing people’s perceptions of what happened and to justify it. It is also possible to create great silences.
“The PAC deserves credit just like any other organisation that fought apartheid. But one of the big problems is that many of the PAC leaders did not, and still don’t, write their own histories.”
The role played by many of the white people who opposed apartheid has also been largely forgotten. They include people such as Father Trevor Huddleston, who spent years in the vanguard of the anti-apartheid struggle ministering to people in the townships of Johannesburg and who was eventually recalled by his church amid fears for his safety; Mike Terry, who led the British Anti-Apartheid Movement for more than two decades; and British Labour politician Peter Hain, who grew up in South Africa and joined the AAM aged 17 after his activist parents fled into exile to avoid arrest.
An exhibit at the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, which commemorates 131 opponents who were hanged under apartheid-era antiterror laws
CREDIT: Denis Farrell/Rex
Also largely forgotten are the white students of the National Union of South African Students, who took to the streets to oppose apartheid, and the thousands of young white men from the End Conscription Campaign, who chose prison or exile rather than serve in the South African Defence Force.
In his first State of the Nation address, the recently appointed president, Cyril Ramaphosa, called for all South Africans to come together for the good of South Africa.
But it remains to be seen whether, with a new president in place, they will be offered a wider sense of their own recent history.