REMEMBER THE LESSONS OF THE PAST AND RESIST ETHNICITY IN POLITICS AT ALL COSTS

THE TIMES NEWSPAPER
JOHANNESBURG, SA
By Mondli Makhanya
Mar 14, 2009

We saw what it did to us in this country in the early 1990s, and we do not want to go back there

In the winter of 1990 there was that familiar early-morning telephone call and the voice of a photographer colleague at the other end of the line. There had been yet another massacre — this time in KwaThema on the East Rand.

Inkatha-supporting hostel dwellers had woken up in the middle of the night to butcher their political rivals.

In no time the colleague had come round to pick me up and we sped off to the East Rand.

What we saw there was a most galling sight. We moved from hostel room to hostel room, jumping over corpses. Heads had been chopped off. Limbs were strewn over the floor. There were groaning men lying around with gashes on their heads and multiple wounds.

To this day, when I recall that scene, I can still smell the blood. It has a distinct smell — and there was lots of it.

In talking to survivors, it became clear that the marauders had singled out Xhosa speakers. That was how, in their depraved heads, an ANC supporter could be identified.

Almost all the dead and wounded were Xhosa-speaking men.

Hostel dwellers of other ethnic groups told us they had been told to leave the hostel so as not to disturb Inkatha’s murder fest.

Only those who happened to share rooms with Xhosa speakers had become victims.

After speaking to the survivors, I wandered over to the perpetrators of the massacre, who were gathered on the hostel grounds, armed to the teeth and singing war songs under the friendly watch of the police.

When I inquired about the massacre, they very proudly told me it was “in defence of the king”. They rattled off a plethora of reasons why the king and the kingdom had to de defended.

They spoke about how the Xhosas in the ANC wanted to strip King Goodwill Zwelithini of his powers and virtually reduce him to a commoner, how the Zulu kingdom would lose its sense of self if it were just another province in a united South Africa and how Zulu traditions and customs would be degraded in a plural country.

You know, all the balderdash that the cantankerous chief from Ulundi used to spout at the time.

No amount of reasoning was going to dissuade these men from their narrow secessionist beliefs. They were prepared to die and kill for the kingdom.

This scene was playing itself out in many parts of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal as Inkatha dug deep into the wells of Zulu nationalism.

We now know that much of the violence of the time was instigated and abetted by the apartheid state’s security forces. But, in order for their instigation to succeed, there needed to be fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of discord.

The aforementioned cantankerous chief ensured that the ground was a well-tended, fertile bed of Zulu nationalism and ethnic mobilisation.

Fortunately for South Africa, democracy and history dealt him and his party a painful blow, and today they find themselves on the periphery of South African politics.

Even though Inkatha continued mobilising along ethnic lines after the 1994 elections, it found that there wasn’t much of an appetite for that type of politics.

That was until ethnic mobilisation began rearing its head again in the past few years. It insinuated its way back into our politics during Jacob Zuma’s numerous visits to the courts.

Many Zuma loyalists, particularly those from his home province, attributed his woes to a conspiracy to keep a Zulu person out of power, even though there was not the slightest evidence of this. In fact, his support base was national.

It was around that time when we saw the emergence of the 100% Zuluboy T-shirts bearing his face.

Zuma did nothing to discourage such backward gestures, and even seemed to play to the gallery on some occasions.

The more this happened, the more such backward thinking filtered down to the ground.

This demon emerged again in the run-up to the ANC’s Polokwane conference, with some of Thabo Mbeki’s Eastern Cape followers waging a sub-subterranean ethnic campaign.

Now we’re hearing rumblings around the Congress of the People, which is flexing its muscles in the powerful Eastern Cape region, where it stands the best chance of making inroads into the ANC’s support base.

Talk of the Xhosanisation of COPE is getting louder and louder. The appointment of the Rev Mvume Dandala above Mosiuoa Lekota hasn’t helped matters.

So we have a party that had, as one of its stated missions, the modernising of South African politics — yet it is wallowing in primitive debates.

The spectre of ethnicity in politics is something we must resist at all costs.

It is extremely dangerous, having played a defining role in many of the conflicts in our continent and other parts of the world.

In its most extreme form, it resulted in genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and mass killings in Kenya.

We saw what it did to us in this country in the early 1990s, and we do not want to go back there.

We are far from that state of affairs, which is why we must nip in the bud any attempt from any quarter to drag us in that direction.