Chris Hani

Hugh Macmillan

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780821447406
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This biography shows how Black political leader Chris Hani's life and death were pivotal to ending apartheid and to establishing a democratic government in South Africa.

Chris Hani is one of the most iconic figures in South Africa's history, as a leader within the African National Congress (ANC) and as chief of staff of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. His assassination in 1993 by a far-right militant threatened negotiations to end apartheid and install a democratic government. Serious tensions followed the assassination, leading Nelson Mandela to address the nation in an effort to avert further violence:

Tonight I am reaching out to every single South African, black and white, from the very depths of my being. A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin. The cold-blooded murder of Chris Hani has sent shock waves throughout the country and the world… 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.

Hugh Macmillan's concise biography details Hani's important role in shaping twentieth-century South African history.

1

Roots in the Eastern Cape

Chris Hani was born on 28 June 1942 at what was, from the point of view of the enemies of Nazism-Fascism, the low point of the Second World War. On the day of his birth, Hitler’s army of occupation in the Soviet Union launched its advance towards Stalingrad, which was to be the site of its later defeat in the decisive battle of the war. In the previous week 10,000 South African soldiers of the Second Division, British Eighth Army, including more than 1,000 black troops of the Native Military Corps, had surrendered to German forces under General Erwin Rommel at Tobruk. The fall of Singapore to Japan in February 1942 and the subsequent occupation of much of South East Asia were major setbacks. The Japanese invasion of Burma threatened India and its attack on the British naval base at Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in April threatened the Indian Ocean. Considerations of ‘Native’ loyalty in the event of a threat to South Africa prompted the suspension of the hated pass laws in the country’s major cities in May 1942 – they were to remain in abeyance until 1946.

Martin Thembisile (which means ‘promised’ in isiXhosa) Hani, better known as Chris, was born at Lower Sabalele in the district of St Mark’s (now Cofimvaba), in the Transkei (now part of the Eastern Cape Province). With an area as large as Basutoland and Swaziland combined, and a much bigger population, the Transkeian Territories formed the largest block of land in African occupation in South Africa. A classic labour reserve, the area exported workers and imported food to supplement the crops that were grown by the permanently resident population of older men, women and children. They were dependent on remittances from workers on the mines and in the factories of the Transvaal, on the sugar plantations of Natal, and in the city of Cape Town, but there was also some cash income from the sale of wool from the large flocks of sheep that grazed the rolling hills. Although poverty was endemic it was not uniform as some families, including Chris Hani’s, had cattle, which provided milk and draught power for ploughing, and sheep were unevenly distributed. St Mark’s was a drought-prone district where the crops sometimes failed completely, as they did in 1951–52, when Chris Hani was nine. In times of drought the women of Sabalele had to walk long distances to collect water and they often had to go even further to collect firewood. The nearest large store was at St Mark’s, which was about 15 kilometres away. The nearest town of any size was Queenstown, about 60 kilometres away in ‘white’ South Africa, and the nearest railway was the siding at Imvani on the line between Queenstown and East London.

From the early 20th century onwards, the area was administered by the South African Native Affairs Department through chiefs and headmen, and a system of representative councils, which had at their apex the Transkeian General Council, or Bunga. The long-serving headman in the Sabalele area, Gqoboza Ndarala, died in the week of Chris Hani’s birth. The acknowledged paramount chief, or king, in Chris Hani’s youth was the young Sabata Dalindyebo and the senior chief in St Mark’s district was Kaiser Matanzima, who was 26 at the time of Hani’s birth. There was an extensive system of mission schools in the Transkei that provided a good basic education for many of the men who became South Africa’s prominent black leaders in the second half of the 20th century, including Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, and his son Thabo, the future president, who was born the week before Hani and about 100 kilometres to the east. Lower Sabalele lies halfway between two mission stations, the old-established Anglican mission at St Mark’s and the newer Catholic mission at Zigudu. The disproportionate number of black leaders who emerged from the Transkei was a reflection of the quality of the school system, but may also have been the result of the self-confidence young men acquired growing up in an overwhelmingly African area.

Chris Hani was the third surviving child of Gilbert ‘Hendesi’ Hani and his wife, Mary ‘Nomaysie’ Hani. He described his father, who was born in 1910, as ‘semi-literate’, but he was well educated by the standards of his time. He had passed standard six, the last of eight years of primary school, a considerable achievement at a time when very few pupils proceeded to secondary school, and he was able to speak and write English fluently. He worked at first as a labour migrant on the mines, then in the construction industry, and, latterly, as a self-employed trader in Cape Town. When Chris Hani was six years old, in 1948, his father applied for a licence to set up a ‘Native’ eating house on common land close to his home on the boundary between Upper and Lower Sabalele. He did not pursue the application, but the fact that he made it at all is an indication that he was a man of ambition and enterprise, with some savings, and that he may have sought at that time to abandon labour migration and to make a living at home. But he was away from home for most of his children’s formative years, as were the fathers of most of their contemporaries.

In the same year, 1948, the National Party came to power and began to introduce apartheid, a more radical, ruthless and rigid version of the segregation that South Africa’s wartime prime minister, General Smuts, had described in 1942 as having ‘fallen on evil days’. The introduction of apartheid was soon to have an impact on the Transkei in several ways. The Bantu Authorities Act (1951) was intended to strengthen the power of the chiefs and to lay the foundations for a new system of local government in African areas. In the context of the Transkei the government sought to replace the council system and the Bunga. The strengthening of the administration was intended to make possible the imposition of intensely unpopular ‘betterment’ measures: to counter soil erosion by compulsory de-stocking, the culling of cattle and sheep, and the reallocation of land and residential sites. These measures were also intended to make room for the removal of African people from nominally ‘white’ towns and farms and their ‘dumping’ in the already overcrowded reserves – a process that intensified in the late 1950s, contributing to rural revolts in various parts of South Africa, including Pondoland within the Transkei.

Another disturbing intervention was the Bantu Education Act (1953). This involved the take-over by the state from the Christian missions of the African school system, beginning with primary education in 1955 and culminating with Fort Hare University College in 1959, then the only university college for Africans in the country. There were also changes in the curriculum that were intended to make education for Africans less academic and to reduce the influence on them of the English language, and the culture associated with it, which were seen by Afrikaner nationalists as sources of dangerous liberal and radical ideas. This was part of a systematic campaign to destroy the mission-based, and syncretist, intellectual traditions of the Eastern Cape, which, as Xolela Mangcu has shown in his recent biography of Steve Biko, had roots going back over three or four generations into the early 19th century.

Chris Hani was an exceptionally bright child who, beginning school in 1950, managed to complete his primary education before the Bantu Education Department takeover and his secondary education before the introduction of retrograde curricular changes. After three or four years at a Catholic primary school at Upper Sabalele, which used the buildings of the local church, he transferred to the Catholic mission at Zigudu, where he remained for a further three or four years. He did his junior certificate exams at Cala (later Matanzima) Secondary School and then transferred to Lovedale, a Church of Scotland school with a strong academic reputation, near the small town of Alice in the Ciskei, where he spent two years studying for the matriculation exams. He had earlier managed to complete standards two and three at Sabalele in one year, and standards five and six at Zigudu in one year. He then achieved a first-class pass in the Senior Certificate exams at the age of 16 – a remarkable feat. He said that he had an advantage over his contemporaries because of the home teaching he received from an aunt who was herself a teacher – she had done four years’ education beyond standard six. Members of the Hani family were known locally as amagqoboka – the educated ones.

Hani’s parents were both baptised, and he was himself christened in the local Catholic Church when ten days old, but he says that they were not practising Christians, and he seems to have discovered religion for himself. He was impressed and strongly influenced by the Catholic priests and sisters at Zigudu and was an altar boy at nine. From the age of 12, and for several years afterwards, he wanted to enter a seminary and train for the priesthood. He was prevented from doing so by his father, who felt that people should look for their reward on earth and not in heaven, a view that he eventually came to share. His mother was also opposed to his becoming a priest, but for a different reason – she wanted grandchildren.

In an interview that he gave shortly before his death to Charles Villa-Vicencio, the editor of a book on religion and politics, he made it clear that he saw a clear thread of continuity, and no contradiction, between his early religious beliefs and his later political convictions. He found the things that originally attracted him to the Church – ‘the suffering of the people and the example of the priests in Cofimvaba’ – replicated in the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). As he said: ‘My political involvement came as a natural outcome of my religious convictions.’

Chris Hani grew up in a time of political ferment. The ANC launched its Defiance Campaign against unjust apartheid laws in 1952 when he was ten and adopted the Freedom Charter at the Congress of the People in 1955 when he was 13. His father may have been a member of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), and his uncle, Milton Hani, certainly was. He ran a small shop in Khayamandi Township, Stellenbosch, and was also prominent within the ANC in the Western Cape. The brothers both recognised the leadership of Moses Kotane, a leading member of the ANC and the general secretary of the CPSA. It is not, however, clear whether either of them became members of the underground SACP, which was set up in 1953 after the CPSA had been banned in 1950.

Gilbert Hani was on first-name terms with Ray Alexander (Simons), founder of the Food and Canning Workers’ Union, and was a close friend of Elizabeth Mafikeng (sometimes spelled Mafekeng), who was also a leader of that union and of the ANC Women’s League. He became chairman of the Native Vigilance Association in the Cape Town township of Langa and was a middle-ranking official in the ANC. He was also an organiser among migrant labourers in Cape Town of opposition to the imposition of Bantu Authorities in the Transkei and of an Urban Bantu Council in Langa. He became a prominent opponent of Chief Kaiser Matanzima, who used his support for Bantu Authorities to secure promotion to the status of paramount chief of a new, and essentially bogus, paramountcy – ‘Emigrant Tembuland’ – which included St Mark’s and Sabalele. He was able to prevent Chief Matanzima from addressing a meeting in Langa – the chief had to be given a police escort out of the township, a humiliation for which he never forgave his adversary. In 1962 Gilbert Hani was banished from Cape Town to Sabalele, where he would have been under the watchful eye of Matanzima. He chose to avoid banishment by going into exile at Mafeteng in what was then the British protectorate of Basutoland – it became the independent kingdom of Lesotho four years later. He lived there with Elizabeth Mafikeng, who had gone into exile a little earlier.

Chris Hani became politically aware through the influence of his father and uncle, but also through his teachers and contemporaries at Lovedale. The introduction of Bantu Education was a matter of great concern to the school’s staff and also to the students, who were politically organised in a clandestine manner in the face of an authoritarian administration. Hani was at first drawn to the Sons of Young Africa (SOYA), the youth wing of the Non-European Unity Movement, as was his near contemporary, Thabo Mbeki. This group had a strong influence in the Eastern Cape, especially the Transkei, through the Cape African Teachers’ Association, which was affiliated with it. They both soon shifted their allegiance to the ANC Youth League, concluding that the Unity Movement was excessively intellectual and elitist. Hani believed that the movement was much more interested in the theory than the practice of revolution. He recalled: ‘The struggle was waged in the mind; in the head.’ While he was at Lovedale Hani was exposed for the first time to radical and Marxist ideas through reading copies of the Unity Movement’s publication, Torch, and journals such as New Age and Fighting Talk, which were edited by Lionel Forman and Ruth First, who were both associated with the SACP. According to one account he was recruited to the ANC by Sipho Makana, later a member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC).

After matriculating at the end of 1958, Hani moved across the Tyhume River in Alice to enter Fort Hare University College, which was then associated with Rhodes University in Grahamstown. In 1959, the year that Hani entered Fort Hare, the college was taken over by the Bantu Education Department and it began the process of transformation from an institution that had drawn students from all over Southern, Eastern and Central Africa into a ‘tribal college’ for Xhosa-speaking students. Although there was resistance to these changes, including a strike in 1959, Hani managed to survive three years at the college and graduated in 1961 with a pass degree in English and Latin. He also did some law courses. He was able to pay the fees at Fort Hare and to maintain himself with the help of a scholarship from the Bunga, a loan from the Bantu Education Department, and cash contributions from his father, who was then relatively well off. Gilbert Hani had earlier on been able to buy his wife a sewing-machine with which she supplemented her income.

In interviews that he gave in the last months of his life, Hani placed great emphasis on the importance of moral values, tracing his own to three sources: his religious upbringing, the non-racism and love of democracy that he acquired through the ANC and the SACP, and his education in classical and English literature. While he was in his second year at Fort Hare the ANC was banned after the Sharpeville massacre and he came under the influence of Govan Mbeki, father of Thabo, who wrote extensively on the Transkei, as well as of Raymond Mhlaba, later commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and Andrew Masondo, a Mathematics lecturer. Hani was drawn into a socialist study group and read the Communist Manifesto, noting its religious language, and Emile Burns’s What is Marxism?, a political primer by a Scottish communist, which was much used by the British and South African communist parties. He joined an underground SACP cell at Fort Hare in 1961, seeing no contradiction between that and continued church attendance.

It was his interest in the Catholic Church, as well as the possibility of becoming a lawyer, that led him to the study of Latin, and he also did Classical Studies, reading the Greek classics in translation. He was fascinated by the Roman historian Tacitus’s Histories and was ‘moved beyond words’ by the plays of Sophocles and Euripides. He read and re-read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, noting the relevance for exiles of Odysseus’s struggle to regain his kingdom. He enjoyed tracing the links between these Greek authors, English poets like Chaucer and Dryden, and religious writing. Bringing the various ethical strands together, he said: ‘The Greek tragedies can be seen as an ancient form of contextual theology, an attempt to relate the common ethical ideals of society to the contemporary issues of the day. The classical tales were a serious quest for human values. Religion is a quest for spiritual fulfilment and moral perfection. Political struggle is about the creation of a better world in which to live. They are for me all facets of a multifaceted quest for human completion. Intellectuals have a special obligation to make the insights of former ages available for the present struggle. They can assist us not to make the same mistakes and to forge models of human existence based on the wisdom of the past.’

2

Armed struggle

The turn to armed struggle had been under discussion within the ANC and the SACP since the early 1950s, but it was only after the Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC in 1960 that there was a move from abstract discussion towards action. Leading members of the ANC, such as Chief Albert Luthuli, and of the SACP, such as Moses Kotane, had doubts about this course of action. Around the middle of 1961 a decision was made by both organisations to found Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) as an autonomous organisation. It was formally established in July 1961 and launched a sabotage campaign on 16 December of that year. Soon afterwards, in January 1962, Nelson Mandela left South Africa to travel through Africa and to Europe, seeking financial and logistical support, military training for MK recruits, and weapons.

After completing his degree at the end of 1961 – he graduated at Rhodes University, which gave degrees for Fort Hare, in April 1962 – Chris Hani moved to Cape Town to join his father, who was determined that he should become a lawyer. He wanted him to be ‘a black Sam Kahn’, referring to the communist lawyer and Cape Town city councillor, who was a member of parliament for the Western Cape as a representative of so-called ‘Native’ interests from 1949 to 1952. Hani was articled to a firm of attorneys in Cape Town. Through his father’s connections, and the links that he had established at Lovedale and Fort Hare, he was rapidly co-opted onto the underground regional committee of the ANC, also known as the Committee of Seven. He also worked with the ANC-aligned South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), which remained a legal organisation. In the course of 1962, he joined MK and at the end of the year he underwent military training with other recruits under Denis Goldberg on a farm at Mamre, near Cape Town.

He had no real difficulty in reconciling his turn to armed struggle with his religious convictions, but he had difficulty in understanding the opposition of the churches in South Africa to it. ‘Still under the influence of the Church, I was disturbed and challenged by the open hostility of Church leaders to armed struggle. They were downright insensitive to black frustrations and despair and narrow in their understanding of violence and who was responsible for it. I realised that the Church had throughout history condoned a defensive military action as well as providing theological justification for the right of the oppressed to resort to military action to remove a tyrant. “So what the hell was going on?” I asked.’

He had, meanwhile, been arrested with Archie Sibeko and another man in possession ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Roots in the Eastern Cape
• 2. Armed struggle
• 3. The Wankie Campaign
• 4. After Wankie and Sipolilo: The Hani Memorandum
• 5. The Morogoro Conference and after
• 6. Interlude in Lesotho, 1975–82
• 7. Political commissar: Zambia, Angola, Mozambique
• 8. From people’s war to negotiations
• 9. Visions of a new South Africa
• Postscript
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index