Non-racial South Africa: book shows debate on nation building is still relevant today
- Edward Webster
There has been much comment recently on the lack of representation of minorities in the ANC's leadership structures
There has been much comment recently on the lack of representation of minorities in the leadership structures of South Africa’s governing party, the African National Congress (ANC).
For Douglas Gibson, a former leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), the exclusively black composition of the ANC’s top leadership shows that the ANC is no longer committed to building one nation. He believes
the ANC is clearly not a home for all. Look at its MPs, ministers, MECs, councillors, and mayors … The leadership has place only for black South Africans.
For Gibson, the baton has been passed on to the DA.
At the centre of this debate is the “national question”, the drive to build one united democratic nation. This debate has been captured in the scholar Mandla Radebe’s fascinating biography, The Lost Prince of the ANC: The Life and Times of Jabulani Nobleman “Mzala” Nxumalo, 1955-1991.
The book does not only begin to fill a gap in liberation history. It also reminds South Africans of the rich and robust debates that took place by an idealistic generation committed to building a non-racial South Africa. It is a legacy that the ANC needs to recover if it is to rebut those who argue that it is no longer a “home for all”.
Who was Mzala?
Mzala was something of a cult figure in ANC circles, celebrated for his intellectual insights. But his premature death at the age of 35 makes him a relatively unknown figure outside the party.
Born and brought up in a closely knit and deeply religious family in rural KwaZulu-Natal, Mzala showed a close interest and ability in scholarly pursuits at an early age. Forced into exile after a student revolt at the University of Zululand in 1976, he rapidly emerged as a leading grassroots intellectual within the ANC and its ally, the South African Communist Party (SACP). He was prolific in his writings and the range of issues he touched on.
The great value of Radebe’s book is that it offers the reader a rounded picture of a revolutionary of many unexpected dimensions. He was deeply committed to his family and strongly influenced by his Christian upbringing. His passion was music and the Amandla Cultural Ensemble of the ANC, a cultural group that through its music, poetry, theatre and dance, was used to mobilise international support for the struggle against apartheid.
But what stands out in Radebe’s biography is Mzala’s contribution to debates on Marxist theory inside the ANC. It was three-fold.
Firstly, he regarded the working class as the driving force of the revolution. Secondly, the motive force behind the revolution was not the exiled leadership, but the masses back home.
History’s great call to our movement is to begin a process of de-exiling ourselves, of transferring the initiative of the liberation process to the actual arena of our struggle, inside South Africa (page 143).
But his major contribution was on the difficult debate on the role of ethnicity. Mzala unequivocally wrote that
our democratic republic will definitely develop the positive aspects of my Zulu culture, language and so on, so that I, together with those of my ethnic group, can