LITMIR.BIZ

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later he was recruited by Simon Kekana, head prefect at Lovedale and chair of the African National Congress Youth League, to join the League. Getting involved in politics at school was illegal, so everything Daddy did at the time was in secret and underground. My father was deeply affected by the events surrounding those who were arrested and charged during the Treason Trial of 1956. By the time he was 15, he had been heavily influenced by the writings of Govan Mbeki on the problems and struggles in the Eastern Cape. When I think of what I was up to at that age – dressing up for socials and reading Danielle Steele – I am in total awe of my dad.

      By 1957, Daddy had already started reading journals and newspapers such as The New Age, Torch and Fighting Talk by Ruth First, which added to his political awakening and introduced him to Marxist concepts.

      “There was a page in New Age which dealt with the struggle of the working class throughout the world,” he told Luli Callinicos in their interview. “What was happening in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, China – the life that people were building there. And that had an appeal in my own impassionate young mind. Given my background, I was attracted by ideas and the philosophy which had a bias towards the working class, which had as its stated objective, the upliftment of the people on the ground.”

      Daddy matriculated in 1958, achieving really high marks in all his subjects – English, Xhosa, Latin, History, Mathematics and a subject called ‘Hygiene’.

      When news arrived that he had gained admission to Fort Hare University, a relatively liberal campus considering the apartheid regime’s iron grip over South Africa and its neighbours at the time, the entire Hani family, especially my Tamkhulu, was elated.

      “I got a bursary and a scholarship to go to university because I was performing rather above average,” he downplayed his achievements in his interview with Luli. “When I went over to Fort Hare, I won a government loan to go to university. I think basically that is what helped me to go. It was extremely hard. One would have only one pair of shoes, one jacket and it was not easy because other students from families which were more comfortable than mine, the kids would be better clothed than myself. But I had accepted the fact that this was not important for me. It was through this spirit of self-sacrifice and accepting that the priority was to get my education. There were a number of us coming from rural areas who got their pocket money because parents sold hides and wool whenever it was the sheep-shearing season. We had some sheep and some cattle and goats at home. So my father bought a sewing machine for my mother. Now and again through that I could get a bit of pocket money whilst I was at Fort Hare.”

      Daddy had a never-ending thirst for knowledge. From the moment he became a student at Fort Hare he embraced his new intellectual environment and he read and read and read – English, Latin and Greek literature, modern and classical; he literally gobbled up all this new information. I think his early fascination with Catholicism inspired him to be particularly drawn to Latin studies and English literature.

      I remember my father often sitting with a book, reading for hours, when we lived in Dawn Park – he took his deep thirst for knowledge everywhere he went. There were even stories that he had copies of Shakespeare and Virgil in his backpack when he was on the run from the apartheid forces during the exile years.

      At Fort Hare, he was soon devouring Marx and any literature that criticised South Africa’s racist capitalist system. By the age of 19, Daddy joined the South African Communist Party, and quickly converted to being a full on Marxist.

      “In 1961, at Fort Hare, I was doing my third year, studying for a BA degree and majoring in Latin and English,” he told Luli Callinicos. “I am approached by some comrades who apparently had been moulded or welded into a Communist Party unit by Comrade Mbeki. So, in 1961, I joined the Party and I began seriously studying Marxism, the basic works of Marxist authors like Emily [Burns] What is Marxism?, The Communist Manifesto, The World Marxist Review and a number of other publications. I began to read the history of our Party by people like Edward Roux for instance, Time Longer than Rope, giving the earlier history of the Communist Party.”

      In the same year, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC, was established. He was clear in his interview with Luli about why he was drawn to the SACP.

      “I belonged to a world, in terms of my background, which suffered I think the worst extremes of apartheid. A poor rural area where the majority of working people spent their times in the compounds, in the hostels, away from their families. A rural area where there were no clinics and probably the nearest hospital was 50 kilometres – generally a life of poverty with the basic things unavailable. Where our mothers and our sisters would walk 3 kilometres and even 6 kilometres whenever there was a drought to fetch water. Where the only fuel available was going 5, 6 kilometres away to cut wood and bring it back. This was the sort of life. Now I had seen the lot of black workers, extreme forms of exploitation, slave wages, no trade union rights. Where it was said that workers create wealth but in the final analysis they get nothing. They get peanuts in order to survive and continue working for the capitalists. For me the appeal of socialism was extremely great. But I didn’t get involved with the workers’ struggle out of theory alone. It was a combination of theory and my own class background. I never faltered in my belief in socialism. For me that belief is strong because that is still the life of the majority of the people with whom I share a common background.”

      The following year, in 1962, Daddy became one of the first volunteers for MK, which marked the beginning of his long journey into the armed struggle, a cause and approach he passionately believed in. Halfway through his studies, my father decided to leave Fort Hare to complete his BA at Rhodes University, which he believed was a better university.

      During holidays he would return home to the village.

      “I used to go and be with my mother, help her in the fields, growing maize and harvesting,” he told Luli. “Because, if you harvested probably 20 bags of maize, the rest would be sold to the white shopkeeper, because that was the only market available in the rural areas. It was the white shopkeeper who would buy at prices determined by him. In other words, I contributed even to the slender financial resources of the family by working very hard during holidays in the fields and also looking after the stock.”

      In that same year, 1962, Daddy graduated with a BA degree in Latin and English and decided to pursue law. The following year he moved south to do his articles at the law firm Schaeffer & Schaeffer in Cape Town. He soon got caught up with his new life there, spending long hours with ANC icon Govan Mbeki, who became a mentor and father figure to him, as well doing volunteer work in trade unions. In the same year, at the age of 20, he was elected to MK’s highly secretive seven-man regional committee, dubbed the ‘Committee of Seven’, in the Western Cape.

      “I became a member of the Committee of Seven, in overall charge of the underground of the ANC in the Western Cape,” he told Luli. “It [was] in the course of my activities within that Committee of Seven that I [was] recruited to become part of the MK set up. I [was] recruited into a unit and I began to operate in small ways, throwing Molotov cocktails, cutting telephone cables and all that.”

      Towards the end of that year, Daddy had his first real run-in with the law when he was arrested, along with his friend and comrade Archie Sibeko, at a roadblock on their way to Nyanga East to distribute leaflets against the 90-day Detention law. After spending the weekend at Philippi Police Station, they were both charged under the Suppression of Communism Act for “furthering the aims of a banned organisation” and being in the possession of banned material. They spent the following 30 days in isolation cells before the trial began. I am sure Daddy was tortured during this time.

      My father was found guilty and sentenced to 18 months in prison with hard labour. The exorbitantly high bail was set at £125. While out on bail, waiting to hear whether his lawyers would consider appealing the sentence, Daddy left the country to attend an ANC conference in Lobatse, Bechuanaland, known today as Botswana.

      When news reached my dad, in February 1963, that his sentence had not been overturned, he and Archie decided to go into hiding. Daddy secretively travelled to Soweto, where he stayed underground with a family sympathetic to the struggle. In May 1963, along with a small group of exiles, my father set off for Bechuanaland and

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