Chris Hani’s Murder Robbed South Africa of a Great Leader

Hani was born in the Transkei, now the Eastern Cape. He attended Catholic primary schools in the Transkei and did his matriculation exams at Lovedale at the early age of sixteen before moving on to the University College of Fort Hare. He graduated at nineteen, having taken courses in Latin and English literature, as well as the Greek classics in English. His parents discouraged him from seeking ordination as a Catholic priest, but he valued his classical education.

He had an inherited interest in the ANC as his father, Gilbert, a labor migrant who became a small trader in Cape Town, was an active member. His uncle, Milton Hani, was also an active member of the Communist Party of South Africa, which was the SACP’s legal predecessor before the authorities banned it in 1950. His own political education began at school at Lovedale where he was drawn firstly toward the Sons of Young Africa, the youth wing of the Trotskyist Non-European Unity Movement, and then to the ANC Youth League.

It was at Fort Hare that Hani joined a Marxist study group under the influence of Govan Mbeki, who was a leader of both the ANC and the SACP. South Africa’s Communists had reconstituted their party in 1953 as a clandestine organization after the government ban; the ANC was also outlawed in 1960. Hani’s study group read the Communist Manifesto and Emile Burns’s What is Marxism?, and he enlisted in an underground cell of the SACP during his time in Fort Hare.

After graduation in 1961, Hani joined his father in Cape Town and became an articled clerk in a firm of attorneys. He soon became a member of MK and did elementary military training. In 1963, he moved north to Johannesburg and then through Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) to Tanganyika (now Tanzania).

From there, he traveled with other activists to the Soviet Union, where he spent a year, undergoing military training and political education in Moscow. He traveled widely in the USSR and especially valued his exposure to ballet, opera, and Russian literature.

In 1965, Hani returned to newly independent Zambia, where he became one of a group of ANC and MK leaders who were planning a return to South Africa. When it became clear in 1966 that newly independent Botswana would not provide a transit route for freedom fighters to South Africa, the ANC leadership resolved to form an alliance with the Zimbabwean African Political Union, seeking to open a route through Rhodesia, which was ruled by the white-settler dictatorship of Ian Smith.

A group of seventy-nine men, mainly MK members, crossed the Zambezi river near Livingstone on July 31, 1967, in what came to be known as the Wankie Campaign. Hani was one of the leaders of a group who first clashed with Rhodesian forces three weeks after crossing the Zambezi.

In the wake of another clash, he led a group of about twenty men who took refuge in Botswana where they surrendered to the local paramilitary police. The authorities charged them with having entered Botswana carrying weapons of war and they received two-year prison sentences, although they were released after one year.

Hani returned to Zambia with others in September 1968. Although the members of what was called the Luthuli Detachment had failed in their military objectives, they had shown great bravery and sustained heavy losses. Hani was later certain that the campaign was a good example of armed propaganda and helped to inspire resistance within South Africa, including the Black Consciousness Movement, which had its origins in the late 1960s.

Hani’s role in the Wankie Campaign earned him a reputation for physical courage. It was his role in the campaign’s aftermath that also gave him a reputation for moral courage. He became the lead signatory, one of seven, of a three-thousand-word document that was written in January 1969 and became known as the “Hani Memorandum.” The opening sentence stated: “The ANC in Exile is in deep crisis as a result of which a rot has set in.”

Although the document did not attack the ANC president Oliver Tambo personally, this was a devastating critique of the Congress leadership as a whole and of its failure to recognize the “heroes and martyrs” of the Wankie Campaign and the subsequent, equally unsuccessful Sipolilo Campaign. The main targets of the memorandum were Joe Modise, MK’s commander-in-chief, and Duma Nokwe, ANC secretary-general and head of the security department. The authors saw the security department as being more closely focused on detecting subversion among the membership than on defending the organization against external attack.

The memorandum concluded with a demand for a conference to discuss the issues it raised. Modise and Nokwe responded with fury. When the signatories refused to attend a tribunal that they considered to be stacked against them, they were first suspended and then expelled from the ANC. They were even threatened with execution, and Hani believed that his life was in danger. He withdrew for a while to the Zambian Copperbelt where he stayed with expatriate friends.

However, Tambo agreed to hold the conference that the memorandum demanded, which took place in the Tanzanian city of Morogoro in April 1969. While Hani and the other signatories were unable to attend as they were no longer ANC members, the conference did recommend their reinstatement, which took effect in June. Modise was demoted, though he remained commander of MK, and Nokwe was replaced as secretary-general and head of security.

Among the important policy decisions of the conference were the formal opening of membership of the ANC and its national executive to white, colored, and Indian members. This brought the Congress in line with the practice of MK and signified the end of the multiracial Congress Alliance and a step towards non-racialism. The conference also adopted a new “Strategy and Tactics” document, which, in response to the Memorandum, specifically rejected “militarism” and emphasized the primacy of political struggle.

While Hani’s reinstatement did not occur without controversy, he was rapidly promoted to positions of leadership. He became the SACP’s deputy-general-secretary in 1972, and was elected to the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC) in 1974, along with Thabo Mbeki. He began to play a diplomatic role and traveled to Scandinavia in 1972–73, establishing close links with Sweden.

In September 1974, he became the first serving member of the NEC to enter South Africa for underground work, although he was unable to stay long. He moved on to Lesotho, a country where he had connections through Limpho Sekamane, who he had recently married, and through his father, Gilbert. Hani Sr had been running a café in Mafeteng with his partner, Elizabeth Mafikeng, a trade unionist, since 1963.

Hani was to remain based in Lesotho until 1982. Although he carried out some recruiting for MK, he did very little military work during this time. Most of his activity involved political liaisons with established and newly emerging trade unions; with Black Consciousness organizations, such as the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization; and with the opposition to the Bantustan government in the Transkei. Hani and the Lesotho branch of the ANC were putting into practice the Morogoro Conference’s resolution about the primacy of political work.

His stay in Lesotho became increasingly dangerous, and there were attempts on his life in 1981 and 1982. The ANC eventually withdrew Hani from the country at the request of its government in 1982. His wife and family were lucky to escape death in December of that year when there was a massive South African raid on Lesotho’s capital, Maseru, which killed many ANC members and local citizens.

In 1983, Hani was appointed deputy commander and political commissar of MK, and he became the organization’s chief of staff in 1987. In these capacities, he traveled frequently between Angola, Zambia, and Mozambique. However, the Nkomati Accord of March 1984 between the Mozambican government and the apartheid regime meant that he was henceforth excluded from the country, and MK later had to withdraw from its Angolan camps to Uganda in 1988.

In the early months of 1984, Hani had to contend with two major mutinies in the Angolan camps, which were prompted by poor living conditions; MK casualties in fighting with UNITA, which was engaged in a civil war with the Angolan government; and the frustration of cadres who saw no prospect of getting into action in South Africa. While Hani could not escape some responsibility for the crises in Angola, he and Joe Slovo had an image of being on the side of the troops, in contrast with Joe Modise, the MK commander, and the hated security apparatus.

His continuing popularity was demonstrated when he came top of the poll in the NEC elections at the Kabwe Consultative Conference in 1985. MK activity in South Africa reached a peak in 1988 and then declined as pressure on its bases in the frontline states increased.

In 1985, the movement toward a negotiated settlement began after the meeting of ANC leaders with the Anglo-American delegation of South African businessmen and journalists, as guests of Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, in the Luangwa National Park. Hani represented MK and made only one intervention in the discussions, saying that while the ANC was accused of violence, it was the government of President P. W. Botha that was the truly violent actor.

In the years leading up to the ANC’s unbanning and the release of Mandela in February 1990, and during the subsequent period of negotiations, observers generally portrayed Hani as a hard-line figure in contrast with Thabo Mbeki, the conciliator. Although he was sometimes involved in the unfolding process — for example, through participating in the CODESA talks in December 1991 — he did not play a major role overall. He and Slovo acted with Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC secretary-general, to remove Mbeki and Jacob Zuma from leadership of the talks in August 1991 on the grounds that they were moving too slowly.

In December 1991, Hani stepped down as MK chief of staff and as a member of the ANC’s National Working Committee, taking over from Slovo as general secretary — in other words, leader — of the SACP. This came at a moment when the Soviet Union was disintegrating, and half the members of the SACP’s central committee (including Mbeki and Zuma) had resigned from the party, not wishing to be identified as communists. Yet Hani, with characteristic courage, took on the leadership role.

He had always been politically close to Slovo, and the two men had in general welcomed the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev and his reform agenda of glasnost and perestroika. Hani agreed with the thrust of Slovo’s pamphlet, Has Socialism Failed?, published in January 1990, in which he argued that Soviet communism was a distortion of socialist ideals, but that its failure did not discredit those ideals as such.

In an interview conducted shortly before his death, Hani said that while he and his comrades might have been blind not to see the lack of democracy in the Soviet Union, socialism was no more invalidated by the bad things done in its name than Christianity had been. He did not believe that the crisis of international socialism represented the “end of history.”

Hani was a progressive on many issues, including his support for feminism, his response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and his views on rural feudalism and the role of chiefs. He saw the function of the SACP as the promotion of “democratic socialism” within the ANC and of the “national democratic revolution” in South Africa as a whole.

There was room in this framework for “born-again socialists and born-again communists,” committed to pluralism and a multiparty system. Hani and his co-thinkers did not wish to impose socialism, and they rejected concepts such as that of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” He had personally come to accept that there was a role for the market in economic life, but he argued that “the great majority of South Africa’s people are not even in the market.”

As Hani acknowledged, he was in the unusual position of heading a communist party that was growing rapidly at a time when most communist parties in the rest of the world were in decline. However, he rejected the suggestion of his friend Wolfie Kodesh that he might want to lead the SACP into an oppositional stance toward the ANC.

It is not entirely clear why he decided, not long before his death, that he would not participate in the projected government of national unity, which would bring together the ANC and the outgoing nationalist party for a period of up to five years. It is possible that he had doubts about the viability of the government of national unity, which ultimately lasted less than two years after being established a year after his assassination.

Hani had always been more skeptical about the negotiating process than his rival Thabo Mbeki, and he took a harder line as it unfolded. He appears to have believed that it was important for him, as the SACP’s leader, to assume an independent and critical role in the transitional phase: “The perks of a new government are not really appealing to me . . . the real problems of the country are not whether one is in cabinet, or a key minister, but what we do for social upliftment of the working masses of our people.”

There are still unresolved questions about Hani’s murder in 1993. Were the two men found guilty of his assassination, Janusz Waluś and Clive Derby-Lewis, acting independently, or were they acting, as seems likely, as agents of the apartheid state? We do not know for sure.

It is also impossible to say what the wider political consequences of his death proved to be. Hani was the ANC’s most popular and highly respected leader, receiving 95 percent of the vote in the NEC elections at the first ANC conference held inside the country in July 1991.

Would he, and not Mbeki, have succeeded Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1999, and would that have affected the course of South African history? All that we can say for sure is that his death represented an incalculable loss to South Africa.