There are two moments described in Raymond Suttner’s book The ANC Underground in South Africa (Jacana) that provide touching glimpses of the human complexity of lives implicated in the struggle for freedom in this country.
One has to do with veteran communists Ray Alexander and Jack Simons. The couple had been members of the then Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) until its dissolution in 1950 ahead of the apartheid state’s plan to ban it. The CPSA disappeared in some confusion, with members not knowing what the future held.
After 1953 the party was reconstituted in secret and as an underground party, now the South African Communist Party. When party leader Brian Bunting approached Alexander and Simons to join the underground SACP, Alexander immediately said yes. Simons angrily stomped out of the room.
Later he “berated” Alexander for not first discussing the issue privately with him before agreeing. Simons did not rejoin the party for another 20 years. His decision, it seems, was made so that there would be at least one parent to keep the family going if the other were detained.
The other moment in Suttner’s book has to do with Albertina Sisulu and her son Zwelakhe. Father Walter Sisulu was, of course, serving a very long sentence on Robben Island, and Albertina Sisulu was keeping the home fires burning — both in terms of family and in terms of basic organisational contacts and structures.
In the 1970s Zwelakhe was much taken with the newly emergent Black Consciousness (as was his sister Lindiwe). Those attracted to BC at that point certainly felt that the ANC had become dormant and wasn’t doing anything about the oppression of South Africa’s people. Many, of course, would later be drawn into the ANC (to its immense benefit) after the 1976 uprising, when many fled the country.
That process is captured in microcosm in the story of how Albertina Sisulu took Zwelakhe in hand: “I had to educate Zwelakhe back from BC — I had to sit him down at the kitchen table and teach him about history and his family.”
Simons stomping out of the room; Albertina and Zwelkhe Sisulu having a serious talk over the kitchen table — These are just two images of how, for individuals involved in the struggle, complex dynamics developed between the personal and the political, the ideological and the familial, the vast sweep of history and the small private moments.
Suttner, now an academic at Unisa, draws in part on his own history in the ANC underground (activities for which he was jailed) in his book, but it is not a memoir. It is subtitled A Social and Political History, and it uses sociological methods to enrich the story of how the movement built a presence in the country after it was banned, and what that meant for those who were involved.
Suttner gives us the broad outlines and an understanding of policy processes such as the movement towards armed struggle and the foundation of an underground (as well as the tensions between populist and top-down styles of organisation, and the re-establishment of ANC hegemony after 1976). But against such things he sets the testimony of many individuals, leaders as well as rank-and-file, that explore nuances often neglected in the big-picture histories of South Africa’s path to liberation.
“I see this multi-faceted approach as providing texture that is missing if you focus on how dynamite was made or who decided first on armed struggle,” says Suttner. “I have tried to humanise and gender the actors.”
Gender is one of the areas Suttner zooms in on, to discuss the complexity of the different roles that people took in the struggle. Another is the conflict or overlap between a “revolutionary morality” and more traditional family and love relationships. These emerge as grey areas in which simple ideological positions are blurred by human realities.
“I did not consciously seek grey areas, but I came upon them,” he says. “For example, the fact that many MK combatants consulted izangoma or similar factors. I also came to understand aspects of my own involvement that I now realise have been repressed by me and a lot of other people, that we pay a price in terms of the personal, which is seldom acknowledged. What I say about ‘love for the people’ displacing personal intimacy, and the organisation seeing itself as a substitute family, is an example.
“I have tried to probe the texture of people’s experiences. I did not probe in this way in the past and it is new for me and has something to do with my reading of literature on gender.”
An heroic masculinity as the model for revolutionary behaviour is strong in the ANC’s culture and history, but, as Suttner shows in the book, matters are more complex than that. Chris Hani, for instance, did a lot of what can only be seen as a kind of mothering of his fellow-cadres in MK.
“Masculinities are variable, now and in the past,” says Suttner. “My sense is that there is no ‘hegemonic masculinity’ within the ANC, but there have always been contending masculinities as there are today. Some of these are supportive of gender equality, others allow space for abuse.
“I think we need to recognise that people entered the struggle with a range of identities, and many of these got lost within the context of ‘unity of the people and the ANC/SACP’. I try to unpack some of that. I think that people learn nothing from a series of flattering adjectives about heroic and inevitable victories and resistance. But I see my work as starting what I hope will be part of a broader enquiry.”