ANC supporters in Tembisa township.
FIFTH COLUMN
I was glancing at the declaration from the ANC’s 1985 Kabwe conference, as one does occasionally, and I came across a very important point. So important, in fact, that it got a point of its own (you might say it’s a single-point point): “There is a need to establish an effective and dynamic link between the rear and the front.”
Now, obviously, the ANC was in exile at the time, and waging insurrection against the apartheid regime from an “external base”, but I believe there are many lessons from that era of the struggle that we should take to heart.
Even today, as the triumphant liberation movement, 20 years after coming home, sweeps to municipal triumph on a tide of unpaid invoices, it behooves the nation to pay close attention to key concepts that emerged 50 years ago in the crucible of liberation.
Obviously, the front and the rear are in different places when you’re in exile. The front is at home, it’s the home front — or is that the rear? Surely the guys in Zambia and London and Moscow aren’t calling themselves the rear?
No, the people are always the front. If you are a good revolutionary, the people are always in front of you, so to speak, as you march forward or, you could say, to the front. You, humbly, are the rear — but because you are part of the vanguard of the people you are the front of the rear, right?
As Mao said, even a rearguard action opens a new front. But please note that the Theory of Multiple Fronts was denounced as “ultra-left” and never mentioned again.
At any rate, my main point is that, in the transition from exile to back home and then government, the positions of the rear and the front change places a few times — especially if you’ve got to negotiate a transition to democracy.
Luckily the ANC had Nelson Mandela, now the holy ghost of at least two political parties, to help the negotiating process, and he had an impeccable sense of front/rear interchange (possibly because he’d read Clausewitz and Sun Tzu in jail, and/or one of Jackie Collins’s racier paperbacks).
One might argue, along with the Derrideans, the Hegelians and the strategists of AC Milan, that front and rear exist only in relation to one another.
But not many people (and least of all politicians on the stump) can make that leap out of biopolitical essentialism or, for that matter, out of the frying pan into the fire.
This is understandable. Naturally, when you’re on the campaign trail, and you’re fronting a party that’s on the stump, you’re in front, obviously; and your front, your plane of battle, is in front of you.
Yet, if you’re addressing the people who have been laggardly in declaring their wholehearted support for you, surely many among those before you, one could say the rear is in front of you.
Certainly, if any dancing takes place, you’d better be sure you have “an effective and dynamic link” between your rear and your front.
I must stop saying “stump”.