Benjamin Pogrund on the anniversary of a march that nearly toppled the Nationalist government
THE young man who frightened the hell out of the Nationalist government this month 37 years ago has grown into a mature man of the world intent on unseating the African National Congress government of today.
But Philip Kgosana’s style has changed over the years: in 1960 he was a Pan Africanist Congress Pied Piper who led thousands on a march to the white Parliament in Cape Town; now he works at the grassroots, organising and mobilising to challenge the ANC in democratic elections.
After more than three decades in exile, Kgosana finally returned home late last year and was elected as the PAC’s national organiser. He brings to the job his degrees in economics and public administration at universities in Ethiopia and Uganda, his training in Ethiopia’s military college and parachute school, and his 20 years’ work for the United Nations, first with the UN Development Programme, and then Unicef, the UN Children’s Emergency Fund, in Sri Lanka, Tanzania and most recently in Botswana.
“In 1960 I was a young rebel fighting against apartheid, my feelings almost bordered on hate. Over the years I spent with the UN I came to appreciate human beings for what they are and what they can contribute,” he says.
“I have come to understand what Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe called the human race. This outlook is what I would like to see myself bringing into our country.”
Sobukwe comes up frequently as Kgosana speaks. It was while working as a messenger in the then Department of Bantu Education in Pretoria in February 1959 that he first met Sobukwe, the Pan African Congress’s founder-president: “He was marketing the PAC. He talked to us for about half an hour and I was convinced I was listening to the right guy.”
Kgosana no longer has the Sobukwe mannerisms which he adopted at that time, like the drawn-out “thaaat’s right”, with finger upraised, during discussion, although the Sobukwe style of earnest speaking still peeps out. But his basic belief is unchanged: “Sobukwe is a kind of messiah to some of us,” he says.
Within weeks of his conversion to Africanism, Kgosana was enrolled at the University of Cape Town as an economics student. He had wanted to study as a pharmacist but discovered that no university would accept blacks for this. He was a founder member of the PAC when it was formed in April 1959.
Less than a year later, in the angry aftermath of the Sharpeville shooting of March 21 1960 when police killed 68 people, he led a crowd of thousands to Parliament to press the PAC’s demands for the abolition of the hated pass laws, a minimum wage for workers and the release of arrested leaders.
How a boyish-faced stripling who was barely fluent in the Xhosa of most of Cape Town’s township people achieved this remains a mystery. Kgosana laughs as he remembers those tense days and how young and old followed him. There was no “magic” about it, he says. “A certain moment comes when after a series of events you reach a point where you give an order and it has to be obeyed and respected.”
That point was reached on March 30 when, at first light, some 5 000 men, Kgosana at their head, set off from Langa to walk to the city. They had been on strike since March 21, the city was close to paralysis and the police were resorting to wholesale assaults and the arrest of leaders.
The PAC had only 900 members in Langa but it spoke for many more that day. By the time, late in the morning, that they arrived in the city, their numbers had swelled, according to press estimates, to anything from 30 000 to 60 000. MPs hurriedly left Parliament and the building was protected by troops.
Capetonians still speak with wonder about that silent march by the people of Langa, through Mowbray, along De Waal Drive and down Roeland Street past the old prison. Drivers of cars and buses, even police vehicles, who encountered the crowd were politely ushered through the ranks. There was no menace and no threat, only the determination to make their demands known to the government.
Halting the crowd at the corner of Roeland and Buitenkant streets on the edge of the city centre, Kgosana walked the few blocks to the Caledon Square police station. The commissioner of police was there and the local police and security chiefs. “I could see panic on their faces,” he recalls. What certainly scared them was the knowledge that with a flick of his finger Kgosana could set his supporters loose on Cape Town, with unimaginable results.
“I told them I wanted an appointment with the minister of justice, FC Erasmus. I said I would discuss with the minister the demands we were making.”
The policemen went away and returned with the message that he could have an appointment, provided he sent his followers away. Kgosana was acting in accordance with instructions issued by Sobukwe who was under arrest and facing charges of “incitement”: co-operate with the police and if they said disperse, then disperse, but request that they gave a reasonable time to do so.
“Sobukwe was totally opposed to any use of violence at that stage. His argument was that if he wanted us to use violence then he would first have to teach us, train us, how to use violence. Then he would be able to command people who knew some violence discipline.”
So, using a police loud-hailer and speaking in every language he could muster – English, Xhosa, Setswana, Afrikaans and Zulu – Kgosana told the crowd that they had achieved what they had come to do. “I was totally convinced at that stage that the highest point of a non-violent struggle in South Africa had been reached,” he says. “It had been a most disciplined, non- violent campaign after the terrible story of Sharpeville.”
He led his people back to Langa, and then with a small group of other leaders returned to Caledon Square by car. He says he had no illusions: he knew a State of Emergency had been declared earlier in the day and he expected to be arrested after his meeting with Erasmus. But he still went to keep the promised appointment.
But it was not to be. The government betrayed him. The moment Kgosana arrived at Caledon Square he was curtly told: “The minister has no time to see you.” He was immediately detained under the Emergency. That night the army put a ring of steel around the townships and police and soldiers began methodically going from house to house, kicking down doors and forcing people to return to work.
Kgosana was later charged with holding an illegal procession but escaped from the country while on bail.
There is no trace of bitterness as he tells the story of the betrayal. Instead he laughs as he remembers that the security police chief who detained him was “fuming” about having to deal with this “little native agitator”.
With the PAC-in-exile in acute disarray, Kgosana got on with building his life. Now home again he sees the main problem facing the PAC as “party-building and party organisation. We can have goodwill across the country, and I think it is there, but it has to be made concrete through a certain order within the party in the form of organised branches which know their responsibility and duties. And a lot of accountability is necessary.”
He spells out what he is trying to do: “Our people are being seen and are being active at the ward level, not only as PAC but as members of the ward committee. It is only when people see that you are involved in their day-to-day business of life and you are concerned with their general welfare that they will pick you up when it comes time to say who will represent the ward.”
It is no use, he says, the PAC promising to give people houses and better schools when it gets into government. “The people who are holding power have said those things and nobody sees it happening. We cannot repeat the same language and therefore the strategy has to be different. We have to be associated with work that has been done to improve the quality of life.”
But why a PAC? Not only is there its Africanist creed, he says, but “you need a good opposition party, not a party that is subservient to the government” and he goes on to the well-used argument: “Democracy is as good as the opposition makes it.”
If democracy is not fostered, he warns, “we will drift into the one-party system which Africa has experienced over the last 30 years”. He believes there are already worrying signs that democracy is slipping in the ANC’s deposing of Patrick Lekota from the Free State premiership, and the treatment of Bantu Holomisa.
“If the ANC fails to deliver there has to be a choice,” he says, and he believes the PAC must rise to the level where it will be seen widely as a viable alternative to the present government.
“There are basic things which should have come out of the fruits of April 27 1994,” he says. “But the trickle-down to those who have suffered most is not sinking and we have to identify why.”
Kgosana argues that after nearly three years many people “feel despondent, they feel let down, they have been living in the world of empty promises. Even the staunchest members of the ANC are worrying about the lack of direction.”
Can Kgosana do for the PAC what he did 37 years ago? Some inside the organisation worry that he no longer has the personal power and magnetism that he demonstrated then. “During the Cape Town days I was a crusader,” he responds. “I think I have matured.” He does not speak in terms of street politics but of “hard work” and “restructuring the party so that it is a machine that can win elections”.