Playwright Zakes Mda visits a small town in the Free State in this week’s installment of our guest writer series
‘Bert Oosthuizen? Just up the street,’ says the sweet Afrikaner girl with a ready smile. The throbbing sounds of Maak-Haar-Eina fill the cafe as she serves her black customers with fat cakes and Russian sausages.
I am on the South African National Civic Organisation (Sanco) ‘consultation trail’ in the small eastern Free State town of Wepener. The issue at hand is the installation of Dr Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri as premier of the Free State.
What do the citizens of small-town Free State think?
The blacks want me to talk to their mayor, Lebona Phalatsi, and whites direct me to Oosthuizen, their spokesman.
After driving through muddy streets in the rusty corrugated iron shack township of Qibing, I find Phalatsi playing a game of morabaraba with a group of children.
He is not the mayor at the moment, I discover, because he has been suspended by the African National Congress. Then why do the people in the street refer to him as the mayor?
Phalatsi gleefully tells me that it is because they do not recognise the suspension. It was imposed on the local branch by the higher regional structures.
‘Just as in the case of Terror Lekota where the national executive imposed its will on the provincial structures,’ he says.
His problems, the suspended mayor seems to think, all began with the bust of Kommandant Louw Wepener, which to this day stands proudly in front of the Town Hall. He spearheaded the movement to have it removed and kept in the library because he felt it was an insult to his people.
Now allegations and counter-allegations are flying in all directions in the town. These include rape, child abuse, and dagga smuggling.
Phalatsi is appealing against his suspension because he says it is unconstitutional. Disciplinary measures, according to the constitution of the ANC, must be convened ‘at the area of the level where the violation was committed’.
He is accused of instructing people to demolish the low-income houses that the town council was building.
‘I had nothing to do with that,’ he says. ‘Qibing Building Association actually destroyed the houses. They were protesting against corrupt tendering procedures.
‘Contracts for building the houses were given to white construction companies even though there are black builders in the township. Although I had nothing to do with the destruction of the houses, I feel that the people who destroyed them had legitimate complaints.’
He is being persecuted because he is insisting that Louw Wepener’s statue must be removed.
‘Louw Wepener was a Boer soldier fighting the black people for their land in the last century. He ravaged and savaged the lands of the Basotho people, and was killed at Thaba Bosiu in 1865.
‘His statue in De Beer Street, which is our main street, is an insult to black people.’
For the sake of reconciliation, he says, the bust must not be destroyed, but must be relocated to the library. ‘After all, even Terror Lekota removed the statue of Verwoerd,’ he adds.
Wepener people have very strong ties with the people of Lesotho. They feel that the border between the two countries was arbitrarily drawn through conquest.
‘Wepener is really part of Lesotho,’ says Phalatsi, ‘I myself have most of my relatives in Lesotho. What do I say to them when they come here where I am mayor and they see the statue of a Boer who persecuted their forebears?’
His fellow ANC councillors, Phalatsi says, have betrayed him. They have been ‘bought’ over by rightwing Afrikaners, and the ANC-led council is now corrupt. During weekends the ANC councillors are invited out for a braai at the farm of the town clerk, an Afrikaner of the old order who ‘does not support whatever the ANC is doing’. Now they have joined the Afrikaners in talking against the removal of the statue, and in framing him. Hence his suspension by the regional structures of the ANC.
Although he has been suspended from mayorship Phalatsi is still a town councillor and continues to serve in the branch executive of the ANC.
He has no intention of giving up his campaign against the bust. He fully supports Sanco and was the treasurer of Sanco Southern Free State before he became mayor. ‘My followers and I fully support Sanco’s campaign against the Matsepe-Casaburri woman.
‘We’ll fully participate, but only as individuals. If we participate as ANC branches the NEC will pounce on us, and some of us will be ‘redeployed’ to the unemployment lines,’ he declares.
He says there is now a culture of fear in the ANC, for the organisation supports people who are corrupt, and punishes those who are trying to rectify the situation. ‘If we go on at this rate,’ he says, ‘in 12 years’ time or even less, we’ll not be the ruling party.’
He claims that it is part of his fight against corruption that he now wants to unseat Joseph Mthala, the man who took over the mayorship. He accuses Mthala of being involved in a sordid case of child abuse, abduction and rape.
The Wepener police confirm that a ‘docket has been opened’ against Mthala. But then, they add, a ‘docket has been opened’ against Phalatsi too. Charges of dagga smuggling and of ‘passing false cheques’ are being investigated against him. He is currently on bail, they say, for throwing stones at a woman right in town, and using bad language.
I find Bert Oosthuizen in his yard which is littered with vehicle engines of all sizes. There are skeletons of heavy-duty trucks and sundry pieces of metal all over the yard.
He is a lean man with a friendly smile and a hand that gives one a tight grip in a warm greeting. He is the chairman of the Ratepayers Association and a member of the federal council of the Freedom Front. ‘I am up there with Viljoen,’ he boasts.
He says he has no problem with the new dispensation, since he wants to be part of the solution.
‘There are a lot of decent people in the ANC,’ he says. ‘I served with them in the Transitional Local Council.’
He says that Phalatsi is the most capable in the council. ‘But he has a mean streak, and is not honest. I know him very well, from the time he was born. He grew up in front of me, his mother was working for my wife. It was my family which comforted her when this boy was born, for he was an albino. That is why he was named Lebona.’
Oosthuizen says that the other councillors, even the whites, are incompetent, and the town is in financial difficulties. The services are deteriorating very fast. In the past two months 22 families have left because they see no future in the town. Businesses are closing down, and unemployment is increasing.
‘I have lived here all of the 66 years of my life, except for a short stint working for a bank in the then Rhodesia, but now I am selling everything and leaving too,’ he laments.
For Australia, perhaps? Or Canada? ‘No, I am going to Bethlehem (in the north-eastern Free State), to farm with my son-in-law. Here I am getting too many problems with the working staff. Now they come with demands for higher salaries.
‘And these are people who have worked for me for the past 24 years. Do you think if I had the money I would not pay them higher salaries?’
He feels that small Free State towns which used to be self-sufficient in the past will either be a burden for the province, or will become ghost towns.
Oosthuizen agrees with Phalatsi that most of the problems of Wepener emenate from the bust of Kommandant Louw Wepener in De Beer Street.
He says, ‘For the harmony of the town I will say take the bust away if most people don’t like it. But it is still there because the people of Wepener of all colours want the bust to stay. It is a sign of reconciliation. It is only Phalatsi and his half-brother who want to get rid of it. They once tried to remove it by force, then all of a sudden there were 28 blacks in uniform who said they would protect the bust with their lives. They came from the township.’
Mantshiyane of Sanco agrees that the problems of Wepener begin with the bust. Sanco feels that the mayor had to understand the political climate first, before he went around ‘fiddling’ with the bust.
‘You do not win the National Party and the Freedom Front members that way. He should have started with development instead of the statue. So even the black people of Wepener opposed him. They physically stopped him when he was trying to remove the statue.’
Mantshiyane is echoed by Nketsi Moleko, a furniture shop saleswoman. ‘The statue has been standing here since 1965. Did you ever hear that it has eaten somebody during that time? We have no time for useless quarrels here about statues. We want development.’
Oosthuizen is confident that the bust will stay. In the meantime he finds himself on the same side with the ‘enemy’ on the question of Terror Lekota.
He fully supports a demonstration against the installation of Matsepe-Casaburri as premier of the Free State, although he may not necessarily participate in it. He did not know about it, and has no mandate from his party to participate.
‘The worst thing that can happen to the Free State is taking Lekota away. He is the most capable man ‘ black or white ‘ I ever met, because he is against corruption. He is well liked by the farmer community. He would have been the trump card in Mandela’s policy of reconciliation. Why take such a man away?’
Mantshiyane says the in-fighting in Wepener is typical of what is happening in most small towns in the Free State, such as Ficksburg, Zastron and Bobhouse ‘ even Bloemfontein. Democracy is not functioning at grassroot level.
The problems all started before the local elections when the higher structures of the ANC imposed their own candidates on lower structures ‘ ‘just as they have done at provincial level with Matsepe-Casaburri’.
Sanco as a watchdog organisation did not run for local elections, but their members ran on the ANC ticket. Sanco considers itself a faithful ally of the ANC, and most of its members are ANC members as well. But it will continue to play its watchdog role outside party politics.
‘We are not against Matsepe-Casaburri as a person. We are against the fact that she has been imposed on us.
‘We are willing to compromise and let Terror go since he has already resigned. But we want our own candidates who have been nominated by us, not the ‘sole candidate’ imposed on us by the NEC. If we want a woman as premier we have our own Motlalopula Chabaku, the current speaker of the legislature.’
The feeling among some that the ANC is no longer a mass-based organisation but a corporation with directors who transmit their decisions in a top-down fashion. At all levels the ANC violates its own principle of consultation. Its unstated policy seems to be that democracy is good for South Africa, except for ANC members.
‘If we do not speak now,’ Mantshiyane says, ‘in two years’ time you will be killed if you try to speak. Now we’ll use the same tactics that we used against the apartheid regime. We’ll make the Free State ungovernable.’
Nketsi Moleko puts in the last word. ‘For the time being we are putting our problems in Wepener aside, since we are now faced with this big provincial problem, which is really a national problem.
‘We don’t care if Madiba says he has full confidence in Matsepe-Casaburri. In any case, when Madiba has full confidence in someone we have reason to worry. He expressed the same full confidence in Alan Boesak, and we all know what happened to him, and in Nkosazana Zuma, even when it was apparent to everyone that something was wrong with the manner in which the Sarafina II debacle was handled.’
Zakes Mda is the author of Ways of Dying (Oxford University Press)