analysis
James Myburgh
In his speech to Parliament on the president’s state of the nation address, Essop Pahad accused Tony Leon of having sung “hymns of praise” to the “apartheid war machine” and the “policy of the Bantustans” while serving in the army.
The evidence Pahad produced for this was an article by Ronald Suresh Roberts in the Financial Mail on Leon’s reportage, as a young conscript, for the in-house South African Defence Force journal, Paratus. Roberts had gone so far as to claim, deliriously, that in these writings one could find the “wellsprings of [Leon’s] current political philosophy”.
The piece by Roberts was published shortly before the local government elections in December 2000. Its timing was, it appeared, not wholly unconnected to the propaganda requirements of the ruling party. Certainly, some senior African National Congress members, including Thabo Mbeki, seized on the article to accuse Leon of having been an “apartheid security force propagandist”.
Unfortunately for Roberts and the ANC, these claims rested on rather flimsy foundations. Roberts had had to subject Leon’s mundane reportage to horrible tortures before it confessed to supporting the Bantustan system or the invasion of Angola.
For instance, Pahad (following Roberts) claims that one article entitled “Our magnificent air taxis” describes “the illegal invasion of Angola”. In truth, the only mention of Angola in the five-page article was the sentence: “the unsung heroes of 28 squadron were also responsible for evacuating 1 604 refugees in a period of four days, shortly after the conclusion of hostilities in Angola”.
But Pahad’s attempt to warm up these stale accusations does open him up to the question: who was he singing “songs of praise” to in the 1970s? There are two extremely revealing articles written by Pahad for the African Communist during this period. The one is a review of the life of the South African Communist Party stalwart Yusuf Dadoo on his 70th birthday (1979), the other a report on a visit to Cuba (1976).
In the 1970s Pahad was, as one could expect, an unquestioning supporter of the Soviet Union and a blind adherent to the Comintern “line”. In his article on Dadoo Pahad described the Soviet Union as “the main bulwark of all those fighting for a new and better life free from capitalism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, racism and fascism”.
Elsewhere in the piece he claims that, at the outbreak of World War II, no distinction could be drawn between the forces opposing Hitler and the Nazi regime. For Pahad, “Communist and non-communist progressives characterised the war as an imperialist war”.
Of course, this changed when “in June 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union”. “In a flash,” Pahad writes, “the progressive forces everywhere marshalled their energies in support of the world’s first socialist country … It was now a people’s war in which the Soviet Union, the only socialist country in the world, had to be defended and assisted.”
Pahad’s inability to see a distinction between the Nazi regime and Britain helps put in perspective his blindness to the moral distinction between those who enforced apartheid and the liberals who opposed it.
The more revealing article is that on Cuba. Pahad attended the first Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (CPC) in Havana as a keen young socialist. As he put it: “For me as a South African revolutionary the 1st Congress was an unforgettable and emotional experience.” Pahad described Cuba as a “haven of socialism” and a “small island of Freedom on the very doorstep of the most criminal and aggressive imperialist power”.
Cuba, Pahad wrote, “is a country in which power belongs to the working people, a country in which the means of production are collectively owned, a country in which the alliance of workers and farmers is an unbreakable bond, cemented, guided and organised by the CPC, the leading force in Society and the State”.
It was, Pahad affirmed, a “socialist democracy in practice and no amount of calumny, lies and half truths of the imperialist ideologues and mass media can distort this truth”.
There were, for Pahad, lessons that could be learnt from this “small island of Freedom”.
For one: “The Cuban experience has once more demonstrated the fundamental truth that in order to build a socialist society the decisive role has to be played by a vanguard Party resting on the firm bed-rock of the science of Marxism-Leninism.”
Another: “In every aspect of life in Cuba, as in other socialist countries, we see the prime necessity of a Party to lead, to guide and to direct, and for its members to be the most disciplined with the highest revolutionary consciousness.”
For Pahad it was wondrous to see how “in Cuba a new society and with that a new man is being created”.
To what extent does Pahad still adhere to these “fundamental truths”?
There has been no mea culpa from him and, unlike many other members of the SACP, he does not appear to have gone through a process of ideological detoxification. What is so striking about these earlier descriptions of Cuba is how familiar the language is in contemporary South Africa. Only two years ago the current ANC leadership called for the creation of a “New Person” in this country.
While Pahad no longer openly expounds socialism, he still believes that the party (the ANC) should be the “leading force in Society and State”. And that in the “transformation” of South Africa “a vanguard Party” is needed “to lead, to guide and to direct”.
This view is shared by his master. A couple of months ago, in the ANC national executive committee’s January 8 statement, Mbeki described the ANC as “the vanguard movement for the social transformation of our country”, and called on the party to “build up a membership … of committed revolutionary cadres”.
James Myburgh is a former researcher for the Democratic Alliance doing a doctorate at Oxford University