A selfless servant of the revolution

Dumisani Makhaye need not worry. He is unlikely ever to be accused of moderation, proportion or good sense. He will forever bestride the face of our politics like a colossus, ceaselessly victimised by Lilliputian liberals and other, lesser mortals. His struggles will always be of the epic variety at the forefront of history’s great currents, as outlined by Marx, Engels and Lenin.

For him, the victory will continue forever – and struggle is certain.

It is less certain, however, that the MEC for housing in that corner of our little land known as KwaZulu-Natal will ever again enjoy such commodious housing as the R22 500-a-month mansion on Umhlanga Ridge with the half Olympic-sized pool, teak kitchen, jacuzzi and the special installation of R190 000 in furnishings which he has been occupying at taxpayers’ expense for some time now.

For Cde Makhaye, student of the communist classics and purveyor of a brand of Marxism so vulgar that it makes even other members of the workers’ vanguard giggle, is an honourable man. It has been pointed out to him that, for the price of his rent each month, three starter homes could have been built in the province, each housing a family of five poor peasants or proletarians.

Selfless servant of the revolution that he is, Cde Makhaye not only stooped to listen to what was being said in this instance; he also heard it. And now, as a consequence, he is to move back closer to the masses of the people in whose bosom he first forged his political consciousness.

Of course, Cde Makhaye’s occupation of this mansion, owned by a bloodsucking white bourgeois called James Fulton, was a nefarious set-up designed to discredit him. It was all engineered by the province’s Department of Public Works, headed by Celani Mtetwa who belongs to a certain other party not unknown in the province.

If you do not believe me, ask Cde Makhaye’s boss, Cde S’bu Ndebele, leader of the African National Congress in KwaZulu-Natal: he says so too.

If Cde Makhaye had any personal role in renting the house in Umhlanga Rocks I feel sure it was for reasons he suggested in a comment he made in July last year, when he was dealing with the tremendous housing shortage in KwaZulu-Natal. Cde Makhaye said: “While our objective remains to house people with no roofs over their heads, we need to explore ways in which our people can get bigger, better-quality homes.” Cde Makhaye, I am sure, was just exploring some of those ways and trying out one of the better houses.

Whatever the case, Cde Makhaye is blameless in this whole episode. He always is. The attempt to turn the incident into a scandal is the work of reactionaries. It is the work of blacks who have, as Cde Makhaye often says, been “rented” by whites, and of white liberals like Peter Davis, editor of the Sunday Tribune.

It may even be the work of dangerous third force elements bent on exposing Cde Makhaye and other leading patriots in the province to needless security risks. For this reason, Cdes Makhaye, Ndebele and others in the KwaZulu-Natal cabinet have sought, as they put it, an “audience with the intelligence community” to find “the source and aims of this sinister plot”.

But, as Makhaye pointed out in his letter to the Sunday Tribune last Sunday in which he laid the entire business to rest, there are also more pathetic motivations behind the so-called scandal. He pointed out that what worried Davis about him (Makhaye) renting a house in Umhlanga Rocks was that a black man was now living in this formerly white area.

Cde Makhaye wrote in his letter: “Cynics will say [Davis] is driven by an attempt to flush out ‘kaffirs’ from white suburbs. He may be one of those whites who think that they know Africans more than they know themselves.

“That is what happens to white bosses who deal with rented blacks.”

And who among us is not a cynic today? Particularly about someone like Davis, who always – even in the days of apartheid – opposed apartheid; someone whose own father was a prominent member of the old Liberal Party?

In his brilliant letter, Cde Makhaye went on to point out: “Davis, with his rabid anti-communist bigotry unwittingly identifies himself with the unfortunate company of Adolf Hitler, Josef Goebbels, Eugene de Kock, Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster, PW Botha, Jimmy Kruger, the white police who unleashed their dogs on Africans …”

It was vintage Cde Makhaye: concise, measured, to the point – but ruthless – I am sure you will agree.

How about this gem in the same letter? “Davis, your heart must heave and tremble as it receives the message that Dumisani Makhaye has … deepened his contact with the black working class, the black peasantry, the unrented black intellectuals and the whites who have broken honestly with the apartheid past.

“Among my new acquaintances are the domestic workers who put food on your table, Mr Davis. In spite of their super-exploitation, they will not poison you …”

Of course, the real reason people like Davis go for Cde Makhaye is that Makhaye is, as he says in the letter, “still a loyal student of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki, Chief Albert Luthuli, Steven Dlamini, Moses Kotane and Moses Mabhida”. He is not, he told the leadership of the ANC, including Cdes Thabo Mbeki and Mosiuoa Lekota, in favour of a “white-pleasing” ANC.

In their wisdom Cdes Mbeki and Lekota did not try to contradict him.

Why? Because, they know that in Cde Makhaye they have just the kind of comrade the party wants and needs. For was it not Cde Makhaye who joined in sponsoring a tribute to Cde Mbeki’s leadership in a draft resolution for this year’s national general council which spoke of the president’s “resolute, visionary and decisive leadership” which had brought “a sense of discipline, urgency and boldness in both the ANC and its government”?

That is to say: is Cde Makhaye not one of those most precious of cadres, one that kisses upwards and pisses downwards?

Is he not also the kind of comrade who (something of a literary figure himself) recalls to mind a passage of verse from Where Engels Fears to Tread by Cyril Connolly, the late English writer?