In his now famous interview with Irish radical Helena Sheehan, senior communist and African National Congress member Jeremy Cronin remarks that “the worst elements” in the ANC were “unleashed” on the left after last year’s anti-privatisation strike. The fact that this is happening again ironically confirms his complaint.
ANC national spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama’s public assault on Cronin last week carried the unmistakable message: independent ANC thinkers who find the party wanting are disloyal. Cronin’s interview was not meant for publication. The implication, therefore, is that his private convictions represent a form of treachery.
Ngonyama’s totalitarian outlook is underscored by the fact that the interview was essentially a defence of the ANC, and the South African Communist Party’s alliance with it, against far-left criticism. It is possible Ngonyama had not read, or understood, the interview before attacking it. To be frank, he is not among the ANC’s foremost intellectuals. But, if he was talking from an informed stance, the implication is that any defence of the ANC that concedes flaws is unacceptable. Only unquestioning support will suffice.
More ominous still was KwaZulu-Natal MEC Dumisani Makhaye’s scurrilous broadside in the Sowetan newspaper. After a paragraph or two of pseudo-Marxist babble, Makhaye gets down to the real point: Cronin is white, middle class and the son of a naval officer. By criticising President Thabo Mbeki’s African renaissance, Cronin is, as Makhaye would have it, calling for a “white messiah” to lead that renaissance.
So the real crime is Cronin’s race. No mention is made of his years in an apartheid jail — a sacrifice not made by Makhaye, that well-heeled provincial minister.
It is hard to see what someone like Makhaye is doing in the ANC, a movement that professes the principles of non-racialism, democracy and universal human rights. He is rabidly anti-white, once complaining at a national executive committee meeting that the ANC was becoming a “white-pleasing” organisation. In the wake of Zimbabwe’s violent and fraudulent election, he congratulated Robert Mugabe on his “victory” and called for the ANC to merge with that noted beacon of democratic practice, Zanu-PF. He regularly issues paeans of grovelling praise to The Leader, more suited to North Korea or Iraq than the proud citizens of a free country. His Sowetan “analysis” conveys the belief that there is no room in the ANC for left-leaning whites of independent mind, even those who have given their lives to the movement. Indeed, the paradox of Makhaye and those who think like him is their clear preference for former agents and enforcers of the apartheid state — if, like New National Party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk, they wheedle for favours and bend the knee.
Makhaye’s intellectual poverty is borne out by his reliance on the politics of smear and label. Liberal use is made of empty Marxist cant — “petty bourgeois”, “ultra-leftist”, “reactionary elements”. No serious attempt is made to engage Cronin’s ideas, which are not particularly earth-shaking and which the ANC in other contexts has partly conceded. If Cronin was wrong to perceive a widening gap between leaders and the masses, what is the point of the ANC’s “Year of the Volunteer”, aimed at drawing the rank and file into national programmes?
Makhaye, Ngonyama and their like may be a numerical minority in the ANC, but what is striking is the freedom and confidence with which they express themselves. This suggests that they enjoy high-level sanction. What would happen to Cronin if he publicly attacked the party’s Africanist faction in the same venomous vein? In like manner, Peter Mokaba was free to peddle his dissident views on HIV/Aids to all and sundry, while HIV-orthodox ANC members for the most part kept their heads safely below the parapet. Why has no one from the party’s sane social democratic centre dared come to Cronin’s public defence?
Cronin may or may not be right to argue in his interview that sufficient space remains in the ANC and the ruling alliance for diversity and debate. He may or may not be right to defend the party against ultra-left charges that it is irreversibly sliding towards Stalinism. But the interventions of Ngonyama and Makhaye do more than any argument offered by the far left to suggest Cronin is deluding himself, and is guilty of excessive optimism.
A shame on Israel
Israel has been plunged into a profound moral crisis by Monday’s attack on a Hamas military leader in Gaza that killed 16 people, 10 of them children, and wounded 160 others. If you aim a one-tonne bomb from a supersonic jet into what you know is a densely populated area you clearly intend to kill many more than one man. That is what Israel’s monstrous Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intended this week. Having done so, and knowing the extent of the casualties, he then declared the operation “a great success”.
Sharon has shamed Israel and the cause of a Jewish homeland. He is no better than those of Israel’s enemies who have bombed Israeli children. The question is whether the people of Israel have the good sense to get rid of him — lest they be similarly judged.