It seems to be an unavoidable fact of the human condition that former altar boys, especially the Catholic ones, end up being the best revolutionaries.
Chris Hani grew up in rural Transkei, near Cofimvaba, and got his rudimentary education in Catholic schools, from where it was a natural progression for him, bright lad that he was, to become an altar boy and develop a fierce determination to become a priest when he grew up. Luckily his father put his foot down, vetoing any such plans, and Chris was set on the road to becoming a lifelong revolutionary instead.
Perhaps Catholic priests (and high church Anglicans like Trevor Huddleston) have that much more fervour about their mission — or at least they did in the old days. Perhaps they had a way of putting across the ideas contained in the Christian Bible in a particularly believable way.
Certainly the life of Christ was itself quite a revolutionary one, standing up, as he did, against both Roman colonial occupation and repression, and the reactionary cant of his own religion and society. The guy sure did change the world, although it took some time.
And that would have been attractive and significant in the growing mind of the young Chris Hani.
But how revolutionary can you get? How determined can you become in the quest to reach that elusive goal of universal liberation? I can only speculate that it was that early Catholic intensity that turned Chris into the dedicated, single-minded, selfless revolutionary that he was — a selflessness that would ironically also be the cause of his destruction (like Christ’s, one might argue, while seeking to avoid straying into the territory of blasphemy).
The more gullible among us would leap at the analogy. ‘Hey, yeah: ‘Chris’, ‘Christ’, ‘crucifixion’. There might be something in this!”
But that is not in any way where one wants to go.
To begin with, the guy we all knew and loved as ‘Chris” wasn’t Chris at all. His real name was Martin Tembisile Hani. He had borrowed his younger brother’s name in order to secure a passport from the South African authorities while he was on the run, and used this subterfuge to get out of the country. (Presumably he brushed aside any notion that his kid brother might one day have some use for a passport of his own. The revolutionary impulse is filled with daunting certainties, decisions that have to be taken on the spur of the moment, consequences to be considered at some later time.)
But once out of the country, and through all those revolutionary years, until the day he was killed, he kept his brother’s identity — or at least part of it. At no time, not even after coming out from underground and returning to South Africa, did he ever consider reverting to being Martin Hani. Why?
Chris was a funny guy. The former altar boy who was determined to become a priest was an unlikely candidate for a guerrilla. Even in later years it was his intellectual character rather than his physique that impressed you when you met Chris.
And yet, in 1963, at the tender age of 21, he, along with a small group of others, had decided that, rather than taking advantage of the ANC leadership’s offer to send them abroad for advanced education, priming them for ‘leadership”, he would join the ranks of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), and become a soldier like any other South African patriot. And he turned out to be the best and most dedicated soldier of that early, post-Rivonia generation — and a natural leader within the ranks of MK.
Those were indescribably difficult times in exile. It was clear that all levels of the ANC and MK were infiltrated. People were advised to choose noms de guerre to avoid being identified, and to save their families from persecution back home.
I grew up with people who called themselves by unlikely names like Boston Gagarin (also known as Tar Baby), Tau Tau, DB, Sheriff, Champ and so on.
Chris kept the name Chris — but, in a half-hearted attempt at concealment, changed his surname to Nkosana. And so we knew him till the 1970s, and everybody’s cover was blown anyway, and he reverted — not to his own name, but his brother’s. I guess he figured no one, not even his wife, would swallow that ‘Martin” moniker that he had dropped so long ago. And so ‘Chris Hani” he stayed.
But at another level, I think that the name he chose to be known by was an indication that he never had any intention of coming out from underground until the final objective had been attained. It had become part of his skin. He had taken a decision, way back in 1963, to throw himself into the struggle for liberation, at whatever cost, and losing his own identity was part of that process. It made no difference to him. What mattered was the final outcome.
I believe that this is what made the man we will always remember as Chris Hani what he was to all of us. Through the long years of exile and underground engagement, Chris was uniquely open, honest, committed, courageous, friendly, loving, humorous, open about his own fallibility and loyal far beyond the call of duty. Something of all of this shone through Chris, so that even those who did not know him intimately instantly trusted his integrity.
To those who had lived through the long, bitter years of struggle, inside and outside the country, Chris Hani was a rare symbol of all the things that were held dear in the concept of commitment and leadership. Why is his loss so painful even now, 10 years after he was cut down?
A friend of mine who marched with Chris all through those years, from 1963 to 1993, says that his loss is important because ‘Chris, today, would have been the conscience of the African National Congress. No one would have been able to ignore his views. He was not the kind of person who would be tempted to stream into the comfort zones of the new South Africa. He would never have given up the fight for the ordinary people.”
For myself, I agree with all of the above. But more than that, I miss him because he was just Chris.
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