It’s funny how things pan out. When the great intellectual and stalwart of the struggle, a young man still only in his 30s known as Mzala, died in London somewhere in the 1980s, there was much talk about whether he should be buried where he had ”fallen” or whether his remains should have been repatriated to what was then a bitter South Africa to be laid to rest, as they say, at the place of his birth. Going ”home” was anathema in those days, the very thought of setting foot in the Native Land, alive or dead, was tantamount to treason against the cause that we had all sworn to. We would ”take the country the Castro way” or die in the attempt.
His parents, uncomplicated people from KwaZulu-Natal, sacrificed everyÂÂthing to be present in his final hours in this bizarre landscape of distant England. He had left home many years before and they had probably had little contact with their beloved son as he moved through the geography of exile: Zambia, Tanzania, probably the Soviet Union and the United States. As well as his trenchant contributions to the philosophy of liberation, he published a landmark and groundbreaking analysis of one of the most difficult personalities of apartheid rule. His book was called Chief With a Double Agenda, as I recall, and was about Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s discomforting relationship with the apartheid regimes led by Hendrik Verwoerd, Balthazar Johannes Vorster and PW Botha in succession.
The book achieved some fame and notoriety, but was always difficult to find. You could pick it up on the shelves of the International Defence and Aid Fund in Islington, to the north-east of central London, but not in a lot of other places. Its message was tough, but never became essential reading — even for the exiled community that lived, according to lip service, by and large by the politics of what we were fighting for, what was facing us and what we could expect in the unlikely event of final emancipation.
Mzala’s parents, as I say, were puzzled by what their son had become. Not that they were against his beliefs, or the way he articulated them. They were, after all, the soil from which he had sprung, and were as affected, disaffected and tortured by the injustices of the system as he was.
What puzzled them most was the nature of his impending death. When I went with a friend to visit them in a South London flat, they stared at us with incomprehension. ”He just kept on saying that he was having terrible pains in his stomach,” his father said to us. ”And then he died.”
The gulf between us, in this hour of death, was wider than the Atlantic Ocean. They were from home. We were relatively smug revolutionaries, or so we told ourselves. Theirs was the homeland we proclaimed we were fighting for. We were at home in the places that we had made ourselves comfortable in, studying, talking, honing the weapons of war, but not really understanding any more what it was we were aiming at for much of the time.
They were real. They were from the front line, doing all they could to keep their heads below the line of fire down there in Zululand. We, on the other hand, were generally slipping away from reality, moving towards the blandness of an incipient globalisation, with its catchphrases and shouted slogans let forth into the luxurious winds of the West that held us in such relatively comfortable captivity.
Mzala’s death brought us face to face with each other. His parents moved around his flat, where they were cramped in close confinement, with aching joints, blank stares of incomprehension, elderliness sped up by this incomprehensible journey to a foreign, colonial land whose purpose could only end in the demise of their precious offspring, who could have been a leader of men and women in his own country, made them proud and honourable, perhaps wealthy, if only time and place had allowed more balance for the fortunes of the Wretched of the Earth.
Why all this maudlin stuff? I am prompted to meditate on the life and death of Mzala because of reports that the remains of another great struggle stalwart, Moses Mabhida, have recently been exhumed in Mozambique and returned to South Africa for burial somewhere near his native Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal.
As with Mzala, who I came to almost know in the last months of his life, and in the process discover a hidden life in the man who was far removed from his revolutionary philosophy, Comrade Mabhida was an interesting mix of revolutionary orthodoxy and Zulu/African traditionalism.
He wasn’t just an ANC cadre. He rose to become leader of the SACP and apparently woke, walked, thought, talked and slept with a copy of Karl Marx’s infamous Das Kapital at his side.
And yet this is the man who, when I came to pay my respects and say my farewells at the Liberation Centre in what was then the Front Line capital of Lusaka, upbraided me with the stern admonishment: ”Don’t say ‘Good morning’ to me, comrade. You must say, ”Good morning, Uncle. You and I will never be equals.”
I was pretty young, I guess. I left the encounter with a bitter young taste in my mouth. It pulled the rug from under all the equality talk that I had come to believe in and chant as a revolutionary mantra. Not that I didn’t respect the man. Just that I was not expecting a wagging finger of native traditionalism as I stepped out to another phase of my life, flying to London, and, ultimately, a meeting with people like Mzala — all too short, all too fleeting.
Mabhida’s bones have now been repatriated, via the newly renamed OR Tambo International Airport. Mzala is already at rest in the dust of KwaZulu-Natal. Numberless and nameless others have never been given the option — left to lie where they have ”fallen”, as it were.
The logic of our Native Land is often difficult to fathom.