And as a disclaimer, those of you who know you're pieces of shit in relationships. Shut the fuck up. I'm not talking to you bastards-n-bitches. Dirtbags. Now? Just needed to add that part, because we are living in a time when rapist-enablers and molester-enablers want to pretend like they're the ones being wronged and woe-as-me, no. Short bridge. Long walk. Get the steppin. With that said!? Disclaimer?
Done!
Here are a few posts about Mac Maharaj of the ANC who stepped down not long ago as Presidential Spokesman. Maharaj? Has had his share of questions raised about him and his own dealings. I am posting these articles because the latest one I came across, in it? He raises some GOOD AND GREAT POINTS. But I'm not discounting the source of who is talking is Him. But he does HIGHLIGHT, how White Power Supremacy works and points out some fundamental features of it that are universal. With the primary one being to keep the targeted group, unable to explore and experience all aspects of life, to create that drive to do for themselves.
For me it was a good read, because he made good points AND GREAT POINTS. But I never forgot about the fact that this is still HIM, talking. Here is the first article;
July 26, 2015 1:27 pm
Veteran of the ANC, former confidant of Mandela and until recently the spin-doctor of President Zuma
T
he following is a transcript of a wide-ranging interview between Alec Russell, News Editor of the Financial Times, and Mac Maharaj, former confidant of Nelson Mandela and until recently the spin-doctor of President Jacob Zuma. The interview, on Sunday June 7, covers the Nkandla controversy, the record of the ANC, the party’s succession battle and Africa’s ups and downs since the 1950s.
Mac Maharaj: When President Zuma visited me in hospital there was total excitement. Those nurses and staff who missed the occasion felt terribly aggrieved. But then I said to [my wife] Zarina that his presence, even the image, should have created negativity in some way. We found no evidence of that negativity. By the time I left there isn’t a single person in the entire ICU section of nursing staff from cleaner to nurses, which do not now show heightened warmth towards me. Now, the question arises, there is this one image of the President: how does it square with the dominant image presented by many of the opinion-makers?
On Africa in the 60s
So what became the challenge for independent Africa? Economic development is not taking place. The Cold War is raging. Kwame Nkrumah wants to build the Upper Volta Dam. Where’s the money going to come from? Egypt under Nasser wants to build the Aswan Dam. The line up on everything you want to do has been divided on the basis of the Cold War. It didn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong; if you want to tough out the communist country’s grip on the country, you go there and you do your thing and promise the people things. But nothing is being addressed in a fundamental sustainable manner.So the issue when most of Africa gained independence in the 60s, again translated itself into what’s our custom? What’s our tradition and the dominant at the time was one-party democracy. All of it, all the founding fathers of African independence felt that way. At that stage even scholars in the West had no fundamental critique of one-party democracy.
And even on the question of those developments, little came forward in a substantial way. There was literature but not in a substantial way to make you aware that if you build the Kariba Dam you must now set aside maintenance. You can’t do it if you wait for one day. There will be nothing.
Alec Russell: So it was quite lucky that South Africa gained its independence in the 90s and not in the 60s?
MM: Exactly. But I don’t want to put it like Tutu would put it that it’s a good thing that Mandela suffered because he became a reconciler.
I was a young man in Britain at that time when Sékou Touré took power in Guinea. Was I chuffed! Yes, a prime minister riding a bicycle. And here’s a prime minister who produces a party congress document, says, we haven’t got the funds, we haven’t got this, but we’re going to develop because we’ve got the main asset: human capital. And we’re going to invest in human capital. So lots of good thinking, lots of attempts to unlock development]. Kenya made an effort of pulling its own way but we cannot forget that the Cold War had a fundamental impact on shaping the pathways and made the pathways extremely difficult.
AR: You’re very candid about your time in the Cold War. But when you look at your attitude in eastern Europe, were you naive?
MM: I’ll put it slightly differently. I was already very left when I left the country and came to Britain. I wanted to study at the LSE. It was not a communist university, but it was left, and I said, that’s where I want to stay. Now, when I look back, in Britain there was literature criticising communism, but it was not criticising itself from what I’ve experienced. So, I don’t want to use the word naive. I was in an environment where the choices that I have to make about what I believe were driven by my experience, and the experience was, you are telling me that communism is rubbish, but when I go to communism it treats me like a human being. My first room was in Notting Hill Gate where the notice said, for “Coloureds Only”. There were 96 beds in that three-storey building. There were beds under the stairs. I paid for the flat £5 and ten shillings, but I think many used to pay one pound and ten shillings, one and a half pounds, for a bed under the stairs. Now, that’s the experience you have.
So, that’s why I’m a little bit wary about the word, because naive implies that there was a better way that we should have known. For me these quibbles that I put up, Alec, is because they arise even now as we talk and debate, because there is not enough public discourse aimed at understanding the views of the other and I use this word based on the way I have looked at Mandela.
There were times when he would phone me at five in the morning, and he’d say, Mac, so and so, what do you know about that person? And he’d question me. I’d put the phone down. What the bloody hell? You ring me at 5 o’clock? Three, four days later I learn that he had a breakfast with the person. He has now looked at the person, tried to understand him, he’s going to engage him from where he comes from and then he’s going to be at pains to discuss with you to bring you to where he wants you.
To return to that period, the next wave in the face of these difficulties was a sense suddenly that it will come through the barrel of a gun. Libya, Gaddafi came that way. What changed?
But then I must be careful, because it’s very easy from hindsight to say what he should’ve done, that he had the resources and where he should have put it. At that time there was nobody saying where to put it. There was no question about infrastructure development
Whether you come from a free market perspective or more of a Marxist attitude, the truth of the matter is that all are premised on free movement, but in the circumstances of the Cold War, closed economies were the norm. And closed economies can grow wealth up to a point, but after that it’s over. So, that’s where I come from, and in South Africa translating all that, we found ourselves confronted with a regime so solidly backed because of the Cold War and because of its strategic position and assets, so firmly supported by the developed West.
So, here’s our battle now. Our strategy’s now compounded. We’ve got a well-developed economy, we’ve got a powerful ruling body, we have a race divide, we have privileged whites. Again it’s coming back to today: when there was white minority rule they could redistribute among the white community because they’re a minority. We can’t redistribute that way amongst ourselves when we are the majority.
When I look back as a young man, at Natal University, I was not prepared to listen to any white person, lecturer, student or anyone, who comes and tells me that I must be engaging in peaceful action. We had to go through a phase where we came to distinguish between extra legal action, extra constitutional action, because we were now fighting in a space where we don’t have the vote but we do not want to end up in jail. So, we began to talk about extra constitutional, extra parliamentary forms of action.
When I got to Britain I cannot think of a period where I grew up as rapidly as I grew up in Britain, because it put me in touch from Malaysians to Latin Americans, Nigerians, the lot. We were all going through the same experiences, and we were going through failures and successes. The British had crushed the Malaysians and Burmese when they resorted to armed struggle. Cameroons attempted it, crushed, and lo and behold then comes the Cuban and Algerian experiences. Just one bloody boat, and here we are. What are we doing? You will see a very interesting debate that took place amongst those that were committed to Marxism. There was one strand that said, the conditions have to be mature, they have to mature for such a revolution to take place. Che Guevara says we can create the conditions. So, here when the debate is taking place, our answer to anybody who says it’s is a problem, we respond that we’ll create the necessary conditions by launching the armed struggle. Forget about some of the literature that’s coming up at the moment, for example claiming that Chief Luthuli was a pacifist. He wasn’t. He presided over the meeting of the national executive of the ANC and next night presided over the joint meeting of the Congresses, both of which authorised Mandela to set up Umkhonto weSizwe.
By that time, not so much the experience of the West but the experience of the East, of the Soviets and the Chinese, were telling us, don’t think it’s just the barrel of a gun; that political mobilisation of the people is a crucial component of the armed struggle. The first time we went for advice: Mao Tse Tung told Walter Sisulu, the then Secretary-general of the ANC that resorting to the armed struggle in SA was a crazy idea. That was in 1953.
AR: Crazy because . . .?
MM: Mao tse Tung said that you haven’t created any of the conditions for a successful revolution. You are thinking that if we can just give you an army and train you, you’ll fight your way to victory. I mention these things because the way forward was becoming a very, very complex one, Every time we tried to do some peaceful action there was increased repression in SA. The answer was more repression from the system.
So what were our assumptions then? Our assumption was, get rid of the foreign ruler and everything will be hunky-dory. That is number one. Our assumption was that economic development would be a walk in the park. We had lived in our life experience in a continent that was used to take the raw materials out of; so underlying that assumption was that all that would stay here for our people’s benefit.
And look back, how we struggled.
On his early activist years
AR: When you were in your early activist years — before you were on Robben Island — did any one of you think it would take as long as it did to bring down apartheid?
MM: You know, when we turned to the arms struggle [in 1961] we thought it would be over in six months. Comrades were not allowed to tell their families. There was a song that we would take the country the Castro way, based on the banana boat song Belafonte used to sing. And when I came into the country on May 2nd 1962 after my training in the German Democratic Republic, every almost every underground unit member was telling me, just give it six months. When we landed in prison, Wilton Mkwayi, every New Year would get up and greet us from his cell, shouting and greeting, and welcoming the new year and saying, don’t worry, chaps, five years and we’re going to be out. And then one day somebody got fed up and shouted back and said, Wilton, I’ve heard this nonsense so many times. And Wilton said, I’ve never told you when the five years begins.
But by the time I got to prison, to be fair, Mandela was already arguing and debating issues of the struggle. With me it is the way in which he won the argument as to whether I should study Afrikaans. He understood where I was coming from. He understood that I was committed to the issue of an armed struggle based on mass mobilisation. But he said to me, Mac, in the end, he says, how do you ambush the other side? You have inferior forces, you have inferior weaponry, but how are you going to defeat that chap? So I say, well, it’s a, b, c, whenever he forces . . . here and do this there, and let me draw it for you on the ground, and I’ll get you to move his forces from this position, where he’s numerical and weapon superiority is neutralised. We discussed this at great length, drawing on the sand, and when we’d finished he said, but if you don’t know the General on the other side who is also seeking to understand what you are likely to do, what you do? And if you don’t know your opposite, how are you going to get them to respond the way you want. You’d better understand that.
No, I said, but I’ve read the Commando by one of the Afrikaner leaders, Denys Reitz and other books so I have an idea how they think. Mandela responded that those were specific instances under previous commander. So what must I do? I ask He says, learn the language. OK, I said, I’ll learn. He says, no, learn their poetry, understand their culture, because I’m talking about understanding.
Now, I don’t think we ever reached a point to have that sort of luxury that we enjoyed by being in prison with Mandela and Sisulu. Unless you do rigorous military training over years and rise through the ranks, these lesson never comes to you.
So, with all those difficulties, the setback of the Rivonia arrests in 1963 was a phenomenal setback, but we cannot interrogate history on the basis that if we were there again would we have done it differently? Because the differently only arises because you’re looking back.
We used to say “we’ll go for classical guerrilla warfare”. I get to prison, Madiba says to me, what do you mean by classical guerrilla war? I said, the way the Chinese did it. Get a liberated zone in a rural area and from there we operate. He says, can you look at South Africa’s map?
Now, one of the most interesting things in my life has been that when I was a student in London and also teaching, I was in a South African Communist Party unit, and we received a request for literature, and I used to go and collect the literature, buy them all over, and mail them to secret addresses in South Africa. I remember getting a message from home that thanked us for the books that we sent and said, can you also make a special effort to give us the books written by colonial forces that defeated the guerrillas in specific instances. If I recall correctly there was British general who had written of his experiences in Malaysia. When I’m now in prison and we’re having this kind of debate, I’m listening to Mandela, what is he saying? So, one day I say to him, bloody hell, did you read this book? He says, of course I did, I studied it. I said to him, so you are the person who was asking for all this literature, and it turned out to be true.
A very interesting point for me from the point of view of lessons. The past should not be looked at . . . generally we look at the past for success stories, but if you want a real lesson from the past, look for the lesson that says what you should not do. So, here we are, we’re caught in this situation, and we were now talking about mounting classical guerrilla warfare. One of the comrades who had done his military training in the People’s Republic of China argued that Botswana was on the eve of its independence and it would serve as our rear base. But then remember at that time there’s the Algerian independence war taking place. The Algerian anti-colonial forces had Tunisia on one and Morocco on the other as neighbouring states to which they could retreat. We’re looking for that kind of environment here in SA. We can’t find it. And so our struggle kind of makes a point where even though Mozambique was independent, Zimbabwe was independent, and Namibia had gained independence, but there was no possibility that we could operate freely. We had to make an arrangement that said to the leadership in our neighbouring countries, please, as our then president of the ANC, Oliver Tambo put it to Samora Machel and to the frontline states, he says, all we are asking you is just close your eyes when our cadres go through your respective countries and lets deny that you’re giving us any facility. We don’t want you to fight our struggle; we know it’s not possible for you to do our fight.
That’s a very important point, because part of the difficulty has been that in 30 years of exile also threw up another interesting problem. How do you get assistance, how is your presence tolerated in the country? These countries do not have the economic, the political power or military capacity to withstand a country like South Africa. How do you live in that host country?
Our exile movements from SA other than the ANC in one way or another got involved in the politics of the host country. We took a position, straight up. At one time I think we were accused by Potlako Leballo of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) who informed the Tanzanians that we were part of the Oscar Kambona plot to stage a coup in Tanzania. The Tanzanians gave us 14 days to clear out of Tanzania, and our guerrilla force had to clear out and we ended up somewhere in a remote part of the Soviet Union!, There was no truth in the allegation against us but we had to work hard to rebuild our relations with Tanzania. So we kept seriously outside the area of host country politics. Again, from the point of view of a theorist, you can start condemning men and making judgments.
That is how things shaped up. So, those are the difficulties, some of them. The rest are there, but they illustrate now the condition of Africa……. because when Mandela went out in 1962, we thought that the independent African countries would be able to train and us and even provide logistic support. If you read that crazy document, Operation Mayibuye, you will see that we thought that within six months we would be parachuting guerrillas into SA using Soviet aircraft, and Mandela himself says that when he went to Ethiopia and he was on the parade and there was a young Ethiopian lad flying a fighter plane, doing all those aerobatic moves in the air. When the pilot landed and walked up to the stadium to take his salute, Mandela got the shock of his life.
Then again there was a black pilot in Nigeria and Mandela is panicking. That gives you an idea how colonialism had destroyed our self-confidence. So that’s how Africa was, but we learn again to cut out the judgmental claptrap. The simple reality is that it was an assumption sitting in the back of our minds. It was not a conscious statement grounded on facts and analysis. It was an assumption that with Pan African unity, every country could become free with us. The reality was Africa was not developed. Each country had enormous problems of its own. Every experiment took us one way and then sometimes took us two steps forward and one back, sometimes it took us one step forward and two steps back. And that’s how we had to move, and it is in that space that we had to move as South Africans. That for me tells me how important Africa was for us, is that by the mid-80s it was becoming clear that either SA was going to be reduced to ashes or it would have to find a way forward.
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