South Africa commemorates Sharpeville Massacre of 1960

[Paul Rigby]

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v0...ttler.html

Callaloo
Volume 32, Number 1, Winter 2009

E-ISSN: 1080-6512 Print ISSN: 0161-2492

DOI: 10.1353/cal.0.0315
Reviewed by
Meta L. Schettler
Wilderson, Frank B., III. Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. Boston: South End Press, 2008.

Wilderson taught classes at two universities in South Africa, the University of the Witswatersrand and Vista University, both in Johannesburg, and he helped organize protests by student groups while simultaneously working with an underground cell in MK. From his first trip to South Africa in 1989, as an outsider, Wilderson painfully predicted (using Fanon) the cooption of the ANC’s radicalism by liberal establishment forces and Nelson Mandela’s probable role in allowing that cooption. South Africans rarely received Wilderson’s Marxist critiques of Mandela willingly, which is understandable, but in the end Wilderson’s analysis proved prophetic. Wilderson recalls one memorable incident [End Page 285] which even put his life at risk, when, during a secret meeting with an MK cadre, the comrade slammed his head against the steering wheel of his car and held him at gunpoint in response to Wilderson’s commentary on Mandela. Wilderson recalls his thoughts in that moment, “Breathe, Frank, breathe. I knew that he had a black belt in karate and I could feel it in his firm, expert grip pinching my neck. Guess you don’t do Jesus jokes in Jerusalem” (287). Despite this frequent backlash, Mandela’s reputation being unassailable, Wilderson also documents how his own immediate circle of ANC comrades attempted to resist the coming “Hydra” of “English liberalism and African conciliation” (144).

Key to this resistance was the leadership of Chris Hani, a leader in the South African Communist Party and a senior officer in Umkhonto we Sizwe. Tragically, Hani was assassinated a year before the elections, on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1993. Most valuably, Incognegro introduces an American audience to Chris Hani through memories of ANC work, his popularity among the rank and file, and the shock of his sudden loss. In many ways Wilderson’s personal narrative pivots on Hani’s death. Would a revolution be possible without his leadership? It is perhaps impossible to know at what point the ANC’s goal of a people’s revolution was surrendered for a compromised negotiation with the apartheid regime to achieve the goal of democratic elections. Did it happen during the secret negotiations to release Nelson Mandela and his fellow leaders on Robben Island? Did it happen when prominent South African businessmen met with exiled ANC leaders to talk about a negotiated solution? Or did it happen behind closed doors in talks between various political and military leaders of the National Party and the African National Congress after Mandela was released, during the 1990 to 1994 period? Wilderson’s Incognegro points toward this last time period as the most likely answer.

In a meeting with his MK cadres immediately after Hani’s assassination, one comrade suggested a broader conspiracy coming from conservative forces outside South Africa, “Fifty-thousand dollars from the Heritage Foundation. Thirty-thousand dollars from a West German minister of parliament. And someone from the ANC, someone high up enough to sell a vital piece of information—the timetable of Hani’s bodyguards” (381). In this speculation, Incognegro perhaps resembles Zoë Wicomb’s brilliant novel David’s Story [2000] which explores the experience of two MK comrades during the transitional period, David Dirkse, who is confessing the story to an anonymous narrator, and Dulcie, one of his comrades, who is being tortured by unknown assailants throughout the novel. One troubling commonality between Incognegro and David’s Story lies in their description of the active execution of ANC activists during the years of transition. Both David and Dulcie’s names exist on such a hit list, and at the end of the novel David takes his own life by driving his car off a cliff into the sea near Cape Town. Similarly, Wilderson writes that in 1992 comrades close to him were receiving death threats, “Eleven ANC comrades that I am close to get death threats as a matter of course. . . . Ten to twelve people close to them have been murdered execution style. They were educators, intellectuals, labor union organizers, peace commission workers, and university students” (190–191). What is most unsettling about these assassinations (which also struck down Chris Hani) is the chilling possibility that the ANC leadership itself, through their deep compromises with white South Africa, sacrificed their own in order to achieve the transition and come into power.