By Panyaza Lesufi and Khaye Nkwanyana
If Harry Gwala was still alive today, he would have turned 100 on July 30 this year. In a sense, this year represents the centennial birthday of Harry Gwala.
Commemorations of leaders are not just about memories of a life well-lived and therefore the packaging of cosmetic events designed as symbolic remembrances, albeit those initiatives are not insignificant. But, more importantly, the life and times of leaders such as Gwala should impose upon us, the living, a great sense of soul searching on whether we are still discharging similar commitments to the cause of our people, as they did.
Great leaders and icons, like all human beings, live and die, but what distinguishes them from the rest of us is the immortality of their ideas; their teachings and the imprints of their footsteps.
Those imprints that they live behind, as a legacy, continue to breathe life to the successive generations, in the afterlife of that leader. These immortal legacies of great leaders become a standard for setting the bar high for generations of future leaders. This becomes the case because these leaders and their revolutionary trudges, while they live, become a transcendent fountain of inspiration.
It is with gratification that the ANC this year declared that this would be the year of celebrating the life and times of Harry Gwala as part of 25 years since his passing and a centennial birthday in July 2020.
The story of Gwala is often less told in South Africa. And where it is told, more often and subjectively, it is always told from a position of dishonesty and a portrayal in bad taste. There are a lot of untruths and distortions deliberately made around Gwala’s name, including projecting him as a warlord of Natal after the unbanning (of the ANC) in 1990.
If anyone were to interact with those who were living on the East Rand, now Ekurhuleni, KZN Midlands (Pietermaritzburg, Howick, Mooi River, Escort, Ladysmith, Newcastle) and larger parts of KZN province, they will tell you that they survived political violence because of assistance from Harry Gwala.
He stood with the people who were under attack during the internecine violence fomented by the IFP with the assistance of the Bantustan Zulu government assisted by De Klerk’s government through the SA Police.
Gwala ensured that people under siege were defended through self-defence units. Scores of displaced people, with their homes burnt down during this time, would camp in Gwala’s property for help and protection as a leader. Amongst other interventions, he allocated land to the displaced people without seeking permission from the apartheid Pietermaritzburg municipality authorities. He was not going to recognise that enemy.
In doing this, he confronted and directed the authorities to rather charge him than the people he had directed to build houses to settle in municipal land. Those large human settlements, which are now well developed, are today a legacy of the man that he was.
Gwala joined the SACP in 1942 and the ANCYL in 1944. He worked with the leaders such as Anton Lembede. It is during this time when he began his trade union activism, organising workers in the Chemical and building industries.
Comrade Mdala (as he was affectionately known) was not just a school teacher. Many senior comrades who were on Robben Island spoke of how Harry Gwala was a good political teacher, from Marxism to various theories of development.
Upon his release from Robben Island, in 1988, Mdala helped with the recruitment of health professionals for a newly formed union NEHAWU in particular in Edendale Hospital, from where he was once expelled. That explains why Edendale Hospital, as the biggest in the region, became a focal point of struggle through worker strikes, with the Special Branch raiding it more often to seize shop stewards.
Gwala was suspicious of the CODESA negotiation process in terms of winning our demands over the table with white apartheid oppressors. And so he did not trust what could be the outcomes of this process in the interest of our peoples’ demands. As for him, the movement committed serious mistakes in agreeing to suspend MK as this elevated the National Party to occupy some high moral ground at the table, whilst funding low-intensity warfare in Natal and the then PWV.
What can we learn from Harry Gwala’s leadership? Today we have strange cadres who, before taking a political stand on any issue, first make assessments on the views of powers-that-be so that they align their posture for purposes of relevance. Many comrades also do this checking of blind-spots before making their views known.As a result of this new fear and nurtured culture of pleasing leaders rather than respecting them has given birth to the institutionalized tabular rasa tradition from the foremost leading cadres in our movement and alliance.
Today, wrong things are not challenged with the strength of vigour that they should be, because comrades are fearful of being rounded off and isolated, if not cornered, and lose their deployments. By so doing, we are in the service of those who are in the mission to destroy these organisations that we belong to.
Lesufi is the Harry Gwala Foundation board chairperson and Nkwanyana is a board member.