The Story Behind Soweto Blues, Miriam Makeba’s Famous Song About The June 16 Uprising

Miriam Makeba in 1969 in exile. Rob Mieremet/Nationaal Archief, CC BY

BY GWEN ANSELL

ASSOCIATE OF THE GORDON 

INSTITUTE FOR BUSINESS SCIENCE,

UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA

Miriam Makeba sang a famous song about the 16 June 1976 uprising in her birthplace, South Africa. The protest was a pivotal point in the fight against apartheid and white minority rule in the country. The song was called Soweto Blues and its opening lines go:

The children got a letter from the Master.

It said no more Xhosa, Sotho, no more Zulu

Refusing to comply they sent an answer

That’s when the policemen came…

The song recalls the events of that day when South African schoolchildren, marching peacefully in Soweto to protest the imposition of Afrikaans as an official language of instruction alongside English in Black schools, were shot down by the police of the apartheid regime.

Soweto Blues was also the title chosen by my publishers for the cover of my historical research on the politics of South African jazz and popular music.

Many high school students in South Africa – and many of their teachers – were not fluent in Afrikaans, seen as the language of the oppressor. The move was part of a push, dubbed “Bantu Education”, to reduce Black education and cut it off from international opportunities and “subversive” English-language ideas. The system’s architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, had declared that Black children must never be educated above the level of “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.

Soweto Blues is one of the two compositions most closely associated with the events of June 16. The other, Isililo (Tears of Soweto), from Sakhile, was written in retrospect, in 1982, as the group’s co-leader, saxophonist Khaya Mahlangu, reflected on his nightmare memories of Soweto on that day.

But Soweto Blues was written hot, as the news of the massacre reached the world. The story of the song is a story of solidarity with the struggle against apartheid across the African continent.

Composed and recorded in Kumasi, Ghana

Ask who composed the song, and the answer is likely to be trumpeter Hugh Masekela and/or his ex wife Miriam Makeba. The song, officially released in 1977 by Makeba, is best-known in the version released on her 1989 album, Welela.

The lyrics are instantly recognisable as being penned by Masekela the rhymer – “Just a little atrocity/Deep in the city”.

But the melody tells a bigger, pan-African story. It was co-written by the trumpeter and guitarist Stanley Kwesi Todd, founder of Ghanaian ensemble Hedzoleh (“freedom”) Sounds.

Masekela was introduced to the west Africans by Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti in 1973, and the collaboration produced three albums led by his name: Introducing Hedzoleh Soundz (1973); I Am Not Afraid (1974); and The Boy’s Doin’ It (1975).

But there were other collaborations between Kwesi and Masekela too, including the 1977 You Told Your Mama Not to Worry. That was recorded in Kumasi, Ghana with Kwesi as co-producer, and released in the US by the new Casablanca label, before that imprint settled into a pop and disco music identity.

Makeba came from her exile home in Guinea to record; there were compositions by Masekela and Todd, tunes adapted from tradition, and a title track about exile composed by South African singer and songwriter Letta Mbulu. Soweto Blues closed the A-side. The original album, regrettably, is currently hard to find.

A marketable title

So how did it end up as my book title? It wasn’t my intention.

The main title I wanted was Black Heroes, alluding to a 1976 Tete Mbambisa tune paying tribute to both the young martyrs of ‘76 and to US jazz star John Coltrane. That seemed to me to sum up the relationship between South African and Black American jazz as torches lighting the way to freedom.

But it appeared that “somebody in marketing” didn’t think the two words “Black” plus “Heroes”, would sell. “Aren’t there any other song titles that might be catchier?” A back-and-forth ensued, until Soweto Blues came up. “That’s it! 'Soweto’ always sells!”

The 1976 uprising sparked in Soweto, but spread across the country, from the urban settlements of Langa and Gugulethu in the Cape to the rural villages of the North West province. Parents scoured mortuaries for their dead children, many of whom had apparently been shot in the back. Nobody knows precisely how many died, but the national figure is estimated as well north of 700.

And just as the rising itself cannot be narrowed to what happened in Soweto – even if the name “sells” – so the song paying tribute cannot be confined to South Africa alone. It came from a trumpet-player exiled in the US, a singer sheltered by Guinea, and a musician born in Ghana.

Half a century later, the words of the song still have lessons about the events of June 16. The story of its creation teaches too: about a shared African history in which borders did not define humanity.

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South Africans Are Far Less Tolerant Of Migrants Than Before – Hotspots, Drivers And Solutions

BY STEVEN GORDON

CHIEF RESEARCH SPECIALIST,

HUMAN SCIENCES RESEARCH

COUNCIL

Anti-immigrant marches in several major South African cities (such as Tshwane and Johannesburg) in early May 2026 once again led to questions being asked about xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa.

In the wake of the protests President Cyril Ramaphosa called on South Africans to embrace solidarity with their African neighbours. For their part, foreign governments lodged their protests while police sought to curtail violence.

The tension in the country was palpable.

Are the recent outbreaks of anti-immigrant activism a harbinger of a wider uptick in anti-migrant sentiment amongst South Africans? Recent public opinion data from the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) suggests that this might be the case.

The HSRC’s South African Social Attitudes Survey is an important source of information on what ordinary South Africans think about international migration. The survey series consists of nationally representative, repeated cross-sectional surveys that have been conducted annually by the HSRC since 2003.

The latest data, from the 2025 survey, show that South Africans are more hostile towards immigrants than at any other time before since the survey began in 2003. An important dimension of the change has been an attitudinal shift and hardening of attitudes towards migrants among poorer and working-class adults. In addition, the recent growth of anti-immigrant sentiment has been geographically concentrated in four provinces: Mpumalanga, Gauteng, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal.

The rise in anti-immigrant sentiment is particularly concerning given that the country is due to hold local government elections on 4 November 2026. Aspirant political parties, in an attempt to maintain or gain power, may seek to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment for their own ends. In this way elections can provide a potential accelerant for xenophobia.

Growing hostility may even provoke xenophobic violence in a country that has a long history of collective anti-immigrant hate crime. and is home to more than two million international migrants.

Declining Hospitality

South African Social Attitudes Survey has included the following in its questionnaire since 2003:

Please indicate which of the following statements applies to you? I generally welcome to South Africa… (i) All immigrants; (ii) Some immigrants; (iii) No immigrants; and (iv) Uncertain.

In 2003 about a third (34%) of the South African adult population said that they would welcome all immigrants. The remainder indicated that they would accept either none (32%) or some (35%).

The proportion of the public that would be prepared to welcome foreigners tended to fluctuate within a narrow band over the 2003-2017 period.

But around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the research data began to show an upswing in anti-immigrant sentiment.

About a quarter (26%) of those surveyed said that they would welcome all immigrants during the 2021 survey round. This was similar to figures in the mid-2010s.

But the share that held this hospitable attitude fell in subsequent survey rounds. In 2025 15% of adults said that they would welcome all foreigners.

Conversely, the proportion of the public adopting a hostile position (in other words ‘welcome no immigrants’) increased from 30% in 2021 to 42% in 2025.

Geography and class

The provinces with the highest growth in anti-immigrant sentiment – Mpumalanga, Gauteng, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal – are ones through which most immigrants travel and often settle.

The situation has become particularly delicate in KwaZulu-Natal. The share of adults in the province who said that they would welcome no immigrants grew from 23% in 2021 to 45% in 2023 and then again to 60% in 2025.

The upsurge in hostility in KwaZulu-Natal could be linked to growing popular anger against the current economic and political status quo. A staggering 88% of provincial residents are unhappy with present economic conditions, and an equal proportion expect conditions to worsen over the next five years.

The notable attitudinal shift among poor people is also concerning.

South Africa is a highly unequal nation characterised by stark economic divisions. Most citizens can be found on the wrong side of these divides and could be classified as economically disadvantaged.

Historically, as research has shown, anti-immigrant sentiment in the country tended to cut across class divisions. But in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, something changed.

Before the pandemic, South African Social Attitudes Survey data showed a linear relationship between economic disadvantage and anti-immigrant sentiment. In the years following the pandemic, however, a clear pattern emerged. As the lockdowns ended and the post-pandemic recovery began, most socioeconomic groups in South Africa became more and more hostile towards immigrants. But antipathy grew at a much more aggressive rate for the low and lower middle socioeconomic groups.

During the 2025 survey round, adults in these groups were much more hostile towards foreigners than those in the upper middle and high socio-economic groups.

The drivers

What could have caused the economically disadvantaged to become more antagonistic towards immigrants over the last five years or so?

It could be argued that the poor have become more likely to scapegoat foreigners for the failures and inequalities of the post-pandemic economic recovery. Poor people have been badly affected by a cost of living crisis and persistent deindustrialisation. They need someone to blame and foreigners have long provided a handy scapegoat.

The South African economy has struggled in the last few years, dealing with doggedly high unemployment. The country also has notoriously high crime rates. Such problems, as experts have argued again and again, cannot be directly laid at the feet of immigrants living in the country. But it would appear that they are getting blamed anyway.

What should be done?

The South African government has a National Action Plan to Combat Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.

Implemented in March 2019, one of its goals was to reduce public hostility towards migrants. Clearly, whether because of a lack of resources or government coordination, the plan has not succeeded.

The country needs to reinvigorate it and its associated processes. What’s needed is political, civic and community leaders to address legitimate socio-economic grievances without allowing immigrants to become scapegoats for deeper structural failures in society.

Efforts to strengthen social cohesion, improve economic inclusion, enhance public trust in governance and promote responsible political leadership are also crucial.

Well-provisioned and effective anti-xenophobia strategies are urgently required to address the worsening situation. The alternative is to allow hatred to flourish.

READ ORIGIAL STORY HERE

Haunted By Apartheid, An American Confronts The Limits Of Revenge

BY VIOLET KUPERSMITH

Each of Lauren Francis-Sharma’s three novels begins with a calculated killing. In her 2014 debut, “’Til the Well Runs Dry,” a desperate Trinidadian girl catches and slaughters a wild opossum to feed her family. In 2020’s “Book of the Little Axe,” a band of Crow boys stalks and takes down a bighorn sheep on a hunting expedition. Now, in “Casualties of Truth,” Francis-Sharma’s tense, timely new novel about the monstrous legacy of South African apartheid, the killing in the opening pages is of a man. Like the opossum and the sheep, he is also being hunted for sustenance, albeit sustenance of a different, darker, figurative kind.

The deceased is a white policeman in 1996 Johannesburg. At the book’s outset, he is lamenting Mandela’s presidency and his own perceived loss of power under it, limping from injuries sustained during an unexplained altercation with an American girl. In the early hours of the following morning, his throat is slit by an unseen assailant. We later learn that the policeman’s execution was an act of revenge: an attempt to claim justice for other stolen lives, for stolen dignity, for the stolen agency of an entire traumatized country. But at what cost? This is the uneasy question at the center of the story: Can we ever really atone for violence without more violence? And can we survive what has been done to us without sacrificing our own humanity in the process?

From 1996 Johannesburg, the novel flashes forward to 2018 Washington, D.C., where Prudence Wright and her husband, Davis, are by all outward appearances very happily married. The Wrights are wealthy, successful and attractive, and they own an enormous home in Bethesda, Md. While Prudence contends that they are not a real Black Washington power couple, “at least not in the way Black Washingtonians knew Black Washington power couples to be,” she and Davis still turn heads when they enter a room together.

The Prudence we meet in 2018 is guarded, carefully composed, the kind of woman who has sharpened herself to a point out of self-preservation. After a tragedy-scarred childhood in Baltimore, she went on to earn three Ivy League degrees and a partnership at McKinsey before stepping back from her career to stay at home with her autistic son.

On the stormy D.C. night when Prudence’s story begins, she is accompanying Davis to meet his new colleague at what she assumes will be a tedious work dinner. But when the colleague arrives at the restaurant he turns out to be Matshediso, a South African man whose life collided with Prudence’s two decades earlier, when she spent a few months in Johannesburg for a law school internship. Matshediso knows secrets from Prudence’s past that still haunt her, and it is no coincidence that he has suddenly re-materialized as an I.T. guy at her husband’s law firm.

“Casualties of Truth” is a brutal history lesson in the guise of a thriller. The novel is taut and deftly plotted, volleying between 1996 and 2018 as it exposes Matshediso’s shared history with Prudence — and with the dead policeman — as well as what Matshediso wants with Prudence now.

There is a nightmarish quality to the story; moments of strange, almost surreal terror arise as abruptly as they vanish — a threatening man leaps onto the hood of a car without warning, a child goes missing in a restaurant, an idyllic morning at a farmers’ market devolves into trippy anguish. The potential for violence lurks beneath even the most innocuous surfaces, keeping Prudence (and the reader) perpetually on edge.

But the novel’s deeper aim is to shine a light on the human rights violations committed during the apartheid era. Amid the suspense, Francis-Sharma brings us into the courtrooms of South Africa’s 1996 Truth and Reconciliation hearings: “a system where citizens could lodge complaints and perpetrators could request pardons for the horrible things they had done,” and the new government’s way of “forging the most progressive democracy ever envisioned while also making amends for the past horrors for which they were largely not responsible.”

Prudence attends some of the proceedings as part of her internship, and the testimonies she witnesses are the most gripping passages in the entire book — bald descriptions of atrocities, made all the more appalling by the mundane delivery of the amnesty-seeking men who committed them.

“Casualties of Truth” is a tale of dual reckonings, of a woman and a country both forced to face their histories and the harrowing violence that has shaped them. Despite the pain chronicled in its pages, and despite having no easy answer to the complex question of what real accountability looks like, the book does contain a shred of hope: Though the truth alone is not justice, there is still freedom in it.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Moederland: Nine Daughters Of South Africa Review – My Ancestors’ Role In The Horror Of Apartheid

BY KAREN JENNINGS

On 29 May this year, South Africans will go to the polls to vote in their seventh democratic general election. Thirty years ago, the country’s first free and fair election saw the formal end of apartheid when, as Cato Pedder writes, “all night, all that day, all the next day, 19.5 million people, 85% of the electorate, queue[d] peacefully outside polling stations across the country … And each of them, as they receive[d] their ballot paper … [felt] this ritual [was] somehow holy.” With Nelson Mandela as the president of the new South Africa, the country was full of hope, but the ensuing decades have been troubled by blatant government corruption, nepotism, water and electricity crises, vast unemployment and social unrest. This year a record 27.72 million citizens are registered to vote (19,525 of those in London), a jump of almost 1 million since 2019. This increase suggests people’s frustrations; their desire to question those in power. Many new voters are women, and women make up the majority of registered voters (55.24%). However, analyses after previous elections have shown that women are often kept from voting by domestic duties, which is likely to occur again in May.

It is women and their role in South Africa’s past that form the subject of Moederland and through which Pedder attempts to understand herself and where or how she belongs. She lives in England, yet her name and blood irrevocably connect her to South Africa and a culture “freighted with shame”. Named after her grandmother, she has spent her life explaining that Cato is not pronounced “Kate-o” but “Cuh-too. It’s Afrikaans, short for Catharina”. Her great-grandfather was Jan Smuts, twice prime minister of South Africa, a man so revered by the British that a statue of him still stands in Parliament Square. Smuts is the only person in the world to have signed the peace treaties after both world wars; he was central to the creation of the League of Nations, and drafted the preamble to the UN charter. He was also a white supremacist who supported racial segregation and was involved in writing and promulgating the laws that paved the way to apartheid. Pedder struggles with her “place in all this”, her great-grandfather tying her “to the white male power that continues to saturate South Africa and further afield”.

It is no secret that women are often absent from history books, with historians blaming a lack of recorded information. But, as Pedder finds, the South African archives are full of the letters and journals of women, as well as opgaafrolle (tax censuses), the transcribing and analysing of which my own colleagues at Stellenbosch University are engaged in; revealing data about women, enslaved people and indigenous Khoikhoi people who were often forced into servitude. This data conveys details such as what they owned, where they lived, and family groupings. The information is there: it only has to be looked for.

Informed by impressively thorough research, Pedder follows nine of her female ancestors (family trees are included at the start of the book), from the 17th century when the Dutch first landed at the Cape, and moving through the centuries, via the “great trek” of settlers into the interior, the atrocities of the Boer war, and the shame and horror of apartheid. Exploring the past, bringing it to vivid life with wonderful prose, she intersects the lives of her ancestors with her own thoughts and experiences.

But this is not another whinging apologia by a white author. Pedder writes with perspicacity and sensitivityand is able to articulate her dismay at having laboured under “the misapprehension that in retelling the long-forgotten stories of women, [she would be] striking a righteous blow” not only for her own female ancestors but for women generally, such as her proto-Afrikaans forebear and seventh great-grandmother, Anna Siek, whose place in history books has been little more than “a footnote”. In reality, Pedder realises, writing about white women means writing about how they have participated in white domination. White and black women have had very different experiences, so while Pedder is horrified at her proximity in the family tree to a slave-owning torturer – Michiel Otto, second husband of Siek – she must also acknowledge the role his wife (and the wives of other white men) played in oppression. Or even someone like Isie, wife of Smuts, who was appalled by the thought of white women voting or having seats in parliament, let alone men of colour, or, heaven forbid, women of colour.

The first of the nine women in Moederland is a Khoikhoi girl whose real name we do not know, though she has become famous in South African history. The Dutch adopted her as a pet, a translator, a creature to civilise, and named her Eva (after the biblical first woman). Her Khoikhoi name is recorded by them as Krotoa, and so she has become known to us. Her role in the history of South Africa, her life caught between the Dutch and her own people, her eventual partial banishment to Robben Island with her white husband and mixed-race children, her alcoholism and death, have been revisited and imbued with various isms and significances in recent decades – she is part of colonialism, racism, post-colonialism, feminism, post-apartheid reparations, and historical rewriting and reclamation. Pedder is aware of the way Krotoa has been exploited over the centuries for various ends, and also that she represents a true connection to South Africa prior to the ill-effects of colonisation. Her own desire to find a connection with Krotoa does not sit comfortably with her, yet it is there, a wish to find some link that will legitimate her sense of belonging to South Africa. But what role can DNA really play, she asks. Does having a connection to Indigenous people remove you from guilt and responsibility? What percentage is enough to belong fully and wipe the slate clean? Her DNA results show that she is “European, but there are matches to another community, partial incomplete”. Yes, she is a colonialist, but she is also South African.

In fact, Moederland provides more questions than answers, but that is not a flaw. It is the questioning that makes this book valuable, just as it is questioning that must become part of all our lives on a path to understanding ourselves and others today when too often cancel culture wants to delete and deny. Research enables us to explore, and it fuels our ability to interrogate ourselves, our pasts, our presents and futures. We need more books like this, we need more detailed research, more people allowing themselves to be uncomfortable and to question.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

How Apartheid, European Racism And Pelé Helped Cultivate A Culture Of Diversity In US Soccer That Endures Into Messi-Era MLS

Patrick "Ace" Ntsoelengoe

BY JOHN M. SLOOP

PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

North America’s most diverse professional league kicks off on Feb. 21, 2024, as Major League Soccer returns after a winter break.

The league, commonly known as the MLS, has long prided itself as a standard-bearer for racial and national diversity: Last season saw players from 81 countries across six continents compete for teams. Members of racial minorities make up 63% of players and 36% of head coaches, according to the latest diversity scorecard from the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.

As a soccer scholar and author of the book “Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch,” I know that this diversity is in part by design and has deep roots. Indeed, the MLS had, as a model of diversity, an earlier attempt to get Americans to embrace the “beautiful game”: the North American Soccer League, or NASL.

The fall and rise of the NASL

Most often remembered for bringing Pelé to the U.S., the NASL was arguably the first serious attempt to develop a truly professional “major” soccer league in the country. It ran from 1968 to 1984 and peaked in popularity the mid-1970s.

With minimal audiences at the gates and a TV contract that was scrapped early on because of dismal ratings, the league struggled early on. A full dozen of the 17 inaugural teams folded after the first year, leaving just five competing in the second season. Growth was slow – by 1973 there were nine teams, and games had an average attendance of about 6,000 fans.

Most team owners and league commissioner Phil Woosnam believed the NASL needed more sizzle to appeal to an American market. To that end, the league decided to make a number of alterations. Rules were tweaked to increase the number of goals, and more traditional American sports add-ons – tailgating and cheerleaders, for example – were encouraged to help improve the atmosphere.

But the impulse to alter both the substance and meaning of the game had mixed results, at best. Although the NASL was able to enlarge its audience among a subset of fans through these stylistic distractions, others felt alienated by the focus on razzmatazz.

As Newsweek reported at the time, first-generation immigrants – the demographic expected to make up the supporting base – stayed away. Polls revealed that these traditional soccer supporters perceived the quality of play in the league to be so inferior that they weren’t interested in attending games.

Likewise, European players often found the innovations of the NASL off-putting. After playing his first game for the Portland Timbers, Pat Howard – a former player for the English team Everton – found himself thinking, “What kind of football is this? I mean, there were blinking cavalry charges up the wings, ducks behind the goal, firecrackers going on.”

A study commissioned by the NASL convinced the league that it would have to increase the skill level of the game if it hoped to grab the largest possible viewership. And that is when the story of the league’s diversity really takes off.

A league of nations

The New York Cosmos, owned by Warner Communications, was one of earliest NASL teams to reach out to international star power, luring Pelé out of retirement to play three seasons for a reported US$4.7 million.

The Cosmos followed the signing by bringing in other global stars, such as Germany’s World Cup winning captain Franz Beckenbauer, Italian Giorgio Chinaglia and Brazilian Carlos Alberto.

Other global stars who signed for different teams included elite global players such as Johan Cruyff, Gerd Müller, Peter Osgood, Bobby Moore, Eusébio and George Best. It represented a who’s who of the soccer world, albeit an aging one.

The impact on the league was immediate. It resulted in increased attendances and a higher media profile in the U.S.

It also set a course for rosters featuring players from around the world – and not only through the import of fading stars.

NASL teams needed to strike a balance – and balance their budgets – by searching for players who were talented but also undervalued. And this often meant bringing in African and African diaspora players. They were aided in their search by overseas racism, both implicit and state-sponsored.

European teams in the 1970s had relatively low numbers of Black players playing in them.

It led players like Trinidad and Tobago’s Leroy DeLeon to choose the NASL rather than sign contracts with European teams. As DeLeon recounted, he decided to join the New York Generals in 1969 after a recruitment trip to England in which he only saw one Black player, West Ham’s Clyde Best. By contrast, the Washington Darts, the team DeLeon later joined, had seven Trinidadians on the roster.

Escaping apartheid

Meanwhile, under the apartheid laws in South Africa, Black and white players were prohibited from playing one another. To Black South Africans, the NASL represented a chance to escape the racism of their homeland.

Patrick “Ace” Ntsoelengoe was one of many Black South Africans who viewed the NASL as being the only route toward international fame. Fellow Black South African Webster Lichaba, who played in Atlanta in the early 1980s, relished his treatment in the U.S.: “You were allowed to eat in any restaurant; you went into any club if you wanted to; you stayed in any area you wanted to. … It was different, a different lifestyle altogether. You were treated as an equal.”

Kaizer Motaung, who played for the Atlanta Chiefs and later returned to South Africa to found the successful Kaizer Chiefs football club, noted: “America was an eye-opener for me. I am in a foreign country, but here are Black people holding high positions being respected worldwide.”

And it wasn’t only Black South Africans who made the move. Apartheid resulted in a sporting boycott of South Africa, preventing the country from playing in international games. As such, the NASL represented an opportunity for white South Africans to play in front of a wider audience.

As soccer scholar Chris Bolsmann has noted, both Black and white players later went back to South Africa, energized to act against apartheid and confident of their ability to succeed in joint struggles again racism.

While some overseas players returned home after their playing careers ended, others stayed to help the grassroots game in the U.S. Trinidad and Tobago goalkeeper Lincoln Phillips, who played for the Baltimore Bays, went on to coach Howard University’s men’s soccer team – the first from a historically Black college or university to win an NCAA soccer championship in 1974 – and later helped found the Black Soccer Coaches Association, an organization designed to help move Black coaches up the administrative ladder in soccer.
A lasting soccer experiment

While the North American Soccer League never turned soccer into a religion in the U.S. and was not without its own race issues – not least the gap in wages between predominantly European elite players and cheaper African and Caribbean players – it nonetheless leaves a legacy of diversity in U.S. soccer that continues today.

As soccer author Ian Plenderleith has argued, the NASL was the first soccer experiment of “mixing several ethnic backgrounds” into one team.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Women In South Africa’s Armed Struggle: New Book Records History At First Hand

BY THOKO SIPUNGU

LECTURER IN SOCIOLOGY

RHODES UNIVERSITY

South Africa’s young democracy was a culmination of years of sweat, blood and revolution against the apartheid regime. In the early 1960s, after decades of “non-violence” as a policy of resistance, the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) formed military wings to take the fight to the apartheid regime.

Based on the living record and popular discourse, it would be easy to assume that the struggle against apartheid was almost entirely the domain of men. But women played a crucial role – one which is only really coming to light today.

In her book Guerrillas and Combative Mothers, political and international studies academic Siphokazi Magadla uses life history interviews to offer firsthand insights into women’s participation in the armed struggle against apartheid in South Africa from 1961 until 1994. She also examines the texture of their lives in the new South Africa after demobilisation.

Magadla interviewed women who fought with the ANC’s military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK); the PAC’s military wing, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (Apla), formerly known as Poqo; and the paramilitary self-defence units in black urban residential areas.

As a sociologist interested in gender and sexuality, I was keen to read this book for the gendered experiences of liberation struggles. I read it alongside other studies about women in southern African liberation wars.

Much of the prevalent discourse about women’s wartime participation tends to centre on one question: why do revolutions and wars fail women? This discourse tends to, for example, heavily examine women’s experiences of sexual violence and victimisation in wars. It excludes their agency and contribution to wars.

But Magadla’s book, as well as the feminist analyses I read to complement it, widens the lens. She wants to know why women joined the armed struggle. How did women use or play with femininity and womanhood to optimise military effectiveness? How can women’s participation broaden our understanding of combat beyond direct physical fighting? And, lastly, how do women view their involvement in the revolutions that result?

Broadening the definition of combat

Some may argue that the women profiled by Magadla were not combatants. Few of them engaged in direct combat; that is, physical fighting on the battlefront. But the author urges us to widen the definition of combat.

Citing the South African political activist and academic Raymond Suttner, Magadla argues that apartheid was a war with no battlefront. Instead it occupied all corners of society. It was fought in homes, schools and churches. Women guerrillas put themselves at risk in different ways and relied on creative approaches to get close to potential targets.

Thandi Modise, who has served in South Africa’s parliament since 1994 and is currently the minister of defence and military veterans, is one of the women profiled in the book. She tells of carrying a handbag from which protruded a pair of knitting needles – an absolutely ordinary, nonthreatening sight – while she observed potential military targets.

On the rare occasions that women’s wartime participation is recognised in the wider discourse, they tend to be shown as armed revolutionaries who are, simultaneously, feminist icons. Images abound of these women soldiers toting AK47s, ready to shoot, or carrying rifles – and babies on their backs.

Magadla weaves in accounts throughout the book to disrupt this popular narrative. After all, it potentially erases those women who carried neither AK47s nor babies on their backs during the war for liberation. Some women hid bullets inside tampons to bring into the country for the war while others carried explosives in their purses. Some spent endless hours watching and testing for potential dangers and weaknesses in the apartheid military’s defences.

One example is Nondwe Mankahla, who, while working as a distributor for the New Age newspaper, simultaneously couriered bomb equipment for political activists Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba.

Soldiers, not ‘she soldiers’

Throughout the book, Magadla refuses to pigeonhole the participants. She recognises that their experiences vary and analyses how the women of MK negotiated its culture of patriarchy in a way that highlights the women’s agency without romanticising their struggles.

Women in MK were known as “flowers of the nation” or as umzana (a small home) of the organisation. Some of the women found the labels, umzana in particular, endearing. Others felt that they diminished women’s roles. Similarly, they resisted qualifiers such as “she comrades” and “she soldiers”.

But they did not want to erase their femininity. Some aspects of the patriarchal culture worked to the advantage of women both inside the organisation and in their encounters with the apartheid security police during operations. Women combatants could easily manipulate their femininity to defy the guerrilla image contained in government propaganda.

During the 1980s MK staged Operation Vula, a mission to bring exiled leaders back into the country. Busisiwe Jacqueline ‘Totsie’ Memela successfully smuggled anti-apartheid activists Mac Maharaj and Siphiwe Nyanda into South Africa from Swaziland (Eswatini). Magadla attributes her success to a combination of her military training and dynamic use of femininity: Memela dressed as a Swati woman while observing the border around the clock.

A work of theorising

Guerrillas and Combative Mothers is more than just a project to name the women who dedicated their lives to liberating South Africa. It also presents different ways of theorising. It raises an interesting methodological question about seeing the limits of verbal language and the utility of silence when dealing with traumatic events. How do we analyse silence when the people’s wounds have not healed and therefore their lips remain sealed?

However, while Magadla’s argument is sophisticated, the language doesn’t “sweat”, to quote Toni Morrison. It remains simple and accessible to all audiences.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

South Africa’s ANC Marks Its 112th Year With An Eye On National Elections, But Its Record Is Patchy And Future Uncertain

BY SANDY AFRICA

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, POLITICAL SCIENCES,

AND DEPUTY DEAN TEACHING AND LEARNING

(HUMANITIES), UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA

The speech President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered at the 112th birthday celebration of South Africa’s governing party, the African National Congress (ANC), on 13 January can be seen as the party’s opening election gambit: a stadium packed to capacity, the display of a united leadership, and an invocation of three decades of success, delivered by a leader firmly in control of his party.

The annual January 8 statement, unsurprisingly, was a 30 year self-assessment and is self-congratulatory. It was silent on the many failings under ANC rule: sluggish economic growth; crime and lack of security; failure to deliver essential services and maintain public infrastructure.

Ramaphosa said the anniversary occasion was an opportunity to focus members of the party on the tasks ahead of the 2024 general elections – expected between May and August. He pointed out that the ANC had, over its 30 years in power, put in place the building blocks of a social democratic state. These include:

a constitution that guarantees human rights to all South Africans and is much admired around the world

protecting workers’ rights, promoting investment and economic development and providing a legal framework for black economic empowerment

an active role for South Africa on the international stage, and solidarity with people struggling for their rights and striving for a just world order.

Assuming the moral high ground by supporting the cause of Palestine was a reminder of the ANC that once won the hearts of many South Africans and international supporters: principled and standing up for justice, as it had done in the struggle against apartheid.

Ramaphosa highlighted the oft-repeated statistics reflecting “delivery” by the ANC-led government since 1994:

4.7 million houses have been built and provided “mahala” (for free) to South Africans, including houses allocated to nearly 2 million women

89% of households now have access to water and 85% have access to electricity

more than 28 million people are beneficiaries of social grants aimed at alleviating poverty.

Along the way, mistakes had been made, Ramaphosa said. But the ANC stood resolute in addressing the stubborn legacy of colonialism, apartheid and patriarchy.

Not much was said about these mistakes. The ANC is nursing its fragile unity ahead of a general election later this year. Tactically, it might have been wiser for the party to own up to some of its shortcomings, as this could have denied its opponents and critics the chance to ridicule some of its claims.

As a political scientist, I am interested in the ingredients of durable democracies in post-conflict societies, including South Africa, Mauritania and Libya. Thirty years after its first democratic elections, the stakes are high for the ANC as the party that took the lead in ushering in a new era.

Despair and frustration

It is an open secret that the party has been riven by factions. And the state it runs has been racked by corruption for which few have been held accountable.

The perception that South Africa has been unsuccessful in the fight against corruption has dented the country’s image, and lessened its international leverage and stature.

This, in spite of the ANC government having an anti-corruption strategy. And, to the chagrin of some members, the party has insisted that those facing allegations of corruption must relinquish state and party positions.

There is disappointment that the reversal of the perception of a party mired in corruption has been slow in the making.

There is a mood of despair over high levels of crime and violence. There is also widespread frustration over crumbling infrastructure and poor service delivery.

Lashing out at detractors, a confident Ramaphosa said that South Africa was markedly different to that of 30 years ago – and that this was an achievement of the ANC.

He urged members and supporters to campaign for a decisive victory and avoid a coalition with other political parties. Coalitions, he argued, did not benefit the people but the deal-makers who came from the smaller parties. This argument is not without merit – the coalitions have rendered some municipalities dysfunctional.

Yet, in spite of the public pronouncements, the ANC may be bracing itself for a coalition government. Several surveys say the party will garner less than 50% of the vote needed to form a government.

The largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, has struck a deal with like-minded parties in the hope of unseating the ANC.

Wooing young voters

Ramaphosa’s speech reflected the party’s comfort zone, one in which it does not have to appease multiple factions. But this may be a short-lived luxury.

In addition to having to contend with a record number of splinter formations in the upcoming general elections, the ANC is also facing a generational change.

The 2024 general election may become the battle for the soul of the young voter. If that is the case, then the ANC needs a fresh image, one less reliant on its history as a liberation movement. It must reflect the interests and aspirations of potential supporters more: unemployed youth, women under constant threat of gender-based violence; the financially squeezed middle class, and those living in crowded, uninhabitable circumstances.


Ramaphosa called on supporters to stand up against gender-based violence, and to resist the exclusion of marginalised people, such as the LGBTQI community and disabled persons. He acknowledged the positive role of the youth in society, and commended the ANC Youth League for their inputs in shaping the statement. He promised that the party would attend to their concerns and recommendations:

beneficiation of raw materials

reindustrialisation of the economy

the energy crisis

the climate crisis

the quality of public services.

These items are already on the ANC’s policy programme being implemented in government. So if the party had been more astute, the January 8 statement could have indicated, especially to its younger constituency, what would be done differently this time round. As it is, these items also feature high on the list of priorities of other political parties, including those formed in recent months.

Bravado amid disillusionment

The ANC, through its January 8 statement, put on a show of bravado. However, it would be foolhardy of it to ignore the fact that the political terrain has shifted.

Even long-serving members within its ranks have become disillusioned with the party, as evidenced by the recent resignation of ANC veteran Mavuso Msimang, who later retracted his decision. Not all of these can be labelled rogue ex-members. In any case it is just posturing for the ANC to claim that it is and has been the only vehicle through which citizens can express their political agency.

The ANC leans heavily on its liberation movement brand. But this will not necessarily be a determining factor in who will sway voters later this year. Many see the ANC as having brought the country to the brink of failure. Others see its policies as centrist and not radical enough.

The governing party has only a few months in which to persuade voters to give it yet another chance to govern South Africa It won’t be easy.

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‘Moral Compass’: Requiem For South Africa’s Archbishop Tutu

Relatives stand in front of the casket carrying the remains of Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu after it was put in a hearse following his funeral service at the St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town, South Africa, Saturday, Jan.1, 2022. Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist for racial equality and LGBT rights died Sunday at the age of 90. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

BY ANDREW MELDRUM

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA (AP) — Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has been remembered at a state funeral Saturday for his Nobel Peace Prize-earning role in ending South Africa’s apartheid regime of racial oppression and for championing the rights of LGBTQ people.

“When we were in the dark, he brought light,” Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the head of the worldwide Anglican church, said in a video message shown at a requiem Mass celebrated for Tutu at St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town.

“For me to praise him is like a mouse giving tribute to an elephant,” Welby said. “South Africa has given us extraordinary examples of towering leaders of the rainbow nation with President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Tutu .... Many Nobel winners’ lights have grown dimmer over time, but Archbishop Tutu’s has grown brighter.”

Tutu died last Sunday at age 90. His plain pine coffin, the cheapest available at his request to avoid any ostentatious displays, was the center of the service, which also featured African choirs, prayers and incense.

Tutu, who became an Anglican priest in the early 1960s, was awarded the Nobel prize in 1984 for his non-violent opposition to apartheid. He later became the first Black archbishop of Cape Town.

After South Africa achieved democracy in 1994, Mandela named Tutu to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body created to report on human rights violations that took place during apartheid.

Throughout his life, Tutu actively promoted equal rights for all people and denounced corruption and other failures he saw in South Africa’s government, led by the African National Congress party.

“Archbishop Desmond Tutu has been our moral compass and national conscience,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who delivered the funeral eulogy, said. “Even after the advent of democracy, he did not hesitate to draw attention, often harshly, to our shortcomings as leaders of the democratic state.”

Ramaphosa handed a national flag to Tutu’s widow, Leah, as she sat in a wheelchair.

The cathedral can hold 1,200 worshippers, but only 100 mourners were allowed to attend the funeral because of COVID-19 restrictions.

A few dozen people braved stormy weather to watch the service on a large screen in front of Cape Town City Hall. The municipal government building is where Tutu held hands aloft with Nelson Mandela on the day in 1990 when Mandela was released after serving 27 years in prison because of his opposition to apartheid.

Michael Nuttall, the retired bishop of Natal, delivered the sermon. Nuttall called his relationship with Tutu “an unlikely partnership at a truly critical time in the life of our country from 1989 through 1996, he as archbishop of Cape Town and I as his deputy,” With humor, he described himself as “No. 2 to Tutu.”

“Our partnership struck a chord, perhaps, in the hearts and minds of many people: a dynamic Black leader and his white deputy in the dying years of apartheid,” Nuttall continued. “And hey, presto, the heavens did not collapse. We were a foretaste, if you like, of what could be in our wayward, divided nation.”

Two of Tutu’s daughters, Mpho and Nontombi, both church ministers, participated in the service along with former Irish President Mary Robinson and Graca Machel, the widow of two African presidents, Samora Machel of Mozambique and Nelson Mandela.

The cathedral’s bells rang as Tutu’s casket was taken away after the funeral for a private cremation.

In keeping with Tutu’s commitment to the environment, his body will be “aquamated,” a process that uses water to prepare remains for final disposition. Tutu’s remains are to be interred at the cathedral where his funeral was held.

In the days before the funeral, several thousand people paid their respects to Tutu by filing by his casket in the cathedral and signing condolence books.

Obama Calls Desmond Tutu The World’s ‘Moral Compass’

FILE - Retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa gestures during the opening concert for the soccer World Cup at Orlando stadium in Soweto, South Africa, Thursday, June 10, 2010. Tutu, South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist for racial justice and LGBT rights and retired Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, has died, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced Sunday, Dec. 26, 2021. He was 90. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File)


JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Reactions to the death Sunday of Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu:

“Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a mentor, a friend, and a moral compass for me and so many others. A universal spirit, Archbishop Tutu was grounded in the struggle for liberation and justice in his own country, but also concerned with injustice everywhere. He never lost his impish sense of humor and willingness to find humanity in his adversaries, and Michelle and I will miss him dearly.” — Former U.S. President Barack Obama.

“The death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu (always known as Arch) is news that we receive with profound sadness — but also with profound gratitude as we reflect upon his life. ... Arch’s love transformed the lives of politicians and priests, township dwellers and world leaders. The world is different because of this man.” — Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.

“Indeed the big baobab tree has fallen. South Africa and the mass democratic movement has lost a tower of moral conscience and an epitome of wisdom.” — The African National Congress, South Africa’s ruling party.

“The friendship and the spiritual bond between us was something we cherished. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was entirely dedicated to serving his brothers and sisters for the greater common good. He was a true humanitarian and a committed advocate of human rights.” — the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader.

“I am deeply saddened to hear of the death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He was a critical figure in the fight against apartheid and in the struggle to create a new South Africa — and will be remembered for his spiritual leadership and irrepressible good humor.” — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

“No words better exemplify his ministry than the three he contributed to a work of art at The Carter Center: love, freedom, and compassion. He lived his values in the long struggle to end apartheid in South Africa, in his leadership of the national campaign for truth and reconciliation, and in his role as a global citizen. His warmth and compassion offered us a spiritual message that is eternal.” — former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

“He was never afraid to call out human rights violators no matter who they were and his legacy must be honored by continuing his work to ensure equality for all.” — Amnesty International South Africa Executive Director Shenilla Mohamed.

“The loss of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu is immeasurable. He was larger than life, and for so many in South Africa and around the world his life has been a blessing. His contributions to struggles against injustice, locally and globally, are matched only by the depth of his thinking about the making of liberatory futures for human societies.” — The Nelson Mandela Foundation.

“I’m saddened to learn of the death of global sage, human rights leader, and powerful pilgrim on earth. ... A great, influential elder is now an eternal, witnessing ancestor. And we are better because he was here.” — Dr. Bernice King, youngest daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“We are all devastated at the loss of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Elders would not be who they are today without his passion, commitment and keen moral compass. He inspired me to be a ‘prisoner of hope’, in his inimitable phrase. Arch was respected around the world for his dedication to justice, equality and freedom. Today we mourn his death but affirm our determination to keep his beliefs alive.” — Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and chair of The Elders, an independent group of world leaders and human rights activists.

Tutu’s passing “closes an important chapter in Africa’s long and painful struggle for justice, liberty and democracy and the continent’s current efforts to create prosperity and stand find its competitive edge in the rest of the world. For South Africans, it is a major reckoning with the reality that one-by-one, its heroic liberators are leaving.” — Raila Odinga, Kenya’s former prime minister and opposition leader.

“His legacy is moral strength, moral courage and clarity. He felt with the people. In public and alone, he cried because he felt people’s pain. And he laughed — no, not just laughed, he cackled with delight — when he shared their joy.” — Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba.

“His Holiness Pope Francis was saddened to learn of the death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and he offers heartfelt condolences to his family and loved ones. Mindful of his service to the Gospel through the promotion of racial equality and reconciliation in his native South Africa, His Holiness commends his soul to the loving mercy of Almighty God.” — Telegram sent by the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.

“A powerful and courageous voice for nonviolence, reconciliation and peace. He will be very much missed in our troubled world. May he Rest In Peace.” — Egypt’s former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei.

“Through his distinguished work over the years as a cleric, freedom fighter and peacemaker, Archbishop Tutu inspired a generation of African leaders who embraced his non-violent approaches in the liberation struggle.” — Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta.

Tutu’s death was “a loss for justice, truth and peace in the world. ... He loved Palestine and Palestine loved him.” — Mohammed Shtayyeh, prime minister of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.

Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s Nobel Peace Winner, Dies At 90

FILE - Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu addresses new University of Oklahoma graduates, at a ceremony at the university after he received a honorary degree, Tuesday April 25, 2000 in Norman, Okla. Tutu, South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist for racial justice and LGBT rights and retired Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, has died at the age of 90, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced. (AP Photo/J. Pat Carter, File)

BY ANDREW MELDRUM

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning icon, an uncompromising foe of the country’s past racist policy of apartheid and a modern-day activist for racial justice and LGBT rights, died Sunday at 90. South Africans, world leaders and people around the globe mourned the death of the man viewed as the country’s moral conscience.

Tutu worked passionately, tirelessly and non-violently to tear down apartheid — South Africa’s brutal, decades-long regime of oppression against its Black majority that only ended in 1994.

The buoyant, blunt-spoken clergyman used his pulpit as the first Black bishop of Johannesburg and later the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town as well as frequent public demonstrations to galvanize public opinion against racial inequity, both at home and globally.

Nicknamed “the Arch,” Tutu was diminutive, with an impish sense of humor, but became a towering figure in his nation’s history, comparable to fellow Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela, a prisoner during white rule who became South Africa’s first Black president. Tutu and Mandela shared a commitment to building a better, more equal South Africa.

Upon becoming president in 1994, Mandela appointed Tutu to be chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which uncovered the abuses of the apartheid system.

Tutu’s death on Sunday “is another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who have bequeathed us a liberated South Africa,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said.

“From the pavements of resistance in South Africa to the pulpits of the world’s great cathedrals and places of worship, and the prestigious setting of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, the Arch distinguished himself as a non-sectarian, inclusive champion of universal human rights.”

Tutu died peacefully at the Oasis Frail Care Center in Cape Town, the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Trust said Sunday. He had been hospitalized several times since 2015 after being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997.

“Typically he turned his own misfortune into a teaching opportunity to raise awareness and reduce the suffering of others,” said the Tutu trust. “He wanted the world to know that he had prostate cancer, and that the sooner it is detected the better the chance of managing it.”

In recent years he and his wife, Leah, lived in a retirement community outside Cape Town.

“His legacy is moral strength, moral courage and clarity,” Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba said in a video statement. “He felt with the people. In public and alone, he cried because he felt people’s pain. And he laughed — no, not just laughed, he cackled with delight — when he shared their joy.”

A seven-day mourning period is planned in Cape Town before Tutu’s burial, including a two-day lying in state, an ecumenical service and an Anglican requiem mass at St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, according to church officials. Cape Town’s landmark Table Mountain will be lit in purple, the color of the robes Tutu wore as archbishop.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was among the world leaders paying tribute to Tutu. “He was a critical figure in the fight against apartheid and in the struggle to create a new South Africa — and will be remembered for his spiritual leadership and irrepressible good humor.”

Throughout the 1980s — when South Africa was gripped by anti-apartheid violence and a state of emergency giving police and the military sweeping powers — Tutu was one of the most prominent Black leaders able to speak out against abuses.

A lively wit lightened Tutu’s hard-hitting messages and warmed otherwise grim protests, funerals and marches. Short, plucky, tenacious, he was a formidable force, and apartheid leaders learned not to discount his canny talent for quoting apt scriptures to harness righteous support for change.

The Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 highlighted his stature as one of the world’s most effective champions for human rights, a responsibility he took seriously for the rest of his life.

With the end of apartheid and South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, Tutu celebrated the country’s multi-racial society, calling it a “rainbow nation,” a phrase that captured the heady optimism of the moment.

In 1990, after 27 years in prison, Mandela spent his first night of freedom at Tutu’s residence in Cape Town. Later, Mandela called Tutu “the people’s archbishop.”

Tutu also campaigned internationally for human rights, especially LGBT rights and same-sex marriage.

“I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this,” he said in 2013, launching a campaign for LGBT rights in Cape Town. “I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say, ‘Sorry, I would much rather go to the other place.’”

Tutu said he was “as passionate about this campaign (for LGBT rights) as I ever was about apartheid. For me, it is at the same level.” He was one of the most prominent religious leaders to advocate LGBT rights.

Tutu’s very public stance for LGBT rights put him at odds with many in South Africa and across the continent as well as within the Anglican church.

South Africa, Tutu said, was a “rainbow” nation of promise for racial reconciliation and equality, even though he grew disillusioned with the African National Congress, the anti-apartheid movement that became the ruling party in 1994 elections. His outspoken remarks long after apartheid sometimes angered partisans who accused him of being biased or out of touch.

Tutu was particularly incensed by the South African government’s refusal to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama, preventing the Tibetan spiritual leader from attending Tutu’s 80th birthday celebration as well as a planned gathering of Nobel laureates in Cape Town. South Africa rejected Tutu’s accusations that it was bowing to pressure from China, a major trading partner.

Early in 2016, Tutu defended the reconciliation policy that ended white minority rule amid increasing frustration among some South Africans who felt they had not seen the expected economic opportunities and other benefits since apartheid ended. Tutu had chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that investigated atrocities under apartheid and granted amnesty to some perpetrators, but some people believe more former white officials should have been prosecuted.

Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born Oct. 7, 1931, in Klerksdorp, west of Johannesburg, and became a teacher before entering St. Peter’s Theological College in Rosetenville in 1958 for training as a priest. He was ordained in 1961 and six years later became chaplain at the University of Fort Hare.

Moves to the tiny southern African kingdom of Lesotho and to Britain followed, with Tutu returning home in 1975. He became bishop of Lesotho, chairman of the South African Council of Churches and, in 1985 the first Black Anglican bishop of Johannesburg and then in 1986, the first Black archbishop of Cape Town. He ordained women priests and promoted gay priests.

Tutu was arrested in 1980 for taking part in a protest and later had his passport confiscated for the first time. He got it back for trips to the United States and Europe, where he held talks with the U.N. secretary-general, the pope and other church leaders.

Tutu called for international sanctions against South Africa and talks to end the conflict.

Tutu often conducted funeral services after the massacres that marked the negotiating period of 1990-1994. He railed against black-on-black political violence, asking crowds, “Why are we doing this to ourselves?” In one powerful moment, Tutu defused the rage of thousands of mourners in a township soccer stadium after the Boipatong massacre of 42 people in 1992, leading the crowd in chants proclaiming their love of God and themselves.

As head of the truth commission to promote racial reconciliation, Tutu and his panel listened to harrowing testimony about torture, killings and other atrocities during apartheid. At some hearings, Tutu wept openly.

“Without forgiveness, there is no future,” he said at the time.

The commission’s 1998 report lay most of the blame on the forces of apartheid, but also found the African National Congress guilty of human rights violations. The ANC sued to block the document’s release, earning a rebuke from Tutu. “I didn’t struggle in order to remove one set of those who thought they were tin gods to replace them with others who are tempted to think they are,” Tutu said.

In July 2015, Tutu renewed his 1955 wedding vows with wife Leah. The Tutus’ four children and other relatives surrounded the elderly couple in a church ceremony.

“You can see that we followed the biblical injunction: We multiplied and we’re fruitful,” Tutu told the congregation. “But all of us here want to say thank you ... We knew that without you, we are nothing.”

Tutu is survived by his wife of 66 years and their four children.

Asked once how he wanted to be remembered, he told The Associated Press: “He loved. He laughed. He cried. He was forgiven. He forgave. Greatly privileged.”

AP Was There: Nelson Mandela Released From Jail 30 Years A

In this Feb. 11, 1990 file photo, Nelson Mandela and his wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, gesture as Mandela walks free from the Victor Verster Prison in Paarl, Cape Town, South Africa after serving 27 years in prison. Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020 marks the 30 year anniversary of the release of the former South African president. (AP Photo/Greg English, File)

BY GREG MYRE

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the 30th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, a key event in ending South Africa’s brutal apartheid system of racial oppression, AP is republishing its coverage of Feb. 11, 1990.

Nelson Mandela walked through a prison gate to freedom Sunday, setting set off joyous celebrations and violent clashes as blacks nationwide welcomed their leader back from 27 years in jail.

“Comrades and fellow South Africans, I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all,” Mandela told tens of thousands of cheering supporters who thronged outside City Hall at twilight, many getting their first look at the African National Congress leader.

In this Feb. 13, 1990 file photo, Nelson Mandela and his wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, gesture as they arrive at Soccer City Stadium in Soweto, South Africa two days after after being released after serving 27 years in prison. Mandela's release set off joyous celebrations and violent clashes as supporters welcomed Mandela back from years in jail. (AP Photo/Udo Weitz, File)

But he emphatically reaffirmed his commitment to the ANC’s guerrilla campaign and called for increased pressure to end white-minority domination - the same cause that resulted in his life sentence on charges of plotting against the government. He also reiterated that talks with the government cannot begin until it lifts the state of emergency.

“I stand here before you not as a prophet, but as a humble servant of you the people,” said the white-haired Mandela, who looked much more an elder statesman in his suit and tie than a guerrilla leader.

“Today, the majority of South Africans, black and white, recognize that apartheid has no future. It has to be ended by our decisive mass action,” he said in a rousing half-hour speech frequently interrupted by roars of “Viva!”

“We have waited too long for our freedom.”

Violence broke out about the same time Mandela’s motorcade arrived in Cape Town from Victor Verster prison and delayed his speech. Police said a black looter was shot to death by officers, and first aid workers said more than 100 people were injured when riot police fired shotguns after groups of black youths smashed shop windows in the city center.

Some youths retaliated by hurling bottles at the officers. Hundreds of terrified people waiting to hear Mandela ran for cover as police fired blasts of shotgun pellets.

Clashes between police and celebrating blacks were reported in at least two other areas, including the tribal homeland of Ciskei, where hospital officials said police shot three people to death and wounded 20.

In Natal Province, where ANC supporters have been feuding with a more conservative black group, police said 12 blacks were killed in factional fighting Sunday. It was a harsh reminder of the bitter feuds involving black factions who disagree on the best way to fight for equality.

Elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of blacks danced and jogged through the streets of big cities and impoverished townships, rejoicing at Mandela’s freedom.

“Very good news, very good news,” President Bush said after Mandela’s release. Bush said he telephoned Mandela, told him all Americans “were rejoicing at his release” and invited him to the White House.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, speaking at a church service outside Cape Town shortly before Mandela was released, commended the South African government for making a “courageous step” but said “the pillars of apartheid remain in place.”

A thunderous cheer went up as the man who was the world’s most famous prisoner walked hand-in-hand with his wife, Winnie, through the gate of Victor Verster prison in Paarl, 35 miles from Cape Town.

Under a brilliant blue sky, the Mandelas gave clenched-fist salutes to the hundreds of supporters who had waited for hours outside, many of them waving green, gold and black ANC flags and wearing T-shirts emblazoned with a youthful image of Mandela.

Mandela appeared solemn and dignified as he and Winnie walked to a white BMW sedan and climbed in. He broke into a broad smile as the car set off slowly in a police-escorted motorcade.

The decision to free Mandela, after a prolonged international campaign on his behalf, was announced Saturday by President F.W. de Klerk. Eight days earlier, de Klerk stunned the nation by lifting a 30-year ban on the ANC and announcing other reforms aimed at clearing the way for black-white negotiations.

De Klerk, who spoke at length Saturday on Mandela’s release, stayed out of the public eye Sunday. Anton Pretorius, a de Klerk spokesman, said the president planned to comment on Mandela’s release later in the week.

Government television, however, broadcast live Mandela’s exit from prison and later showed most of the ANC leader’s speech.

His elderly appearance probably shocked many South Africans, the majority of whom were born after Mandela was last seen publicly in 1964.

Mandela has clearly lost weight since the 1960s; both his face and his body are leaner than when he was a sturdily built boxer decades ago. At 71, his face is creased with two thick lines that frame his strong, confident smile.

Mandela in his speech called de Klerk “a man of integrity” who had gone further than any previous National Party leader in accommodating black political aspirations.

But he said further steps - including the lifting of the state of emergency and release of all political prisoners - must be taken before talks can begin. The ANC shares these demands.

Mandela was the last well-known political prisoner in South Africa. Six of his ANC colleagues who had been imprisoned for more than 25 years, including Walter Sisulu, were released in October.

In the mid-1980s, Mandela rejected offers to go free in exchange for a renunciation of violence. De Klerk abandoned this condition, although he said after meeting Mandela on Friday night that he believed the black leader was “committed to peaceful solutions.”

Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, one of the South African government’s harshest critics, urged the ANC to suspend guerrilla actions in the wake of Mandela’s release.

But Mandela told the Cape Town crowd the ANC resorted to violence in 1961 as a “defensive action against the violence of apartheid,” and added, “The factors which necessitated the armed struggle still exist today.”

“We have no options but to continue,” he said.

He urged whites to “join us in the safety of a new South Africa. The freedom movement is a political home for you, too.”

Mandela, whose imprisonment included years of hard labor on windswept Robben Island in Cape Town’s harbor, told his family: “Your pain and suffering was far greater than my own.”

This story from 1990 was written by Greg Myre, who at that time was an AP correspondent in South Africa.

Undercover With Mandela’s Spies: The Living And The Dead Still Bound By Apartheid’s Devastation

BY MARIANNE THAMM

Bradley Steyn and Nelson Mandela. Image via Hawkstein

Bradley Steyn’s book Undercover with Mandela’s Spies is not just a rollicking read full of testosterone-driven skop, skiet and donner, treachery and treason, it is also about a young white man’s gradual attainment of wisdom, of understanding how psychologically, emotionally and spiritually corrosive the idea of unreconstructed whiteness is.

While a packed audience attended the Cape Town launch of Bradley Steyn’s recently published biography, Undercover with Mandela’s Spies – The Story of the Boy Who Crossed the Square, an account of how he went from apartheid Security Branch operative to spying for the ANC, the ghosts of those who suffered and died in apartheid violence moved among us.

Steyn was a 17-year-old schoolboy when he strolled across Strijdom Square towards the State Theatre in Pretoria one hot afternoon in November 1988. Fresh from rugby practice, the schoolboy carried a set of clean clothes in a tog bag for that night’s performance of the ballet Giselle,to be performed at the State Theatre, where his mother, Daphne, worked.

That year, 1988, was a torrid one of assassinations, murders, constant violence and bomb and limpet mine explosions in Kokstad, in a disco in Hillbrow, in central Johannesburg, in Cape Town in an office block only 100m from parliament, outside the Sterland cinema in Pretoria, to name only a few.

While the National Party was talking to ANC leaders both in exile and imprisoned in South Africa, behind the scenes, the war between the state and ANC Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) operatives escalated. Cross-border raids by apartheid forces in Zimbabwe and Botswana, targeted the ANC and its allies.

It was the year Trevor Manuel was detained for the third time while Nelson Mandela was moved from Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town to Victor Verster Prison in Paarl. It was from here that he would in 1990 step through the gates, a free man.

But on 15 November, white supremacist Wit Wolf, Barend Strydom, then 23 years old and dressed in camouflage, chose to drive to Pretoria’s CBD, armed with a 9mm pistol with extra ammunition bulging in his pockets.

His mission was to kill any and every black person he encountered on the capital’s streets in the name of white and specifically Afrikaner supremacy. At the end of Strydom’s random shooting spree, eight victims lay dead, one of them cradled in Steyn’s arms, while 16 others were injured.

It is unfortunate that a superb foreword by veteran journalist Janet Smith and which formed part of an earlier draft of Steyn’s manuscript (co-written with author Mark Fine) did not make it to the final print.

Smith’s thoughts would have offered a crucial entry point into this complex, painful and layered story about the corrosive psychological and emotional impact of white supremacy and particularly toxic patriarchy in shaping events and history.

These not only led to the bloody massacre on Strijdom Square but deeply affected and shaped the lives of South Africans who lived under the apartheid regime.

Smith wrote: “If I was wary of supremacists – who didn’t hesitate to DM me with threats of slitting me open from top to bottom and rejoicing if I was gang-raped – I was cautious of Bradley at the get-go. I was affected by his experience as the boy who crossed the square, but I was immediately suspicious of everything else, especially the depth of his relationship with the ANC.”

She said that while she was “moved by his [Steyn] having witnessed Strydom’s massacre, I felt he had to be that white male stereotype of a special kind that my generation of South Africans knows only too well. He would want to be ‘protected’ and treated as special in some way because he had always been told he was.”

Smith’s sentiments echoed my own when I first picked up this remarkable book. Do we really need another damaged white person who finds redemption through black suffering and pain?

Smith wrote: “Our history has been related by white men, through white men and with white men’s often-covert comfort in a shared white maleness. My experience and that of many other women has been that Bradley and millions of other white South African men like him were damaged, unable to recognise or – for some – atone for their violence. So, without the outlet of overt racism, they harmed women in frightening, private ways, privileged and sheltered by their masculine pain, and that was just what it was.”

Encountering Steyn at the Cape Town book launch in person it is evident he has, ever since that day in 1988, grappled with the demons that came to haunt him and which altered the course not only of his life, but his sense of self.

What Smith had also set out in her omitted foreword were the violent currents that shaped the shooter Barend Strydom’s life and worldview, his unconstrained psychopathic rage as a result of early childhood trauma and which found horrific expression in the murder of those he considered “not human”.

The ideology of apartheid cultivated and groomed feelings of superiority, hate, suspicion and fear. Strydom was not born a racist mass murderer. So, what was it that shaped his rage and his hatred beyond a political system nourished by these selfsame atavistic impulses?

“When Barend Strydom was 18 months old, his unhappy young mother died of a bullet wound. They were alone at home when it happened. She was 21, and court papers recorded with cold economy that she was ‘suicidal’ and in an ‘unstable marriage’ to Nicolaas (Nic) Strydom, a 22-year-old policeman. Barend – who later preferred ‘Hendri’, from his second name, Hendrik – was their only child.”

What the court documents also revealed was that “Hendri had survived a near-death incident a year earlier when he was six months old, ‘falling unconscious for a couple of hours’ after being smothered. And it is only the young woman who put a gun to her own head who knows why her small son had ‘blue strangulation marks’ on his neck the day she pulled the trigger. The child – who’d spent a fortnight in hospital under observation after being choked as a baby – had previously been admitted to the paediatric ward after surgery for a cleft lip and palate. If Hendri witnessed his mother unravelling before she raised the gun to her head, he was deemed oblivious to it.”

It has taken Bradley Steyn 30 long and difficult years to internalise the effects of what he witnessed that day in November.

Steyn now lives in the US, having fled South Africa. His life was under threat after he was exposed as an undercover operative for the ANC’s security wing (DIS). In the Western Cape, Andre Lincoln and Jeremy Vearey (both later to become generals in the SAPS) played a significant role – it was these two men who “turned” Steyn – as well as his original Special Branch recruiter, Neil De Beer.

Steyn’s book is an insider account of the depraved dirty tricks campaign of the ruthless Special Branch, under the cover of “legitimate” business, The Project Group, and ultimately aimed at destablising South Africa’s slow rise from white minority rule to democracy.

On the surface, the Project Group appeared to be a “legitimate” business offering security at clubs and restaurants in Cape Town. In reality, the outfit was a Special Branch project.

The blueprint for what has morphed today into a continued violent turf war around protection rackets in the city was set then. Today Vearey is one of those SAPS senior officers still trying to undo the grip of the criminal underworld on Cape Town’s nighttime economy.

If you want a history of where it all began, this is it.

But Steyn’s book is not just a rollicking read full of testosterone-driven skop, skiet and donner, treachery and treason, it is also about a young white man’s gradual attainment of wisdom, of understanding how psychologically, emotionally and spiritually corrosive the idea of unreconstructed whiteness is.

Steyn delicately highlights a matter that seldom receives attention in South Africa. And that is of the many bitter and broken white men who emerged from that long dark night – fighting the apartheid government’s war, while being left to lick their own wounds, forgotten and abandoned in its aftermath.

The white boy who saw the massacre on Strijdom Square, who found his “True North” as an ANC spy, has come a long way, but is aware there is still some distance to cross in order to heal the rift between white and black South Africans.

Sitting in the audience of the Cape Town launch on 4 June, was Selina Williams, sister of ANC activist and MK operative Coline, who along with Robbie Waterwitch was killed in 1989 when a defective landmine the duo was due to place at the Athlone Magistrate’s Court exploded. Coline was 22 and Robbie 20 when they died.

While their deaths happened only one year after the Strijdom Square massacre there is no doubt that the defective mine was handed to the cadres by someone who had infiltrated the then still underground movement.

Bradley Steyn’s book is yet another vital missing piece in the reconstruction and remembrance of South Africa’s past. His intention is to memorialise those South Africans who were killed and injured that day, all of them named in the book.

And while it is written as a thriller of sorts, it has depth and layering that render it so much more than that. DM

‘Undercover with Mandela’s Spies – The Story of the Boy Who Crossed the Square’ is published by Jacana.

SOURCE: DAILY MAVERICK. READ FULL ARTICLE HERE.