Struggle Is Our Life

Mervyn Bennun: After our Kristalinacht, SA’s brave struggle faces defeat.
Business Day, 30 May 2008 PIC: wikinews.org

A Rejoinder -We can and we should defeat defeat!

Yours is an alternative voice in many ways than one. The xenophobia that has displaced so many of our African brothers and sisters in South Africa riles even the humblest amongst us. Your approach to the problem-and its antecedents- is refreshing. Refreshing because it puts back to the table the nobility of the struggle we fought to be free.

Dialogue has lately gone to cast doubt on the cause? In troubled Zimbabwe, the MDC says the people must liberate themselves from their liberators. Thabo Mbeki, the mediator in the Zimbabwean crisis, is seen as being too soft on his Zimbabwean counterpart, Robert Mugabe, because of their struggle history. The MDC can campaign however it wants, but in the end –like in the case of liberation movements that freed other African countries- the struggle that ZANU and ZAPU fought shall remain sullied. It (this struggle) is something we are encouraged to distrust.

The xenophobia attacks in SA have invited nasty remarks. Our leaders have been correctly criticized for waking late in the day when the ‘town was burning.’ Then the leaders were likened to the African leaders of the continent who neglect their own as soon as they ascend to high office. It is said that this is exactly what happens with the so-called strugglers. They engage in gallant fights in the name of the people as a ploy to get into positions of influence so that they can plunder the resources of their countries. Look at Zimbabwe in the hands of liberators, and tell us what stops our country from going the same route when it is in the hands of liberators? The struggle is sullied.

The reflex is to blame one another for errors committed in the here and now, plan for the future and forget the past. This way, the struggle that will be fought will be against our own beliefs, values and the new direction we were intent on charting. We see the folly of our ways in the xenophobic attacks on our fellow Africans, but then we blame our ANC for the degeneration. “Attack, attack, attack!” as former Orlando Pirates FC coach, Victor Bondarenko, used to say. We attack the new country and spit on its leaders, then turn on its history as well as the graves of its fallen martyrs and spit some more. There is no value there. We cannot redeem anything! The struggle loses its meaning. Its songs serve the rage and disdain that we represent in these new times, and like some blogger we are wont to say we ‘cancel the belief that struggle is noble.’

This struggle about which Patrice Lumumba had said, “…no Congolese (substitute for South African) worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that independence has only been won by struggle, a struggle that went on day after day, a struggle of fire and idealism, a struggle in which we spared neither effort, deprivation, suffering or even our blood.

The struggle involving tears, fire and blood is something of which we are proud in our deepest hearts, for it was a noble and just struggle, which was needed to bring to an end the humiliating slavery imposed on us by force.”

Indeed nobody can fault you for feeling the way you do. But everybody should praise you for giving us ‘umkhombandlela’ (direction) in the new South Africa we are building.-

Nkosana Zali, Mogale City GP