Celebration with ANC when the world was still flat

Seeing the fanfare, pomp and ceremony with which South Africa’s ruling African National Congress this weekend celebrated its centenary birthday took me back to 1987 when a considerably more youthful ANC (and me) celebrated its 75^th anniversary in exile in Zambia in a world very different from how we know it today.

I was one of a handful of South African journalists joining a contingent of colleagues from around the world as guests of the ANC at its celebratory bash in the Mulungushi Hall in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. Among the South Africans were veterans like Max du Preez and Alistair Sparks, their pens still scraping along very actively in today’s South Africa.

White South Africans were not particularly welcome in Zambia back then, and while my entry into Zambia as part of a group went without a hitch that time, unlike when I returned alone several months later. This time the ANC man who was supposed to meet me upon arrival with my temporary Zambian entry papers was nowhere to be found and the Zambian authorities immediately placed me under armed guard as a suspected South African “spy”. But that’s another story.

Back then the Cold War was still very much around and the Iron Curtain still firmly in place despite Mikhail Gorbachev already having tentatively introduced glasnost and perestroika, which, a few years later would cause that dreaded curtain and that infamous wall in Berlin to come crashing down.

Our ANC minder, a painfully thin man with a big Afro hairstyle and an even bigger smile named Tom Sebina, introduced me to the “first secretary” of the East German embassy. Upon hearing that my maternal grandfather had hailed from Leipzig – then in East Germany – he promptly offered to arrange for me to visit East Germany courtesy of the German Democratic Republic government. Things took a while to organise, so unfortunately the collapse of both the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall put paid to that trip.

Many changes were also taking place in South Africa and 1987 was two years after laws prohibiting sex and marriage across racial lines had been scrapped, Indians had also shortly before been allowed back into the Free State. This weekend they were in Bloemfontein in abundance at the banquet tables.

But, State President P W Botha was still ensconced in the Union Buildings in Pretoria, warming the throne now occupied by President Jacob Zuma and refusing to cross the Rubicon, while that “terrorist” Nelson Mandela was still safely incarcerated where he could do no harm. Of course, the future Nobel Peace Prize laureate would have been released already then had he not refused to renounce the use of violence.

Every facet of life in Zambia was still controlled by Unip, “the party for the people” led by President Kenneth Kaunda ... not that there was much left to control in what was then an economically exhausted country after almost three decades of nationalisation and one-party rule. Even the yolks of eggs served for breakfast at the Pamodzi were white – caused by deficiencies in chickens’ diets due to the economic hardships, we were told.

This weekend a happy Kaunda sat at the ANC’s banquet table as a respected elder statesman, both his country and that of his hosts now in much better democratic shape in an Africa that is considerably more prosperous and more democratic. Perhaps the ANC’s suspended youth leader, Julius Malema – who wishes to take South Africa back to the kind of country Zambia was back then – should have a quiet word with Mr Kaunda.

Back then Kaunda, Mozambique’s Joachim Chissano, Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, Jesse Jackson of the United States, Namibia’s Sam Nujoma, the Cubans, the Russians, and many others were all collectively part of what was known as “the total onslaught” – enemies of South Africa. This past weekend they were all feasting on Zuma’s speech and South Africa’s finest cuisine and wines. Poor Muammar Gaddafi probably would have been there too, had history not taken a cruel Nato-led twist against him.

Blood brothers

In 1987 I – like some of the other South African journalists - arrived in Lusaka with gifts of Borkum Riff tobacco for Thabo Mbeki’s ever-present pipe and KWV brandy for Tom Sebina.

Kept busy by foreign journalists all day and knowing about the gift in my suitcase, Sebina could later no longer contain himself. He stood up in the foyer telling the foreign journalists he now needed time to spend with his “blood brothers” from South Africa ... meaning myself and the other South African journalists.

We retreated upstairs where the bottle of KWV did not last long. In Afrikaans Sebina muttered some unmentionable words about the American and British journalists.

I conducted separate interviews in my hotel room with Mbeki and South African Communist Party and Umkhonto we Sizwe supremo Joe Slovo. Less than a decade later Mbeki would first become South Africa’s deputy president and then its president, while Slovo would become Minister of Housing under President Mandela. Mbeki elaborated on his economic plans for a future South Africa, while Slovo refused to commence with our interview before I had ordered him a hamburger and chips.

Later, en route to visit an ANC farm north of Lusaka we were stopped at a roadblock with guns pressed to our necks until Sebina could satisfactorily explain to the nervous Zambian soldiers what whites with South African passports were doing in his car. Dangerous times, those were.

On one side of the farm ran the Tanzam Railway Line, built and abandoned by the Chinese – having since returned in bigger numbers than ever before. On the other side the ANC had as its neighbour the dreaded arch capitalists, Anglo American Corporation ... then very much part of what the ANC viewed, as “the enemy”.

On the farm the ANC workers were fattening two pigs for the table, one of which was called PW Botha. Almost two decades later President Mbeki would attend the real former State President Botha’s funeral in South Africa and was even seen to shed a tear or two.

At the end of my visit to Zambia, when I needed to get to the airport for my flight back to Johannesburg and no taxi could be found, Mbeki generously offered to take me. Contrary to Pretoria’s propaganda of the time he drove a battered little Toyota Corolla. I am perhaps the only South African journalist who can claim to have had former President Mbeki as his taxi driver!

Another example of the silliness of the times was, when upon my arrival back at Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport, a customs official made me unpack my bag which was full of highly illegal, banned ANC and SACP literature that could earn one a lengthy stay in jail. However, the customs man tossed these aside, uninterested, and finally asked me: “Do you have any Playboys?”

South African journalists were also prevented by law from quoting any ANC or SACP members or the literature of their organisations. as both were banned. To get around that obstacle, instead of quoting for example Mbeki directly, one merely wrote: “Sources close to the ANC said that bla bla bla .....”

Unlike this past weekend’s banquet extravaganza, the 75^th celebration consisted only of the speeches in the Mulungushi Hall. A rather nervous moment arose when at one point during Kaunda’s speech I crossed the empty floor in front of the speakers’ podium to check my tape recorder. Zambian soldiers, positioned on the public gallery above, jumped up and nervously clasped their rifles, watching me closely until I returned to my seat, their president still railing unharmed against the evils of apartheid.

After the speeches I photographed the late Chris Hani, the late Joe Modisi, the late Joe Slovo and Mbeki together. I asked them when, after having been in exile since the early sixties, they expected to be back in South Africa. A smiling Slovo replied: “By the turn of this decade.”

Prophetic words indeed.

Stef Terblanche