[Marxism] Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa.

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The ANC must stand its ground 
Bheki Khumalo: POLOKWANE BRIEFING  
10 June 2007 11:59 
http://www.mg.co.za/ 
http://tinyurl.com/2xc63r

("It therefore makes perfect sense that our president spent Africa Day in
the company of General Vo Nguyen Giap, architect of the successful defence
of the Vietnamese people. Just as Cuba rather than the US was our closest
friend in Angola, so too General Giap's victory in the battle of Dien Bien
Phu and beyond was part of our revolutionary tradition.")
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 10, 2007 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/books/review/Harding-t.html

The Old Revolutionary 
By JEREMY HARDING 

SHADES OF DIFFERENCE 
Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa. 
By Padraig O'Malley.

648 pp. Viking. $32.95. In 2003, Mac Maharaj, who had served under
Nelson Mandela in South Africa's first fully democratic government,
was accused in the press of taking kickbacks during his time as
minister of transport. Maharaj had left politics four years earlier,
when Thabo Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela as president, and was
working in the private sector.

The accusation, it turned out, was the result of a high-level leak
from the public prosecutor's office. Though no charges were ever
brought, the rumors persisted and Maharaj was unable to salvage his
reputation. His employer, First Rand, carried out its own
investigation and cleared him, but he left the company and a little
later he left South Africa. It was a sad end to a legendary career.

"Mac" - or Satyandranath Ragunanan Maharaj - had spent nearly 40
years as an anti-apartheid activist, much of it in exile and some of
it underground or in detention in South Africa, as well as a further
five in government. "Shades of Difference," by Padraig O'Malley, the
John Joseph Moakley professor for international peace and
reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is a
collaborative biography, bringing together the author's analysis and
Maharaj's own reflections, transcribed from hours of interviews. The
result is exactly what O'Malley set out to achieve: "a portrait of
Mac and of South Africa." It is a striking success.

Maharaj was born in 1935, to Hindu parents in Natal. An earlier
generation had been shipped from colonial India during the 19th
century as indentured labor for South Africa's cane fields. Mac
wanted to read for a law degree, but his skin color was against him.
As a fervent young Marxist with a hatred of apartheid, he was
skeptical about nonviolence at a time when many, including Mandela's
organization, the African National Congress, still favored it. "I
took to Communism," he tells O'Malley, "like a fish to water."

In the mid-1950s, he left the country to study law in London. Here he
mixed freely with Communists, becoming a member of both the British
Communist Party and the banned Communist Party of South Africa.
Before sending Maharaj back home in 1962, the exiled Communist
opposition arranged a stint in East Germany where he trained in
printing and sabotage.

He returned to South Africa, O'Malley explains, to lead a knife-edge
existence as "the struggle's publisher and bomb maker," a member of
the party's central committee and also of the military wing of the
A.N.C. He made pipe bombs, printed pamphlets and spirited militants
out of the country for combat training. But the circle was
tightening, and in 1964 he was arrested.

O'Malley, who provides a very good sense of the political context,
tells us that from about 1960 until Mandela's release in 1990, some
80,000 people were detained without trial. There were no rules, least
of all behind closed doors. During his interrogation, which included
beatings and appalling torture - described in detail here - Mac tried
to slit his wrists with eggshells. The attempt failed, but his
willpower held up: he gave only the names of comrades he knew were
safely out of the country.

Mac was charged with four counts of sabotage. On Robben Island he
quickly fell in with Mandela and the other political prisoners.
Mandela, he says, had nicknames for everyone. Mac was "Neef," or
"Nephew" in Afrikaans. Mac called Mandela "Oom" or Uncle. "Of course
I was pleased," he told O'Malley. "Looking back, I can see it was
also a way of wrapping us into a relationship in which we had to
maintain a certain respect." For his part, Mandela, writing honestly
and well about Mac in his foreword to "Shades of Difference," says
the strength of their relationship "transcends the struggle."

After serving 12 years, Maharaj moved to Lusaka, Zambia, where he
joined the A.N.C. By the mid-1980s he was a senior member, and went
on to become one of the key figures behind "Operation Vula," the
A.N.C.'s complex underground communications system. It linked
militants inside the country with the exiled leadership in Lusaka,
and smuggled freedom fighters into South Africa. One of the strengths
of this book is to show how crucial Vula was to the A.N.C. - how much
the exiled leaders felt they'd lost touch with homegrown activists in
the townships.

Maharaj himself re-entered South Africa in 1988 in disguise. He and
his colleagues had put the word about that he was gravely ill and
receiving treatment in Moscow. Even his children were deceived, as
O'Malley explains in a careful evaluation of the damage done to Mac's
family life by his political commitments.

Back in South Africa Mac made contact with labor union leaders and
political figures, while running weapons through Botswana. Operation
Vula remained in place even after Mandela's release, in case the
talks with F. W. de Klerk's government broke down.

Maharaj was detained again in 1990 on charges of terrorism and
subversion, and waited several months before his release on bail. The
charges were eventually dropped, and Mac benefited from a group
indemnity granted by de Klerk. In 1994 he became a member of
Mandela's cabinet.

Was Maharaj really guilty of taking bribes at the end of his
extraordinary career? And why was the allegation leaked so
assiduously several years after he had quit politics? O'Malley
speculates that Mac was the victim of a complicated internal feud
within the A.N.C., involving several government figures and including
the deputy president of the country.

It's not clear if Thabo Mbeki approved of Mac's fall from grace. Mac
doesn't say, but O'Malley believes he did. The whole episode confirms
his suspicion that the new post-Mandela South Africa has turned sour.
Mbeki, he writes, has given "the thumbs-up for the revolution ... to
start eating its own," and doing "what postrevolutionary movements do
best: marginalize old comrades and trample on others in the stampede
for power."

Jeremy Harding's most recent book is "Mother Country," a memoir about
birth parents and adopted parents.


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