The Struggle for South Africa's Liberation: Success and Failure
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- Published on Monday, 28 September 2015 23:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1168 .... September 29, 2015
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The Struggle for South Africa's Liberation: Success and Failure
John S. Saul
This paper was presented at a seminar at the University of Johannesburg on Wednesday, August 5, 2015. Albie Sachs and Ben Turok served as discussants and a lively, disputatious but comradely exchange followed -- with some challenging interventions from the large audience as well.
It is true that I'm from Canada and only arrived in Africa, in Tanzania to be specific, in 1965 at the age of 27; nonetheless, it was in Africa that I grew up, at least politically; not, initially, in South Africa but in Tanzania where I taught for many years and in working with Mozambique's FRELIMO in exile in DSM; in visiting the liberated areas of a new Mozambique in... Tete Province in 1972; and, later, in teaching in a liberated Mozambique at the Universidade de Eduardo Mondlane.
Of course I visited South Africa throughout these years too, even once, in the 1980s, doing so illegally (having been refused a visa), I've had books banned by the apartheid government, and I've taught here in Jo’burg, just down the road at Wits at the turn of the present century. But, in the 1960s and the 1970s, my "African education" began not with the Freedom Charter but with Fanon, Cabral and Nyerere. We were aware of what the Freedom Charter had to say in 1955 needless to say and honoured it. But in Dar es Salaam we were beginning to judge movements throughout the continent not by what they said in the heat of struggle but by what they actually did once they were in power. And we were looking for voices -- Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and Julius Nyerere were three such voices -- within the camp of liberation that could instruct us.
Let me also make a further specific introductory point if I may. Let me, in fact, pick up from where I left off my brief appearance at the South Africa Book Fair last weekend and, assuming that there's not too much overlap of audience, even use the same entry point. It seems appropriate to do so in part because I have been instructed by my old friend David Moore to change my topic from the one I had proposed (that being entitled "The Struggle for Southern African Liberation: Success or Failure") to "South Africa's Freedom Charter and its legacy: reflections on anti-colonial programmes, post-colonial practices, and possibilities for the future" -- in order to fit in with the broader topic of the 60th Anniversary of the Freedom Charter already established as to the overall theme of the seminar series of which my presentation now makes a contribution.