Thirty years ago, Chris Hani, charismatic leader of the ANC and leader of the South African Communist Party, fell under the bullets of an assassin from the white far right. Today, South Africa remembers this great figure with nostalgia at a time when the country is struggling with glaring inequalities and corruption scandals.
The tragedy took place on the morning of April 10, 1993. Coming out of his car which he had just parked in front of his home in Boksburg, one of the white suburbs of Johannesburg, the black leader was arrested, then shot at point-blank range under the eyes of her fifteen-year-old daughter. His dirty work completed, the assassin, a tall white man with blond hair, flees at the wheel of his red Ford Laser. The police were notified by a neighbor who had witnessed the scene from afar. She had had the presence of mind to write down the number plate of the killer’s car. Quickly intercepted at a police checkpoint, the assassin initially denies having been on the scene, before confessing to his crime.
Janusz Walus had fled his country, communist Poland, to come and settle in South Africa. Recently naturalized, he claims to have killed Chris Hani out of hatred against communism. The searches carried out at his home will prove that the man was part of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) and the Conservative Party (extreme right), both nostalgic formations of apartheid, opposed to the process of negotiations in course for power sharing between the white minority and the black majority. The police will also find in the assassin a ” red list featuring the names and addresses of nine South African personalities to be killed. Chris Hani’s name was number three on the list…
Aware that this violent murder was likely to rekindle the anger of the black populations and to jeopardize the process of negotiations for a peaceful settlement of the South African problems, black and white leaders are multiplying calls for calm. Speaking in turn, from the evening of April 10, Nelson Mandela calls on its troops to refrain from reprisals. He reminds them that if Hani was killed by a white man, it was the phone call made by an Afrikaner neighbor that led to the arrest of the killer. The call was heard, even if it did not prevent the exacerbation of racial tensions and the outbreak of violent riots here and there. There was no big night. Probably because the leaders knew that their missing hero had himself, a few months before his death, reoriented his strategy by emphasizing the peaceful and negotiated transfer of power.
An influential and popular leader
An outstanding and charismatic speaker, Chris Hani was a particularly influential leader among the youth of the black townships and ghettos, who formed the base of the ANC. In 1991, he was elected to the national executive of this historic formation with the record figure of 95% of the vote. The ultimate proof of his popularity, more than 100,000 people came to pay their respects during his funeral at the Soweto football stadium on April 17, 1993. “ His popularity transcended generational fault lines and many saw him as Nelson Mandela’s likely heir apparent. “recalls Max du Preez (1), a veteran South African journalist who closely followed the fortunes and misfortunes of the assassinated leader.
Like Mandela, Hani had devoted most of his life to the cause of the ANC. Born in 1942, into a poor family in the Xhosa region (southeast), he joined his Youth League at the age of 15, while at the same time pursuing university studies, specializing in Latin and classical literature. English. Under the influence of Govan Mbeki, the father of his school friend, Thabo Mbeki, he also joined the Communist Party at a very young age, although it had been banned since the 1950s.
At the age of 21, Hani had to leave his country illegally in order to participate in the first actions of the armed wing of the ANC (Umkhonto We Sizwe, “the Spear of the Nation”), from the territory of Zimbabwe, at the time the Rhodesia. A revolutionary at heart, the young man proved to be an outstanding military strategist during his long years in exile, working to coordinate and intensify guerrilla operations intended to destabilize the South African regime. These actions were carried out from Lusaka, Zambia, which housed the headquarters of Umkhonto We Sizwe, of which Hani would become the real boss in 1987.
” Admittedly, Chris Hani’s reputation owes much to his brilliant military career at the head of the Umkhonto We Sizwe, which under his aegis had gone from being a ragged guerrilla army to a real military organization.continues Max du Preez. But it is above all his stand in favor of ordinary soldiers and his denunciation of the corruption and abuses that were rampant in the ANC military training camps that contributed to his legend. »
Pragmatism and radicalism
The legend of Chris Hani is made of pragmatism and radicalism, from which the man will hardly deviate on his return from exile in 1990, after the end of the banishment of the anti-apartheid parties. It was thus when he was elected the following year at the head of the South African Communist Party, he attempted to reform the organization from within by pushing his orthodox and neo-Stalinist wing to adopt in his doxa the notion of ” democratic socialism “.
Within the ANC, he embodies the hard wing of the party, but lends his full support to the continuation of the process of peaceful negotiations initiated with the Afrikaner authorities. This did not prevent him from remaining faithful to his convictions, making the frustrations of the youth and the poor heard in the party’s political meetings. In negotiations with the apartheid regime, he called for a radical transformation of society, by redistributing land and resources, and opposed the positions too timid to his liking of the moderate branch of the ANC led by Thabo Mbeki, future successor to Nelson Mandela at the head of the country and close to white business circles.
After Hani’s assassination, his rivalries with the dubbed leaders of his generation were sure to fuel various conspiracy theories involving both the secret services and the mysteries of the ANC. According to journalist Max du Preez, who attended the trials of the black leader’s alleged assassin and his white Afrikaner far-right accomplices, ” there was not a shred of evidence of any involvement of ANC leadership or white business in the murder of Chris Hani. This tragedy is part of the ethnic and community violence in which the country was plunged during the period of democratic transition. In the Hani affair, all the signals were pointed towards the extreme right which simply wanted to make a coup by having the most prominent black communist in the country assassinated. “.
Paradoxically, it was a “successful” coup, not in the sense of the Polish killer and his neo-Nazi godfathers who, by perpetrating their crime, hoped to derail negotiations and sow the seeds of civil war. The Johannesburg war did not take place. On the contrary, the assassination was the occasion of a general awakening, with for consequence the revival and the acceleration of the talks between black and white leaders for the invention of a new South Africa. Barely twelve months later, Pretoria held its first democratic elections, based on the principle of ” one man, one voice “. We know the rest.
For Max du Preez, Chris Hani would have been an excellent president of his renewed country. “Steve Biko and Chris Hani are two men I often think of and think to myself that if these two giants of integrity and intelligence were still among us, sighs the journalist, the history of post-apartheid South Africa would no doubt be very different from what it has become. »
(1) Renowned South African journalist, Max du Preez is the founder of Vrye Weekblad, South Africa’s first anti-apartheid newspaper, in the Afrikaans language. A political analyst, he is also the author of several volumes of essays, including A Rumor of Spring (2013), devoted to the turbulent post-apartheid years.
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