I have known Comrade Blade Nzimande and worked with him since 1984, says Dr Michael Sutcliffe.
Durban - Soon after Comrade Sbu Ndebele was released from Robben Island I remember him venturing forth on one aspect of the tragedy of apartheid: that African South Africans often adopted the PHD mentality when trying to demonstrate their intellectual prowess.
Of course those PHDs were comrades who Put Him/Her Down (PHD) rather than engage substantively in advance of the National Democratic Revolution and the struggle for socialism.
Whilst I am not a member of the SACP and hold no brief to speak on behalf of Comrade Blade Nzimande, I have known him and worked with him since 1984, probably around the time Comrade Floyd (Shivambu) was born.
I remember distinctly the night Blade and I first met – at the Umlazi campus of the University of Zululand. I was a temporary lecturer in Geography and he was on the Psychology faculty. Blade was well known on that campus as one of the few outspoken progressives and that is why I sought him out.
Both of us taught adult part-time students, most of whom travelled each day up to 200km each way to study and ultimately get degrees.
I still remember getting to campus that night, a night much the same as ones before and after where simply getting to the campus was a mission – roadblocks galore, the stench of teargas, and security forces everywhere.
I always used the sight of the helicopters to work my way around the backroads, avoiding detection in getting to campus.
As we worked then in the UDF and in the many formations of the liberation movement, we did not walk around announcing who we were and what we were doing, but we all accepted that each was working in their own way to undo the apartheid state, brick by brick, mortar shell by mortar shell.
But I remember my first meeting with Blade because I confronted him and asked him if I could give a lecture in his course on what I saw as African schizophrenia, where Africans under apartheid had to adopt two personalities – one for when they engaged with whites and the other was the personality of who they really were. That trait still continues today – don’t we still hear rich people often saying: “my maid thinks…..”.
Blade and I became comrades from then onwards. We worked together on UDF and ANC work, well before 1990.
No-one paid R12 for membership cards then, but we all struggled hard together.
We met comrades abroad as well and I could list the many leaders, some now having passed on and others alive, who would vouch for that.
Blade was hugely articulate and engaged independently in ways not dissimilar to people like Pallo Jordan.
We also engaged progressive academics together, holding meetings to encourage them to be part of our democratic future.
For your edification, the Joint Academic Staff Association at the University of Natal was the only academic staff association in the whole of South Africa that was affiliated to the UDF.
Blade drove and launched the only academic journal written in isiZulu, in a way not unlike Dr. Dube’s newspaper Ilanga, showing us that we needed to move beyond our Anglocentric ways.
Blade became the mainstay of the Education Policy Unit started in the late 1980s and which laid the foundation for building a new educational order.
We worked closely on the many post-apartheid South Africa policy initiatives before 1990, all of which were initiated by our ANC leadership and which required us to meet clandestinely abroad.
In the 1980s Blade moved back home to Msunduzi, and working under the leadership of comrade Harry Gwala and all our comrades there had to face the apartheid wars of the Edendale valley.
Of course, later on we then had to focus on peace-making and reconstruction.
Floyd, I would be delighted to take you around some of those sites, to show you Mshayazafe and Inanda, Umlazi, SJ Smith and teach you about the many terrible things that happened when you were probably still in diapers.
The “Saracen Republic” graffiti still stands at the entrance to Umlazi signifying what it was like when you were barely born.
And in all of that Blade was there.
Don’t be so blinded by emotion that you focus on the men and not the ball. We all have many virtues and faults: after all I drink red wine and you drink imported whisky. But I do think we are all still committed to the continuing liberation of our country.
We differ in ideas, methods and praxis, and that’s what we want to hear, for as Marx taught us all in his thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
* Michael Sutcliffe is the former city manager of eThekwini.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.