By MEC AMANDA BANI-MAPENA
Durban - The road to freedom is difficult. It is hard and heart-breaking at times, but the cause is just and the result, which is not in doubt, is well worth any sacrifice – even death – Dr Margaret Mncadi
Today, 9 September 2022, marks 36 years since the gallant fighter of the Struggle for freedom, Andrew Zondo, and his comrades, Sipho "Machina" Xulu and Clarence Lucky Payi, were executed by the apartheid regime.
Disregarding the possibility of death, Zondo, Xulu and Payi, who struggled heroically against oppression and apartheid, might have been inspired by Martin Luther King who had said during the struggle for civil rights in America: “Some of us will have to get scarred up, but well shall overcome.
Before victory is won, some will be misunderstood. Before victory is won, more will have to be go to jail. Before justice is victorious, some of us may even face the physical death.”
In paying tribute to Zondo, Xulu and Payi, and remembering how they met their death, one is reminded of the words spoken by Rosa Luxembourg, the Marxist theorist, uttered the day before she was murdered: “Your order is built on sand. The revolution will raise its heart again, proclaiming to the sound of trumpets, I was. I am. I shall be.”
So it be for Zondo, Xulu and Payi as well. Indeed, few people would disagree that the martyrs carved themselves a niche in the history for fighting for justice and human rights which will last for all time. Many have learnt it is impossible to kill the revolutionary and the history, and revolutionaries die in order to continue living in our memories. In remembering, we make the past present.
We recall, honour and praise the sacrifice of the three cadres, who made the supreme sacrifice for our freedom and belonged to the innumerable heroes who died for their ideals.
Anna L Peterson and Brandt G Peterson, in their piece Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador, recount a story of Oscar Romero, an archbishop of San Salvador, who a month before his death said in an interview: “If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvador people… May my blood be the seed of freedom and the signal hope will soon be a reality.”
Romero was killed on the orders of a Salvadoran military colonel who organised clandestine death squads and the far-rights political party. During that country’s 12-year civil war, the archbishop often denounced social injustices from the pulpit. His condemnation of repression by the state security forces made him a target of the military’s death squad.
Similarly, Zondo, Xulu and Payi, South Africa’s foremost, courageous and compelling champions of human rights, who, with their greatest weapon, the courage of a righteous cause, also not only denounced the injustices of the apartheid government, they were prepared to, by any means necessary, deliver a decisive blow to the apartheid regime. Unfortunately, they were arrested in the process and sentenced to death. There is no doubt, however, that the blood of the freedom fighters laid the seed that led to South Africans to achieve their freedom.
Though consigned reverently in history, the time has come for the voices of these martyred crusaders for justice, almost forgotten and little known by the current generation, to be heard more widely.
American female civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hammer teaches us that there are two things we should always care about: “Never forget where we came from and always praise the bridges that carried us over.” Zondo, Xulu and Payi should be remembered as the bridges that carried us over to the Promised Land, a liberated South Africa.
We owe them, and many other unknown freedom fighters, a debt we can never repay. Above all, we owe them their deserved remembrance. In making sure that the trio are always remembered, a French-Canadian Architect, Eugene-Etienne Tache’s motto, which he devised for Quebec, a province in Canada, is worth quoting. The motto ‘Je Me Souviens’, translated literally into English means “I remember.” It may be paraphrased as conveying the meaning “we do not forget, and will never forget, our ancient lineage, traditions and memories of all the past”.
We must remember the fearless cadres because we are also engaged in a crucial struggle of memory against forgetting. We must remember the comrades not because we are prisoners of the past, but because the past provides the best point of reference for our present and can be our guide to a better future.
The Czech writer, Milan Kundera, puts it aptly when he posits: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what, it is and what it was… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Our gratitude goes to the late struggle stalwart, Fatima Meer, for publishing, in 1987, the book, “The Trial of Andrew Zondo: A sociological Insight”. It is a treasure trove of information on this hero of our liberation. Meer argues persuasively that the ostensibly white court needed to contextualise Zondo beyond December 23, 1985 at Amanzimtoti Mall. Instead, the court “separated Andrew Zondo on the 23rd December, from Andrew Zondo at all other times in his history”.
In memory of Andrew Zondo, Sipho Xulu and Clarence Payi, we must commit ourselves not to allow the passage of time to have these gallant soldiers of the Struggle for liberation expunged from our memories.
Building a socially-cohesive KZN
*Bani-Mapena is the MEC for Sport, Art and Culture in KwaZulu-Natal.
SUNDAY TRIBUNE