ANC legacies? Retrieving and deploying emancipatory values today

Raymond Suttner, The Daily Maverick

For many decades and for many people, the name “ANC” conjured up selflessness, sacrifice in the service of the oppressed people of South Africa and the meaning of freedom itself. People bent every effort to link themselves with the message of the ANC. They risked police attention and possible arrest by listening to the ANC broadcasts on Radio Freedom, beamed from Lusaka and other African states in the period of illegality. They read any scrap of paper or document or listened to any message broadcast from the ANC in exile, for the organisation represented their hope for freedom. It enjoyed great legitimacy and authority in the imagination of very many South Africans.

Political violence threatens an already battered democracy

Raymond Suttner, The Daily Maverick

When I joined the liberation struggle led by the ANC/SACP alliance in the late 1960s, it entailed support for armed struggle. Until then I had been a liberal without the benefit of any exposure to the ANC and its allies, which had been absent from public politics in the aftermath of the Rivonia arrests.

I then abandoned my reading of Martin Luther King Jr and Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, whose conceptions of morality and care for the well-being of other human beings had inspired me. I did not abandon their injunction to combat indifference to “evil”, or remove their works from my bookshelf. But I did not see them as relevant to a life in which I had taken a course that entailed the use of force to combat and bring down the apartheid regime. I did not romanticise armed struggle, but saw it as a necessary choice with which I wanted to associate myself.

Raymond Suttner What is ethical politics?

Liberation and Ethics: Is there a connection?

Raymond Suttner, The Daily Maverick

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the legitimacy not only of President Jacob Zuma and the ANC, but also the notion of the liberation Struggle itself is in shreds. For some of us, it was unthinkable that such an alliance of forces could degenerate into a moneymaking, lawless and violent operation represented by people who were prepared to trample on the values that we understood the movement to embody. Certainly, this did not happen overnight. The process leading to the present state of affairs has been long in the making.

Did Mandela ‘sell out’ the struggle for freedom?

Raymond Suttner, The Daily Maverick

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

For every generation to find its own path, to know what ought to be adopted from what has gone before and what has been done by previous generations, it is important to engage from an informed position.

It is the earlier work of previous political and social movements that determine the conditions under which those who come later address unfinished forms of oppression and the errors or mistakes of those who went before them. It is through engagement with the present in the context of this inheritance that they may be able to make informed choices that contribute to the broader national debate that needs to unfold.

Popular Struggles Then and Now - First Panel (27 March 2015)

Colloquium: Popular Struggles Then & Now

Raymond Suttner on Numsa's United Front

Intellectual Traditions in South Africa

Raymond Suttner on State Repression and Illegality in Durban

Raymond Suttner: “The dream has become a nightmare”

http://www.bistandsaktuelt.no/nyheter-og-reportasjer/arkiv-nyheter-og-reportasjer/the-dream-has-become-a-nightmare

Bistandsaktuelt: My project here is to hear what people think about twenty years of democracy and freedom. After the election in 1994 my reading was that there was euphoria, a hopefulness that now seems to have disappeared. What is your comment?

Suttner: There was a promise. A dream of what we wanted to see. And in some ways, without being melodramatic the dream has become a nightmare. In one of my blogs I wrote that one of the reasons why I was grieving prior to Mandela dying was that Mandela represented a vision of a free SA, where leaders acted with integrity. It has turned into a nightmare in the sense that there is a lot of violence, and I think that some of it is fuelled by the rhetoric of the leadership with phrases like “shoot to kill”, militaristic songs and lots of sexual and gender based violence. And then there is the corruption and patronage.

How do we move towards an emancipatory politics in South Africa?

Raymond Suttner, Polity

Political analyst Steven Friedman correctly concludes (in Business Day, 9 May 2014) that the ANC may not face electoral defeat for the foreseeable future, though he, uncharacteristically, treats this as everything that may be entailed in the notion of politics. ‘What happens inside the African National Congress (ANC) remains more important to our political future than what happens outside it.’   If we want a sense of where our politics is headed, he says, ‘we need to look at the tensions within the ANC rather than the challenges it faces from outside.’

‘Outside’, here, refers to other electoral parties, not the whole of the ‘outside’. It is important to define our understanding of politics and its scope. It may well be that some who voted ANC will be on the streets protesting today or in the near future. It is reported, for example, that the ANC scored 60% of the vote in the Bekkersdal hotspot.

Remembering Chris Hani

http://raymondsuttner.com/2013/05/03/remembering-chris-hani/

by Raymond Suttner

I have hesitated to write about Chris Hani, partly because I did not know Comrade Chris all that well, meeting him for the first time in 1990. But I want to convey a few things that I learnt. The first is that Chris cared about people and this one hears from all the MK soldiers, that he was concerned about every one of them, spending evenings with them, remembering their names even after fleeting meetings. During these evening discussions, Dipuo Mvelase, who had been a camp commander, speaks of Hani introducing her to feminism. But they would talk about everything, and many of the cadres missed their mothers and fathers and they speak of being able to speak to him about things that they would sometimes not have discussed with their ‘mum.’

Suttner's View: How do we stop the violence that is all around us?

Raymond Suttner on Disillusionment with Formal Politics

Chris Vick speaks to Proffessor Suttner about the political effects of the Cosatu rupture

Makhanda & the 1819 War

Makhanda & the 1819 War - Written by Raymond Suttner in prison in 1979 by TigersEye99

Raymond Suttner on Democracy in the Current Conjuncture

Nelson Mandela & Masculinity

Raymond Suttner, Mail & Guardian

The main biographies of Nelson Mandela do not consider him as a gendered subject. Yet in these times of widespread violence perpetrated by men, we may learn from Mandela's model of masculinity the type of man he represented.

He changed a lot over the years as his conditions altered; he changed as a human being. We are not dealing with a person whose identity as a man can be reduced to one single, enduring quality.

Raymond Suttner Remembers Mandela (From the 13th minute)