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| Michael Neocosmos |
Phyllis
Naidoo divided the world into “comrades” and “assholes”. She was dismissive of
the corrupt leadership of the ANC, and though it saddened her that many around
her betrayed the principles of the struggle, she remained fundamentally
committed to the idea of human equality. She was a mother to all.
Phyllie, as
I used to call her, was my “mum”. Like several others, most of them highly
placed cadres in the ANC today, I was adopted as her son, something I am
extremely proud of. One of the advantages of choosing a mother or a son is
precisely that choice is central, you do not inherit the social burdens of
family and commitment must be renewed.
We adopted
each other sometime in the late 1990s I am not exactly sure when. I had met
Phyllis in Zimbabwe in 1987 and spent a lot of time at her house throughout
1988. At the time I had been doing support work for what we termed “the
movement”, i.e. the ANC in exile. Phyllis’s house in Harare was a necessary
stop for all leading and middle-ranking cadres of the organisation, where
meetings would take place in an informal atmosphere and where activists from
inside the country would meet exiles. The house was guarded so it was presumed
to be safe, although Jacob Zuma would always turn on the radio when talking to
you about important matters. In addition a large number of supporters,
Zimbabwean and foreign radicals as well as Swedish and other funders, would
visit; such visits were de rigueur among the left at the time and they were
always extremely pleasant, unless some “big meeting” involving bigwigs was
happening. Phyllis would conjure up tasty meals often from leftovers or
vegetables grown in her garden and she would mother if not the nation itself,
at least most of its genuine representatives at the time. The luminaries I met
there included Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, Alfred Nzo, John Nkadimeng, TG
(Thomas Nkobi), Francis Baard, Ray Alexander, Michael Lapsley, John Osmers and
many, many others. The younger comrades would refer to her as “Aunt Phyl”. In
addition, many diplomats from supporting countries came through (especially
Cubans; she had a particular admiration for Fidel and Ché). Not wishing to
simply eat at her expense, I busied myself fixing the house. In particular, I
constructed an extensive shelving system for all her pamphlets and documents
and did quite a bit of cooking. Judy Todd mentions Phyllis’s generosity during
this period at length in her reminiscences (Through the Darkness).
Born in
1928, Phyllis was at home in the role of mother to all. Of course she had a
number of anointed “sons”, Ebrahim Ismael Ebrahim (“Ebie”) and Ngoako
Ramathlodi come particularly to mind. At the same time, she would be engaged in
campaigns, writing, in particular, a pamphlet against the death penalty which
took up much of her time (this was when Robert McBride was on death row). She
was always concerned about the plight of her comrades, and was particularly
insistent that if the ANC was unable to look after its own people when they
were in trouble, it could not pretend to transform the country in a way
beneficial to all. Unfortunately when cadres were no longer useful, they were
abandoned by the organisation which did not have any welfare system to speak of
and they had to fend for themselves. I remember one person called Duma, who had
had his hand blown off in Swaziland as he was opening his post-office box (he
had been the ANC rep there for a while, a very dangerous position to hold).
Phyllis was keen on seeing that he could survive and was giving him money. He
eventually died and she was to make all the funeral arrangements herself as the
man was far from home. There were many cases like this. When Albie Sachs was
blown up by a car bomb in Maputo she was the one who arranged to send him a get
well card and have it signed by the leadership. As a matter of pure chance I
ended up signing it alongside Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. When I lived in
Lesotho in the 1990s she turned up with her brother and wanted to visit the
graves of those murdered by the SADF in 1982.
Phyllie was
totally non-sectarian in her politics and friendships. Although she soon moved
away from the NEUM (Non-European Unity Movement) where she had begun her
politics, she retained her friendships in that organisation. Although an
atheist she had befriended the nuns at Marite whom she got me to visit when she
came to Lesotho. The latter had been harbouring ANC guerrillas and nursing the
wounded ones. Phyllie wanted them remembered in South African history. Along
with her walking up to Bruce Springsteen in Harare in 1988 and thanking him
(“thank you, Mr Stingsteen”) for his support for freedom in South Africa, this
constitutes one of the loveliest (and funniest) memories I have of her.
All this
simply to make the point that Phyllie was primarily a human being. Her humanity
guided her political principles. There could be no politics for her in the
absence of a commitment to humanity. Politics without principles was a
contradiction in terms, and such principles meant a total commitment to
equality, not as a future ideal but as a current practice now, today. She pursued
a fidelity to this axiom when she returned from exile, right up to her death.
There have been many clichés written about her and no doubt there will be many
more; a “stalwart of the struggle” is one, a “mother to all exiles” is another
as is a “fearless cadre”. The difficulty, however, is that such clichés cannot
capture the politics of such a committed activist and extraordinary human
being. Looking after the welfare of Robben Island prisoners and their families
(most were poor) when the former returned after serving their sentences in the
1970s took up a lot of her time, but this was not done for charity reasons; it
was how she believed politics should be conducted, with humanity uppermost at
all times. Losing her two sons, of whom she was so proud (one killed by an
Apartheid agent, the other dying as a result of an allergy to anaesthetics),
devastated her but she was extremely resilient.
On her
return from exile, she refused the offer of a parliamentary position because
she could never see herself as a professional politician; her politics were not
of that order. She insisted on living on her MK pension only, in a small flat
on Umbilo Road in Durban filled with memories of struggle. Not exactly the
“leafy suburbs”, she preferred to be close to the people she had the greatest
respect for, the poor and exploited (everyone knew her at the shopping centre
and all were puzzled when she would introduce me as “my son”), and it was there
that I stayed when I visited Durban, sleeping on the couch under the ground floor
window. Many of her comrades found her difficult to deal with because of her
acerbic tongue and her cussing, which offended petty-bourgeois sensibilities,
yet she was generous to a fault. She divided the world into “comrades” and
“assholes”, the latter term usually being applied to those who lined their
pockets at the poor’s expense. After liberation of course and as she grew
older, she witnessed many of the former transmogrifying into the latter; and
her mood could best be described as frustrated resignation. Whenever she could, she would intone that
“the struggle continued”, but she was well aware that this slogan meant very
little unless the struggle and its methods were clearly defined. She had spent
all her life in the ANC and SACP, so understandably found it impossible to see
them all of a sudden as “the enemy”; she remained therefore a “disciplined
comrade” in public, not least, she said, because she was afraid of losing her
pension if she were to be too openly critical. Of course, it was not difficult
for her to intone against corruption in government – the ANC leadership
recognises that itself – yet for her, corruption was not simply the liberal
concern with the use of public position for private gain; rather, more
profoundly, it referred to the rapid evaporation of political principles, their
replacement by crass opportunism and the collapse of a commitment to equality
in daily practice. It was the latter features which provided the conditions for
private accumulation. What could be done about it, of course, was the point
where she got stuck, as did many other committed cadres who thought like her.
To say that she thought that many of her comrades had betrayed the principles
the struggle had stood for, would be an understatement; I was quite amazed to
hear her being totally dismissive of the corrupt leadership of the ANC, yet I
did not detect anger, only sadness and a realisation that the baton would now
have to taken up by a younger generation of activists. Rather than pour out
acerbic commentary on those of her comrades who had lost their way, she
immersed herself in writing short biographies of those who in the past had
committed and sacrificed their lives to liberate the country. She was adamant
that these people should not be forgotten in the scramble for riches and wanted
to show that a different set of values underlay the idea of freedom than is the
case today. It was out of this commitment that her books were produced. It
would be to misunderstand her completely to dismiss these as simplistic
hagiographies, as some have done (sotto voce of course).
Phyllie had
a prodigious collection of newspaper and magazine cuttings and pamphlets which
supplemented her extensive memory; this helped her to write her biographies,
but her data could also get her into trouble when the truth as she recalled it
did not conform to the truth as the powerful wanted it remembered. Her flat was
burgled twice while she was present. The first time she was extremely upset as
she felt betrayed by the masses themselves; I teased her that the burglars
represented the people of this country just about as much as the government
did, and she laughed. More ominous was the second burglary, during which only
computer equipment was taken. She was convinced that the culprit was the
“public” rather than the “private” sector, so to speak, as someone in power was
unhappy with the fact that she knew about his talking under torture and wanted
the evidence removed. Of course, we will never know for sure now but the
paranoia of power is notorious and the break-in was clearly a professional job,
not an attempt by the “lumpen-proletariat” to increase its chances of survival.
This led her to rethink the previous break-in.
During one
of my visits she told me excitedly that there was someone she wanted me to
meet. This turned out to be AK M. Docrat (“Doc”), who was penniless and lived
in a crummy flat on Grey Street I seem to recall. The man had a mind sharp as a
razor but could not look after himself properly and Phyllie would take him food
and give him a wash. He was reduced to selling his books in order to survive
and many landed at Ike’s bookshop. He was an extraordinary character who
harangued me about how it was necessary to rise in revolt against Thabo Mbeki
who had betrayed the revolution! How this was to be achieved was less clear,
but it denoted frustration among Phyllie’s generation of cadres. I was totally
astounded by the forthrightness. Soon
after meeting him he passed away but got an important mention in Phillie’s
Footprints in Grey Street.
Phyllie had
many health problems and not simply because she smoked like a chimney; she also
had a piece of shrapnel permanently lodged in one of her kidneys (as a result
of the parcel bomb in Lesotho) which made urinating painful and sometimes
unpredictable. As she grew older she had greater and greater difficulty in
walking and moving herself about more generally. Walking up to the café for
coffee was becoming more and more difficult. I was extremely honoured,
therefore, when she agreed to give the keynote speech during my inaugural
address at Monash University outside Joburg in 2008. The theme was migration
and the organisers seemed to expect some kind of prayer session, but Phyllie
came forth with a speech on the horrors of the slave trade and indentured
labour which insisted on reminding universities of the importance of research
in breaking the silence surrounding these crimes against humanity in Africa. It
was a committed intervention such as one rarely hears in universities these
days, where managerialism and commercialism provide the parameters of thought.
Phyllie was fed up with receiving honours and awards, she said, and would have
preferred the money to be spent on more socially useful projects. A committed
political activist to the end, she was very dismissive of the political class
(irrespective of party affiliation). Towards the end of her life she was
largely ignored by the leadership of her party and it was only thanks to the
generosity of one of her junior comrades that she was able to end her life
beyond poverty. After all the work she put in for others she may have been
abandoned by the “assholes”, but she lived to the end, faithful to the idea of
human equality.
She would
always end her many obituaries with Hamba Kahle! So, Hamba Kahle! Phyllie, my mum. I will miss
you badly but you will be in my thoughts always.
