The new biography of Joe Modise, one-time commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), is welcome. Comrade and Commander fills in a blank about Modise throughout the ANC’s three decades as an underground liberation movement with an armed wing.
The book is edited by Ronnie Kasrils, a lifelong colleague of Modise and later South African deputy minister of defence, and Fidelis Hove, a son-in-law of Modise.
Modise’s posting as Umkhonto we Sizwe commander makes him one of the most important leaders throughout the ANC’s underground epoch. In addition, he played a major role in the political and military integration that followed apartheid.
Umkhonto we Sizwe was formed in 1961 as the ANC’s response to the apartheid regime banning the movement and its rival the Pan-Africanist Congress, and suppressing all African trade union activities.
As a political scientist, I have studied South African politics for four decades and so can contextualise the book’s claims against a broader background.
What makes this book so important is that Modise (1929-2001) was the victim of ugly smears that have persisted for the quarter century since his death. The most repeated of these are that he was a gangster during the 1950s and that he was corruptly enriched from the government’s 1999 arms deal. This was a major rearmament of the post-apartheid army, navy and air force.
The book sets out to demolish these smears and does so convincingly in my view.
The smears
Comrade and Commander twice refers, in footnotes, to the most elaborate of these smears being repeated by academics – RW Johnson and Stephen Ellis. Elsewhere, it draws readers’ attention to full-length refutations in print by Kasrils and others.
It dismantles the claims through interviews with eyewitnesses, the facts in some cases, and the absence of facts in other instances.
The book contains 50 edited interviews with 40 people, plus a few reprinted short articles.
The early years
Joe Modise was born in 1929. His father was from Bechuanaland Protectorate (today’s Botswana) and his mother was Coloured, a South African term for persons of biracial descent. He got as far as his junior certificate (today’s grade 10) in school, a rare achievement for an African during the 1940s. He later studied part-time to complete school. He got a job as a bus driver.
The book sets out how in 1947 Modise joined the ANC Youth League, and was active in its campaigns. He was among those charged in the 1956 Treason Trial, in which 156 anti-apartheid activists were ultimately acquitted in 1961. He was in Umkhonto we Sizwe from the first day, and had to flee South Africa in early 1963 with the Special Branch, the apartheid security police, hot on his trail.
His father’s background meant that he was fluent in Setswana. This language was useful in setting up Umkhonto we Sizwe depots and the underground “pipeline”, smuggling ANC activists across the border to Bechuanaland.
Joe Modise the commander
During the exile years, Modise was among those taken to the Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) for military training in 1964. This training was more about conventional war than guerrilla war, which the Russians only later provided, along with specialised training for underground work.
He was appointed head of Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1965, and took part in the guerrilla incursion into Sipolilo in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in 1967.
Modise received criticism in the memo of 1969, to the ANC leadership, drafted by Chris Hani, then a leading Umkhonto we Sizwe guerrilla, and others. Among the complaints was that he had been given a Peugeot car by the ANC, and was running a furniture business in Lusaka (Zambia), exporting to South Africa. What the complainants could not be told for security reasons was that the ANC was using the car to smuggle weapons and munitions from Tanzania to Zambia, since experience showed Umkhonto we Sizwe that customs officials were less suspicious of Peugeots than of Land Rovers and Jeeps. The furniture was made with secret compartments to smuggle arms and ammunition into South Africa.
Read more: Remembering South African struggle hero Chris Hani: lessons for today
During ANC debates, Modise was a strong supporter of opening the ANC and its armed wing up to persons of all colours (Africans, Indians, Whites and Coloureds) which it finally did in 1985. He supported the 1990s negotiations to end apartheid and move to democracy.
In April 1994, South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, appointed Modise as his defence minister. Thus, the former guerrilla army leader now headed the South African National Defence Force, a combined national military, made up of former apartheid-era soldiers and former liberation struggle guerrillas. He got on well with the former defence force chiefs, with the exception of General Georg Meiring, who remained resistant to change.
Debunking lies
The most charitable explanation for the smears that Modise was a gangster is that he was fluent in “flaaitaal”, later named “tsotsitaal”, the black urban jargon considered gangster language. He would chat away to other people in this patois to put them at ease.
The most persuasive argument of Kasrils and Hove in debunking the smear that Modise was corrupt is their repeated question: where is the money? Although Modise was a cabinet minister and his wife, Jackie Sedibe, a brigadier-general, they lived in a modest middle class house in Leondale, Germiston, to the east of Johannesburg. Jackie ran a small second-hand clothes business out of her home until she was 80 years old, 20 years after Joe’s death.
One poignant passage from this book is how his two daughters, on the day of his funeral, had to deal with a headline in one newspaper smearing him for corrupt enrichment, while they rummaged in the family house to find the bus fare for an aunt to get home after the funeral.
Keith Gottschalk is an ANC member, but writes this review in his professional capacity as a political scientist and historian.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
