I was born in a small rural town in the Transkei called Cofimvaba. This town is almost 200 kilometres from East London . I am the fifth child in a family of six. Only three of us are still surviving, the other three died in their infancy. My mother is completely illiterate and my father semi-literate. My father was a migrant worker in the mines in the Transvaal , but he subsequently became an unskilled worker in the building industry.
Life was quite harsh for us and we went through some hard times as our mother had to supplement the family budget through subsistence farming; had to bring us up with very little assistance from my father who was always away working for the white capitalists.
I had to walk twenty kilometres to school every five days and then walk the same distance to church every Sunday. At the age of eight I was already an altar boy in the Catholic church and was quite devout.
After finishing my primary school education I had a burning desire to become a priest but this was vetoed by my father.
In 1954, while I was doing my secondary education, the apartheid regime introduced Bantu Education which was designed to indoctrinate Black pupils to accept and recognise the supremacy of the white man over the blacks in all spheres. This angered and outraged us and paved the way for my involvement in the struggle.
The arraignment for Treason of the ANC leaders in 1956 convinced me to join the ANC and participate in the struggle for freedom. In 1957 I made up my mind and joined the ANC Youth League. I was fifteen then, and since politics was proscribed at African schools our activities were clandestine. In 1959 I went over to university at Fort Hare where I became openly involved in the struggle, as Fort Hare was a liberal campus. It was here that I got exposed to Marxist ideas and the scope and nature of the racist capitalist system. My conversion to Marxism also deepened my non-racial perspective.
My early Catholicism led to my fascination with Latin studies and English literature. These studies in these two course were gobbled up by me and I became an ardent lover of English, Latin and Greek literature, both modern and classical. My studies of literature further strengthened my hatred of all forms of oppression, persecution and obscurantism. The action of tyrants as portrayed in various literary works also made me hate tyranny and institutionalised oppression.
In 1961 I joined the underground South African Communist Party as I realised that national liberation, though essential, would not bring about total economic liberation. My decision to join the Party was influenced by such greats of our struggle like Govan Mbeki, Braam Fischer, JB Marks, Moses Kotane, Ray Simons, etc.
In 1962, having recognised the intransigence of the racist regime, I joined the fledgling MK. This was the beginning of my long road in the armed struggle in which there have been three abortive assassination attempts against me personally. The armed struggle, which we never regarded as exclusive, as we combined it with other forms of struggle, has brought about the present crisis of apartheid.
In 1967 I fought together with Zipra forces in Zimbabwe as political commissar. In 1974 I went back to South Africa to build the underground and I subsequently left for Lesotho where I operated underground and contributed in the building of the ANC underground inside our country.
The four pillars underpinning our struggle have brought about the present crisis of the apartheid regime. The racist regime has reluctantly recognised the legitimacy of our struggle by agreeing to sit down with us to discuss how to begin the negotiations process.
In the current political situation, the decision by our organisation to suspend armed action is correct and is an important contribution in maintaining the momentum of negotiation.
Chris Hani, February 1991
Quotes from Chris Hani
On Peace
"If you want peace then you must struggle for social justice."
On political tolerance
"We as the ANC-led liberation alliance have nothing to fear and everything to gain from a climate of political tolerance. We do not fear open contest and free debate with other organisations. Open debate can only serve to uncover the bankruptcy of our political opponents.
On the SACP
"We must never forget that the SACP champions the interests of the workers and the poor. Therefore our role has become, in my own view, even more critical… The Party in this country can only be strong if it spends some of its time on building and consolidating itself as an independent entity. We can only become influential if everybody can see we are really independent, we are strong, we've got presence in regions, we've got branches, and we're beginning to tackle some of the issues that face the workers and the poor in this country.
On socialism
"The crisis of socialism cannot spell the end of history. I'm saying this because we've got to go back to the reasons for the emergence of the theories of scientific socialism…. That is still the position in capitalist countries, we have a class which own the means of production, and we have workers who only sell their labour power. So long as that contradiction of social production and private appropriation remains, there'll always be a case for socialism.
Socialism is not about big concepts and heavy theory. Socialism is about decent shelter for those who are homeless. It is about water for those who have no safe drinking water. It is about health care, it is about a life of dignity for the old. It is about overcoming the huge divide between urban and rural areas. It is about a decent education for all our people. Socialism is about rolling back the tyranny of the market. As long as the economy is dominated by an unelected, privileged few, the case for socialism will exist.
On why he did not want to go into a future government
"The perks of a new government are not really appealing to me. Everybody of course, would like to have a good job, a good salary, and that sort of thing. But for me, that is not the be-all of a struggle. What is important is the continuation of the struggle – and we must accept that the struggle is always continuing – under different conditions whether within parliament, or outside parliament, we shall begin to tackle the real problems of the country. And the real problems of the country are not whether one is in the cabinet, or a key minister, but what we do for social upliftment of the working masses of our country.
On the armed liberation struggle
"When we finally launched an armed struggle, we were not abandoning our quest for peace, we were pursuing that quest in the most effective way left to us by an intransigent and brutal regime.
On the ANC and the alliance
"We have fought together with the ANC and progressive trade union movement. We feel our presence in this broad alliance has actually strengthened the alliance, and brought about a situation where the interests of the workers and the poor are embraced in the basic programme of the ANC and the trade unions. I think that's a major contribution that we have made. And I don't think we should feel shy about saying openly that we actually radicalised the ANC. We have moved the ANC from being a narrow nationalist movement championing the interests of a few, to a movement which has embraced the interests of the workers, the oppressed intelligentsia, the black middle class and I think that is our basic achievement…
The ANC despite being a multi-class organisation, must still retain that element which has made it appealing to the majority of our people, namely, the radical element, the element of addressing some, not all of the aspirations of the working class…
This is also the time where we should consolidate this alliance. And this alliance cannot work in the old way, a few communists working with the ANC and Cosatu to strengthen these organisations… Let's accept that there's always going to be a struggle within the ANC (not a hostile struggle) for the predominance of the ideas of the various classes within the ANC; there'll always be an attempt to balance these tendencies within the ANC. The ANC has always got to have these tendencies, otherwise it wouldn't be the ANC.
Source
Numsa News