Walter Sisulu on Community Volunteers

Walter Sisulu burning his "reference book" during the 1952 Defiance Campaign

Walter Sisulu: Walter Sisulu: “Marshalling was born out of the plan to organize the Defiance Campaign. We had borrowed quite a lot from the volunteers set up in India. Also with the Indian Congress organized in 1946 we had copied quite a lot to perfect the machinery of the Defiance Campaign.

“Immediately after the elections of 1994 I think the leadership did not succeed in mobilizing the people by giving them direction. Now marshalling has got that effect: it gives people a particular direction.

“I would like people to think quietly about mobilizing the marshals to bring back the spirit of working together, of doing things in an objective way. Not showing off, but wanting to achieve good results.

(Walter Sisulu speaking in the documentary made by the Marshals in 1997. The title of the documentary is: “Soldiers for Development”).

As General Secretary of the ANC Walter Sisulu played the driving role in getting the Defiance Campaign off the ground. The people can gain richly from his legacy!

While many veterans in the Anti Apartheid struggle are aware of this, none really take Sisulu’s legacy seriously.

When given the opportunity to speak about marshalling in this documentary the gloves must come off. Three years after the great 1994 elections the stalwart, Walter Sisulu, states that the implementation of the goals of the liberation struggle never got off the grou8nd. Why? The ANC failed to give the people direction once they had decided to dump the marshals.

The Defiance Campaign was a passive resistance campaign. It was social in nature and driven by direct community involvement. Walter Sisulu mentions that the idea was borrowed from India while Mohandas Ghandi was toppling British rule there. He could also have mentioned the first instance of passive resistance in South Africa was under the leadership of Mohandas Ghandi himself. In 1907 he succeeded in getting pass laws abolished in the Transvaal, by means of burning passes and volunteering to go to jail!

Another point that comes out clearly with Walter Sisulu’s speaking about the marshals directly impacts on the question of organization. The Defiance Campaign was open and in essence a social movement. When the ANC constructed branches with a hierarchy structure, essentially it became political in the worst sense. People then joined the ANC not to serve their communities, as members of the communities they came from, but for positioning for power and influence.

Today the ANC is a heavy top down structure. The NEC is the top, the branches and local structures are crumbling on the ground. Councillors only want to be elected to earn a salary and dish out tenders. Besides, positioning for power and influence has taken the worst form. Leaders want to be rich. Much like Ngonyama Smuts states, “I did not fight Apartheid to be poor!” But the people remain poor, becoming poorer by the day, while many, Smuts also, have enriched themselves!

While it appear that the time for passive resistance and community self-protection is past, communities can enrich themselves with the legacy of a great peoples’ leader and community builder, Walter Sisulu. And as Sisulu has indicated, this can only happen when people get direction from a marshalling, community based structure!!!



COMMUNITY SOLIDARITY

From what we can glean from Walter Sisulu's few brief, but very profound words, two issues are paramount. One, passive resistance implies a form of organization which is not hierarchical or driven by leaders sensing instructions from a tope structure through to officials elected as leaders of branch members on the ground.

One tries in vain to get more depth in the organization of the Defiance Campaign which has a long history in South Africa, and goes back directly to Mohandas Ghandi in South Africa in 1907. It is remarkable how the implications of this have been buried in present day narratives on the liberation struggle in South Africa. For two distinctly different approaches have been conflated, or let me say one form of struggle, the Ghandian non-violence which was embedded in the ANC campaign and method of organization up to 1960, has been overwhelmed and made invisible by the rather artificial “armed struggle since 1960.

There is a very logical explanation for how the non-violence approach of the A N C became smothered by so-called “armed struggle”. There is no doubt that until 1960 the Passive resistance approach was successful and the chosen direction of the A N C leaders. It was during the pass burning campaign of the late 1959 that a division grew in the A N C‘s ranks. A faction, under leadership of Robert Sobukwe, broke with the main body on the grounds that an alliance with white groups was undermining the Africanist nature of the struggle. While the contention was not really about strategy, the break did involve in competition between the fledgling P A C (as Sobukwe’s movement renamed itself) did result in competition to “mobilize the masses”. While the carefully crafted Defiance Campaign under the leadership of Walter Sisulu was in progress, Sobukwe thought to do better and organized a huge mass of people to hand in their passports at the Sharpeville Police Station.       

The comprehensively but loosely organized volunteer movement had been by passed by an opportunistic group. They stormed a police station with thousands of protesters. As there were only a few policemen at the Sharpeville station, it’s obvious that this reckless action ended in bloodshed. It gave the Apartheid regime a good reason to declare a state of emergency and ban all liberation movements.  

Debt and community solidarity

What is debt? It sounds bad as no one wishes to be in debt. But actually debt can also be a form of community solidarity. One person lends to another person who is in need, and the guy who lends does not stress if the debt is not repaid back soon, or even at all. Here we see community solidarity at work: the wealth of one community is shared by all. Or, an injury to one is an injury to all.

In practice it mostly does not work like this. We have greedy people who want to make a profit out of another person’s need. These matshonisas will be keen to lend to people in need but charge a huge interest on the money lent. If they know that any member is in need, and that this person in need may soon be expecting money, like a pension pay out, a compensation pay out, then the matshonisas will be keen to lend lots of money to get back much more than they gave when such repayment has to be forced.

Debt can break not only a single person or a household, it can destroy a community. A debt ridden community is one that is eating itself up. It is therefore necessary to build community solidarity to prevent this happening. Especially if mine veterans who are diseased from their work may become victims of all sorts of people seeking to take their money for so-called "services" to access what is owed to them as compensation. 

Now if these matshonisas get to hear of the large potential sums of compensation that may be paid to ex-mineworkers, they will come down and raid like vultures from the sky. They will make all sorts of promises. This has been happening for years. These matshonisas like to feed at pension pay points. Many mine veterans have shown receipts from people taking money from them to “help get your “compensation” They always charge a fee. Sometimes it is R 50 but some mine veterans have been duped for up to R 500! Once their money is taken, they hear nothing!

Now that there is so much speculation about the Constitutional outcome, we can also expect fly by night legal experts coming along to take their chances. Even some NGO’s will see their way open to score money and give “assistance.

The fight against debt is not only a personal fight, it is a community fight. We can read Walter Sisulu’s approach to community organization — a community that shares and where many marshals are active is a community that prospers!

 

Marshals: History and challenges

Who are the marshals and what do they do?” This was a question that the leaders of the Marshals had to ask themselves after 1994, when they were cut loose from official ANC structures.


After the 1994 elections a period of uneasiness existed. The ANC from Luthuli House indicated that the marshals would not be disbanded but play an active development role in their communities for the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP). But soon after the 1994 elections interest in this promise by the ANC faded away.

In the Eastern Cape, and especially in the former Border Region, marshals did not take this rejection lightly. After many interventions with both the National and Provincial leaderships of the ANC they got the fuzzy go- ahead: “you must come up with your own plan and we will support you”.

In this light an interim leadership of the Border Region marshals was elected. This committee included Simon Mapuka, Alfred Tshongolo, Travolta Poni and Berend Schuitema and others. This leadership put together a plan that they would become involved as “soldiers for development” to implement the Program (RDP) in their own communities.

This approach was discussed in great detail by the then Chairperson and General Secretary of the Border Regional Committee of the ANC, Sindisile Maclean and Smuts Ngonyama respectively. Both wholeheartedly supported the merits of this approach proposed by the marshals. They also gave their approval to the marshal to approach the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to look at structuring and training.

Because of the excellent working relationship the Border Region marshals had with the United Nations Observer Mission to South Africa (UNOMSA) during the pre-1994 election period, the marshals found the UNDP eager to assist. Ms Robin Mauala, an official of UNOMSA, who was based in East London, was delegated to facilitate the restructuring and training program on behalf of the UNDP.

After three years of preparatory work, a project was finally put on the table. The Eastern Cape Marshals would be joined by those of the Northwest Province and an ambitious train-the-trainer program commenced at the Pelindaba Skills Training Institute at Broederstroom, in the Northwest Province. The Eastern Cape marshals selected 200 to go on the first six months, full time training camp at Broederstroom.

However, during the course of training the ANC dumped both the RDP and the Marshals Corps Project. The RDP office was abolished. Many marshals in the Eastern Cape became active in CPFs. This linked in with their history as they were active in the street and area committees during the 1980s. It is important to note this. They were not started by the UDF or SANCO. In fact, just like in Egypt and Libya and Tunisia, they came together by themselves to protect their communities against criminals, from outside provocateurs and political interventionists. These street and area structures took shape as Self Defence Units. Later, after 1990, they were integrated into ANC branch and MK structures.

In December 1993 MK was dissolved and its members given the option to join the SADF, then to be known as SANDF. The Marshals were never dissolved and continued as a structure. The structure was strongest in the Eastern Cape. In the Border region alone there were 10.000 marshals. 3,000 marshals volunteered as Soldiers for Development.

Berend Schuitema