To stand or not to stand?

February 2006, Al-Qalam

It was quite a dilemma. Should I stand or shouldn’t I? Was it ok for me to rise as a mark of respect for the man who had died a few days earlier, as we were asked by the chairperson. Sadly, the dilemma was resolved for me in a very unfortunate way.

I was at a conference organised by the Gauteng government. The chairperson, an MEC in the province, began the proceedings by calling on all delegates to rise in a minute of silence for businessman Anton Rupert, whose death a few days earlier was covered in most of the South African media. I must confess to having been a little taken aback at her request. But she didn’t stop at that. “He opposed Verwoerd,” she said. “Despite being an Afrikaner that opposed Apartheid, he was able to make ends meet.”

Her little obituary had suddenly moved from being sad to being laughable. “Make ends meet”? Anton Rupert? Was this the same Rupert who, on his death, was one of the Fortune 500 businesspeople? One of the richest people in the world? Whose family business empire includes Richemont, Cartier, Mont Blanc, Rothmans and Dunhill, and shares in Distell, British American Tobacco, FirstRand, Absa, TransHex, Unilever, Nampak, TotalSA, Rainbow Chicken and Medi-Clinic?

As for opposing apartheid…? From his boardroom, I suppose. I remember feeling particularly upset when she said this. Oh, I know that President Thabo Mbeki referred to Rupert as a “man van waarde” and had sent Trevor Manuel to attend Rupert’s funeral. (South African Communist Party leader, Blade Nzimande, also flew to Cape Town to attend the funeral.) And I know he was a philanthropist and that he inspired the setting up of the “Bantu Development Corporation”.

But I also remember the slogans and pamphlets we had in the 1980s which spoke about our opposition to “racial capitalism”, an ideology that Anton Rupert epitomised, a term that was synonymous with “apartheid”. Lest our communist friends forget, Rupert’s enormous wealth was built on the backs of the Black working class – whatever nice things he might have said about “he who wants to retain all, will lose all”. I suppose only someone who has “all” is able to make a statement like that. After all, when you have all, you don’t really want to lose it now, do you.

These kinds of responses to Rupert’s death reminded me of what some foreign friends say to me, often surprised: that they have met many South Africans and, among them, many Whites. But it seems that there isn’t a single person who had supported Apartheid. Suddenly, after 1994, everyone had struggle credentials and had a retrospective place reserved for themselves in the anti-apartheid trenches. It becomes somewhat treacherous, however, when the forging of those credentials is done by people who had been in the trenches.

Of course, it is not just rich white businessmen whose past rapidly has been written into the annals of the struggle. The same applies to members of all communities – including the various Muslim communities in South Africa. Today it seems that not a single Muslim was other than “in the forefront of the struggle against Apartheid”. There were even Muslims testifying to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to this role for themselves, without shame or embarrassment. About how they led the Muslim community in fighting Apartheid. About how much they had suffered for being the great activists that they were.

Except that some of them supported the NP during Apartheid – morally and even financially; some of them had been at the forefront of the ranks of the impimpi, ready to spy on the activist Muslims who were their neighbours; some of them had been quite happy to acquiesce to Apartheid’s plans of group areas, “separate development”, separate education, etc; some of them very easily hurled the epithet of kafir at those Muslims who were engaged in “kufr politics”; some of them were collaborators who joined the tricameral parliament; many of them are still as racist as they were 20 years ago.

How easily we forget.

And how easily does our history become corrupted and falsified.

I am sure that those who had refused to bury Rashaad Turner or Imam Abdullah Haron – because these martyrs had been killed “not for Islam but for politics” – are also today claiming to have led Muslims in the anti- apartheid struggle. Let’s not forget those who spied on Babla Saloojee and Ahmed Timol.

I wonder how many of the gems of our community were killed because of these collaborationist Muslims who now carry black-green-gold membership cards, have Nelson Mandela’s photograph in their offices and trot out the names of famous struggle heroes as if they had been intimate friends.

Back to my conference where we were asked to stand for Anton Rupert. I mentioned that my dilemma was resolved in an unfortunate way. Not only did the chairperson ask us to rise for Rupert. She then added, almost as an aside, that we were also rising for the three people killed in the laundry murders in Gauteng (of course, since they were mere workers, no one remembers their names). We were being asked to stand for three workers who had been killed allegedly by their bosses because they had decided to join a trade union and for an arch-capitalist.

I decided then that I would stand – but only for Jocelyn Lesito, Constance Moeletsi and Victoria Ndweni, the victims of the laundry murders, and not for Anton Rupert. (I wonder how he had reacted when his workers had first decided to join a union.)