Cyril: Impimpi or unusual liberation hero?

PATH TO THE PRESIDENCY

Cyril: Impimpi or unusual liberation hero?

Was President Ramaphosa an agent of apartheid and/or white capital, or an unusual outlier in liberation politics who made some ANC comrades jealous? Following Julius Malema's latest attacks, MAX DU PREEZ investigates Ramaphosa's youth and his path to the presidency … and forms his own theory.

ANGELA TUCK
ANGELA TUCK

THINGS Cyril Ramaphosa had in common with Nelson Mandela (and Steve Biko) were a stable childhood, a strong father figure, a good academic education and a fearless sense of self-assertion against white racism. All three followed an unusual path in politics.

But Ramaphosa also grew up with another formative influence that made him something of an outsider: he comes from a Venda-speaking background and was teased about it as a schoolboy. Vendas and Tsongas were considered dumb and ugly by some in the black community of Soweto during his youth — and still are today, apparently: Jacob Zuma's daughter, Duduzile (now an MP), continues to refer to Ramaphosa in her hate campaigns on social media as “Big Nose".

In my long experience as a political journalist, no senior politician has been gossiped about as much as Ramaphosa. He followed a different path to the top than almost anyone else. As the accusation over the years against him goes, he was indeed “late to the ANC” — he was already deep into his 30s before he became an ANC member. He was not in exile, not in Umkhonto we Sizwe, and he was not on Robben Island.

He believed from his teenage years that he would one day become president. His choice for change was not armed struggle but religion, first, then the trade union movement.

Something Johnnies-come-lately like Malema hold against Ramaphosa is that his father was a policeman. They fail to point out that Biko and Zuma’s fathers were also policemen during the apartheid years.

Childhood

One must go back to Ramaphosa's youth to understand him better.

He was born on November 17, 1952, in the Western Native Township, the second of three children of Samuel Ramaphosa and Erdmuthe Netshidzivhani. His mother chose the name Matamela for him. According to his biographer, Anthony Butler, it means “someone who evokes speechless wonderment”. (Much of my information about Ramaphosa's childhood comes from Butler's excellent book Cyril Ramaphosa: The Road to Presidential Power.)

Shortly after his birth, the family was relocated to Tshiawelo, Soweto, which was set aside for Venda and Tsonga speakers under the apartheid government’s policy of ethnic separation. The Ramaphosas were conservative and devout Christians of the Lutheran church. It was a close-knit family and Cyril had a strong relationship with both parents.

Samuel Ramaphosa was widely known as Sergeant Ramaphosa, someone fluent in all 11 of South Africa's languages. He saw himself more as a community policeman and was a pillar of the local community, sometimes asked to settle disputes. After 1976, black policemen were seen as the enemy, but Butler quotes a friend who says, “no one ever dreamt of counting Sergeant Ramaphosa as one of the enemy”. He died in the late 1980s.

Cyril’s younger brother, Douglas, was more hot-headed. He was part of the 1976 uprisings, later joined MK, and trained in the Soviet Union.

Cyril's schoolfriends remember him as a boy who was always painfully neat and well-dressed, and always had a Bible under his arm. He read a lot, including thriller writer James Hadley Chase, and was fond of movies. Where Eagles Dare with Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton and The Great Escape with Steve McQueen were among his favourites.

His primary school was a Venda institution, Tshilidzi Primary, and his high school, Sekano-Ntoane High, had mostly Zulu-speaking students. He learned to live with the different ethnicities in Soweto and, like his father, to speak all the languages; he scolded Malema last week in Pedi.

The young Cyril was an active Christian. At school, he was a member of the Christian youth club Young Ambassadors and the Student Christian Movement (SCM), a national organisation that he later led.

In 1969, his parents decided to send him to Mphaphuli High in Sibasa, Venda, where his father’s people came from. His teachers remember him as a true leader who encouraged students. He also became the leader of the Black Evangelical Youth Organisation, doing missionary and community work in villages around Sibasa. He was a lay preacher who shared the gospel on trains and streets, and was reportedly talented as an actor in the school’s stage plays.

Veteran journalist Denis Beckett met the young Cyril in 1969 at an SCM camp at Hartebeespoort Dam and recalls that he stood out above the others. The 17-year-old told Beckett he was going to be president one day.

His piety gradually became somewhat politicised and he repeatedly remarked that everyone is equal before God, that white people had no right before God to demand better treatment. His schoolfriends were impressed with his fearlessness and remember several occasions when he scolded white men who cursed him. This reminds one of Mandela and Biko, who also never backed down to white authority figures.

Ramaphosa has told interviewers that if it were not for the necessary struggle against apartheid, he would have become a businessman. “I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 16. What would have been a business career was interrupted by apartheid. I started as a hawker buying and selling things.”

Politics and detention

In 1972, Ramaphosa went to the Turfloop campus of the University of the North to study law, and again he soon became a leadership figure with a strong streak of black consciousness. His fellow students remember him as a driven person, a hard worker, a good organiser and a lover of movies. He was a bridge-builder between rural and urban worlds for fellow students.

The struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, which reached a peak in 1974, highly politicised Turfloop. Ramaphosa was arrested under the Terrorism Act after a march to the police station to demand the release of student leaders. And this is where many of the gossip stories begin.

He was in solitary confinement for 11 months in Pretoria Central Prison. He says he watched the insects in his cell every day and gave them names, just to keep himself from going mad.

In 1975, the state formally charged nine people detained with him. Terror Lekota and Saths Cooper were among them. The security police liked to to sow suspicion, so Ramaphosa was listed as a state witness, which he never was.

In 2019 — and this is where Malema got his stories — Lekota, then leader of Cope, claimed in parliament that during his detention Ramaphosa wrote to the police, telling them the accused tried to plant communist ideas in his head. As compensation, Ramaphosa was released in September 1975 and not charged, said Lekota, while he, Cooper and others were sent to Robben Island.

Ramaphosa’s response was that the police put severe pressure on him to testify against, among others, Lekota and Cooper, but that he refused. He would never have betrayed his comrades:

Cooper, later a world-renowned psychologist and, among many other things, vice-chancellor of the University of Durban-Westville, sharply criticised Lekota afterwards, saying he had no idea what the politician was talking about.

An MK veteran sentenced to 25 years in prison in 1986, Marion Sparg, wrote that Lekota made the false accusations against Ramaphosa out of bitterness and due to his own trauma. “His life has fallen apart, and he cannot comprehend that someone he was in the trenches with is at the helm of South Africa.”

Sparg criticised Malema and Floyd Shivambu, who cheered Lekota. “Julius Malema, born in 1981. Floyd Shivambu, born in 1983. Mbuyseni Ndlovu, born in 1985. All these brash EFF youngsters in their red berets and quasi-military outfits are led by a man who can’t accept that he was born too late to join Umkhonto we Sizwe. So, today, he calls himself a ‘commander-in-chief’.”

After his detention, Ramaphosa was much more reserved and found it difficult to trust others. According to his mentor at Turfloop, Tshenuwani Farisani: “He was hurt, angry and bitter. He almost wished he could have been detained longer. He was frustrated that he had not been charged.”

Ramaphosa says his Christian faith began to waver during his detention, and he began to reconsider his belief in the black consciousness movement: “I realised that we needed to move away from this parochial way of assessing the situation in our country and see that non-racialism, going beyond just blackness, was important to further our objectives and there were whites we could actually work with, who could make a contribution in our struggle.”

In 1976, Ramaphosa was again detained without trial for six months, this time with his brother Douglas. After his release, he told his father that he must understand that he and his brother were “children of the liberation struggle” and that he should resign from the police, which he did shortly thereafter.

After his release, he became a law clerk at Henry Dolowitz in Johannesburg. Dolowitz remembers that Ramaphosa consistently refused to use the separate elevator for black people, but no one ever dared to challenge him. He also remembers Ramaphosa jokingly telling him: “When I am president, you will be made minister of white affairs.”

Why did he not go into exile like so many others? Here is his explanation: “One of the things that held me back was a family situation. My father and mother were getting old and I wanted to be around, to be there for them."

Trade union leader

In 1979, the Wiehahn Commission changed the political scene when it recommended that black unions should be legalised. Ramaphosa realised this was the place where he could continue his fight against apartheid.

He began working at the Council of Unions of South Africa in 1982 and from there started to build a union for miners.

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was founded in August 1982 with 14,000 members, and within three years it had 344,000 members. Ramaphosa was the only full-time worker and the first president, James Motlatsi, is still one of his best friends.

The growth of NUM was phenomenal and largely due to Ramaphosa's drive and persuasive ability. He raised money from wealthy unions in Scandinavia, Britain and America.

The Chamber of Mines and the largest mining group, Anglo American, hoped the NUM would become a “sweetheart union” that would stabilise the workforce, but it became a nightmare for them.

In 1987, the NUM launched a mass strike that lasted three weeks and involved 340,000 workers.

Butler writes: “Cyril used his gifts as an orator to modulate his voice and to tease and threaten his opposite numbers. Even his body language would change in response to the demands a situation presented — for example, to maintain pressure on an undecisive chamber negotiator. His ability to out-talk his opposite numbers, and always to find the right form of words, was a great source of satisfaction and pride for the observing union representatives. They were equally delighted by his seeming disdain for his adversaries, and his complete immunity to browbeating by mining executives."

The strike ended when Anglo American indicated it wanted to destroy NUM at all costs. The union did not succeed with all its demands, but suddenly there was a superstar that everyone had to take note of, and he was only 34 years old: Cyril Ramaphosa.

Ramaphosa told Malema in parliament this week that the strike brought the mining industry and the entire economy to a standstill. “You call that a sellout position. Where were you? Where were you?"

Duduzile Zuma joined Malema this week by posting a photo of Ramaphosa with the NUM's team of struggle lawyers on Twitter — the union veteran Zwelenzima Vavi later praised the team of white lawyers as “heroes":

In 1983, Ramaphosa was one of the chief architects of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), which played an important political role in the tumultuous 1980s and early 1990s.

And there sits the ANC in Lusaka watching an influential political leader's star rise, but he is not part of the ANC.

ANC’s rising star

Ramaphosa was gossiped about and accused of ending the strike too early, among other things. But eventually he had to be involved with the ANC leadership.

His path to the inner circle, much to the irritation of many returning exiles, was via Mandela, with whom he had a close relationship — and this naturally sparked more jealousy.

And so he was the man who stood next to Madiba on the Cape Town City Hall balcony during his first public speech at the Grand Parade, the secretary-general of the ANC in 1991, later the ANC's chief negotiator with the National Party, then chairperson of the constitutional assembly.

He was considered by many in the ANC inner circle, especially Thabo Mbeki, as an intruder, and in 1996 he chose to escape that toxic environment and enter the business world.

But his youthful dream of becoming president of a democratic South Africa never disappeared and was realised on February 15, 2018.

If his route to the presidency had followed a more conventional ANC path, if he had been a more archetypal ANC leader, the current government of national unity would probably never have happened.

♦ VWB â™Ś


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