Dare Not Linger

by Nelson Mandela

  * The four original divisions from 1910 to 1994 were Natal, Transvaal, Orange Free State and the Cape of Good Hope and ten fragmentary homelands scattered throughout the country. The new provinces are KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Northern Cape, Free State, Northwest and Gauteng. See the map here. Originally set up to perform a broad economic development function within the homeland constitutional dispensation that prevailed at the time, the Development Bank of Southern Africa was reconstituted in 1994 as a development finance institution. It promotes economic development and growth, human resource development and institutional capacity building by mobilising financial and other resources from the national and international private and public sectors for sustainable development projects and programmes in South Africa and the wider African continent.

  * George Bizos – see People, Places and Events.

  * Denis Goldberg – see People, Places and Events.

  * The statutory bodies also include the Commission for Gender Equality, Independent Electoral Commission and the Independent Broadcasting Authority.

  * These were the dissenting voices in the ANC who broke away to form the PAC. Eight senior ANC leaders, the Group of Eight, were expelled from the ANC for their opposition to white members of the Communist Party, whom they saw as diluting the nationalist agenda of the ANC.

  * Pixley ka Isaka Seme – see People, Places and Events.

  * Congress of Traditional Leaders (CONTRALESA) – see People, Places and Events.

  * One of the oldest Bantustans, the Transkei gained nominal independence to become an autonomous republic from the South African state in 26 October 1976, with Paramount Chief Botha J. Sigcau as president and Chief Kaiser Matanzima as prime minister.

  * Chief Maqoma was commander in the anti-colonial so-called Sixth Xhosa War of 1834–6. Hintsa was the thirteenth king of the amaXhosa and ruled from 1820 until his death in 1835. Siqungati was a Thembu warrior who fought against colonialism. Gecelo was a Xhosa chief who was in the forefront of battles against colonialism in the 1800s. Cetwayo was a nephew of King Shaka Zulu. He succeeded his father, Mpande, as king of the Zulu nation in 1872. Bambatha led a protest known as the Bambatha Rebellion against British rule and taxation in 1906. Mampuru was a king and anti-colonial fighter who was executed by colonial powers in 1883. Sekhukhune was king of the baPedi who fought in two anti-colonial wars. He was assassinated by his rival Mampuru in 1882. Makhado was a warrior king and son of King Ramabulana. Tshivhase was the son of Dibanyika, the first King of the VhaVenda, south of the Limpopo River. Dalindyebo Ngangelizwe was king of the abaThembu from 1879. In 1904, he visited England and attended the coronation of King Edward VII. Indlovukazi was the Swazi queen mother. Labotsibeni Gwamile was the queen mother and queen regent of Swaziland.

  † Cyprian Bhekuzulu kaSolomon was king of the Zulu nation, 1948–68. Sabata Jonguhlanga Dalindyebo was paramount chief of the Transkei, 1954–80, and leader of the Democratic Progressive Party.

  ‡ Ngangomhlaba Matanzima is the chairperson of the Eastern Cape House of Traditional Leaders.

  * Borrowed by the ANC from the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, this energetic dance, consisting of rhythmic movement and stamping of feet, was integrated into political protest in the beleaguered South African townships in the 1980s.

  * Sekwati (1775–1861) was king of the baPedi people in what is now South Africa’s Limpopo Province.

  * A ‘candle wife’ is a woman selected by the nation and married off to the royal household for the sole purpose of producing a male child.

  † Nkadimeng was a member of the ANC National Executive Committee, a leading member of the South African Congress of Trade Unions and the SACP and the deputy president of the COSATU. Ramatlhodi was a member of the NEC of the ANC and the premier of Limpopo Province from 1994 to 2004.

  * A technicon is an institution similar to a polytechnic.

  * Jonas Savimbi was the co-founder and leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) (UNITA), the anti-communist nationalist movement opposed to the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) (MPLA)government in Angola with the covert aid both of apartheid security and the Central Intelligence Agency.

  * Trust Feed is a community in KwaZulu-Natal where, in 1988, eleven people were killed. Police Lieutenant Brian Mitchell and four constables were convicted of the eleven murders. They received death sentences that were later commuted to life sentences.

  * The South African Police (SAP) was renamed the South African Police Service (SAPS) when apartheid ended and it was amalgamated with other apartheid police forces.

  * In early 1994 President Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana attempted to crush protests demanding the homeland be reincorporated into South Africa. On 7 March 1994, violent protests and a civil service strike reacted to his announcement that the territory would boycott the democratic elections set for 27 April 1994. On 11 March, the AWB sent armed men to support Mangope. They embarked on a random shooting spree in which forty-two people were killed. Three AWB men were shot dead by a Bophuthatswana policeman.

  * Basie Smit was implicated in the charge of attempted murder when the prominent cleric Frank Chikane was sent poisoned T-shirts in 1989. Smit also awarded a medal to convicted mass murderer and former security policeman Eugene de Kock.

  * George Fivaz – see People, Places and Events.

  * Meyer Kahn – see People, Places and Events.

  * In its commitment to keep South Africa under white control, P. W. Botha’s government used the term ‘total strategy’ to describe its suppression, which was usually disproportionately violent, of the increased black resistance, which it termed ‘total onslaught’. This doctrine saw the government conduct cross-border raids on the ANC in neighbouring countries.

  * Organisation of African Unity (OAU); Southern African Development Community (SADC) – see People, Places and Events.

  * The report by General Pierre Steyn in 1992 detailed police and military involvement in violence in the run-up to the election.

  * The ‘Vlakplaas Unit’, a division of the counter-insurgency unit of the SAP, was responsible for the torture and deaths of many anti-apartheid activists.

  * Mandela succeeded the late Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere as chairperson of the multiparty Burundi Peace Process.

  * Chaired by leading academic Dr Vincent Maphai, and featuring an array of experts in various fields, the Presidential Review Commission’s terms of reference were published in the Government Gazette (no. 17020) on 8 March 1996, with a remit to recommend the transformation of the public service.

  * The photographs were taken by Cloete Breytenbach who worked for the Daily Express in London.

  * Treason Trial – see People, Places and Events.

  * Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela were two of South Africa’s most prominent musicians. They fled the country during apartheid and built successful careers abroad.

  * Barry Feinberg was an anti-apartheid activist, exile, poet and film maker. He now lives in South Africa. Ronnie Kasrils was a freedom fighter for MK. He served in Mandela’s cabinet as deputy minister of defence and later, under President Mbeki, as minister of intelligence. John Matshikiza was an actor, poet, theatre director and journalist. He went into exile with his parents, Todd and Esme Matshikiza, as a child and returned in 1991. He died in South Africa in 2008. Billy Nannan was an anti-apartheid activist who went into exile in the 1960s after being detained and tortured. He worked for the ANC in London until his death there in 1993.

  * Afrikaners, which means ‘Africans’ in Dutch, are descended from seventeenth-century Dutch, German and French settlers to South Africa. They rose to political and economic prominence after the 1948 elections won by the Afrikaner party, called the National Party, and established apartheid, which officially ended forty-six years later after the advent of democracy.

  † Aparthei
d South Africa had a legally enforceable ‘Colour Bar’ which designated certain jobs to people based on their racial classification.

  * These were projects under the direct supervision of the president, which included providing free medical care for children under six and pregnant women, a nutritional feeding scheme for needy primary schools, electrification of 350,000 homes and the restoration of services and job creation in rural areas.

  * H. F. Verwoerd – see People, Places and Events.

  * Sol Plaatje – see People, Places and Events.

  * The IMF loan agreed by the TEC was US$889 million (R2.8 billion) under the IMF’s Compensatory and Contingency Financing Facility (CCFF) to ‘help countries cope with temporary exogenous shocks affecting export earnings without resorting to undue and unnecessary adjustments’. The objective was to avoid a balance-of-payments crisis in the run-up to the 1994 election, caused mainly by a drought in 1992, which cut cereal exports. The CCFF loan represented 1.5 per cent of total government debt.

  * The rebellion, which originated in Greytown, KwaZulu-Natal, in 1906 and was led by Chief Bambatha, was a protest against a one-pound poll tax aimed at forcing black people from rural areas to work in the mines.

  * The strange-looking figure of ‘13780,4463’ hectares of ‘land approved’ for land-redistribution projects is an error in Mandela’s original handwritten manuscript. It is unknown what the actual figure approved was. However, a 2014 report by the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation lists land-redistribution hectares ‘delivered’, which would have been less than hectares ‘approved’. By 1999 a total of 521,276 hectares of land had been delivered for land-redistribution projects. By 2014 this had increased to 4,313,168 hectares (Development Indicators 2014, p. 35).

  * It is likely that Mandela is in fact referring to Operation Masakhane (Let’s Build One Another) here, rather than Operation Mayibuye. In a speech he gave on the project in 2 September 1997, Jay Naidoo, who was the cabinet minister responsible for the ANC’s Reconstruction and Development Programme, said that the main aim of Masakhane was to facilitate ‘the restructuring of governance institutions so as to put the country on a path of sustainable development’. The programme actively urged residents to pay for services such as water, electricity, sewerage and refuse collection.

  * During the apartheid era, migrant workers came to the cities to work and were provided bleak accommodation in blocks of hostels and were forbidden from bringing their families.

  * The New National Party was formed in 1997 after the National Party left the Government of National Unity the previous year. The party’s first leader, F. W. de Klerk, was succeeded by Marthinus van Schalkwyk, but it eventually disbanded in 2005.

  * South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1961 when it became a republic.

  * Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe since 1987; Quett Masire, president of Botswana, 1980–88; Joaquim Chissano, president of Mozambique, 1986–2005.

  * Bizima Karaha, who was the ADFL’s foreign minister before and after Kabila became president of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997, was also involved in the peace talks.

  † Mobutu had prostate cancer and died in Morocco on 7 December 1997.

  ‡ Sadako Ogata was the UN’s high commissioner for refugees from 1991 to 2000 and had met with Mandela in March 1997 to discuss the refugee crisis in Zaire.

  * Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the UN, had endorsed the peace talks in the hope that it would lead to a ceasefire.

  * In the 1960s the ANC joined the Non-Aligned Movement in its call for four nuclear-free zones in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe.

  * This is in line with the ‘One China’ policy enforced by the Beijing government, which maintains that the People’s Republic of China is the only government representing all Chinese people. It has its roots at the end of the civil war in 1949 when Chiang Kai-Shek’s defeated Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan and made its seat of government while the victorious Communists, led by Mao Zedong, centred their rule in mainland China.

  * Mandela was referring to the Kosovo War, on the one hand to actions by Yugoslav forces against Kosovo Albanians, for which Yugoslav officials were subsequently convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on the other hand to NATO’s intervention, without UN Security Council authority, bombing Yugoslavia to force withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo. Mandela made the comments five weeks before the UN Security Council acted to end the war.

  * Anton Lembede was a co-founder of the ANCYL, established in 1944, and its first president. He died in 1947 at the age of thirty-three. Duma Nokwe was the first black lawyer to be admitted to the Transvaal Supreme Court. However, he was prevented from practising because he was accused in the 1956–61 Treason Trial. He was secretary general of the ANC, 1958–69. John Beaver Marks was president of the ANC in the Transvaal, the Transvaal Council of Non-European Trade Unions and the African Mine Workers Union. He was deployed by the ANC to join the headquarters of the External Mission in Tanzania, 1963. Bishop Alpheus Zulu was a member of the ANC, president of the World Council of Churches during the 1960s, and Bishop of Zululand and Swaziland. After he retired, he joined the IFP. Alex La Guma, one of South Africa’s foremost writers of the twentieth century, was the leader of South African Coloured People’s Organisation. His work on the Freedom Charter led to his arrest and charge of high treason. Upon his death in Havana, Cuba, he was the Caribbean representative for the ANC.