Winnie Mandela

[Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso]

Still “controversial” in death...

Winnie Mandela was a hero. If she’d been white, there would be no debate

Afua Hirsch

Peaceful protest did not end apartheid: it took revolutionaries. And it shouldn’t be difficult to choose between a system of racial supremacy and a person who helped overthrow it

440 

Published: 15:00 WAT Tuesday, 03 April 2018

 Follow Afua Hirsch

Heroes are curious things. Ours have roots in the ancient Graeco-Roman sense of the concept, which places a premium on military victory. What’s problematic is how many of our heroes embody an inherent level of violence, as is unsurprisingly the case with people whose main accomplishments arise from war. We are tolerant about people who regarded the working classes as an abomination (Wellington), the transatlantic slave trade as a good idea (Nelson) or Indians as repulsive (Churchill), because we think the ends – defeating Napoleon or Hitler – justified the means.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, as the press coverage of her death this week shows, is not entitled to the same rose-tinted eulogy as our white British men. She is “controversial” and a “bully”. One newspaper columnist was boldly willing to abandon his usual restraint in not writing ill of the dead specially for this “odious, toxic individual”.

The media reports have raised the horrific murder of 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi, though few have been unduly troubled by the fact that this was a crime she always denied any involvement in, or by the ample evidence of the lengths to which the apartheid regime went to infiltrate and smear her and her followers.

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Sadly, I suspect much of the newly discovered outrage sparked by Madikizela-Mandela’s death has little to do with any recent conversion to the cause of Black Lives Matter, or accompanying grief for the fate of little Stompie – one of so many black children who lost their lives during the brutality of apartheid and the struggle against it. What it’s really about is a reluctance to admit that apartheid was so wrong, and so entrenched; and that without the resilience and vision of Madikizela-Mandela, and those of her ilk, it would not have been brought down.

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Britain’s heroes are allowed to have waged war. The warriors against white supremacist oppression, on the other hand, are not. When, for instance, I questioned Piers Morgan over the appropriateness of having a 50-metre column in Trafalgar Square to commemorate Admiral Nelson, he spat that Nelson Mandela has a statue despite being a “terrorist”. When I debated with a renowned naval historian over his adulation of the admiral, the argument wound its way to Haiti – the only example in history of slaves successfully overthrowing their masters and establishing their own republic – and whether this was a victory for the enslaved over their oppressors (my view) or a tragedy for the plantation owners who were killed in the process (his).

There is no end to the contortions in our psyche. Who now – outside South Africa, where I have heard its demise lamented more than once – would defend the apartheid regime? It’s easy to condemn in hindsight. Yet we have forgotten what it actually takes to overthrow such tyranny when the legal and moral force of a sovereign state was on the side of white supremacy. Columnists did not cut it. Activists could not have done it. Peaceful protest did not do it. Sports boycotts, books, badges and car boot sales did not do it. It took revolutionaries, pure and simple. People willing to break the law, to kill and be killed.

Our ambivalence about apartheid is the elephant in the room

It took women such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. She was, as the world’s media have had to be repeatedly reminded this week, not an “activist”: she was a leader in a liberation struggle. She survived – during more than 35 years of apartheid – surveillance, threats, harassment, arrest and imprisonment, 491 days in solitary confinement and eight years in exile. The methods of torture used against her included, according to one account, denying her sanitary products so that she was found, in detention, covered in her own menstrual blood.

I doubt the Daily Mail, recalling Madikizela-Mandela’s life this week as “blood-soaked”, appreciated the irony of this choice of phrase, nor that of judging her – rather than the apartheid regime she helped overthrow – the “bully”.

Our ambivalence about apartheid is the elephant in the room. As a nation, one of our techniques for glossing over this uncomfortable fact has been overly beatifying Nelson Mandela, whose posthumous glory has always struck me as coming at the cost of forgetting the others. Who now remembers the names of Robert Sobukwe – the profound pan-Africanist whose medical treatment for fatal lung cancer was obstructed by the apartheid government, or Elias Motsoaledi, convicted at Rivonia alongside Mandela and not released from Robben Island until 26 years later.

Winnie Mandela was loved and loathed, but she earned her place in history | Ralph Mathekga

We consider Nelson Mandela to be safe because of his message of forgiveness, because of truth and reconciliation, because he accepted the Nobel peace prize with apartheid-regime president FW de Klerk – decisions to which Madikizela-Mandela was fundamentally opposed. She was a radical until the end. Each rejection of that radicalism is an endorsement of the tyranny she fought against.

But is it surprising that we endorse it? An endless litany of heroes were either architects of, or happy to take part in, the very apartheid Madikizela-Mandela sacrificed so much to help end. Among them are those at the centre of our current statue wars – Cecil Rhodes, Lord Kitchener, Jan Smuts – all immortalised on prominent plinths. It’s hard to resist the conclusion – comparing the fact that it’s these people whom we immortalise, and those such as Madikizela-Mandela whom we demonise – that we are still undecided about which side of history we, as a nation, are on.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Denmark this week unveiled its first statue of a black woman. It does not commemorate someone who fed neatly into diversifying the existing order – the limited kind of black hero we in Britain seem willing to accept – but the “three queens” of the Caribbean island of St Croix, who led an unprecedented revolt against Danish colonial rule. Doing so requires Denmark to take a new look at its true history, seeing through its 20th-century rebranding as a liberal bastion that saved Jews from the Nazis, and whose empire was “not as bad as others”.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. We see ourselves as a moral, decent and rights-respecting nation. But when we are tested for our true moral grit, we keep failing. The death of Madikizela-Mandela is another opportunity to choose between a narrative of white supremacy and the one that overthrew it. If the media coverage of her death is anything to go by, this is, apparently, a deeply controversial choice.

• Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist

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Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, PhD.,
Department of Political Science and Public Administration,
Babcock University,
PMB 4010, Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State, Nigeria. 
Official Email: yacob-...@babcock.edu.ng
The Editor, Journal of International Politics and Development: ji...@babcock.edu.ng
Institutional Website: www.babcock.edu.ng
.....
Intelligence Plus Character -- that is the goal of True Education - Martin Luther King, Jr.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Impressive article.

My appreciation of Nelson Mandela is deeply diluted by my understanding of what he did to Winnie. I see him as allowing her to be sacrificed as a deal to end a war soaked in the blood of Back people.

I wonder what the business of the public was in the information he gave in court during their divorce that she did not allow him into the bedroom after he left prison. With all his fame and power, could he not have got a private divorce instead of dragging their private issues into a public divorce court proceedings?

Why was Winnie being branded for murder while the end of apartheid rule was conducted on the basis of mutual forgiveness? Why did he allow her to be indicted for difficulties with paying bills for a relative's schooling after he had left prison?

I read something about her having had sexual relationships with other men while he was in prison and sustained those relationships after he came out.

So?

What more was to be expected, since he had spent so long in prison? A realistic understanding is to see their marriage as sacrificed to the anti-apartheid struggle and a resolution to their almost inevitable marital challenges as best carried out with the discretion due to two heroes who gave up so much of their lives for something bigger than themselves.

Winnie Mandela was the icon of the struggle while he was in prison. The person who fought out the bitter war in daily battles of mind and often of blood and bone. Their ideological and relational difficulties should have been kept private to themselves, not allowing those who had murdered and dehumanised so many to try to humiliate her while elevating him, giving those dehumanisers a last laugh even as they conceded political power while most likely holding economic power.

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Yes, this is an amazing piece; Afua Hirsh knocked it out of the ball park on this one. One addendum to her beautiful piece is of course that it is not just white "heroes" who are allowed to be and are forgiven for being morally imperfect. Women in general and especially black women are rarely forgiven for or allowed the space for moral imperfection. Winnie is a victim of both racism and sexism. A defiant, militant, ideologically inflexible black woman was a threat to many, including the male honchos of the ANC.

The bright side is that history will ultimately be as kind, if not kinder, to Winnie as it will be to Nelson. By the way, there is a wonderful, sympathetic autobiographical documentary playing on Netflix. It's very good, and does a good job of presenting the Stompie tragedy in a manner that doesn't previlege the premise of Winnie's guilt or complicity but instead explores the broader, overarching complicity and culpability of the apartheid regime.

[Kenneth Harrow]

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 3 April 2018 at 18:25
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impressive article.

 

My appreciation of Nelson Mandela is deeply diluted by my understanding of what he did to Winnie. I see him as allowing her to be sacrificed as a deal to end a war soaked in the blood of Back people.

 

I wonder what the business of the public was in the information he gave in court during their divorce that she did not allow him into the bedroom after he left prison. With all his fame and power, could he not have got a private divorce instead of dragging their private issues into a public divorce court proceedings?

 

Why was Winnie being branded for murder while the end of apartheid rule was conducted on the basis of mutual forgiveness? Why did he allow her to be indicted for difficulties with paying bills for a relative's schooling after he had left prison?

 

I read something about her having had sexual relationships with other men while he was in prison and sustained those relationships after he came out.

 

So?

 

What more was to be expected, since he had spent so long in prison? A realistic understanding is to see their marriage as sacrificed to the anti-apartheid struggle and a resolution to their almost inevitable marital challenges as best carried out with the discretion due to two heroes who gave up so much of their lives for something bigger than themselves.

 

Winnie Mandela was the icon of the struggle while he was in prison. The person who fought out the bitter war in daily battles of mind and often of blood and bone. Their ideological and relational difficulties should have been kept private to themselves, not allowing those who had murdered and dehumanised so many to try to humiliate her while elevating him, giving those dehumanisers a last laugh even as they conceded political power while most likely holding economic power.

 

 

 

 

On 3 April 2018 at 22:20, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso <jum...@gmail.com> wrote:

Still “controversial” in death...

Winnie Mandela was a hero. If she’d been white, there would be no debate

Afua Hirsch

Peaceful protest did not end apartheid: it took revolutionaries. And it shouldn’t be difficult to choose between a system of racial supremacy and a person who helped overthrow it

440 

Published: 15:00 WAT Tuesday, 03 April 2018

 Follow Afua Hirsch

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[Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso]

Absolutely: racism and sexism are difficult to extricate in black women’s lives wherever it exists.

[Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso]

“Winnie Mandela was the icon of the struggle while he was in prison. The person who fought out the bitter war in daily battles of mind and often of blood and bone”.

I couldn’t agree more. Beyond her many personal sufferings and deprivations, her human flaws and errors, she did something often overlooked in the narrative: In my simple opinion, it was Winnie Mandela who made Nelson Mandela, and not the other way round. He went to prison for 27 years, and she spent every single day of those twenty seven years fighting psychologically, physically, emotionally, financially, and every which way the struggle demanded— but more importantly, she spent every single day of those twenty seven years keeping the memory of Nelson Mandela alive in the South African and in the global consciousness. She was relentless in ensuring that his name was kept blazing hot while he was away. She seared the conscience of the world with that name, traveling when she could to promote the brand she created and that the liberal world equally found appealing for their own reasons. She ensured he was not forgotten. In her struggle, She so intelligently and strategically privileged his name over and above that of the so many other equally worthy anti-apartheid fighters who suffered like him but whose names 99% of the world have forgotten or never heard of. It was Winnie Mandela who made sure that Nelson Mandela walked out of prison a larger than life hero, even to a generation that never knew him personally. It was Winnie who made Nelson Mandela that.

[Adeshina Afolayan]

Well put, Oga Ken. Winnie lived as best as she could and within the complex circumstances that her context presented her. But she did so many things that made her complicit in the very acts that she and others were fighting the apartheid system for. And this takes us to the very heart of the question of violence and its moral dynamics--Martin Luther King, Jr/Mahatma Gandhi versus Frantz Fanon/Malcolm X binary. 

All these do not make Winnie an less a hero, a tragic hero if you like. But we should lay the blame where it should be. Death does not cover all.

Adeshina Afolayan, PhD
Department of Philosophy
University of Ibadan

+23480-3928-8429

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Ken,

Is anyone trying to erase flaws or give a free hand to dehumanising behaviour? 

the issue is why claim to end apartheid on mutual forgiveness but persecute an anti-apartheid fighter for a claim for a crime which is a fraction of what sustained apartheid?

i dont get the logic.

toyin

On 4 April 2018 at 03:46, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Kenneth Harrow]

Hi toyin

Yes, lots of people are trying to overlook the flaws.

And I suppose no one is above an accounting. I like shina’s account of it: she did the best she could. But the killing of stompie, for me, crossed the line.

As for mutual forgiveness, the truth and reconciliation commission did not grant a blank pardon to everyone. There were limits on what was considered acceptable or not; some other scholars on the list probably can provide the details.

 

These are hard questions, and I for one do not want to sweep them under the carpet. I once taught che guevara’s account in the Cuban revolution, and was particularly disturbed at the rule they followed of murdering anyone who had joined the revolution, and then wanted to leave the group. Understandable, but acceptable? You decide. Not an easy call.

 

But no free passes to anyone; not any of our heroes. We are all in this revolution together, I feel, and that doesn’t mean yielding moral authority to leaders or heroes but assuming moral authority for our acts.

I’d be interested in hearing defense of some of these hard issues; but not excuses. For instance, when the anc started to torture, in the camps abroad, it was shocking news. I had been supporting/working for many many years to further the anc revolution, at home in east lansing. The news of torture was very very disturbing, as you might imagine.

What would you do with that info, at the time?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 05:59
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

Is anyone trying to erase flaws or give a free hand to dehumanising behaviour? 

 

the issue is why claim to end apartheid on mutual forgiveness but persecute an anti-apartheid fighter for a claim for a crime which is a fraction of what sustained apartheid?

 

i dont get the logic.

 

toyin

On 4 April 2018 at 03:46, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Kenneth Harrow]

I like this take on it. Thanks shina.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 06:09
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Well put, Oga Ken. Winnie lived as best as she could and within the complex circumstances that her context presented her. But she did so many things that made her complicit in the very acts that she and others were fighting the apartheid system for. And this takes us to the very heart of the question of violence and its moral dynamics--Martin Luther King, Jr/Mahatma Gandhi versus Frantz Fanon/Malcolm X binary. 

 

All these do not make Winnie an less a hero, a tragic hero if you like. But we should lay the blame where it should be. Death does not cover all.

 

 

Adeshina Afolayan, PhD
Department of Philosophy
University of Ibadan

+23480-3928-8429

[Ayotunde Bewaji]

Dear all,

I have followed this issue of whether to valorize or vilify Winnie. May Her Courageous Gentle Soul Rest from all the toil that helps us all to walk tall in the world today. One thing we should all bear is mind is the need for "principle of charity". We seem to be too hasty to judge others. Let me pose some issues:

When is Oga Kenneth going to drag George Bush or Barack Obama to the Hague for Iraq and Libya respectively?

What do you do about a mole, whose activities cause numerous deaths and sabotage of efforts, if that mole is a teenager?

What is Moshe Dayan and Netanyahu? When did we ever hear of any Hague request?

What about Trump and Israeli massacre that just happened under our noses? Did anyone raise any eyebrow?

Let me leave you with a Yoruba proverb:

Eni ija o ba, lo n pe ara e l'okunrin

I find it instructive, as it speaks to how one would behave if one were in similar circumstances in which Queen Winnie had to navigate the struggle. It is easy to stay outside, looking in, condemning all involved in difficult situations.

Ire o.

Tunde.

[Femi Kolapo]

Hard questions indeed, Ken. 

We strive to grow from the biological human to the divine human; to fulfil the ideal of the perfect that we believe we can be. But it’s a great distance from the reality to the ideal. Oppression, discrimination, Sharpsvilles, tortures, evictions, denigration, humiliation, all of which were significant features of apartheid, thrived not just on personal but also institutionalized hate at the same time as they bred hate in their victims. 

It is the unfortunate lot of the oppressed to fight a two-fronted battle: against the outside demon tormenting them and the inner demons of hate that the outside demon keeps producing and reproducing. Its no wonder there’s been few Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings. But the Gandhi ideal, however imperfectly held, seems at different points in time to always be present in some degree among both the oppressor group and the oppressed group who must fight their oppression.

It is a contradiction, a tension, whose resolution hopefully will tend towards the ideal. The unswerving faith in the likes of Gandhi and MLK  that the worst oppressor has something positive in them that admits of reason and kindness is clearly worth advocating and teaching. Humans must always strive for the divine lest we revert to mere biological human.

/Femi Kolapo

 

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 4, 2018 9:41:40 AM
To: usaafricadialogue

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Ken,

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

One of the world's greatest activists has passed away. We celebrate the life of this brave, determined anti - apartheid activist, Winnie Mandela.

Her autobiography entitled "491 Days. Prisoner number 1323/69". Picador Africa, published in 2013, documents her arrest on May 12, 1969 by the white supremacist government of apartheid South Africa.

More trials and tribulations were to follow her.

Winnie, we salute you. 

Rest peacefully.

Join the ancestors triumphantly.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

africahistory.net

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

If  we can forgive the apartheid agents-  perpetrators of systematic  murders between 1948 and 1990 -

then  we can forgive the anti-apartheid activists in their just and noble struggle.

The apartheid government  killed thousands of children and their parents, directly and indirectly,

through bio-chemical warfare and massacres.Recall the testimony of Wouter Basson, Dr. Death,

and our knowledge of Project Coast.See Purkett and Burgess (2005).

South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction.Indiana U P.

GE

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Sent: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 10:46:58 PM
To: usaafricadialogue

[Kenneth Harrow]

Beautiful answer, femi. So hard for us to remember (especially for us here in the states, in this age of trump).

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Femi Kolapo <kol...@uoguelph.ca>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 11:44
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hard questions indeed, Ken. 

We strive to grow from the biological human to the divine human; to fulfil the ideal of the perfect that we believe we can be. But it’s a great distance from the reality to the ideal. Oppression, discrimination, Sharpsvilles, tortures, evictions, denigration, humiliation, all of which were significant features of apartheid, thrived not just on personal but also institutionalized hate at the same time as they bred hate in their victims. 

It is the unfortunate lot of the oppressed to fight a two-fronted battle: against the outside demon tormenting them and the inner demons of hate that the outside demon keeps producing and reproducing. Its no wonder there’s been few Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings. But the Gandhi ideal, however imperfectly held, seems at different points in time to always be present in some degree among both the oppressor group and the oppressed group who must fight their oppression.

It is a contradiction, a tension, whose resolution hopefully will tend towards the ideal. The unswerving faith in the likes of Gandhi and MLK  that the worst oppressor has something positive in them that admits of reason and kindness is clearly worth advocating and teaching. Humans must always strive for the divine lest we revert to mere biological human.

 

 

/Femi Kolapo

 

 

[Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso]

Additionally, if you permit me to dissent just a bit and align fully with Afua Hirsch’s position in the article: Winnie was not just an activist, because that is such a tame word to describe her role, and really does not do justice to her experience. She was a warrior, a fighter, a soldier, a field marshal, a captain, a general. She was on the very frontline of a brutal battle very day the apartheid regime lasted. Let’s remember this when we crucify her from the comfort of our suburban cushy lives.

[Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso]

Thank you, Gloria.
As Moses has so eloquently put it, History will be kind to Winnie Mandela. I’m sure of it.
And to those who want to eat fresh corn but refuse to acknowledge that in the real world one seed/grain has to die for several ears of corn to grow, I say, what a crying shame.

[Kenneth Harrow]

Hi moses

Thanks for this extraordinarily rich response.

You say you disagree with my take, yet in your full response below you signal that  “the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie.”

As did the ANC.

What do we as just plain activists do, under these circumstances? You yourself open the question, as did i. I didn’t close it—just said we shouldn’t drop it. You attribute this to the violence we see arise during the struggle.

We are part of it. I say this not to condemn it, but not to excuse it. If we have to look at the case, the moment, etc., I am ok with that. But in the end, you have to decide, will I continue to march, to speak out, to raise money, to do what I can to support the cause? Do I try to  bring pressure on the movement not to commit torture? or just ignore it?

Look at these questions from the insider as an activist. That’s how I wanted to pose it. And your posting makes that question a crucial one, not an irrelevant one.

Look, I am not putting blame as much as insisting these questions not be dropped; that has nothing really to do with exculpating the enemy and their actions, which is the whole reason for the struggle in the first place

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 12:28
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

 

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

 

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

 

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

 

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

 

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

 

 

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

 

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Windows Live 2018]

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (meoc...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Ken,

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Kenneth Harrow]

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (meoc...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Ken,

 

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

 

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

 

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

 

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

 

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

 

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

 

 

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

 

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 3 April 2018 at 18:25
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impressive article.

--

USAAfric...@googlegroups.com

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

powerful debate.

particularly rich philosophical statements from femi and moses.

toyin

On 4 April 2018 at 22:46, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (meoc...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Ken,

 

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

 

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

 

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

 

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

 

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

 

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

 

 

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

 

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Biko Agozino]

Winnie developed a barometer theory that whatever was done to her was a measure of what could be done to the masses with impunity.

Winnie was never charged with killing Stompie. The allegation was that she was an 'accessory after the fact', sugesting that she helped to get rid of the body. It should be noted that Nelson stood by her in the courtroom during the trial. Whatever led to their divorce should be accorded privacy and understanding.

I wrote a column on the trial for African Concord magazine in 1991 critiquing the opinion of the judge that Winnie was an 'unblushing liar' given that blushing black is not visible like the pink blush. I also argued that Winnie was perceived by the judge to be playing the role of a macho man (to say that she was not involved was like staging Macbeth without Macbeth he said, not Lady Macbeth, mind you) because she was being judged against the false standard of white femiminity. That column helped me to develop the theory of victimisation as mere punishment and the punishment of the innocent, in my study of Black Women and the Criminal Justice System, as a departure from the conventional theory of the punishment of offenders, poo.

One of the most important lessons that Malcolm X taught us is that all the holy men in the scriptures engaged in naughtiness more serious than picking their nose but they were forgiven by the all merciful and honored by their imperfect descendants for the great things they got right. Derrida also wondered how people of African descent could forgive the unforgivable while the Abrahamic religions of the book insist that forgiveness is called for, except for what is unforgivable? Tutu answered with the philosohy of Ubuntu and stated that nothing is unforgivable and everyone has something that deserves forgiveness. If only Africans extend this legendary forgiveness to fellow Africans rather than descend into genocidal rage all the time.

Both Winnie and the ANC admitted that mistakes were made during the struggle and they were offered forgiveness by the TRC. What is still missing is the offer of reparative justice by the government and the corporations to the families of the victimized.

The barometer will never die. Amandla!

Biko

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

[Windows Live 2018]

Ken:

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (meoc...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Ken,

 

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

 

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

 

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

 

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

 

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

 

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

 

 

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

 

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 3 April 2018 at 18:25
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impressive article.

--

USAAfric...@googlegroups.com

[Kenneth Harrow]

Another small word here. As I said, I agreed that the anc really was obliged to return the violence with violence; but I do not at all agree that that turned the tide or led to de klerk stepping down and opening the path to negotiations. That’s a long story, so I’ll stop here.

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 5 April 2018 at 18:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

 

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

 

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

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[Kenneth Harrow]

Hi shina

You are dodging my question. I totally favour the anc having the burning spear. Of course the military response was legit. But not all targets are legitimate in warfare, not at all! There are war conventions, Geneva conventions, there are legitimate targets and illegitimate targets. Civilians are not legitimate targets, and torture is not a legit practice. No one can convince me that the anc needed to torture, or that  killing children Is legitimate.

I understand the paradoxes; I’ve read the canon of revolutionary actions and beliefs. But even in a revolution, one choses to kill civilians or not. That is the subject camus took up in The Rebel and especially Les Justes, his play about the assassination of the czar.

It is the subject of mudimbe’s first novel as well. It is not new as an issue.

I am not preaching passivism, or non-violent resistance, which you are attributing to me.

So, how do we, collectively, assume the responsibility for supporting a cause? Moses spoke of the fog of war. Well, that dodges the question. Maybe winnie was not really responsible; others on this list have much better knowledge of the answer to that question, so I will defer to them. But I stand firm on my first position, that there are limits, there are such things as war crimes, crimes against humanity, conventions like the Geneva convention, and those things matter, even in the midst or war, or rather, especially in the midst of war. I actively supported the anc for years, especially in east lansing, so I can raise the question concerning the organization that I aligned myself with.

Lastly, the apartheid regime was vicious: it did target civilians, it tortured and blackmailed many people; it slaughtered women who marched in sharpeville, they killed steve biko and thousands of others, illegitimately. I doubt I could have forgiven them after the war. But the atrocities were reason to condemn them.

Get it? They were a marker of the illegitimacy of the regime. We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>

Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 5 April 2018 at 18:57

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

 

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

 

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

"We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs."harrow

Ken, there is absolutely  no moral equivalence here -  unless you want to

run with the hounds and hunt with the hunter.

You forgot to mention that the apartheid state was a nuclear state-  with

biowarfare  capabilities-  backed by most of the Western world

until Jimmy Carter,  and later the US Congress and the Black Caucus stepped in.

The ANC  was the proverbial goliath fighting with a slingshot.

In fact I  would give the ANC a medal for its  relative restraint during the anti - apartheid

war and after it, given the  highly extraordinary circumstances. 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:02 AM
To: usaafricadialogue

[Kenneth Harrow]

Gloria, what does this mean for you? That torture or killing of civilians was ok? Remains ok?

I am sure you know there was a debate within the anc on this, too.

As for moral equivalence, I never suggested anything like that.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 09:28
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs."harrow

 

Ken, there is absolutely  no moral equivalence here -  unless you want to

run with the hounds and hunt with the hunter.

 

You forgot to mention that the apartheid state was a nuclear state-  with

biowarfare  capabilities-  backed by most of the Western world

until Jimmy Carter,  and later the US Congress and the Black Caucus stepped in.

The ANC  was the proverbial goliath fighting with a slingshot.

 

In fact I  would give the ANC a medal for its  relative restraint during the anti - apartheid

war and after it, given the  highly extraordinary circumstances. 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 

[Ayotunde Bewaji]

Geneva Convention

Made for others

A master/slave dialectic

When African leaders are carted away

Geneva jail awaits

For Crimes against humanity

When Arab/Coloured leaders are killed

Like pesky flies

Geneva convention in abayance

When US of A uses depleted uranium

A world full of multiple standards remain

Muted, defeaningly muted in loud silence

When Israel levels Jenin

In hay of munitions supplied 

By the bastions of democracy ad freedom

When scores are killed of stone throwing protesters

UN Security Council calls for independent investigators

God's own country vetoes action

When peoples of color tries to free themselves

Haiti gets levied from freeing property

No cries arise

When youth wing of ANC erase moles

Ken bawls and guffaws

War crimes are evil

Jamaican donkey says

Ground no lebel

African Americans know it

Stand your ground

Thank God it's Friday

Ire o.

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Ken,

You're making it seem as though the ANC's military wing tortured and killed indiscriminately. That's not true at all. In fact, Mandela's autobiography makes it clear that the ANC debated all these issues and thereafter painstakingly, carefully, and precisely delineated the boundaries and contours of its violence. The resolution to establish an armed wing after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was quite clear that only SABOTAGE operations were authorized. As the name suggests, sabotage was designed to hurt the Apartheid economy by bombing military installations, power plants, and other critical infrastructures that enabled the state to maintain itself and replenish its violent, racist domination. The resolution was also clear that civilians--white civilians-- were off limits and not to be targeted. In other words, violence was designed to be used in measured, well defined ways in conformity with the enlightened principles you've stated. The ANC's sabotage operations DID NOT target civilians, white or black.

That said, the ANC's military wing, Umkomto we Sizwe, was a regimented military organization. Like all military organizations, it punished insubordination, treason, betrayal, and other crimes. It was particularly harsh on moles planted by the apartheid state. It tortured and killed moles because moles got many black people within and without the struggle killed by informing on the movement. There were hundreds of moles in both branches of the ANC, a story of betrayal and apartheid's dirty war that is documented in Jacob Dlamini's book, Askari. Given the damage that moles and internal saboteurs did to the struggle, the increasingly paranoid members of the military wing, some of whom were assassinated even on foreign soil where they thought they were safe, lashed out against people discovered to be moles. In this reaction, some innocent people were falsely accused of spying for the state and tortured. In the fog of war, the luxury of a thorough investigation was often absent, and so accusations alone sometimes sufficed. Mistakes were made. It is inevitable. All violent revolutions make such mistakes, have incidents of "friendly fire," so to speak.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the ANC did not torture or kill indiscriminately. They punished treason and betrayals of the movement harshly with torture to deter regular black folk and members of the organization from turning coat to spy for the apartheid state. It's easy to sit in judgment over them for adopting such drastically self-preservationist regimens from the comfort of our homes thousands of miles away, temporally and spatially removed form the horror of apartheid. But from their trenches the ANC operatives who were trying to stay alive amidst the onslaught of the apartheid regime had little time for philosophical purity and enlightened principles of war. I am a historian and have studied or read about many violent revolutions. I've yet to read of a clean one where the modern rules of war were consistently observed. It would be great if you could acknowledge this fact even as you espouse the ideals of a humane revolutionary war.

As Gloria said, the ANC demonstrated remarkable restraint by not going after white civilians, whom one could argue were culpable in apartheid since they sustained the system by renewing its electoral mandate and by benefitting from its policies of racial exclusion and privilege.

On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Gloria, what does this mean for you? That torture or killing of civilians was ok? Remains ok?

I am sure you know there was a debate within the anc on this, too.

As for moral equivalence, I never suggested anything like that.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 09:28
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs."harrow

 

Ken, there is absolutely  no moral equivalence here -  unless you want to

run with the hounds and hunt with the hunter.

 

You forgot to mention that the apartheid state was a nuclear state-  with

biowarfare  capabilities-  backed by most of the Western world

until Jimmy Carter,  and later the US Congress and the Black Caucus stepped in.

The ANC  was the proverbial goliath fighting with a slingshot.

 

In fact I  would give the ANC a medal for its  relative restraint during the anti - apartheid

war and after it, given the  highly extraordinary circumstances. 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:02 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi shina

You are dodging my question. I totally favour the anc having the burning spear. Of course the military response was legit. But not all targets are legitimate in warfare, not at all! There are war conventions, Geneva conventions, there are legitimate targets and illegitimate targets. Civilians are not legitimate targets, and torture is not a legit practice. No one can convince me that the anc needed to torture, or that  killing children Is legitimate.

I understand the paradoxes; I’ve read the canon of revolutionary actions and beliefs. But even in a revolution, one choses to kill civilians or not. That is the subject camus took up in The Rebel and especially Les Justes, his play about the assassination of the czar.

It is the subject of mudimbe’s first novel as well. It is not new as an issue.

I am not preaching passivism, or non-violent resistance, which you are attributing to me.

So, how do we, collectively, assume the responsibility for supporting a cause? Moses spoke of the fog of war. Well, that dodges the question. Maybe winnie was not really responsible; others on this list have much better knowledge of the answer to that question, so I will defer to them. But I stand firm on my first position, that there are limits, there are such things as war crimes, crimes against humanity, conventions like the Geneva convention, and those things matter, even in the midst or war, or rather, especially in the midst of war. I actively supported the anc for years, especially in east lansing, so I can raise the question concerning the organization that I aligned myself with.

Lastly, the apartheid regime was vicious: it did target civilians, it tortured and blackmailed many people; it slaughtered women who marched in sharpeville, they killed steve biko and thousands of others, illegitimately. I doubt I could have forgiven them after the war. But the atrocities were reason to condemn them.

Get it? They were a marker of the illegitimacy of the regime. We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 5 April 2018 at 18:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

 

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

 

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (meoc...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Ken,

 

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

 

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

 

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

 

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

 

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

 

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

 

 

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

 

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso]

Addendum
https://kenopalo.com/2018/04/04/graca-machels-letter-to-winnie-madikizela-mandela/

GRAÇA MACHEL’S LETTER TO WINNIE MADIKIZELA-MANDELA
4April
2018
Leave a comment

This is from Eye Witness News:

As I struggle to accept your transition, I take solace in the fact that you have risen to become one of the brightest stars in the sky where you will remain ever present and radiantly shining. You will continue to serve as a guide to your loving family, your grateful nation, our beloved Africa, and indeed, the world.

winnieThe extraordinary life you led is an example of resilient fortitude and inextinguishable passion that is a source of inspiration to us all of how to courageously confront challenges with unwavering strength and determination.

Thank you for your brilliant wisdom, your fierce defiance and your stylish beauty.

Fortunately, stars shine brightest during the darkest of hours. I know you will continue to illuminate our sky, even through the storms and clouds. Your legacy will be an uplifting beacon from which we can continue to draw guidance and strength during difficult times.

You loved our people unconditionally and sacrificed so much for our freedom. It is my prayer that as befitting tributes are paid to you both at home and abroad, all of us will internalise the values you helped to mould and birth into existence.

As a nation, I hope we will stand tall and proud, and as uncompromising as you were in the defence and protection of our rights. As one of our brightest stars, continue to be the lioness that protects your children and your grandchildren. Warm their hearts so that while your transition may shake them, it does not break their spirit.

Your legacy is everlasting. Take a well-deserved rest in peace, my BIG sister.

Love and Respect Always,

Your little sister, Graça.

[Rex Marinus]

As it should be...

Obi Nwaanma

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso <jum...@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 7, 2018 1:58 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

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[Kenneth Harrow]

Hi moses, nothing I said implied much less stated that I believed the anc tortured andkilled indiscriminately. It was a shock when those first newpaper accounts appeared since it ran counter to everyone’s belief in the anc.

I don’t know whatever gave you that impression. I raised it since it was a matter of contention, and when you continue your posting, you stte it was an issue that was debated.

 

I am disturbed by the uniform condemnation of my call tht the issue be debated here. In fact you are the only one to take up that question, and you retreat in the end with evocation of the fog of war. I would urge you to reconsider the rationalizations for it. No one really believes that torture somehow yields the truth. In this country that has been the vicious argument used in favour of Guantanamo.

As I read your post, it seems clear that the logic of the situation should have led them, and us, to oppose torture, for many reasons; not least the higher moral ground occupied by the anc, and the considerable alienation it risked in it becoming public. The anc was fighting the decent fight; torture and assassination of civilians did not help the movement. I do admire your considered answer and knowledge; but am disappointed in the general indifference to the question from other members of the listserv who seem to have had no trouble in this practices.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>

Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 14:19
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

You're making it seem as though the ANC's military wing tortured and killed indiscriminately. That's not true at all. In fact, Mandela's autobiography makes it clear that the ANC debated all these issues and thereafter painstakingly, carefully, and precisely delineated the boundaries and contours of its violence. The resolution to establish an armed wing after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was quite clear that only SABOTAGE operations were authorized. As the name suggests, sabotage was designed to hurt the Apartheid economy by bombing military installations, power plants, and other critical infrastructures that enabled the state to maintain itself and replenish its violent, racist domination. The resolution was also clear that civilians--white civilians-- were off limits and not to be targeted. In other words, violence was designed to be used in measured, well defined ways in conformity with the enlightened principles you've stated. The ANC's sabotage operations DID NOT target civilians, white or black.

 

That said, the ANC's military wing, Umkomto we Sizwe, was a regimented military organization. Like all military organizations, it punished insubordination, treason, betrayal, and other crimes. It was particularly harsh on moles planted by the apartheid state. It tortured and killed moles because moles got many black people within and without the struggle killed by informing on the movement. There were hundreds of moles in both branches of the ANC, a story of betrayal and apartheid's dirty war that is documented in Jacob Dlamini's book, Askari. Given the damage that moles and internal saboteurs did to the struggle, the increasingly paranoid members of the military wing, some of whom were assassinated even on foreign soil where they thought they were safe, lashed out against people discovered to be moles. In this reaction, some innocent people were falsely accused of spying for the state and tortured. In the fog of war, the luxury of a thorough investigation was often absent, and so accusations alone sometimes sufficed. Mistakes were made. It is inevitable. All violent revolutions make such mistakes, have incidents of "friendly fire," so to speak.

 

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the ANC did not torture or kill indiscriminately. They punished treason and betrayals of the movement harshly with torture to deter regular black folk and members of the organization from turning coat to spy for the apartheid state. It's easy to sit in judgment over them for adopting such drastically self-preservationist regimens from the comfort of our homes thousands of miles away, temporally and spatially removed form the horror of apartheid. But from their trenches the ANC operatives who were trying to stay alive amidst the onslaught of the apartheid regime had little time for philosophical purity and enlightened principles of war. I am a historian and have studied or read about many violent revolutions. I've yet to read of a clean one where the modern rules of war were consistently observed. It would be great if you could acknowledge this fact even as you espouse the ideals of a humane revolutionary war.

 

As Gloria said, the ANC demonstrated remarkable restraint by not going after white civilians, whom one could argue were culpable in apartheid since they sustained the system by renewing its electoral mandate and by benefitting from its policies of racial exclusion and privilege.

 

 

On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Gloria, what does this mean for you? That torture or killing of civilians was ok? Remains ok?

I am sure you know there was a debate within the anc on this, too.

As for moral equivalence, I never suggested anything like that.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 09:28
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs."harrow

 

Ken, there is absolutely  no moral equivalence here -  unless you want to

run with the hounds and hunt with the hunter.

 

You forgot to mention that the apartheid state was a nuclear state-  with

biowarfare  capabilities-  backed by most of the Western world

until Jimmy Carter,  and later the US Congress and the Black Caucus stepped in.

The ANC  was the proverbial goliath fighting with a slingshot.

 

In fact I  would give the ANC a medal for its  relative restraint during the anti - apartheid

war and after it, given the  highly extraordinary circumstances. 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:02 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi shina

You are dodging my question. I totally favour the anc having the burning spear. Of course the military response was legit. But not all targets are legitimate in warfare, not at all! There are war conventions, Geneva conventions, there are legitimate targets and illegitimate targets. Civilians are not legitimate targets, and torture is not a legit practice. No one can convince me that the anc needed to torture, or that  killing children Is legitimate.

I understand the paradoxes; I’ve read the canon of revolutionary actions and beliefs. But even in a revolution, one choses to kill civilians or not. That is the subject camus took up in The Rebel and especially Les Justes, his play about the assassination of the czar.

It is the subject of mudimbe’s first novel as well. It is not new as an issue.

I am not preaching passivism, or non-violent resistance, which you are attributing to me.

So, how do we, collectively, assume the responsibility for supporting a cause? Moses spoke of the fog of war. Well, that dodges the question. Maybe winnie was not really responsible; others on this list have much better knowledge of the answer to that question, so I will defer to them. But I stand firm on my first position, that there are limits, there are such things as war crimes, crimes against humanity, conventions like the Geneva convention, and those things matter, even in the midst or war, or rather, especially in the midst of war. I actively supported the anc for years, especially in east lansing, so I can raise the question concerning the organization that I aligned myself with.

Lastly, the apartheid regime was vicious: it did target civilians, it tortured and blackmailed many people; it slaughtered women who marched in sharpeville, they killed steve biko and thousands of others, illegitimately. I doubt I could have forgiven them after the war. But the atrocities were reason to condemn them.

Get it? They were a marker of the illegitimacy of the regime. We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 5 April 2018 at 18:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

 

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

 

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

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Ken,

 

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

 

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

 

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

 

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

 

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

 

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

 

 

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

 

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Ken,

       If you are waiting for us to pull out our hair and shed buckets of tears for the alleged

torture of the ANC, that may not happen. Let me tell you why.

 The ANC was not RUF or Charles Taylor's

NPFL ( National Patriotic Front).  It was a principled liberation movement

 with rules and regulations for the armed struggle.

The ANC emerged in 2012  and from the passing of the Natives Land Act

 that  relegated the Black population to 13 % of the land, to a series of discriminatory

 laws and atrocities perpetrated by the White regime,waged a very disciplined

anti-colonial liberation war. A few unfortunate incidents took place. They occasionally

 slipped from the high ground but as Moses pointed out the principled leadership of the

ANC kept this in check. Their war was extraordinary given the

enormous battle they had to fight. I won't repeat the challenges they faced because

 this would most likely fall on deaf ears.

They could have engaged in a great deal of massacres of white civilians but did not do so.

 If you want to throw them in your giant trash bin, fine. Shikena.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Sent: Sunday, April 8, 2018 2:21 AM

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Correction: The ANC emerged in 1912.

 Let me say also that my previous narrative   relates to the ANC as a liberation movement. When it became a political party the revolutionary spirit of  the ANC changed. We know that the ANC in government has abandoned some of the earlier ideals.There is a rush to get rich overnight. Now I do appreciate the view that since Whites remained generally  in control of the economy, a Black bourgeoisie would at least diversify the landscape and deny Whites the feeling of exclusivity and some kind of divine- sanctioned manifest destiny. But this  has happened at the expense of programs that would more swiftly and radically reduce, income disparity.

 There is also  a new  timidity-  absent in the revolutionary years. To date, the ANC has not been able to bring about genuine land reform,  and the people whose ancestors lost their land to settler colonists remain landless a generation after. We shall see what would happen with  billionaire  Cyril Ramaphosa in power. His recent statement on land reform may be an election gimmick- or maybe not.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

[Kenneth Harrow]

Hi  Gloria

To make it plain, I was an activist who met weekly with a liberation group on my campus and mobilized in the struggle for south Africa for many many years. I am not an historian like you and moses, but these is nothing about the movement that I did not live with and debate in the struggle. So I really insist that this discussion be framed as one within the body of activists, not between insiders and outsiders. I don’t know what activities you yourself or moses might have taken during that struggle, but I feel I have earned the right to pose questions about policies. Moses himself acknowledged that such debates occurred within the movement,  and if you and he (among others on the list whose opinions I value) feel entitled to enter this debate, it should be with the respect for the question and in this case questioner.

At msu our group was called the southern African liberation committee. You can google it. We managed to get our university to adopt sanctions, as did the state of Michigan. Our U and state were the first to do so in the country. I remember taking my children to rallies when they were 5 or 6; and now are almost 40. You do the math. We were active for many years.

 

I should not be attacked for questioning the murder of stompie or the use of torture when these issues agitated the anc itself. It hurt the movement quite a bit since much of our work was to mobilize abroad. The most powerful location for that struggle in academe that I worked in occurred in the African literature association, where dennis brutus led the charge in favour of boycott. I joined my colleagues in that fight. I wonder how many on this list who fulminate when I raise these questions did anything whatsoever about the struggle. In my work, teaching about apartheid, and activism in the profession and on my campus, it was an important part of my life.

 

It is distasteful to have to establish my bona fides, but in this case it is galling to be lectured over a movement that I have supported actively for 30 years.

I repeat, we are in this struggle together, and that gives us, gives me, the right to pose questions without being accused of betraying the struggle.

And one reason I want to return to this issue is precisely because torture is the tactic of our enemies; it is one of the reasons Guantanamo is a symbol for hateful imperialist values. There are very good political, not to say humane, reasons to oppose torture and targeting of civilians, much less children. These reasons are not only because this will not and did not advance the cause, it actually impeded it. Do you realize how significant world opinion was in effecting change in south Africa? It was not easy to fight for the boycott. There were many activists whose research was in south Africa. There were colleagues in s Africa who wanted to liaison with academe here, to come to our conferences. The boycott was part of a struggle that lasted for decades, and its impact was real. It was part of the struggle. We wouldn’t have prevailed if the ANC had turned to such tactics publicly and widely.

But I won’t go on. Simply, the questions I posed are  legitimate, for all of us, but also for those within the movement. One should not be intimidated out of raising these questions for the past and for now.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday 8 April 2018 at 14:18
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

       If you are waiting for us to pull out our hair and shed buckets of tears for the alleged

torture of the ANC, that may not happen. Let me tell you why.

 

 The ANC was not RUF or Charles Taylor's

NPFL ( National Patriotic Front).  It was a principled liberation movement

 with rules and regulations for the armed struggle.

 

The ANC emerged in 2012  and from the passing of the Natives Land Act

 that  relegated the Black population to 13 % of the land, to a series of discriminatory

 laws and atrocities perpetrated by the White regime,waged a very disciplined

anti-colonial liberation war. A few unfortunate incidents took place. They occasionally

 slipped from the high ground but as Moses pointed out the principled leadership of the

ANC kept this in check. Their war was extraordinary given the

enormous battle they had to fight. I won't repeat the challenges they faced because

 this would most likely fall on deaf ears.

 

They could have engaged in a great deal of massacres of white civilians but did not do so.

 If you want to throw them in your giant trash bin, fine. Shikena.

 

 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 

 

[Kenneth Harrow]

Gloria,

I agree with your assessment, but would be harsher in condemning the anc. Ok, mandela and Mbeki chose what became neoliberalism; a compromise like that of Kenyatta after independence. No one on the left was happy. I heard chris hani at msu about a month before he was assassinated, and it felt as though the struggle was being sidelined when capitalism replaced socialism as the goal, and hani was there to lead the good fight.

Then came zuma.

I have heard only dismay over the corruption and fall of the anc away from original ideals.

Along with this, I don’t know how many have followed the scandalous implication of ramaphose in the miners’ strike. A complete betrayal of the ideals of the struggle.

I am pretty sure that progressives in s Africa are seeking alternatives to the anc, now.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 9 April 2018 at 11:20
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Correction: The ANC emerged in 1912.

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[Windows Live 2018]

Ken:

I deplore and condemn torture in all its ramifications ad weapon of war and I wish it were otherwise than the charges against the AND in this regard.

When M&s England was indicted for torture on behalf of the allies I 20p4 I was at the forefront of the condemnations 

But Winnie is no Corporal England.  Your point on Winnies role on torture is well taken but it must be assessed  in the context of the whole struggle as Moses indicated 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 08/04/2018 14:53 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

Hi moses, nothing I said implied much less stated that I believed the anc tortured andkilled indiscriminately. It was a shock when those first newpaper accounts appeared since it ran counter to everyone’s belief in the anc.

I don’t know whatever gave you that impression. I raised it since it was a matter of contention, and when you continue your posting, you stte it was an issue that was debated.

 

I am disturbed by the uniform condemnation of my call tht the issue be debated here. In fact you are the only one to take up that question, and you retreat in the end with evocation of the fog of war. I would urge you to reconsider the rationalizations for it. No one really believes that torture somehow yields the truth. In this country that has been the vicious argument used in favour of Guantanamo.

As I read your post, it seems clear that the logic of the situation should have led them, and us, to oppose torture, for many reasons; not least the higher moral ground occupied by the anc, and the considerable alienation it risked in it becoming public. The anc was fighting the decent fight; torture and assassination of civilians did not help the movement. I do admire your considered answer and knowledge; but am disappointed in the general indifference to the question from other members of the listserv who seem to have had no trouble in this practices.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>

Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 14:19
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

You're making it seem as though the ANC's military wing tortured and killed indiscriminately. That's not true at all. In fact, Mandela's autobiography makes it clear that the ANC debated all these issues and thereafter painstakingly, carefully, and precisely delineated the boundaries and contours of its violence. The resolution to establish an armed wing after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was quite clear that only SABOTAGE operations were authorized. As the name suggests, sabotage was designed to hurt the Apartheid economy by bombing military installations, power plants, and other critical infrastructures that enabled the state to maintain itself and replenish its violent, racist domination. The resolution was also clear that civilians--white civilians-- were off limits and not to be targeted. In other words, violence was designed to be used in measured, well defined ways in conformity with the enlightened principles you've stated. The ANC's sabotage operations DID NOT target civilians, white or black.

 

That said, the ANC's military wing, Umkomto we Sizwe, was a regimented military organization. Like all military organizations, it punished insubordination, treason, betrayal, and other crimes. It was particularly harsh on moles planted by the apartheid state. It tortured and killed moles because moles got many black people within and without the struggle killed by informing on the movement. There were hundreds of moles in both branches of the ANC, a story of betrayal and apartheid's dirty war that is documented in Jacob Dlamini's book, Askari. Given the damage that moles and internal saboteurs did to the struggle, the increasingly paranoid members of the military wing, some of whom were assassinated even on foreign soil where they thought they were safe, lashed out against people discovered to be moles. In this reaction, some innocent people were falsely accused of spying for the state and tortured. In the fog of war, the luxury of a thorough investigation was often absent, and so accusations alone sometimes sufficed. Mistakes were made. It is inevitable. All violent revolutions make such mistakes, have incidents of "friendly fire," so to speak.

 

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the ANC did not torture or kill indiscriminately. They punished treason and betrayals of the movement harshly with torture to deter regular black folk and members of the organization from turning coat to spy for the apartheid state. It's easy to sit in judgment over them for adopting such drastically self-preservationist regimens from the comfort of our homes thousands of miles away, temporally and spatially removed form the horror of apartheid. But from their trenches the ANC operatives who were trying to stay alive amidst the onslaught of the apartheid regime had little time for philosophical purity and enlightened principles of war. I am a historian and have studied or read about many violent revolutions. I've yet to read of a clean one where the modern rules of war were consistently observed. It would be great if you could acknowledge this fact even as you espouse the ideals of a humane revolutionary war.

 

As Gloria said, the ANC demonstrated remarkable restraint by not going after white civilians, whom one could argue were culpable in apartheid since they sustained the system by renewing its electoral mandate and by benefitting from its policies of racial exclusion and privilege.

 

 

On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Gloria, what does this mean for you? That torture or killing of civilians was ok? Remains ok?

I am sure you know there was a debate within the anc on this, too.

As for moral equivalence, I never suggested anything like that.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 09:28
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs."harrow

 

Ken, there is absolutely  no moral equivalence here -  unless you want to

run with the hounds and hunt with the hunter.

 

You forgot to mention that the apartheid state was a nuclear state-  with

biowarfare  capabilities-  backed by most of the Western world

until Jimmy Carter,  and later the US Congress and the Black Caucus stepped in.

The ANC  was the proverbial goliath fighting with a slingshot.

 

In fact I  would give the ANC a medal for its  relative restraint during the anti - apartheid

war and after it, given the  highly extraordinary circumstances. 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:02 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi shina

You are dodging my question. I totally favour the anc having the burning spear. Of course the military response was legit. But not all targets are legitimate in warfare, not at all! There are war conventions, Geneva conventions, there are legitimate targets and illegitimate targets. Civilians are not legitimate targets, and torture is not a legit practice. No one can convince me that the anc needed to torture, or that  killing children Is legitimate.

I understand the paradoxes; I’ve read the canon of revolutionary actions and beliefs. But even in a revolution, one choses to kill civilians or not. That is the subject camus took up in The Rebel and especially Les Justes, his play about the assassination of the czar.

It is the subject of mudimbe’s first novel as well. It is not new as an issue.

I am not preaching passivism, or non-violent resistance, which you are attributing to me.

So, how do we, collectively, assume the responsibility for supporting a cause? Moses spoke of the fog of war. Well, that dodges the question. Maybe winnie was not really responsible; others on this list have much better knowledge of the answer to that question, so I will defer to them. But I stand firm on my first position, that there are limits, there are such things as war crimes, crimes against humanity, conventions like the Geneva convention, and those things matter, even in the midst or war, or rather, especially in the midst of war. I actively supported the anc for years, especially in east lansing, so I can raise the question concerning the organization that I aligned myself with.

Lastly, the apartheid regime was vicious: it did target civilians, it tortured and blackmailed many people; it slaughtered women who marched in sharpeville, they killed steve biko and thousands of others, illegitimately. I doubt I could have forgiven them after the war. But the atrocities were reason to condemn them.

Get it? They were a marker of the illegitimacy of the regime. We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 5 April 2018 at 18:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

 

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

 

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

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Ken,

 

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

 

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

 

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

 

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

 

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

 

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

 

 

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

 

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Kenneth Harrow]

I like to be able to agree with you, and friends on this list. I certainly agree with your statement. Winnie was a strong inspiration for many of us, for decades.

None of us is a saint, meaning, our actions are above any judgment. Winnie, too, was not the issue here, but the tactics her branch of the movement practiced. Moses cited them in one of his resumes.

My interest in this thread, in fact, is not winnie, but the larger one that you address in your first sentence, which I find the crucial issue.

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Ken,

Two  additional points:

1. I challenged you to give me an example of a clean revolutionary war, one without unsavory aspects, and you could not. Isn't it the case that in fact most revolutions are cannibalistic and eat their own? By that sordid standard, the ANC was a paragon of revolutionary discipline and decency. Which tells me that you've fallen into the trap that white conservatives who do not support anti-colonial wars of liberation set for white liberal intellectuals to blackmail them and force them on the defensive. They ask these liberal intellectuals to account for and defend their anti-colonial allies the moment the usual factoids about fratricidal and unflattering happenings within the movement emerges. You and your colleagues in the US pro-ANC camp were either naive to assume that some elements within the ANC's military wing would not slip into unauthorized conduct or that the ANC as an organization would consistently display moral perfection. In that sense I would say that your disappointment stems from your naivety; you're/were a victim of your own naivety. Moreover, you don't seem to expect such moral and philosophical transcendence from white-led revolutions. Why do white white allies of black causes always expect black revolutionaries to be morally perfect as though such revolutionaries have to earn the support of their Western white allies by embracing a consistent ethos of moral perfection that is impossible even in conditions of peace let alone in situations of war?

2.The second point is that it is remarkable to me that in all your references to news that got to you and your group in MSU about misconduct within the anti-Apartheid liberal struggle, you did not bother to also note that MOST of those reports would have been false or exaggerated, the result of the apartheid state's sophisticated media manipulation campaign to discredit the liberation movement and its leading figures. There is a great documentary on Winnie playing on Netflix. I suggest that you watch it. In this documentary, operatives of the Apartheid secret police and intelligence services describe how they planted stories and manipulated local and international media to portray Winnie and the military wing of the ANC as murderers, torturers, among other others. Also, in Long Walk to Freedom, there is a telling encounter the imprisoned Mandela had with an American journalist who visited him in jail. The latter was not on a fact finding mission. Instead he had made up his mind that Nelson Mandela  was a terrorist and his questioning focused only on that angle; he repeatedly asked why Mandela and the movement adopted terrorist and violent methods, etc. What kind of stories do you think such a journalist would return to the States to write for his newspaper? You and your ANC supporter friends should have been more mindful of falling victim to Apartheid-sponsored propaganda that filtered through to you in the States.

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 7:23 PM, Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Ken:

I deplore and condemn torture in all its ramifications ad weapon of war and I wish it were otherwise than the charges against the AND in this regard.

When M&s England was indicted for torture on behalf of the allies I 20p4 I was at the forefront of the condemnations 

But Winnie is no Corporal England.  Your point on Winnies role on torture is well taken but it must be assessed  in the context of the whole struggle as Moses indicated 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 08/04/2018 14:53 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

Hi moses, nothing I said implied much less stated that I believed the anc tortured andkilled indiscriminately. It was a shock when those first newpaper accounts appeared since it ran counter to everyone’s belief in the anc.

I don’t know whatever gave you that impression. I raised it since it was a matter of contention, and when you continue your posting, you stte it was an issue that was debated.

 

I am disturbed by the uniform condemnation of my call tht the issue be debated here. In fact you are the only one to take up that question, and you retreat in the end with evocation of the fog of war. I would urge you to reconsider the rationalizations for it. No one really believes that torture somehow yields the truth. In this country that has been the vicious argument used in favour of Guantanamo.

As I read your post, it seems clear that the logic of the situation should have led them, and us, to oppose torture, for many reasons; not least the higher moral ground occupied by the anc, and the considerable alienation it risked in it becoming public. The anc was fighting the decent fight; torture and assassination of civilians did not help the movement. I do admire your considered answer and knowledge; but am disappointed in the general indifference to the question from other members of the listserv who seem to have had no trouble in this practices.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 14:19
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

You're making it seem as though the ANC's military wing tortured and killed indiscriminately. That's not true at all. In fact, Mandela's autobiography makes it clear that the ANC debated all these issues and thereafter painstakingly, carefully, and precisely delineated the boundaries and contours of its violence. The resolution to establish an armed wing after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was quite clear that only SABOTAGE operations were authorized. As the name suggests, sabotage was designed to hurt the Apartheid economy by bombing military installations, power plants, and other critical infrastructures that enabled the state to maintain itself and replenish its violent, racist domination. The resolution was also clear that civilians--white civilians-- were off limits and not to be targeted. In other words, violence was designed to be used in measured, well defined ways in conformity with the enlightened principles you've stated. The ANC's sabotage operations DID NOT target civilians, white or black.

 

That said, the ANC's military wing, Umkomto we Sizwe, was a regimented military organization. Like all military organizations, it punished insubordination, treason, betrayal, and other crimes. It was particularly harsh on moles planted by the apartheid state. It tortured and killed moles because moles got many black people within and without the struggle killed by informing on the movement. There were hundreds of moles in both branches of the ANC, a story of betrayal and apartheid's dirty war that is documented in Jacob Dlamini's book, Askari. Given the damage that moles and internal saboteurs did to the struggle, the increasingly paranoid members of the military wing, some of whom were assassinated even on foreign soil where they thought they were safe, lashed out against people discovered to be moles. In this reaction, some innocent people were falsely accused of spying for the state and tortured. In the fog of war, the luxury of a thorough investigation was often absent, and so accusations alone sometimes sufficed. Mistakes were made. It is inevitable. All violent revolutions make such mistakes, have incidents of "friendly fire," so to speak.

 

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the ANC did not torture or kill indiscriminately. They punished treason and betrayals of the movement harshly with torture to deter regular black folk and members of the organization from turning coat to spy for the apartheid state. It's easy to sit in judgment over them for adopting such drastically self-preservationist regimens from the comfort of our homes thousands of miles away, temporally and spatially removed form the horror of apartheid. But from their trenches the ANC operatives who were trying to stay alive amidst the onslaught of the apartheid regime had little time for philosophical purity and enlightened principles of war. I am a historian and have studied or read about many violent revolutions. I've yet to read of a clean one where the modern rules of war were consistently observed. It would be great if you could acknowledge this fact even as you espouse the ideals of a humane revolutionary war.

 

As Gloria said, the ANC demonstrated remarkable restraint by not going after white civilians, whom one could argue were culpable in apartheid since they sustained the system by renewing its electoral mandate and by benefitting from its policies of racial exclusion and privilege.

 

 

On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Gloria, what does this mean for you? That torture or killing of civilians was ok? Remains ok?

I am sure you know there was a debate within the anc on this, too.

As for moral equivalence, I never suggested anything like that.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 09:28
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs."harrow

 

Ken, there is absolutely  no moral equivalence here -  unless you want to

run with the hounds and hunt with the hunter.

 

You forgot to mention that the apartheid state was a nuclear state-  with

biowarfare  capabilities-  backed by most of the Western world

until Jimmy Carter,  and later the US Congress and the Black Caucus stepped in.

The ANC  was the proverbial goliath fighting with a slingshot.

 

In fact I  would give the ANC a medal for its  relative restraint during the anti - apartheid

war and after it, given the  highly extraordinary circumstances. 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:02 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi shina

You are dodging my question. I totally favour the anc having the burning spear. Of course the military response was legit. But not all targets are legitimate in warfare, not at all! There are war conventions, Geneva conventions, there are legitimate targets and illegitimate targets. Civilians are not legitimate targets, and torture is not a legit practice. No one can convince me that the anc needed to torture, or that  killing children Is legitimate.

I understand the paradoxes; I’ve read the canon of revolutionary actions and beliefs. But even in a revolution, one choses to kill civilians or not. That is the subject camus took up in The Rebel and especially Les Justes, his play about the assassination of the czar.

It is the subject of mudimbe’s first novel as well. It is not new as an issue.

I am not preaching passivism, or non-violent resistance, which you are attributing to me.

So, how do we, collectively, assume the responsibility for supporting a cause? Moses spoke of the fog of war. Well, that dodges the question. Maybe winnie was not really responsible; others on this list have much better knowledge of the answer to that question, so I will defer to them. But I stand firm on my first position, that there are limits, there are such things as war crimes, crimes against humanity, conventions like the Geneva convention, and those things matter, even in the midst or war, or rather, especially in the midst of war. I actively supported the anc for years, especially in east lansing, so I can raise the question concerning the organization that I aligned myself with.

Lastly, the apartheid regime was vicious: it did target civilians, it tortured and blackmailed many people; it slaughtered women who marched in sharpeville, they killed steve biko and thousands of others, illegitimately. I doubt I could have forgiven them after the war. But the atrocities were reason to condemn them.

Get it? They were a marker of the illegitimacy of the regime. We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 5 April 2018 at 18:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

 

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

 

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

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Ken,

 

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

 

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

 

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

 

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

 

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

 

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

 

 

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

 

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Ken,

But these practices were not official policies of the ANC or its military wing, making them aberrations. As I stated, the official policy for conducting the armed resistance against apartheid was clearly outlined in the resolution that set up the armed wing. Again, this is well covered in Long Walk to Freedom. The policy is consistent with the enlightened principles of wars that you've been referencing--that is, no targeting of civilians, no torture, etc. In the fog of war however, and fighting against a ruthless and dirty enemy that blackmailed, forced, and incentivized many blacks to inform on revolutionaries, the resort to unauthorized methods (torture and killing of moles) is an understandable, if unfortunate, human response. Both torturer and tortured mole were victims of the apartheid regime. This is precisely what the apartheid regime wanted-- to turn black against black and stoke distrust, paranoia, and infighting within the struggle.

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 9:29 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

I like to be able to agree with you, and friends on this list. I certainly agree with your statement. Winnie was a strong inspiration for many of us, for decades.

None of us is a saint, meaning, our actions are above any judgment. Winnie, too, was not the issue here, but the tactics her branch of the movement practiced. Moses cited them in one of his resumes.

My interest in this thread, in fact, is not winnie, but the larger one that you address in your first sentence, which I find the crucial issue.

ken

 

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 9 April 2018 at 19:23
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

I deplore and condemn torture in all its ramifications ad weapon of war and I wish it were otherwise than the charges against the AND in this regard.

 

When M&s England was indicted for torture on behalf of the allies I 20p4 I was at the forefront of the condemnations 

 

But Winnie is no Corporal England.  Your point on Winnies role on torture is well taken but it must be assessed  in the context of the whole struggle as Moses indicated 

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 08/04/2018 14:53 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi moses, nothing I said implied much less stated that I believed the anc tortured andkilled indiscriminately. It was a shock when those first newpaper accounts appeared since it ran counter to everyone’s belief in the anc.

I don’t know whatever gave you that impression. I raised it since it was a matter of contention, and when you continue your posting, you stte it was an issue that was debated.

 

I am disturbed by the uniform condemnation of my call tht the issue be debated here. In fact you are the only one to take up that question, and you retreat in the end with evocation of the fog of war. I would urge you to reconsider the rationalizations for it. No one really believes that torture somehow yields the truth. In this country that has been the vicious argument used in favour of Guantanamo.

As I read your post, it seems clear that the logic of the situation should have led them, and us, to oppose torture, for many reasons; not least the higher moral ground occupied by the anc, and the considerable alienation it risked in it becoming public. The anc was fighting the decent fight; torture and assassination of civilians did not help the movement. I do admire your considered answer and knowledge; but am disappointed in the general indifference to the question from other members of the listserv who seem to have had no trouble in this practices.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 14:19
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

You're making it seem as though the ANC's military wing tortured and killed indiscriminately. That's not true at all. In fact, Mandela's autobiography makes it clear that the ANC debated all these issues and thereafter painstakingly, carefully, and precisely delineated the boundaries and contours of its violence. The resolution to establish an armed wing after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was quite clear that only SABOTAGE operations were authorized. As the name suggests, sabotage was designed to hurt the Apartheid economy by bombing military installations, power plants, and other critical infrastructures that enabled the state to maintain itself and replenish its violent, racist domination. The resolution was also clear that civilians--white civilians-- were off limits and not to be targeted. In other words, violence was designed to be used in measured, well defined ways in conformity with the enlightened principles you've stated. The ANC's sabotage operations DID NOT target civilians, white or black.

 

That said, the ANC's military wing, Umkomto we Sizwe, was a regimented military organization. Like all military organizations, it punished insubordination, treason, betrayal, and other crimes. It was particularly harsh on moles planted by the apartheid state. It tortured and killed moles because moles got many black people within and without the struggle killed by informing on the movement. There were hundreds of moles in both branches of the ANC, a story of betrayal and apartheid's dirty war that is documented in Jacob Dlamini's book, Askari. Given the damage that moles and internal saboteurs did to the struggle, the increasingly paranoid members of the military wing, some of whom were assassinated even on foreign soil where they thought they were safe, lashed out against people discovered to be moles. In this reaction, some innocent people were falsely accused of spying for the state and tortured. In the fog of war, the luxury of a thorough investigation was often absent, and so accusations alone sometimes sufficed. Mistakes were made. It is inevitable. All violent revolutions make such mistakes, have incidents of "friendly fire," so to speak.

 

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the ANC did not torture or kill indiscriminately. They punished treason and betrayals of the movement harshly with torture to deter regular black folk and members of the organization from turning coat to spy for the apartheid state. It's easy to sit in judgment over them for adopting such drastically self-preservationist regimens from the comfort of our homes thousands of miles away, temporally and spatially removed form the horror of apartheid. But from their trenches the ANC operatives who were trying to stay alive amidst the onslaught of the apartheid regime had little time for philosophical purity and enlightened principles of war. I am a historian and have studied or read about many violent revolutions. I've yet to read of a clean one where the modern rules of war were consistently observed. It would be great if you could acknowledge this fact even as you espouse the ideals of a humane revolutionary war.

 

As Gloria said, the ANC demonstrated remarkable restraint by not going after white civilians, whom one could argue were culpable in apartheid since they sustained the system by renewing its electoral mandate and by benefitting from its policies of racial exclusion and privilege.

 

 

On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Gloria, what does this mean for you? That torture or killing of civilians was ok? Remains ok?

I am sure you know there was a debate within the anc on this, too.

As for moral equivalence, I never suggested anything like that.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 09:28
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs."harrow

 

Ken, there is absolutely  no moral equivalence here -  unless you want to

run with the hounds and hunt with the hunter.

 

You forgot to mention that the apartheid state was a nuclear state-  with

biowarfare  capabilities-  backed by most of the Western world

until Jimmy Carter,  and later the US Congress and the Black Caucus stepped in.

The ANC  was the proverbial goliath fighting with a slingshot.

 

In fact I  would give the ANC a medal for its  relative restraint during the anti - apartheid

war and after it, given the  highly extraordinary circumstances. 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:02 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi shina

You are dodging my question. I totally favour the anc having the burning spear. Of course the military response was legit. But not all targets are legitimate in warfare, not at all! There are war conventions, Geneva conventions, there are legitimate targets and illegitimate targets. Civilians are not legitimate targets, and torture is not a legit practice. No one can convince me that the anc needed to torture, or that  killing children Is legitimate.

I understand the paradoxes; I’ve read the canon of revolutionary actions and beliefs. But even in a revolution, one choses to kill civilians or not. That is the subject camus took up in The Rebel and especially Les Justes, his play about the assassination of the czar.

It is the subject of mudimbe’s first novel as well. It is not new as an issue.

I am not preaching passivism, or non-violent resistance, which you are attributing to me.

So, how do we, collectively, assume the responsibility for supporting a cause? Moses spoke of the fog of war. Well, that dodges the question. Maybe winnie was not really responsible; others on this list have much better knowledge of the answer to that question, so I will defer to them. But I stand firm on my first position, that there are limits, there are such things as war crimes, crimes against humanity, conventions like the Geneva convention, and those things matter, even in the midst or war, or rather, especially in the midst of war. I actively supported the anc for years, especially in east lansing, so I can raise the question concerning the organization that I aligned myself with.

Lastly, the apartheid regime was vicious: it did target civilians, it tortured and blackmailed many people; it slaughtered women who marched in sharpeville, they killed steve biko and thousands of others, illegitimately. I doubt I could have forgiven them after the war. But the atrocities were reason to condemn them.

Get it? They were a marker of the illegitimacy of the regime. We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 5 April 2018 at 18:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

 

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

 

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

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Ken,

 

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

 

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

 

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

 

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

 

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

 

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

 

 

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

 

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Kenneth Harrow]

Moses

It is one thing to set up a series of principles for an organization and another for practices to occur in the field. With mandela in prison, far away, the camps in angola and Mozambique were worlds away.

No one was duped about how the s African regime operated. In another posting you referenced our naivete in accepting s afr propaganda. I will look for that and respond, and give you my memory of these things that are now almost 30 years old. Memory of 30 yrs back can never be reliable.

k

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 9 April 2018 at 22:58
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

But these practices were not official policies of the ANC or its military wing, making them aberrations. As I stated, the official policy for conducting the armed resistance against apartheid was clearly outlined in the resolution that set up the armed wing. Again, this is well covered in Long Walk to Freedom. The policy is consistent with the enlightened principles of wars that you've been referencing--that is, no targeting of civilians, no torture, etc. In the fog of war however, and fighting against a ruthless and dirty enemy that blackmailed, forced, and incentivized many blacks to inform on revolutionaries, the resort to unauthorized methods (torture and killing of moles) is an understandable, if unfortunate, human response. Both torturer and tortured mole were victims of the apartheid regime. This is precisely what the apartheid regime wanted-- to turn black against black and stoke distrust, paranoia, and infighting within the struggle.

 

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 9:29 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

I like to be able to agree with you, and friends on this list. I certainly agree with your statement. Winnie was a strong inspiration for many of us, for decades.

None of us is a saint, meaning, our actions are above any judgment. Winnie, too, was not the issue here, but the tactics her branch of the movement practiced. Moses cited them in one of his resumes.

My interest in this thread, in fact, is not winnie, but the larger one that you address in your first sentence, which I find the crucial issue.

ken

 

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 9 April 2018 at 19:23
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

I deplore and condemn torture in all its ramifications ad weapon of war and I wish it were otherwise than the charges against the AND in this regard.

 

When M&s England was indicted for torture on behalf of the allies I 20p4 I was at the forefront of the condemnations 

 

But Winnie is no Corporal England.  Your point on Winnies role on torture is well taken but it must be assessed  in the context of the whole struggle as Moses indicated 

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 08/04/2018 14:53 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi moses, nothing I said implied much less stated that I believed the anc tortured andkilled indiscriminately. It was a shock when those first newpaper accounts appeared since it ran counter to everyone’s belief in the anc.

I don’t know whatever gave you that impression. I raised it since it was a matter of contention, and when you continue your posting, you stte it was an issue that was debated.

 

I am disturbed by the uniform condemnation of my call tht the issue be debated here. In fact you are the only one to take up that question, and you retreat in the end with evocation of the fog of war. I would urge you to reconsider the rationalizations for it. No one really believes that torture somehow yields the truth. In this country that has been the vicious argument used in favour of Guantanamo.

As I read your post, it seems clear that the logic of the situation should have led them, and us, to oppose torture, for many reasons; not least the higher moral ground occupied by the anc, and the considerable alienation it risked in it becoming public. The anc was fighting the decent fight; torture and assassination of civilians did not help the movement. I do admire your considered answer and knowledge; but am disappointed in the general indifference to the question from other members of the listserv who seem to have had no trouble in this practices.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 14:19
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

You're making it seem as though the ANC's military wing tortured and killed indiscriminately. That's not true at all. In fact, Mandela's autobiography makes it clear that the ANC debated all these issues and thereafter painstakingly, carefully, and precisely delineated the boundaries and contours of its violence. The resolution to establish an armed wing after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was quite clear that only SABOTAGE operations were authorized. As the name suggests, sabotage was designed to hurt the Apartheid economy by bombing military installations, power plants, and other critical infrastructures that enabled the state to maintain itself and replenish its violent, racist domination. The resolution was also clear that civilians--white civilians-- were off limits and not to be targeted. In other words, violence was designed to be used in measured, well defined ways in conformity with the enlightened principles you've stated. The ANC's sabotage operations DID NOT target civilians, white or black.

 

That said, the ANC's military wing, Umkomto we Sizwe, was a regimented military organization. Like all military organizations, it punished insubordination, treason, betrayal, and other crimes. It was particularly harsh on moles planted by the apartheid state. It tortured and killed moles because moles got many black people within and without the struggle killed by informing on the movement. There were hundreds of moles in both branches of the ANC, a story of betrayal and apartheid's dirty war that is documented in Jacob Dlamini's book, Askari. Given the damage that moles and internal saboteurs did to the struggle, the increasingly paranoid members of the military wing, some of whom were assassinated even on foreign soil where they thought they were safe, lashed out against people discovered to be moles. In this reaction, some innocent people were falsely accused of spying for the state and tortured. In the fog of war, the luxury of a thorough investigation was often absent, and so accusations alone sometimes sufficed. Mistakes were made. It is inevitable. All violent revolutions make such mistakes, have incidents of "friendly fire," so to speak.

 

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the ANC did not torture or kill indiscriminately. They punished treason and betrayals of the movement harshly with torture to deter regular black folk and members of the organization from turning coat to spy for the apartheid state. It's easy to sit in judgment over them for adopting such drastically self-preservationist regimens from the comfort of our homes thousands of miles away, temporally and spatially removed form the horror of apartheid. But from their trenches the ANC operatives who were trying to stay alive amidst the onslaught of the apartheid regime had little time for philosophical purity and enlightened principles of war. I am a historian and have studied or read about many violent revolutions. I've yet to read of a clean one where the modern rules of war were consistently observed. It would be great if you could acknowledge this fact even as you espouse the ideals of a humane revolutionary war.

 

As Gloria said, the ANC demonstrated remarkable restraint by not going after white civilians, whom one could argue were culpable in apartheid since they sustained the system by renewing its electoral mandate and by benefitting from its policies of racial exclusion and privilege.

 

 

On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Gloria, what does this mean for you? That torture or killing of civilians was ok? Remains ok?

I am sure you know there was a debate within the anc on this, too.

As for moral equivalence, I never suggested anything like that.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 09:28
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs."harrow

 

Ken, there is absolutely  no moral equivalence here -  unless you want to

run with the hounds and hunt with the hunter.

 

You forgot to mention that the apartheid state was a nuclear state-  with

biowarfare  capabilities-  backed by most of the Western world

until Jimmy Carter,  and later the US Congress and the Black Caucus stepped in.

The ANC  was the proverbial goliath fighting with a slingshot.

 

In fact I  would give the ANC a medal for its  relative restraint during the anti - apartheid

war and after it, given the  highly extraordinary circumstances. 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:02 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi shina

You are dodging my question. I totally favour the anc having the burning spear. Of course the military response was legit. But not all targets are legitimate in warfare, not at all! There are war conventions, Geneva conventions, there are legitimate targets and illegitimate targets. Civilians are not legitimate targets, and torture is not a legit practice. No one can convince me that the anc needed to torture, or that  killing children Is legitimate.

I understand the paradoxes; I’ve read the canon of revolutionary actions and beliefs. But even in a revolution, one choses to kill civilians or not. That is the subject camus took up in The Rebel and especially Les Justes, his play about the assassination of the czar.

It is the subject of mudimbe’s first novel as well. It is not new as an issue.

I am not preaching passivism, or non-violent resistance, which you are attributing to me.

So, how do we, collectively, assume the responsibility for supporting a cause? Moses spoke of the fog of war. Well, that dodges the question. Maybe winnie was not really responsible; others on this list have much better knowledge of the answer to that question, so I will defer to them. But I stand firm on my first position, that there are limits, there are such things as war crimes, crimes against humanity, conventions like the Geneva convention, and those things matter, even in the midst or war, or rather, especially in the midst of war. I actively supported the anc for years, especially in east lansing, so I can raise the question concerning the organization that I aligned myself with.

Lastly, the apartheid regime was vicious: it did target civilians, it tortured and blackmailed many people; it slaughtered women who marched in sharpeville, they killed steve biko and thousands of others, illegitimately. I doubt I could have forgiven them after the war. But the atrocities were reason to condemn them.

Get it? They were a marker of the illegitimacy of the regime. We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 5 April 2018 at 18:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

 

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

 

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (meoc...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Ken,

 

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

 

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

 

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

 

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

 

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

 

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

 

 

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

 

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Kenneth Harrow]

Moses

Here is your posting to which I’d like to make some small responses.

1. I can’t answer your rhetorical question about one clean revolution. The standards involved crimes against humanity, etc. all that is post world war 2. I can’t point to an ideal revolution. That’s not really relevant, in my thinking. Perhaps you might frame  it differently. The struggle in s African was not a revolution, in my mind, like the French revolution or Russian or cuban revolution—revolutions based on class and orders that no longer exist in those forms. The question might be, compare it with other comparable anti-colonial struggles, like that in Zimbabwe, or kenya, or Algeria. Let me not pretend to argue one is cleaner or better than the other. If the real goal was to oust an unjust regime, that overrode the considerations I am raising, and I wouldn’t dispute that. But it is really incumbent on you, a youngish scholar whom I respect, to retain the values that emerged after wwII and with difficulty produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the convention against genocide.  For me, the accomplishments of the three revolutions were of such an order than I would not revise my support for their struggles—despite all the bad things that followed, the reigns of terror in all three cases. But surely we have learned basic lessons for values to fight for, even within the struggle. Don’t use “fog of war” as an excuse, but decide whether you would support a movement that crossed the lines beyond what you could accept. Everyone in these movements knows what I am talking about, and debated and fought over it. If you have not read assia djebar’s Algerian White, I recommend it. The movement was riven, and whereas she was ready to make ultimate sacrifices for its success, some of the leadership deserved to be shot. On another note, we all remember the scene in The Battle of Algiers where the fln has an elderly woman plant a bomb in an Air France waiting room. The camera zooms in on the baby about to be killed; the scenes in the dancing club also highlight the pathos of killing young people happily dancing. The film tries to be frank in facing what actions were taken by the fln. And everyone remembers the opening scene of torture which functions, dramatically, to explain the violence and brutality of the fln. In the end of that film, in the end of the struggle, we dance in the street as nelson mandela became the new president. But we don’t shut off our conscience. Or intellect. I also don’t mean to be debating you much less lecturing you, but rather insisting that these questions are not to be shut away for us, and more than they were for activists in the heart of the struggle itself.
2. You make too quick assumptions about the naivete of those of us active in opposing the apartheid regime. There were s African agents who came to our campus to intimidate our students, and we learned of that. We were, I believe, completely aware of the attempts of the s African regime to discredit the struggle, to post false stories. I remember clearly after all these years the shock in reading about the torture: I was on a plane, I think in Africa, reading Le Monde, when the story broke. It was covered by the major press. We all questioned sources, determined which were the most credible; we were, in fact, heavily guided by people like dennis brutus and other s Africans who were leading the charge in the ALA. You might have heard that the ALA separated itself from the ASA due to our activist positions, and of all of them, s Africa was the most pressing. You are assuming a kind of liberal naivete on our part; a naivete of distance, as if we acted in isolation. Dear friend, you were not there at the same, didn’t attend meetings with lengthy debates over what policies our associations should take, whose positions were reliable and whose were compromised. It was not a distance struggle for us. I do not want to exaggerate my role: I was just part of a movement, of groups that were commonly joining in this struggle as best we could.
3. That's it
4. ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 9 April 2018 at 22:48
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

Two  additional points:

 

1. I challenged you to give me an example of a clean revolutionary war, one without unsavory aspects, and you could not. Isn't it the case that in fact most revolutions are cannibalistic and eat their own? By that sordid standard, the ANC was a paragon of revolutionary discipline and decency. Which tells me that you've fallen into the trap that white conservatives who do not support anti-colonial wars of liberation set for white liberal intellectuals to blackmail them and force them on the defensive. They ask these liberal intellectuals to account for and defend their anti-colonial allies the moment the usual factoids about fratricidal and unflattering happenings within the movement emerges. You and your colleagues in the US pro-ANC camp were either naive to assume that some elements within the ANC's military wing would not slip into unauthorized conduct or that the ANC as an organization would consistently display moral perfection. In that sense I would say that your disappointment stems from your naivety; you're/were a victim of your own naivety. Moreover, you don't seem to expect such moral and philosophical transcendence from white-led revolutions. Why do white white allies of black causes always expect black revolutionaries to be morally perfect as though such revolutionaries have to earn the support of their Western white allies by embracing a consistent ethos of moral perfection that is impossible even in conditions of peace let alone in situations of war?

 

2.The second point is that it is remarkable to me that in all your references to news that got to you and your group in MSU about misconduct within the anti-Apartheid liberal struggle, you did not bother to also note that MOST of those reports would have been false or exaggerated, the result of the apartheid state's sophisticated media manipulation campaign to discredit the liberation movement and its leading figures. There is a great documentary on Winnie playing on Netflix. I suggest that you watch it. In this documentary, operatives of the Apartheid secret police and intelligence services describe how they planted stories and manipulated local and international media to portray Winnie and the military wing of the ANC as murderers, torturers, among other others. Also, in Long Walk to Freedom, there is a telling encounter the imprisoned Mandela had with an American journalist who visited him in jail. The latter was not on a fact finding mission. Instead he had made up his mind that Nelson Mandela  was a terrorist and his questioning focused only on that angle; he repeatedly asked why Mandela and the movement adopted terrorist and violent methods, etc. What kind of stories do you think such a journalist would return to the States to write for his newspaper? You and your ANC supporter friends should have been more mindful of falling victim to Apartheid-sponsored propaganda that filtered through to you in the States.

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 7:23 PM, Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Ken:

 

I deplore and condemn torture in all its ramifications ad weapon of war and I wish it were otherwise than the charges against the AND in this regard.

 

When M&s England was indicted for torture on behalf of the allies I 20p4 I was at the forefront of the condemnations 

 

But Winnie is no Corporal England.  Your point on Winnies role on torture is well taken but it must be assessed  in the context of the whole struggle as Moses indicated 

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 08/04/2018 14:53 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi moses, nothing I said implied much less stated that I believed the anc tortured andkilled indiscriminately. It was a shock when those first newpaper accounts appeared since it ran counter to everyone’s belief in the anc.

I don’t know whatever gave you that impression. I raised it since it was a matter of contention, and when you continue your posting, you stte it was an issue that was debated.

 

I am disturbed by the uniform condemnation of my call tht the issue be debated here. In fact you are the only one to take up that question, and you retreat in the end with evocation of the fog of war. I would urge you to reconsider the rationalizations for it. No one really believes that torture somehow yields the truth. In this country that has been the vicious argument used in favour of Guantanamo.

As I read your post, it seems clear that the logic of the situation should have led them, and us, to oppose torture, for many reasons; not least the higher moral ground occupied by the anc, and the considerable alienation it risked in it becoming public. The anc was fighting the decent fight; torture and assassination of civilians did not help the movement. I do admire your considered answer and knowledge; but am disappointed in the general indifference to the question from other members of the listserv who seem to have had no trouble in this practices.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 14:19
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

You're making it seem as though the ANC's military wing tortured and killed indiscriminately. That's not true at all. In fact, Mandela's autobiography makes it clear that the ANC debated all these issues and thereafter painstakingly, carefully, and precisely delineated the boundaries and contours of its violence. The resolution to establish an armed wing after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was quite clear that only SABOTAGE operations were authorized. As the name suggests, sabotage was designed to hurt the Apartheid economy by bombing military installations, power plants, and other critical infrastructures that enabled the state to maintain itself and replenish its violent, racist domination. The resolution was also clear that civilians--white civilians-- were off limits and not to be targeted. In other words, violence was designed to be used in measured, well defined ways in conformity with the enlightened principles you've stated. The ANC's sabotage operations DID NOT target civilians, white or black.

 

That said, the ANC's military wing, Umkomto we Sizwe, was a regimented military organization. Like all military organizations, it punished insubordination, treason, betrayal, and other crimes. It was particularly harsh on moles planted by the apartheid state. It tortured and killed moles because moles got many black people within and without the struggle killed by informing on the movement. There were hundreds of moles in both branches of the ANC, a story of betrayal and apartheid's dirty war that is documented in Jacob Dlamini's book, Askari. Given the damage that moles and internal saboteurs did to the struggle, the increasingly paranoid members of the military wing, some of whom were assassinated even on foreign soil where they thought they were safe, lashed out against people discovered to be moles. In this reaction, some innocent people were falsely accused of spying for the state and tortured. In the fog of war, the luxury of a thorough investigation was often absent, and so accusations alone sometimes sufficed. Mistakes were made. It is inevitable. All violent revolutions make such mistakes, have incidents of "friendly fire," so to speak.

 

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the ANC did not torture or kill indiscriminately. They punished treason and betrayals of the movement harshly with torture to deter regular black folk and members of the organization from turning coat to spy for the apartheid state. It's easy to sit in judgment over them for adopting such drastically self-preservationist regimens from the comfort of our homes thousands of miles away, temporally and spatially removed form the horror of apartheid. But from their trenches the ANC operatives who were trying to stay alive amidst the onslaught of the apartheid regime had little time for philosophical purity and enlightened principles of war. I am a historian and have studied or read about many violent revolutions. I've yet to read of a clean one where the modern rules of war were consistently observed. It would be great if you could acknowledge this fact even as you espouse the ideals of a humane revolutionary war.

 

As Gloria said, the ANC demonstrated remarkable restraint by not going after white civilians, whom one could argue were culpable in apartheid since they sustained the system by renewing its electoral mandate and by benefitting from its policies of racial exclusion and privilege.

 

 

On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Gloria, what does this mean for you? That torture or killing of civilians was ok? Remains ok?

I am sure you know there was a debate within the anc on this, too.

As for moral equivalence, I never suggested anything like that.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 09:28
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs."harrow

 

Ken, there is absolutely  no moral equivalence here -  unless you want to

run with the hounds and hunt with the hunter.

 

You forgot to mention that the apartheid state was a nuclear state-  with

biowarfare  capabilities-  backed by most of the Western world

until Jimmy Carter,  and later the US Congress and the Black Caucus stepped in.

The ANC  was the proverbial goliath fighting with a slingshot.

 

In fact I  would give the ANC a medal for its  relative restraint during the anti - apartheid

war and after it, given the  highly extraordinary circumstances. 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:02 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi shina

You are dodging my question. I totally favour the anc having the burning spear. Of course the military response was legit. But not all targets are legitimate in warfare, not at all! There are war conventions, Geneva conventions, there are legitimate targets and illegitimate targets. Civilians are not legitimate targets, and torture is not a legit practice. No one can convince me that the anc needed to torture, or that  killing children Is legitimate.

I understand the paradoxes; I’ve read the canon of revolutionary actions and beliefs. But even in a revolution, one choses to kill civilians or not. That is the subject camus took up in The Rebel and especially Les Justes, his play about the assassination of the czar.

It is the subject of mudimbe’s first novel as well. It is not new as an issue.

I am not preaching passivism, or non-violent resistance, which you are attributing to me.

So, how do we, collectively, assume the responsibility for supporting a cause? Moses spoke of the fog of war. Well, that dodges the question. Maybe winnie was not really responsible; others on this list have much better knowledge of the answer to that question, so I will defer to them. But I stand firm on my first position, that there are limits, there are such things as war crimes, crimes against humanity, conventions like the Geneva convention, and those things matter, even in the midst or war, or rather, especially in the midst of war. I actively supported the anc for years, especially in east lansing, so I can raise the question concerning the organization that I aligned myself with.

Lastly, the apartheid regime was vicious: it did target civilians, it tortured and blackmailed many people; it slaughtered women who marched in sharpeville, they killed steve biko and thousands of others, illegitimately. I doubt I could have forgiven them after the war. But the atrocities were reason to condemn them.

Get it? They were a marker of the illegitimacy of the regime. We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 5 April 2018 at 18:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

 

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

 

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (meoc...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Ken,

 

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

 

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

 

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

 

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

 

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

 

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

 

 

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

 

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Ken,

Thanks for your detailed response and the illuminating autobiographical detours. Three points:

1. Has it occurred to you that the fact that you cannot point to any anti-colonial war or struggle that meets your idealistic humanitarian standards is an indication that those standards are unrealistically naive in the context of a brutal war between colonial oppressors and liberation fighters? Reflect on it. I see much navel-gazing in your postulations and not enough self-reflection and self-critique. Even when you restrict yourself to the post-World War II period, you'd be hard pressed to find a clean revolutionary or anti-colonial struggle. As a historian, that is a significant factoid for me, for it tells me that the problem is not the ANC or Winnie or the military wing but rather the nature of anti-colonial armed struggle. It also tells me that every struggle, regardless of time and space, has its unique contradictions that we must make peace with even as we keep our focus pragmatically on the larger objective.

2. I was in South Africa last summer and had several conversations with people. Black people there are souring on Nelson Mandela a bit and the stocks of Chris Hani and Winnie Mandela have been rising. Black people adore them and their ideological stances. Chris Hani as you know was the leader of the military wing, and Winnie was his deputy. He was outside and she inside, but they worked together. By your logic of puritan humanitarian principles, these two individuals should be hated and not adored as they are. But the opposite is the case. It is not that black South Africans do not know that some elements of the military wing committed atrocities (if they didn't know, the TRC certainly informed them) or that these two individuals, as the leaders of the military aspect of the struggle, bear some vicarious moral responsibility for the atrocities even if they didn't know about or authorized them. Unlike you, however, black South Africans are able to be pragmatic in their evaluation of Winnie and Hani and of the military wing that they led. They are able to compartmentalize the atrocities and weigh them against the general climate created by the Apartheid state. They are able to weigh them against the overarching objective being pursued at the time. They are able to weigh these violations of individual rights against the greater, collective good of the struggle against racist oppression. You may not understand it, but it is called Ubuntu. It is an African humanist ethos that does not see individual rights or interests but collective interests and rights. In this frame, the unfortunate violation of an individual's right in the process of fighting for the collective good can be forgiven, subordinated to the greater objective of the common struggle. We academics are not always right. We should sometimes humbly listen to the perspectives of people on the ground, on whose behalf we are purportedly fighting. We can learn from their pragmatism in order to moderate our philosophical, humanitarian, and revolutionary puritanism.

3. This brings me to your constant refrain: the post-War universal declaration of human rights and related conventions. With all due respect, I'm a little disappointed that you keep invoking this document as some sort of truly universal, sacrosanct corpus that should guide and inform political conduct everywhere in all contexts. I disagree, and I question the universality of these conventions and principles. They are provincial principles in the final analysis. I prefer the perspectives of people who question the "universal" claim of that declaration, people who deconstruct it and point to the declaration's history in  European internationalism, and in hypocritical, self-righteous European claims. I prefer the perspectives of those who, unlike you, do not take the principles outlined in the declaration and its associated documents as the point of reference or departure for conversations about humanitarianism. Why can't you see that those principles are Euro-American in origin and framing and that they were designed largely to hold Other people (not Euro-Americans) in check so that they cannot challenge Euro-American hegemony without running afoul of its precepts? Have the architects of the principles crafted in Geneva, San Francisco, and and other places ever held themselves accountable to them? There is new, brilliant, and illuminating work being done in the area of human rights that critiques the Euro-American (faux universal) principles of human rights that you constantly cite to underpin your contentions, principles that have come under sustained scholarly attack from academics with origins in the global South. I suggest that you acquaint yourself with the groundbreaking work of my compatriot, Bonny Ibhawor, who's critique of the narrow individualism of Western human rights discourse my perspective here echoes. You seem completely entrenched in this Western individualistic understanding of human rights and are unwilling to consider how, in other contexts, the individual and his rights and interests are subsumed under those of the community, under the larger struggle and its objectives.

On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 2:57 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Moses

Here is your posting to which I’d like to make some small responses.

1. I can’t answer your rhetorical question about one clean revolution. The standards involved crimes against humanity, etc. all that is post world war 2. I can’t point to an ideal revolution. That’s not really relevant, in my thinking. Perhaps you might frame  it differently. The struggle in s African was not a revolution, in my mind, like the French revolution or Russian or cuban revolution—revolutions based on class and orders that no longer exist in those forms. The question might be, compare it with other comparable anti-colonial struggles, like that in Zimbabwe, or kenya, or Algeria. Let me not pretend to argue one is cleaner or better than the other. If the real goal was to oust an unjust regime, that overrode the considerations I am raising, and I wouldn’t dispute that. But it is really incumbent on you, a youngish scholar whom I respect, to retain the values that emerged after wwII and with difficulty produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the convention against genocide.  For me, the accomplishments of the three revolutions were of such an order than I would not revise my support for their struggles—despite all the bad things that followed, the reigns of terror in all three cases. But surely we have learned basic lessons for values to fight for, even within the struggle. Don’t use “fog of war” as an excuse, but decide whether you would support a movement that crossed the lines beyond what you could accept. Everyone in these movements knows what I am talking about, and debated and fought over it. If you have not read assia djebar’s Algerian White, I recommend it. The movement was riven, and whereas she was ready to make ultimate sacrifices for its success, some of the leadership deserved to be shot. On another note, we all remember the scene in The Battle of Algiers where the fln has an elderly woman plant a bomb in an Air France waiting room. The camera zooms in on the baby about to be killed; the scenes in the dancing club also highlight the pathos of killing young people happily dancing. The film tries to be frank in facing what actions were taken by the fln. And everyone remembers the opening scene of torture which functions, dramatically, to explain the violence and brutality of the fln. In the end of that film, in the end of the struggle, we dance in the street as nelson mandela became the new president. But we don’t shut off our conscience. Or intellect. I also don’t mean to be debating you much less lecturing you, but rather insisting that these questions are not to be shut away for us, and more than they were for activists in the heart of the struggle itself.
2. You make too quick assumptions about the naivete of those of us active in opposing the apartheid regime. There were s African agents who came to our campus to intimidate our students, and we learned of that. We were, I believe, completely aware of the attempts of the s African regime to discredit the struggle, to post false stories. I remember clearly after all these years the shock in reading about the torture: I was on a plane, I think in Africa, reading Le Monde, when the story broke. It was covered by the major press. We all questioned sources, determined which were the most credible; we were, in fact, heavily guided by people like dennis brutus and other s Africans who were leading the charge in the ALA. You might have heard that the ALA separated itself from the ASA due to our activist positions, and of all of them, s Africa was the most pressing. You are assuming a kind of liberal naivete on our part; a naivete of distance, as if we acted in isolation. Dear friend, you were not there at the same, didn’t attend meetings with lengthy debates over what policies our associations should take, whose positions were reliable and whose were compromised. It was not a distance struggle for us. I do not want to exaggerate my role: I was just part of a movement, of groups that were commonly joining in this struggle as best we could.
3. That's it
4. ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 9 April 2018 at 22:48
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

Two  additional points:

 

1. I challenged you to give me an example of a clean revolutionary war, one without unsavory aspects, and you could not. Isn't it the case that in fact most revolutions are cannibalistic and eat their own? By that sordid standard, the ANC was a paragon of revolutionary discipline and decency. Which tells me that you've fallen into the trap that white conservatives who do not support anti-colonial wars of liberation set for white liberal intellectuals to blackmail them and force them on the defensive. They ask these liberal intellectuals to account for and defend their anti-colonial allies the moment the usual factoids about fratricidal and unflattering happenings within the movement emerges. You and your colleagues in the US pro-ANC camp were either naive to assume that some elements within the ANC's military wing would not slip into unauthorized conduct or that the ANC as an organization would consistently display moral perfection. In that sense I would say that your disappointment stems from your naivety; you're/were a victim of your own naivety. Moreover, you don't seem to expect such moral and philosophical transcendence from white-led revolutions. Why do white white allies of black causes always expect black revolutionaries to be morally perfect as though such revolutionaries have to earn the support of their Western white allies by embracing a consistent ethos of moral perfection that is impossible even in conditions of peace let alone in situations of war?

 

2.The second point is that it is remarkable to me that in all your references to news that got to you and your group in MSU about misconduct within the anti-Apartheid liberal struggle, you did not bother to also note that MOST of those reports would have been false or exaggerated, the result of the apartheid state's sophisticated media manipulation campaign to discredit the liberation movement and its leading figures. There is a great documentary on Winnie playing on Netflix. I suggest that you watch it. In this documentary, operatives of the Apartheid secret police and intelligence services describe how they planted stories and manipulated local and international media to portray Winnie and the military wing of the ANC as murderers, torturers, among other others. Also, in Long Walk to Freedom, there is a telling encounter the imprisoned Mandela had with an American journalist who visited him in jail. The latter was not on a fact finding mission. Instead he had made up his mind that Nelson Mandela  was a terrorist and his questioning focused only on that angle; he repeatedly asked why Mandela and the movement adopted terrorist and violent methods, etc. What kind of stories do you think such a journalist would return to the States to write for his newspaper? You and your ANC supporter friends should have been more mindful of falling victim to Apartheid-sponsored propaganda that filtered through to you in the States.

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 7:23 PM, Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Ken:

 

I deplore and condemn torture in all its ramifications ad weapon of war and I wish it were otherwise than the charges against the AND in this regard.

 

When M&s England was indicted for torture on behalf of the allies I 20p4 I was at the forefront of the condemnations 

 

But Winnie is no Corporal England.  Your point on Winnies role on torture is well taken but it must be assessed  in the context of the whole struggle as Moses indicated 

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 08/04/2018 14:53 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi moses, nothing I said implied much less stated that I believed the anc tortured andkilled indiscriminately. It was a shock when those first newpaper accounts appeared since it ran counter to everyone’s belief in the anc.

I don’t know whatever gave you that impression. I raised it since it was a matter of contention, and when you continue your posting, you stte it was an issue that was debated.

 

I am disturbed by the uniform condemnation of my call tht the issue be debated here. In fact you are the only one to take up that question, and you retreat in the end with evocation of the fog of war. I would urge you to reconsider the rationalizations for it. No one really believes that torture somehow yields the truth. In this country that has been the vicious argument used in favour of Guantanamo.

As I read your post, it seems clear that the logic of the situation should have led them, and us, to oppose torture, for many reasons; not least the higher moral ground occupied by the anc, and the considerable alienation it risked in it becoming public. The anc was fighting the decent fight; torture and assassination of civilians did not help the movement. I do admire your considered answer and knowledge; but am disappointed in the general indifference to the question from other members of the listserv who seem to have had no trouble in this practices.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 14:19
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

You're making it seem as though the ANC's military wing tortured and killed indiscriminately. That's not true at all. In fact, Mandela's autobiography makes it clear that the ANC debated all these issues and thereafter painstakingly, carefully, and precisely delineated the boundaries and contours of its violence. The resolution to establish an armed wing after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was quite clear that only SABOTAGE operations were authorized. As the name suggests, sabotage was designed to hurt the Apartheid economy by bombing military installations, power plants, and other critical infrastructures that enabled the state to maintain itself and replenish its violent, racist domination. The resolution was also clear that civilians--white civilians-- were off limits and not to be targeted. In other words, violence was designed to be used in measured, well defined ways in conformity with the enlightened principles you've stated. The ANC's sabotage operations DID NOT target civilians, white or black.

 

That said, the ANC's military wing, Umkomto we Sizwe, was a regimented military organization. Like all military organizations, it punished insubordination, treason, betrayal, and other crimes. It was particularly harsh on moles planted by the apartheid state. It tortured and killed moles because moles got many black people within and without the struggle killed by informing on the movement. There were hundreds of moles in both branches of the ANC, a story of betrayal and apartheid's dirty war that is documented in Jacob Dlamini's book, Askari. Given the damage that moles and internal saboteurs did to the struggle, the increasingly paranoid members of the military wing, some of whom were assassinated even on foreign soil where they thought they were safe, lashed out against people discovered to be moles. In this reaction, some innocent people were falsely accused of spying for the state and tortured. In the fog of war, the luxury of a thorough investigation was often absent, and so accusations alone sometimes sufficed. Mistakes were made. It is inevitable. All violent revolutions make such mistakes, have incidents of "friendly fire," so to speak.

 

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the ANC did not torture or kill indiscriminately. They punished treason and betrayals of the movement harshly with torture to deter regular black folk and members of the organization from turning coat to spy for the apartheid state. It's easy to sit in judgment over them for adopting such drastically self-preservationist regimens from the comfort of our homes thousands of miles away, temporally and spatially removed form the horror of apartheid. But from their trenches the ANC operatives who were trying to stay alive amidst the onslaught of the apartheid regime had little time for philosophical purity and enlightened principles of war. I am a historian and have studied or read about many violent revolutions. I've yet to read of a clean one where the modern rules of war were consistently observed. It would be great if you could acknowledge this fact even as you espouse the ideals of a humane revolutionary war.

 

As Gloria said, the ANC demonstrated remarkable restraint by not going after white civilians, whom one could argue were culpable in apartheid since they sustained the system by renewing its electoral mandate and by benefitting from its policies of racial exclusion and privilege.

 

 

On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Gloria, what does this mean for you? That torture or killing of civilians was ok? Remains ok?

I am sure you know there was a debate within the anc on this, too.

As for moral equivalence, I never suggested anything like that.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 09:28
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs."harrow

 

Ken, there is absolutely  no moral equivalence here -  unless you want to

run with the hounds and hunt with the hunter.

 

You forgot to mention that the apartheid state was a nuclear state-  with

biowarfare  capabilities-  backed by most of the Western world

until Jimmy Carter,  and later the US Congress and the Black Caucus stepped in.

The ANC  was the proverbial goliath fighting with a slingshot.

 

In fact I  would give the ANC a medal for its  relative restraint during the anti - apartheid

war and after it, given the  highly extraordinary circumstances. 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:02 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi shina

You are dodging my question. I totally favour the anc having the burning spear. Of course the military response was legit. But not all targets are legitimate in warfare, not at all! There are war conventions, Geneva conventions, there are legitimate targets and illegitimate targets. Civilians are not legitimate targets, and torture is not a legit practice. No one can convince me that the anc needed to torture, or that  killing children Is legitimate.

I understand the paradoxes; I’ve read the canon of revolutionary actions and beliefs. But even in a revolution, one choses to kill civilians or not. That is the subject camus took up in The Rebel and especially Les Justes, his play about the assassination of the czar.

It is the subject of mudimbe’s first novel as well. It is not new as an issue.

I am not preaching passivism, or non-violent resistance, which you are attributing to me.

So, how do we, collectively, assume the responsibility for supporting a cause? Moses spoke of the fog of war. Well, that dodges the question. Maybe winnie was not really responsible; others on this list have much better knowledge of the answer to that question, so I will defer to them. But I stand firm on my first position, that there are limits, there are such things as war crimes, crimes against humanity, conventions like the Geneva convention, and those things matter, even in the midst or war, or rather, especially in the midst of war. I actively supported the anc for years, especially in east lansing, so I can raise the question concerning the organization that I aligned myself with.

Lastly, the apartheid regime was vicious: it did target civilians, it tortured and blackmailed many people; it slaughtered women who marched in sharpeville, they killed steve biko and thousands of others, illegitimately. I doubt I could have forgiven them after the war. But the atrocities were reason to condemn them.

Get it? They were a marker of the illegitimacy of the regime. We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 5 April 2018 at 18:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

 

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

 

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Date: 04/04/2018 19:15 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

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[Kenneth Harrow]

Hi moses

Thanks for your considered responses. I don’t know if I have the energy to respond to all your points. I do have one request, if you will, which is not to assume you know my thinking on a point before giving me a chance to express it.

1.on your first point—really on all of them—where there is room to debate a given issue, I believe it is possible to be within a struggle, a movement, and to debate its practices. I agree that wars, revolutions, etc., were and are anti-humanitarian in their nature. But there must be attempts to curb their excesses, to hold people accountable. The Syrians and Russians who use poison gas are breaking those conventions. While bombing people into submission is vile, attempts to end the use of poison gas is not something we should quit on. Ditto for other practices. When the U.S. put lt. calley on trial for crimes against humanity,for slaughtering civilians in my lai, the army wasn’t happy about it. But if we take the long view, we shouldn’t quit our opposition of such crimes, even in wartime.

2.you put chris hani into the same bag with winnie. I attended chris hani’s talk here at msu, shortly before he returned to s Africa to be assassinated. He was our favorite figure in the struggle, that’s all I want to say. he had our complete support, and his talk was an inspiration. Imagine our shock when he was killed shortly after meeting and hearing him speak.

 

3. you might be surprised to hear me say this. I understand pretty completely your critique of human rights approaches taken after ww2. I have some knowledge of how they were framed and their history. They are not an end, but a part of the struggle to achieve greater justice. They are amended to include notions of rights that encompass more than political rights, i.e., social and economic. The fact that the enlightenment was the historical moment when such thinking was framed is ultimately irrelevant to their value to us today. To say otherwise is to claim that anything coming from the west, with its oppressive history, is invariably compromised. But we can take what is good, build on it, improve it, make it serve our notions of justice today. I have made arguments along the line you make, about western liberal notions of the individual, etc. but that is not the end of story. I view my own work for human rights as entailing compromises all the times (I am country specialist for amnesty international, for Rwanda and Burundi, and the tools used by amnesty are international law, including u.n. declarations). I don’t frame amnesty’s mandate; I support using it as best we can to oppose oppressive regimes, like the two in Rwanda and Burundi today, and we need some tools in that opposition, just as we need the same tools against trump, or before him, Obama with some of his policies. Anyway, the discourses on human rights now are not of one piece, and I very much doubt we’d be disagreeing on how to ground them. I support completely the change in the direction of social and economic rights, which is the current progressive platform. But if you ask me where I’d give my money, it would be human rights watch, alongside doctors without borders and others of that ilk, who are attempting to work for those abused by oppressive regimes.

 

I get tired of theoretical claims in this field. There are 6 million internally displaced people from the drc. 450,000 refugees from Burundi now. and Rwanda is a tight police state.

That’s enough reason to work on changing things, which includes addressing those who control the arms trade and mineral extraction. Those basics remain these issues, in the end, just as the basics concerning people with semi-automatic weapons in Nigeria remain the same. It isn’t puritanism to claim there are basic rights that we need to defend when people are shot, their goods and lands taken, their rights trampled on. No one is going to say, when being kidnapped and tortured, that they have no rights worth defending because the European enlightenment was an imperfect history on which to base the rights. Pragmatically I would begin by saying, stop the abuse; we can figure out later whether we want to use Ubuntu or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the reason for our call to stop the abuse.

 

I guess I do have one point of disagreement with you. Given the history of England and then france in framing the various notions of rights that developed in the 17^th and 18^th c, I don’t see them as largely developed to keep non-european peoples in check. They were framed within the various class struggles of those countries at that time. They are not “universal” in my view, but assumed those notions as the middle classes in both countries opposed the noble or royal interests, and eventually as the working classes in 1848 and 1870 pushed their agendas. Ditto for the Russian revolution. Now we can use the elements of those struggles for our purposes, and I believe we mostly do do that. You never asked my views on their “universality.” Again, please don’t assume such naiveté on my part. But I have no trouble evoking them if they serve my purposes. If the architects came from one place or another, that’s irrelevant to how useful they might be in our attempts to struggle for more just society. If they reflect values that enabled slave owners and slave trade money to prevail, they could also be used to fight against slavery. And if the term “universal” enables us to carry on that fight, ok, let’s use what works for now, and attempt to craft better tools for the future.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 10 April 2018 at 19:51
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

Thanks for your detailed response and the illuminating autobiographical detours. Three points:

 

1. Has it occurred to you that the fact that you cannot point to any anti-colonial war or struggle that meets your idealistic humanitarian standards is an indication that those standards are unrealistically naive in the context of a brutal war between colonial oppressors and liberation fighters? Reflect on it. I see much navel-gazing in your postulations and not enough self-reflection and self-critique. Even when you restrict yourself to the post-World War II period, you'd be hard pressed to find a clean revolutionary or anti-colonial struggle. As a historian, that is a significant factoid for me, for it tells me that the problem is not the ANC or Winnie or the military wing but rather the nature of anti-colonial armed struggle. It also tells me that every struggle, regardless of time and space, has its unique contradictions that we must make peace with even as we keep our focus pragmatically on the larger objective.

 

2. I was in South Africa last summer and had several conversations with people. Black people there are souring on Nelson Mandela a bit and the stocks of Chris Hani and Winnie Mandela have been rising. Black people adore them and their ideological stances. Chris Hani as you know was the leader of the military wing, and Winnie was his deputy. He was outside and she inside, but they worked together. By your logic of puritan humanitarian principles, these two individuals should be hated and not adored as they are. But the opposite is the case. It is not that black South Africans do not know that some elements of the military wing committed atrocities (if they didn't know, the TRC certainly informed them) or that these two individuals, as the leaders of the military aspect of the struggle, bear some vicarious moral responsibility for the atrocities even if they didn't know about or authorized them. Unlike you, however, black South Africans are able to be pragmatic in their evaluation of Winnie and Hani and of the military wing that they led. They are able to compartmentalize the atrocities and weigh them against the general climate created by the Apartheid state. They are able to weigh them against the overarching objective being pursued at the time. They are able to weigh these violations of individual rights against the greater, collective good of the struggle against racist oppression. You may not understand it, but it is called Ubuntu. It is an African humanist ethos that does not see individual rights or interests but collective interests and rights. In this frame, the unfortunate violation of an individual's right in the process of fighting for the collective good can be forgiven, subordinated to the greater objective of the common struggle. We academics are not always right. We should sometimes humbly listen to the perspectives of people on the ground, on whose behalf we are purportedly fighting. We can learn from their pragmatism in order to moderate our philosophical, humanitarian, and revolutionary puritanism.

 

3. This brings me to your constant refrain: the post-War universal declaration of human rights and related conventions. With all due respect, I'm a little disappointed that you keep invoking this document as some sort of truly universal, sacrosanct corpus that should guide and inform political conduct everywhere in all contexts. I disagree, and I question the universality of these conventions and principles. They are provincial principles in the final analysis. I prefer the perspectives of people who question the "universal" claim of that declaration, people who deconstruct it and point to the declaration's history in  European internationalism, and in hypocritical, self-righteous European claims. I prefer the perspectives of those who, unlike you, do not take the principles outlined in the declaration and its associated documents as the point of reference or departure for conversations about humanitarianism. Why can't you see that those principles are Euro-American in origin and framing and that they were designed largely to hold Other people (not Euro-Americans) in check so that they cannot challenge Euro-American hegemony without running afoul of its precepts? Have the architects of the principles crafted in Geneva, San Francisco, and and other places ever held themselves accountable to them? There is new, brilliant, and illuminating work being done in the area of human rights that critiques the Euro-American (faux universal) principles of human rights that you constantly cite to underpin your contentions, principles that have come under sustained scholarly attack from academics with origins in the global South. I suggest that you acquaint yourself with the groundbreaking work of my compatriot, Bonny Ibhawor, who's critique of the narrow individualism of Western human rights discourse my perspective here echoes. You seem completely entrenched in this Western individualistic understanding of human rights and are unwilling to consider how, in other contexts, the individual and his rights and interests are subsumed under those of the community, under the larger struggle and its objectives.

On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 2:57 PM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Moses

Here is your posting to which I’d like to make some small responses.

1. I can’t answer your rhetorical question about one clean revolution. The standards involved crimes against humanity, etc. all that is post world war 2. I can’t point to an ideal revolution. That’s not really relevant, in my thinking. Perhaps you might frame  it differently. The struggle in s African was not a revolution, in my mind, like the French revolution or Russian or cuban revolution—revolutions based on class and orders that no longer exist in those forms. The question might be, compare it with other comparable anti-colonial struggles, like that in Zimbabwe, or kenya, or Algeria. Let me not pretend to argue one is cleaner or better than the other. If the real goal was to oust an unjust regime, that overrode the considerations I am raising, and I wouldn’t dispute that. But it is really incumbent on you, a youngish scholar whom I respect, to retain the values that emerged after wwII and with difficulty produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the convention against genocide.  For me, the accomplishments of the three revolutions were of such an order than I would not revise my support for their struggles—despite all the bad things that followed, the reigns of terror in all three cases. But surely we have learned basic lessons for values to fight for, even within the struggle. Don’t use “fog of war” as an excuse, but decide whether you would support a movement that crossed the lines beyond what you could accept. Everyone in these movements knows what I am talking about, and debated and fought over it. If you have not read assia djebar’s Algerian White, I recommend it. The movement was riven, and whereas she was ready to make ultimate sacrifices for its success, some of the leadership deserved to be shot. On another note, we all remember the scene in The Battle of Algiers where the fln has an elderly woman plant a bomb in an Air France waiting room. The camera zooms in on the baby about to be killed; the scenes in the dancing club also highlight the pathos of killing young people happily dancing. The film tries to be frank in facing what actions were taken by the fln. And everyone remembers the opening scene of torture which functions, dramatically, to explain the violence and brutality of the fln. In the end of that film, in the end of the struggle, we dance in the street as nelson mandela became the new president. But we don’t shut off our conscience. Or intellect. I also don’t mean to be debating you much less lecturing you, but rather insisting that these questions are not to be shut away for us, and more than they were for activists in the heart of the struggle itself.
2. You make too quick assumptions about the naivete of those of us active in opposing the apartheid regime. There were s African agents who came to our campus to intimidate our students, and we learned of that. We were, I believe, completely aware of the attempts of the s African regime to discredit the struggle, to post false stories. I remember clearly after all these years the shock in reading about the torture: I was on a plane, I think in Africa, reading Le Monde, when the story broke. It was covered by the major press. We all questioned sources, determined which were the most credible; we were, in fact, heavily guided by people like dennis brutus and other s Africans who were leading the charge in the ALA. You might have heard that the ALA separated itself from the ASA due to our activist positions, and of all of them, s Africa was the most pressing. You are assuming a kind of liberal naivete on our part; a naivete of distance, as if we acted in isolation. Dear friend, you were not there at the same, didn’t attend meetings with lengthy debates over what policies our associations should take, whose positions were reliable and whose were compromised. It was not a distance struggle for us. I do not want to exaggerate my role: I was just part of a movement, of groups that were commonly joining in this struggle as best we could.
3. That's it
4. ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 9 April 2018 at 22:48
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

Two  additional points:

 

1. I challenged you to give me an example of a clean revolutionary war, one without unsavory aspects, and you could not. Isn't it the case that in fact most revolutions are cannibalistic and eat their own? By that sordid standard, the ANC was a paragon of revolutionary discipline and decency. Which tells me that you've fallen into the trap that white conservatives who do not support anti-colonial wars of liberation set for white liberal intellectuals to blackmail them and force them on the defensive. They ask these liberal intellectuals to account for and defend their anti-colonial allies the moment the usual factoids about fratricidal and unflattering happenings within the movement emerges. You and your colleagues in the US pro-ANC camp were either naive to assume that some elements within the ANC's military wing would not slip into unauthorized conduct or that the ANC as an organization would consistently display moral perfection. In that sense I would say that your disappointment stems from your naivety; you're/were a victim of your own naivety. Moreover, you don't seem to expect such moral and philosophical transcendence from white-led revolutions. Why do white white allies of black causes always expect black revolutionaries to be morally perfect as though such revolutionaries have to earn the support of their Western white allies by embracing a consistent ethos of moral perfection that is impossible even in conditions of peace let alone in situations of war?

 

2.The second point is that it is remarkable to me that in all your references to news that got to you and your group in MSU about misconduct within the anti-Apartheid liberal struggle, you did not bother to also note that MOST of those reports would have been false or exaggerated, the result of the apartheid state's sophisticated media manipulation campaign to discredit the liberation movement and its leading figures. There is a great documentary on Winnie playing on Netflix. I suggest that you watch it. In this documentary, operatives of the Apartheid secret police and intelligence services describe how they planted stories and manipulated local and international media to portray Winnie and the military wing of the ANC as murderers, torturers, among other others. Also, in Long Walk to Freedom, there is a telling encounter the imprisoned Mandela had with an American journalist who visited him in jail. The latter was not on a fact finding mission. Instead he had made up his mind that Nelson Mandela  was a terrorist and his questioning focused only on that angle; he repeatedly asked why Mandela and the movement adopted terrorist and violent methods, etc. What kind of stories do you think such a journalist would return to the States to write for his newspaper? You and your ANC supporter friends should have been more mindful of falling victim to Apartheid-sponsored propaganda that filtered through to you in the States.

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 7:23 PM, Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Ken:

 

I deplore and condemn torture in all its ramifications ad weapon of war and I wish it were otherwise than the charges against the AND in this regard.

 

When M&s England was indicted for torture on behalf of the allies I 20p4 I was at the forefront of the condemnations 

 

But Winnie is no Corporal England.  Your point on Winnies role on torture is well taken but it must be assessed  in the context of the whole struggle as Moses indicated 

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 08/04/2018 14:53 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi moses, nothing I said implied much less stated that I believed the anc tortured andkilled indiscriminately. It was a shock when those first newpaper accounts appeared since it ran counter to everyone’s belief in the anc.

I don’t know whatever gave you that impression. I raised it since it was a matter of contention, and when you continue your posting, you stte it was an issue that was debated.

 

I am disturbed by the uniform condemnation of my call tht the issue be debated here. In fact you are the only one to take up that question, and you retreat in the end with evocation of the fog of war. I would urge you to reconsider the rationalizations for it. No one really believes that torture somehow yields the truth. In this country that has been the vicious argument used in favour of Guantanamo.

As I read your post, it seems clear that the logic of the situation should have led them, and us, to oppose torture, for many reasons; not least the higher moral ground occupied by the anc, and the considerable alienation it risked in it becoming public. The anc was fighting the decent fight; torture and assassination of civilians did not help the movement. I do admire your considered answer and knowledge; but am disappointed in the general indifference to the question from other members of the listserv who seem to have had no trouble in this practices.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 14:19
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

You're making it seem as though the ANC's military wing tortured and killed indiscriminately. That's not true at all. In fact, Mandela's autobiography makes it clear that the ANC debated all these issues and thereafter painstakingly, carefully, and precisely delineated the boundaries and contours of its violence. The resolution to establish an armed wing after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was quite clear that only SABOTAGE operations were authorized. As the name suggests, sabotage was designed to hurt the Apartheid economy by bombing military installations, power plants, and other critical infrastructures that enabled the state to maintain itself and replenish its violent, racist domination. The resolution was also clear that civilians--white civilians-- were off limits and not to be targeted. In other words, violence was designed to be used in measured, well defined ways in conformity with the enlightened principles you've stated. The ANC's sabotage operations DID NOT target civilians, white or black.

 

That said, the ANC's military wing, Umkomto we Sizwe, was a regimented military organization. Like all military organizations, it punished insubordination, treason, betrayal, and other crimes. It was particularly harsh on moles planted by the apartheid state. It tortured and killed moles because moles got many black people within and without the struggle killed by informing on the movement. There were hundreds of moles in both branches of the ANC, a story of betrayal and apartheid's dirty war that is documented in Jacob Dlamini's book, Askari. Given the damage that moles and internal saboteurs did to the struggle, the increasingly paranoid members of the military wing, some of whom were assassinated even on foreign soil where they thought they were safe, lashed out against people discovered to be moles. In this reaction, some innocent people were falsely accused of spying for the state and tortured. In the fog of war, the luxury of a thorough investigation was often absent, and so accusations alone sometimes sufficed. Mistakes were made. It is inevitable. All violent revolutions make such mistakes, have incidents of "friendly fire," so to speak.

 

Nonetheless, the fact remains that the ANC did not torture or kill indiscriminately. They punished treason and betrayals of the movement harshly with torture to deter regular black folk and members of the organization from turning coat to spy for the apartheid state. It's easy to sit in judgment over them for adopting such drastically self-preservationist regimens from the comfort of our homes thousands of miles away, temporally and spatially removed form the horror of apartheid. But from their trenches the ANC operatives who were trying to stay alive amidst the onslaught of the apartheid regime had little time for philosophical purity and enlightened principles of war. I am a historian and have studied or read about many violent revolutions. I've yet to read of a clean one where the modern rules of war were consistently observed. It would be great if you could acknowledge this fact even as you espouse the ideals of a humane revolutionary war.

 

As Gloria said, the ANC demonstrated remarkable restraint by not going after white civilians, whom one could argue were culpable in apartheid since they sustained the system by renewing its electoral mandate and by benefitting from its policies of racial exclusion and privilege.

 

 

On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 11:15 AM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

Gloria, what does this mean for you? That torture or killing of civilians was ok? Remains ok?

I am sure you know there was a debate within the anc on this, too.

As for moral equivalence, I never suggested anything like that.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 6 April 2018 at 09:28
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs."harrow

 

Ken, there is absolutely  no moral equivalence here -  unless you want to

run with the hounds and hunt with the hunter.

 

You forgot to mention that the apartheid state was a nuclear state-  with

biowarfare  capabilities-  backed by most of the Western world

until Jimmy Carter,  and later the US Congress and the Black Caucus stepped in.

The ANC  was the proverbial goliath fighting with a slingshot.

 

In fact I  would give the ANC a medal for its  relative restraint during the anti - apartheid

war and after it, given the  highly extraordinary circumstances. 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:02 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Hi shina

You are dodging my question. I totally favour the anc having the burning spear. Of course the military response was legit. But not all targets are legitimate in warfare, not at all! There are war conventions, Geneva conventions, there are legitimate targets and illegitimate targets. Civilians are not legitimate targets, and torture is not a legit practice. No one can convince me that the anc needed to torture, or that  killing children Is legitimate.

I understand the paradoxes; I’ve read the canon of revolutionary actions and beliefs. But even in a revolution, one choses to kill civilians or not. That is the subject camus took up in The Rebel and especially Les Justes, his play about the assassination of the czar.

It is the subject of mudimbe’s first novel as well. It is not new as an issue.

I am not preaching passivism, or non-violent resistance, which you are attributing to me.

So, how do we, collectively, assume the responsibility for supporting a cause? Moses spoke of the fog of war. Well, that dodges the question. Maybe winnie was not really responsible; others on this list have much better knowledge of the answer to that question, so I will defer to them. But I stand firm on my first position, that there are limits, there are such things as war crimes, crimes against humanity, conventions like the Geneva convention, and those things matter, even in the midst or war, or rather, especially in the midst of war. I actively supported the anc for years, especially in east lansing, so I can raise the question concerning the organization that I aligned myself with.

Lastly, the apartheid regime was vicious: it did target civilians, it tortured and blackmailed many people; it slaughtered women who marched in sharpeville, they killed steve biko and thousands of others, illegitimately. I doubt I could have forgiven them after the war. But the atrocities were reason to condemn them.

Get it? They were a marker of the illegitimacy of the regime. We could not condone on our side what we condemned on theirs.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 5 April 2018 at 18:57
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken:

 

Note my caveat: If we choose the violent revolutionary path.  If the ANC had not developed a military wing to counter the miasma of Apartheid we probably would not have a liberated South Africa today.  It was a singular scenario which buttressed the fact; those who make a peaceful change impossible make a violent change inevitable.  

The Apartheid regime knew they were running an inhuman anti people system hence the violent repression.

 

The ANC and its variegated offshoots could not confront the system with the hymns of ' let my people go' alone. ( we know the biblical archetype was not confined to such hymn singing alone since Moses was a military leader as well)

 

Anti Apartheid forces including the Nigerian govt at the time knew use of force might be necessary to dislodge  the regime.  It was not an easy choice to make. Those who force that choice on the opposition take the blame.

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 04/04/2018 23:04 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

Really? No limits? No moral considerations?

I can’t believe that we have no choices, no limits to what we would condone. How does that make us better than them??

This has been the dilemma of camus, and doubtless many other thinkers. Anyway, instead of rehearsing the arguments and issues, I’ll put in 2 cents. We have to imagine we are better than the torturers and mass murderers. We might fight them tooth and nail, but not “at any cost.”

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 4 April 2018 at 17:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impeccable analysis Moses!  Once it's a revolution both sides hands drip with blood.

 

A girls got to do what a girls got to do!

 

The Bolsheviks staged a military coup lined up the Czar and his family and executed them in cold blood.  Prior to that the Czar had been authorizing the killing of the Bolsheviks

 

 

 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

 

 

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[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

"You put chris hani into the same bag with winnie. I attended chris hani’s talk here at msu, shortly before he returned to s Africa to be assassinated. He was our favorite figure in the struggle."Harrow

Hmm.  Interesting to know that you liked Chris Hani, Chief of  Staff   of  " umkhonto we Sizwe,

the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC).

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

[Kenneth Harrow]

I didn’t condemn Umkhonto we sizwe, ever. There were debates about tactics, and I commented solely on assassination of children, of civilians, and of torture.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 10 April 2018 at 23:20
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"You put chris hani into the same bag with winnie. I attended chris hani’s talk here at msu, shortly before he returned to s Africa to be assassinated. He was our favorite figure in the struggle."Harrow

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Ken,

You see your own inevitable contradiction, don't you? That is the issue with excessive idealism. You say you supported and still support Umkomto we Sizwe and that you love Chris Hani. But if you read or watch the testimonies of the TRC, you'll see that the atrocities graphically narrated by victims and their relatives were committed by people affiliated with Umkomto, which Chris Hani led. In fact, some of the atrocities were unfortunately connected to the high command, even if they were inadvertent and as I said aberrations. Which tells me that you love Chris Hani and Umkomto, despite or in spite of their imperfections and mistakes. It tells me that you're willing and able to overlook or look beyond the inevitable foibles of anti-colonial armed struggle to accord Hani and Umkomto their deserved respect for what they helped accomplish. Curiously, however, you are unwilling to extend the same pragmatic courtesy to Winnie Mandela. Why? Like Gloria, I noticed this contradiction when I read your comment that you love(d) Chris Hani.

Another thing is that your penultimate post actually buttresses my point about the pragmatic compromises we sometimes make when we support struggles against oppression. You acknowledge that even your frame of reference for humanitarianism and human rights--the UN Declaration and its allied documents--are grounded in exclusionary and imperialist post-Enlightenment notions and that the post-War adoption of these principles represent an imperfect, problematic universalization of Euro-American notions of human rights. Yet you say you subscribe to them because they offer you a platform to challenge oppression. Fine, I have no problem with that, but you're making a compromise here, and yet you question the decision of others to do the same. Not only that, you said you will always support Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. I hope you know the Euro-American histories of those organizations, their origins in Cold War Western politics and imperialism, and how in fact they selectively report or highlight atrocities, focusing mostly on violations in the non-Western world. You probably recognize their imperfection and yet strategically support them. There nothing wrong with that. However, that is precisely what people do all over the world, including people who support and admire Winnie, Umkomto, Hani, and other anti-colonial struggle entities who could be accused of having at least tolerated atrocities of the type you stated. People forgive or overlook the imperfections of these figures to appreciate their broader contributions to the liberation struggle. You seem unwilling to concede the right to people to make a decision that you yourself have made in regard to some of these Western principles and institutions of human rights.

Finally, could you please be more specific when you mention "assassination of children, of civilians, and of torture"? As far as I know, children were not assassinated on the scale you are implying. A few teenagers were killed because of they were accused of being moles, some clearly unfairly. Much of that was unauthorized and occurred outside the gaze of the ANC/Umkomto leadership. And no, civilians were not targeted for assassination by the ANC or its military wing. Not denying that atrocities occurred, but you're making it seem as though they were systematic and widespread, which they were not.

 

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 8:46 AM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

I didn’t condemn Umkhonto we sizwe, ever. There were debates about tactics, and I commented solely on assassination of children, of civilians, and of torture.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 10 April 2018 at 23:20
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"You put chris hani into the same bag with winnie. I attended chris hani’s talk here at msu, shortly before he returned to s Africa to be assassinated. He was our favorite figure in the struggle."Harrow

 

Hmm.  Interesting to know that you liked Chris Hani, Chief of  Staff   of  " umkhonto we Sizwe,

the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC).

 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

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[Kenneth Harrow]

Hi moses

I didn’t imply widespread of systematic abuses. My main point is that toleration of such abuses was not accepted; was debated; is something for us to pass judgment on. I have not been made aware of hani sanctioning torture or the assassination of children etc. the case involving winnie was notorious, and you yourself pointed to it as not an aberration.

As for your reading of the major human rights organization, their targeting of global south targets, etc., I don’t share those views. It might burden the discussion to get into that here, but simply I recognize that they were constructed in a world having emerged from wwII, that colonialism was not a main feature, that they were difficult to get accepted; that they addressed important needs; that they evolved over time to expand the rights they defend, and that they are vitally important for people in the global south. They are equally important for people in the global north, and to the extent that there are abuses in the north, hrw and amnesty do not discriminate in favour of the u.s. or Europe.

If anything, it is actually the opposite. Also, they are highly limited by not having all the resources they need.

We all cast our support strategically. And are probably pragmatic about it.

But we have different lines that we draw where that support goes.

ken

 

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>

Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 11 April 2018 at 12:01
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Ken,

 

You see your own inevitable contradiction, don't you? That is the issue with excessive idealism. You say you supported and still support Umkomto we Sizwe and that you love Chris Hani. But if you read or watch the testimonies of the TRC, you'll see that the atrocities graphically narrated by victims and their relatives were committed by people affiliated with Umkomto, which Chris Hani led. In fact, some of the atrocities were unfortunately connected to the high command, even if they were inadvertent and as I said aberrations. Which tells me that you love Chris Hani and Umkomto, despite or in spite of their imperfections and mistakes. It tells me that you're willing and able to overlook or look beyond the inevitable foibles of anti-colonial armed struggle to accord Hani and Umkomto their deserved respect for what they helped accomplish. Curiously, however, you are unwilling to extend the same pragmatic courtesy to Winnie Mandela. Why? Like Gloria, I noticed this contradiction when I read your comment that you love(d) Chris Hani.

 

Another thing is that your penultimate post actually buttresses my point about the pragmatic compromises we sometimes make when we support struggles against oppression. You acknowledge that even your frame of reference for humanitarianism and human rights--the UN Declaration and its allied documents--are grounded in exclusionary and imperialist post-Enlightenment notions and that the post-War adoption of these principles represent an imperfect, problematic universalization of Euro-American notions of human rights. Yet you say you subscribe to them because they offer you a platform to challenge oppression. Fine, I have no problem with that, but you're making a compromise here, and yet you question the decision of others to do the same. Not only that, you said you will always support Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. I hope you know the Euro-American histories of those organizations, their origins in Cold War Western politics and imperialism, and how in fact they selectively report or highlight atrocities, focusing mostly on violations in the non-Western world. You probably recognize their imperfection and yet strategically support them. There nothing wrong with that. However, that is precisely what people do all over the world, including people who support and admire Winnie, Umkomto, Hani, and other anti-colonial struggle entities who could be accused of having at least tolerated atrocities of the type you stated. People forgive or overlook the imperfections of these figures to appreciate their broader contributions to the liberation struggle. You seem unwilling to concede the right to people to make a decision that you yourself have made in regard to some of these Western principles and institutions of human rights.

 

Finally, could you please be more specific when you mention "assassination of children, of civilians, and of torture"? As far as I know, children were not assassinated on the scale you are implying. A few teenagers were killed because of they were accused of being moles, some clearly unfairly. Much of that was unauthorized and occurred outside the gaze of the ANC/Umkomto leadership. And no, civilians were not targeted for assassination by the ANC or its military wing. Not denying that atrocities occurred, but you're making it seem as though they were systematic and widespread, which they were not.

 

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 8:46 AM, Kenneth Harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:

I didn’t condemn Umkhonto we sizwe, ever. There were debates about tactics, and I commented solely on assassination of children, of civilians, and of torture.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

har...@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 10 April 2018 at 23:20
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

"You put chris hani into the same bag with winnie. I attended chris hani’s talk here at msu, shortly before he returned to s Africa to be assassinated. He was our favorite figure in the struggle."Harrow

 

Hmm.  Interesting to know that you liked Chris Hani, Chief of  Staff   of  " umkhonto we Sizwe,

the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC).

 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

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