Naledi Pandor and Joe Matthews

NALEDI PANDOR AND JOE MATTHEWS

An article by Isaac Mpho Mogotsi, posted on Politicsweb, suggests that Minister Naledi Pandor suppressed some awkward truths about her father Joe Matthews.

Our Science and Technology Minister, Naledi Pandor’s article, “Through the generations”, which appeared in The New Age newspaper of 11 January 2012, makes for interesting but confounding reading

The article poses more questions about truth-telling than it purports to answer. Even when it involves a family as heroic and multi-talented phenomenon as Naledi Pandor’s, the fine art of a son or a daughter narrating the great historical tale of his or her forebears is fraught with grave challenges, at the best of time.

When such a narrative is attached to a great occasion, such as the ANC Centenary celebrations this year, the room for possible embellishment, and even outright propaganda in favour of your parents or great parents, can become irresistible and overwhelming.

The writings of Isabel Allende, daughter of Chile’s first socialist President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in a bloody coup by USA-supported General Pinochet’s right-wing forces in 1972, and of Deng Rong, the daughter of China’s former Supreme Leader, Deng Xiaoping, attest to the phenomenal historical, revolutionary, and even literary power of such reminiscences.

On the other extreme are the writings of the daughters of Fidel Castro and Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, who were so appalled by the revolutionary excesses of their revolutionary and highly ideological parents that they penned, what essentially were, denunciations of their fathers.

Where does Naledi Pandor’s recent article sit in this writing and memory continuum?

Before fully entertaining this question, it is useful to remember the words of Donald Culross Peattie, who, in his article “The Epic of Michelangelo”, pointed out that Michelangelo used “his art” to utter “ageless truths” (Reader’s Digest - Great Lives, Great Deeds, 1965, page 191).

Did Naledi Pandor use her prominent position - as a leading and long-serving national Cabinet Minister, and a formidable ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) member, to utter “ageless truths” about her grandfather and father on the occasion of the ANC’s Centenary?

I would say that Naledi Pandor got it absolutely correct in her account of her celebrated and highly respected grandfather, and leading ANC and South African icon, Professor Zachariah Keodirelang ‘ZK’ Matthews. Naledi’s warm and adoring reminiscences about ‘ZK’ will themselves become part of our treasured legend about her grandfather until the other side of eternity.

She has thus done history, the ANC, and our fight against the pervasive tendency towards deliberate and calculated forgetfulness about aspects of our anti-apartheid struggle, a huge and indispensable favour indeed.

To appreciate how vital this contribution is, we should remind ourselves of these words written about ‘ZK’ in an explanatory note in Nelson Mandela’s classic book, “Conversations with Myself”:

“(1901-1968). Academic, politician, anti-apartheid activist. Member of the ANC. First black South African to obtain a BA degree at a South African institution, 1923. First black South African to obtain an LLB degree in South Africa, 1930. Conceptualised the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter. Following the Sharpeville massacre, with Albert Luthuli he organised a ‘stay-away’, a national day of mourning, on 28 March 1960. In 1965 he retired to Botswana, and became its ambassador to the USA.” (Appendix D - People, Places and events, page 432).

In a word, in Professor ‘ZK’ Matthews, the ANC had its first, arguable still unparalleled, political genius, a towering organic thinker, and unassailable practical political philosopher. Yet, despite this very elevated stature of ‘ZK’ in the intellectual and political history of the ANC, it has not seen it fit to name a single city or metropolitan area after him, not even the area around Kliptown, where the Congress of the People met and adopted the Freedom Charter, both which were brain-children of Professor ‘ZK’.

But ordinary SA people, and ordinary ANC members throughout decades since 1955, have given ‘ZK’ a greater honour than any that successive post-apartheid democratic governments could ever hope to confer on him. In popular imagination of ordinary South Africans, Professor ‘ZK’ Matthews remains the undying political metonymy for both the 1955 Congress of the People, and the Freedom Charter adopted by the same Congress of the People.

In South Africa’s history, there can be no greater timeless and ageless political and intellectual honour and tribute than that. But what has been Naledi Pandor’s treatment of her father, whom she knew better, and got to understand even more - Joe Matthews, the son of Professor ‘ZK’ Matthews?

Here Naledi’s The New Age article becomes decidedly murky. Writing about her own father, Naledi Pandor suddenly decides to go saccharine and fuzzy, abruptly abandoning the guiding Michelangelo principle of using her elevated positions, and her much admired bloodline and venerated genealogy, to utter “ageless truths”. Instead of truth-telling, the natural instinct of a daughter to protect, and to promote, her beloved father she so much adores kicks in.

But out through the window goes the bold determination to utter “ageless truths”, as she brilliantly did with her grandfather.

At the very heart of this narrative dilemma confronting Naledi Pandor is that the political history of her own father, Joe Matthews, unlike her much-loved grandfather, Professor ‘ZK’, is parts heroic and deeply noble, but also parts highly questionable, if not completely ignoble.

Because Naledi Pandor has very correctly made the decision never to denounce her own father, like Fidel Castro and Joseph Stalin’s daughters did, she has decided to suppress certain unpleasant facts about her own father, and then over-emphasise and underline those parts of her father’s political history that shed a warm and endearing glow, and halo, around her deceased father, Joe Matthews.

What you get at the end, therefore, is not historical revisionism, which is pardonable. What is at play here is probably something much more sinister, namely a deliberate attempt to mislead the general public, especially the SA youth, about the extent to which Joe Matthews zigzagged away politically from the great political path that was cleared and trod by ‘ZK’ Matthews, and indeed, much later by his own daughter, Naledi Pandor herself.

That she attempts to achieve such a feat of historicist ignominy on the occasion of the ANC Centenary celebrations is doubly mind-boggling.

What are the “ghosts” about her father, Joe Matthews, that Naledi Pandor would rather she did not have to advertise publicly? And how does one deal with such “ghosts”, given Naledi Pandor’s cleat reluctance to confront such “ghosts” in a public space?

In his brilliant article entitled “An opportunity to craft new ideas”, which appeared in the Sunday Independent of 08 January 2012, Sipho Seepe, himself a renowned partisan intellectual during the Mbeki-Zuma ANC succession battle (2005-2007), cautioned as such about the current ANC: “Rather than being on the forefront of proposing and advancing ideas that will take the country forward, it finds itself having to respond to largely personalised and individualised attacks that masquerade as commentary.”

A fair point by Sipho Seepe as far as it goes. But how does one present a fuller, nuanced, and more rounded historical and political perspective of Naledi Pandor’s father than she has hitherto been willing to do, at least as represented by her recent The New Age article, without appearing or seeming to be dishing out “...largely personalised and individualised attacks that masquerade as commentary”, as Sipho Seepe remarks?

Yet the imperative of truth-telling is both abiding and compelling enough of itself. At its very best truth-telling, to borrow the words of Allan Bloom in a different context, “should give new eyes to human beings, inducing them to view the world differently, converting them from fixed modes of experience…” (“The Closing of the American Mind”, page 17). That Bloom writes “is ambition enough.”

Perhaps no one else has written a more unflattering, and damning, account of the unpleasant political history of Joe Matthews than Vladimir Shubin, the former Soviet Union’s points man and main contact with the exiled Lusaka-based ANC leadership.

In his biography of the exiled ANC entitled “ANC - A View From Moscow” Shubin makes the following comments about Joe Matthews:

• “Joe Matthews, after playing a leading role for some years in the SACP and the ANC, later concentrated on his private business and finally found his political home in the Inkatha Freedom Party”. (Page 7).
• In 1960 Joe Matthews was visiting Moscow as part of the SACP leadership. (Page 26).
• Following the ANC Morogoro Conference of 1969, London-based Joe Matthews became a member of the 20-member ANC National Executive committee (NEC). (Page 72).
• In 1975, Joe became the Secretary of the ANC NEC’s Revolutionary Council, a structure which for the first time in the history of the ANC, included non-Africans like Yusuf Dadoo, Joe Slovo and Reginald September as members.
• Joe Matthews was again part of the ANC/SACP to Moscow in 1969. “Joe Matthews was also there, this time as a representative of the Communist Party of Lesotho. He made a strong anti-Beijing speech, comparing the Chinese Communist Party with a ‘mad elephant’”. (Pages 75-76).
• The SA head of Security Police identified Joe Matthews as part of the ‘pro-communist group” within the ANC exiled leadership that is ‘opposed’ by the ANC President OR Tambo. (Page 81)
• “As early as 1954, Joe Matthews, then a member of the leadership of the ANC Youth League, called Buthelezi ‘one of the most loyal sons of this land’. Did he anticipate then that he would one day become one of Buthelezi’s lieutenants?” (Page 104).
• In 1975 the ANC NEC could not function properly because only five or six people continued to function in the NEC, “whilst Joe Matthews had left for Botswana”. (Page 106).
• On the eve of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, Joe Matthews renounced his revolutionary past in an article to the Johannesburg Sunday Times that was entitled ‘I Believed’.
• His revolutionary past included his activities within the ANCYL in the early 1950s; clashing with PAC’s founder, Robert Sobukwe, in 1959; leaving SA for exile in pre-independence Lesotho in 1960; being banned from Lesotho in 1965, and then moving to London, where he became managing editor of the ANC Sechaba magazine; moving to Botswana in 1970 and giving up his involvement in the ANC.
• In Botswana working in the Office of that newly-independent country’s President, as Assistant Permanent Secretary, and later becoming an Assistant Attorney-General of Botswana, whilst amassing substantial commercial interests there; in 1972 Joe Matthews severed all ties with the ANC and SACP; his ‘I Believed’ article of 1976 called for recognition of ‘independent’ Transkei; he resigned his Botswana government positions, his commercial venture collapsed, and he left Botswana for the West;
• He tried to attend the ANC’s first post-exile Durban conference in July 1991, but was refused accreditation; he then joined the Inkatha Freedom Party as its Chief Executive officer; he was subsequently seconded by the IFP to serve in SA’s first democratic government under Nelson Mandela, as the Deputy Minister of Safety and Security. (Pages 109-110).

Thus, Matthews moved from ANCYL, ANC, to SACP and CP of Lesotho, and then to serving Botswana government, abandoning politics for business, abandoning the hospitality of the Botswana Government for a stay in the West, and at the end joining IFP, which is on the right of the ANC. This suggests a “fair-weather” political morality willing to serve contradictory political forces from extreme left to extreme right.

On occasions Joe Matthews placed personal and family interests above loyalty and commitment to the exiled ANC-led anti-apartheid struggle and failed to consistently honour the great legacy of his father, ‘ZK’, of unswerving loyalty and commitment to one political home, the ANC, and was at times mercurial and unreliable.

What Vladimir Shubin’s book reveals about Matthews contradicts the ‘revisionist’ history Naledi Pandor presented about her father in her recent article. Joe Matthews proved that unswerving commitment and loyalty to the ANC cause did not come easy to every ANC leader. His story is best summed up by the comment made in the 1975 SACP Statement on the ANC’s Group of Eight rebels in 1975, entitled “The Enemy Hidden under the Same Skin”: “Most of them have made many somersaults in their chequered political careers, always following what seemed to serve their ambitions at any given moment. Some of them were communists at one time and anti-communists at others, tribalists and African nationalists, strongly pro-Soviet and equally strongly anti-soviet and pro-China.”

Joe Matthews’ compromised past is as much Naledi Pandor’s inheritance as is the undoubted and unambiguous great historical and political role of her grandfather, Professor ‘ZK’ Matthews. After all, no one has a choice over who their parents are, or what their parents will be up to.

The dictates of the Pedagogy of Truth-Telling, however, require that Pandor tell us the whole truth even when blood gets thicker than water, and truths become inconvenient. This is especially true during the ANC Centenary celebrations this year.

Isaac Mpho Mogotsi is Executive Director, Centre of Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA). He is also a businessman and former diplomat.

SOURCE: Politicsweb

MY FATHER DID NOT COMPROMISE ME

Naledi Pandor responds to Isaac Mogotsi, “Naledi Pandor and Joe Matthews” PoliticsWeb, 18 January 2012
Isaac Mogotsi believes my grandfather, ZK Matthews, was a great man and that he has not been appropriately memorialized. He believes that my father was not a great man, largely because he thinks he was disloyal to the ANC. He presents my grandfather as noble and my father as ignoble. He presents my grandfather as a saint and my father as a sinner (see here).

Isaac Mogotsi is entitled to his opinion, even if he fails to marshal facts and evidence in its support.

But he is not entitled to use words like ‘sinister’ and ‘suppression’ and ‘ghosts’ and ‘compromised’ and ‘mislead the general public’ about my recollections of my father. I take exception to those terms. I take strong exception to them and if my father was alive he would have put Isaac Mogotsi to the sword in the printed word and in public debate.

I did not ‘suppress’ information about my father’s political life. What an absurd comment to make. I was asked to reflect on my grandfather and my father in the time they were active in the ANC together. And that is what I did. And that is why I talked about the 1950s and 1960s when I was a child and growing up and learning about our struggle for liberation.

Did my father ‘suppress’ anything about his political life? How do I know? But he certainly did not suppress the fact that he served on the central committee of the SACP between 1962 and 1970 and that he then left the party. This is hardly surprising, given the events in central and eastern Europe at that time. Most sensible communists left the party after the suppression of the Prague Spring and the invasion of Hungary. To stay in the party was to advertise to the world that you were a Stalinist. And that my father never was. But he never left the ANC and he remained committed to its core political principles then and late in his career when he was a minister in government.

My father has given more interviews than any other struggle veteran. Isaac Mogotsi should spend time looking at the Mandela Foundation website and at the Padraig O’Malley oral archive, probably the largest collection of interviews with South African politicians involved in the negotiated-solution phase of South Africa’s struggle for democracy in the early 1990s. They certainly give a deep insight into the complex relationships between the ANC and the SACP.

Let me add this. Commitment to political principle is a virtue. The ANC has a rich and varied group of world-renowned leaders whose commitment to liberation has never been questioned (even by Mr Mogotsi). My grand father is among them. My father is among them. My grandmother is among them. My mother is among them. But while political principle is unchanging, strategy and tactics in the struggle do change. And that is what my father was good at. He made strategy and tactics his own speciality. And the ANC is much the better for his great understanding and subtle skill in articulating the best way forward.

So don’t call me compromised by what I learned from my father, Mr Mogotsi. Don’t call me compromised. What did you learn from your father, Mr Mogotsi?

SOURCE: Politicsweb

JOE MATTHEWS: MOGOTSIE IS ECONOMICAL WITH THE TRUTH

Kgosie Matthews responds to the criticism of his father’s record in politics

Mogotsi’s “Naledi Pandor and Joe Matthews” (PoliticsWeb, 18 January 2012) is a piece of writing that my father, Joe Matthews, would have loathed. It lacks a factual basis and is peppered with unnecessary quotes that are designed to convey some reading but which fail to disguise the fact that the piece is in essence an old-fashioned hatchet job. By describing Naledi Pandor’s treatment of her father as ‘murky’, Mogotsi’s reveals his ignorance, both about the ANC and the more importantly about the Matthews family itself.

Even Matthews’s enemies over the decades have always acknowledged his sheer brilliance, not least because he was widely acknowledged as the leading authority on the liberation movement. His frequent comment to those he encountered was: “you must read!”

Reading was something that Joe Matthews did a lot. He believed in extensive discussion and argument. While he was adversarial in intellectual matters, he was not one for personal attacks, vile invective, and distortions, despite frequently having been being the subject of lies and distortions himself. He rarely responded because he had the self-assurance and thick skin of a complete politician. Criticism to him was part of the game.

Matthews had detractors principally because he advised his comrades without fear. He was never a snivelling courtier bowing and scraping to curry favour. Matthews was a big figure, and if his fellow politicians wanted to hear some straight talking, a good starting point was ‘what does Joe think?’ And Matthews would let them know and more often than not he was right.

One part of Mogotsi’s article that would have interested Matthews is his choice of comparators. He compares Matthews to figures who have occupied voluminous amounts of newsprint and about whom numerous books have been written: Stalin, Castro. Matthews would have chanced a wry smile at being in the camp of the West’s ‘bogeymen.’

But to get at the truth, which is what Mogotsi purports to want to do about Matthews, you need a long historical perspective. Mogotsi’s critique of Matthews takes Shubin’s account as its starting point and from an intellectual standpoint it is all downhill for Mogotsi from then on, because Shubin’s account consists primarily of invective. For one thing, it is poorly sourced, but more seriously, if South Africans are to take history lessons about their leaders from Soviet-era Communists of the pre-Gorbachev era, then our problems are even more deep rooted than I thought.

Concerning the Zulu question, Matthews and Buthelezi had a lifelong friendship, from their days in the youth league until Matthews’s death. Did Matthews see it as his historic duty to persuade Buthelezi to participate in the 1994 election and to draw back from the brink of a low intensity conflict in Zululand? Yes. Was this in South Africa’s best interests? Yes. But is it correct to speak of the IFP as Matthews’s political home? The answer is rather more complex than Mogotsi’s borrowings from Shubin suggest, particularly when so much material on the subject is now available.

Matthews’s position as a member of the ANCs top leadership pre dates 1969. Thabo Mbeki will occasionally refer to his and Matthews’s time in Moscow where they celebrated Joe Matthews fortieth birthday on 17 June 1969.

Did Matthews make an assessment that China’s Cultural Revolution was an anathema? I do not know, but hopefully yes.

Was the head of the South African security police an appropriate source for material on divergences of opinion between Matthews and Tambo? Certainly not. Were there divergences? The record suggests otherwise. Matthews and Tambo as comrades and as African nationalists (in the ‘persons concerned with resisting colonialism’ sense) cannot be separated and were entirely at one. Tambo was always conscious that the liberation movement was a broad church comprising a variety of strands of thought and embodied the political tradition that ZK Matthews and the apex of the liberation movement held dear, namely, that inter-African conflicts must be avoided at all costs. Matthews was schooled in this tradition which was one of the many tenets of what was known as the ANC way.

If Matthews described Prince Buthelezi as a loyal son of the land in 1954, he was correct in so doing. Prince Buthlezi was then a member of the ANC, so this was a wholly appropriate comment. But Matthews respect for Buthelezi had a deeper and more interesting source than that. He had observed Buthelezi’s determination to restore the royal Zulu house to its former position, colonial forces having left the Zulu King of the time almost destitute. Matthews saw in that effort by Buthelezi an act of resistance to European intentions and he held Buthelezi in deep respect for that act alone. He did not seek to justify every action taken by Buthelezi but fundamentally they both understood that a new South Africa would have to have room for many varied opinions, quoting the Zulu proverb that ‘people are not like water and flow in different directions’.

Matthews left for England from Botswana in 1970 not 1975. The functioning of the ANC executive in 1975 is not something that Mogotsi would have been privy to. The suggestion that Matthews gave up his involvement in the ANC and severed all ties with the ANC is wrong.

Matthews travelled widely with Sir Seretse Khama, and was frequently in Zambia and other parts of Africa, attending OAU and Commonwealth and non-aligned movement meetings in different parts of the globe, working to advance the ANC’s interests, securing support, simultaneously working underground. A lot of what Matthews did has not even been written about. The numerous biographies of Madiba for example do not even scratch the surface of Matthews’s relationship with Madiba, and their journey through Africa. But more importantly, there is the Tambo-Matthews association: again there is a large gap in the record, and few are alive to tell this story: Duma Nokwe is long gone, but perhaps when Thabo Mbeki has a chance to write he will be able to set the record straight.

Matthews’s position on Transkei is another that is widely misunderstood. His issue with the Homelands was that it was entirely wrong to deprive South Africans of their right to be South Africans. But did he believe that, as a policy option, the ANC should vilify Homeland or other Traditional leaders? He did not. What influenced him on this? Well he often knew them personally. He told a story of a discussion that Madiba and he had with KD Matanzima many, many years ago. Madiba’s recall is not as extensive as that of Matthews, but in essence these were Madiba’s cousins. Matthews did not like the use of terms such as ‘stooge’ and ‘sell out,’ and frequently referred to pamphlets by Lenin (Left Wing Communism - an infantile disorder) and Mao (Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People) in an effort to dissuade comrades from engaging in political insults, name calling and conflicts of a more serious nature. He was opposed to bloody sectarian internecine conflicts among the Xhosa and Zulu and his position was always that fire should be reserved for Pretoria and persuasion for homeland leaders. Ultimately, well after Matthews, his ideas became ANC policy.

Despite having had friends at the highest level in Botswana (Seretse Khama was the last guest to leave Matthews 50th birthday party in 1979 at 89 Mongana Close in Gaborone), Matthews is not likely to have always regarded the Botswana governments approach towards South Africans refugees as hospitable, but more importantly, by the 1980s, life in Botswana and the frontline states was far from safe for senior South African exiles many of whom were killed in cross border raids by South African special forces. By the time Matthews left Botswana it had long ceased to be safe for exiles.

When China’s leaders discuss Mao, they say something along the lines of ‘Mao’s victories far outweigh his mistakes.’ There are few politicians who have not made mistakes. Did Matthews make mistakes? Yes. He certainly analysed the decisions of the movement, in the hope that the analysis would hasten achieving the goal of liberation. Matthews did not waiver in wanting to achieve the goal of liberation. He had read Lenin and understood the need to change tactics, and to reach uncomfortable accommodations. Principles and goals without tactics often mean goals unachieved.

Moreover, Matthews was not personally ambitious, and nor was his father. Both of them actually believed in public service, both of them advised royal houses, Z K Matthews advised Tshekedi Khama among others, Joe Matthews advised Sir Seretse Khama and Prince Buthelezi; and both advised and worked on behalf of the Church. Joe Matthews spoke to academics at length, about his motives, he wrote a lot and was concerned that the leadership of the liberation movement were not writing enough to explain the movement’s actions. He wanted black South Africans to tell their own story and on the liberation movement he was the ‘Professor.’

Matthews did not want to go on and on in politics, and believed that the movement’s history should be conveyed to the young, so that there could be ease of generational change within the ANC. He considered the pen mightier than the sword.

Naledi Pandor can rest assured that the truth about her father is that he was a great teacher, and a man who did not follow others for the sake of easy popularity. His was not a fair-weather morality-serving contradictory force: he was concerned as his father had been with reconciling those forces in South Africa’s interests.

SOURCE: Politicsweb

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