Chris Hani: Elected as General-Secretary of the SACP

On 8 December 1991, former Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Army Chief of Staff, Chris Hani, was elected as General-Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) at its first legal congress in four decades after its unbanning in February 1990. He took over from Joe Slovo, who resigned as a result of ill health.

Martin Thembisile “Chris” Hani was born on 28 June 1942 in the rural village of Sabalele, in the Cofimvaba region of the former Transkei, where he grew up a devout Christian. Hani was introduced to the politics of inequality early in life, when his father had to leave their rural home in search of work in the urban areas. This had a profound influence on the young Chris, who became aware of his mother’s struggle to run the household.

Hani was enrolled at a Catholic school where he soon developed a love for Latin. At this stage of his life, Hani’s desire was to enter the priesthood, but his father disapproved and moved him to another school, Matanzima Secondary School at Cala, in the former Transkei.

In 1954, a number of Hani’s school teachers who were active in the Unity Movement lost their jobs after they protested against the introduction of Bantu Education. This played a further role in developing Hani’s political ideas. Hani later moved again to the Lovedale Institute in the Eastern Cape, where he matriculated in 1958.

Hani was exposed to Marxist ideology while a student at University of Fort Hare from 1959-1961, where he also explored his childhood passion for the classics and for literature. Hani graduated in 1962 from Rhodes University in Grahamstown, with a BA degree in Latin and English. He then moved to Cape Town and worked as an article clerk with a legal firm from 1962–1963, but did not complete his articles.

Hani’s uncle had been active in the Communist Party of SA (CPSA), an organisation founded in 1921, but which had dissolved itself in response to the Suppression of Communism Act (1950). Ex-Communist Party members had to operate in secret, and re-emerged as the underground SACP in 1953.

Hani’s frustration with the Apartheid system and the influence of leaders such as Govan Mbeki, Looksmart Ngudle, Bram Fischer, JB Marks, Moses Kotane and Ray Simons, led him to join the underground SACP in 1961 and MK in 1962.

He was subsequently charged under the Suppression of Communism Act and held in jail. He was granted bail of R500.00, and during this period entered Botswana to attend the 1962 ANC Conference in Lobatse. On his return to South Africa, he was arrested at the border. He was tried and given an 18-month jail sentence. In 1963, while out on bail pending an appeal, Hani went underground on the advice of the ANC leadership.

In the same year, Hani left South Africa for military training in the Soviet Union, and returned in 1965 to Kongwa, near Dodoma, Tanzania, as ANC-MK Camp Commissar. Hani took an active role in the Rhodesian bush war, acting as a Political Commissar in the joint MK-ZIPRA (Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army) Campaign, which operated out of Zambia in 1967.

Hani was present for three battles during the “Wankie Campaign” (fought in the Wankie Game Reserve against Rhodesian forces) as part of the Luthuli Detachment. He was later on elected as assistant General Secretary of the SACP IN 1972, and moved to Maseru, Lesotho, in 1974, where he worked hard to build the underground structures of the ANC and MK.

In 1975 Hani was appointed Army Commissar and was co-opted to the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC), as well as Chief of Staff of MK in April 1987. Because of his high-risk status, Hani’s appointment as Army Commissar was not made known until a year later, when he was well-entrenched in Lesotho.

After the unbanning of ANC and SACP on 2 February 1990 Hani returned to South Africa and became a charismatic and popular leader in the townships and rural villages. When Slovo announced that he had cancer in 1991, Hani took over as General-Secretary of the Communist Party. In 1992 Hani stepped down as Chief of Staff of MK to devote more time to the organisation of the SACP.

On 10 April 1993, as he returned home from buying a newspaper at a cafe in the suburb of Dawn Park, Boksburg, Hani was assassinated by Januzs Walus, an anti-Communist Polish refugee who had close links to the White right-wing movement. Also implicated in the assassination was Conservative Party MP Clive Derby-Lewis, and the conspiracy theory went beyond the right-wing, linking the assassination to certain “rogue” elements within the ANC.

Speaking to Luli Callinicos on how the ANC managed to absorb young members of the June 16 Soweto Uprisings who had been groomed in the theories of the Black Consciousness Movement, which was more closely aligned to the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), Chris Hani maintained:

“We had a coherent and concrete programme of struggle. We were not sporadic. We followed a strategic path and that is why we were able to influence trade unions and youth organisations.”

Castro Khwela
Good evening fellow Compatriots!