Army in exile waiting to free SA has always been a fiction

Did Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) exist? At first blush the question may seem elaborately pretentious and a little facile. But it goes to the heart of some of the deepest unresolved matters about contemporary SA.

Between 1985 and 1990 hundreds of South Africans who had received military training in MK camps abroad were reinfiltrated into SA. Almost all were young adults. Most had been through various degrees of trauma. In the camps they had received the most rudimentary political education; they had wildly varying understandings of why they joined an army and what they were fighting for.

They were sent back into SA with minimal support. Typically, they were given a small amount of cash, a few grenades and an assault rifle, and told to fend for themselves. The country to which they returned was in a state of insurrection.

Insurrections are by their nature mercurial and opaque. It may seem from a distance that just two sides are involved: the people and an illegitimate state. But the closer you come, the more difficult it is to discern who is fighting whom.

Violence is available to a degree it is not in calmer times, and it comes to fill the slightest fractures: between neighbours, between districts, between families, between the old and the young. It is among the worst possible contexts in which to inject traumatised young people carrying grenades, automatic weapons and fear.

Many returning MK cadres were brave and disciplined and distinguished themselves in the harshest conditions. But many more were swept into the anarchy to which they arrived.

Take, for instance, a young man called Oupa Seheri, who was reinfiltrated into SA in early 1987. Carrying a machine-gun pistol in his jacket pocket, he stopped one evening at a

Soweto shebeen. Within a couple of hours he was drunk, and when a stranger brushed past him he took umbrage and threw a punch. The stranger ’ s name was Xola Mokhaula. He overpowered Seheri without much effort, disarmed him of his machine pistol, and took it home.

Hours later, Mokhaula’s mother’s house was raked with automatic gunfire. Seheri, backed by members of Winnie Mandela’s football club, stormed the house, killed two of its occupants, one of them Mokhaula, and took his machine pistol back. Seheri was arrested, tried and found guilty of murder.

There is such pathos in this story. Two young souls were extinguished that night. Another, troubled and violent, almost certainly in need of a social worker and some care, thought himself a soldier and ruined his life.

There is also broader pathos. The insurrections of the mid1980s were fuelled in part by a powerful idea: that an exiled army was waiting to come home to liberate the country. That is what gave the youths on the barricades the hope and inspiration to risk their lives. But in fact, the MK they imagined didn’t exist. The real MK was already at their side. It consisted of youths like them, only more dangerous because they were heavily armed, afraid and torn from their roots.

There is greater pathos still, inasmuch as a national narrative is currently abroad that looks back on those times with nostalgia. In the story people tell there was a time when things went bad. For most, it was when Zuma came to power. For others, it started earlier. But always, there was a time before, when decent people fought for worthy ideals.

In fact, there has always been a lot of folly in SA history, however far back one cares to look. Hiding from that folly is not healthy for it gives fuel to the illusion that the country recently descended into a quagmire.

Better to know that the farce and tragedy have always been with us, and that life has nonetheless gone on.