Blurb

Chris Hani’s assassination in 1993 gave rise to one of South Africa’s greatest political questions: If he had survived, what impact would he have had on the ANC government? And could this charismatic man have risen to become president of the country?

In the 30th anniversay year of his murder by right-wing fanatics, this updated version of the seminal biography of Hani re-evaluates his legacy and traces his life from childhood in rural Transkei to the crisis in the ANC camps in the 1980s and the perilous last 36 months he spent back home rallying for South Africa’s freedom.

Drawing on interviews with those who knew him, this vividly written book provides a detailed account of the life of a hero of South Africa’s liberation, who was an intellectual and a fighter.

About the authors

Janet Smith is a former newspaper editor and the author of Patrice Motsepe: An Appetite for Disruption. She is also a co-author of The Coming Revolution: Julius Malema and the Fight for Economic Freedom and The Black Consciousness Reader, among other titles.

Award-winning journalist Beauregard Tromp is the Africa editor of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. He was deputy editor at the Mail & Guardian and Africa correspondent for The Star.

Extract

The assassination in 1993

When he killed Hani, Walus was 38 years old. An immigrant from Poland, he had made a life for himself in South Africa over 10 years – and he was not doing badly. He still had business activity in the homeland of Qwa Qwa, where the apartheid government had once allowed significant concessions to white immigrants, especially those who fled Eastern Europe.

The Sunday Times reported that, at one time, when the Walus family were living in Qwa Qwa together running a glass-cutting business, their turnover was more than R1.5 million a year – a huge sum for the time. They lived in an affluent area there, and Walus’s father Tadeusz owned a luxury home in upper-class Waterkloof, Pretoria, and had another factory in Harrismith.

It was in 1989 that things fell apart. Walus’s father blamed this on the politics of Pretoria, which had decided to unravel the homeland system, and was cutting back on loans to foreigners. The game was over.

The father went home to a Poland in economic free-fall, but his sons remained in South Africa.

LON80:SAFRICA-RIGHTISTS:CAPE TOWN,7APR99 - FILE PHOTOS AUG97 - South Africa\'s Truth Commission denied amnesty to the killers, Clive Derby-Lewis (L) and Janusz Walus, of South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani who until his death was seen as a successor to Nelson Mandela. The commission said the two white right-wing extremists were acting alone and without a political mandate. Derby-Lewis and Walus are shown in this combo photo attending the Truth Commission sitting in Pretoria in August 1997. ns/Photos by Juda Ngwenya REUTERS

Janusz worked for a transport company, and had a fixed address – a flat in Pretoria. He had few friends, but he had a lover, Maria Ras, in the capital city, and a wife called Wanda and a daughter named Ewa living in the city of Radom in Poland. When Walus killed Hani, Ewa was the same age as Hani’s middle daughter, Nomakhwezi.

Walus’s interests were primarily in right-wing activity and Shokotan karate. He did not appear particularly intelligent, and was disturbingly deadpan about his childhood pain: the wrench of being forced to live in a particular way because of a ruling ideology. Few believed him. Few sympathised.

The appeal court reiterated:

According to the defence’s evidence, the appellant found the yoke of communist rule in Poland intolerable. He and his family suffered much deprivation and frustration. It was in order to escape from the rigours of life under a communist regime that the first appellant settled in South Africa which he saw at the time as a political haven. He became a South African citizen. His political views were strongly rightist. The political changes in South Africa heralded in February 1990, and thereafter put into effect, appalled the first appellant and outraged his staunch anti-communist sentiments. He was friendly with his two co-accused. In the course of her evidence, Mrs Derby-Lewis told the court that the first appellant did not have many friends; and that she and her husband ‘were probably his closest friends’. They called him by the familiar name of ‘Kuba’.

By the end of the doomed process – a trial, an appeal and a plea for amnesty at the TRC – the Derby- Lewises had denigrated their former friend.

His loneliness, a corollary to the openness to infamy, was exposed, while Clive Derby-Lewis’s wide popular network of support was elevated. As it happens, neither image was quite correct. But certainly, Derby-Lewis had gained some influence within the far right. Ex-NP member of the Transvaal Provincial Council and member of the General Council of the CP since 1982, he became a CP MP in 1987, two years later being nominated to the President’s Council.

When he was arrested for murder, he was still a member of the council, which was collapsed soon after Hani’s killing. Derby-Lewis was nearly 20 years older than the man with whom he elected to collaborate. On the surface of it, the 57-year-old with the comical moustache lived a peculiar life attempting to adjust his insufferable Englishness to a penchant for Afrikaner supremacy, such as that practised by the white right-wingers within the CP and on the fringes of white society. Derby-Lewis shared a home in Acacia Park, Krugersdorp, with his wife – an Australian former nun and ex-gay club owner – who was the editor of the English section of the racist weekly newspaper Die Patriot and the press officer for the CP.

Lawyer George Bizos, who confronted Gaye Derby-Lewis at the TRC hearings where he represented the Hani family, told us, ‘she was smart, she was the brains, and I detested her’. This was no straightforward murder case. This was war – and it was profoundly personal. Hani’s beloved 15-year-old daughter Nomakhwezi had been present when the gunshots rang out. ‘Hey daddy, he’s greeting you,’ the Sunday Star of 11 April reported her as having said when she saw Walus approaching.

These words cut to the bone, although later there was hesitation about what had really happened.

Nonetheless, the country wept.

Later on, after her father’s killers were sentenced to death, Nomakhwezi said in an interview that she felt she was robbed. ‘I miss him very much. Some days I feel he has just gone overseas and one day he will come back. And some days you tend to believe he is gone, but I have not accepted that he is dead.’

Her younger sister, Lindiwe, said in the same interview in the Sunday Star that she couldn’t understand why Walus had to come all the way to South Africa to kill one black communist. ‘I am sure it makes no difference at all to him, but to me, it’s a world of difference.’ ‘I am a Catholic,’ said Nomakhwezi, ‘and I believe there is a God, and He is supposed to be powerful enough to protect good people. It puzzles me that God did not stop these killers. My dad did nothing wrong to anyone, but God took him away. His crime was that he cared for people.’

Hani is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers and retails at R310.

The Saturday Star