Listening to the silent majority

[110]

I went to meet Mr Ephraim Tshabalala, President of the Sowetan ‘Sofasonke Party’. The name stands for ‘we shall live together and we shall die together’. Willie Ramoshaba opened his list of 100 Black Achievers with this prominent 80-year-old businessman of Swazi extraction. Author Don Mattera told me he recalled the days when Mr Tshabalala

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drove a bus for his father.^84. Today, the president, a founding member in 1944 of ‘Sofasonke’, runs dozens of companies, all listed on his writing paper. The son of a farm herdsman, he received no formal education beyond the third grade. His success in life was obvious. He received me in his plush offices on Loveday Street in downtown Johannesburg. He took me from the board room into his private office solely to show me pictures of his grandchildren, since his son, Vusi, married Princess Dlalisile, daughter of King Sobhuza II of Swaziland. Today, his business empire comprises several garages, a string of butcheries, bottle stores, cinemas, supermarkets and dry-cleaning depots, among other things. In 1968, he was listed as a millionaire.

In 1976, when all communication between the government and the people of Soweto had broken down following the student riots, Ephraim Tshabalala decided the time had arrived to revive and reorganise his political organisation. He wanted, he said, to give the people of Soweto a new platform to express themselves. He estimated the present membership of Sofasonke at 2,4 million, most of whom are Zulus, Swazis and Xhosas in the Soweto township and Reef region.

The Constitution of 15 pages is a solid and well-thought-out document. As early as the second paragraph it says that Sofasonke was established to represent bona fide residents of Soweto on the City Council or any other administrative authority for Soweto which may be established in the future. And, the second part of paragraph 2 reads, ‘The Sofasonke Party shall further establish branches of the Party in other urban areas to represent the interests of the residents in such areas. It shall, however, not operate in the homelands.’ While talking to Mr Tshabalala, I did not as yet understand the importance of this paragraph and the consequences it carried for other townships in the Vaal region. I knew of problems in Lekoa city and KwaThema townships, but I had not, as yet, related the trouble mainly to the branching out of Sofasonke into neighbouring towns. So far, I harboured only suspicions. I gently brought Mr Tshabalala round to the subject when I asked him whether his party was perhaps causing problems in the region and why. ‘We Swazis were the original traders and businessmen,’ replied the President of Sofasonke. ‘In Basutuland you'll find also one of the oldest

84. When I reminded him of this, Mr Tshabalala began recounting stories of the days when he was a bus driver with Mattera's father.

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groups. The Venda is a new group coming into our area. Bophuthatswana is another new group entering the urban areas. They used to be working in the mines all the time. They are being replaced there now by migrant labour from Mozambique and other regional states. So, we have many different peoples flocking into this region.’

Obviously he evaded a direct answer so I flatly came out with the news that I had heard disturbing sounds from townships around the Vaal, that Sofasonke, as originally a Sowetan political party, was stirring up trouble elsewhere, while having no business there. At that point, Mr Tshabalala pointed to the second paragraph, sub 2, of his party's constitution and added, ‘Some of the mayors and councillors in these townships don't want to have an outside party coming in. They only want their own supporters and organisations operating there. So, I told them, now, please, yours is an old-fashioned approach. It is the Party that must tell you what to do when you are serving in the town council. Sometimes, mayors and councillors come into the town council unopposed, as was the case with mayor Samuel Kolisang in Lekoa. He used to be with me, in Sofasonke, you know!’

I asked if they were still friends. ‘No, he is no friend anymore. When Kolisang started his VRRP in 1988, he stole his Constitution from me. You see what kind of a man he is to copy my Constitution and starts his own party?’ He continued to my surprise, ‘What can you do? Can you trust Samuel Kolisang? At present, I have with Sofasonke even the majority of councillors in the Lekoa City Council. Kolisang has only 9 councillors left.’

This amazing claim sent me back later to question the VRRP about it. In the first place, Sofasonke president Tshabalala apparently was being told by his associates that Kolisang had been left in the cold altogether by his own VRRP with a mere 9 councillors. The VRRP assured me they still had 18 councillors on the town council, which seemed more likely, since they began a year ago with 40 seats. But, I could hardly go in there and start counting the membership myself. Furthermore, the people that had drafted the VRRP Constitution were incensed with Tshabalala's accusation of their having blindly copied the Sofasonke Constitution. I compared the two, and, of course, there were similarities, as is the case with all constitutions, but I came away doubting Mr Tshabalala's claims. I wondered what homunculus, or ‘manikin’ operated within his brain proper. It's the ancient theory of a brain within a brain that accounts for

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vacuous or circular psychological processes taking place outside awareness leading us into inpenetrable swamps of fantasy and untruth.

I proceeded to tell Mr Tshabalala that after his proxies caused so much trouble in Lekoa and used coup methods, bodily attacking the mayor, stealing documents, and so forth. Samuel Kolisang called a mass-meeting in the Sharpeville stadium and 19 000 or 22 000 people came to hear their mayor. The people even wanted the names of the Sofasonke troublemakers, which he didn't supply in order not to endanger their lives. It was more than obvious that this information took Mr Tshabalala by complete surprise. His associates weren't informing him properly.

I asked the President of the Party, ‘is Sofasonke against overthrowing apartheid by violence’? ‘Yes, of course,’ he replied. ‘But then, you should be in the National Forum of Black Leaders to negotiate,’ I continued. ‘No,’ he said again most decisively. ‘The NFBL was not established by the people. That Forum is only meant for the people who are presently represented in it, it is being imposed from the top downward and not from the bottom upwards. It should come from the people themselves. The present National Forum is not representative for black people at all. Sofasonke will not join. Remember. Tom Boya was a mayor who was joining the system. He immediately lost his next election. Every one of them who joins this organisation will lose in the next election. These blacks only joined for themselves, not on behalf of the people. So, all those people who are now talking to the government in the NFBL will be out the next time the people vote.’ I said to myself that if his prediction were to come true, it would mean in practice that even fewer trained minds would be available to serve the interests of black people in the townships than there were at the moment.

I asked Mr Tshabalala if, with the sudden departure of Minister Chris Heunis, perhaps a new Nats leadership was prepared to broaden the base of the National Forum of Black leaders. Tshabalala: ‘It is in the end the people who will have to decide. They will have to vote. Take, for instance, John Mavuso. Who put John Mavuso into the NFBL? All those people who are now taking part in the National Forum were not properly voted in. They never even had political parties. They got in unopposed. Many of these so-called politicians went to their brothers and sisters and asked them, will you vote for me? You see, in Soweto, no-one can get these days into political office, without having been voted into power.’

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On the subject of membership of the NFBL I sympathized with the criticisms of UMSA, FIDA and as I discovered now, Sofasonke. It was a perfect example of old thinking versus new thinking. Black brains no longer accepted the heavy-handed methods of the past, so that those blacks who had co-operated with the government all along would automatically shift into leading positions once the time had arrived for all-round negotiations. As Tom Boya had warned when PW Botha had declared apartheid had to go, blacks in South Africa would have settled for half a loaf. Now, they wanted nothing short of full recognition of their basic civil and human rights. Eighty-year-old Ephraim Tshabalala joined hands in the matter of the NFBL with Boya's ‘young lions’.