Remembering Chris Hani: Biography, agency, and political life today

Abstract

This article is based on research carried out for the author’s PhD dissertation, which focused on the contested ways in which Martin Thembisile ‘Chris’ Hani is remembered and memorialised (in biographies, museums, exhibitions, film, and the public domain more generally), and what these invocations tell us about processes of historical production, the transitional period from apartheid to democracy, and what it means to live on in the wake of apartheid and colonialism. This article takes up some of these debates in an abridged form, focusing on processes of biographical production, the individual and experience, and what can be seen as a tension between romantic and tragic modes of narrative emplotment. Throughout Longford attempts to problematise individualist ideas about freedom, modernity, and agency, and offers alternative routes through which to understand historical change, political struggle, and subjectivity, as well as biographical and historical production as a conflicted and contested terrain.

Keywords:

• Chris Hani
• biography
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Rousseau, “Identification, Politics, Disciplines.” 177. Many of the arguments and themes found in this article are discussed in more detail in the author’s PhD dissertation. See: Longford, “The Un/timely Death(s) of Chris Hani.”

2 Longford, “The Un/timely Death(s) of Chris Hani.”

3 Lundborg, The Politics of the Event. 1.

4 Rassool, “Rethinking Documentary History and South African Political Biography.” 28.

5 Žižek, Event. 44.

6 Lalu, Undoing Apartheid.

7 Longford, “Governing the ungovernable.” See for example the speech by Blade Nzimande at the 2018 Hani Memorial, at which I was present. Unlike previous memorials which were dominated by Zuma and his supporters, the 2018 memorial offered the SACP (and the ANC) an opportunity to address failings within the movement and to distance itself from the previous administration. Nzimande, who had presided over the Rhodes and Fees Must Fall Movements as Minister of Education in Zuma’s administration, benefited from the absence of Zuma’s replacement, President Ramaphosa, who was scheduled to address the nation at Winnie Mandela’s funeral (14 April), and delivered the keynote address, using the platform to argue for the renewal of the movement. He did so by invoking Marxism’s envisaged new man of history and the revolutionary spirit of Chris Hani, alongside that of Winnie Mandela, to call upon SACP members to become cadres of a new type and to intensify the struggle against state capture and corruption.

8 Rassool, “Rethinking Documentary History and South African Political Biography.”

9 Rousseau, “Popular History in the 1980s.”

10 Johnson, “Anti-Apartheid People’s Histories and Post-Apartheid Nationalist Biographies.”

11 See for example: April “Theorising Women.”; Landau, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries; Mangcu, Biko: A Life.

12 Scott. “The Evidence of Experience.” 793.

13 Scott, Conscripts of Modernity. 155.

14 Cronin in The Life and Times of Chris Hani.

15 Hani, “The Tasks of the Party in a Democratic South Africa, 227.”

16 Scott. Conscripts of Modernity. 189.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samuel Longford

Samuel Longford is a postdoctoral research fellow and digital editor and curator at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), University of the Western Cape (UWC). His research coalesces around questions of political violence in postapartheid South Africa, liberation struggle historiography, theories of historical change and human action, as well as biography, public history, and museum and heritage studies. His PhD dissertation, “The Untimely Deaths of Chris Hani: Discipline, Spectrality, and the Haunting Possibility of Return,” focused on the contested ways in which former General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), Chris Hani, is remembered and memorialized today, and what these invocations mean for thinking through the transitional period from apartheid to democracy, and the ANC’s postapartheid project. As well as his work at the CHR, Sam lectures at the Department of Historical Studies, UWC, and is currently working toward completing a book manuscript based on his PhD research.