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ROBERT MWELI RESHA - INTELLECTUAL SKETCH |
| Before her riveting autobiography appeared in 1991, Maggie Resha was known predominantly as the wife of Robert Resha, one of the major political leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) during its exile period. One measure of the importance of Robert Resha in the national liberation struggle is that on the occasion of the sixteenth anniversary in 1985 of the 1969 Morogoro Conference (a historic gathering of the ANC in Tanzania to re-assess their liberation struggle, a re-assessment that was to assure the great political victory twenty-five years later in 1994), Oliver Tambo, President-General of the ANC during the exile period, placed him in a gallery of great heroes and heroines who enabled the ANC to retain its historical vision despite its profound travails in exile: “Many who participated to ensure that the Morogoro Conference was the success that it was are no longer with us. I refer to such outstanding leaders, stalwarts and activists of our movement as Moses Malume Kotane, Uncle J. B. Marks, Yusuf Mota Dadoo, Mick Harmel, Duma Nokwe, Robbie Resha, Kate Molale, Flag Mokgomane Boshielo, M. P. Naicker, Ngcapepe Ntunja and others. They left us a heritage of unwavering commitment to the people’s cause, a spirit of self-sacrifice for the victory of our struggle and a revolutionary morality and practice which did not allow for personal ambition, factional conspiracies or cowardice and timidity in the face of an enemy counter-offensive. As we observe a minute’s silence in their honour, let them serve as our example of the kind of cadre we must produce to carry their work forward to its successful conclusion” (“Morogoro Remembered”, in Oliver Tambo Speaks: Preparing For Power [1988]). Maggie Resha’s ver important autobiography, ‘Mangoana o tsoara thipa ka Bohaleng (My Life in the Struggle), in part shows the political activities of her husband in the 1950s, particularly in Sophiatown. But the real historic importance of the book lies elsewhere. In contrast to the autobiographies of Sophiatown Renaissance writers, for instance Ezekiel Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959), Todd Matshikiza’s Chocolates for My Wife (1961), Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me On History (1963), all of which failed to situate their literary and cultural project in the political context of the 1950s, Maggie Resha’s book provides this contextualization with tremendous force. In fact, this amazing book articulates the cultural politics or the revolutionary politics which incubated or necessitated the emergence of the Sophiatown Renaissance, a politics of cultural formation that had been absent for over three decades. In a fascinating coincidence, the book appeared in the same year as a forceful critique had been made about such an absence. In an Introduction written from Warsaw to the 1990 new edition of Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me On History, Lewis Nkosi observed: “Whatever else Drum writers were successful at, deep political analysis was not one of their strengths, for the simple reason that very few Drum writers were at the time had any clearly worked out social theory (I naturally include myself among them), and the lack of one makes their writings on politics seem wildly improvised and dangerously spontaneous” (“Introduction”, Blame Me On History, Penguin Books, 1990). In a chapter entitled “The Struggle for Sophiatown” Resha writes: “What was Sophiatown? Sophiatown was a sprawling township, with a population of about 130,000 inhabitants, a few miles from the centre of the city of Johannesburg. Most of them were a deprived community, who lived from hand to mouth. But they were a settled community, with established homes, a people who wanted to live a decent life. It was this community that the recently-elected Nationalist regime destroyed by forcibly removing the people. For that there were several reasons. The first, and foremost reason for the removals was that Sophiatown was one of the oldest townships in which Africans and other black people had the right to freehold ownership of land and property. This was unlike the more usual situation, where Africans, deprived of their rights to own land by the Natives Land Act of 1913, were tenants of the municipalities, in pockets on the outskirts of towns, segregated from so-called ‘white areas.’ . . . Soon after the Group Areas Act and the Resettlement Act were passed, the regime formed the ‘Resettlement Board’, whose task was to conduct the removal, from beginning to end. Members of the Board went from house to house, collecting the names of members of each family, while at the same time ordering the landlords to sell their properties to the government. The ANC, from the outset in 1953, mobilised the people, emphasising co-operation between the tenants and the landlords. The ANC argued that, if the tenants co-operated with the regime and left, the landlords would be left with empty houses, which they would not be able to keep. On the other hand, it argued, if the landlords sold to the government, tenants would have nowhere to go” (My Life in the Struggle, pp.52-3). While Resha’s autobiography is brightened by its optimism, determination and the will to change history in the present, a different contrast could not be imagined than Modisane’s brilliant autobiography which is darkly permeated with defeatism, pessimism and complete loss of hope. Perhaps this comparison is ahistorical in that while Bloke Modisane wrote his book in early 1960s when the African people felt that they had been resoundingly defeated, Maggie Resha’s autobiography was written in the late 1980s when the African felt they were re-making African history again in the process of defeating apartheid. But the deeper contrast is that in the 1950s whilst Maggie Smith was permanently engaged with the revolutionary politics of transformation, the Drum writers contented themselves with the cultural politics of form and of the writerly. This contrast is one of the unending themes of South African political and cultural history of the twentieth-century. Maggie Resha belongs to a noble intellectual tradition whose complex contours are still not topographically and spatially clear to us. | |