Sometimes There Is a Void by Zakes Mda Page B

then developed further when he was the president of the ANC Youth League in 1948. He had initiated Lembede into the politics of the ANC when the latter first came to Johannesburg from Natal. My father talked about the Programme of Action which he drafted and which was adopted as the policy document of the ANC at their conference on December 17, 1949. The fundamental principles of the Programme of Action were inspired by the desire to achieve freedom from white domination and the attainment of political independence. The document did not focus only on the political rights of the oppressed African majority, but on their economic rights and their right to education.
    What impressed me most were the cultural rights. My father talked at length about the necessity of uniting the cultural with the political struggle. His unfulfilled dream was the establishment of a national academy of arts and sciences.
    When he addressed us on these issues we all had to sit still. If anyone fidgeted or scratched himself my father became quite irritated because that indicated that the culprit was not interested in the proceedings. He was the only one who talked at these meetings, which turned them into lectures rather than discussions. Ours was to listen and punctuate his sentences with ‘ewe, tata’ – yes, father – to prove that we were paying attention.
    According to my father, the ANC had gone wrong when it fell under the influence of the Communist Party of South Africa, and by extension of the Soviet Union. At that age I couldn’t understand why his cardboard boxes were full of books by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin – these were
never kept in open bookcases as they were banned material – while at the same time he was so much opposed to the Communist Party, which he called anti-revolutionary. Despite his anti – Communist Party stance he was apt to expound on dialectical materialism and to outline in most admiring terms the history of the Bolsheviks in Russia. Of course none of us at the table knew what dialectical materialism was all about. He never seemed to notice or even care if we were out of our depth as long as we continued to repeat ‘ewe, tata’ .
    When he was not poring over his clients’ files and law reports, he was reading Das Kapital and quoting from it, or from Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Dühring . Yet he believed, like the other youths who broke away from the ANC to form the PAC, and like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, that Africa should follow a policy of ‘positive neutrality’, allying herself to neither the Soviet camp nor the American camp. Black people, he said, should determine their own future.
    â€˜We can take the best from the West and from the East,’ he said. ‘And as Sobukwe said in his inaugural speech, we can do that while maintaining our distinctive personality and refuse to be stooges of either power bloc.’
    By the East he meant the Soviet bloc and mainland China from which he believed Africa could learn how to run a planned economy. So you see, even though he was anti-Communist Party he was a socialist nonetheless. From Western nations, Africa could learn the establishment and maintenance of viable democratic governance. He completely abhorred what he referred to as totalitarianism in China and the Soviet Union.
    My father believed that one day there would be a United States of Africa, which would be a socialist democracy – stretching from Cape to Cairo, Morocco to Madagascar.
    And that became our slogan. When Cousin Mlungisi and I wanted to provoke white motorists on the main road I would shout: ‘Cape to Cairo, Morocco to Madagascar’, and then run away. I doubt if they knew what it was all about. If they heard us at all from their speeding cars they most likely associated the Cape-to-Cairo bit with Cecil John Rhodes.

    â€˜Remember, my children, there is only one race on earth; the human race.’ That was my father’s