African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 5c
Comrade Mzala
“Cooking the Rice Inside the Pot” (download linked below) by
Comrade Mzala (Jabulani Nxumalo), written in 1985, the year of the ANC’s Kabwe
(Zambia) conference, is the final item in Part 5 of the African Revolutionary
Writers series.
Sixteen years after the Morogoro conference, and nine years
after the 1976 events in which Mzala himself took part, victory was clearly
certain, yet the path still had to be understood and pressed forward with
determination and vigour.
What Mzala shows, and this is even more clear when taken
together with the writings of Moses Kotane, Govan Mbeki and Oliver Tambo that
we have used and which are also linked below, is that the armed struggle
initiated on 16 December 1961 was crucial.
Any criticism of the armed struggle, whether it concentrates
on MK or on any particular operations misses the point that is made crystal
clear by Mzala. The rice was always going to be cooked inside the pot, i.e.
inside the country. The armed struggle was the way back to the “pot”. Both by
example as well as by direct contact, the adoption of armed struggle by the ANC
(which was also a turning away from “passive resistance”) was essential. If
there had been contradiction between the liberation movement and the popular
masses on this point, it could have been disastrous.
The point is made very strongly when Mzala quotes Che
Guevara thus: “…guerrilla warfare is war
by the entire people against the reigning oppression. The guerrilla movement is
their armed vanguard; the guerrilla army comprises all the people of a region
or country.”
Mzala even finds support for his argument from a “racist
general”, writing in the Johannesburg “Star” in 1973, saying: “The objective for both sides in a
revolutionary war is the population itself . . . military tactics and hardware
are all well and good, but they are really quite useless if the government has
lost the confidence of the people among whom it is fighting.”
Mzala, writing in anticipation of victory, is careful to
note that the popular masses cannot be taken for granted, illustrating this
caution by reference to the Spanish experience.
But for us, now looking at the armed struggle in retrospect,
this text is a powerful reminder of its crucial necessity and the central part
that it has played in South Africa’s liberation, to date.
Comrade Mzala was the author of the book “Gatsha Buthelezi -
Chief with a Double Agenda”, published by Zed Books in 1988. An account of the
attempted suppression of that book in South Africa from 1991 can be downloaded here (556 KB PDF).
There is a short biography of Jabulani Nxumalo on the SACP
web site here, and an obituary written
shortly after his death by Brian Bunting, here.
The Communist University’s “Mzala” archive is here.
Please download and read the entire text via
this link:
Further reading:
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