By: Carl Mangazitha Niehaus
I am a son of Boers, and I come out of the old Western Transvaal (now the North West Province). I grew up in a small dorpie (little town/village) with the name of Zeerust. I know what it means when there was a long drought, and the first rains come. Those big pregnant drops of water falling in the sand and the dust of the dry and thirsty earth. I am sure all of you know that smell of the first rains after winter, and after a drought.
Tonight, as I was sitting there at the table, this gathering was for me like that rain coming down after a long drought. Louis and Dezzie, thank you very much for the invitation for me to be here tonight, and for this weekend, to be with you. For all of you who are here tonight, thank you very much for the open arms, and for the warm reception which I received.
I also want to thank my lovely partner Noluthando (I lovingly call her Nolie), the woman in my life, the rock in my life. Nolie, I think everyone has seen you here, but can you just stand up for a moment please. Two years ago I was very ill, in fact my doctor said that I was going to pass on with COVID-19. This woman cared for me and supported me. When there was no-one else to take care of me, she was truly there for me. Nolie and her little boy Nkanyezi, our son, were taking care of me, and nursed me back to health.
As we say in Afrikaans, behind every successful man there is a strong woman standing, and I do not say that at all in a sexist manner.
I am a bit tongue-tied tonight, because I am aware that Louis is going through a very difficult time. I am aware of the attacks that are being launched against him. As I am standing here tonight I am aware that he is also being attacked because he is here at that table sitting next to me. In the social media there is a wave of attacks by angry, bile spitting Afrikaners.
However, Louis, I am talking to you as one Afrikaner to another Afrikaner. We are part of this country, we are part of the soil, we are part of the thorn trees, we are part of the Jacaranda trees in Pretoria. We are standing high on the Drakensberg mountains, and we look out far over the wide open plains of our country, and we see new horizons.
Louis, you are seeing new horizons, you are following the instructions that God has given you. You want to walk a road where you want to see this country of ours as a country where all the people must take hands and get together.
Yes, I know, you love your Afrikaner people, and I love my Afrikaner people. You love all in this country – not just the Afrikaners – and so do I. We want to see a good future, a true future, that will give hope to every person in this country. Where there will not be people who are trampled on, and that there are not people who are being undermined. That there will no longer be the exploitation of one human being by another!
I have unwaveringly taken my principled positions, and I stand strongly by those. I will NOT compromise. I stand by those positions first and foremost as a South African, but also as an Afrikaner.
I do not want to talk for very long, but Louis you remember I have told you a while ago about Oom Beyers Naudé (Dr. Beyers Naudé, one of the icons of the anti-apartheid struggle), that man who became my Dad, who was my Father, when my own Dad could no longer be a father to me. When my dad rejected me about the decisions that I have taken to fight against apartheid and racism in South Africa.
Oom Bey himself was thrown out, and rejected by his fellow Afrikaners. He was kicked out of the Dutch Reformed Church, out of the congregation of Aasvoël Kop, one of the most pre-eminent Dutch Reformed Church congregations. Many afternoons, in the back of his garden at his house in the suburb of Greenside, I sat talking to him, and every time he told me the same thing: “Carl, never forget and reject your roots, because a tree without roots gets blown over quickly by the wind and storms of life”. Those roots that Oom Bey was talking about, were his Afrikaner roots. Those roots were also our beloved language, Afrikaans.
I sat here tonight listening to the poems that you were reading out. I love Afrikaans, I have grown up in Afrikaans, I drank it in with the milk from my Mother’s breast. When I dream, I dream in Afrikaans. I know the poems of Ingrid Joker, and the hauntingly beautiful poignant essays of Antjie Krog. I have read all the books of Breyten Breytenbach. I love Ettienne Leroux. When the novel ‘Magersfontein O Magersfonein’ was censored and banned by the apartheid regime, I – together with a few fellow students – secretly made copies of the book at the library of the then Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit (RAU) [now the University of Johannesburg], and illegally distributed it. We loved the language of Afrikaans.
If there is one thing that makes me happy, it is to write. I wake up every morning at four, and then I sit in front of my iPad, and I write … I write in Afrikaans, and I write in English, because I love words. Because it is in words that we express our emotions, it is in words that we reflect on our deepest feelings. It is through words that we know our history. It is through words that we continue to live long after we have physically already perished. Ultimately words describe our legacy.
I thank all of you for what you do for the Afrikaans language. I thank you also for your love for your own people, and I reach out to you to also give your love for EVERYONE – black and white – in South Africa. That love must means that we MUST work for justice, that we MUST address poverty, whether is white or black poverty. That we consciously reject exploitation. That we understand what the big White Monopoly Capitalist (WMC) powers are doing in order to oppress our people, and to destroy them.
All of us want to see, and hope for, a beautiful future. Many us have certainly during the last months and years experienced how our own lives are shrinking and wilting. Many of us, because of the economic circumstances in our country, no longer have any money in our pockets. We battle hard, and we are scared about how we will continue to live and survive from day to day. How are we going to keep our children at school, and pay the school fees? … How one will keep food in the pantry? How one will pay for the exorbitantly expensive petrol?
The ONLY way for us to pull ourselves out of the deep hole that we find ourselves in now in South Africa is for us a people, as fellow South Africans – ALL of us black and white – ALL Africans to take hands and to work together.
Louis, and myself, – and with these words I am concluding – walked the same road to a small village in northern KwaZulu-Natal, with the name of Nkandla. Louis went to Nkandla because he woke up in the middle of the night, after he had seen a vision from God in a dream that he had to go and meet with President Jacob Zuma. He did not go with the intention to irritate people, He did not go there to play a political game. He went to reach out to a great fellow South African – President Jacob Zuma.
I personally know President Zuma very well. I have now known him for forty years. I truly know who he is. I know hat he is a son of the soil, the salt of the earth. I also know there are so many distortions and misrepresentations that have been deliberately created about Msholozi. However, I do not want to expand about that tonight, because it is well known, and can be seen by anyone with eyes.
I just want in closure to tell the following about my personal experience with President Zuma: In 1983 I was found guilty of so-called ‘High Treason’, because I stood up against apartheid, and joined the African National Congress and the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Because of the underground activities, and armed activities, that I carried out as a member of the ANC and of MK I was sentenced to 15 years of political imprisonment. When the negotiations started the then apartheid Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetzee, said that he was not prepared to release me because I was a traitor to my own people. He said that he was prepared to release the rest of the ANC political prisoners, but not me. He said I was a ‘volksverraaier’ (traitor to the nation), and that I must rot in jail.
About a week after Kobie Coetzee had said all of this, I was early in the morning called from my prison cell and taken to the visitor’s room in the prison. I was incarcerated in Pretoria Central Maximum Prison, which is now known as Kgosi Mampuru Prison. When I walked into the visitor’s room, Msholozi was waiting there for me. He had just returned a week before from exile. He told me that he had specially requested to see me, and he explained hat he was leading the ANC’s advance negotiating team. He emphasised that it was his intention to get me, like all other political prisoners, released from prison.
Msholozi stayed true to that undertaking. He did not give up, and worked day and night to get me set free. It took him six months after that first visit to get met released. Every second weekend after the first visit he came to that prison to visit me. Every time after he had seen me, he would call my parents to tell them how I was doing.
Remember, my Mom and Dad were staunch racist Afrikaner nationalists, they did not like Msholozi, they did not want to hear from him. Remember, my parents were very angry with me because I joined the ANC, they felt that I brought disgrace and shame into their home being a prisoner. However, Msholozi was not phased by any of this, every time after he had visited me he called my parents and promised them that he will get their son out of jail.
Six months later he succeeded, and I was released, because Nxamalala made my release one of the conditions for the continuation of the discussions and negotiations with apartheid National Party government.
I am talking about this, because it is for me in my life in the first instance always about loyalty. President Jacob Zuma stood with me in the darkest days of my life, I will stand with him. I will NEVER betray him!
These last few days I got to know someone called Louis Liebenberg. I have not known him personally before, yes, I knew the name, because who does who does not know his name in South Africa? Last Monday Louis walked into the courtroom at the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein where President Zuma’s appeal about his medical parole was being heard, and he sat down next to me on the hard wooden bench in the public gallery.
It was a stone hard, and very uncomfortable wooden bench, even this morning we still joked that our backsides are still sore and lame from sitting on that uncomfortable bench the entire day.
As Louis sat down he greeted, shook my hand and introduced himself, and said that he had been wanting to talk to me for a long time. While we sat there I saw there was a commotion on Twitter and other social media platforms. Photo’s and videos were trending of Louis together with a number of white South Africans (mainly Afrikaners) outside the court with posters that declared that President Jacob Zuma must be freed, and that Cyril Ramaphosa must fall. A video was trending about Louis talking in a straightforward manner. He said fearlessly what he feels and thinks. As we say in Afrikaans: ‘Hy praat uit die hart’ [He talks from the heart].
So, as we were sitting there next to each other on that hard wooden court bench, we started talking. What I want to say is that I have gotten to know someone during the last couple of days who understand what loyalty is. This gathering, this gala dinner tonight, all of you who are here and who stood up to thank Louis, who talked about him and what he did in your lives, and how he changed your lives and wrote a new part of life into your lives.
I think you understand what I mean when I say to you that Louis is a man of loyalty and solidarity. I am still going to get to know him much better, but I no longer need to doubt him, and to be hesitant and refrain from engagement. I understand the man, I can feel his heart-beat. I understand what he means for people.
Now I am really concluding: More than anything South Africa needs loyalty. We need a new South Africa. This afternoon we said to each other that one of our Minister friends said: “South Africa needs a drastic, radical, make over”. She is correct, that is really urgently necessary. We can’t continue to plodder along like this. What is going on now is destroying our country, and it is destroying our people.
I am going to say these last few concluding words in English, because I want my dear love Nolie to understand them too, unfortunately Nolie is not fluent in Afrikaans.
Loyalty is everything. In this country, if we are not going to cover each others’ backs as fellow South Africans, and we are not going to protect each other from the exploitation of the world – especially imperialism and it’s local variant of White Monopoly Capitalism – that will destroy us, exploit us, and suck us dry; we will fail and perish. That drastic make over that we need, must be built on principled unity and loyalty.
I am happy to be here with you, I am happy to call Louis and Dezzi my friends. I am happy to be a friend to all of you. I know there are many people in this country who do not like me, but I also know that there are many people in this country who love me.
I love you all! All of you are my people, you are my fellow South Africans, Together we can build a new future. Together we can give hope to each other.
NKOSI SIKELEL’ iAFRIKA!
*This is a translated version of a speech delivered in Afrikaans by Carl Mangazitha Niehaus at the Tenth Awards Ceremony Banquet for Afrikaans Writers at Sun City Resort on Saturday 20 August. Ambassador Carl Niehaus is an ANC veteran of 43 years of uninterrupted ANC membership. He is a former member of the ANC NEC, and former SA ambassador to The Netherlands. He is an NEC member and national spokesperson of MKMVA. Ambassador Niehaus was given the Zulu warrior name of ‘Mpangazitha’ by the Executive Council of the Injeje yabeNGUNI Council in recognition of his dedication in fighting against the enemies of the people of South Africa.
