Z. Pallo Jordan: A great anti-Stalinist embracing a Stalinist purge

By: Isaac Mogotsi

It is not a hyperbole to say that of all the organic thinkers produced by the African National Congress (ANC) during its 30 year political exile from South Africa, Z. Pallo Jordan came the closest to being a candidate to emulate the international standing, intellectual status, influential writings and revolutionary traditions of Franz Fanon or Amilcar Cabral or Milovan Djilas on revolutionary, progressive and democratic movements across the world.

In his Mail & Guardian article of 20 August 2014, under the title “Jordan’s strength lies in his history”, Ben Turok, like Pallo Jordan an ANC veteran himself, wrote glowingly at length thus about the Pallo Jordan:

“And talking of history, that is precisely his strength.

“He has not joined the Communist Party, preferring to remain somewhat independent, in so far as that is possible for a member of the ANC, and a senior member at that.

“But Pallo is more than merely independent. He is also different in that he does his own thinking, working things out, in his own way. And that makes him at times unpredictable”.

Very interestingly, Ben Turok then made this statement about Pallo Jordan:

“It is also known that Pallo is both very proud and highly sensitive to criticism”.

From these words of Ben Turok, we pretty much get an accurate measure of Z. Pallo Jordan the man, activist and political leader.

The social and family milieu within which Pallo Jordan grew up, and was influenced by, is provided by his famous mother Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan in the Preface to her great book A Life’s Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala (Berkeley University of California, 1992).

In the Preface Pallo Jordan’s mother states that:

“Like Trotsky, I did not leave with the proverbial one-and-six in my pocket. I come from a family of landed gentry (and) could have chosen the path of comfort and safety, for even in apartheid South Africa, there is still that path for those who collaborate. But I chose the path of struggle and uncertainty”

She further states that:

“From a very early age, I was made aware of the needs and problems of others and saw all these people treated with dignity and humanity. This had a tremendous impact on me as a child, even though there were never any lectures on it. And yet, I am still very class conscious and, like most people from my class, very arrogant. My arrogance, however, has always been tempered with concern, sympathy and caring for the less fortunate. From this class position, I knew quite early that I was as good as the best, black and white”.

From these words of Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan we can adduce a number of important things about the personality, that is the composite personal characteristics, of Z. Pallo Jordan, many of which are confirmed by Ben Turok.

What Ben Turok refers to as pride and sensitivity on the part of Pallo Jordan to criticism can be understood as the same thing which Phyllis Jordan described as “arrogance” on her part owing to her elevated class position in the oppressed black African society as part of the landed gentry, even under apartheid, and her awareness that her arrogance which stems from her class privilege must be attenuated by her caring, sympathy and concern for those less privileged than she was.

Phyllis Ntantala also informs us by implication that she was au fait with Leon Trotsky’s revolutionary history and writings, and that she valued some form of association of her life’s rudiment with that of Leon Trotsky’s life.

In an article on the occasion of Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan’s passing on, GroundUp carried an article titled Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan dies at 96, which is dated 19 July 2016.

In part the article reads:

“A revolutionary socialist who initially pinned her colours to the mast of the Non-European (later New) Unity Movement (NEUM), Phyllis Ntantala battled apartheid, capitalism and oppression of women”.

For his part Paul Trewhela wrote an article under the title Phyllis Ntantala: Our greatest feminist intellectual, which Politicsweb carried on 25 July 2016. The article pays a glowing tribute to Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan and describes her as “…the greatest South African feminist intellectual of our lifetime”.

Tellingly, Trewhela wrote this:

“As a member of the anti-Stalinist Non-European Unity Movement in the Cape, she challenged the curse of patriarchal slavishness with all her being, all her life”.

Both GroundUp and Paul Trewhela direct our minds to another aspect of the intellectual milieu which shaped Pallo Jordan’s mind early on in his life, namely the metaphorical presence of arguably history’s greatest anti-Stalinist in the person of Leon Trotsky, who was the ideological lodestar of the New Unity Movement to which Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan belonged for a period in her activist life.

It is therefore no wonder that Pallo Jordan’s finest hour is that at the height of the formidable Soviet power, and its pervasive influence across the world and on the ANC through the South African Communist Party (SACP), Pallo Jordan steadfastly remained firmly opposed to Stalinism and its excesses, and independently so.

It is hard today to fully grasp and appreciate the great courage it took a leading member of the high councils of the ANC, such as Pallo Jordan was, to stand up to the pervasive influence of the Soviet model of development within the exiled ANC pre-1989, that is before the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries started to implode.

It has to been noted that this was at the time when discerning students of power within the exiled ANC like Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and others tactically joined the SACP in exile in order to better position themselves for the power battles within the exiled ANC, which SACP membership they quickly renounced once the ANC and SACP were unbanned. In his book ANC: A View from Moscow, Vladimir Shubin informs us that already in 1962 Thabo Mbeki was a member of the SACP (Jacana Media, 2008, page 94).

Not so with Z. Pallo Jordan, to his eternal credit.

It is no surprise therefore that Pallo Jordan’s finest writing ever was his paper The Crisis of
Conscience in the SACP, written in 1992 and which was a brilliant but blistering critique of Joe Slovo’s seminal paper Has Socialism failed? of the same year.

This magisterial paper by Pallo Jordan represents the validation of Ben Turok’s correct assessment of Pallo Jordan that:

“…Pallo is more than merely independent. He is also different in that he does his own thinking, working things out, in his own way”.

This The Crisis of Conscience in the SACP paper by Jordan crystallised his impressive anti-Stalinism of many decades within the exiled ANC.

In brief, Pallo Jordan won the decades-long ideological argument against the pre-1989 SACP within the exiled ANC regarding what correct political and ideological posture to adopt towards Stalinism.

Pallo Jordan was vindicated by history.

This was very impressive by any political measure.

Pallo Jordan, in addition to a few others within the Marxist Workers’ Tendency (MWT), before the latter was expelled from the ANC, had the fortitude and foresight to break away from the suffocating straightjacket of Soviet ideological orthodoxy in exile at the time when the ANC and SACP relied most heavily on Soviet material and diplomatic support for the successful prosecution of their anti-apartheid struggle, thus often parroting uncritically the Soviet line on important international issues.

As correctly pointed out by Adam Habib in his paper “SACP’s Restructuring of the Communist Theory” (Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 1991), Pallo Jordan shone brightest in his paper critiquing Joe Slovo’s when he analysed the “bureaucratic degeneration” of the Soviet state under its leader Josef Stalin, building on the best traditions of Yugoslav Communist and anti-Stalinist theorist Milovan Djilas. (See Milovan Djilas’ The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, Frederick Praeger, New York, 1957).

When one studies and carefully analyses the excellent intellectual traditions of Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan (nee Phyllis Ntantala), Pallo Jordan’s mother and an undisputed intellectual powerhouse in her own right, especially in light of her amazing critique of “the arrogance of power” in her literary masterpiece A Life’s Mosaic: An Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala (Berkeley University of California, 1992), it is not difficult to appreciate why it was to Pallo Jordan to fall the intellectual mantle within the exiled ANC to show and expose Stalinism and Soviet power for the brutal and tragic farce they were.

But Pallo Jordan’s great service to the best of ANC’s intellectual traditions goes far beyond his denunciation of Stalinism, while he remained broadly a proud and committed intellectual Marxist, if not a lifelong Trotskyite.

Right up to the time Nelson Mandela fired him from his Cabinet in 1996 (and indeed even beyond), Pallo Jordan was a voice that would challenge some of the reigning orthodoxies and hegemonic policies within especially the the pre-power ANC, and later on within the post-apartheid ANC, which often clouded the imagination and clarity of thought of the exiled and post-apartheid ANC leadership, such as for decades failing to cultivate closer contacts with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in exile, because the ANC/SACP alliance slavishly pandered to the Soviet Union, to the great consternation of independent Marxist thinkers within the ANC like Pallo Jordan, who as Ben Turok pointed out, never joined the SACP.

Commenting on Pallo Jordan’s independent-minded quality, Ben Turok commented that “…this quality has sometimes made him unpopular with political leadership who prefer comrades who toe the line, or at least, broadly conform to the general position adopted at a particular time”.

Indeed so much so that in 1996 the Mail & Guardian speculated that the reason Nelson Mandela fired Pallo Jordan from his Cabinet in the same year was because of, amongst other differences, their clash over Mandela’s constitutional proposals to the then Constituent Assembly led by Cyril Ramaphosa at the time. (See Mail & Guardian, article, Staff Reporter, 04 April 1996).

In 1992 again Pallo Jordan penned a seminal internal pre-power ANC paper he titled “A Strategic Debate within the ANC: A Response to Joe Slovo” (1992), which critiqued Joe Slovo’s internal ANC paper titled “Strategic Perspective” of the same year, also indeed seminal. Jordan viewed the “Strategic Perspective” internal ANC paper of Joe Slovo as advocating for a Chinese Great Leap-type lurch within the newly unbanned ANC to what Pallo Jordan characterised as “a change of gear” – towards closer cooperation, and less confrontation, with the apartheid regime of last white apartheid and colonial president FW de Klerk.

At the time Pallo Jordan was expressing acute skepticism, if not outright cynicism bordering on deep disquiet, about the prospect of successful negotiations with an odious, dubious, cunny, untrustworthy and intransigent apartheid regime willing to cling to power by means fair or foul. Jordan believed that the negotiations with the apartheid regime were merely “an aspect of a strategy lower than the four pillars of the struggle”, and could not be elevated to be a strategy, or one of the pillars of the anti-apartheid struggle, as some of the ANC luminaries like Joe Slovo and Thabo Mbeki sought to do. In brief, Pallo Jordan believed that negotiations were merely a tactic of the struggle and not its strategy.

Jordan was deadset against the attempt embodied in the 1992 “Strategic Perspective” paper of Joe Slovo to elevate negotiations with the apartheid regime to a primary strategy of the unbanned ANC, and to so elevate it above “other prongs of the struggle”, suspecting that it was what the Strategic Paper sought to do by a sleight of hand and a “wordplay”.

He believed at the time that given South Africa’s Colonialism of a Special Type reality, as defined and illuminated by the ANC’s epochal 1969 Morogoro conference, “…the regime’s objective, however defined, is to retain the essentials of White power – i.e the accumulated and palpable privileges that the Whites, as a dominant racial group, enjoy in terms of ownership and control of decisive sectors of productive property, domination of the civil service, control over the decisive organs of the state. While quite prepared to make room for Blacks to enter the political domain, the regime is determined to so condition what power the majority acquire that it will frustrate any attempts to tamper with these essentials of White power”.

This was heady stuff from the busy pen of Pallo Jordan in 1992.

And these outstanding and unsurpassed theoretical positions of Pallo Jordan, given free reign in his “A Strategic Debate Within the ANC” paper, wonderfully cognate and are completely homologous with the positions spelt out by – believe it or not – Pallo Jordan’s biological and revolutionary mother Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan in her truly amazing paper under the title The 1994 South African Election.

This The 1994 South African Election paper Phyllis Ntantala, written literally on the even of the historic elections in South Africa on 27 April 1994, was a bold masterstroke. It is the stuff of oracles.

Here are some of the powerful and important assertions made by Pallo Jordan’s mother, two years after Pallo Jordan’s A Strategic Debate Within the ANC paper, which retain their clarity, resonance power and validity even today:

Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan wrote:

“If revolution is defined as the violent overthrow of one class by another, the African National Congress has never been a revolutionary organisation”.

And,

“As a result, for most of its history, the ANC ‘s political practices have leaned heavily on the traditions of European liberalism”.

And,

“In short, the ANC from its inception has been bourgeois in its outlook”.

And,

“The ANC never sought to overthrow the existing bourgeois order in South Africa. It sought to join it. It is in this sense that it cannot be called revolutionary”.

And,

“This is not to say there were never revolutionary elements in the ANC; their position was never dominant. Successive South African governments, obsessed with race and colour, never understood this”.

And,

“Only the white liberals did – liberals who are both the formulators of policy and the guardians of the principles of bourgeois democracy”

And,

“No wonder that the first whites to take the ANC seriously were liberals”.

And lastly,

“The political aims of the ANC and the liberals were the same: the establishment of bourgeois democracy in South Africa”.

Both Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan and her son Z. Pallo Jordan believed in the early to mid 1990s that the negotiations between the ANC and the Nationalist Party, the party of apartheid, would not result in the fundamental change in the class nature of the oppressive South African society founded on centuries-long British and Afrikaner (Dutch) colonialism and apartheid, respectively.

This is really the core message of Pallo Jordan’s Strategic Debate within the ANC paper and The 1994 South African Election paper by his highly erudite and definitely more principled mother, who never betrayed the less fortunate to the end of her long, unique and precious life.

What is clear is that the last 28 years have validated and vindicated Pallo Jordan’s profound analytical prescience in predicting that the apartheid regime and what he called “White power” would seek to “retain all the essentials of White power”, which post-facto, Lindiwe Sisulu bemoans as a fact and reality of present-day democratic South Africa in her seminal “Hi Mzansi, have we seen justice?” article of 7 January 2022.

But more crucially, the entire democratic praxis of the ANC since the advent of democracy in our country in 1994, what Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan calls “the ANC’s political practices”, have utterly and completely validated and, most astonishingly, vindicated all the theoretical positions set out by Pallo Jordan’s mother in her seminal The 1994 South African Election paper, one by one separately, and all of them collectively.

Post-apartheid and democratic South Africa has not experienced any fundamental change of ruling bourgeois class from the pre-1994 status quo ante founded on European colonisation of South Africa and on the Afrikaner apartheid regimes between 1948 to 1994.

If anything, a small minority of ANC leaders have joined the pre-1994 ruling white bourgeois class, and by so doing, overnight turned themselves into black multi-millionaires and billionaires, solely on account of their monopolised and exclusive proximity to the pre-1994 white European bourgeois establishment in South Africa.

Given what Pallo Jordan himself predicted in 1992 about the apartheid regime’s now known intransigent determination to retain the essentials of “White power”, namely control over decisive state organs like the judiciary, as well as over what Pallo Jordan at the time termed “the accumulated and palpable privileges, including ownership and control of decisive sectors of productive property” (an untransformed economy and untransformed land ownership patterns, in today’s political parlance), it is really quite astonishing, and disheartening at the same time, that it is the same Z. Pallo Jordan who would erupt with such volcanic fulminations in public in reaction to Lindiwe Sisulu’s recent”Hi Mzansi” piece, and even go as far as to call on President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa to fire Lindiwe Sisulu from his national Cabinet for her robust and no-holds-barred article.

On face value at least, Lindiwe Sisulu’s “High Mzansi” piece seems to be the one which is faithful to and cognates with the core sentiments expressed in Pallo Jordan’s internal ANC “Strategic Debate” paper of 1992 about the cynical tactical manoeuvring and strategic positioning of the apartheid regime during negotiations with the ANC and with the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) in the early 1990s, and also with Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan’s powerful theoretical postulations in her The 1994 South African Election, and not Pallo Jordan’s malicious, unwarranted and, truth be told, vile ideological and personalised assault on the character and integrity of Lindiwe Sisulu during his January 2022 eNCA interview on the “Hi Mzansi” piece.

This unbecoming, and quite frankly despicable, political and personal assault by Z. Pallo Jordan on Lindiwe Sisulu and her Hi Mzansi article is a clear betrayal of the outstanding and highly commendable theoretical positions which Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan courageously advanced in her The 1994 South African Election paper.

The son has betrayed his loving and beloved mother.

So complete is Pallo Jordan’s astonishing volte-face away from his publicly stated political beliefs of 1990 – 1992, embodied most prominently in his The Strategic Debate Within the ANC paper, that today Pallo Jordan can go to the extent of collaborating with Mac Maharaj, another ANC Struggle Stalwart, to produce a book, including on the early 1990s negotiations, under the heading, believe it or not, “Breakthrough: The Struggles and Secret Talks that Brought Apartheid South Africa to the Negotiating Table” (Penguin Random House South Africa, 2021). The title of the book is in reference to the events leading up to and inclusive of the negotiations at CODESA, which Pallo Jordan once looked askance at and poured open scorn upon. (See Sunday Times, RSA, Extract, ‘Breakthrough’ by Mac Maharaj and Z. Pallo Jordan,12 October 2021).

Even Pallo Jordan must know that those negotiations, which he and Mac Maharaj today dub as “a breakthrough”, have dismally failed to rid our democracy of the ability of “White power”…”to retain the essentials of White power”, to.use.ghe words of Pallo Jordan.

Thus South Africa is today a Neocolony of a Special Type, where whites own the economy, and the black poor majority (or natives, if you like), who won political rights, including the right to a universal vote, remain economically excluded and marginalised in the land of their forefathers and their foremothers.

This is what Thabo Mbeki would term A Historical Injustice, only this time under a democratic government led by the ANC.

This continuing historical injustice too more than vindicates Pallo Jordan’s prescient prediction of 1992 that the apartheid regime would be more than eager to allow black people into the political domain, which the FW de Klerk’s reform agenda has accomplished, while insisting “to retain ownership and control over the decisive sectors of productive property”, which is a sad reality under our constitutional democracy in the wake of apartheid.

Mr. Z. Pallo Jordan, how can this then be described as a “breakthrough” by your own political standard, measure and analytical lens of your 1992 Strategic Debate within the ANC paper?

In short, it is Pallo Jordan who has departed from his core beliefs and convictions of 1990 – 1992 about what negotiations with the apartheid regime would mean and result in, while what Pallo Jordan called “White power” succeeded to this day “… to retain the essentials of White power”.

The regime and white privilege have succeeded and are succeeding to do so!

The inverse is growing black poverty, unemployment and deprivations, as well as post-apartheid South Africa becoming the most unequal country in the whole world.

A few black faces are coining it, while the black poor majority continues to suffer as they did under colonialism and apartheid.

The more things change, the more they remain the same!

And this, denuded of everything else, is what the “Hi Mzansi” piece by Lindiwe Sisulu calls public attention to.

Ms. Lindiwe Sisulu, to answer your question:

No, the black poor majority in post-apartheid and democratic South Africa has not tasted justice…yet.

It is not yet Uhuru for them, to paraphrase the lyrics of Letta Mbulu’s haunting song.

And it seems that is really Lindiwe Sisulu’s “sin”, if it can be called that, in the eyes of Pallo Jordan and his ilk – to writ, to ventilate this historical injustice under our post-apartheid constitutional democracy in public as a leading ANC leader and veteran.

Only a political pundit with “a colonised mind”, or a black judge with such “a colonised mind”, (to borrow an expression used by black businesswoman Judith Dlamini in her recent interview with Clement Manyathela on 702 radio talkshow), who will deny such an obvious fact and reality of our current untransformed status quo post-apartheid, and deny that our whole education edifice, including the part geared to educating and producing our judges and other legal practitioners, is still completely based on Eurocentrism and intended to produced black intellectuals trapped in European modes of thinking, something Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan pointed to and stoically battled in her heroic struggles against Bantu Education in Kroonstad in the Orange Free State province of colonial and apartheid South Africa, where she taught poor black kids.

This lack of ideological and analytical consistency too clarifies why Pallo Jordan did not emerge as exiled ANC and democratic South Africa’s Franz Fanon or Amilcar Cabral or Milovan Djilas.

The singular personal political failure of Pallo Jordan since the end of apartheid has been his inability or unwillingness to deploy his formidable and organic intellectual and analytical arsenal to consistently critique public power under the successive governments of the ruling ANC since Nelson Mandela fired him from his Cabinet, other than during the presidency of Jacob Zuma, in the same passionate way he once, thanks God, critiqued Stalinism and its “bureaucratic degeneration” within the exiled ANC and within the unbanned and pre-power ANC, especially in his seminal paper “The Crisis of Conscience in the SACP” paper.

Pallo Jordan has instead chosen to be the gatekeeper, enforcer and praise singer of the ANC governments first under Thabo Mbeki, and now under Cyril Ramaphosa, arguably South Africa’s most pro-capital, pro-white and neoliberal administrations post-Nelson Mandela.

Closer to the point is that one of “the essentials of “White Power” which the apartheid regime has managed to preserve is precisely the largely untransformed judiciary, founded on colonial, anti-poor and anti-black Roman-Dutch law imported by our European colonisers on our society, which facilitated and legalised wholesale genocides and land grabs against our people during colonialism and apartheid, and now sacrifices the property rights protecting the ill-gotten gains of colonialism and apartheid. It is a judiciary which still teems with many apartheid-era white judicial officers who enforced apartheid.

The only plausible explanation Pallo Jordan can possibly offer for his failure or unwillingness to thus emerge as our Franz Fanon or Amilcar Cabral or Milovan Djilas is that he had to walk away from his core beliefs and convictions of 1990 – 1992 in the greater interest of subjecting himself under the ANC’s “democratic centralism” power praxis, that is, if one chooses to be a bit charitable.

But wait a minute!

Wouldn’t that too have bee a handy excuse for those in the Soviet Communist Party under Josef Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, who dreaded to raise their quivering and suppressed voices against Josef Stalin’s excesses and purges? (See Donald Rayfield’s classic Stalin and his Hangmen, Random House, 2005).

In his seminal paper The Crisis of Conscience in the SACP, Pallo Jordan, like Ruth First, stood head and shoulders above any revolutionary and democratic theorist in Africa in tearing down the veil the exiled ANC and SACP, especially leading SACP lights like Joe Slovo and Michael Harmel, had thrown for decades over the Stalinist purges, bureaucratic excesses, fake trials, wholesale murders and human rights abuses of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe , as well as over the heroic, if also futile, struggles Communists and Leninists like Trotsky, Bukharin and others waged against Josef Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, following the death of Lenin in 1924.

Joe Slovo’s Has Socialism Failed paper cannot ever be accepted as his genuine or implicit ideological mea culpa for misleading the entirety of the exiled SACP and ANC to pander for decades shamefully and disastrously to Stalinism.

A grave intellectual and deeper analytical reckoning in this regard still awaits him and other South African Stalinists, including black Stalinists within the current leadership of the SACP, even if posthumously so.

As I pointed out earlier, Pallo Jordan contributed immensely to our better collective understanding of Milovan Djilas’s bureaucratic ‘New Class”, which emerged in Soviet Eastern Europe through “bureaucratic degeneration”, what today the SACP calls “tenderpreneurship” and the so-called “State Capture”), some of which metastasised into the rapacious neo-capitalist Oligarch Class in post-communist Eastern Europe, especially in Boris Yeltsyn’s Russia of the 1990s.

Above all, Pallo Jordan would have imbibed from his heroic and indefatigable mother important cautionary lessons about “the arrogance of power” she so brilliantly articulated in her autobiography.

It is thus all the more puzzling that Z. Pallo Jordan, with such intimate scholarly knowledge of the excesses, brutalities and abuses of the Stalinist model of development in Eastern Europe, failed to emerge as Franz Fanon or Amilcar Cabral or.Milovan Djilas of new, democratic South Africa, but instead chose proximity to and the rewards of State power, albeit.once remove, under successive ANC administrations since 1994, in the process forgoing what the African American intellectual giant Michael Eric Dyson calls “the life of mind” in his New Republic article bitterly critiquing another African American intellectual giant Cornel West.

The more troubling aspect of Z. Pallo Jordan’s attack on Lindiwe Sisulu in his eNCA interview of January 2022 is the extent to which Jordan basically renounced his excellent and exemplary anti-Stalinist legacy of many decades by issuing a public call (fatwa) to president Cyril Ramaphosa to purge Lindiwe Sisulu from his national Cabinet a la Josef Stalin and the 1930s Great Purges.

No fair trial. No Magna Carta Libertum. No due process. No representation. No assumption of innocence before proven guilty. No ANC Integrity Commission.No witnesses called. No appeals. Nothing of the sorts.

Just a very livid and apoplectic Z. Pallo Jordan being the accuser, the prosecutor, the judge and the jail warden who shouts to president Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa:

Just fire her from your national Cabinet!

This is very sordid, politically speaking.

This is nothing short of the height of betrayal of one’s own principles, beliefs and convictions.

It is Stalinism at its very worse and most impure form.

The clear intention was to stampede Lindiwe Sisulu into a craven apology to president Ramaphosa for the High Mzansi piece.

It was to silence any debate in South Africa on the continuing Historical Injustice of our democratic and constitutional era.

In his reincarnation as a neo-Stalinist, Z. Pallo Jordan has assumed the role of being a gatekeeper, ruthless enforcer and drunken praise singer of a ruthless, neoliberal, pro-white power, rapacious, special-type -neocolonialism-dependent and pro-West hegemonic neoliberal faction within the ANC.

It is clear that having once served as a Cabinet Minister under Nelson Mandela, albeit briefly, Pallo Jordan tasted, and seems to still be irresistible attracted to, the allure, pomp, ceremony and trappings of State Power, to which he can issue fatwas in public to do as he (Pallo Jordan) pleases, such as getting Minister Lindiwe Sisulu fired from the national Cabinet, without due process and just because Pallo Jordan so demands.

It is utterly bizarre and unconscionable.

A question has to be asked therefore:

Was Z. Pallo Jordan amongst those in the ANC who advised former president Thabo Mbeki to fire Jacob Zuma from his national Cabinet in 2005, thus precipitating the biggest ANC factional battles still raging today and which have put the ANC nearest to its implosion and to losing power?

How is his call for Lindiwe Sisulu to be arbitrarily fired from the Cabinet any different from what Josef Stalin and his henchmen did under Soviet power in the 1920s – 1930s?

For her part, this is what Pallo Jordan’s highly admirable biological mother Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan wrote in her The 1994 South African Election about what Mac Maharaj and Pallo Jordan called a “breakthrough” in their eponymous book:

Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan wrote, and I must quote her at length here:

“The bourgeois character of the negotiations is illustrated by the parties that eventually joined them. The black labour movement, black civic organisations, and black peasant organisations were denied representation, while Mandela insisted that the Bantustan and other so-called ‘traditional African Leaders’ be accorded full representation. This, of course, skewed the whole basis of the talks to the Right, with no un-welcome ‘Left’ issues intruding on the agenda. The only topics of discussion were those of interest to the white and black bourgeoisie. It is instructive, too, that the supposed representatives of the black South African majority were not elected by that majority. They simply took it upon themselves to attend the negotiations and to ‘speak’ for the African people. Thus there was no canvassing of ideas and opinions from the masses. There were no ‘report back’ meetings at which issues under consideration at the negotiations could be aired and explored. The only news the majority received was the sound bites from a predominantly white media. The only party that could claim a mandate was the National Party, which had received it from its white constituency in the 1992 referendum. An exercise more contemptuous of black South Africans would be hard to imagine”.

And this is what Z. Pallo Jordan and Mac Maharaj call a “breakthrough”.

Yet the indomitable and legendary Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan was not finished.

She concluded her The 1994 South Africa Election paper with this powerful sentiment, and I again allow her to talk to us from her venerable eternal resting place in the United States of America (USA) at some length, for the sake of clarity and for her biological son Z.Pallo Jordan’s sake:

“In the final analysis, all we can say is that the struggle for total liberation has only begun. The majority of South Africans will get absolutely nothing from the so-called ‘new dispensation’…The answer to the question ‘What is in it for us’will soon be answered: The answer is Nothing! Only the bourgeoisie will gain! One does hope that the various elements that have been left out of the new dispensation will find one another, stand up fearlessly, articulating clearly the goals of the majority of South Africans. In that task, they cannot and must not allow themselves to be distracted by the blandishments of the black bourgeois order.”

Profound words of a profound mind of a an absolutely fearless, erudite black woman, – our black prophetess -, of enormous intellectual substance, who never succumbed to the arrogance and blandishments of bourgeois power, whether black or white.

My question is:

Has Z. Pallo Jordan, the biological son of the immortalised Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan, who Paul Trewhela very accurately described as “…the greatest South African feminist intellectual of our lifetime”, fallen pathetic victim to “the blandishments of the black bourgeois order” post April 1994, against which his Struggle Stalwart biological mother cautioned us a day before our historic, all-inclusive 27 April 1994 democratic elections, meaning almost thirty years ago, and which elections admittedly won us crucial political rights which were and are deliberately denuded and devoid of a substantial controlling stake in our national economy?