When King Charles II returned from exile in 1660, he carried with him some impressive grievance. Upon his restoration he ordered the remains of the people who’d killed his father Charles I to be dug up then posthumously beheaded or stabbed. Oliver Cromwell’s sack of bones got it particularly badly.
It’s difficult to read this history and not think about the British academic Marxists who influenced the ANC. Most have popped their clogs, but unlike those who’ve felt the sharpest end of their influence and die alone in pit latrines or shebeen gun fights 10,000km away, some of these people lie in quaint little country graveyards visited by elderly village volunteers with flowers.
I’m not suggesting we bring in Caterpillars and start shooting holes in the skulls of the departed but…maybe just slap them around a bit.
Ralph Miliband is buried in Highgate Cemetery, which is where Karl Marx is also buried. Miliband was an academic Marxist, and massive chinas with Joe Slovo. One of Miliband’s sons, David, came home one day and discovered Slovo in the kitchen of the family’s London home – and the young boy admitted to being “starstruck”. Then in 2009, after David had risen through the Labour Party to become Foreign Secretary, he appeared on BBC radio with one of Slovo’s daughters, Gillian.
The presenter asked David whether terrorism was justified, to which David gave a remarkable response – “uh, umm, uh, look, erm, haha, whew – okay – I don’t think it is justified, but I think it is certainly justified for the ANC.” Even the lily-livered British establishment couldn’t stomach it, and he was roundly condemned by all political parties.
Clownish
Ralph Miliband’s other son Ed is Britain’s climate change secretary, and easily the most clownish of Keir Starmer’s cabinet – which is impressive given the immediate competition. He stabbed his brother David in the back for party leadership in 2015, so David went on to command a £1m+ annual salary from a “charity” called the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Under the scorching of USAID, last week David announced that the “charity” would start the process of redundancy for 17,000 workers (no mention of salary reduction).
Slovo’s other daughter Shawn went to Cape Town in 2004 and lost her rag because apparently there weren’t enough black staff employed as waiters at the Mount Nelson Hotel. It’s not clear whether she then drove to Mosiuoa Lekota’s residence and threatened him with a knife, but Lekota complained hurriedly about this incident in Parliament before rushing off. Possibly because his family were being held at gunpoint by a maniac playwright disgusted with (what she interpreted to be) the pedestrian pace of social engineering.
Other names like John Rose, Tom Bell, Ken Keable, Katherine Salahi, and Mary Chamberlain will not be immediately familiar but they were no less influential than people like Michael Harmel, the Irish communist whom Nelson Mandela spoke warmly about it in his memoir and to whose wife he wrote from prison when Harmel died. Harmel attended Thabo Mbeki’s graduation from the University of Sussex, considered – even then – one of the UK’s most radical universities.
At the time when Ronnie Kasrils was recruiting privileged white activists from yet another socialist institution, this time the London School of Economics, a man called Eric Hobsbawm was holding thumbs for genocide somewhere. He was an uncle of the contemporary British academic Marxism, and when he didn’t get his way, he needed to show the BBC how he really felt. A telling exchange occurred in an interview with the journalist Michael Ignatieff 1994:
Michael Ignatieff: What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?
Hobsbawm: Yes.
Seriously dangerous people
There you have it. These were seriously dangerous people, who thought seriously dangerous things, and the range of their ideas was evidenced in 2005, when the Afrikaans cultural activist, Dan Roodt, published the meticulously researched The Scourge of the ANC – which explained the misery of the party in exile. Roodt concluded that wherever they were, but especially in the UK, ANC exiles were poor, bored, homesick and depressed – they were not thinking about leadership let alone legislation, rather about who was going to sponsor their next drink.
The speed at which the party was expected to assemble into legitimate political participation caught them unprepared, so here these seriously dangerous white British Marxists and academics and activists, acting in the influential capacities of friendship and sympathy, volunteered advice, counsel and solidarity.
But the ANC largely failed these ghosts because to be seriously dangerous, you can’t be triumphalist. Of course, these influencers wanted ruin, but ideally ruin accompanied by mass surveillance and censorship, tiers of justice, prohibitive taxation, and a loathing of ambition – not to mention an obsession with luxury beliefs like net zero. Half-arsed attempts at marshalling the acceptable narrative were made by the likes of Africa Check (founded by an Englishman) and more recently, former DA chancer Phumzile van Damme’s fiddling with the global “misinformation” and “disinformation” scam – but only affirmative action on the inventory of self-inflicted human catastrophe could be considered remotely successful.
Hatred
Most hatred of the ANC today is contained in a hatred of corruption, complacency, arrogance and managerial incompetence, and those still touched by the spirit of British Marxist influence are few: probably only Naledi Pandor, with johnny-come-lately Panyaza Lesufi making an effort.
Not enough loathing is allocated to the groups and individuals who gave direction to or endorsed the most destructive choices possible. British Marxist academic influence on South Africa deserves to be examined alongside colonialism: both are types of foul conquest, the difference being that only one built roads.
All three of Slovo’s daughters live in North London. Not Yeoville.
[Photo: by Mary Bettini Blank from Pixabay – Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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