South Africa: 30 years after his assassination, the legend of Chris Hani, "giant of integrity and intelligence"

Chris Hani was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa (SACP) in 1991. © AFP/Walter Dhladhla

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

8 min

Thirty years ago, Chris Hani, charismatic leader of the ANC and leader of the South African Communist Party, was shot by a white far-right assassin. Today, South Africa remembers this great figure with nostalgia at a time when the country is struggling with glaring inequality and corruption scandals.

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The tragedy took place on the morning of April 10, 1993. Getting out of his car that he had just parked in front of his home in Boksburg, one of the white suburbs of Johannesburg, the black leader was arrested, then shot at point-blank range in front of his fifteen-year-old daughter. His dirty work completed, the assassin, a tall white man with blond hair, flees at the wheel of his red Ford Laser. The police were alerted by a neighbour who had witnessed the scene from afar. She had had the presence of mind to write down the license plate of the killer's car. Intercepted quickly at a police checkpoint, the assassin initially denied having been at the scene, before confessing to his crime.

Janusz Walus had fled his country, communist Poland, to settle in South Africa. Newly naturalized, he claims to have killed Chris Hani out of hatred against communism. The searches carried out at his home proved that the man was part of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) and the far-right Conservative Party, both nostalgic formations of apartheid, opposed to the ongoing process of negotiations for power-sharing between the white and black minorities. The police also found at the murderer's home a "red list" containing the names and addresses of nine South African personalities to be shot. Chris Hani's name was number three on the list...

Aware that this violent murder was likely to revive the anger of the black population and jeopardize the process of negotiations for a peaceful settlement of South African problems, black and white leaders multiplied calls for calm. Speaking on the evening of 10 April, Nelson Mandela called on his troops to refrain from reprisals. He reminds them that if Hani was killed by a white man, it was the phone call made by an Afrikaner neighbor that led to the arrest of the killer. The call was heard, although it did not prevent the exacerbation of racial tensions and the outbreak of violent riots here and there. There was no big night. Probably because the ringleaders knew that their late hero had himself, a few months before his death, reoriented his strategy by emphasizing the peaceful and negotiated transfer of power.

An influential and popular leader

An outstanding and charismatic orator, Chris Hani was a particularly influential leader among the youth of the black townships and ghettos, which formed the basis of the ANC. In 1991 he was elected to the national executive of this historic party with a record 95% of the vote. As proof of his popularity, more than 100,000 people came to pay tribute to him at his funeral at the Soweto football stadium on April 17, 1993. "His popularity transcended generational fault lines and many saw him as Nelson Mandela's likely heir apparent," recalls Max du Preez (1), a veteran South African journalist who closely followed the slain leader's fortunes and woes.

Like Mandela, Hani had devoted most of his life to the cause of the ANC. Born in 1942 to a poor family in the southeastern Xhosa region, he joined its Youth League at the age of 15, while simultaneously pursuing university studies, specializing in Latin and classical English literature. Under the influence of Govan Mbeki, the father of his school friend, Thabo Mbeki, he also joined the Communist Party at a very young age, which had been banned since the 1950s.

At the age of 21, Hani had to leave his country clandestinely in order to participate in the first actions of the armed wing of the ANC (Umkhonto We Sizwe, "the Spear of the Nation"), from the territory of Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia. A revolutionary at heart, the young man would prove during his long years of exile an outstanding military strategist, working to coordinate and intensify guerrilla operations designed to destabilize the South African regime. These actions were carried out from Lusaka, Zambia, which was home to the headquarters of Umkhonto We Sizwe, of which Hani became the real patron in 1987.

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Certainly, Chris Hani's reputation owes much to his brilliant military career at the head of the Umkhonto We Sizwe, which under his aegis had gone from an army of ragged guerrillas to a real military organization, continues Max du Preez. But it was above all his pro-ordinary soldier stance and his exposure of corruption and abuse in the ANC's military training camps that contributed to his legend.

Pragmatism and radicalism

The legend of Chris Hani is made of pragmatism and radicalism, to which the man will hardly deviate when he returned from exile in 1990, after the end of the banishment of anti-apartheid parties. Thus, when he was elected the following year as head of the South African Communist Party, he tried to reform the organization from within by pushing his orthodox and neo-Stalinist wing to adopt in his doxa the notion of "democratic socialism".

Within the ANC, he embodies the hard wing of the party, but gives his full support to the continuation of the process of peaceful negotiations with the Afrikaner government. This did not prevent him from remaining faithful to his convictions, making the frustrations of the youth and the poor heard in the party's political meetings. In the negotiations with the apartheid regime, he called for a radical transformation of society, by redistributing land and resources, and opposed the too timid positions for his taste of the moderate branch of the ANC led by Thabo Mbeki, future successor to Nelson Mandela at the head of the country and close to the white business community.

After Hani's assassination, the latter's rivalries with the dubbed leaders of his generation will not fail to fuel various conspiracy theories involving both the secret services and the mysteries of the ANC. According to journalist Max du Preez, who attended the trials of the alleged killer of the black leader and his far-right white Afrikaner accomplices, "there was not an ounce of evidence of any involvement of the ANC leadership or white bosses in the murder of Chris Hani. This tragedy is part of the ethnic and communal violence in which the country was plunged during the period of democratic transition. In the Hani case, all the signals were pointed at the extreme right, which simply wanted to make a coup by assassinating the most prominent black communist in the country."

Paradoxically, it was a "successful" coup, not in the sense that the Polish killer and his neo-Nazi sponsors understood it, who, by perpetrating their crime, hoped to derail the negotiations and sow the seeds of civil war. The Johannesburg War did not happen. On the contrary, the assassination was an opportunity for a general awareness, with the consequence of reviving and accelerating talks between black and white leaders for the invention of a new South Africa. Just twelve months later, Pretoria held its first democratic elections, based on the principle of "one man, one vote". We know the rest.

For Max du Preez, Chris Hani would have been an excellent president of his renewed country. "Steve Biko and Chris Hani are two men I often think about and I think that if these two giants of integrity and intelligence were still with us," sighs the journalist, "the history of post-apartheid South Africa would probably be very different from what it has become."

(1) A well-known South African journalist, Max du Preez is the founder of Vrye Weekblad, South Africa's first anti-apartheid Afrikaans-language newspaper. A political analyst, he is also the author of several volumes of essays, including A Rumour of Spring (2013), devoted to the turbulent post-apartheid years.

► READ ALSO: South Africa: 30 years after the assassination of Chris Hani, the Communist Party calls for an investigation

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