Thembile Ndabeni
Cape Town - It is unfortunate that we have a rich history that is not known because it is unrecorded, whether on purpose or not.
We need to dig deep for the purposes of preservation and learning.
How many people know that there were coloured compatriots who continued the battle in a certain period in the Struggle for freedom in South Africa?
It is amazing how people of colour became educated, talented, and outstanding political beings out of a squeezed or repressive space.
It is also impressive how smart they were in all respects.
One of those people was Alfred “Touch” Hutchinson, born of coloured and Swazi parents in the then Eastern Transvaal. He obtained a BA degree in English and a teacher’s diploma from the pot that cooked the leaders of Southern Africa, the University of Fort Hare.
He followed in the footsteps of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, ZK Matthews, Robert Sobukwe, and Seretse Kama.
These individuals went to Fort Hare with no name at all, but came back with names.
Hutchinson is lucky that he achieved what he went there to obtain, unlike the late Stanley Mabizela who was wrongly accused of misbehaviour and expelled.
He took a bullet for a fellow student who had misbehaved.
He was the leader of the ANC in his province and participated in the 1952 Defiance Campaign.
He taught briefly at Pimville High School after his dismissal for participating in that campaign.
Just like many political activists especially before him, he later studied law but unfortunately could not complete it.
As a youth, he attended the World Youth Festival in Bucharest in 1953.
He also toured Britain, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria.
He went back to teaching and taught at the independent Central Indian High School in Johannesburg from 1955 to 1958. He was elected to the ANC executive committee in 1952 and served until 1958.
After his acquittal at the 1956 Treason Trial, he left the country and landed in Ghana.
He taught briefly at the Accra University College.
He then moved to London. In Britain he taught for about 10 years and earned a Master’s degree from Sussex University.
When browsing about Hutchison I found he did receive a state honour posthumously for his role in the Struggle.
That is very much appreciated. But now further than that it is not the case.
Who must be blamed, us ordinary people on the ground, the Education Department’s history curriculum, or the liberation movements?
Each must take a share of blame. There are ordinary people on the ground who knew about him but did not say anything, even after 1990, if they were scared to do so before.
The Department of Education’s History curriculum pre and post 1990, failed to have him in the syllabus.
His liberation movement, the ANC, failed big time, both pre and post 1990.
In pre-independence political activists would sloganise about their leaders, dead or alive.
The blame is on the leaders and not the ordinary activists because they sloganised based on the information they had.
They got the information from the leaders at different levels through hearing them sloganising or through umrhabulo.
Umrhabulo came about formally and informally; formally through a political education from the education and training convenor (ET).
The ET got the information from the top echelons down and through access to relevant institutions like the library, discussion, dialogue and from underground structures because liberation movements were outlawed.
Now that we cannot change the failures of the past, what must be done?
It begins with you as an individual who is informed to teach others about this wonderful liberation fighter – “each one teach one”.
It is free now, for seminars, displays of his work, naming of relevant places after him and many other things. We cannot waste time blaming the history curriculum of the pre-1994 dispensation because they would not do it at all.
A person of colour had to be humiliated, like Sara Baartman, or made a puppet like the Bantustan or Tricameral entity to be part of the history curriculum. Therefore, the current Department of Education must do its part.
His liberation movement, the ANC, must play its part in teaching their members about him and the role he played in the liberation Struggle.
For his writings to be known it begins with his party and then spreads to people generally. But this does not undermine or undo any progress that might have taken place. It can never be about the wishful thinking or pattern/order of events now, but progress.
This late former political activist and 1956 Treason Trialist, teacher and author died in Nigeria on October 14, 1972.
But he is not known for his work in his country.
Yet he outsmarted the apartheid regime using a special weapon, literature, though he did not have much time.
Ndabeni is a former history tutor at UWC and a former teacher at Bulumko Senior Secondary in Khayelitsha.
Cape Times