Gora Ebrahim
AwaaZ, Volume 6, Issue 1- 2009, had chronicled some of the Indian activists who participated in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. The following obituary by Chris Barron was published by the Sunday Times of South Africa on 5 December, 1999; and gives us an insight into Gora Ebrahim's central role in the PAC and his ultimate disillusionment with the party. STANDING BETWEEN THE PAC AND EXTINCTION Gora Ebrahim: 1936 - 1999 For almost 30 years Gora Ebrahim, who has died in his Berea, Johannesburg, flat at the age of 63, articulated the policies and vision of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) with unrivalled eloquence. But when he left the PAC five months ago to join the ANC the only surprise was that he didn't do it sooner. Born in Durban on May 29, 1936, Ebrahim cut his political teeth in Trotskyite circles as a student at Sastri College, Natal University and Wits. He joined the PAC in 1957 and went into exile in 1963, returning to South Africa after the unbanning of the organisation in 1990. He was the PAC's chief representative in Egypt, Iraq, China and Zimbabwe, and at the United Nations in New York. He subsequently became secretary of foreign affairs for the organisation, based in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. It is no great exaggeration to say that for a lot of this time Ebrahim was all that stood between the PAC and extinction. For many years there was a concerted international campaign to withdraw recognition from the organisation as a liberation movement in favour of treating the ANC as the only representative of the oppressed masses of South Africa. If this had happened, and it was a near thing, the PAC would have been excluded from the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organisation of African Unity and the UN, among other international platforms. Ebrahim fought tooth and nail to maintain recognition for the movement, using his considerable debating skills to argue that it was not for outsiders to choose a liberation movement for the people of South Africa. When the time came, they would choose for themselves, he said. Ebrahim did more than anyone to persuade the Scandinavian countries, most notably, that the PAC was an organisation of sufficient credibility to warrant the material support they provided, and without which it could not have survived. He did this largely through the force of his own personality, intellect, eloquence and sophistication. Before Ebrahim went to Beijing under the auspices of the Afro-Asian Journalists Association in the late '60s, during the Cultural Revolution, China knew little about South Africa and nothing at all about the PAC. His intellectual analysis of the situation and astute marketing of PAC strategy was lapped up by Mao Tse Tung, and opened the doors to aid from China. When frequent internal bickering and power struggles made donor countries doubt the wisdom of their support for the PAC, it was Ebrahim who, working through his impressive network of foreign contacts, contained the damage. In so far as the PAC projected an image to the outside world of unity and purpose, it did so through the person of Ebrahim. In short, he was the PAC's lifeline to the international community. While serving as the PAC's chief representative at the UN the esteem accorded him in international diplomatic circles helped the organisation rally more support for certain causes it took up than might otherwise have been the case. Its success in mobilising support for the 'Sharpeville Six', sentenced to death under a common purpose ruling for the death of a person killed during unrest in the Vaal Triangle, is a case in point. Due mostly to Ebrahim's powers of persuasion even Margaret Thatcher agreed to take a personal interest in their fate, and their sentence was commuted. Ebrahim helped form the South Africa Non Racial Olympic Committee in the early '60s, and became acting president when co-founder Dennis Brutus was arrested and jailed. Never were his debating skills put to more effective use than in the way he rallied the international community behind the anti-South African sports boycott, opposing apartheid was not yet as fashionable as it became, and the early response to the campaign he initiated and pursued for some time virtually single-handed was not welcoming. Eventually the boycott became one of the sharpest thorns in South Africa's side and succeeded spectacularly in persuading whites to support F W de Klerk's proposal to negotiate an end to apartheid. Ebrahim's value to the PAC did not make his position in the organisation as secure as one might have supposed. During a particularly major internal ruction in the mid-70s he was obliged to leave Tanzania hurriedly after a fall-out with the acting President, Potlako Kitchener Leballo. He was never able to determine whether his expulsion was the work of the Tanzanian government or at the behest of the PAC itself. With his French wife, whom he had met in China while she was working as a translator, and his two Tanzanian-born children, he went to Iraq and became editor of the Baghdad Observer, English daily. Somewhat improbably, given the reason for his presence there, he became the PAC's chief representative in the capital and stayed for around five years, raising its profile in Iraq as well as important financial support. The seeds of Ebrahim's ultimate disillusionment with the PAC were planted shortly after the organisation's return, after its unbanning, to South Africa. His problems were chiefly 'it's refusal to end the armed struggle, ditch its rabble-rousing slogans which he believed had been overtaken by events, and commit to negotiations'. Its withdrawal from the Patriotic Front it had formed with the ANC and Azapo, and its on-off-on-again attitude to Codesa (Convention for a Democratic South Africa), where he was a key member of its negotiating team, upset him. Honed by his wide travels, frequent contact with ambassadors around the world and his experience at the UN, his thinking by this time transcended what he increasingly felt was a limited, dogmatic party line out of touch with new realities. Ebrahim saw sharply that continuing to characterise the nature of oppression as colonial racism was making the PAC as racist in its own way as the racism it sought to replace. He believed the new challenge was how best to translate its policy of Africanism - always the core of his loyalty to the PAC - into a meaningful force in the post-apartheid era. He wanted a broad, open-ended Africanism to replace what he felt was the PAC's narrow, nationalistic version which no longer served the country. For him, Thabo Mbeki's talk of African renaissance was the language of PAC founder Robert Sobukwe. He believed it paved the way for a merger between the PAC and ANC. Being on the periphery of PAC power play, his attempts to change its thinking led to his marginalisation by more extremist elements in the party until, after the 1999 elections, he lost his seat in Parliament. His growing disaffection with the party was reflected in his decision to take a holiday in Harare during the PAC's local government election campaign two years previously, and his negligible role during its run-up to the general elections. He believed his skills were wasted on a party he saw going nowhere, and could be better used as an ambassador in Africa where he had close friendships with many leaders. The government agreed, and had pencilled his name in as a future ambassador when he died of a suspected heart attack. He leaves a wife, Xaviere, son, Yasir (named after his friend Yasser Arafat), and daughter, Zareena. Mduduzi Sibeko 011 724 9298 071-101-2595 msib...@randwater.co.za The information contained in this message and or attachments is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from any system and destroy any copies. -- Sending your posting to payco@googlegroups.com Unsubscribe by sending an email to payco-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com You can also visit http://groups.google.com/group/payco Visit our website at www.mayihlome.wordpress.com
