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Challenges amid progress: Cronin at a protest march in Cape Town.

The Left movement in South Africa has always been non-racial in nature. The Communist party was launched in 1921, as in other parts of the world, under the impact of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. In middle class English-speaking families like ours, we were told not to get involved in politics; “leave that to the Afrikaanists,” they said.

Of course, in 1968, the distant echo of students’ movements in Paris and other places in my whites-only university campus intellectually seduced me. There were sit-ins in the administrative building and alternate universities. Soon, I was recruited to the underground.

Well, in the 1950s, ANC was a mass organisation. In 1961, there was an armed struggle inspired by Cuba, Algeria etc, rather over-ambitious, and quickly defeated. The apartheid regime felt that it had won a victory. So our main function was trying to regain the political footing. The headquarters were in London and the few underground units like ours were engaged in propaganda, to show that we weren’t dead.

Seven years. I went to prison in 1976, the year of the Soweto uprising that saw young black school students, inspired by American black power, in an affirmation of black pride, turn militant. I was charged with 17 acts of terrorism…once they even called for the death penalty, which made me half-proud and half-terrified.

I had written poetry before, adolescent love poetry. But there was a sense of dissatisfaction… the feeling that I was a privileged white and who gives a damn about my feelings. Of course, writing was banned inside prisons but it is there that I got a more authentic South African voice.

As a white, my cultural upbringing was not quite South African and the reference points were from English literature, another part of the false consciousness. It was when I was in Paris for a brief while, in the afterglow of 1968, which brought out how South African I really was. So the writing came out of compulsion, a psychological and emotional need.

When I came out of prison in 1983, I was treated like a veteran; there was an aura around me because I was in prison. It was a period of heightened activity, including cultural activism. We told stories of prison to remind people that it was a non-racial struggle, and that whites too had gone to prison (separate prison of course!).

Some of the poems didn’t work, some did. We had to remember that we were not reading to a salon audience. Though I learnt a lot from the oral tradition, I am still not an oral poet. I remain glued to the page.

I was exiled between 1987 and 1990 and I divided my time between London and Lusaka. There is actually an extensive exile machinery — the diaspora exile — and they have some great achievements. It was mainly a battle to sustain unity… it is remarkable that the ANC survived years of exile and remained unified which also owed to the external solidarity it received, India being a leading example.

My father was a staunch Catholic, a naval officer, and an ethical man, politically. But he died when I was quite young. My mother was apolitical, so I do not think that they influenced my politics. My mother used to work for the ANC but that’s only because my name figured on the party list!

Well, we think of politics as an art of the possible, because in active politics, one cannot be entirely idealistic, one gets sucked into pragmatism.

Marxism is a science of the probable, as it tries to understand and think about other possibilities…another world is possible. Politics, on the other hand, is also a passionate struggle for the desirable.

A few of my friendly critics say that I use poetry to dodge…it often happens that a metaphor that I had used in a Parliament speech becomes a poem, or a poem that I write contributes to a speech.

It is a very interesting question. There was a big paradox — we were in the middle of negotiations, at the threshold of a breakthrough, and our Communist legacy had always been Moscow-aligned rather than Beijing-aligned. Most of the ANC leaders were SACP members.

But in 1990, the top Communist leaders gave up on the SACP and left, becoming full time members of the ANC; that somewhat demoralised the party. Most of the radical national movements in the region, as in Zambia, Namibia etc, had a Marxist flavour and they received a setback. In South Africa itself, the social-democratic project was rolled back. In a way, the new South Africa emerged in a kind of neo-liberal triumphalism.

The event helped to launch a process of discussing what had happened in the Soviet Union; we had a good debate about what went wrong and what we must not repeat. Many of our cadre had been trained in the Soviet Union and they had gone into denial in the 1970s and 1980s.

The positive things that we learnt from Gandhi, self-emancipation, popular mobilisation, local organs of democracy were some of the resources brought into the new South Africa.

But the danger is that the ANC is becoming very ruling party-ish, something like ‘your-struggle–is-now-over-thank-you-very-much-now-we-are-going-to-give-you-democracy’. This is what we have to prevent, while also fighting against bureaucratisation and corruption.

An interesting thing in our country is that SACP members are also members of the ANC. In fact, we contest elections on ANC tickets. The ANC-SACP alliance has been in place since the late 1920s and it is complicated, like any marriage. We would like to believe that alliance politics has been our contribution to the left political lexicon.

We always understood the national dimension — class, interwoven with the national movement.

Well, we are proud of what we achieved, but there is a huge division that still exists. We have functioning institutions of democracy, process of reconstruction, led, as only it could have been, by black people…Mandela, not just as a single iconic character but also the great tradition that he symbolises.

So all the while we are progressing constantly, all the raw material for massive factional, sectarian conflict is present in society. There are also socio-economic challenges — along with Brazil and Guatemala, South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in terms of the Gini coefficient. That is not changing. Citizens are enjoying democratic rights but there is also huge inequality, almost first world-third world divisions.

Unlike in India, where poverty is more visible, in South Africa, it is tucked away. The spatial geography sees to it that the poorer townships are 17 –18 kilometres away from the city, so that people have to commute long distances. So there is a fear that the democratic gains might get eroded. There is also the HIV/AIDS epidemic; at least five million out of a population of 50 million are affected. At 37.5 per cent, unemployment too is a huge problem.

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