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Griffiths Mxenge. The human rights fighter and martyr of AZANIA

By Iqbal Suleman

He grew up as the son of peasant farmers in a rural village in Rayi near King Williams’s town. He was a qualified lawyer. He could have pursued a life of privilege, comfort and ease. He could have spent his entire life quietly in the bourgeois suburbs. But Griffiths Mxenge chose to be a freedom fighter and a human rights activist lawyer during the times of the brutal Apartheid regime.  In the 1950’s whilst a student at Fort Hare university he joined the ANC youth league.  After completing his B.A degree majoring in English and Roman Dutch law, he proceeded to study his LLB law degree at the University of Natal. Whilst a student he was detained for 190 days and later convicted under the Suppression of Communism Act because of his ANC activism. He was sent to Robben Island to serve a term of two years. After his release from Robben Island he was served with a two year banning order and regular detention by the Apartheid security establishment including a period of 109 days in solitary confinement.  Instead of passing his life away quietly and reaching the age of 70’s in one of Johannesburg leafy bourgeois suburbs he died in his forties in the frontlines of the anti -apartheid freedom struggle on the night of the 19th December 1981. A young man in the peak of his life. This iconic freedom fighter and human rights lawyer was slaughtered in the most gruesome manner by the Apartheid Regime’s death squad. Griffiths was killed with three okapi knives, a hunting knife and a wheel spanner. There were 45 stab wounds on his body. The Apartheid mercenaries slit his throat and cut off his ears. They cut his stomach into pieces. This was the naked expression of Apartheid’s racist barbarism.

 

Griffiths was principled and ethical. He was an anti- racist and anti-capitalist activist. He did not seek fame nor fortune. Being an activist in the Apartheid era was different to being an activist in the post-Apartheid period. You put your life on the line when you resisted Apartheid. This is the path that Griffiths chose because he was deeply rooted in the soil of South Africa. He could not extricate himself from the land and its people. This is why he sacrificed everything, his career, his income, his family and ultimately his life. The political freedom and civic liberties that South Africans enjoy today is rooted in the blood of the great martyrs such as Griffiths Mxenge.

As a lawyer, he represented Maphetla Mohapi of the Black Consciousness Movement, who died in Apartheid police custody. He represented Joseph Mdluli an MK cadre who also died in police detention. He was also the instructing attorney of the PAC leader Zephaniah Mothopeng in the Bethal “terrorism” trial. This tells us that he had the courage to fight these legal cases that every other lawyer did not want to touch because of the risk and stigma associated with freedom fighters.  Though he was a committed cadre of the ANC, Griffiths was not a sectarian and had the wisdom to act outside of party political sectarian divisions. He respected and revered everyone who fought against Apartheid which is why he represented freedom fighters from political formations outside of his ANC, like the PAC and the Black Consciousness Movement. He valued the unity of the oppressed people and all the progressive movements resisting Apartheid. It behoves us to remember that all of these national liberation movements in South Africa were deemed to be terrorist organisations and the leaders like Mandela were declared terrorist by Western Governments like the United States who profess to be the champions of democracy, international law and human rights. The genocidal war in Gaza for more than a year now has shattered whatever remained of the image of the United States as a champion of international law and human rights. The whole world can clearly see that the United States government as well as Germany, the United Kingdom and other western countries are complicit in aiding and abetting the Israeli Regime to carry out its genocide on the occupied people of Palestine by providing the Israeli Regime with weapons that kill mainly children and women in Gaza and also providing political and diplomatic cover for the Zionist regime.  In this context, the South African government has honoured the legacy of Griffiths Mxenge by being the only government in the world to stand up to Israeli Colonialism and American Imperialism and to defend international law and human rights by pursuing the charges of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

The martyrdom of Griffiths is a point of reflective consciousness today the 19th November 2024 as we think about that fateful night of 19 November 1981. What would Griffiths think about us? Will we have the courage to look him in the eye and tell him that after he passed we liberated our country politically but we have not democratized our economy and we remain as one of the most unequal nations of the world? That we established the Truth and Reconciliation commission that provided amnesty to the Apartheid mercenaries such as Dirk Coetzee. That our government continues to pay the Apartheid debt with interest to western countries that sustained the Apartheid regime? As we remember how the sacred blood of this martyr fell on this earth, land and nation we inhabit, what we will say if he were to ask us “What have you sacrificed for this country, for freedom and justice? And when he asks us further “Why do some of you live a life of luxury and opulence whilst the majority of people are starving and living in squalor? Why is it that you say that South Africa belongs to all but only a minority owns land and property? Why are you who are committed to social justice and the equal distribution of wealth so divided that you seem to hate each other more than you seem to hate capitalists and racists? Why do you steal from your own government when the blood that was sacrificed by comrades was to create a people’s government whose wealth belong to the people of the country and should be shared among all the people? How can you say that you have freedom when you have the majority living like humiliated slaves in the most abject, inhumane conditions in townships such as Alexandra whilst a few are living as kings in  bourgeois suburbs like Sandton? Why do you purchase a vehicle for 2 million bucks when you can purchase one for two hundred thousand bucks? Why do buy a shirt for two thousand bucks when you can buy a decent shirt for two hundred bucks? What are you doing with the political freedom that so many sacrificed their lives for? Will you only wake up when the political system reverses completely to the right or will you act now, urgently, passionately, ethically and fearlessly in pursuit of the actualisation of social justice so that every South African child will get a quality education, proper nutrition, a fair chance at life, live in a brick house with water and electricity, have access to quality medical care. Equal rights and equal citizenship with a shared and democratized economy, a social ownership of wealth where every South African can live a dignified life. These are the values that Griffiths and many like him fought and died for. We can only truly honour his legacy if we actualize these values. Griffiths was an Africanist whose mind was liberated. He was not intellectually imprisoned by the ideas of America and Europe. He was a native intellectual who to this day challenges us to Africanize the discourse on human rights.

Iqbal Suleman

Suleman is a social justice lawyer and former head of the law clinic for Lawyers for Human Rights in Pretoria.

 

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