Not every story needs to be a struggle story

These days, it seems that to die in South Africa is to finally receive your liberation stripes.

A friend sent me a link to a social media tribute the other day. The dearly departed was someone we had all known, an ever-present figure in the entertainment scene, known more for their fashion statements and lavish brunches than for their political convictions.

But there it was, typed with deep conviction: “She was an MK operative, underground since her teens. A real soldier of the struggle.”

Another funeral, another surprise unveiling of yet another “former operative”. It’s become such a pattern that one starts to wonder if uMkhonto weSizwe was, unbeknown to us, bigger than the SA Police Service, the army and Eskom combined.

Welcome to the world of the zama zamas of the struggle. Those who, like illegal miners operating in the shadows, emerge only in the haze of incense and praise poetry, often just after the obituaries have been filed.

Umkhonto weSizwe – The Spear of the Nation. Once a name that evoked quiet respect, nervous admiration and sometimes fear. People trained in Angola, the Soviet Union, Mozambique and East Germany.

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Some were part of cells inside the country. Committed, trained, ideological. And most kept quiet because silence was survival. There were codes, protocols, drop-offs, safe houses. I recall one woman working as a nurse in Lusaka. She spoke little, listened a lot.

Years later, we discovered she coordinated three safe passages into the Eastern Cape and trained two units. She never once referred to herself as a cadre.

The true underground was invisible by design. The danger was real. Names could mean death. To be known then was to be dead. And yet now, somehow, in the democratic glow, everyone was underground.

South Africa’s post-liberation mythology is fertile ground for what I call struggle laundering.

There are many reasons why this happens. Some are benign, but then grief does strange things. Communities want to honour their own. Families need dignity. Others are more strategic: access to state funerals, provincial honours, or proximity to history. Struggle credentials open doors, even from the grave.

We’ve seen fashion designers, club promoters, music producers, even TV actors posthumously declared liberation operatives.

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We do not dishonour the dead when we demand truth. In fact, truth is the only proper tribute.

False credentials not only distort history, but they also undermine the quiet courage of those who asked for nothing, expected nothing, and yet did everything.

The real zama zamas of the liberation were those who dug deep with nothing but belief.

Some never returned. Some returned with broken bodies and scarred psyches.

Some came back to nothing, to find that others had become ministers, moguls and men of means while they stand in SA Social Security Agency lines or live in rented back rooms.

They remember Operation Vula not as legend but as survival.

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They remember walking barefoot across borders, changing names, missing funerals.

They remember learning Russian in dim dormitories.

There’s Joe, who ran logistics in Lesotho for years, carrying messages on microfilm in matchboxes. Lindiwe, who ferried weapons in her child’s nappies. Or Rashid, who spent nine years in Swaziland before slipping back into SA through bush trails, living in safe houses, never seeing his children.

These people exist. Many are alive. And you will never hear them speak of the struggle unless you ask, and even then, rarely in detail. The zama zama, in literal terms, is a miner without permit or protection. They go underground illegally, dangerously, driven by the hope of gold.

South Africa has thousands of them. Most are unknown until a tunnel collapses or an explosion is heard at midnight.

The zama zamas of the struggle are much the same. Some genuine, digging in the dark against apartheid, risking it all.

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Others? Well, some mine the struggle retrospectively, hoping for glittering rewards: recognition, validation, burial benefits, family pride.

But here lies the danger: if everyone was underground, if everyone was MK, who filled the marches, the boycotts, the student movements, the defiance campaigns?

Are we rewriting our history to make room for ghosts that never walked the corridors?

As the nation wrestles with who we were and what we became, we must ask: are we honouring sacrifice or manufacturing struggle fiction?

I write this not to mock, but to mourn. To mourn the loss of truth. We owe the struggle more than retroactive glory. We owe it honesty.

Not every DJ was an MK commander. Not every fashionista ran a cell. But that doesn’t mean their lives weren’t meaningful.

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The idea that struggle is the only currency of worth is poverty. Some cooked for cadres. Some wrote poems. Some raised children alone. Some simply survived. And that, too, is history.

Let us honour all of it.

But let us also be vigilant against the commodification of sacrifice. Because one day, our children will ask what we did.

And we must not hand them a mythology mined from gold dust and exaggeration.

“We are not short of heroes,” Keorapetse Kgositsile, who was inaugurated as SA’s National Poet Laureate in 2006, once said.

“We are short of those who remember them honestly.”

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