By Carl Niehaus
When I received the message that comrade Jessie Duarte passed on in the early hours of last Sunday, I wept. I wept for Jessie, for our Movement, and for myself. There were no easy feelings – no sense of comfort that hers was a life well lived, that I could celebrate without hesitation.
Yet, despite these mixed emotions I had no doubt that a true comrade passed on, and that she will be sorely missed – no matter how much she had caused pain and havoc in the lives of so many of us.
In order to try to explain the confusing and hurtful complexity of these emotions my recollection of Yasmin ‘Jessie’ Duarte must be brutally honest and personal, but always against the broad canvass of the politics of the days of our lives.
I first met Jessie in 1977, 45 years ago, when she was the administrator of the office of Dr Beyers Naudé in Braamfontein, in Johannesburg. The same offices that also accommodated the Release Mandela Campaign.
A couple of days before I met her I met Naudé for the first time. I was a young Afrikaner student who had just been expelled from the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) for having put up posters on the university campus calling for the release from prison of Nelson Mandela and the other Rivonia trialists.
Oom Bey, as he was lovingly known, was engaging me as a young fellow Afrikaner, and trying to guide me through the turmoil of having become, because of my opposition to apartheid, despised and considered an ‘enemy’ by my own people. He was more capable of doing so than any other person, because by the time we met he had been the victim of similar treatment by our fellow Afrikaners. He understood what I went through when my Dad threw me out of our family home, and as a youngster of 18 I walked the streets and slept on park benches. Oom Bey became the father to me that my father, because of his racist apartheid convictions, could never be.
When I first walked into Oom Bey’s offices I was met by the frowning, almost growling face of Jessie. Unlike Oom Bey she did not feel the need to welcome me warmly. In fact I got the sense that she looked at me as yet another burden, and trouble, that Oom Bey was bringing into an already overburdened and extremely busy office with hardly any resources. Oom Bey’s explanation about my background did not seem to warm her demeanour towards me either.
In the days and years that followed, my relationship with Oom Bey grew very close – as I have intimated it became a father-son relationship.
Because of our mutual proximity to Oom Bey, and our shared political convictions, Jessie and I were inevitably often in each other’s presence. Ours was a complex relationship, sharing the same political convictions, often facing the same dangers from the apartheid state, but never really warming personally to each other.
Almost right from the beginning I got the sense that Jessie experienced me as ‘competition’ among those of us who were in the inner circle of Oom Bey. I never fully understood this, because I never felt the same about her, but her being a fiercely territorial person she was evidently not comfortable with my proximity to Oom Bey, and the father-son relationship between us.
Despite these persistent feelings of unease, I grew to respect Jessie’s courage and fiercely independent spirit. She was never a sycophant or praise singer to Oom Bey, or for that matter to any of the senior liberation struggle leaders she worked with, and those included Mama Albertina Sisulu (to whom she was very close), Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and later after he was released from prison, Nelson Mandela. Jessie had the courage to speak her mind to any of these leaders, and when she disagreed with them she would confront them in a forthright manner. Her no-nonsense personality, somewhat combustible temperament and short fuse never allowed her to beat about the bush. Although it was not easy to work with Jessie, and the confrontations could be exhausting if you wanted to stand your ground, I respected her as a courageous and principled person.
Her politics, until very late in her life, were principled and ideologically driven. Like many of her generation Jessie was strongly influenced by Black Consciousness, but this she combined with an uncompromising commitment to non-racialism.
Jessie was one of the few true internationalists in the ANC, and her commitment to the cause of the Palestinian people and hatred for apartheid Israel played a central role in the strong ANC conference resolutions that were regularly formulated in favour of the struggle for full liberation of the Palestinian people, and the ANC’s strident denouncements of Israel. She similarly supported the people of Cuba and Venezuela against US/Western imperialism, and the struggle for self-determination and independence of the people of Western Sahara, and the close fraternal relations between the ANC and the Polisario Front.
In the immediate period after the release of Mandela comrade Jessie, together with comrades Barbara Masekela and Frene Ginwala, formed a formidable and very efficient administrative team in the ANC presidency. I don’t think these three strong and fiercely competitive women really liked each other, and as spokesperson of the ANC at the time who had to engage with them, I can attest to many tensions between them. However, their commitment to the ANC, and dedication to President Mandela was never in doubt. Despite the tensions between them, they all served President Mandela well, and turned the office of the ANC president into a true powerhouse.
This brings me to the most defining characteristic, for me, of Jessie Duarte. Her singular love for, and commitment to, the ANC. It was that love that made her such a formidable force. Jessie was truly prepared to dedicate her whole life and to sacrifice everything in her dedication to the ANC. This was her greatest strength, but sadly towards the end of her life, also her greatest undoing.
To Jessie’s mind almost anything was justified in her single-minded commitment to forge unity in the ANC, and to save the liberation movement from itself. In doing so she crossed a very important line, which to my own mind should never be stepped over: For the end to start justifying the means.
I express this criticism with great reluctance, because in general I do subscribe to our cultural predisposition that it is better not to criticise and say negative things about those who have passed on.
However, in understanding the last years of comrade Jessie’s life, it will be impossible to understand why she conducted herself in the manner that she did, without having to address this issue. It is the proverbial elephant in the room that in all honesty we cannot fail to address, not only because if we do not do so we are bound to fail in any honest assessment of her life and contribution to our liberation struggle, but also because there are very important lessons for us to learn – both at a personal and organisational level.
Jessie and I come from an older generation that lived, during the worst years of apartheid, exile and underground work, by the maxim that you must be prepared to subject everything – and when I say everything I mean literally everything – to the demands of the liberation struggle and the needs of the ANC. Family and personal relationships came secondary to those all-encompassing – and often personally devouring – demands. To sacrifice your own ‘self’, and your loved ones, became more often than not the norm.
While this could often be justified during the extremely difficult years of apartheid oppression, it became engrained in many of us who lived those lives and made huge – sometimes unimaginable – sacrifices. We ended up stuck in an entrenched mindset that we carried forward into our lives, and way of doing things, also into the era of democracy after 1994.
Self-sacrifice can be a very laudable characteristic, but it can also become abused and very dangerous in the hands of unscrupulous people. Those who live like that can become the inadvertent tools of inflicting great pain and destruction on the lives of others as the well-meaning, but misdirected, henchmen and women of self-serving so-called ‘leaders’ and manipulators.
I have watched with horror and pain how comrade Jessie’s fierce commitment to unity in the ANC turned her into an instrument of enforcement of grossly unfair decisions by a National Executive Committee (NEC) that had increasingly become like malleable clay in the hands of Cyril Ramaphosa and beholden to his money.
The manner in which Jessie accepted and carried out the reformulation and enforcement of the so-called ‘step aside’ resolution to the effect of forcing some of her closest comrades to ‘step aside’, or to be suspended, as she did in the instance of the secretary general of the ANC, comrade Ace Magashule, presented to my mind the worst, lowest, point of her life. In the process she inflicted much harm and pain on a comrade that truly respected her greatly, and whom I know she also respected and loved. The fact that she, regardless of all of this, none the less continued to be part of such dastardly conduct, because she justified it to herself as necessary in order to try to keep the ANC ‘together’, can never justify her behaviour.
Cyril Ramaphosa evidently, in the most cynical and manipulative way, abused comrade Jessie’s love for the ANC, and her ardent wish to keep the ANC united, in order to get her – once comrade Ace Magashule was forced out of the ANC secretary general’s office (SGO) – to do his bidding and dirty work.
Many a comrade can attest to how viciously unfairly comrade Jessie treated them, not only personally but also with regards to the genuine organisational concerns of their branches, and ANC constitutional structures at various levels. Time after time the provisions of the ANC constitution were flaunted and blatantly disregarded in an unseemly breathless rush to repress any expression of internal criticism or dissent.
All of this was justified in the context of trying to maintain ‘unity’, but in reality it became vicious repression that stifled and destroyed our much-needed right and duty to express internal criticism.
Lip-service was paid to internal democracy, while in practice comrade Jessie, at the end of her active life as the deputy secretary general of the ANC, when she was fully in control of the SGO after comrade Ace was so wrongly forced out, became an intolerant, repressive enforcer and inquisitor.
I personally, like many other comrades, was at the receiving end of vicious efforts to charge, fire and suspend those whom she felt were not abiding by the increasingly dictatorial norm of so-called ‘unity’ that she saw as the justification for her repressive and intolerant conduct.
Even more unfortunately, this was too often executed in a very personal manner with direct personal attacks, sometimes in the most inappropriate way and time. In early 2021 when I was gravely ill with Covid-19 and fighting for my life in hospital, Jessie saw fit to attack me viciously on national television. When I posted a social media message expressing my pain at being attacked in such a personal way at a time when I was literally fighting for my life, comrade Jessie decided to immediately institute disciplinary action against me for having criticised her, even while I was still very ill in hospital.
Such actions, as myself and Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla and many others have experienced, were often accompanied by personal WhatsApp messages berating and insulting one in the most extraordinary and inappropriate manner.
When I first made the call #CyrilRamaphosaMustGo!, I received a formal letter from the secretary general’s office instructing me to remove a poster to that effect, which was the profile photo on my personal WhatsApp account. When I queried the correctness of such an ‘instruction’, and pointed out that Ronald Lamola ran a campaign in 2016 calling for President Jacob Zuma to go, even picketing at ANC NEC meetings holding a poster to that effect without any negative sanction against him, I got a personal WhatsApp message in the middle of the night from Jessie, telling me “Suga wena”.
These are some of the memories about the latter part of comrade Jessie’s life that unfortunately cannot be overlooked when considering her legacy.
I have no doubt that she was deeply torn – in fact emotionally torn apart – by the mission that she made herself believe that she had to carry out. Sadly, in the process she compromised some of the most important comradely relationships of her life, including the very warm and close relationship that she had with President Jacob Zuma.
It is my personal view that while Jessie continued to remain in contact with President Zuma, and visited him several times at Nkandla after he was so viciously and wrongly forced by the ANC NEC to resign as president, she did not do enough to defend and protect Nxamalala.
I have no doubt that this knowledge caused her much agony, which I personally experienced when she called me in the middle of the night on the July 7, 2021 when President Zuma drove from Nkandla to Estcourt prison to hand himself over to start serving the illegal 15 months prison sentence that the Constitutional Court imposed on him. Jessie was in tears, and wanted to know how Msholozi was doing. She kept on repeating to me on the phone: “Carl this is hard, it is too hard”. The next afternoon when I was arrested in front of the Estcourt prison, the first call that I received after I was released from the police cells was from Jessie. She wanted to know if I was okay, if I had legal representation and she kept on repeating, “No Carl, what Bheki (referring to Bheki Cele, the Minister of Police) is now doing is not right”.
Yet, despite having expressed that sentiment, she continued to pursue ANC disciplinary charges against me for having said in a media conference at Nkandla that our law enforcement agencies were being abused for factional ANC party political battles. Jessie was even prepared to give evidence before the ANC National Disciplinary Committee (NDC) against me. It was only her serious illness that prevented her from doing so.
I am writing about these personal recollections because I experienced the last couple of years of Jessie’s life as deeply tragic, and a time of great personal agony for her.
I will never be part of those who, without reservation condemn comrade Jessie and call her a sell-out, as I have seen some comrades do on social media.
We should never deny the totality of comrade Jessie Duarte’s life, and the huge contribution, at great personal sacrifice, that she made to the liberation struggle over many decades. However, I can also not make light of the genuine anger that many comrades – including myself – felt and still feel about the manner in which she treated us, and the pain and harm that she inflicted.
It also does not help to beat around the bush; in the last part of her life Jessie betrayed many of her closest comrades, and it is true that such betrayal by a fellow comrade always inflicts the deepest, most painful, and longest lasting wounds.
I am writing all of this with great sadness, and a lump in my throat, because it should never have been like this. Comrade Jessie herself, and all of us, deserved better, but tragically the longest lasting – dominant – memory of the complicated and mixed legacy of her life will be that of betrayal.
These were the turmoil of mixed emotions that accompanied me last Sunday when I went to pay my respects to comrade Jessie at her house, and attend her funeral at the Westpark Heroes Acre. That I, and other comrades, had to face the very unpleasant discomfort of having had to try to manage in a civil manner the insincere handshakes of so-called ‘comrades’ – our daily detractors and tormentors – literally on the doorstep of comrade Jessie’s house where her emaciated body was lying in the lounge, was only a further reflection of the terrible tragedy that had befallen our beloved liberation movement.
I sat crestfallen listening to the obituary that Cyril Ramaphosa delivered. He praised her for her courage, and having done her job well as deputy secretary general.
In a way it was correct that Ramaphosa delivered the obituary, because despite the fact that we all – including Ramaphosa himself – know that Jessie did not like him at all, and that she actually despised him and never trusted him, she none the less served him well.
Perhaps better than most of us, this duplicitous man understood her as a deeply loyal person, and in the most cynical way used, and abused, her love for the ANC to get her to do his dastardly dirty work.
In a country where so much self-serving propaganda is made of the abused word ‘capture’, I sat there at the funeral reminding myself that I was probably observing the very worst form of capture. As Ramaphosa was delivering that obituary he was literally hammering the last nails into comrade Yasmin ‘Jessie’ Duarte’s coffin.
Carl Niehaus is an ANC veteran of 42 years of uninterrupted ANC membership. He is a former member of the ANC NEC, and former SA ambassador to The Netherlands. He is an NEC member and national spokesperson of MKMVA. Ambassador Niehaus was given the Zulu warrior name of ‘Mpangazitha’ by the executive council of the Injeje yabeNguni Council.