Here is an interview with South African socialist, scholar and working class fighter Trevor Ngwane. Among other things, Trevor discusses:

• his own history of struggle,
• the role of the ANC and the S. African Communist Party;
• his view of BRICS;
• the war in Ukraine;
• the role of Roy Singham;
• and more.

Below the link to the video are (1) the times in the interview where Trevor comments on particular issues and (2) a transcript of the tape

Start: his personal background in the context of what was going on in S.A. at the time

3:15 I ask about Trevor’s relationship with the ANC and the S.A. Communist Party

4:15 Trevor discusses his time as an elected counselor and his expulsion from the ANC, This is related to the ANC’s turning to the right.

9:14 Trevor talks about the Marikana miners’ massacre

10:25 Trevor talks about BRICS – his criticisms of it. He explains that from the S. African workers’ perspective, BRICS should be viewed in the context of the ANC turning to neoliberalism.

16:20 I asked Trevor to respond to the “anti-imperialists” like Vijay Prashad 18:49 Trevor talks about the role of Roy Singham in South Africa

23:33 Trevor talks about the Russian invasion of Ukraine including an analysis of both the “anti (US) imperialist view and his own view. (Hint: he says “the bombs are raining down on their heads. They must take up arms and we must support them.”)

32:29 Trevor makes some summary comments. “Marx said the workers have no country. He said there is a world to win. But that world we can only win by reaching out across the borders.”

Full transcript

John Reimann
Oaklandsocialist was privileged to interview South African socialist and scholar activist

Trevor Ngwane, South African socialist, scholar and fighter for the working class

Trevor Ngwane
I was born in South Africa and grew up here went to school. during Apartheid days, we had universities called bush colleges, because, you know, we call them bush colleges, because they were kind of second, third class institutions of learning. And in fact, you wouldn’t be able to finish your completed degree there, because there are always those student discrepancies where students go on strike, and then you all get expelled. So it was like that then.

And then at the time, of course, everyone was more or less trying to do the fighting against apartheid. you know,. The majority of people were just trying to survive the system, I would imagine. And then we got our independence in 1994. At that time, I was already a socialist. And also, I worked for a union. Like you, my union expelled me twice, but that was because in the run up to freedom, there was a period of healing [unclear] . So, you know, people talk about a peaceful transition. But from about 1990, actually, 1989 There was a lot of violence. Some of the violence, of course, was waged by a man who died last week. Gatsha Buthelezi was the was the Zulu chief and leader of a political party, Nkatha, and the Bantustan leader, a leader of the Bantustan called Zululand. And I happen to come from Zululand. And then, in any case, we got our independence. Oh, another cleaning up was getting rid of radicals from various organizations. Unfortunately, it also included closing down organizations

John Reimann
Trevor joined the ANC. And also the South African Communist Party, which had been seen as the real revolutionary wing of the ANC.

Trevor Ngwane
I didn’t last in the Communist Party, because when the ANC was unbanned, the Communist Party was unbanned, I was already a socialist. And my politics was more or less well defined. So I did not agree with SACP. Although not strongly, so. But when I started attending branch meetings in 1999, they were so boring, you know,

John Reimann
Trevor got elected as a local councillor. Here, he explains what happened

Trevor Ngwane
Although at that time, the ANC in asserting itself had allowed the Civics, the committee organizations, to also nominate half the public representatives. Well, half the candidates. So I was nominated by both the ANC and then by the Civics even if you eliminated by the Civic, you ran in the election on an ANC ticket. Of course, this arrangement of giving power to the Civic disappeared after that first election. Remember also even the unions COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, for the first national elections, it was allowed to nominate 20 parliamentarians, some of them became cabinet ministers, which was part of hegemonizing, the mass movement, but also maybe part of getting votes by the ANC. So after four years, I had a fight with the ANC because they were privatizing, and attacking the union, the South African municipal workers, union, municipal workers who were the first target of privatization. So I was expelled, and I served my last term of office as an independent, because the ANC did not want to have a by-election, you know, in case I won, or it was going to be bad publicity. So that’s how it ended.

John Reimann
What kind of organizing did you do outside of the ANC after that period?

Trevor Ngwane
The Civics were doing that anyway, even before the ANC took power, because remember, part of the strategy of fighting against apartheid was to take over some of the duties of the state. So when I left the ANC in 1999, already there was this struggle against privatization of municipal services. So we’re organizing around it. And then the unions are also fighting against that. We’re also organizing around a various issues concerning the provision of what we call basic services, water, electricity, housing. Part of organizing locally, also involved just addressing people’s day to day problems, including, you know, dispute resolution, family fights, neighbor fighting neighbor. In fact, at the height of the Civics, we had community courts, you know. I’ve run a committee court where I’m sitting there in charge, you know, someone is complaining about someone or about whatever. In fact, there was a sudden explosion of these movements. One of them was this anti privatization forum. Another was in Cape Town called the anti eviction campaign, fighting against people being evicted from their houses, and from their shacks. Very well as the… Oh, the famous Treatment Action Campaign, fighting for medication for people living with HIV AIDS. You also had movements like in South Africa, fighting against the repayment of the Apartheid debt. So it was a slew, you know, of movements, especially from 1999 to about 2004.

John Reimann
I asked Trevor, if he had been involved in the campaign for justice for the Marikand miners who were massacred in 2012.

Trevor Ngwane
We formed the Marikana support campaign, which half exists today.

John Reimann
Trevor went the next day on a delegation from the Democratic Left Front or DLF.

Trevor Ngwane
Yeah, the following day, it was terrible because there’s the blood [everywhere]. So getting there early kind of made it easy for us as the DLF as we were called then to make direct contact, provide direct, much needed support very early on. So that relationship with the miners, you know, lasted long. In fact, I would say it has lasted to this day. Yeah, yeah, of course, you know, it changes. But it’s still there. Yeah.

John Reimann
Switching gears. I asked Trevor about BRICS, because he had been involved in organizing protests against BRICS whose Convention had been held in South Africa just a few days or a week or so ago.

Trevor Ngwane
On the first day of the summit, they had what is called a “BRICS Business Forum”. Okay. Yeah. But there was no BRICS civil society forum, or civil society, or BRICS trade union forum. Even the World Bank, and the IMF these days, when they have these meetings, you know, there will be some tokenism and have so called parallel civil society, you know. I’m just saying that because during the wave of social movements here, 1999 to 2004, it coincided with the anti globalization movement, you know, world social forum. So, you know, that was the politics then where, you know, the big guys who then say, “Okay, we’ll accommodate you by having a parallel forum.” I think the COP, you know, the family meetings, they do such things, but BRICS doesn’t even do that.

Secondly, BRICS, especially Russia, China. You know, it’s a project of capitalist restoration. Can you see? Yeah, so the Soviet Union collapsed. You know, maybe it should have collapsed. But, you know, those leaders clearly abandoned the strategy for socialism. Now, the ANC like saying, whenever a socialist organization, but certainly they once many times pretended to be one, if you know what I’m trying to say. So they gave the impression that, you know, at the minimum, they would introduce or allow elements of socialism. And they had a more than 50 years alliance with the Communist Party, which argued that the first stage of the revolution will be democracy. The second stage of the revolution will be socialism. Now, 30 years after democracy, there is absolutely no movement towards socialism. To the contrary, the ANC has retreated from what I can call a vaguely social democratic program. Yeah, because when they took power, in 1994, they had a program called… they took power on the basis of a program called the Reconstruction and Development Program. That’s that program, which came up with the slogan, “people driven, people centered development”. That’s the that program which led to the local community forums I told you about that program, which came up with specific targets for providing who are people working class people with free state housing. Those houses today are called RTP houses. But two years into power, the ANC discarded the RTP and adopted a new neoliberal politics.

So we view BRICS from our perspective on the ANC. You know, we ask ourselves “what will be the components? What will be the features of the new geopolitical order? Will the attack on trade unions happening in China continue? Will, things like invading the Ukraine, that is no respect for the rights of nation to self determination not be respected? Will semi-fascist ideas like those of Modi in India? Remember before Lula Bolsonoro in in Brazil with those ideas prevailed. So that’s why, you know, we were opposed to BRICS. We are socialists, you know. So, we are anti imperialists. That is a given for us, but we don’t want false hope. And democracy, demagogues now pretending to be what they are not.

John Reimann
I asked Trevor, about suppose that “anti imperialist”, like Vijay Prashad, who supports BRICS, I forgot to mention him, but Noam Chomsky is another of that type.

Iran is part of the “Global South”, but what does its government have to offer other than repression and corruption?

Trevor Ngwane
You know, they simply adopt… I think, even BRICS, they do this, they just adopt this terminology, the global South and the Global North. Can you see? Yeah. So suddenly, they are the Global South, whether they are dictators, whether they are anti worker. I mean, the the UAE, you know, Iran, I’m not talking about the country, like you said, but the states, they’re, the governments, you know, they are part of the global south sea. So whatever they do, you know, must be good, because when they thrive,

John Reimann
Israel too is part of the global South!

Trevor Ngwane
No. Yeah, so, so that’s, yeah,

I’m just trying to point out the completely… I think there’s a lot of opportunism, half truths. Yeah, actually theoretical of obfuscation. This is a sleight of hand, can you see, to to fool the masses. And to confuse, you know, young students who are keen to fight for justice, you know, who know that something called Imperialism is wrong. And then to say, “yes, these dictatorial states, these anti democratic states, these states who attack women, you know, some, just like maybe even worse than the Taliban, they are good because these things happen to be in the global south.” So, you know, I don’t agree with these politics.

Roy Singham has played a big role in the South African left.

John Reimann
I asked about the role of Roy Singham in South Africa. And Trevor started by talking about his role in the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, or NUMSA.

Trevor Ngwane
I’m a member of NUMSA, the union, because you know, I work at a university and you know, NUMSA is spread everywhere. So NUMSA help spearhead the Workers Party, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party. And then from what I hear… but these things are not transparent, you know, yeah, so you hear you know, in the corridors. I mean, no one says, “Thank you comrades. here is the financial statement. A million came from a guy called Singham.” It doesn’t… in fact. I like to say to the comrades, “this is money which comes through the roof, you know. There’s a hole in the roof. But, and you know, and you know, the roof… there is the leader who is near the roof.” So, yeah, it doesn’t come through the door where you know, the treasurer of the organization can sign for it.

So, so that’s all I know. And that’s s as far as I can comment, and even comment strongly because my feeling was (and) is that even with NUMSA even though it gets subscriptions from workers, I believe that there is money coming through the roof. So, certainly for the SRWP it seemed to me that money is coming through the roof. Can you see? Now when that happened, I joined SRWP, like many comrades here, grassroots activists, maybe guys like me, you can call us mid layer activists, you know, whether positive or negative, leaders, you know. [We] just get sidelined. Can you see? Because the man is talking now. Can you see? And then the accountability is not coming from the ground up, as is our tradition. But it’s from the top of the roof downwards. So it so if indeed it was Singham who was funding SRWP, yeah, I think he destroyed the party. Before it was really, it really became anything because it basically undermined democracy. Probably gave too much power to the top leaders who happened to be NUMSA bureaucrats, basically, you know, top guys.

And, for example, you know, the SRWP did very badly in its election, you know. It ran in the election in 2019. It got 25,000 votes. Now NUMSA is a union with 300,000 members. So clearly our party SRWP failed to persuade NUMSA members to vote for it. You know, the so called NUMSA moment when you had hope. But all that has been destroyed. Yeah. So that’s how if if Singham was funding SRPWP, which I believe he was I think his methods not are not good. Yeah. Yeah.

Devastation of Ukraine carried out by Putin’s invasion.

John Reimann
I asked about how the war in Ukraine is seen in South Africa.

Trevor Ngwane
Oh, the wider working class views the Ukraine war? Certainly they have an opinion probably is not high up on the daily concerns. Especially because there is a real crisis of everyday life. Have it. But, you know, our working class is politicized. So they watch the news.

They have a lot of opinions. Social media has also facilitated that. So I imagine they get a lot from the, from the organizations from what God said on television, from leaders of Yeah, of the distractions.

John Reimann
Trevor talked about the role of the South African Communist Party, which still has some influence, and how they see Russia today, as being simply more or less on a par with the old Soviet Union, and what influence that has within South Africa.

Trevor Ngwane
So, there is that Soviet nostalgia, there is also a misunderstanding of Putin. Sometimes he’s projected as a hero, someone who can stand up to the West, someone who’s able to defy the USA. And then there is a perception that on that narrative that the Ukraine invasion was provoked by the Ukrainian government, who allowed itself to be a pawn and be used against Russia. So there’s a lot of talk about, “it’s a proxy war”. You know, “NATO”. Yeah. So it’s like that. And the whole thing then is understood in terms of what I can call in abstract analysis of geopolitics. My view is that with my comrades, you know, we are socialists here. Firstly, what can a Ukrainian worker do? If he’s in Kyiv or wherever they are, and then bomb start raining down on your apartment, you, yeah. Next thing, hundreds of 1000s, millions must be displaced, move away. So we think that worker has to take up arms and defend the country, you know, defend his or her people. Defend, you know, the place where he or she lives, you know, and we we would support, you know, materially. And, critically, that’s true strategy. Can you see?

Yeah, we also understand that, even though we don’t support the Ukrainian state, but we cannot see how that ordinary worker would defend himself, effectively, without standing with the Ukrainian state, without joining an organized army, without getting training, using those weapons. So on this ground we support the struggle of the Ukrainian people with their state, you know, against the Russia. That’s, that’s my position, you know, yeah, that’s my position.

And then, you know, one day just to give you another example, but it’s the same thing: Some people from the Ukraine came here, some academic types. And then they were doing the rounds. And then somehow, they wanted to meet academics. So they must have met them by then someone must have said must also meet the left. So some left academics, met with them, just a few of us, I don’t know, about five, in a restaurant. They were obviously funded by the Ukrainian state because they had bodyguards, wherever. But among them were professors, some NGO person, you know, so they were they were civil society people doing a job. So they went on and on about the history, okay. I’m sure you know, that history. It’s not complicated, but as long as it goes back, you know, you know, Russia and the Ukraine. At the time, the Empire you know. And some of them are historians so they could  refer to documents by basically arguing for the rights of the Ukrainian nation to self determination. Okay. Yeah, basically. And then on our side, you know, my comrades or colleagues were there, besides asking questions. So the questions were not planned. They were like, critical. “What about___? Can you see ___? Yeah, what about this? And that?” Some of them even repeating some of the arguments, which maybe it’s fair, you know, if, if people say that about why they support Russia, you know, we might as well as the Ukrainians, yeah. So these guys, these comrades from Ukraine answered until someone said, “no, no, but now, let’s hear what, Trevor thinks.” Because I was just just sitting there listening. No, I was, I was not at all switched on. I was just listening. Can see, yeah. Open minded. So all I said, I said, “Hey, you know, comrades, I think these people are fighting for their lives, you know. Bombs are raining on their houses, you know. We have no choice but to support them.” You know, and, you know, and that was that. Even even them when they come with their long stories. Basically, they’re saying, “Help us, we are dying.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s my view. That’s my view.

John Reimann
We discussed how we can work together, going forward. That would include possibly having some joint forums, and that sort of thing, possibly even having a visit to South Africa, all headed towards the goal of establishing direct links between the workers in the United States and the workers in South Africa. Following that, I asked Trevor, for any final words, here’s what he said.

Trevor Ngwane
You know, Marx said, the working people have got no country. Working people have got no country. Yeah. Instead, they have a world to win. But that world they can only when, by reaching out across the borders, you know. Workers don’t belong to any nation, because these nations, actually class formations supervised by bourgeois ideologues, acting on behalf of capital, you know. And Marx said the working class is the revolutionary subject. So not only must we act in our respective countries, but we have to unite across the oceans, across the borders. I can tell you one thing: You have a problem in the USA white supremacy, people like Trump. We have the same problem. Yeah. Because some people say South Africa is the USA of Africa because, you know, we’ve got a bigger economy. And there’s a lot of uneven development in Africa. You get many migrants coming, looking for work in Johannesburg. So you get xenophobia, where the elite here start instigating, you know, against migrants, immigrants, start blaming them, you know. So we can learn a lot from each other, and we can support each other in those struggles, because strategies like xenophobia, although it involves fighting Trump, but a lot of it you can do among ourselves as workers, you know, organizations, you know, talk to each other, sought each other’s ideas out, you know, reach out to the migrant from Mexico, from Mozambique, from Zimbabwe, find out their real situation. You know, guided by socialist principles, international solidarity and then we can address this divide-and-rule rule tactics of the bourgeoisie and win. So, certainly, you know, it’s most important to have those worker-to-worker links across the oceans. Yeah,

Note: For those who found this interview interesting, we recommend also this article on the background history of Zimbabwe.

And also this article on the recent coup in Niger.

Trevor Ngwane, South African socialist, scholar and fighter for the working class