It is notable that, today, as the liberation veterans age and begin to publish biographies and reflections, how many times they need either the hand of sympathetic liberals or academics to do so on their behalf. (In this he was not alone as Lancet editor, Richard Horton, who also has cancer, did the same to the British science establishment). And, in Scientists against the Science, he did not spare the health academics as they buckled under government and business pressures to prematurely lift the lockdowns to “save the economy”. In long papers over 20, Oupa excoriated the Ramaphosa government for its responses that amounted to the abandonment of the poor. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and the worst health crisis of the last 100 years, an ANC government cuts the health budget and maintains the elite political project of austerity and privatisation, with the commentariat as its praise-singers. The erstwhile liberation movement of the ANC and its Cosatu and SACP allies has become a disgraced BEE “front” for South Africa’s oligarchs of white monopoly capital. In South Africa, not 30 years have passed since what appeared to be the achievements of winning the right to vote and yet, today in 2021, nearly two-thirds of eligible South Africans find the political class so corrupt and dysfunctional that they do not vote or (in the case of young people) bother to register. For him, critique meant not so much debunking the arguments of those who merely worship the current order as an accomplished fact but showing how and why such views should be dominant today. In papers such as The Dream Corrupted and the Long Reach of De Klerk Oupa critiqued South Africa’s transition. Oupa’s writings on these questions give a different interpretation and give us perspectives, even now, of what may be done. That the only alternative to the elite pact was more bloodshed and chaos. At the same time the ANC would have us believe, simultaneously, that it both won the negotiations battle and that its hands are tied in any attempts to deal with the outstanding apartheid questions: the national question, the land question, the limited nature of our democracy and public accountability. Liberal commentators salute the post-1994 constitutional order and lay claim to have been the guiding influences. It is one of the abiding myths of the current moment that the outcomes of these negotiations were the best possible. It is capitalism’s shift to neo-liberalism that accounts for the rampant corruption and privatisation and the decline of democracy that is South Africa today.Īs the apartheid regime of FW de Klerk (who also died in 2021) began the open negotiations of 1990 (we now know that regime-ANC secret talks long preceded 1990) which ushered in the transition, Oupa wrote detailed studies of these negotiations and their relations to the state of play of national struggles on the ground to provide strategic guidance to activists.
It is the ANC’s acceptance that development and democracy required a competitive capitalism that is the basis for its subservience to the old apartheid oligarchs. Not because of some mere ideological dogma but because, as has subsequently been painfully demonstrated, apartheid and capitalism were inextricably linked. Over all this time, Oupa was part of a socialist current in Cosatu and in the youth and community struggles who fought to ensure that struggles for democracy and national liberation were fused with struggles against capitalism.
Oupa left Cape Town in 1990 for Durban where he joined Sached (Durban), while writing a weekly educational series in the Learning Nation in Johannesburg before taking over Khanya College in Johannesburg in 1998.
Thereafter he helped form the Lagunyacro (a contraction of Langa, Gugulethu, Nyanga and Crossroads) youth movement and the Western Cape Youth League. He was also a leader of the Committee of 81, which coordinated the joint boycotts of African and “coloured” schools in 1980. Our job is to change it.”īorn in Gugulethu, Cape Town in 1960, Oupa as a student at Fezeka High led the 1976 uprising in Cape Town (which only started in August of that year). He repudiated the idea that “theory” was the sole prerogative of the academy and instead epitomised Marx’s 11 th thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only attempted to understand as it is. He combined these with programmes of discussion with networks of activists and education programmes with workers at the SA Committee for Higher Education (Sached) and Khanya.