Alert! Perusers of this week’s Mail & Guardian may have noticed that the letters page contains a scathing attack by Paul Trewhela on Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp, authors of the new Chris Hani biography, Hani: A life too short.
The M&G hasn’t put the letter online (yet), but a longer version of it has just appeared at Politicsweb – and, like the original, it carries the whiff of serving a dual purpose: first, as an aggressive (not to say openly hostile) act of setting the historical record straight; and second, as a lever for promoting Trewhela’s own book. The shortcomings that he finds in A life too short are remedied, he says, in his treatment of the ANC and SWAPO’s military prison system, Inside Quatro.
Trewhela’s attack appears to boil down to a claim that Smith and Tromp glossed over Hani’s supposed role in secret prison executions. A contest for control over the narrative of the struggle leader’s legacy, then:
There is a serious problem with the recently published biography, Chris Hani: A Life Too Short (Jonathan Ball, 2009), written by Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp. Sello M Alcock hints at the problem but does not identify it in his review in the Mail & Guardian (16 October), when he notes that they “manage only to gloss over” certain complex episodes in Hani’s life in exile.
The authors are senior journalists in South Africa, which makes the matter more disturbing.
Smith is an executive editor of The Star, the premier daily newspaper in the country and the leading media organ of the Independent News & Media group. Tromp is a senior reporter on The Star. This year he won the Mondi Shanduka Newspaper Journalist of the Year award, the CNN African Print Journalist of the Year award and the Vodacom Regional Print News Journalist of the Year award.
Their biography of Chris Hani fails on a most basic criterion, however: integrity to sources.
The result is that complexities in Hani’s life are obscured, and not made properly accessible to the reader.
The crucial chapter concerns Hani’s relation to the mutiny of about 90 percent of the trained troops of Umkhonto we Sizwe in Angola in 1984, the incarceration of leaders of the mutiny in Quatro prison camp, and their subsequent fates.
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