At a Glance
The Natal Midlands: Soil, Sugar, and the Making of a Revolutionary
Harry Gwala was born on 18 June 1920 in Shayamoya, a rural community in the Natal Midlands — the region of hills and valleys between Durban and the Drakensberg that was, in his lifetime, one of the most intensely politically contested landscapes in South Africa. The Midlands were sugar country and dairy country and, in the towns, textile and manufacturing country: Pietermaritzburg, the provincial capital, had a substantial industrial working class that was African, Coloured, and Indian in composition, and it was from this working class and the surrounding rural communities that Gwala's politics grew.
His father was a peasant farmer, his education brought him to teacher training level, and he worked in Natal schools for years while simultaneously developing his organisational life in the trade unions and political movements. The Natal Midlands gave him a direct, immediate experience of the economic structures of racial capitalism — the wages paid to Black workers in the textile mills, the conditions on the sugar estates, the systematic exclusion of African farmers from the land they worked — that shaped a political analysis grounded in material reality rather than abstraction.
He joined the South African Communist Party and became active in African National Congress structures in the Natal Midlands in the late 1940s and through the 1950s — the period of the Defiance Campaign, the Congress Alliance, the Freedom Charter, and the Treason Trial — building the organisational networks that would sustain his political influence through decades of imprisonment and return. The quality of his organisational work in this period was the foundation of the authority he retained even through two Robben Island sentences: the networks he built were personal as much as institutional, rooted in relationships of trust that imprisonment could defer but not destroy.
Robben Island: Two Sentences, One Conviction
His first arrest and conviction under the Suppression of Communism Act sent him to Robben Island in the 1960s, placing him among the community of political prisoners that included Mandela, Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, and the other major figures of the ANC and SACP underground. The Robben Island experience was, for many of the prisoners who survived it, a period of political deepening — the enforced removal from day-to-day activity created space for theoretical study and political debate that the press of underground organisational work had not permitted. Gwala was a participant in the political education programmes the prisoners organised for themselves, and he emerged from his first sentence with his political convictions hardened rather than moderated.
Released and returned to the Natal Midlands, he resumed his organisational activity in the period of the 1970s — the decade that saw the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement, the Soweto uprising of 1976, and the revival of ANC underground activity inside South Africa. He was re-arrested in 1976 and convicted of conspiracy to commit sabotage, receiving a life sentence and returning to Robben Island for a second time.
His second Robben Island sentence was marked by the onset of motor neurone disease, a progressive neurological condition that over the years of his imprisonment destroyed the motor function of both his arms. By the time of his release in December 1988, he was physically unable to use his arms — a condition that had led human rights organisations and international campaigners to press for his release on humanitarian grounds, arguing that continuing to imprison a man in his condition constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The apartheid government, calculating that releasing a terminally ill man would cause less political damage than the continued international criticism, agreed to his release.
The Lion Returned: Pietermaritzburg and the Violence of the Transition
The Natal Midlands to which Gwala returned in 1988 was a region in the grip of political violence on a scale that dwarfed the township conflict elsewhere in South Africa. The conflict between the ANC and Inkatha — the Zulu cultural and political organisation led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, which had collaborated with elements of the apartheid security apparatus — had by the late 1980s produced a death toll in KwaZulu-Natal that was larger than the combined casualty figures for the rest of the country. Communities had been divided, families had been split, and the routine political activity of organising and canvassing that was the lifeblood of any political movement had become a potentially fatal activity in large parts of the Midlands.
Into this situation returned a man who had served two life-defining prison sentences, who had lost the use of both arms to a degenerative disease, who was operating from a wheelchair, and who retained — despite all of this, or perhaps because of it — an authority in the Midlands townships that no other political figure could match. Gwala's physical condition seemed, in the eyes of his supporters, to demonstrate something essential about the nature of his commitment: here was a man whom the apartheid state could not break, who organised with his voice when it had taken everything else.
His role in the Natal Midlands violence was the most bitterly contested aspect of his political career. His opponents — including figures within the ANC leadership who were engaged in negotiations with the National Party and viewed Midlands violence as a complication they could not afford — accused him of directing and encouraging the ANC's armed response to Inkatha aggression, of creating and overseeing self-defence units that were responsible for attacks as well as defence, and of a militancy that was making the violence worse rather than better. His supporters, drawn from the communities most directly targeted by Inkatha and the security forces, argued precisely the opposite: that without his organisation of armed self-defence, the ANC's base communities in the Midlands would have been destroyed by systematic political killing.
The Negotiated Settlement and the Revolutionary's Dissent
Harry Gwala's relationship with the negotiations of the early 1990s was one of principled and vocal opposition. He was among the most prominent of the ANC's internal critics of the settlement that was being negotiated, and his criticism was not primarily tactical — he was not arguing that the ANC was negotiating badly — but strategic: he did not believe that a negotiated settlement with the National Party could deliver the economic transformation that the liberation movement had been fighting for.
His argument, rooted in the Marxist analysis that had shaped his politics since the 1940s, was that political democracy without economic transformation would leave the structures of racial capitalism — the ownership of the mines, the farms, the factories, the banks — intact beneath a changed political surface. The majority would gain the vote but not the economic power. The ANC would gain the government but not the state. The transition would be, in this analysis, a managed transfer of formal political authority that preserved the essential structures of exploitation that apartheid had been built to serve.
This critique was not unique to Gwala — it was shared by elements of the SACP left and by many within the ANC's working-class constituency — but he expressed it with a bluntness and a public commitment that other critics were more cautious about. He did not moderate his language for diplomatic purposes, did not soften his criticism out of loyalty to the leadership, and did not pretend to be convinced by arguments he found unconvincing. His public disagreements with Mandela and the ANC negotiating team were conducted with a directness that alarmed the party's leadership and reassured the constituency that had never trusted the settlement.
Legacy: The Unbowed Revolutionary
Harry Gwala died on 18 June 1995 — his seventy-fifth birthday — in Pietermaritzburg. The democratic election of 1994 had taken place, the ANC had won, Mandela was president, and the transition that Gwala had opposed was complete. He died having seen it happen, having watched the settlement he had criticised become the new constitutional order, having had the experience of living long enough to know that the future had arrived and that it was not the future he had fought for.
His legacy is genuinely complex and genuinely contested. The violence of the Natal Midlands in which he was a central figure left thousands dead and communities traumatised in ways that outlasted the formal end of political conflict. His role in that violence — whether he directed it, encouraged it, responded to it, or some combination of all three — remains a matter of disagreement among those who knew him and those who have studied the period. The truth, almost certainly, is that the violence was driven by forces larger and more complex than any individual, and that Gwala was one significant actor in a situation that had multiple drivers and no clean moral positions.
What is not contested is the quality of his commitment or the consistency of his political life. He believed what he said. He served two Robben Island sentences for what he believed. He organised from a wheelchair when the disease had taken his arms. He spoke the criticism of the negotiated settlement that the ANC's leadership found inconvenient. He died as he had lived: unaccommodated, unreconciled to a settlement he regarded as insufficient, and unwilling to perform a contentment he did not feel. The Lion of the Midlands was, to the end, a lion.