Now’s the time to learn from Che Guevara

Ernesto Che Guevara is reported to have died 50 years ago on October 9, 1967, in Bolivia. More precisely though, Che was executed by the Bolivian army, under the direct instructions of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. 

Che did not die of natural causes, nor did he live long, he drew his last breath at the age of 39.

The captors and executors of Che, cut off his hands and buried him in an unmarked grave in the jungles of Bolivia. 

They believed that by cutting his hands off, they would be able to provide proof of his death, whilst by disposing of his body in such a crude way, they would not allow his grave to become a shrine, and therefore extinguish the memory and ideas of Che Guevara.

How wrong they were!

I first learnt of Che Guevara in the mid-80s when we used to visit an older comrade who worked for the Transport and General Workers’ Union.

We would discuss the fate of the revolution while listening to jazz, and plan public acts of defiance and organising the youth.

The comrade had named her pot plants after various revolutionaries, one was Fidel Castro, another Amilcar Cabral, and of course, Che Guevara.

In my naiveté, I thought these were the Latin names for the plants, until one day, I asked her, “What do these names mean?” And that’s when she told me about Guinea Bissau poet, author and activist Amilcar Cabral, and Cuban President Fidel Castro and about this Bohemian revolutionary from Argentina who fought for Cuban and African liberation, Che Guevara.

It was Che who captured my imagination more than any of the others. He seemed to typify the African National Congress-led struggle against apartheid. It was not just freedom for freedom’s sake, rather building a life of freedom for all - a society of higher ideals that did not focus on things but on the well-being of the most downtrodden.

Che’s ideas and ideals resonated with the ANC’s commitment to the principles of non-racialism and non-sexism.

It would have been easy for the ANC to preach a doctrine of hate against the oppressor, but rather - like Che - they focused on the struggle surpassing narrow objectives, believing that we all deserve a society, including our erstwhile oppressors, wherein we are free, especially free from prejudice, discrimination and built-in oppression.

Today, we should be using the ideas, ideals and principles of Che Guevara to build the country we dreamed of when struggling against apartheid.

Understand that this myth of Che Guevara, grew in a time when there were no T-shirts of Che, easily purchased in Truworths or Jet.

There were no books outlining his life, or movies documenting his story.

I was left to feed on titbits and crumbs fed to me by those who studied abroad and visited over the holidays.

The Guevara myth grew to Herculean proportions. I named my son after him.

The interesting thing is, once political freedom arrived and I could find literature on Che, his myth did not stand up to his actual life. Most would say that all life stories are not as big as the myth, but with Che Guevara, his actual life was greater than his myth.

John Lee Anderson’s tome on Che Guevara is able to outline not just the courage and sheer bloody-mindedness of Che, but his willingness to sacrifice everything he knew, just to live a life that was in service of the people.

The Motorcycle Diaries, which sketch Che’s journey through South America after completing his medical studies, reveal how he recognised that he had to commit class suicide to join the struggle against oppression, and the Swedish-made documentary Sacrificio shows that even Che’s death revealed how left- wing activists can exploit revolutionary rhetoric to put forward selfish and greedy agendas.

More than anything, all that has been written and documented about Che reveals that there can only be one Che Guevara.

I do not think that our planet would have been able to withstand two of them.

Che put everything second to the revolutionary struggle. His family, children, friends, comrades - and even his needs - were all a distant second to the primacy of the revolution.

It was not that he was disinterested in creature comforts, but that he fervently believed that he existed only to take forward the revolution, nothing else, but just that! I am truly unsure that even I, an enthusiastic fan of Che Guevara, will want to live like Che, it is just too much to ask. There can only be one Che.

But we must aspire to be like Che Guevara. And we have the latitude to cherry-pick which of his many qualities we should emulate. Because, as one visionary said, any of us, leaders and followers alike, seem to elevate Che’s anger and penchant for violence above his other more cerebral qualities.

We have arrived, it seems as a country and a movement, where our frustrations too easily boil over and we are quick to become instant revolutionaries, and build barricades, so we can live our fantasy out of burning them down! We have all seen the footage, of young, old, students and so forth resorting to violence. We equate being revolutionary to being violent.

As a movement and a country, we show no appetite to tackle the tough challenges with honesty and intellectual fervour.

We rather create caricatures of issues, and call that being radical. We search for easy, rhetorical solutions.

And of course we are good at making our challenges and our problems be about this or that person or persons. Our politics and social discussions become about people, not ideas, ideals and principles.

We fool ourselves that fighting against somebody, and placing another in a leadership position is revolutionary work.

Che Guevara was a medical doctor. He was not a lawyer, or a trade unionist.

Che Guevara was a foreigner. He did not belong to any of the high and well-known struggle families. On this 50th Anniversary of his death let us try to be like Che.

Let us create heroes out of those who are committed to (re)building this country, assert its independence globally, and unapologetically putting forward socio-economic transformation programmes that place the people at the centre and that are led and driven by the people.

Then we are living lives like Che Guevara!

* Williams is the Director of Africa Affairs & Special Projects at the National School of Government. These are his personal views.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.