The inconvenient hero: McBride and SA’s selective memory

SOUTH Africa has always had a complicated relationship with its struggle heroes.

- NCO DUBE

Former Independent Police Investigative Directorate head Robert McBride testified before the Ad Hoc Committee investigating corruption, political interference, and criminal infiltration in South Africa's criminal justice system. McBride embodies South Africa's complicated relationship with its liberation fighters. The writer explores how McBride's refusal to be a "convenient hero" reveals our nation's selective memory and unresolved trauma. I ARMAN HOUGH Independent Newspapers

(I ARMAN HOUGH Independent Newspapers)

We celebrate them in song, in murals, in the sepia-toned nostalgia of public holidays, yet we recoil when they appear before us in the flesh. Flawed, human, unvarnished.Few figures embody this contradiction more sharply than Robert McBride. He is not a likeable man, and perhaps he has never tried to be. He is arrogant, flippant, dismissive, and often abrasive. He is also a politician’s worst nightmare: independent-minded, unpredictable, and utterly unwilling to toe any party line.

But beneath the rough edges lies a truth that many in the ANC’s struggle-credential class quietly resent, McBride is the real thing. A genuine combatant. A man who went to war, carried out missions, faced the gallows, and lived to tell the tale.

In a country where struggle credentials have become political currency that is sometimes inflated, sometimes forged, often selectively remembered, McBride's are inconveniently authentic. And that authenticity has made him both a symbol and a target.

A life lived under surveillance