Gaye Davis
Tom Sebina, who has died aged 60, was for years the public voice of the African National Congress and one of the last of the organisation’s cadres to return from exile.
His office, little more than an agglomeration of desks and chairs crowded into a tiny room at the ANC’s rudimentary headquarters off a dusty side street in downtown Lusaka, Zambia, was the first port of call for visiting journalists eager, during the organisation’s last months of exile, for interviews with its leading figures.
They would come armed with the obligatory bottle of duty-free whisky, which would duly be stashed alongside Sebina’s desk. Then they would wait – and wait – for the promised interviews to materialise. Sebina was not a man to be pushed around, and anyone who thought their bottle of hooch would grease the wheels soon learnt otherwise.
One of my most enduring memories of Sebina is of him facing a torrent of abuse in the foyer of Lusaka’s Pamodzi Hotel from an infuriated Radio France journalist.
It was February 1990; the ANC had been unbanned for three days, yet the journalist was still trying to get an official response to this watershed event. A string of missed deadlines had driven him to the end of his tether.
But Sebina stood his ground. The journalist’s difficulties were not his fault: ANC leaders were still jetting in from around the world and a meeting of the national executive committee had yet to take place.
I think Sebina took a mischievous delight in the frustration of foreign correspondents unaccustomed to the ANC’s way of doing things, particularly if they came across as arrogant and demanding.
To those who showed the necessary humility, Sebina was unfailingly polite and helpful as far as he was able.
With the unbanning of the ANC and the move to centre stage of the organisation’s leaders, Sebina’s voice was stilled. Poor health saw him take a back seat in ANC activities after his return from Lusaka to his Soweto home, where he died after a long illness on Monday.
His record as a political activist began during protests against Bantu education in the 1950s; he helped distribute pamphlets for the Kliptown meeting which was to produce the Freedom Charter in 1955.
He left South Africa in 1964, making a perilous journey which saw him walking huge distances to reach safety beyond South Africa’s borders.
He underwent military training in the Soviet Union and was deployed to Dar es Salaam, where he worked for the ANC’s Radio Freedom before moving to Lusaka for the department of information and publicity, first under Thabo Mbeki and then under Pallo Jordan.