Some of the most important figures of our age died in 1997, writes Fumane Diseko
This year saw the deaths of three first-generation African leaders who had outlived most of their contemporaries, but not, unfortunately, to the benefit of their people. Dr Walter Hastings Banda (92), president of Malawi from 1964 to 1994, died at the Garden City Clinic in Johannesburg. Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ng’bendu Wa Za Banga (the cock that goes from conquest to conquest leaving fires in his wake) died from prostate cancer after amassing wealth estimated between $5 and $10-billion during his 32-year-long rule of former Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo. The country has inherited a legacy of a $14-billion debt and abject poverty.
Also to exit on a less than glorius note was Jean-Bedel Bokassa (75), who spent a quarter of the Central African Republic’s foreign exchange annual earnings crowning himself as emperor in 1977. His crown alone was worth $5-million. Allegations of infanticide and cannibalism surfaced during his 1987 trial where he was sentenced to life imprisonment for embezzling state funds but released in 1993. Bokassa, a Catholic, fathered 55 children from his 17 wives.
At home, we had sadder good-byes for Frances Baard (87), who was one of the leaders of the great 1956 women’s march; Seaparankwe or Isithwala Ndwe, a recipient of the highest African National Congress award; and Barney Desai (65), veteran Pan Africanist Congress member. He was exiled in the 1960s and upon his return in 1991 represented the PAC at the Kempton Park talks. Other losses were Tom Sebina (60), ANC’s voice for many years in exile; Sandy Jacobson (40), a former Umkhonto weSizwe cadre who went into vegetable farming, found in a car boot brutally murdered; Godfrey Pitje (68) who was President Nelson Mandela’s predecessor as ANC Youth League president, and a member of New Africa Investment Limited’s board of directors; Rose Schlachter (84), active member of the South African Communist Party from the days when it was called the Communist Party of South Africa, a trade unionist from the 1940s, still working in the SACP’s Gauteng office up to her death from a brain haemorrhage; advocate Jack Unterhalter (83), a founder member of the Liberal Party in the mid-1950s, still active in the 1980s when he saved the Sharpeville Six from death row. He wrote a book of poems and proverbs under the pseudonym Jacob Stern.
The literary world saw the exit of poet Allen Ginsberg (70), the original Beat poet and unofficial head of the United States hippie movement; he died of liver cancer. He was followed by William Burroughs (83), the godfather of Beat, author of Naked Lunch and Nova Express, to name a few, and known also for killing his companion by accidentally shooting her — missing the target glass balanced on her head. Also gone are Reverend W Awdry (85), who wrote the Thomas the Tank Engine stories, James Michener (90), the 1948 Pulitzer Prize winner (for his novel Tales of the South Pacific), who died of kidney failure, and Harold Robbins, author of The Carpetbaggers, who died in the same week.
Among actors who died this year was Robert Mitchum (79), a star of more than 100 films, among them War and Remembrance and The Night of the Hunter and James Stewart, star of such Hollywood classics as It’s a Wonderful Life and Vertigo. Local loss was Rosslyn Morapedi (52), who acted in numerous local Sesotho dramas and won the Artes Award for best actress. She was killed in a car accident. Michael Bentine (74), founder member of the Goons team who influenced British comedy, died from prostate cancer. He was a rocket physicist, a Shakespearean actor, journalist and an author of 14 books. Peter Holden, a writer, comic and actor best remembered for Aspro-clear commercials, also died, and Johan Blignaut (44), actor, director, writer and producer of among others Mamza and The Native Who Caused All the Trouble, took his own life.
South African artists Patricia Gunning (69) and Lionel Abrams (66) died this year. One of the great men of ideas of the century, British philosopher and biographer of Karl Marx, Sir Isaiah Berlin (88), exited the world peacefully.
On the music front, Fela Anikulapo Kuti (58), a great African musician and a critic of the Nigerian regime, left a void when he succumbed to Aids-related illnesses. Also Michael Hutchence (37), lead singer of the Australian group INXS, who allegedly killed himself; choir master, Jabulani Mazibuko (80),who died on Good Friday; and jazz violinist Stephan Grapelli (89).
Those who have worked for places in heaven are Mother Theresa (87), born in Albania as Agnes Goinxha Bjaxhiu, who devoted her life to the people of the slums of Calcutta; and Archbishop of Bloemfontein Peter Fanyana John Buthelezi (66).
International politicians who died this year were Michael Manly (72), Jamaica’s former prime minister; Shehu Musa Yar’Adua (54), former military vice president of Nigeria, who died in prison; Swapo’s former secretary general and Namibian Minister of Human Resource Development , Moses Garoeb (55); China’s long-time chairman Deng Xiaoping (92). Xiaoping will be remembered for his brutal crushing of the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989 as well as his reform of Mao Zedong’s economic policies, coining the phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. He was last seen in public in 1994. Former Israeli president Chaim Herzog (78) died after a pulmonary illness.
Two famous but very different wives whose lives ended this year were Dr Betty Shabazz (61), widow of El Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X, after suffering burns caused by a fire set to her house by her 12-year-old grandson, Malcolm Shabazz; and Elize Botha (75), wife of former president PW Botha, who died of a heart attack.
Environmentalists leaving the world poorer for their departure were Judi Bari (47), leader of environmental group Earth First!, who died of breast cancer, and Zambian-born environmentalist Norman Carr (84), writer of Return to the Wild.
Professor Sam Nolutshungu (52), who had been offered the tough vice-chancellorship of the University of the Witwatersrand, accepted it, declined, and then died several months later. Dr Nganani Enos Mabuza (58), former leader of the former homeland, KaNgwane, died of cancer.
This year South Africa lost two mayors: Soweto’s mayor Sophie Masite (39), from complications after giving birth to healthy twins; and Brits’s mayor Levy Makhubu Mamabolo (55).
The death of Soraya Bosch (32), lawyer and activist, was followed by the demise of Lusiba Ntloko (43), a stalwart of the Black Consciousness Movement and national organiser of the Azanian People’s Organisation in 1990. He fell from his flat in Johannesburg. AB Ngcobe (66), one of the founders of the PAC, passed away after a short illness. Mooroogiah Jayarajapathy Naidoo (66), former president of the Natal Indian Congress, died in Durban.
In a dramatic double tragedy, dancer Collin Myburgh (29) stabbed to death his Johannesburg Dance Foundation partner Paula Preller (27), crashed on to a car by jumping from the third floor to escape his pursuers and was later found hanging in a manhole close to the scene of the crime at Wits. The highest-profile international exit was that of Princess Diana (36) and her companion Dodi al-Fayed (42).
Sir James Goldsmith (64), billionaire, playboy, survivor of the stock market’s notorious October 19 1987 Black Monday; enemy of Private Eye, Mr “Cash is King”, father of Jemima Khan, father-in-law of Imran Khan, had a heart attack. Jacques Foccart (83), who masterminded French President Charles De Gaulle’s policy on Africa, died. Multi-million-dollar designer Gianni Versace (50) was murdered in Miami Beach.
South African economist Ronnie Bethlehem (62) was killed in a hijacking outside his home in Gauteng. Roger Beaumont Garlick (52), Penta Communications Services MD, died in a car accident with his daughter, Kathryn Garlick (19). Also exiting this year were Sir John Junor (78), editor of the Sunday Express for 32 years; Nora Beloff (78), first woman political correspondent in Britain; Peter Earle (71), an investigative reporter who helped uncover the Christine Keeler scandal that brought down the Tory government in 1962; and financier Baron Edmond Adolph Maurice Jules Jacques de Rothschild (71).
The sports world lost Jaco Reinach (34), a former Springbok sprinter and rugby player, who died in a car accident; Ashley Harvey Walker (56), former Derbyshire player and cricket consultant; Mercer John Davies (73), an Olympic medalist and Comrades Marathon winner, and renowned English cricketer Denis Compton (78).
Herff Applewhite (65), leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult, died along with 38 other cult members who commited suicide near San Diego. Samuel Coetzee (27) committed suicide in a Boksburg prison while facing five charges for killing men after luring them into sexual acts. Henry Frances Hays, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was finally executed in Alabama for lynching a 19-year-old black teenager, after being on death row for 16 years. Former apartheid spy, Peter Casselton, died after being accidentally crushed against a wall by a truck he was repairing; in his 50s, he had been living off the charity of a dwindling group of drinking mates. And the former head of the now-defunct Bureau of State Security and a key player in the arrest of Nelson Mandela, Hendrik van den Bergh, died at the age of 82.