Swapna Prabhakaran
Archibald Jacob Gumede, journalist, lawyer and veteran freedom fighter, passed away after a long battle with illness in Durban last Sunday. It was Father’s Day and he died surrounded by his children and grandchildren.
His passing was peaceful – appropriate for a man known as “Archie, the gentle giant”.
Gumede played no small part in the 20th- century history of South Africa, living and fighting through the years of the struggle to see his children live in a free country.
He was born in Pietermaritzburg in 1914, the son of one of the founding members of the African National Congress, Josiah Gumede. He was exposed to politics at an early age, influenced no doubt by his father, who had risen through the ranks of the ANC to become its president. Gumede himself was still a young man when he became the provincial secretary of the ANC in the late 1940s.
As the apartheid regime gained ground, Gumede was charged with treason for his involvement with the ANC in 1956 – alongside such men as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, and Oliver Tambo. Over the next 15 years, Gumede was detained several times and twice placed under a five- year banning order.
He often joked in his later years it was thanks to those banning orders that he found the time to qualify as an attorney.
Humble though he was, Gumede never lost his commitment to the struggle for freedom. He passionately defended freedom fighters and the poorest cititzens in the courts and was deeply involved in mobilising and motivating the masses.
At the height of apartheid’s oppression in the late 1970s and early 1980s the United Democratic Front was founded, and Gumede became its co-president.
Charged once again with high treason in 1984, Gumede and five fellow stalwart members of the UDF and the Natal Indian Congress staged a well publicised search for refuge in the British consulate in Durban.
The “Consulate Six”, as they were dubbed by the media, spent three months in the building, evading arrest in a highly visible and non-violent protest against the government of the day.
When the sit-in ended and Gumede was taken away to prison, he told the local newspaper, the Natal Witness: “I am going to do everything possible, together with the organisations to which I belong, the UDF and its allies, to continue with the fight until South Africa is free.”
A decade later the fight was over, and Gumede spent his twilight years in a wheelchair, looking on as his younger comrades took places in Parliament.
He lived on in KwaZulu-Natal, talking to all who would listen on the virtues of peace in the strife-torn region.