Port Elizabeth | Thursday
GOVAN Mbeki, a veteran of the ANC’s liberation struggle and father of President Thabo Mbeki, died at his home in Port Elizabeth during the early hours of Thursday morning, the presidency confirmed.
President Mbeki’s representative Bheki Khumalo said Mbeki died at his Summerstrand home in Port Elizabeth at 2am on Thursday morning.
Best known to younger generations for his relationship to his more famous son, ”Oom Gov” carved a place in history as a political leader and intellectual in his own right.
His party earlier this year described him as a man who brought with him ”the rare qualities of selflessness and utter devotion to the cause of the oppressed and exploited millions of our country”.
Govan Mbeki was born on July 9, 1910 in the Nqamakwe district of Transkei son of a chief of the Zizi clan who was deposed by the government.
He attended mission schools including Healdtown and completed a bachelor of arts degree, majoring in politics and psychology, and a diploma in education at the University of Fort Hare in 1936.
In 1935 while a student he joined the African National Congress, having come under the influence of South African Communist Party leader Eddie Roux.
Mbeki’s experiences in the Transkei, a black ”homeland” treated by successive white governments as a pool for labour for South Africa’s developing capitalist economy, made a deep impression on him.
However his experience of Johannesburg in the late 1920s was decisive.
”Once again I saw the poverty of the black Africans,” he wrote afterwards. ”Where I lived in the city and in the suburbs police raids were always taking place. Either they wanted to check our passes or were looking for illegal drink. No other event up till then had provoked my anger as much as those raids and I decided definitely to join the struggle to put an end to such a system.”
After leaving university, Mbeki taught at various schools in the Transkei, but was eventually dismissed for political activity.
He then ran a co-operative trading stall in Idutywa and edited the Territorial Magazine, later renamed Inkundla ya Bantu, from 1938 to 1944.
In 1941 he served as secretary of the Transkei African Voters’ Association and in 1943 was elected to a four-year term in the Transkei Bunga, a toothless council, as representative for Idutywa.
At this time he assisted in drawing up an ANC document which listed demands for the type of society envisaged for South Africa and which was a precursor to the Freedom Charter adopted by the Congress movement in 1955.
In 1955 Mbeki moved to Port Elizabeth as local editor of New Age, a leftist newspaper, and became deeply involved in ANC activities.
According to biographer Shelagh Gastrow, he consolidated its support in the area to the extent that it became the hub of Congress support in South Africa.
Port Elizabeth, says Gastrow, became one of the few areas in the country where the M plan, a system of cell organisation devised by Nelson Mandela, was implemented effectively.
Mbeki participated in the planning of the Congress of the People in 1955, becoming leader of the ANC in the Eastern Cape, and was elected national chairman of the movement in 1956.
During the Sharpeville emergency in 1960 Mbeki spent five months in detention.
The following year he joined the Communist Party of South Africa and in December 1961 was arrested and charged under the Explosives Act, spending several months in solitary confinement before being brought to trial.
He was acquitted on a technicality.
In 1963, ignoring a house arrest order, he went underground and joined Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC’s military wing – serving as secretary of its high command.
In July that year he was arrested during the police swoop on the Rivonia headquarters of MK, and along with Nelson Mandela was sent to Robben Island to serve a life sentence for sabotage.
In 1970 while in prison Mbeki completed an honours degree in economics, and in 1977 was awarded an honorary doctorate in social science by the University of Amsterdam for his work, The Peasants’ Revolt, published in the United Kingdom in 1964 but banned in South Africa.
The book dealing with peasant resistance to white rule was begun on toilet paper while he was awaiting his Explosives Act trial.
One of a younger generation of political prisoners on Robben Island, Mosiuoa ”Terror” Lekota said in later years that Mbeki helped channel their blind anger towards ensuring that freedom would finally be achieved in South Africa.
Another fellow-prisoner, Thami Mkhwanazi, recalled that Mbeki (”Gevangene 21/67” to the warders) never went to film shows, watched television only for the news and was from the state’s point of view notorious for his uncompromising communist leanings.
But despite this puritanism, he would at weekends strum his guitar and sing Afrikaans folksongs, including Jan Pierewiet.
Mkhwanazi also recorded that Mbeki had a strange habit of switching off lights whenever he saw one on apparently a throwback to the early sixties when the prison authorities insisted that all lights be turned off at night and when they were not needed.
In 1980 he was given in absentia the ANC’s Isithwalandwe award, the highest honour the party can bestow on any individual.
Mbeki was released by PW Botha’s government on November 5, 1987, the first of the Rivonia triallists to be freed, but was banned a few weeks later.
He was elected deputy president of the Senate after the democratic elections in 1994 that saw the ANC sweep to power, served subsequently as one of the Eastern Cape’s permanent delegates to the National Council of Provinces, and formally retired from politics in March 1999.
Nelson Mandela, in one of his last acts before the 1999 general elections that saw him step down as president, awarded him the Order for Meritorious Service (gold).
Asked about his son’s ascension to the presidency, Mbeki said: ”I feel fine not because he is my son, but because we have a man in that position to carry on with the work of the ANC and the people of South Africa.”
In July this year when he turned 90, the ANC honoured him with a special banquet at its national general council meeting in Port Elizabeth.
Mbeki also served as chancellor of the University of Fort Hare.
He was married to Epainette, nee Moerane from whom in his last years he lived separately in Port Elizabeth and had one daughter and three sons, including Thabo. – Sapa