GOVANMBEKI
Govan Mbeki’s death this week ends one of the longest and most heroic lives in liberation politics.
Govan Mvuyelwa Mbeki was born in 1910 in Nqamakwe, Transkei, the son of a deposed chief. After attending various Methodist mission schools he completed a BA at Fort Hare in 1937 and subsequently worked in the Transkei as a teacher, shopkeeper and newspaper editor. In 1940 he obtained a Unisa BCom. He joined the ANC in 1935 and the Communist Party a few years later. He married Epainette Moerane, a schoolteacher and a fellow party member, in 1940.
Mbeki represented Idutywa in the Transkeian Bunga (Parliament) between 1943 and 1947. In 1953 after the destruction of his store by a tornado he moved to Ladysmith to teach. After his dismissal for political activities (which included an effort to organise local coal miners into a trade union) he was invited to take over the management of the New Age office in Port Elizabeth.
For the next decade he was to be deeply immersed in the ANC’s organisational politics in Port Elizabeth, during that time its most powerful base. He became the ANC’s national chairperson in 1956.
A key figure in the ANC and SACP’s decision to embark on guerilla warfare Mbeki led a sabotage unit in Port Elizabeth. He was arrested at Lilliesleaf farm, Rivonia, with other Umkhonto High Command members on July 11 1963 and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released from Robben island in 1987. From 1994 he held a second term of elected office in the South African Senate before his political retirement.
Activism notwithstanding, Mbeki’s real importance was as one of the liberation movement’s foremost intellectuals. His first published booklet, Let’s Do It Together, on the formation of peasant cooperatives, appeared in 1946. This was followed by a series of pamphlets. The Peasants’ Revolt, his contribution to the Penguin African Library, established his international reputation in 1961. A ferocious indictment of the distortion of chiefly institutions under colonial rule, the book focused on popular resistance to Bantu Authorities and agricultural “betterment” in the homelands during the 1950s.
It can also be read as a strategic injunction directed at Mbeki’s fellow ANC leaders, for at that time he was untypical in his championship of rural organisation. Mbeki’s conviction that South African peasants were potential supporters of a radical “national democratic” revolution was an important factor in the ANC’s eventual decision to adopt a rural guerilla-based strategy in the early 1960s. This was a course that Mbeki himself had been advocating in the Eastern Cape as early as 1959.
On Robben Island Mbeki helped direct the programme of political education that the ANC leadership instituted after 1976 as a means of exerting its influence over a fresh influx of political prisoners. Mbeki’s influence was important in ensuring that the ANC’s understanding of history was presented to the young black consciousness militants through an interpretive framework built on socialist classics.
The Robben Island prison school was partly responsible for the virtual hegemony a highly orthodox Marxism had achieved within the mass democratic movement during the 1980s. Not that the Rivonia generation was politically homogenous. A sharp rift existed for a time between Nelson Mandela and Mbeki, with the two disagreeing over the status of Operation Mayibuye, the guerilla warfare plan that the ANC had established at Lilliesleaf, and also at odds over the relationship between the ANC and the Communist Party. Mandela insisted on the separate status of the two organisations whereas Mbeki felt they were in the process of becoming one. Mbeki’s Robben Island lectures appeared in book form in 1991, entitled Learning from Robben Island. In 1970 he completed an honours degree in economics.
His political influence was decisive. He was one of a key group of ANC left-wing leaders who were responsible in the 1950s for turning the ANC into a popular organisation that embraced a social democratic programme and that built its strength through an alliance with labour organisations.
These traditions endure today. For example, activists in Ladysmith still attribute the ANC’s success in building a comparatively effective local government to the traditions of popular service that Mbeki instilled in community organisations in the early 1950s.
And though much has changed in the ANC’s political posture and social following since its adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1956, its commitment to economic redistribution and its relationship with trade unionism continues.
In a political irony that Mbeki would have relished as an example of history’s dialectic, he died on the day that his son’s government was confronted by a massive strike called by its labour allies against privatisation. Never predisposed to personal sentimentality, Mbeki would have welcomed this conflict as yet one more signal that even in South Africa class consciousness will sooner or later prevail over the preoccupations of family, race and nation.
Tom Lodge