BRYAN PEARSON, Johannesburg | Tuesday
EVEN in death anti-apartheid stalwart Govan Mbeki is continuing his fight against injustice in South Africa he has decreed in his will that he be buried in a rundown cemetery to draw attention to the graveyard’s neglect.
Mbeki, father of South African President Thabo Mbeki, died peacefully last Thursday at the age of 91.
Hailed by former president Nelson Mandela as “a great hero of the (anti-apartheid) struggle,” he will be buried on Saturday.
The cemetery he chose for his final resting place borders the black township of Zwide near the south coast manufacturing city of Port Elizabeth, a political hotbed where he spent much of his life.
The cemetery holds the graves of a number of political activists, some of whom died at the hands of the apartheid police.
However, over the years it has been allowed to fall into a state of dereliction first by the white authorities for whom a graveyard for blacks would not been high on a list of priorities, and more latterly by the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which now controls the greater Port Elizabeth area and is battling to redress social imbalances caused by apartheid.
Residents of Zwide said that the fence around the graveyard disappeared some years back, resulting in landless people erecting shanties among the graves and angering families of those buried there.
Some families have exhumed the bodies of their loved ones and reburied them in the graveyard at nearby Motherwell, which during apartheid, when separation between the races was enforced as strictly in death as in life, was reserved for whites only.
Instead of choosing the well-kept, better-managed Motherwell cemetery which he was entitled to do after the demise of apartheid in 1994 Mbeki, fondly known around here as ‘Oom (uncle) Gov’, opted instead for the overgrown, overcrowded, rundown graveyard at Zwide.
President Thabo Mbeki’s representative, Smuts Ngonyama, told local reporters: “Oom Gov had always been concerned about the poor state of the cemetery and he hoped that by being buried there some improvement will be made to the cemetery.”
Said Mbeki’s other son Moeletsi: “It was my father’s last wish to be buried here so we are honouring it.”
The graveyard, he added, is in fact full but a plot has been identified where his father’s grave will be dug.
Moeletsi Mbeki said whether the graveyard is upgraded after his father’s burial “depends entirely on the local municipality.”
Municipal manager Graham Richards said that “a bit of tidying up work” will be done before Saturday’s funeral “to make it as convenient as possible for mourners.”
He said the graveyard was “inherited from the old apartheid system, which spent no money at all” on facilities for blacks.
Beyond the tidying, no one should expect much, he warned.
“We are faced with other priorities like providing housing, water, sewerage and electricity rather than focusing on old cemeteries,” Richardson said.
Mbeki became a political activist when he very young, periodically being detained by the apartheid authorities until he went underground and joined the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).
In 1964 Mbeki and other ANC leaders, including Mandela, were sentenced to life in jail for sabotage and conspiring to overthrow the government, and sent to Robben Island.
Mbeki was released in 1987 at the age of 77, three years before Mandela, and immediately resumed his work for the ANC and the South African Communist Party.
He retired at the age of 89 just before his eldest son became president. – AFP