Tomorrow the last post will be played, his body lowered into the grave and the committal conducted. Tat’uSisulu will really be no more. Everything will have been said and tears will almost have dried. Truly, Kugqityiwe. Why then, do I, who knew him much less than many who have paid the best of tributes, still think I have something to say?
Sometimes when we talk of a better life for the “people”, people are presented as an abstract, homogeneous entity, whose needs are similar and need to be simultaneously met. I am one tiny bit of the “people” and Tat’uSisu lu changed my life for the better. I personally benefited from his being. But how to thank him?
A flurry of words like service, revolutionary, humility, strategist, sacrifice and many more dance in front of me, challenging me to string them into a beautiful and fitting tribute.
I grew up in Orlando East. Because we were poor, I left formal education in form two, and worked in a factory in Jeppe at the age of 13. I was inconsolable when I had to leave school. My late sister Liziwe was an archive of information on the South African struggle and its leaders. It was Tat’uSisulu that she directed me to, an example of how one without formal education can rise to be an outstanding leader of the people.
From then on I was hooked on Tat’uSisulu. Without even knowing him, he became my pillar and my beacon. Through distance learning I passed matric and landed at Fort Hare. I lasted exactly a year, thanks to apartheid and to Tat’uSisulu’s teachings of the need to struggle if you wanted freedom.
On my return from exile I met Tata who had by this time shaped my life (at least the positive attributes). In preparation for my first meeting with such a revolutionary, I rehearsed my “revolutionary” speech. I never delivered it.In two hours he had gently pushed me back to university at the age of 42.
Upon my graduation, I shared with him my excitement at being “educated”. With a twinkle in his eyes he sent me back to Wits for my master’s degree. It was not the formal education that mattered, he counselled me, but the use of that education for bettering the lives of people. Never forget who you are and where you come from, he added.
When I was elected the African National Congress’s deputy secretary general (SG) in 1997, it was to Tat’uSisulu that I poured out what for me was the whole traumatic story of the conference. With a chuckle he told me how he had felt when he was elected as ANC secretary general decades earlier. In that discussion, and in many more, he painstakingly disabused me of any notion I might have had of status in being a deputy secretary general, (“you are here to serve and not to be served”); of material gain in the office (he told me that the ANC still owed him a promised salary, and that being deputy secretary general was not a job but a revolutionary duty); of my importance as an individual (it was by sheer chance that I was elected, as there are thousands of capable ANC cadres, he said).
Instead “service”, “servant”, “people first” … were the refrain of his discussions. And yet he always made me feel special with possibilities of being a ‘real’ leader one day.
Tata loved and had complete confidence in people. He always said that is what kept him going through all the harsh years of struggle.
In 2000 the ANC was grappling with a new tendency among some members to use the ANC as the stepping-stone towards self-enrichment. Some of us were angry and impatient with these rogues who were prepared to “mortgage” the organisation.
But Tata was patient with our impatience always seeing “beauty” where we thought none existed.
While he appreciated the problem, he also called on the leadership to take responsibility for giving these “mortgagers” space. He pointed out that it was not automatic that members would internalise the policies, principles, values, culture and traditions of the ANC. He wondered if we were paying serious attention to the mass base and to ANC branches. Rogues, he maintained would never survive in an ANC with strong active branches.
This advice, given in his dotage, was one factor that led to a branch overhaul.
Since his death, a broad “political school” has been opened in our country.
Daily, since his death, branches of this school were run — in prayer meetings, memorial services, homes, the media … indeed everywhere in our country, teaching the lessons this society can often forget. In death, Tat’uSisulu remained a teacher.
On leaving the deputy secretary general responsibility, Tata laughingly welcomed me to the ranks of “former”. Now was the time, he said, that my leadership was to be tested. Leadership is not only when you are in office. You have to work and give leadership among the masses, in your branch without a title, without hope or wish for personal recognition, gain or reward and under any leader.
Will I ever win, I thought? When I was in office I was not a leader, out of office, I have to give leadership but am still not a leader.
Someone has asked if this country has leadership of TatuSisulu’s calibre?
Undoubtedly. But it is not the formal leadership elected or appointed to responsibilities in the different spheres of authority that is critical, but the society producing those leaders. Leadership is not an external phenomenon descending from above, but is a product of society. If the fabric of our society embodies Tat’uSisulu’s fundamental values and attributes, then the leadership will be a cloth cut from that very fabric. Let his political school continue.
Even if each one of us were to emulate a few of his attributes — humility, integrity, honesty, commitment, love and a hatred of ostentatiousness, we would have paid a fitting tribute to that giant. South Africa would definitely be a better place. Tat’uSisulu has handed the baton to us. We cannot fail him.