The two best-known anecdotes about Wilton Mkwayi, the African National Congress leader who died last weekend, underscore his virtual invisibility outside the movement he served so single-mindedly for 60 years.
Among the last of the 156 men and women on trial for treason at the Johannesburg Synagogue in 1960, Mkwayi was barred from entering the courtroom by a white policeman who thought he was an ordinary member of the public.
He took swift advantage of the mistake to skip the country, flying from Basutoland to Ghana and then to Prague, where he joined the Soviet-aligned World Federation of Trade Unions.
Three years later, back in South Africa and a member of Umkhonto weSizwe’s (MK) national high command, the man nicknamed “Bri-bri” again did a vanishing act under the noses of the dreaded Special Branch.
On June 11 1963 he was working in the garden at Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia when police, tipped off by an informer, swarmed on to the property. They arrested 17 people, many of whom would later stand trial for their lives for sabotage. While the raid was in progress, Mkwayi slipped away.
Eighty-one at the time of his death, Mkwayi is probably the least-known of the titans of Nelson Mandela’s generation. Unlike Mandela — a man of almost superhuman vigour — he would not play a prominent role in the post-1990 transition or the post-1994 ANC government. His age against him, he faded into relative obscurity as a senator and then ordinary member of the Eastern Cape legislature.
Neither a statesman and diplomat in the mould of Oliver Tambo and Mandela, nor an ideologue and theorist, like Govan Mbeki, Mkwayi had had little formal education and is said to have matriculated only while serving a life sentence on Robben Island.
“He was a humble and dedicated man who loved the people,” recalls Rivonia trialist and now MP Andrew Mlangeni.
Born and raised in Ezihlahleni village, near King William’s Town, Mkwayi spent a conventional rural childhood herding sheep and goats and passing through circumcision school before migrating to work in the Port Elizabeth docks in the early 1940s.
His unusual leadership qualities and empathy with ordinary people propelled him into trade union work — at a time when the official bargaining system ignored black unions and the strike represented virtually the only negotiating tool. The Congress of South African Trade Unions credits him with organising a dock strike in 1948.
Those who knew him make special mention of his tenacity and physical courage. Another Eastern Cape leader and Rivonia trialist, Ray Mhlaba, recalls that, as volunteer-in-chief during the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign in the early 1950s, Mkwayi led a march of hundreds through central Port Elizabeth to the docks.
It is hard now to imagine the audacity that lay behind this act of public nose-thumbing in a narrow-gutted, provincial city that was later to become notorious for the brutality of its security policemen.
It was doubtless on account of these qualities that Mkwayi was included in the first MK group to undergo military training in China, together with Mhlaba, Joe Gqabi (later assassinated in Zimbabwe), Abel Mthembu (later a prosecution witness in the Rivonia Trial) and Steve Naidoo.
The men were schooled in Maoist theories of guerrilla warfare at the Nanking Military Academy, as well as visiting battlefields and other sites central to the Chinese revolution.
The attempt to transplant the Chinese revolutionary experience was a disaster for the ANC — just as Mao diverged from the Russian model, so the South African revolution of the late 1980s would take a very different form from Mao’s peasant-based guerrilla campaigns.
But it is not hard to picture the morale-raising impact of personal contact with successful revolutionaries and — for a man of restricted horizons like Mkwayi — the broadening effect of exposure to sympathetic foreigners in a racially equal setting.
His never-say-die temperament was most clearly highlighted after his disappearing act in Rivonia. With the ANC banned, almost all his top ANC colleagues behind bars and the South African Congress of Trade Unions smashed by the 90-day detention law — numerous black unionists, including Mkwayi’s close associate, Caleb Mayekiso, were to die in custody — he eluded the police for several months as MK’s acting leader.
While on the run, according to Mhlaba, he continued to recruit others for military training and to organise their transport out of the country.
In 1964 he himself stood trial under the Sabotage Act with a group of second-echelon leaders who included Mac Maharaj. It would be a decade or more before resistance politics would begin to reassert itself — in the Durban strike wave and Soweto students’ uprising.
Mkwayi’s standing in the ANC pantheon is borne out by the fact that after his release in 1989, the movement bestowed on him its highest honour, that of “Isithwalandwe [wearer of the leopard-skin]” — placing him in the illustrious company of Sol Plaatjie, Mandela, Tambo and Walter Sisulu.
It was because of activists like him that the ANC evolved, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, from the ivory tower of a middle-class elite to a mass movement with 100 000 paid-up members at the time of its banning.
The connection between the top and the base, the popular tradition Mkwayi helped foster, does much to explain how the South African revolution could be waged in the name of an exiled movement.
It also, in part, explains the extraordinary depth and resilience of ANC support since 1994.
All Mkwayi’s colleagues talk of his loyalty, humility and dedication. It will be many years before the selflessness of his generation of leaders is forgotten.
Wilton Mkwayi, born 1923; died July 24 2004