Former president Nelson Mandela has paid a visit to ailing former Eastern Cape premier Raymond Mhlaba at his Summerstrand home in Port Elizabeth, SABC news reported on Wednesday. Mandela was accompanied by his wife Graca.
Mhlaba is suffering from advanced liver cancer. Mandela said Mhlaba had lived a full life.
A son of the Eastern Cape, Mhlaba spent 25 years in jail after being sentenced, along with Mandela, to life imprisonment.
As chairperson of the Port Elizabeth branch of the ANC Mhlaba was the first ANC member in the country to be arrested in the non-violent 1952 defiance campaign against apartheid laws.
He achieved this distiction — without realising it at the time — by leading a group of volunteers into the ”Europeans Only” entrance of the New Brighton police station in Port Elizabeth.
For this, he earned the sobriquet ”Vulindlela” — he who opens the way.
After the ANC was banned in 1960 he joined other exiles doing military training in China, becoming, as he put it in his memoirs, ”a trained and handsome soldier”.
Returning in October 1962, Mhlaba took over command of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC’s armed wing, after the arrest of Mandela.
The following year he was detained along with other key MK members in a security police swoop on Liliesleaf farm at Rivonia in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was sent with Mandela and the other seven Rivonia triallists to Robben Island, off Cape Town.
Released in October 1989, Mhlaba was elected in 1991 to the ANC national executive and South African Communist Party central committee. He became national chairman of the SACP in 1995.
When the ANC swept to power in 1994, Mhlaba became premier of the Eastern Cape.
He suffered a stroke in July 2003. ‒ Sapa