Senior African National Congress officials, including President Thabo Mbeki, paid their last respects to anti-apartheid activist Ellen Kuzwayo at the St John’s Anglican Parish in Soweto on Friday.
Mbeki told hundreds of mourners that this country is free because people like Kuzwayo refused to succumb to despair.
”Through her actions … Ellen Kuzwayo succeeded to inject deep into the souls of the oppressed the conviction that it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
”I ask that we mourn her departure because she left us too soon, because she left us before the new society, for which she had fought throughout her life, had established firm roots.”
The president quoted words from various poets and writers in describing the Ellen Kuzwayo he knew.
”Ellen Kuzwayo is history in the person of a woman,” Mbeki quoted writer Nadine Gordimer.
He also quoted from Kuzwayo’s own autobiography, titled Call Me a Woman.
Mbeki was accompanied by his wife, Zanele, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Johannesburg mayor Amos Masondo, Adelaide Tambo, Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Brigitte Mabandla and other ANC officials.
Because the church was too small to accommodate mourners, a tent was erected outside the church and the service was shown on two big-screen television sets.
Family members sat and watched Kuzwayo’s white coffin, surrounded by flowers, in front of the altar.
Applause and ululations dominated the ceremony when the dignitaries were introduced to the crowd inside the church at the end of the service.
Kuzwayo was buried at Doornkop cemetery in Dobsonville, Soweto. — Sapa