Communist leader Moses Mabhida, who died in exile in Maputo in 1986, finally came home this week.
Mabhida’s remains were exhumed in a special ceremony in the Mozambican capital attended by family members and ANC high-ups, including KwaZulu-Natal Premier S’bu Ndebele and Finance Minister Zweli Mkhize.
After an 11-day motorised homecoming, which will take in ceremonies at Piet Retief and Mkhuze, he will be reburied on December 2 in his home town of Pietermaritzburg.
Mabhida was general secretary of the SACP and national executive member of the ANC and its labour wing Sactu, at the time of his death from illness on March 8 1986.
Former colleagues described him this week as ”less a podium-pushing bully than a strategist and quiet behind-the-scenes organiser with a colossal appetite for work and revolutionary activism”.
”He was a father figure to me who wanted to know about my part in the struggle,” says Sile Ndlanzi, who served under Mabhida in Swaziland and rose to the high command of Umkhonto weSizwe in the 1980s.
”I told him I was not interested in ideology, but wanted guns to fight. He was always reading what I thought was a Bible, but it was actually Das Kapital — he told me to read it. I turned the pages and threw it on the floor and told him I wanted to leave and go back home with guns to fight. He said: ‘The man behind the gun is more important than the gun itself.’ It was my first political lesson,” says Ndlanzi.
At his first meeting with Mabhida in Swaziland, Ndlanzi said he was asked to recruit well-known contemporary South Africans such as Minister of Transport Jeff Radebe and Chamber of Mines CE Diliza Mji.
Nicknamed Madhevu (the man with long whiskers), Mabhida was born in Thorneville outside Pietermaritzburg in 1923.
He joined the ANC and the trade union movement under the influence of Harry Gwala, a teacher at his school, before joining the SACP in 1942. Working full-time with the unions, he was elected one of the four Sactu vice-presidents at its first congress in 1955.
Activist Ivan Pillay believes ”links with the trade unions and the fact that he was one of the few Zulus, and from KwaZulu-Natal, in exile made him the second most important figure in the ANC, behind Oliver Tambo, and vital in the tussle between the IFP and the ANC in exile”.
A staunch Marxist-Leninist and admirer of the Soviet Union, Mabhida’s work and training took him to many communist countries during the Cold War. He was visiting Cuba in 1985 when he suffered a stroke. A year later, he died from a heart attack.
At his funeral in Maputo on March 29 1986, then-ANC president Oliver Tambo paid tribute to his leadership: ”Comrade Mabhida fought hard and long to ensure that nothing should turn the ANC into a rabble of black chauvinists or a clique of Leftist demagogues.
”He battled against all conspiracies designed to weaken the ANC as a fighting organisation of the people, a true national movement loyal to the great principles which inspired its creation and have guided it to this day.”