ANC leader: Anti-apartheid stalwart Raymond Mhlaba in 1984.
Photo: Gallo Images
The ANC gets onto its feet in Port Elizabeth
The second decade of the twentieth century saw great turbulence in Europe, with the continent’s major countries entering a massive war, now called the First World War.
South Africa had only been unified into a single country for four years when this war broke out and the then white government of Prime Minister General Louis Botha quickly joined Britain’s side, diverting many of South Africa’s very limited resources and many of our young men’s lives to this far-away conflict.
These world-shaking events did not penetrate all of the new country of South Africa, and in the little village of Mazoka, between the headwaters of the Tyhume and Koonap rivers in what is now the district of Fort Beaufort in the ancestral land of King Maqoma, a young man whose name was Mxokozeli (I will give you his full name after a few suspenseful moments) did what young men have always done — he fell in love.
His beloved, Dinah Mnyazi, was, however, from a wealthy home and when the Mxokozeli family delegation approached Dinah’s father to ask him to consent to the marriage of Mxokozeli and Dinah, Dinah’s father sent them away empty-handed. They were, for him, too poor. Mxokozeli was not one to give up easily and he persisted until Dinah’s father eventually consented.
As part of his wedding present Dinah’s father gave the young couple a horse, so that if his daughter tired of this unequal marriage, she could ride back to her father. For his part, and as a sign of his commitment, Mxokozeli went off to the mines of Kimberley and Johannesburg to earn his lobola money. The wages proved disappointing, so in 1916 Mxokozeli joined the police force and worked as a policeman for 24 years until 1940.
Mxokozeli and Dinah had eight children. Horrifyingly, five of these died in infancy. Only the last three survived, the eldest being a boy, whom they named Raymond Mphakamisi, and of course he took his father’s name, Mhlaba. Raymond Mhlaba was born in Mazoka on 12 February 1920. He was to become one of South Africa’s great heroes and to out-live the cruelties of the apartheid years which he fought with all of his considerable energy and at immense personal cost.
“I spent my early life in Mazoka village. Like many boys of my age, I learned to work in the family fields as a herd boy,” Mhlaba recorded in his memoirs.
His father was rarely home, for, as a policeman, he was posted all over the Transkei to a variety of rural police stations. Raymond and his mother formed a bond of great affection, and, unlike the common gender-defined roles of the time, he was happy to be with her, working in the kitchen if that was what was required to be near her.
At the age of nine he entered the Mazoka mission school, but three years later he fell ill. As all of his elder siblings had died in their early years, his parents were deeply concerned and decided that the family should move to Balfour where his father was then posted, to be together. Thus young Raymond entered the Balfour Mission School and passed everything, year by year, until he finished Standard 5.
His health had recovered by then and his parents were comfortable to send him to Healdtown Practising School, a boarding school. There he obtained his Standard 6 certificate and his father then sent him to initiation, a 30-day process.
He was back at Healdtown, and says that “it was at this point in my life that the seeds of my political consciousness were sown … it was a Mr Sigila, a teacher at Mxhelo, a village almost halfway between Fort Beaufort and Alice, who first introduced me to political concerns”. Sigala recruited students from the educational institutions of Healdtown, Lovedale and Fort Hare. They formed the Mayibuye Students Association, where they all, as members, undertook to educate their families on particularly the land dispossession issues and other grievances the African community endured.
“Our membership was not big, not more than twenty members”, and the Association did not survive their dispersion into the wider world. But it was Raymond’s political blooding.
When Raymond was 20, in 1940, his father retired from the police force after 24 years of service. All the elder Mhlaba’s pension money was spent buying a plot of land to enable him to farm and thereby support his family. It did not work and the elder Mhlaba again left his family in search of a paying job, this time journeying to Port Elizabeth. There he found employment as a security guard at the Shell Oil Company.
“However, the wages he earned were so meagre that the following year he decided I should come and find work in PE.” Thus, in 1942, began Raymond Mhlaba’s years in Port Elizabeth. The two Mhlabas, father and son, found a flat in Hart Street, Sidwell, which they rented together.
Port Elizabeth was then under a liberal City Council, which rejected and refused to apply the pass laws, curfews and compulsory registration. It was seen as a relatively benign place for Africans to live. As the war effort had drawn many young white workers off to military service, there were even jobs for Africans.
‘I was employed at the Nannucci Drycleaning and Launderers within a week of arriving at PE,’ remembers Mhlaba. ‘The workforce at Nannucci was made up predominantly of coloured women’ and they immediately recruited the 22-year-old Raymond into the Non-European Laundry Workers Union (LWU).
‘I did not have prior knowledge of labour politics and union activities. I did not have a theoretical or practical framework of how the labour movement operated. I knew absolutely nothing about the workers’ strikes. I had no experience of confrontations between employees and employers. I had not learned these matters at school nor from my father … My father did not join any of the workers’ unions. My father was almost indifferent to my interest in the union movement. I merely followed my intuition that I was doing the right thing to join the LWU.’
Now Mhlaba’s political education began in earnest, as did his circle of political comrades. He began attending union meetings regularly at the offices of the Council of Non-European Trade Unions (CNETU) in Queen Street. There he met and worked with a circle of African unionists including Gladstone Tshume, Clifford Dladla, Reuben Mfecane, Sam Ntunja and Adam Mati. These comrades were to become the hard core of his political circle, his right and left hands, in his emerging years in the Communist Party and later the ANC.
But first a period of human behaviour. After a year at Nannucci’s, Raymond’s mother, fearing for her husband’s health, insisted that Raymond’s father return home to rest. In the absence of paternal discipline, Raymond met, courted, won and married Joyce Meke, also from Mazoka but now working as a domestic worker in Port Elizabeth.
They married quietly at the new law courts in 1943. This was a mistake, for his beloved mother was heartbroken. She had for years looked forward to planning her only son’s wedding – now that was never to happen. It took years for the relationship to repair. In that same year, Raymond’s regular attendance at union meetings earned him the executive position as a recruiting officer for the LWU.
In early 1943 Clifford Dladla invited Raymond to a meeting of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). Their regular Sunday morning meetings were Raymond’s first experience of non-racialism as the CPSA drew members from all races, who openly and on equal terms discussed the affairs of the day.
‘This impressed me profoundly and in 1943, on Mayday, I joined the Party officially.’ He soon found that all of his close comrades were also in the CPSA. ‘It was at the Party meetings that I heard about the African National Congress, a political organisation that was non-racial … I realised that I ought to be a member of that organisation … I believed that a true African communist ought to belong to the ANC … other party comrades encouraged me to join the ANC and I did so in 1944.’
He found that he had joined an organisation in disarray. ‘The ANC at national level was moribund during the early 1940s … there was even less political activity at provincial and local levels,’ he remembers.
In Port Elizabeth the ANC only got into action once a year, to send a delegation to the organisation’s 16 December national conference. They would take the hat around to a small number of white liberal households to raise the money to send a small delegation to the conference. They had no fundraising projects, no bank account and no money.
Worse still, the ANC provincial conference was traditionally opened with a speech from the (white) mayor, whose speeches ‘sounded patronising and insincere’. To cap it all, the most effective method of mobilising, the mass protestation of grievances, was unused. Raymond Mhlaba was not going to live with this inactivity for long.
Apartheid Stalingrad by Rory Riordan, Jacana Media, R420.