Remembering Moses Mabhida: Forty Years On
“Our (party’s) alliance with the national liberation movement has stood the test of time and the strains of illegality. There are not significant differences of policy or strategy between us, we are comrades in arms, share a common purpose, confront the same enemy and are committed to a single goal, the overthrow of the racist autocracy and the achievement of a people’s democracy under majority rule.” – Moses Mabhida (ANC Youth Conference, August 1982) –
Forty years ago, on 8 March 1986, Moses Mbheki Mncane (Baba) Mabhida, trade unionist, political revolutionary, former Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Political Commissar and General-Secretary of the SA Communist Party (SACP), died of a heart attack in Maputo, Mozambique. Mabhida was buried in Maputo in a temporary grave on 29 March 1986. In 2006, Mabhida’s remains were transferred to South Africa by the South African government for reburial at his home in KwaZulu-Natal, at Harry Gwala Stadium, on 2 December 2006.
Mabhida was born on 11 October 1923, in Thornville, Natal, to Stimela Mabhida and a Phakathi mother, as the fourth of five children in a peasant family which was later forced off the land. Mabhida was drawn to trade unionism by the late Harry Gwala, then a teacher, an ardent unionist and member of the SACP. Mabhida, too, joined the Communist Party in 1942. After many unionists were banned in 1952 – 1953, his colleagues in the newly revived underground Communis
