Joe Nzingo Gqabi Arrested

On 26 January 1963, Joe Gqabi was arrested with nine fellow members who had undergone military training in Ethiopia and were deported back to South Africa after being captured in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for leaving the country illegally. Upon completing his prison term, he was re-arrested and charged under the Sabotage Act and was convicted and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment on Robben Island.

Joe Nzingo Gqabi was born on 6 April 1929 in Aliwal North, Cape Province. He completed the tenth grade and found work as a construction labourer after coming to Johannesburg in 1951. Gqabi joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1952 and later joined the underground Communist Party (SACP). At the same time, he also joined the Johannesburg based militant newspaper called the ‘New Age’ as both photographer and reporter. His job of exposing the hidden crimes of Apartheid proved a remarkable experience in investigative journalism. Gqabi was one of two thousand political detainees after the 1960 PAC-led Sharpville Massacre and the consequent State of Emergency in 1960. After his release from detention in 1961, he went into exile to join the newly formed military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK).

In October 1961, Joe Gqabi, Raymond Mhlaba, Wilton Mkwayi, Andrew Mlangeni, Abel Mthembu and Steve Nandha Naidoo began their military training in Peking (Beijing), as the first six MK Cadres earmarked for training abroad. In January 1963, Gqabi, Mhlaba, Mkwayi and Mthembu returned to the Lilieslief Farm in Rivonia, Johannesburg. Gqabi was deployed to the External Mission in Lusaka. It was during his deployment that he got arrested in southern Rhodesia.

Following his release, Gqabi was served with a restriction order. In 1975 he completed his high school education and earned a bachelor’s degree by correspondence with the University of South Africa (UNISA). As the 1976 Student Uprisings were approaching, he guided and advised students and the youth, while avoiding arrest until December 31, 1976. After his arrest, Gqabi became chief defendant in the 1977 “Pretoria Twelve Trial” that attracted wide attention in the country and also became known worldwide. He and six of his comrades were acquitted, while the other accused received sentences ranging from 6 to 18 years’ imprisonment.

It was a tribute to Gqabi’s relationship with the Soweto students that three who were crucial witnesses refused to testify against him in the resulting “Pretoria Twelve Trial”, a vital factor in his surprising acquittal in April 1978. Luanda Radio Freedom commented that “the process of practical struggle is drawing emergent forces in the Black Consciousness Movement closer and closer into the mainstream of revolution destroying all wishes to create a third force in opposition to the ANC”. During the trial, MK cadres turned the court into a political platform, accusing the racist regime of crime against the people and articulately championed the ANC and its policies.

Gqabi left for exile two months later and become chief ANC representative in Botswana, a vantage point from which he supervised some successful MK operations in the Transvaal and helped finance the establishment of the Congress of South African Students (COSAS). In 1979 he was one of six members of the Politico-Military Strategy Committee of the ANC that produced the “Green Book”. He was then appointed as ANC representative in Zimbabwe after the country obtained independence in 1980. In Zimbabwe, he managed to develop a remarkable rapport with the leadership and people of Zimbabwe.

After a bomb was discovered under his car in early 1981, Gqabi took added security precautions, but these were insufficient. He was gunned down by members of the Apartheid hit-squad on 31 July 1981, and was shot nineteen times while reversing down the driveway of his house in Harare, Zimbabwe. He was given a state funeral by the Zimbabwean government. At his funeral, the late ANC president Oliver Tambo said: “To say the enemy has struck us a blow is to tell the truth”.

At the time of his death, Gqabi was a member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee and of its Revolutionary Council that contributed enormously in the drafting and development of the ANC Green Book. His body was exhumed in 2004 and brought to South Africa for reburial in Aliwal North. He is survived by his wife Aurelia and two sons, Jomo and Nkululeko.

Castro Khwela
Good day fellow Compatriots!