Moses Mabhida Funeral: Three Streams of the Liberation Struggle

Moses Mabhida Funeral: Three Streams of the Liberation Struggle

Forty years ago, on 29 March 1986, Moses Mabhida, the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress (ANC) and Vice-President of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), was buried in Maputo, Mozambique.

At the funeral, Mozambican President Samora Machel said the following, “Dear Comrades, the whole of Africa, of progressive mankind and all revolutionaries bow in homage to the personality and exemplary life of Moses Mabhida. Moses Mabhida has bequeathed us his example as a determined fighter for the ideals of freedom, justice, equality, democracy, socialism and peace. We know him thus since the start of our national liberation struggle. Moses Mabhida was an elder brother to us. Patiently and modestly, he passed on to us his long experience of struggle. His advice was always valuable.

“In all his dealings with us”, Machel continued, “he displayed his simple, modest and fraternal nature and showed his love of mankind. We remember the long nights when under the starlight we shared the dreams of the future we were building in combat. What would our countries be like. How would our children grow up. How would our people’s aspirations be achieved. His vision of the future revealed the profound humanism that underlay his thinking. In the most difficult moments we went through together he radiated always his calmness, the breath of hope and the certainty of victory.

“Moses Mabhida, our brother, our comrade, felt as his own our freedom, our independence. He was an integral part of the Mozambique people. Moses Mabhida will remain a symbol of the indestructible fraternity of the South African and Mozambican peoples, of the profound identity of our people’s struggles. Moses Mabhida leaves a part of his life in Mozambique. He chose to live out his last days with us, he chose to bid farewell to life on the frontier of his country. In other parts of the world where he would have been welcomed with equal solidarity and comradeship, he would have found more comfort and more sophisticated medical attention for his failing health. He preferred to remain here in a free country, close to his own.

“He was denied his soil in life and it is denied to him after death. But he will not be buried in a foreign land. Mozambique is his country too. The Mozambican soil which also loved and of which the struggle made him a brother will enfold him with love and respect. We shall be the guardians of his body, which is a banner of victories. Men who die fighting, who refuse to surrender, who serve the people and their ideals to the last breath, are the victors. Moses Mabhida is a victorious combatant. His immense personality rests in the heart of all Africans, in the heart of all revolutionaries and lovers of peace.”

As Chairman of the South African Communist Party (SACP), Joe Slovo maintained that “The racists hate South African communists with a special venom. To discredit what we stand for, they spread the myth that the communists are a strange people from faraway places, who import foreign ideas from Europe which are dangerous for Africa. Comrade Baba Mabhida, the leader of South Africa’s communists, personified the real essence of our land and its people.”

Speaking on behalf of the African National Congress (ANC) and providing the main oration of the funeral, President Oliver Tambo greeted all the leaders and mourners, and continued to say, “Your Excellencies and friends, we have gathered here today to bid farewell to a warrior. We have converged from all corners of the globe to pay homage to a revolutionary. We have convened on this grieving piece of earth to salute a patriot.

“We who have walked with giants know that Moses Mbheki Mabhida belonged in that company too. We who have filed among the ranks know that he was proud to count himself as a foot soldier. A colossus because he was supremely human, Moses Mabhida has departed from our midst.

“A seeming void occupies his space, the air so still without his voice, without that quiet voice, that quiet laugh, like the pure not of a bugle. That voice rose from the depths of the Valley of a Thousand Hills and it multiplied, rose and grew and multiplied, reverberating from Durban’s Curries Fountain until it was heard in Dar es Salaam and Havana, in Moscow and Managua, in London and Djakarta, in Beijing and Rio de Janeiro, in Prague and Washington. And in Pretoria, the centres and symbols of oppression and repression which are the Union Buildings and the Voortrekker Monument heaved and trembled as they received his message: ‘An end to fascism, down with racism, freedom for my people’.

“It is rarely given to a people that they should produce a single person who epitomises their hopes and expresses their common resolve as Moses Mabhida did. In a simple language, he could convey the aspirations of all our people in their magnificent variety, he could explain the fears and prejudices of the unorganised, and he could sense the feelings of even the most humble among our people. Moses Mabhida could do all this because he was of the people, a product of the stern university of mass struggle, a product of the life experience of the exploited and downtrodden workers and peasants of our country. It was that university, that education, that experience, which inspired Moses Mabhida to join the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the trade union movement, a trade union movement which ultimately coalesced in the South African Congress of Trade Unions.

“In the ANC, Moses Mabhida rose from the lowest ranks to become a national leader who served on the National Executive Committee of the ANC, as a commander and commissar of the People’s Army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, secretary of the Revolutionary Council, one of the chairpersons of the Political Military Council, who served as an international representative and an underground organiser. He rose through the ranks of the Communist Party to become its General Secretary while he served as Vice President of the South African Congress of Trade Unions.

“This combination of functions sometimes surprised and puzzled our friends. For they wondered why Comrade Mabhida had to serve in so many senior positions in different organisations. But above all it was a combination of functions which enraged our enemies. This combination of functions in one leader of our people upset our adversaries because it reflected the permanence and acceptability among our people of the idea and the practice of the unity of the revolutionary democratic, the socialist and the trade union movements in the South African struggle for national liberation.

“It was part of Comrade Mabhida’s greatness that having quite early on understood the importance of the unity of these great movements, he succeeded in ably serving each one of them individually, and all of them together. He served them together as a collective front for national and social emancipation. Throughout Moses Mabhida’s lifetime, international reaction tried desperately hard and consistently to separate the three movements we have spoken of. It tried to separate the one from the other and to set them against one another. In this contemporary period we have seen determined efforts to separate the trade unions from the broad democratic movement and to persuade them to be nothing more than an agency to bring material benefits to a working class which remains enslaved.

“But Moses Mabhida knew that the very dignity of labour demands that those who toil should not enjoy the fruit of their sweat, but should do so as free men and women. Accordingly, he fought against all attempts to turn the trade unions into appendages of the property-owning classes and he resisted all efforts to emasculate the working class as a leading social force for political change in our country. Likewise, he was fiercely opposed to all manoeuvres which sought to educate the working class to repudiate its own history and to allow itself to be turned into a base for the creation of a new political formation separate from and opposed to the ANC and the Communist Party.

“Moses Mabhida could take no other position, because he had learnt and absorbed the lessons passed on to him and to us by the late Chief Albert Luthuli. That lesson was that the ANC and SACTU were to each other a spear and a shield. Moses Mabhida knew that the durability of the alliance between the ANC, the Communist Party and the trade union movement lay in strengthening each as an independent formation and in security their co-operation on an entirely voluntary basis. He therefore always worked to ensure that these formations respected one another and that they developed among them a deep-seated feeling of revolutionary unity and interdependence.

“Moses Mabhida knew it, as clearly as he was convinced of the certainty of our victory, that the historic and urgent issue of the day in South Africa is the question of the transfer of power to the people. He saw in the ANC the unique and authentic vanguard to mobilise and lead our people to victory. None among us was more conscious than he that the African National Congress could only carry out its historic mission if it maintains the character it has come to assume. That character was that of a parliament of all the people of our country, representative of our future, the negation of the divisions and conflicts that racial arrogance and capitalist greed have imposed on our people.

“That was why 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, as a true national movement loyal to the great principles which inspired its creation and have guided it to this day.

“What an experience it was to listen to Madevu, as he was fondly called, as he spoke in Zulu, as he spoke, drawing on our heroic past, to fire the timid with enthusiasm, to encourage the brave and correct those who had erred. Images he so vividly portrayed were of a Shaka and a Dingane – great giants who if they were alive today would be with us as commanders of the People’s Army, Umkhonto we Sizwe and not arrogant local government functionaries of a regime that despises everything African.

“The deep well from which he drew strength and courage, the undying tradition of our people’s resistance to colonialism and racial tyranny, these enabled him to teach a whole generation not to fear the tyrants, however powerful they might see. It gave him the foresight to recognise the enemy clearly, to concentrate his fire upon the adversary, and never to turn his weapon against the people.

“Yet, comrades, today there some in our country who claim that they drink from the same well, but, their manhood having deserted them, they are so petrified of the enemy, that they see its brutal armed strength as a superhuman machine – a machine in front of which we must cower and cringe. Moses Mabhida will not be with on the glorious day of liberation. He will not be there when the voice of the liberation proclaims from the heights of the sign of our land, from the sacred mountains of Ulundi, when it proclaims that the cause for which so many perished has triumphed. Yet there is an error in those statements, because, wherever Moses Mabhida is in the end laid to rest, his grave shall be like a place of pilgrimage, a place of pilgrimage to all those who love freedom as he did, a beacon to the future for all those who value liberty more than their own lives.

“Moses Mbheki Mabhida will be there when the trumpets sound the salute to freedom. He will be there because the Young Lions who fed on his courage and daring, offspring of the lions and lionesses that our fathers and mothers are, they you have dared to rebel as Bambata rebelled 80 years ago, these Young Lions are his peers, they are the relay team to whom he has handed the torch that he carried for so long. He will be there because his sudden death on March 8th, International Women’s Day, outside the borders of the country for whose happiness he had sacrificed so much, because that death was but Mkhize’s call on us to do what remains to be done and we shall do it together in unity. Together we shall see victory.

“Mozambican men and Mozambican women, you looked after our comrade and brother during the last days of his life. Comrade President Samora Machel, you have done more than your duty, you have exceeded our highest expectations, in the way you have gone out of your way, taking your people with you, to tend and honour one who was to you a comrade of long lasting, a fellow combatant, a leader of the people of South Africa, a leader recognised by the progressive movements throughout the world, anti-imperialist. When Moses Mabhida departed, he was at peace because we too were in this city of revolutionary change. We were here as your guests and fellow fighters for peace, freedom and social progress. We have come, as we must always come, to a liberated zone of humanity, to a corner of our continent that arouses the anger and the envy of our enemies because it is a liberated corner.

“Our common enemies are on all sides. They think they have surrounded us together. They imagine that they will pierce us with the pincers of an enveloping action, an action originating from the Nyasa province and the Cape province. What they do not know is that we are in their rear and on their flanks. It is their cause that is doomed. It is they who are in a hopeless position. It is they who are in a crisis moment which is without precedent in the history of southern Africa – the signal that death is for us but a renewal of life, that death is for us a defeat in battle, a rehearsal for a victorious war. Today Mabhida walks in the company of Magigwane and Ngungunyane. With these as our standard bearers, we can never be defeated. We cannot but be victorious.

“We wish to express our heartfelt condolences to the family of Comrade Mabhida, to all our people who feel bereaved by his departure. His family loved him, but they surrendered him to the revolutionary struggle because they loved freedom even more. Today, as we grieve with them, they can be justly proud of him and of his life. Farewell dear brother, uhambe kahle mfowethu.

“Those who have gathered here to make their pledge in public or in the silence of their hearts will be with you on the Maluti Mountains when you toll the bell of freedom. They will be with you from all the corners of the globe because your presence here signifies their own resolve to contribute all in order to wipe out a crime against humanity. You have been ordered to assert the dignity of all men and women across the oceans, on all the continents, permanently and unequivocally – Moses Mabhida lives. The struggle continues. Victory is assured. Amandla.”

Sources:
Obituary, “Hamba Kahle Comrade Moses Mabhida”, Sechaba, May 1986.
Jack Simons, “Three Streams of the Liberation Struggle”, The African Communist, No. 106, Third Quarter 1986.
Joe Slovo, “Hamba Kahle, Comrade Moses Mabhida”, Umsebenzi, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1986.

Castro Khwela
Good day fellow Compatriots!