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| Pallo Jordan |
Pallo Jordan, Business Day
MME
Mofokeng, Aunt Piny, MaMbeki and many others are the expressions of affection
she earned in a life of service. The passing of Epainette Moerane-Mbeki on June
7 truly marks the end of an era.
Born
in February 1916 to a family of African teachers, who had migrated from
Lesotho, she grew up as a member of the tiny landowning African elite made up
of peasant farmers, professionals and clergy. Like others of their stratum, the
Moeranes invested in the education of the children.
The
Moerane family, like thousands of others in the colonial world, was the outcome
of events unfolding thousands of miles from the tiny village of Mount Fletcher.
Like many modern African peasants, the family were practising Catholics, and
consequently lived in two worlds. One was the traditional setting of the rural
Eastern Cape, before the collapse of the peasant economy in the 1930s. The
second was an international faith that linked them not only to millions of
co-religionists throughout the world but, through the written word, to the rest
of humanity as well.
Thus
it was that one year after her birth, in February 1917, a women’s demonstration
on the streets of Petrograd escalated first into a citywide uprising and then into
a revolution that was to have a decisive effect on her life and that of her
family.
Mme
Mofokeng, Aunt Piny was the sort of activist movements dream of. Possessed of a
singular dynamism, she was the initiator and supervisor of developmental
projects within her community. She was active within the village she had made
her home in 1941 until the eve of her admission to hospital.
She
joined the Communist Party of SA in 1938 and remained committed to its vision
until her passing.
Like
the Catholicism into which she was baptised, communism was an international
movement, but one committed to the emancipation of all humanity from oppression
and exploitation. In SA, the Communist Party was the only one that admitted
people of all races as equals.
Perhaps
providentially, the week during which the mortal remains of this outstanding
heroine are laid to rest coincides with the 50th anniversary of one of the
great turning points in her life and the life of her family. All too often we
focus on the heroic dimension of the struggle, sparing little thought for the
toll that such commitment takes on the individual lives. Moerane married her
fellow teacher, Govan Mbeki, in January 1940 and bore him four children, a
daughter and three sons, between 1941 and 1948.
The
political commitments of the Mbeki parents conspired against family life. After
Govan took up the editorship of the New Age in the mid-1950s, they virtually
lived apart. The intensification of the struggle finally led to a life sentence
on June 10 1964. Like many others, Aunt Piny became a struggle widow for the
next 27 years.
Epainette
Mbeki initiated community development projects in Idutywa from the year she and
Govan settled there. Using a shop as her base, she built up co-operatives of
peasant producers and crafts workers that remain active till today. But she was
trying to do this in a Transkei radically changed since her youth. Her second
son, Moeletsi, characterised the ancestral homestead in Mount Fletcher during
the 1960s as having the "Chekovian air" of lost wealth.
The
destruction of the landowning African middle class was indeed one of the
objectives pursued by the National Party of DF Malan, JG Strijdom, Hendrik
Verwoerd and BJ Vorster. Alongside others, the Mbekis had organised to fight
this onslaught through the Transkei African Voters Association, of which Govan
became secretary in 1941, and the Transkeian Organised Bodies, a federation of
local peasant bodies. The thrust of national government policy, supported and
administered by a corrupted traditional hierarchy, led to the peasant uprisings
of the late 1950s and early 1960s that Govan Mbeki so ably reported in New Age.
Mme
Mofokeng leaves behind a country, a continent and a world that has been
completely transformed from the one into which she was born. In thousands of
unnoticed interventions she made her own singular contribution to that change.
In February 1916, the great powers of Europe were engaged in the first
international conflict of the industrial age, to reorder the world’s geopolitical
hierarchy. The disequilibrium that conflict produced resulted in a revolution
in Russia the following year.
The
new power that revolution gave birth to inspired a global movement committed to
ending oppression. Like thousands of her generation, Aunt Piny heard its call,
and she responded. Her impressive track record in the struggle derived as much
from a passionate commitment as from her profound grasp of the social forces
required to make change possible.
Tsamaya
hanthle Mme Mofokeng.
