Statement by Oliver Tambo at the Funeral of Moses Mbheki Mabhida 29 March 1986, Maputo 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 the earth to salute a patriot. We who have walked with the giants know that Moses Mbheki Mabhida belongs in that company too. We who have failed among the ranks know that he was proud to count himself 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. Like the pure note of a bungle, that voice rose from the depths of the Valley of a Thousand Hills, and multiplied. It rose and grew and multiplied, reverberating from Durban`s Curries Fountain until it was heard in Dar es Salaam and Havana, Moscow and Managua, London and Jakarta, Beijing and Rio de Janeiro, Prague and Washington. And in Pretoria the centres and symbols of oppression and repression - the Union Buildings and the Voortrekker Monument - heaved and trembled as they received his message: Death to Fascism! Down with Fascism! 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 simple language he could convey the aspirations of all our people in their magnificent variety, explain the fears and prejudices of the unorganised and 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 and the life experience of the exploited and downtrodden workers and peasants of our country. It was that education which inspired Moses Mabhida to join the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the trade union movement which ultimately coalesced in the South African Congress of Trade Unions. In the ANC, Moses Mabhida rose from the lowest levels to become a national leader, serving as a member of the people`s army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, Secretary to the Revolutionary Council, and one of the Chairpersons of the Politico-Military Council. He was an international representative and an underground organiser. He rose through the ranks of the Communist Party to become its General Secretary, while for many years he was Vice President of the South African Congress of Trade Unions. This combination of functions sometimes surprised and puzzled our friends who wondered why Comrade Mabhida had to serve in so many senior positions in different organisations. But, above all, it 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, 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 one from the other and to set them against one another. In the 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 that those who toil should not only 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 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 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 lesson passed on to him and to us by the late Chief Albert Luthuli: that the ANC and SACTU were to each other a spear and a shield. Moses Mabhida know 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 securing their cooperation on an entirely voluntary basis. He therefore always worked to ensure that these formation respected one another and 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 maintained the character it had come to assume - that of a parliament of all the people of our country, the representative of our future, the negation of the divisions and conflicts that racial arrogance and capitalist greed have imposed on our people. That is 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, a true national movement loyal to the great principles which inspired its creation and have guided it to this day...
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 01:44:56 +0000
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