Take up MaMbeki's struggle
OUR country has another dark cloud over it in losing struggle stalwart Epainette Nomaka Mbeki, after suffering from a chest infection and heart problem.
She was born in 1916 in Mangoloaneng in the Sotho- speaking section of the Mount Fletcher district of the Transkei. MaMbeki's family, the Moeranes, are Basotho members of the elite Bafokeng clan. Her parents were Christians active in the Catholic Church, and successful peasant farmers strongly committed to securing the available schooling for their children.
In 1938 Bettie du Toit recruited MaMbeki into the South Africa Communist Party in Durban, making her the second black woman to join SACP after Jossie Palmer (Mpama). MaMbeki volunteered for the child welfare organisation in Durban, helped to organise a rent boycott, worked as an agent for Inkululeko (SACP's newspaper) and ran the party's night school.
In 1940, she married ANC and SACP stalwart Govan Mbeki and the couple moved to Mbewulani in the Transkei. MaMbeki was the patron of a successful community farming project which organised the women of her village into a craft and bead work co-operative called Khanyisa.
MaMbeki worked tirelessly to bring secondary schooling to her district of Amathole, in Mbashe and her efforts have been rewarded with the establishment of the Nomaka Mbeki Secondary School, named after her and for which she was the patron.
Our hearts are now so overcome with grief, because all of us thank the great favour of history that we were born contemporaries of MaMbeki and learnt from her. Tomorrow and the day after, for a week, a month, we shall ask: "Is MaMbeki really dead?"
For her death will long seem to us an improbable, an impossible, a terrible arbitrariness of nature.
May the pain we feel, that stabs our hearts each time we think that MaMbeki is no more, be for each of us an admonition, a warning, an appeal: your responsibility is increased.
Be worthy of the leader who trained us. In grief, sorrow and affliction we bind our ranks and hearts together, we unite more closely for new struggles.
Thabang Maseko, spokesperson, EC Young Communist League
