Mhlaba honoured for 50 years service

Tomorrow, South African Communist Party (SACP) veteran Ray Mhlaba will be awarded the party’s highest honour, the Moses Kotane Award, named after the man who served as general secretary of the party from 1939 until his death in 1978. The award will be presented to Mr Mhlaba in recognition of his “outstanding contribution to both the struggle for national liberation and socialism”. The first recipients in 1988 were Brian Bunting and Billy Nair. Political Correspondent Patrick Cull spoke to Mr Mhlaba about the nearly 50 years he has been a member of the SACP.

IT is nearly 50 years since May Day, 1943, when Ray Mhlaba joined the Communist Party of South Africa in Port Elizabeth.

In that time he has been a member of an organisation that functioned openly as a political party with representation in the House of Assembly until it was banned in 1950 and as a key figure representing the Eastern Cape when it went underground and at its re-launch as the South African Communist Party in 1953.

Those nearly 50 years also saw him undergo military training in China as a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe and sentenced to life imprisonment along with Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki and others at the Rivonia Trial. And it is a period that saw him assigned the task of rebuilding the party after his release from prison, its national chairman from 1994 until he became High Commissioner to Uganda and currently a co-opted member of the central committee.

It was also Mr Mhlaba who persuaded the late Chris Hani to become general-secretary of the SACP – “I crushed all his excuses until he surrendered”.

Mr Mhlaba’s formal entry into the political terrain came when he moved from Fort Beaufort to Port Elizabeth in 1942 and joined the Non-European Laundry Workers Union (LWU), becoming recruiting officer for the union the following year.

It was in that year that he attended his first CPSA meeting.

In his memoirs he describes how he witnessed people of all races discussing problems facing the country and “a white person discussing issues openly with an African as an equal”.

“I then thought to myself that this was perhaps the true brotherhood and sisterhood that was preached but not practised by many Christians.”

The following year, he joined the ANC.

The period in which the party could operate openly, however, was to be limited and it was only a matter of time once the National Party came to power in 1948 and on June 20, 1950 the Suppression of Communism Bill was passed by the House of Assembly. On the same day the central committee met in Cape Town and decided to disband.

Communist MP Sam Kahn announced the decision in the Assembly in a statement. After he had done so he said:

“Communism will outlive the National Party. Democracy will still be triumphant when members of this government will be manuring the fields of history. Millions of South Africans will echo my final words: ‘Long Live Communism’”.

A decision was taken to operate underground.

In his biography of Moses Kotane, Brian Bunting describes how the Johannesburg group met hidden in the bushes at dawn, while similar initiatives were being taken elsewhere, including Port Elizabeth.

Bunting notes “It was also slow work, but Kotane insisted from the start that security was to be the tightest and personally checked on every detail”.

Recalling that period, Mr Mhlaba says because of the need for secrecy every person who was proposed for membership was subjected to rigorous scrutiny because of the fear that the party would be infiltrated.

“I was assigned the whole of the Eastern Cape. I had to select people and refer them to the senior people for acceptance. It was a slow process.”

Writing about the period in his memoirs, Mr Mhlaba who was district secretary of the party in Port Elizabeth before it dissolved, says he kept in touch with Moses Kotane and in late 1950 or early the following year he came to Port Elizabeth to discuss the party operating underground, a decision that he supported.

“I had the privilege of being invited to the subsequent illegal conferences of the party before it regrouped. The secrecy we operated under was incredible. We communicated in codes.

“We used books to decode a message. We met at secret venues that I did not know and cannot tell you even today. I only knew I was somewhere in the Transvaal – whether south, east, north or west, I had no clue.”

Mr Mhlaba represented the Eastern Cape at these meetings and was present in 1953 when the new South African Communist Party (SACP) was formally launched.

He says that because of the secrecy surrounding the re-grouping after the decision had been taken to operate underground, even then ANC president Albert Luthuli had been surprised when he was told the party was still in existence.

In the interim he played a leading role in the defiance campaign and was among those who raised the issue of taking up arms, although he says that it was only at the end of the 1950s when Rusty Bernstein asked why the question he was raising was not being taken seriously that the debate began.

Thereafter, Mr Mhlaba advocated the armed struggle although it was only on December 16, 1961, that the first acts of violence were carried out.

Two years later, events ensured that Mr Mhlaba and Moses Kotane would not meet again. Kotane went into exile in January 1963 and the following year Mr Mhlaba was sentenced to life imprisonment following the Rivonia trial.

Mr Kotane died in Moscow on May 19, 1978, and was buried at Novodevichy cemetery on May 26.

Speaking about the award, Mr Mhlaba says he is “very proud because Moses Kotane was very close to me”.

He recalls that on one occasion when Kotane visited Port Elizabeth he asked to stay at his house. “I told him that it was not possible because I only had a three-roomed house. He said ‘I will stay with you’ because had had 14 questions that he wished to discuss with me that night.”

Mr Mhlaba says Moses Kotane had “the most influence on my thinking” but who was also a “fatherly figure” who had groomed him for a leadership position within the party of which he now been a member of close to 50 years.

---

Previous

news

Next