12 February 1912 - 31 January 2021
The South African Communist Party (SACP) mourns the passing away of Comrade Rebecca Kotane, a stalwart of our struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression. The SACP sends its heartfelt condolences to the entire Kotane family, relatives, and our ANC-headed Alliance liberation movement. Ma Kotane passed away on Sunday, 31 January 2021, a few days before her 109th birthday.
Ma Kotane took part in the defiance campaigns in the 1950s and mobilisation towards the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955.
In the 9 August 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings, in which she took part, she was among the women detained by the apartheid regime. Detained for two weeks, Ma Kotane shared a cell with other stalwarts of our movement, including Albertina Sisulu, Helen Joseph, Lillian Ngoyi, Amina Cachalia, Violet Wynberg and others. In detention, they were gravely mistreated and humiliated by the apartheid regime’s authorities, intending to break their revolutionary spirits and discourage them from continuing with the struggle. At some point the apartheid regime even enticed Ma Kotane with a mansion and urged her to divorce her husband, Moses Kotane, long-time SACP General Secretary, and turn against the movement. Ma Kotane stood her ground and never betrayed her revolutionary principles.
Ma Kotane practically supported the struggle to the hilt and also served as a pillar of strength to Kotane during the difficult years of the struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression and capitalist exploitation. By her continued resilience in the fight for social emancipation, over the decades she also helped to keep the name of Moses Kotane alive in the hearts and minds of the people. She last saw her husband in 1963 when he went to exile in Tanzania. This followed relentless house raids, arrests, threats and acts of victimisation by the apartheid regime, which intensified especially after the enactment in 1950 of the Suppression of Communism Act and the state of emergency in 1960. Even after the death of Kotane in 1978, Ma Kotane persisted in the fight for liberation.
Today the name of Moses Kotane cannot be mentioned without at one and the same time mentioning Ma Kotane, a hero of our struggle for liberation and social emancipation in her own right, and vice versa. Since their marriage in 1945, they intimately collaborated in the struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression, in the process helping to build and strengthen the Alliance and various organisations of the people.
In 1934, Moses Kotane wrote his celebrated “Cradock Letter”, directed to the Johannesburg District of the Communist Party. This letter called for the Party to be “Africanised”, that is, to be rooted in the concrete conditions of South Africa—to find expression within the African masses. This important call was an emphasis of the Marxist-Leninist outlook that each Communist Party must engage in a concrete analysis of concrete conditions to devise the correct strategy and tactics in its specific national situation taking into account the international content. Thus, the Communist Party, according to the Cradock Letter, had to become South African not only theoretically, but in reality. It is such outlook which, thenceforth, rooted the Party within the masses of the people, becoming one of the most admired and followed political organisations in Africa.
It was through Kotane’s materialist outlook, working together with other comrades during his time, that the Communist Party dedicated itself to building not only itself but also the progressive trade union movement and the African National Congress, making it a fighting revolutionary organisation. This strengthened the work of the Communist Party in building the Alliance as a national democratic revolutionary front. Through that work, it was also possible to unite the people towards the revolutionary principles of the Freedom Charter and its adoption in 1955.
In memory of Ma Kotane, the SACP calls for the unity of the working class as well as our Alliance in a relentless onslaught against capitalist exploitation and crises, including the pandemics such as COVID-19 and the persistent high levels of inequality, unemployment, poverty, and the associated household crisis to make ends meet, to support life itself.
We must not allow the revolutionary contributions of our stalwarts and the role of the masses as the wider collective to fade. We must continually oppose the line touted by bourgeois propagandists that our democratic breakthrough was reached only through, and by, the contributions of a tiny elite minority of leaders. These and other lines of reasoning are meant to shut down the contribution of communists in our struggle and dim the fact that the basis for the oppression of the people in South Africa was capitalism, presenting itself, firstly, in colonialism and, later, in apartheid terms.
The virus of capitalism has now heightened its aggression through imperialist machination. Our struggle for liberation and social emancipation, the struggle for socialism, the struggle to secure our democratic national sovereignty is not over. We must intensify the struggle. Colonialism and apartheid, just like Nazi fascism and current Israeli apartheid, were nothing but capitalist domination in its diverse forms.
The SACP says:
Tsamaya sentle Ma Kotane, lerumo la setshaba
ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY | SACP
EST. 1921 AS THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SOUTH AFRICA | CPSA
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