11 October 2002
Poet, writer, worker leader and liberation activist, Alfred Temba Qabula passed away on Tuesday night near Flagstaff in the Eastern Cape. The South African Communist Party (SACP) is saddened by this death. We dip our revolutionary banner in memory of this son of the soil. We send our condolences to his family. The SACP salutes Qabula as a rare hero of the working class and national liberation movements. In Qabula, the SACP salutes ordinary people whose role and contribution to the struggle needs more attention and acknowledgement. It is for this reason that the 11th Congress of the SACP declared the year 2003 as the year of working class and communist martyrs.
Alfred Temba Qabula was born in 1942 near Flagstaff in Pondoland. He was the son of a migrant mineworker who died when Qabula was very young. He describes his harsh childhood in his autobiography, A Working Life Cruel Beyond Belief. This book which combined memories and poetry was banned by the Publications Control Board during the last years of the Apartheid regime.
He was a participant in the Pondoland rebellion in 1959 and survived its consequences by hiding in the forests. He joined the "Kongolose" (the ANC) then.
He entered migrancy in Carletonville in the construction industry and lived in the compounds and hostels of the area. He moved to Durban (Inanda-Amautana) in the early 1970s and started working in Dunlop where he worked until 1985. He joined MAWU and was part of the shop-steward leadership. He was a participant in the Dunlop Play and later was a crucial member of the Durban Workers' Cultural Local that started a vast cultural movement in the trade unions involving plays, musical groups, poets and writers etc. He was at the heart of the revival of the isibongo poetry tradition. He had been in hiding between 1985-8 as gunmen were after him in Inanda because of his UDFM stance. He helped the Sarmcol Workers' Cooperative with the making of their plays like Bambatha's Children. He left Dunlop and started working with the Culture and Working Life Project as an active mobiliser of cultural networks amongst the black working class.
His poetry has been widely published and he was considered as one of the most important creative people in the labour movement. By the early 1990s funding for projects was drying up- facing unemployment, Qabula decided to return to the countryside. He was afflicted by a first stroke that left him paralysed four years ago and a second one, earlier this year, leaving him and his family in the grip of untold hardship and poverty. He died at the Lusikisiki hospital. Qabula's death comes on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the 1973 Durban strikes which led to the formation of COSATU.
(The SACP thanks Professor Ari Sitas of the University of Natal for the history of Alfred Temba Qabula.)
CONTACT
Mazibuko K. Jara (surname Jara)
Department of Media, Information & Publicity
South African Communist Party
Tel - 011 339-3621/2 Fax - 011 339-4244 Cell - 083 651 0271
Email - mazibuko@sacp.org.za