18 May 2019
On behalf of the SACP Central Committee and the Party membership as a whole, allow me, first of all, to express our deepest and heartfelt sincerest condolences to Makhalima's wife, uMama Siziwe Sawule-Makhalima, daughters Nozuko, Nobahle and Vuyolwethu, grandchildren and the Makhalima family and relatives as a whole. Cde Mfengu 'Ndlovu' Makhalima belonged to all of us. The SACP expresses its sincere gratitude to the Makhalima family for having shared his life with the Party, our national liberation movement as a whole, the peasants and working class of our country. While his passing affected all of us in a deeply sore way, its impact is nevertheless more immense on the immediate family and relatives as a husband, father, grandfather, as an uncle and an elder. Cde Mfengu Makhalima was a man of great wisdom. Not only the family but also our movement, our struggle for national liberation and socialism, invaluably benefitted from his wisdom. We wish the Makhalima family the greatest ever strength to get through this difficult time of mourning.
uNdlovu, as he was affectionately known, was a great revolutionary, lifelong member of the SACP, ANC and founding combatant of uMkhonto weSizwe (MK). He was a dedicated and loyal servant of the people. He will be greatly missed by all of us. Cde Mfengu was a product and pillar of strength in our struggle for national liberation and socialism and post-1994 he played an outstanding role as a member of the Eastern Cape Provincial Legislature and thereafter Parliament, serving our people wholeheartedly, until he retired from active politics due to old age. He was an epitome of a selfless servant of the people.
Makhalima devoted his entire adult life, from as early as his late teens as a high school student and his early 20s, to end colonial oppression, inclusive of its apartheid regime in our country. He did not limit his attention to the surface in developing his understanding of the problem and contradictions of our society. He was radical as a revolutionary. That means he went deep down to the root of the matter. He resolutely adopted a stance against capitalist exploitation of workers and the class inequalities, poverty and unemployment it created and reproduces on a daily basis. He was unequivocal in his opposition to imperialist domination of our country and other peoples of the world.
Makhalima was unapologetically a Marxist-Leninist to the core. His scientific outlook of society was sharp. Until his last breath, uNdlovu did not mince his words about the necessity for socialism as the vision for a prosperous South Africa, the sustainable solution to capitalist barbarity. He did not mince his words about the importance of the national democratic revolution, our programme of national economic, political and broader social transformation and development as the direct road to socialism. He had a great appreciation of the substantive content of what the great working class revolutionaries and social scientists, Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, meant in the Manifesto of the Communist Party when they said: [Open quote] "The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement." [Closed quote].
uNdlovu recognised race and gender contradictions as deeply serious problems for our society. He fought in the course of our struggle for national liberation and socialism to have them addressed as an immediate task and ultimately resolved. But he was very clear about their economic foundation. He appreciated the connection between all the three main contradictions of the South African society, the class, race and gender contradictions. He understood the class content of racial and gender contradictions and the national and gender content of class contradictions in our country and universally. To him the solution was categorical, the resolution of all these contradictions comprehensively. He was holistic in his worldview.
As we all know, after obtaining his Junior Certificate, and given his class circumstances, especially and the imperative to provide for his family at a young age, Makhalima found work with The New Age newspaper as a distributor. The original New Age was an important platform of the Communist Party. Like other publications associated with the Party, such as Umsebenzi, The Worker and The Guardian, The New Age was banned by the apartheid regime as one of the consequences of the regime's banning of the Communist Party in 1950 under the Suppression of Communism Act.
Makhalima deepened his working class consciousness as a worker at The New Age. He became closer to the ANC Youth League, the underground Communist Party, (the Party was reconstituted underground following its banning), as well as the ANC. This political education work and recruitment were co-ordinated by the SACP. Stalwarts such as Cde Silas Mtongana and Raymond Mhlaba were among those who played a great part in the work. After the banning of the ANC in 1960, Makhalima was accordingly among the first generation to swell the ranks of and build the MK in the immediate year that followed, 1961.
As President Nelson Mandela states in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, by that time the Communist Party, which Makhalima had joined in 1959, had already established military combat work units and carried out related operations against the apartheid regime. It was therefore not an accident of history that uNdlovu, whom we correctly call the people's combatant, was among the first to join the MK. Makhalima was a combatant guided by revolutionary theory. He performed his work with outstanding dedication and great loyalty to the people.
uNdlovu crisscrossed the African continent in the course of our struggle for national liberation and socialism. During his years in exile he landed in Botswana, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Tanzania and Ethiopia where, together with 20 other MK combatants in his unit, he received military training. Makhalima returned to Tanzania after completing the training in Ethiopia. In Tanzania he interacted with many exiled South Africans who were en route to receive military and peaceful academic training then for the future transformation and development of our country.
Cde Mfengu's arrest came after his unit was intercepted in 1963 the then South Rhodesia en route to South Africa where they were deployed to tackle the enemy head-on. We are talking here about brave comrades, our national heroes who were then arrested and extradited to South Africa where they were prosecuted. Makhalima, then only 25, was sentenced to two years imprisonment for leaving the country unlawfully and 20 years for undergoing military training illegally (unlawful and illegal refer to the apartheid law rather than democratic law). He was released in 1977 after his sentence was reduced to 14 years following an application for retrial. The reduction was granted without the retrial that he sought being granted. He never demobilised, despite his release being not without restriction. The resilient and resolute stalwart for freedom continued his revolutionary activism by other means, including clandestine activity.
We need to draw our inspiration from the fact that Cde Mfengu was a recipient of the SACP Moses Kotane Award, conferred by the 11th SACP National Congress in 2002. The Award is given in recognition of outstanding contribution to our struggle for national liberation and social emancipation, to selfless dedication and loyalty to the people, the revolution. We are talking here about the recipient of the Ubuntu Honour Award, conferred by the National Heritage Council in December 2017. The award is a distinct gesture given to distinguished persons with the substance of ubuntu-botho. The recipients of the award include Cde Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Miriam Makeba.
Cde Mfengu 'Ndlovu' Makhalima was a true cadre who never betrayed his historical mission. He loathed corruption in all its manifestation and forms. In his memory, our forthcoming sixth democratically elected government must dismantle the networks of corporate state capture and decisively clamp down and deal with other forms of corruption, graft and malfeasance. We must turn South Africa around, advance radical structural transformation to achieve inclusive growth, and especially lift the poor and the exploited out of their hardships towards shared prosperity.
Cde Makhalima was a Party organiser and leader. He played a central role in rebuilding the structures of the SACP and ANC after the hard-won unbanning of 1990. He served as the SACP Border District Chairperson and in the first ANC Executive Committee in the Border Region in the Eastern Cape. He rose through the ranks of the Party and served as a member of the SACP Central Committee until he retired from active politics due to old age. He nevertheless continued to play an important political role as a lifelong Political Kommissar. He was a moving political education institution and library of Marxism-Leninism.
In a stark contrast to revisionists, to the great revolutionary Makhalima was the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Freedom Charter were mutually reinforcing rather than exclusive. They are still. After all, as he would point out, there are similar provisions in both the programmes, and in addition, as the Manifesto of the Communist Party clearly states, even the programmatic measures it puts forward will be different in different countries. The question of time and space, the historical conditions obtaining in each country, and the necessity for relevant strategic and tactical responses, was as critical to Cde Mfengu as it was to Marx and Engels.
Makhalima attached great importance to the question of scientific method, covering what Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Great October Socialist Revolution, called a concrete analysis of the concrete condition, and inquiry into reality, into facts to seek and verify the truth. He produced short pieces such as the "Methods of leadership", "You are the ANC all the time" and "Method of work of Branch Committee". His approach in understanding human society and its organisation, including our own Alliance as comprising the ANC, the SACP, Cosatu and Sanco, was based on the scientific methods of inquiry and social change developed by the renowned working class social scientist, Karl Marx, namely the materialist conception of history and dialectics.
In memory of uNdlovu, we must deepen political education in all Alliance components. We must deal decisively with anti-reading, anti-study and anti-intellectual tendencies. The success of our national transformation and development programme requires adequately trained membership and broad masses. No factional, reactionary and deviant whirlwinds, storms and cyclones can turn such a calibre of politically trained members and broad masses against our revolution, against the revolutionary fibre of our movement. Politically trained members and broad masses will be able to hold the leadership both in the organisation and the state to account. Such a quality membership and broad masses cannot be mobilised against the truth, cannot be mobilised to defend wrongdoing and wrongdoers. On the contrary, they will be a great force in dealing with wrongdoing and holding wrongdoers to account.
Makhalima was very critical and deeply worried about the negatives that overwhelmed the positives over the past several years in our movement and country. If there is one great lesson that the May 2019 national and provincial elections taught us as a national democratic revolutionary front, that is the fundamental necessity of unity of purpose and cohesion. The waffling and ambiguity that characterised the utterances of certain leaders and their conduct that left much to be desired during our campaign to defend our hard-won democratic power must be looked into and addressed altogether with the contradictory implications for the campaign.
Last but not least, the SACP wishes to express its sincere gratitude to our people who went out to vote ANC despite all countervailing factors and elements. Our people who voted ANC appreciated that the negatives and countervailing factors and elements would become successful without the victory we have achieved under the organisational leadership of the ANC on the ballot. They recognised that there were positives that need to be deepened in the continuing struggle to rollback the negatives and overcome the structural and political forces behind those negatives.
