Ebrahim Harvey is a political writer and a former columnist for the Mail & Guardian. He is also a political activist and was, at one time, a trade unionist in the Congress of South African Trade Unions.

Kgalema Motlanthe

A Political Biography

By Ebrahim Harvey

Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd

Copyright © 2012 Ebrahim Harvey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4314-0438-4

Contents

Preface,
An introductory reflection,
PART ONE: FORMATIVE YEARS,
1 Ancestral roots, youth and political baptism,
2 Life on Robben Island,
3 ‘Meeting the real world’,
PART TWO: FROM ANC SECRETARY-GENERAL TO POLOKWANE AND PARLIAMENT, 1997–2007,
4 From Mafikeng to Stellenbosch, 1997–2002,
5 From Stellenbosch to Polokwane, 2002–2007,
6 The Polokwane ‘revolution’ and its aftermath,
PART THREE: FROM POLOKWANE TO THE YEAR OF MANGAUNG, 2007–2012,
7 Kgalema, third ANC president of South Africa, 2008,
8 Kgalema, deputy president of South Africa, 2009,
9 A rough run-up to Mangaung, 2012,
Endnotes,
Bibliography,

CHAPTER 1

Ancestral roots, youth and political baptism

Ancestral family

Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe was born on 19 July 1949 in the impoverished black township of Alexandra, close to what later became the fabulously wealthy, white Sandton in northern Johannesburg. His parents, Louis Mathakoe Motlanthe and Masefako Sophia Madingoane, came from poor black working class families. Kgalema – also called ‘Mkhuluwa’, meaning ‘Elder One’ or ‘Grandfather’ in Xhosa and Zulu – has two younger brothers, Tlatlane Ernest and Lekota Sydney, with whom he has had close relationships, especially when they were younger. Despite what has been stated elsewhere, Kgalema has no biological sisters. On the maternal side Kgalema’s ancestry hails from the Sepedi-speaking Northern Sotho in the heartland of the Pedi kingdom or what is known as Sekhukhuneland in Mpumalanga (formerly the Eastern Transvaal), which in Sotho means ‘the place where the sun rises’.

Sekhukhuneland, straddling Mpumalanga and Limpopo, has a fascinating political history, rich in the experiences of initially Afrikaner and later British colonialism and the legendary Pedi resistance to both. Boer and British intervention in the Mpumalanga region, particularly the final brutal crushing of heroic Pedi resistance by the British in Sekhukhuneland in 1879, was among the worst manifestations of the ravages of colonialism in South Africa. The collaboration between British and Boer imperialism and racism against the BaPedi – when they were not at war with each other – was concerted and ruthless. Sekhukhuneland’s historical significance is captured by the historian Peter Delius as ‘the heartland of the once powerful Pedi Kingdom which under the leadership of Sekwati and Sekhukhune played a pivotal role in the nineteenth century history of the Transvaal. It held the Zulu, the Swazi, the Boers and the British at bay and had provided a haven in a dangerous and turbulent world. In historical maps of the Transvaal it was marked in bold letters, a place at the forefront of the hopes and fears of statesmen, missionaries and, ultimately, major-generals’.

In more recent times, notes Delius, ‘The ANC was no stranger to Transvaal rural politics nor to Sekhukhuneland, having a rich history of connection stretching back to the first decades of the century. Chiefs played a key role in the foundation and early years of the organisation.’ Some of the most senior royals of the BaPedi maintained close connection with the African National Congress (ANC) and provided financial support. ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) veterans such as Flag Boshielo, John Kgoana Nkadimeng, Lawrence Phokanoka, Elias Motsoaledi, Godfrey Pitje and John Phala (who passed away in August 2009) were born and grew up in Sekhukhuneland. BaPedi battles against the Boers were so heroic that King Sekhukhune II was invited to attend the founding conference of the ANC in 1912.

It was also in Sekhukhuneland that Sabatakgomo was formed, an organisation forged in the interaction between workers in rural and urban areas. Migrant workers, moving constantly between the urban and rural areas, were the key players in its formation, in association with both the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP). They became the link between these organisations and struggles unfolding in both town and countryside. But Sabatakgomo was more than just an organisation. It was also a community battle cry at the first sign of danger. So closely tied is Sekhukhuneland to the history of the ANC in Mpumalanga that the formation of MK was inspired partly by the 1958 Sekhukhune Revolt.

Kgalema’s maternal family moved from Phokwane in Sekhukhuneland to Botshabelo, near Middelburg, when his great-grandfather, the Reverend Ramatoto Johannes Madingoane, left to train as a priest. Upon completion of the training, he went to live and minister to a community in Marapyane, in Mpumalanga. After falling out with this community in 1912, Madingoane bought a farm named Klipfontein. He met his wife, Sophia Mmateng Masefako Nkadimeng, in Jane Furse in Sekhukhuneland, where they were both attending the Lutheran church. She was the daughter of Kgosi Phaswane I and Mankwane Lekala of the Nkadimeng-BaPedi royal clan in Manganeng, also in Sekhukhuneland. At some point they married – it is unclear where and when – and finally settled on their land at Klipfontein.

The Madingoanes had five sons and one daughter. Their eldest son, Kgalema Marcus, was Kgalema Motlanthe’s grandfather, after whom he was named. Kgalema married Louisa Mmope Sehole, a Mokgatla from Marapyane. Their seventh child, a girl called Masefako Sophia, was Kgalema Motlanthe’s mother. In 1939 Kgalema Madingoane moved with his wife to Apex, a squatter camp in Benoni Old Location, in search of work. As such, he was a typical migrant worker. Trapped in cycles of poverty, unemployment and associated dependency, labour migration tends to cross from one generation to the next. Thus most of Madingoane’s grandchildren ended up, like so many others before and after them, going to seek jobs and a living in Johannesburg. Kgalema soon got involved in community matters and eventually became a well-known community leader and later councillor in Apex. He was instrumental in establishing the township of Daveyton in 1955 and also moved into business, running a funeral parlour and general dealership there. After he died in 1956 two schools and a street were named after him.

On the paternal side, Kgalema’s grandfather Petrus Motlanthe was born in Sewaneng, a squatter settlement on the edge of a farm in Ga-Mothiba, some 75 kilometres from Polokwane (formerly Pietersburg). Petrus and his family lived there with many other families until, with squatter removals, they had to leave in about 1940. They were moved to another farm, Melkboomfontein, a few kilometres away.

Kgalema’s father Louis Mathakoe, the eldest son of Petrus, was also born in Sewaneng. Petrus was a polygamist and a traditional healer. A kinsman, Teddy Matsitela, remarked that Louis had ‘contended’ with the fact that his father was a polygamist, suggesting that he had reservations about that cultural practice. With polygamy, there were ‘lots and lots of people’ and Louis loved them all, Matsitela says. The home was called a ‘location’ to show how big the family really was!

When Petrus and his family moved to Melkboomfontein Louis did not go with them. Instead he decided to look for work in Johannesburg. He went to live in Alexandra and got a job as a cleaner at St John’s College in Houghton. Kgalema’s mother Masefako was then working as a domestic worker in Observatory and also living in Alexandra. It was there that they met. They dated for a while and married in 1946.

Kgalema’s parents, like so many other black working-class people, had little formal education. Their circumstances – a product of apartheid education and urban control policies – compelled them to take any job they could get rather than remain trapped in the poor black ghettoes of the then Eastern and Northern Transvaal. Louis would probably have realised that he was going nowhere if he had moved with his parents to yet another squatter settlement, on Melkboomfontein. His choice to move to Alexandra around 1941 and seek work was at least a better prospect in those hard days of apartheid.

Kgalema has a deep sense of family and history. As the research disclosed new information he said, ‘These things fascinate me more than anything else, believe me.’ Born a year after the National Party came to power in 1948, he lived most of his life in the 42-year period of white racist brutality, oppression and exploitation up to 1990. His family’s story still looms large in his mind, a significant backdrop to all that he has experienced in his own time.

Kgalema’s family

Masefako gave birth to Kgalema, her first-born son, on 19 July 1949. It was customary that when a young woman was about to give birth she would go to her parents or relatives for support. This is what Masefako did. She went to the home of her sister Mantimu, where she was looked after. She gave birth at the Boksburg-Benoni Hospital and then returned to Alexandra with Kgalema.

In Alexandra, one of the oldest black townships in Johannesburg, his parents’ home was ‘just one big room’, one of the thousands of ‘houses’ built by owners in their yards and often rented out. Sometimes ten or more families lived in one yard. Many of the yards were quite big, but the rooms were about nine by twelve metres. At night the chairs would be placed on top of whatever tables there were, to create space for sleeping. The Motlanthes often had at least six people living there, but often a friend or two or some family members visited over the weekends. These memories are still vivid for Kgalema.

Kgalema’s family lived in several houses in Alexandra at the time. His grandfather Joseph lived along the same street, 16th Avenue. His aunt Sodi lived in 12th Avenue and his uncle Godfrey was in 6th Avenue. As a result, Kgalema says, he lived ‘at different times in different homes.’ Although he was only eleven when his parents were forcibly removed from Alexandra to Meadowlands in 1956, he could feel that Alexandra was a close-knit community and he missed it, ‘especially in the area of football, which I loved to play as a young boy.’

Several sources say that the first school Kgalema attended was in Alexandra. In fact his brother Ernest says it was in Ga-Mothiba, in Limpopo, where his father was born. Ernest and Kgalema were sent there to their grandmother, Grace, for a few months just when Kgalema was about to start school because their parents did not have their own home at the time and other circumstances made it difficult for them to take care of their children themselves.

Kgalema resumed schooling for Grade 1 in Alexandra at the Anglican missionary school, known as Pholosho Primary. Before Bantu education began, Church schooling was the norm in Alexandra. Anglican, Catholic, Dutch Reformed and Methodist schools existed there until under apartheid almost all closed down. As a result of the Catholic Church refusing to close their schools, they continued to function. The other Church-based schools took a principled stand not to implement apartheid education and instead of working with the government, as they were invited to do, chose to shut their doors, including Pholosho Primary’s. The Sotho meaning of ‘Pholosho’ is ‘saved’ but taking a more principled stand led, ironically, to the school’s demise in Alexandra.

Kgalema’s time in the Anglican school until it was disbanded had a huge formative influence on him, shaping his values and outlook at a still tender age. The Anglican Church ‘is quite distinctive in Christianity. It tends to be more worldly.’ In that more progressive spirit, the official colours of Pholosho Primary were those of the ANC: black, green and gold. This was a conscious reflection of the huge influence of the ANC in Alexandra and more generally in Johannesburg, especially when Kgalema resumed schooling there in 1956. That time and its symbolism must have left an impression on him. In 1955 the Freedom Charter was adopted and in 1957 there was the massive Alexandra bus boycott. Kgalema can still remember that his father bought a bicycle during the boycott in order to get to work.

After Pholosho Primary and the other mission schools shut down, Pholosho continued to operate covertly, under very difficult conditions. Kgalema remembers that the school ‘was spread in different parts of the township, one room in a backyard, another in a garage and others scattered in other places. We went from one place to another to do our schooling.’ Though his early memory of Alexandra is a bit vague, two very different images stay vivid: the regular police raids on shebeens, and always having a tennis ball in his pocket for playing soccer with his friends, either at school or on their way home.

From Pholosho Primary in Alexandra, Kgalema went to Totomeng Lower Primary in Meadowlands, then to Masekhene Higher Primary, also in Meadowlands, and thereafter to Meadowlands Secondary School in Zone 2. Though he stayed in Zone 8 he walked several kilometres daily from there to school in Zone 2 and back. Kgalema’s parents finally placed him in Orlando High School because Meadowlands did not have high schools. He remembers those long walks he had to take from Meadowlands to Orlando High School and back each day. The extensive walking during his school years could well have inculcated his love of walking long distances in mountainous surroundings.

When Kgalema and his brother Ernest returned to Alexandra, they went to stay with their aunt in 13th Street because their parents still did not have a home of their own. With the boys fairly close by, their parents could at least see them more often and be closer to them to monitor their progress and attend to their needs. But two years later, in 1958, the parents got a house at 71, 16th Street and moved in, reuniting with the boys. They stayed there for less than two years before they were forcibly removed to Meadowlands in 1959.

At the time of the mass removals Kgalema’s mother was still working in Observatory as a domestic worker and his father Louis as a cleaner at St John’s. They were loving parents who took care of their three sons as well as they possibly could, under often the difficult circumstances of their menial jobs, low wages and imposed bad working conditions, especially in those years when black trade unions were not recognised and they had to contend daily with what was common for all African people in the urban areas then: the pass laws, police harassment and white racism in every facet of life. Kgalema’s own family experience showed him that these inseparable daily injustices, political and social, made nonsense of the two-stage theory of revolution predominant in the ANC and SACP, which effectively separated political freedom from economic and social justice.

Like most African families, the Motlanthes struggled to make ends meet. Kgalema’s brother Sydney recalls that at one stage his father gave him a kind of ‘bread consumed by miners those days, called mbonyana. I think it was an inferior bread compared to what you bought in the shops. It was cheap bread you chewed forever.’ Kgalema agrees that they knew tough times but that ‘there was always bread at least at home.’

Despite some needy periods Kgalema has no doubt that ‘we grew up in a very stable environment. There were never really serious quarrels between our parents and though they were not perfect, on the whole it was definitely a stable family home. They respected and loved each other and they always warmly received family members who visited.’ Sydney recalls that when he once wanted Kgalema to buy him something, he was scolded for not realising the need to be careful with money when times are tough. ‘He said I was talking like a youngster who did not understand how money works.’

Kgalema’s parents came from stable family backgrounds and were religious, his mother Masefako probably more so than Louis. ‘My parents were practising Christians and as a result I grew up in churchly surroundings,’ he says. Kgalema adds that Masefako was tomboyish, by her own admission, and could do most of the things that boys did back home in Ramantsho, including killing snakes with a stick! She also had a temper, as he remembers candidly: ‘If she was busy washing dishes and you were up to mischief the dishcloth would be thrown at you before you knew it. She was the disciplinarian at home, giving us many spankings.’ Masefako was clearly an assertive, strong woman, even in relation to her husband Louis. Though a bit frail and suffering from Alzheimer’s, at the age of 84 at the time of writing she is still very much alive in Meadowlands, Zone 8.

The brothers Ernest and Sydney did not think that Louis had as great a fervour for politics as Kgalema would have, but ‘like any black person who lived under apartheid he hated it and sometimes spoke about many bad things that the white government did to black people’, Kgalema says. Louis was a ‘soft-spoken, reserved man and gentlemanly, a man of few words and almost reticent’, as Kgalema puts it. It was Ernest who felt strongly that Kgalema took a lot after his father: ‘He has some of my father’s traits. My father was a great listener and never shouted at people or raised his voice.’

Kgalema says proudly that Louis never once ‘lifted a finger on any one of us’. He recalls Louis telling him: ‘I don’t want to touch you because if I do I would do so much harm.’ Yet he may have raised his hand occasionally. Sydney remembers Kgalema intervening to prevent his father from hitting him after he went to play for another soccer club, at a time when all his sons played for the same soccer club, Meadowlands Spa. Kgalema told Louis that it was Sydney’s right to choose to play for whichever team he wanted. It seems that already in those days, when most parents hit their children, Kgalema was opposed to parents using violence to punish their children for any wrongdoing.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Kgalema Motlanthe by Ebrahim Harvey. Copyright © 2012 Ebrahim Harvey. Excerpted by permission of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.