GOVAN MBEKI
Learning
from Robben Island
THE PRISON WRITINGS OF
GOVAN MBEKI
COMPILED BY COLIN BUNDY
KWELA BOOKS
Introduction
COLIN BUNDY
GOVAN MBEKI: INTELLECTUAL ACTIVIST
The diningroom table in Govan’s parents’ home was beautifully carpentered: fully extended, with all its leaves in, it could seat sixteen. Even in its more compact form for everyday use, the table would have been surrounded by a good number of chairs. Govan was the youngest of eight children: he had three half-sisters by his father’s first marriage, while his own mother bore three daughters and two sons. He was born on 8 July 1910, in Mpukane, a ]straggling village in Nqamakwe district in that portion of the southern Transkei known as Fingoland. His parents named him Govan Archibald Mvunyelwe (“he for whom people sing”) Mbeki.
The furniture – like the handsome stone-built house which it occupied – was probably built by students from Blythswood mission school in nearby Nqamakwe, the seat of the magistracy. Pigs and poultry were in pens around the house; at a little distance was his father’s farmland, about sixteen morgen, held under Glen Grey title and all fenced. Govan’s father, Fkelewu Mbeki, owned a quantity of livestock: cattle, horses, sheep and goats. Before East London and Umtata were linked by rail, Fkelewu Mbeki had run a wagon transport services between Kingwilliamstown and the Transkei. He had also earned a modest salary from the government of the Cape Colony when he served as a headman.
Furniture, home, farm and livelihood: in every respect, Govan was born into a typically “progressive” or modernising peasant family characteristic of the region at the turn of the century. Like most other members of this modest elite, his parents were Christians. His mother was the daughter of a Methodist evangelist; Govan is not sure when his father was converted, “but the missionaries evidently had great influence on him”.1 Govan himself was named after one of the most famous missionary educators of the Eastern Cape, William Govan, a Presbyterian minister and principal of Lovedale College from its inception in 1841 until 1870. (An indication of William Govan’s standing amongst African Christians in the Eastern Cape and Transkei is that Govan – named 35 years after the Scot had died – had among his acquaintances two other similarly baptised.)
Fkelewu was a devout Methodist, a teetotaller who would say grace even before drinking a glass of water. Did anything of the family ambience rub off on Govan, who left the church when still a student? Certainly, those who worked with him politically between the 1940s and early 1960s speak about his self-discipline, his dedication to the task in hand, and a certain austerity in his lifestyle. A further defining characteristic of the stratum into which he was born was the premium placed upon education. Govan’s own family exemplified this. Most of his sisters became teachers; his brother also trained initially as a teacher before becoming a demonstrator at the Tsolo school of agriculture.
Govan himself was not only encouraged in his schooling, but also excelled in it, rapidly ascending the rungs of the best education available to a bright young Transkeian of his generation. He began at the local Methodist primary school, a church hall given over on weekdays to this use. In a single large room, six classes were conducted simultaneously: the Sub A pupils chanting out their alphabet while older children scratched their sums on slates – and looking back, Govan wonders with amusement how he learnt anything. He also remembers how he enjoyed school and “never played truant”. In his teens, he left Nqamakwe for boarding school at Healdtown, near Fort Beaufort, a leading Methodist institution. At Healdtown he was introduced to Latin – which he loved, later studying it for two years at university – and also studied history, physical science, biology, and English.
From Healdtown, Govan was awarded a Bunga (United Transkeian Territories General Council) scholarship to Fort Hare,2 where he first completed his Senior Certificate and then enrolled as an undergraduate. He was at Fort Hare from 1932 to 1937 – and these years constituted a formative period of his life, intellectually and politically. (His student life was not all politics. Govan was an accomplished footballer and an enthusiastic ballroom dancer. Years later, held in solitary confinement in Port Elizabeth’s North End Prison, Govan exercised and amused himself by twirling through the remembered steps on the impromptu dance-floor of his tiny cell.)
There had been glimpses of organised politics before 1933 – Govan remembers attending an ANC meeting in the Transkei when he was in his teens, held by an African minister. He also acted at some point in the late 1920s as an interpreter for a cousin, Robert Mbeki, who was a member of the ICU (Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union). The ICU, which grew mightily in rural areas between 1926 and 1928 to become the first mass organisation of black South Africans, was briefly active in the southern Transkei. (Thomas Mbeki, a prominent Transvaal ICU leader, was not related to Govan’s family.) But Fort Hare, when he arrived, was not yet the political hothouse that it became in the 1940s: he cannot recall “any real political work” there in 1932.
In the winter of 1933 there took place an encounter which was a decisive political turning-point in his life. Eddie Roux, a member of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), and his bride Win embarked on “a sort of busman’s honeymoon”. They had recently begun producing a monthly magazine, Indlela Yenkululeko – The Road to Freedom – which they sent to various educational centres “and especially to students at Fort Hare”. Now, with camping gear and a donkey, they tramped through the Ciskei. When they reached Alice they camped by the Tyhume River – and from this base they went to hold outdoor meetings at Fort Hare. The students (recounted the Rouxs) “told us of their life in college and of how they were disciplined and treated at schoolboys. We told them of the movement and of Indlela Yenkululeko.3 Among those students was a rapt Govan Mbeki, immediately attracted by the clarity and radicalism of what he heard. He was most impressed by Roux, and began an association that was to last until the 1950s, long after the older man had broken with Marxism and the Party.
There were other influences, too, at Fort Hare that shaped Govan’s politics. He majored in political science and psychology; and his political science lecturer invited Max Yergan to lecture on fascism and communism. Yergan was a black American who served as a representative of the American Young Men’s Christian Association between 1921 and 1936. Politically, he moved from evangelicism to left-wing activism and then (during the Cold War) to a right-wing anti-communism. In 1934, after an absence during which he had visited the USSR, Yergan returned to Fort Hare. He drew on this experience to preach a riveting sermon (after which he was debarred from the pulpit at Fort Hare!) on the text “I have come that ye may have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). Govan became “very close” to him, visited his home, and was introduced by Yergan to Marxist literature in the shape of the Little Lenin Library.
In 1935 and 1936, student politics at Fort Hare was galvanised by the fascist invasion of Ethiopia, by the Hertzog Bills and the 1936 Native Land and Trust Act, and by the calling of the All-African Convention in December 1935. Govan spent each holiday during these years in Johannesburg, where he lodged with one of his half-sisters. There he was drawn further into political discussions and reading, and encountered for the first time the realities of poverty and police repression in a black township. In 1935 he joined the ANC. He was also influenced by socialist ideas, and became personally close to Edwin Mofutsanyana, a leading African member of the CPSA (Communist Party of South Africa). (Thabo, Govan’s oldest son, was named after Mofutsanyana.) Govan did not, however, join the Party: in fact, he did not become a
