Celebrating The Life and Times of the Rt. Bishop David Russell

The Right Reverend David Patrick Hamilton Russell (1938 - 2014)


The Late Bishop David Russell (right) with SBF CEO N. Biko at the Biko3030 Gala in 2007.

As we celebrate Women's Month in South Africa, we remember a man who supported the rights of women to the end; Bishop David Russell.


In summary: For his excellent contribution and commitment to opposing the apartheid system as a church leader and for taking a brave stand on many thorny issues to ensure that South Africa became a democratic society, David Patrick Russell was awarded the Order of the Baobab in Silver.

Born in the late 1930s, David Russell became involved in the struggle against apartheid from an early age. He did his first degree at the University of Cape Town, and then studied for a Masters Degree at Oxford University. He trained for the priesthood at the College of the Resurrection, Mirfield, England, and later obtained his PhD in Religious Studies (specialising in Christian Ethics) from the University of Cape Town. In 1965 he was ordained as the 12th Bishop of Grahamstown.

A lifelong activist, Bishop Russell, who passed away on August 17th, 2014 after a long battle with cancer, was a friend of Steve Biko and many others fighting apartheid. His support assisted the Black Consciousness Movement in carrying out a number of projects, particularly those facilitated by the Black Community Programmes.

Among Russell’s many acts of defiance was when on August 8th, 1977 he laid down in front of trucks and bulldozers to protest against forced removals from Modderdam in the Western Cape, an area declared “whites only”. He was forcibly dragged by police and arrested as an “enemy of the state”. The apartheid regime served him with a five-year banning order on October 1977 restricting him to Cape Town.

Defying these banning orders, and found in possession of a book – Biko – by Donald Woods, he was sentenced in 1980 to a one year jail sentence. He denounced apartheid injustices and the arrests of anti-apartheid activists as vicious and pointed out that such kind of injustices filled people with “revulsion, bitterness and anger”.

The ministry of women in the church was affirmed when the first female priests in the Anglican Church in southern Africa were ordained by Bishop Russell in 1992. He is honoured for his role in opposing the apartheid system as a church leader and for taking a brave stand on many thorny issues to ensure that South Africa became a democratic society.

Later in life, Bishop Russell was a founding member of the Steve Biko Foundation’s Board of Trustees and served in this role from 1998 - 2009. In recognition of his contribution to the liberation struggle and ongoing pursuit of social justice, Russell was nominated for a national order by the Foundation, and subsequently conferred with the Order of Baobab in Silver by President Jacob Zuma.

While saddened by his passing, the Foundation celebrates the enormous contribution Bishop Russell made to the South African liberation struggle and development at large. “He will always be remembered for his role in fighting apartheid, and the memory of his contributions will continue to inspire coming generations”, said SBF CEO Nkosinathi Biko. 

On 27 April 2011, the State President, Jacob G Zuma, conferred Bishop David Patrick Russell with the Order of the Baobab in Silver for his outstanding contribution to the theological field.

According to the Steve Biko Foundation’s Director, Ms Obenewa Amponsah, “Bishop Russell was an ardent advocate of human rights and his concern for the rights of women was an important aspect of his ministry. Even in retirement he remained an outspoken advocate for inclusivity”. A staunch advocate for social justice and as one who stood firmly on the side of the oppressed, Bishop David Russell will not only be missed by the Steve Biko Foundation, but friends and communities throughout South Africa and the international community.

Bishop Russell is survived by his wife Dorothea and two sons.

Steve Biko Memorial Lecture 2012 Speech by Ben Okri

Biko and the Tough Alchemy of Africa

The Sharpeville massacre of 1966 with its unforgettable images that seared themselves into the consciousness of the world was one of those world events that awoke us from our moral sleep. I was roughly the same age as the children being slaughtered in that famous picture and it instantly made me aware that our fates are one. I don't know how other people in other continents saw that picture but from that day I too became a black South African and we suffered with you in your sufferings and willed you on in your struggles.

You have no idea what you mean in the historic consciousness of the world. Sometimes it seems that awful things in history happen to compel us to achieve the impossible, to challenge our idea of humanity. Your struggle mirrored around the world, is one of the greatest struggles of our times. It poses and continues to pose the biggest questions facing humanity; massive philosophical questions that have never really been tackled by the great thinkers of the human race. These are some of the questions which your history posed: Are human beings really equal? Is justice fundamental to humanity or is justice a matter of law? Is there evil? Can different races really live together? Is love unreal in human affairs? Why is there so much suffering? Why do some people seem to suffer more than others? Can the will of a people overcome great injustice? Can a people transform their lives and their society through the power of a new vision? Does God exist and is God unfair?

All across the continent and everywhere where human love responds to the suffering of others, these questions were nagging kind of music. All across Africa these questions troubled us - and among the voices that articulated a profoundly bold and clear response to these big questions of fate, injustice and destiny, one big voice pierced our minds was that of Steve Biko. One of my points of affinity with Biko is with his rigour and his high-standards of expectation of the human and the African spirit. He asks fundamental questions like: Who are you? What are you? Are you what others say you are? What is your selfhood? What makes you a man or a woman? He asks questions which will be relevant in hundreds of years time, questions which are an inevitable part of a free society. We need to reincarnate Biko's rigour, his high-standards and his forensic questioning of society and of all of his assumptions. We need to keep alive Biko's fierce and compassionate truthfulness. In fact, we need Biko's spirit now more than ever. If he were here today he might well ask such questions: Is the society just? Are we being truthful about one another? Has there been a real change of attitudes and assumptions on both sides of the racial divide? He might have expressed concerns about the police reaction to the striking miners of Marikana. He would have said that it does not need to be said that the murders and the use of apartheid law to try the miners are shocking to the international community and that it has disturbing resonances with his own death. He might well ask: Has there been reconciliation without proper consideration? He might ask whether the things that he fought against have merely mutated like certain cancerous cells. It is a strange kind of fate for Biko to have suffered for in being so unjustly cut down so early, he remains for us perpetually poised in the stance of his difficult questions.

And to think of Biko is to have these questions always come alive in our minds. He is like Kafka's axe that can always be used against the frozen seas of lies and hidden attitudes that fog up the flow of a society's possibilities. He is a figure of constant truth that will continue to haunt the history of this nation as it negotiates through time the continued hidden legacy of Apartheid. It is not surprising that his most famous work is called I write what I Like. In a sense Biko transcends politics and has in him something of the terrible integrity of the true artist, one who with hammer-blows will relentlessly pursue his vision of exalted truth regardless of its consequences. In that sense Biko is more than just the unfinished conscience of this land; he is also that finger pointing at the only acceptable future: a life and a society in which citizens can be proud of what they are. Biko's spirit is permanently, fantastically set against the humiliation of man and woman. His spirit is set against the mediocrity of consciousness, the mediocrity of a consciousness that lives without a sense of what has happened to others. He is not an easy guy. He does not like laziness or lazy thinking. He has the rigour of a young man who will not accept that a decent life is impossible for his people. He will not accept that an agreement has been reached without frank and exhausted dialogue. He may well think that too much has been given away too soon. He may even think that the people who have not honestly acknowledged the death of the injustice they inflicted on others may still in fact harbour deceits of those injustices.

In many ways Biko reminds me of Nietzsche; he did not trust pity and he might have thought forgiveness not really forgiving till the fire of truth has been brought into the consciousness of the one to be forgiven. Generosity without steel can be a weak thing, just as steel without generosity can be a cruel thing. This may be one of the real tragedy of Biko's death. The apartheid struggle needed a dual strand: its hard and is gentle; its sternness and its compassion; its fire and its water. With the murder of Biko some tougher questions which would have been insisted upon might have found a more authentic advocate. 

The fact is that a nation cannot escape from itself and from all of its truths and all of its lies. If its lies linger too long in the unspoken dialogue of a people, sooner or later they will lead to unpleasantness. Even though Biko be absent, the people in the shanty-towns, the poor and the hungry feel the shadow of those lies, feel the pointedness in their lives of the questions that Biko might be asking today. I think I'm going to have some water.

Extracted from the 2012 Steve Biko Memorial Lecture delivered by Ben Okri

Friday Feature: Amazing Women: Navi Pillay

Navanethem (Navi) Pillay, the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights was born on 23 September 1941 in Clairwood, Durban. She went to the University of Natal where she graduated with BA in 1963 and with an LLB in 1965. It was at the University that she joined the Unity Movement.  After completing her degree she commenced her legal career by doing her articles in Durban under the guidance of Narainsamy Thumbi Naicker, a banned member of the African National Congress (ANC) who was also under house arrest. 

In 1967, Pillay became the first woman to open her own law practice in Natal (now kwaZulu Natal). She provided legal defence for political activists from different political organizations detained by the apartheid government.

In her first case after starting her own legal practice, she represented Phyllis Naidoo who was charged for failing to report to the police station as a banned person. In 1971, she represented 10 members of the Unity Movement who were charged under the Terrorism Act.  Pillay also represented her husband Gaby Pillay who was detained by the Security Police under Terrorism Act. It was at this time that exposed the practice and effects of torture and solitary confinement on detainees held in police custody. In 1973, she fought and won the right for political prisoners to have access to legal counsel. In the mid 1970s, Pillay defended detained members of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) such as Saths Cooper and Strini Moodley. Pillay later became the first woman to open legal practice in Durban.  

In 1982, she obtained a Master of Law and in 1988 a Doctor of Juridical Science from Harvard University. In 1995, Pillay joined the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and in 1999 she was elected as its Judge President for which she served two four-year terms. Since 2003, she has served as judge on the International Criminal Court.  Pillay is cofounder of the South African Advice Desk for Abused Women and was appointed the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on 28 July 2008.

Navi Pillay will deliver the 15th Steve Biko memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town on the 11th of September 2014.

Biography accessed on South African History Online website http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/navanethem-navi-pillay-born on 15  August, 2014.

Friday Feature: Amazing Women- Winnie Kgware

Names: Kgware, Winnie
Born: 1917, Thaba 'Nchu, Orange Free State (now Free State)
Died: 1998
In summary: Teacher, President of the Black Peoples Convention, recipient of The Order of Luthuli in Silver 2003

Winnie Kgware was born in Thaba Nchu in the Free State in 1917.  A teacher by profession, and resident at the University of the North (Turfloop) as the wife of the Rector, Kgware was involved in supporting students in their protests against the Government’s restrictions on campus. One of her early acts at the university was to organise a Methodist prayer group in defiance of an order that banned students from worshipping on campus. She gave sustenance to the student movement and in an ironic twist, allowed the rector's residence to be used as a meeting place for the University Christian Movement, an organization that was banned from the campus at the time.

Winnie Kgware encouraged the youth to form a branch of the South African Student Movement and to establish an SRC at Hwiti High School where Peter Mokaba was elected SRC President.

Consequently, at the age of 15 years, Kgware recruited comrade Peter Mokaba to join the underground movement. Peter Mokaba was subsequently expelled from Hwiti High School because of his involvement in the struggle for political liberation and it was then that he registered as a private candidate and passed his exams.  On completion of his matriculation, Mokaba was unable to attend university due to financial constaints.  He opted to teach maths and science at school and to freelance as a journalist. It was only after the intervention Kgware, his political mentor,  that he got money to study at university where he enrolled for a Batchelor of Science in Computer Technology.

In spite of the age gap between her and fellow activists, Kgware played a leading role in the launch of the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) at the university in 1968.

The first national conference of the organisation that became the Black People’s Convention (BPC) took place at Hammanskraal from 16 to 17 December 1972, with 1 400 delegates in attendance representing 145 groups.

The conference elected an executive committee made up of Winnie Motlalepula Kgware (president), Madibeng Mokoditoa (vice president), Sipho Buthelezi (secretary general), Mosibudi Mangena (national organiser), and Saths Cooper (public relations officer).

Kgware became the first president of the BPC formed in 1972 as an umbrella body of the black consciousness movement led by Steve Biko. The BPC was amongst the organizations that were banned in 1977.

One incident that demonstrated the determination of Kgware occurred in 1977 when the bus,-taking mourners to Biko’s funeralin King William’s Town, was stopped by security forces. Kgware,then 66 years old, evaded the police and determined to be at the funeral, hitched a lift all the way to King Williams Town.

In 1998, the Umtapo Centre in Durban awarded the Steve Biko Award to Kgware in recognition of her role in the liberation struggle.

In 2003, President Thabo Mbeki conferred The Order of Luthuli in Silver to Winnie  Kgware   for outstanding leadership and lifelong commitment to the ideals of democracy, non-racialism, peace and justice.

Biography accessed on South African History Online website http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/winnie-kgware on 8 August 2014.

Friday Feature: Amazing Women; The Life of Thenjiwe Mtintso

Names: Mtintso,    Thenjiwe

Born: 7 November 1950

In summary: Journalist, trade unionist,  member of the  Black Consciousness Movement (BCM)  activist, member of the ANC and MK, Deputy Secretary General of the ANC, Central Executive Committee member of the  SACP and ambassador to Italy.

Thenjiwe Mtintso, was born on 7 November 1950 in Soweto Johannesburg where she also grew up. Her mother Hanna Mtintso was a domestic worker and her father Gana Makabeni was a trade unionist and a member of the African National Congress (ANC). Mtintso faced financial problems that compromised her education. Consequently, she was forced to leave school and work full-time in various factories to finance her part-time studies at secondary school and at the University of Fort-Hare.

At university she became a student activist in the South African Student Organisation (SASO)and Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). Her activism in student politics led to her expulsion from the University of Fort-Hare. As a result of her political activism, Mtintso was detained several times by the security police in the 1970s. She was also banned on numerous occasions because of her activities as a political organiser and a journalist of the Daily Dispatch Newspaper.

After she was arrested and brutally tortured by the security police, Mtintso was forced to go into exile in 1978, where she joined the ANC and uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK). She underwent military training and rose through the ranks to become a commander of MK. She was sent for further training in Cuba at the Fé del Valle School.

Mtintso remained in exile until 1992 when she returned to South Africa. She was appointed into the Transitional Executive Committee and thus became an active participant in the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), negotiations. After the first democratic elections in April 1994, she became an ANC Member of Parliament. Later, she served as the first chairperson of the Commission of Gender Equality in 1997, and as chairperson of the board of Gender Links.

A year later she was elected as the Deputy Secretary General of the ANC. Mtintso also served as a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party (SACP). Meanwhile, she also enrolled for a Master of Arts (MA) degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1998. In 2007 she was appointed as South Africa’s Ambassador to Cuba and in 2010, she was appointed as South Africa’s Ambassador to Italy.

Biography accessed on South African History Online http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/thenjiwe-mtintso on 1 August 2014.