Friday Feature

Celebrating Africa Month

Remembering Africa Liberation Day

“Africa’s victory, although proclaimed, is not yet total, and areas of resistance still remain.”

– Emperor Haile Selassie I, First President of OAU

The month of May, also known as Africa Month, marks the annual commemoration on 25 May of the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the precursor of today’s African Union (AU). Today the AU, consisting of fifty-three member states, brings together Africa to collectively address the challenges it faces.

At the end of the Second World War, the African liberation movement was gaining momentum as Africans were fighting for independence from colonial domination. Consequently, between 1945 and 1958, a significant number of African countries gained independence. On 6 March 1957, Ghana was the first country to gain independence.

A year after gaining independence, Ghana’s President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, convened the First Conference of Independent African States in Accra, Ghana on 15 April 1958. The conference was an unequivocal assertion of Africa’s rejection of colonial and imperialist domination of the continent. It became the first Pan African conference to be held on the continent bringing together various African countries. Ethiopia, Egypt, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia attended the conference. Also in attendance were the representatives of the National Liberation Front (FLN) of Algeria and the Union of Cameroonian Peoples. It is worth noting that at the time of the conference, only eight countries were independent.

To further encourage and forge a common goal of fighting against colonial rule, the conference called for the observance of African Freedom Day or African Liberation Day once a year, to mark “the onward progress of the liberation movement, and to symbolize the determination of the People of Africa to free themselves from foreign domination and exploitation.” Consequently, 15 April was enacted as African Freedom Day or Africa Liberation Day.

Years following the First Conference of Independent African States, between 1958 and 1963, seventeen African countries gained independence. On May 25, 1963, the OAU was founded with headquarters in Africa Hall, Ethiopia; Africa Freedom Day or African Liberation Day was changed to Africa Day, which would be commemorated annually on 25 May.

Accessed from: Brands South Africa ;  South African History Online ; Time and Date

Friday Feature

Walter Ulyate Sisulu

Biography of a Freedom Fighter

(1912 – 2003)

“It is a law of life that problems arise when conditions are there for their solution.”  

- Walter Sisulu

Walter Ulyate Sisulu was a South African anti-apartheid activist and a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). He was born on 18 May 1912 in Ngcobo in Transkei (now Eastern Cape) to Alice Mase Sisulu and Albert Victor Dickenson. He was married to nurse and anti-apartheid activist, Nontsikelelo Albertina Sisulu (nee Thethiwe), and together they had eight children, three of which where adopted.

In Ngcobo, Sisulu attended the Anglican Mission Institute, however, after the death of his uncle at the age of fourteen, he left for Johannesburg to find work. In Johannesburg, Sisulu took up a range of work as a delivery man for a dairy; in the masonry and carpentry department, then as a miner of the Rose Deep Mine in Germiston; as a domestic; and as a baker for Premier Biscuits. In 1940, Sisulu was dismissed at Premier Biscuits because he not only organised a strike for higher wages, but he also attempted to form a union. 

Sisulu also worked as a paint mixer for Herbert Evans in Johannesburg; as a packer for a tobacconist; as a part-time teller at the Union Bank of South Africa, and after 1938 as an advertising salesperson and real estate agent. His real estate business, Sitha Investments sold property to Black and Indian people, and prior to the apartheid government shutting its operation, it was the only Black owned estate agency in South Africa.

In 1940, Sisulu joined the ANC and allied with the organisation’s principle of African nationalism. It was also around this this time that he met Albertina Sisulu, who he later married in 1944. In 1943, as founding member of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), he attended conferences of the Federation of Democratic Youth in Romania and the International Union of Students in Poland. He also travelled to the Soviet Union, China, and the United Kingdom. When he returned to South Africa he joined the SACP.

In 1949 Sisulu became ANCYL Secretary-General, where he organised the strategy of active protest, most notably the Defiance Campaign of 1952. For his role in the Defiance Campaign, he was arrested for a brief period before being served with the first of his many banning orders under the Suppression of Communism Act. Ultimately, Sisulu was tried and sentenced for nine months imprisonment with hard labour and suspended for two years for his role in the Defiance Campaign. No longer able to attend public meetings, Sisulu resigned as Secretary-General was forced to work in secret. Sisulu co-organised The 1955 Congress of People but was unable to participate in the event. In the aftermath of the Congress of People, 156 anti-apartheid activists were arrested, with thirty of them tried at the Treason Trial. Released on bail, Sisulu went underground which resulted in the arrest of Albertina Sisulu under General Laws Amendment Act of 1963. She became the first woman to be arrested under the General Laws Amendment Act.

Following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 Sisulu, Mandela and several others formed Umkonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC. During 1962 and 1963 Sisulu was arrested six times but released on bail in April 1963 Sisulu went underground, joining up with the Umkonto we Sizwe, who were secretly located in Rivonia.  

In 1964, at the Rivonia Trial, Sisulu was sentenced to life imprisonment with other anti-apartheid activists. Sisulu served the majority of his sentence on Robben Island, and served the remaining at Pollsmoor Prison, Cape Town.

In 1989, after twenty-five years imprisonment, Sisulu was released from Pollsmoor Prison. He was elected Deputy President of the organisation in 1991, a year after the ANC was unbanned. Sisulu was responsible for restructuring the ANC in post-apartheid/democratic South Africa.

On the eve of South Africa’s democratic elections, Sisulu retired, and nine years later on 5 May 2003, following a long period of ill health Sisulu died. 

Accessed from: African National Congress;  ThoughtCo ; South African History Online;  Wikipedia: Walter Sisulu

Friday Feature

Ndazana Nathaniel Nakasa

Journalist & Author

(1937– 1965)

“As long as the ideas remain unchanged within me, there will always be the possibility that, one day, I shall burst out and say everything that I wish to say in a loud and thunderous voice.” - Nat Nakasa

Ndazana Nathaniel (Nat) Nakasa was born on 12 May 1937 in Lusikisiki, Eastern Cape. Nakasa was the second of three children of Joseph Nakasa and his wife, Alvina Nakasa. As a child from a working-class family in an impoverished rural area, Nakasa was forced by poverty to leave school in 1954 without matriculating. He moved to Durban where he worked as a reporter for Ilanga newspaper, published in Zulu and English. He later moved to Johannesburg where he joined Post and later Drum magazine. He also freelanced for publications in Germany, Sweden, the USA and Britain.

After leaving school, aged seventeen he returned to Durban and after many jobs, two friends helped him find a job a year later as a junior reporter at the Ilanga Lase Natal, a Zulu language weekly. After his reporting attracted the attention of Sylvester Stein of the Drum magazine, he joined the magazine in 1957. He and the other journalists writings at the Drum were influenced by the Suppression of Communism Act, 1950 and had to show the effects of Apartheid indirectly on black lives without condemning it directly for fear of being banned from practising journalism.

With the Sharpville Massacre of 1960, the world took an interest in South Africa and so in 1961, he was asked to write an article entitled The Human Meaning of Apartheid for The New York Times. Drum struggled to keep its black writers due to the severe restriction they found themselves in and many went into exile in Europe of America. In 1963, he announced the formation of a quarterly literary magazine called The Classic, a magazine in English for African intellectual writers and poets from any race around Africa.

The first years printing would be funded by Professor John Thompson of the Farfield Foundation, that unknown to Nakasa was funded by the CIA in order to cultivate a pro-American intellectual elite around the world. It first published in June 1963 and would feature writers such as Can Themba, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and Casey Motsisi. Doris Lessing and Leopold Senghor would feature in other issues and would later be edited by writer Barney Simon. In 1963, the Publications and Entertainment Act was passed which allowed the South African government broad powers to ban or censor content it deemed unfavourable to the interest of the country, further hindering Nakasa's work as he attempted to stay within the law.

In 1964, Nakasa applied for a Nieman Fellowship, a journalism program at Harvard University out of fear for his future employment prospects in South Africa and was accepted for 1965 intake. At the same time, Allister Sparks, editorial page editor of the white anti-apartheid newspaper the Rand Daily Mail invited Nakasa to write a black perspective column for the paper. On accepting a Nieman Fellowship, Nakasa applied for a passport, but like many other black intellectuals, was refused and would have to accept an exit permit instead which meant relinquishing his citizenship and not being allowed to return to South Africa. Unbeknown to Nakasa, the South African police had been monitoring him since 1959 and were about to issue him with a five-year banning order under the Suppression of Communism Act when left for the United States in October 1964.

Nakasa soon found that racism existed in America as well, albeit more subtly. Nakasa didn't like New York City and soon moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he spent his time at Harvard steeped in the somber business of education. While attending the Nieman Fellowship, he participated in protest meetings against Apartheid at Cambridge, Massachusetts and in Washington DC and unsuccessfully attempted again to write an article for The New York Times.

He completed his Nieman Fellowship at the end of June 1965, by which time he was short of money and his attempted to extend his visa beyond August seemed unsuccessful. Now living in Harlem, he wrote articles for several newspapers after leaving Harvard, appeared in the television film The Fruit of Fear and was planning to write a biography of Miriam Makeba. But two days before his death he told a friend, “I can't laugh anymore and when I can't laugh I can't write”. Nakasa seemed homesick, unable to return to South Africa, unsettled and drinking, he became depressed and confessed to friend Nadine Gordimer that he was worried he had inherited his mother’s mental illness. On 14 July 1965, he committed suicide when he jumped from his friend’s New York seven story apartment.

Nakasa's writings were compiled into a book ‘The World of Nat Nakasa’. He was an influential writer and had an impact on many black people and writers. The Print Media Association, the South African Nieman Alumni, and the South African National Editors' Forum have established an annual award for courageous journalism, which is named after him. Its first recipient was Jon Qwelane.

 Accessed from: SA History Online & Wikipedia: Nat Nakasa