Eulogy by President Jacob Zuma at the reburial ceremony of the remains of former SACP General Secretary and former Treasurer-General of the ANC, Mr Moses Kotane, Pella, North West
Director of the Programme
Mme Rebecca Kotane and family,
Former President Thabo Mbeki,
Former Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe
The Leadership of the ANC, SACP, COSATU and SANCO,
The Presiding Officers of Parliament,
Premier and Government of the North West,
Ministers, Premiers, Deputy Ministers, MECs, Mayors
MPs and MPLs
Traditional leaders, religious leaders, members of the business community,
Members of the Diplomatic Corps
Comrades and friends
Fellow South Africans
I greet you all. Dumelang!
Almost two weeks ago today, we converged at the Waterkloof Air Force Base in Tshwane to receive the mortal remains of two outstanding sons of our country, Moses Kotane and J.B. Marks.
Today, Comrade Moses Kotane has finally come home to his permanent resting place.
We are filled with sadness but also pride and joy, for we have the privilege of celebrating the life of this highly regarded giant of our struggle for freedom.
Moses Kotane gave his whole life to the struggle for freedom, justice and equality.
We are honoured to have the opportunity to bid him a formal farewell, which President Oliver Tambo, Yusuf Dadoo and other illustrious leaders had when they interred him for the first time in 1978, at his temporary resting place in Moscow, in the then Soviet Union, surrounded by the love, respect and comradeship of the Russian people.
We are privileged indeed to call this internationalist our compatriot, a man who was respected from Africa to Asia and Europe, because of his ideological clarity and commitment to the cause of freedom of the oppressed.
On this historic day, it is important to reflect on the material conditions and social context which helped shape Comrade Kotane’s thinking as a young man.
These are the conditions that were to ultimately create a giant of our revolution whose life is worth celebrating without any reservation.
Malume Kotane was born during the period when the seeds were planted for the Native Land Act of 1913, the consequences of which we are still reeling from to date.
In 1905, the year of his birth, the Transvaal Native Affairs Department noted in its annual report that the time had come for the land dedicated and set apart as locations and reserves to be defined, delimited and reserved for the natives by legislative enactment.
It is important to also note that 1905 was just a year before the Bhambatha rebellion which, together with many other battles against colonial rule, serve as evidence of the proud resistance traditions of the African people.
That rebellion laid a firm foundation for the formation of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1912, which is also the year in which Mme Rebecca Kotane was born, making her the same age as her beloved political home.
Like many revolutionaries, Comrade Kotane grew up under harsh conditions of poverty, engineered by the colonial regime to ensure that black people amount to nothing more than a source of cheap labour.
During his childhood, the whites-only Union of South Africa was conceptualized and formed in 1910 to the exclusion of the black majority, thus creating the unique situation of a settler colonizer sharing the same geographic space and national boundaries as the colonized.
The regime further passed the Native Land Act in 1913, turning proud self-sufficient African men and women into wage labourers.
Like many African children at the time, Comrade Kotane received very little formal education and had to go find work at the young age of seventeen.
He did a number of jobs in the Krugersdorp area including working as domestic servant.
But the turning point in his life was when he started working at a bakery and joined the African Bakers Union, which like other unions at that time was being set up by the South African Communist Party (SACP) in discharging its responsibility as the vanguard party of the working class.
Comrade Kotane joined the ANC and the SACP in the late nineteen twenties and quickly rose through the ranks of the SACP, becoming a member of the politburo and a full time functionary of the party by 1931 when he was only twenty six years old.
It is important to note here that Comrade Kotane was a hard worker which earned him the positions of leadership.
Through him, we want to inspire our youth in particular to read, work hard and rise through the leadership of organisations through commitment, dedication and hard work.
Indeed Moses Kotane was an avid reader whose thirst for knowledge earned him a fond place in the hearts and minds of the leadership of our movement at the time.
He distinguished himself amongst his peers by his unparalleled grasp and understanding of the complex workings of the capitalist society.
He studied Marxism-Leninism diligently and earned himself a place at the International Lenin School in Moscow, Russia, where he sharpened his ideological outlook.
Mr Kotane returned to South Africa in 1933 and continued working hard for the movement until he was elected General Secretary of the SACP in 1939 at the young age of thirty four.
In his life, we learn that we should work tirelessly to make South Africa a better place for all.
Compatriots and friends,
We are bidding a final farewell to one of the finest organic intellectuals this country has ever produced. This was also a man who never saw the theory of Marxism as a dogma and he certainly did not approach it religiously.
On the contrary, he saw it as the most effective tool with which to analyse society and more importantly, as a guide to action. Importantly, Moses Kotane was not an armchair revolutionary.
He correctly understood what Marx meant when he said:
"Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."
Moses Kotane wanted to change South Africa.
One of his remarkable contributions to the theory of our liberation struggle and the history of our country was his passion for the Africanisation of Marxism-Leninism.
Yusuf Dadoo described him accurately when he said in 1978, that Moses Kotane gave an indigenous meaning to the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism.
In a letter from Cradock in the Cape to the Party leadership, Comrade Moses Kotane wrote in 1934:
"My first suggestion is that the party becomes Africanised, that the Communist Party of South Africa must pay special attention to South Africa and study the conditions in this country and concretise the demands of the masses from first-hand information,
“that we must speak the language of the native masses and must know their demands, that while it must not lose its international allegiance,
“…..the Party must be Bolshevised and become South African not only theoretically but in reality."
Another unique characteristic of Moses Kotane was that he was part of that rare breed of leaders who understood the dialectical intersection of the class and national struggles.
He therefore understood with great depth, the historic relationship between the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party as well as the trade union movement.
He must therefore be credited as one of the founding fathers of the Tripartite Alliance both at theoretical and organizational levels.
While a leader of the SACP, he also executed his tasks fully well as a member of the ANC national executive committee and later as Treasurer-General of the ANC.
His character made it extremely difficult for anyone to demonize either of these two dominant ideological strands in the liberation movement.
He succeeded through unmatched patience and tolerance to neutralize even the biggest anti-communist nationalists such as the young Nelson Mandela in the forties and fifties.
It is this rare ability possessed by Mr Kotane to successfully combine ANC and SACP work without compromising either that made President OR Tambo to say at his funeral in Moscow that:
"If Moses Kotane was the General Secretary of the SACP, he was no lesser degree a highly esteemed and completely devoted leader of the African National Congress."
Ntate Moses Kotane was one of the earliest recipients of the ANC’s Isithwalandwe award which was bestowed on him in 1975, in recognition of his outstanding contribution and sacrifice to the struggle.
The only other people who had received this award at that time were Chief Albert Luthuli, Dr Yusuf Dadoo and Father Trevor Huddleston who had all received it twenty years prior in 1955.
It was good that his organization recognized his contribution during his lifetime.
Compatriots
We are laying to rest a towering figure in the liberation struggle. The story of South Africa can never be complete without mentioning this great son of our people, who guided our revolution.
Today we begin a new chapter in his life and in the history of our struggle. It is the chapter of bringing Moses Kotane home in more respects than his resting place.
We have to bring ntate Kotane home to our schools, universities, townships and rural villages.
Our children, the workers, women, youth and indeed all our people black and white, must know about this man who died in foreign lands, in the quest for the freedom we enjoy today.
Our people need to know all the illustrious men and women who made it possible for them to live as free equal citizens in the land of their birth. They should know that this country produced more leaders in addition to our icon President Nelson Mandela.
South Africa has produced outstanding leaders whose lives will provide inspiration and lessons for generations to come.
It has produced Moses Kotane, JB Marks, Yusuf Dadoo, Walter Sisulu, Andrew Mlangeni, Ahmed Kathrada, Albertina Sisulu, Sophie de Bruyn and many, many other heroes and heroines.
At times we tend to forget what it took for us to reach this stage.
In studying the lives of these men and women, we will understand what it meant to live in South Africa before 1994, and appreciate the strides we have made.
When we say we have a good story to tell, it is because we know the story of the South Africa that Moses Kotane lived in.
We are happy to tell him today, that South Africa is a much better place to live in than it was when he left to go and pursue
the struggle beyond the borders of this country.
We were able to defeat the demon of institutionalized racism and apartheid because of the foundation of struggle that he and his peers laid for us, and for the leadership and guidance that they provided.
The mission of creating a truly united, non-racial, nonsexist and prosperous South Africa continues and began in earnest in 1994. During the first ten years of democracy, more than seven hundred laws or amendments aimed at reconfiguring South African society were approved by Parliament.
The dismantling of the legal framework of apartheid and transformation of many state institutions has led to the visible improvement of the socio-economic conditions of millions of people, which is what comrade Moses Kotane fought for.
Compatriots
Let me once again thank the government and people of the Russian Federation for looking after our leaders in life and in death in the manner that they did.
We shall be eternally grateful for the solidarity and friendship of the former Soviet Union to the African National Congress and the people of South Africa during the difficult days of struggle when friends were few.
Next month, we will travel to Indonesia for the commemoration and celebration of the historic first Africa-Asia Summit in Bandung, Indonesia, which took place in 1955.
A journalist reporting on the summit then in 1955 for a Russian newspapers the Daily Worker, remarked on the towering presence of Comrade Kotane at that conference.
The journalist described Comrade Kotane as follows; “a man who had no seat among the official delegations on the conference floor but to whom many bowed and nodded a warm greeting when he entered the hall".
South Africa will participate in that conference in Bandung in April in memory of this great patriot, who attended that historic conference as an observer and lobbied for the support of the liberation movement to advance the freedom we enjoy today.
Compatriots let me close with the preamble of the Freedom Charter to remind us what type of society our people committed to in 1955, the year in which Moses Kotane travelled the world for 11 months, lobbying for support for our struggle for freedom.
“We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:
That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people;
That our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality; That our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities;
That only a democratic state, based on the will of the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief; And therefore, we, the people of South Africa, black and white, together - equals, countrymen and brothers - adopt this Freedom Charter;
And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing neither strength nor courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won’’.
We have achieved a lot of these commitments, but the struggle continues to build a truly united, nonracial, nonsexist and prosperous South Africa where the fruits of the economy and the wealth of our country are shared and enjoyed by all through inclusive growth and meaningful economic transformation.
Mme Kotane and the whole family and relatives, this important day has finally come. You will now have a place to come and mourn.
The people of South Africa and the world will now also have a monument to come and pay their respects, and draw inspiration from the life of Moses Kotane the fighter, teacher, commissar, administrator, intellectual, outstanding patriot, revolutionary and giant of our struggle.
May his soul finally rest in eternal peace.
Robala ka kgotso Seaparankoe.
I thank you.
