20 March 2007
Premier's Foreword
Human Rights Day is a day of deep historical significance and confidence in
the future for all our people. It revives our memories and honours our
patriots, who systematically paved the road to freedom for us. The Sharpeville
massacre showed the brutal realities and pathologies of the apartheid regime.
We must remember our stalwarts who sacrificed their lives in Langa, Soweto,
Boipatong, Bisho and all those whose stories are still untold. We must engrave
their memories in the soul of our nation, so that we never forget the pain and
humiliation that was endured for us to be free today.
The people we honour today were themselves part of our foundation of
democracy and dignity. Their collective and enduring labour made a significant
contribution in subduing the unyielding fist of apartheid. In this Human Rights
Day Honours ceremony we tap into the solid convictions and visionary strategies
that were implemented for us all to be free, and use these principles of unity
to unite across the artificial boundaries of the past.
The tapestry of struggle reveals an intrinsic unity across the many
differences they bore. It reveals the multicultural element of pioneers of
change. It demonstrates extraordinary perseverance and unity, which cannot be
left to fade away in historical slumber without remembrance or recognition. As
the struggle for equality in our democratic dispensation rages on, we must
bring our history and heroes to the attention of our children by boldly and
proudly reflecting their names in our streets, cities, neighbourhoods and all
around us. In this way we can finally reclaim what rightfully belongs to all
South Africans. Our children must know who brought them their freedom so that
they may temper the excesses that can come with living in freedom.
The great prophet of unity in multiculturalism, Chief Albert Luthuli,
envisioned a South Africa that would become "a home for all its sons and
daughters." Today we again commit ourselves to realising that vision in the
Western Cape as we honour these sixteen 'architects of our freedom and
democracy.'
Ebrahim Rasool
Premier of the Western Cape
Western Cape Provincial Honours Awards - Human Rights Day - 21 March
2007
'Architects of our freedom and democracy'
Names and Category
1. Nkosi Albert John Luthuli - Golden Cross
2. Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe - Golden Cross
3. Steve Bantu Biko - Golden Cross
4. Helen Suzman - Commander
5. Basil February - Commander
6. James Arnold la Guma - Commander
7. Clements Kadalie - Commander
8. Dulcie Evonne September - Commander
9. Harold Jack Simons - Commander
10. Elizabeth (Nana) Abrahams - Officer
11. Father Michael Lapsley - Officer
12. Reginald September - Officer
13 Elizabeth Mafikeng - Officer
14 Anna Berry - Officer
15. Dora Tamana - Officer
16. Johnny Issel - Officer
1. Nkosi Albert Luthuli - Golden Cross
Born in Zimbabwe in 1898, Nkosi Albert John Luthuli was one of Africa's
greatest political figures; the leader and spokesman for South Africa's black
oppressed, our first African Nobel Peace Laureate and father of the vision of a
'Home for All.' He left the active struggle for political rights and human
liberation in July 1967 when it is alleged he was run over by a train.
A teacher and elected rural Chief at the Groutville Mission in modern
KwaZulu-Natal, he joined the African National Congress in 1945. He was deposed
by the Pretoria regime as Chief in 1952 for his political activities and
elected President-General of the African National Congress in the same
year.
A committed Christian, Nkosi Luthuli genuinely and sincerely believed in the
wellbeing, happiness and dignity of all human beings. He was uncompromising
against racialism, imperialism and all forms of racial and sectional
exclusiveness. He believed in and fought for full political, economic and
social opportunities for the oppressed people of South Africa regardless of
colour, creed, nationality or racial origin.
In his autobiography Nkosi Luthuli first captured the vision of the 'Home
for All': 'The task is not finished. South Africa is not yet a home for all her
sons and daughters. Such a home we must wish to ensure. From the beginning our
history has been one of ascending unities, the breaking of tribal, racial and
creedal barriers. The past cannot hope to have a life sustained by itself,
wrenched from the whole. There remains before us the building of a new land, a
home for men who are black, white, brown from the ruins of the old narrow
groups, a synthesis of the rich cultural strains which have inherited.'
2. Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe - Golden Cross
The extraordinary contribution of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe to all South
Africans was that: "there is only one race to which we all belong, and that is
the human race." His espousal of unity was further endorsed at the Africanist
Inaugural Convention in 1959 when he declared that: "we aim, politically, at a
government of the African by the Africans for Africans, with everybody who owes
his only loyalty to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of
an African majority, being regarded as an African."
Born in Graaff Reinet in 1924 to a very poor family he began his political
commitment in the ANC Youth League. In 1957 he left the ANC to become Editor of
'The Africanist' newspaper in Johannesburg. He formed the Pan Africanist
Congress (PAC); was elected its first President in 1959 and led anti-pass law
demonstrations from 1960.
During his confinement at Robben Island under the contrived 'Sobukwe
Clause,' he completed a degree in economics at the University of London. His
strong conviction and active resistance against colonialist apartheid led him
to support the visionary ideal of Kwame Nkrumah for the formation of a 'United
States of Africa': "cutting across sectional ties and interests, whether of a
tribal or religious nature are possible, in a United States of Africa where
there would be no racial groups."
Robert Sobukwe became known as the Professor to his close compatriots and
followers. This was witness to his educational achievements and powers of
speech. He spoke of the need for black South Africans to "liberate themselves."
His strong conviction and active resistance inspired generations of South
Africans, and also inspired many organisations. He died from lung cancer under
house arrest in Galeshewe, Kimberley in 1977 having been refused compassionate
leave to return to Graaff Reinet to die.
3. Steve Bantu Biko -Golden Cross
Steve Bantu Biko, born in 1946, was described by former President Nelson
Mandela in 1997 as "one of the greatest sons of our nation" for keeping the
struggle for freedom flame burning at a time when the political pulse of the
oppressed has been rendered faint due to constant banning, imprisonment, exile,
murder and banishment.
Politically aware from a young age, Steve Biko fearlessly advocated the
wishes of the oppressed South African majority despite enduring numerous
expulsions and banishments by the Apartheid regime. He helped found the Black
People's Convention in 1972 and became its President and was active in the 1976
turning point. Despite being a medical doctor, Steve Biko worked tirelessly to
forge pride and unity amongst oppressed people so that they could build
confidence in throwing off their oppression.
Biko rattled the core foundation on which Apartheid was borne, as he
challenged the propaganda that declared Africans inferior. The consequence was
Biko's brutal assassination in a Pretoria prison cell in 1977 at the hands of
an inhumane system that was "left cold by his death." However, through his
martyrdom, South Africa was left in his words: "in the best position to bestow
the country and the world with the greatest possible gift * a more human face."
As a nation and province, we are challenged to find relevance in Biko's life
and death as we continue to mould our young democracy against discrimination
and injustice.
4. Helen Suzman - Commander
Helen Suzman was born in Germiston in 1917. She was educated in a convent
and thereafter at the University of Witwatersrand. Between 1941 and 1944,
Suzman worked as a statistician for the War Supplies Board. In 1944 she started
lecturing in Economic History at the University of Witwatersrand, then entering
politics to represent the United Party (UP) in Parliament in 1953.
Six years later she founded the Progressive Party (PP) and became its sole
representative in Parliament. During her time in Parliament she defended the
right to freedom of expression for all South Africans and used every
opportunity to speak and put forward questions. In 1974 six colleagues joined
Helen in Parliament. As a Member of Parliament she was able to visit prisons,
amongst them Robben Island, and inspected the living conditions of prisoners.
In 1975 she tackled gender discrimination, especially in the cases of Black
women.
In 1989 she retired from Parliament while remaining actively involved in
South African politics. The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard have
awarded her honorary doctorates. Her struggle against apartheid won her the
United Nations Human Rights Award in 1978 and in 1980, the Medallion of
Heroism. The Helen Suzman Foundation has been established to promote liberal
democracy in South Africa.
5. Basil February - Commander
Basil February was born on 8 August 1943, at St Monica's home in the
Bo-Kaap, Cape Town to middle class parents. He attended Trafalgar High School
in District Six and was a keen sportsperson at the same time as his political
awareness grew as he came into contact with the intellectual influences of the
political thinkers of the time.
A gifted intellectual, he was however denied his application to study law at
the University of Cape Town. In 1963, February joined the South African
Coloured People's Congress (SACPO). In 1964, James April and Basil February
disappeared without bidding their families and friends goodbye. They joined
Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1964 and secretly left Cape Town for Botswana and the
training camps of the ANC in Africa and Czechoslovakia.
February's first assignment was the Wankie Campaign to create a corridor
through then Rhodesia to South Africa. After being separated from his group he
heroically distracted their pursuers to save the rest, paying with his life in
a roadblock near Bulawayo.
6. James Arnold La Guma - Commander
Born in 1894 in Bloemfontein, James Arnold la Guma's life was an unwavering
stand against imperialism, exploitation, and discrimination. Orphaned at the
age of five he started working at the age of eight, dropped out of school in
Grade 4, became a leather work apprentice in Cape Town and participated in his
first protest march at sixteen. Not to be deterred by poverty, La Guma was
motivated to develop himself by spending most of his pocket money on
second-hand books, advancing his own education.
Active in socialist and unionist activism, he was one of the founders of the
Non-European United Front in the thirties, was elected to various senior posts
in the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU), the Communist Party of
South Africa, the National Liberation League (NLL) and a President of the SA
Coloured People's Congress.
La Guma's enthusiasm for the workers' cause and against segregation ensured
his part in the three-man South African delegation to the International
Congress against Imperialism in 1927, where they put demands that would also be
echoed and entrenched at the People's Congress in Kliptown in 1955. He died in
1961 at Grootte Schuur Hospital from a heart ailment.
7. Clements Kadalie - Commander
Clements Kadalie was born in April 1896 in Nkhata Bay District at Chifira
village in Nyasaland, present day Malawi. He graduated from Livingstonia with
honours and at age sixteen he was a qualified teacher and assigned to run
district schools.
In 1918 after a journey which took him through most Southern African
countries he settled in Cape Town. With the support of friend and emerging
trade unionist Arthur F Batty, Kadalie founded the Industrial and Commercial
Union (ICU) in 1919. Kadalie quickly gained prominence with the success of the
dockworkers' strike and in 1923 he became Secretary General of the Union. By
1927 the ICU was claiming membership of 100 000, well above that of the
established white trade unions. Alarmed white farmers and politicians reacted
by calling for action to curb the ICU. In that year Kadalie represented the ICU
at the international Labour Conference in Geneva.
In 1928, internal fighting within the union saw Kadalie alienated from the
ICU. He formed an independent ICU in East London and was a provincial organiser
of the African National Congress (ANC). Kadalie coalesced the imagination of
South Africa's new black wage earners into a movement whose scope was
previously unequalled. He stayed in East London with his wife Emma and five
children until he died in 1951.
8. Dulcie Evonne September - Commander
Born in 1935 and growing up in Athlone, Dulcie Evonne September's political
commitment took her from being a teacher and student activist in the Cape
Peninsula Student Union, to assassination as the ANC's Chief Representative in
Paris in 1988.
Involved in student activism after the Sharpeville Massacre, she was
arrested and detained without trial in October 1963. In 1964 she was charged
with conspiring to commit acts of sabotage, and incite acts of politically
motivated violence and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. On her release
the Pretoria regime limited her activities by imposing a five-year banning
order. She left South Africa in 1974, to pursue her studies in Britain. She
joined the ANC and worked for the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London and at the
ANC headquarters in Lusaka before moving on to Paris. In the course of her work
in Paris, she suffered physical assaults, manhandling by fascist thugs and a
mugging. None of these daunted her or turned her away from the path she had
chosen to follow.
The bitter irony about her murder is that, though Dulcie had received death
threats over the past eight months, and had reported this fact to the French
authorities, she had been given no protection and, as a result, there are no
clues to the identity of the killer, or traces of the assassin.
9. Harold Jack Simons - Commander
Harold Jack Simons was born on 1 February 1907 in Riversdale in the Cape. He
was educated in South Africa and for a few years was attached to a law firm and
was in the public service in Pretoria. He completed a PhD degree at the London
School of Economics.
From 1937 until 1964 he taught African law and administration at the
University of Cape Town, where he became one of the most popular and respected
lecturers. He was a defendant in the sedition trial that followed the African
mineworkers' strike of 1946 and a member of the central committee of the
Communist Party (CPSA) when it decided to dissolve the party in 1950 on the eve
of the enactment of the Suppression of Communism Act. He was placed under
successive bans beginning in 1952 but continued to teach before leaving South
Africa in 1965. In the 1980s, Simons, already in his 70s, became a political
commissar in MK camps in Angola.
He was married to Ray Alexander, herself a prominent trade unionist,
feminist and political activist. Jack Simons died in 1995 in Cape Town.
10. Elizabeth Abrahams - Officer
Born in Paarl in 1926, financial difficulties prevented Elizabeth Abrahams
from completing her schooling. At the tender age of 14 years, Elizabeth
Abrahams was introduced to the harsh and brutal realities of working on farms.
She worked at the Langeberg factory to support her mother in raising seven more
children, and was very conscious of the harsh economic circumstances workers
endured.
She joined the Food and Canning Workers Union at 15, later becoming General
Secretary in 1954. After working for eight years, she was banned for five
years. Returning to union work, she was detained a number of times but
continued working underground.
Affectionately called 'Nana' by her comrades, she became a surrogate mother
to political activists who needed guidance and assurance. She broke all
boundaries and obstacles, and was elected as a Member of Parliament for the ANC
in 1994, while continuing to work for the rights of women and workers.
11. Father Michael Lapsley - Officer
Born in New Zealand in 1949, Michael Lapsley entered the Anglican Society of
the Sacred Mission at the age of seven. At the age of thirteen, he read
Archbishop Trevor Huddleston's book: 'Naught for your Comfort' and later Nelson
Mandela's book: 'No Easy Walk to Freedom' (then banned literature in South
Africa), both of which inspired him to relocate to South Africa, arriving in
1973 at the age of 24.
Father Lapsley was a renowned preacher and speaker. He first worked as
Chaplain at the University of Natal among students on black campuses before
becoming National Chaplain, which exposed him to student activism and the
injustices experienced by black students under apartheid. He became involved in
anti-apartheid activities and he was expelled in 1976, going to live in
Lesotho, where he also became a member of the ANC. In the early 1980s he spent
nine months in London, working in the ANC office, speaking at meetings
organised by the British Anti-Apartheid Movement.
Whilst living in Zimbabwe he discovered he was on the South African
Government hit list and in April 1990 he received a letter bomb resulting in
the loss of his hands. Father Lapsley went on to run the Institute for Healing
Memories in Cape Town.
12. Reginald 'Reggie' September - Officer
Reginald (Reggie) September was born in Cape Town in 1923, to working class
parents. He completed his education at Cape Town's Trafalgar High School before
an apprenticeship as a cobbler where he encountered the exploitation and poor
conditions of factory life.
In 1938, he joined the National Liberation League of Cissie Gool and James
La Guma. In the early 1940s, he became a full-time trade unionist, organising
textile and distributive workers in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. After two
years abroad, he returned to South Africa in 1953 and became one of the
founding members and General Secretary of the South African Coloured People's
Organisation. Imprisoned for five months without charge during the 1960 State
of Emergency and repeatedly banned and harassed he was instructed by the
African National Congress to flee South Africa and was posted as the ANC Chief
Representative for the United Kingdom and Western Europe, from 1963 to
1978.
September finally returned to South Africa in 1991 as a member of the ANC
team that negotiated the future of the country with the South African
Government. He was elected as Member of Parliament in the first democratic
Parliament in 1994 and served until 2004 when he retired.
13. Elizabeth Mafikeng - Officer
Elizabeth Mafikeng was born in 1918 in Tarkastad, leaving for Paarl in the
early 1930 as a result of poverty and working in a canning factory until Pass
Laws were introduced. She became actively involved in politics to fight this
injustice, rising to the position of National Vice-President of the ANC Women's
League and later elected into the National Executive Committee of the
Federation of South African Women.
Mafikeng participated in the African National Congress led 'Defiance
Campaign' and served as the president of the South African Food and Canning
Workers Union and was Paarl branch secretary of the Food Workers Union. In 1955
she left the country without legal papers to represent the Food Workers Union
at the trade union conference held in Sofia, Bulgaria. She was met by police
brutality and deportation to the Northern Cape upon her return from the
conference.
On the night of her deportation, the union leadership organised a large
number of workers to bid her safe journey. She got onto a train and started
waving farewell. She quietly walked two coaches and jumped off the train
unnoticed. She was whisked to Lesotho and sought political refuge there to
avoid deportation.
14. Anna Berry - Officer
Anna Berry was a political activist against apartheid in the rural Southern
Cape. She participated in the public demonstrations that characterised the
seventies as both the struggle against injustice and the regime's application
of its criminal inhumanity gained momentum.
Berry was resident of the village Bloupunt that the apartheid chose to
forcibly remove to Dysselsdorp. Her leading role in the resistance of the
Bloupunt community led to her identification as Accused Number 1 in the
subsequent protracted trial; one of the biggest of its time in the Western
Cape. She was incarcerated for over a year.
Her legal team was led by the late by Dullah Omar and Advocate Ben Kies
after both of whom she named a son, one of seven children. She passed away at
the age of 55 in 2001.
15. Dora Tamana - Officer
Dora Tamana was born in Gqamakwe in the Hlobo district of the Transkei in
1901. Her family experience as a girl of great poverty, deprivation from
resources and migrant labour encouraged her political awareness.
Three of her four children died between 1924 and 1930 of starvation,
tuberculosis and meningitis, prompting the couple to move to Langa, Cape. She
built one of the first 'pondokkies' in Retreat in 1939 and became involved with
the Cape Flats Distress Association (CAFDA). Inspired by socialist childcare
ideas she built the first creche in Blaauwvlei and joined the Communist Party
in 1942 and the African National Congress (ANC) in 1943. She was banned in 1950
and was victim to a forced removal from Blaauwvlei to Guguletu in 1960.
Dora was an organiser of the first Conference of the Federation of South
African Women in 1954 and was elected into the organisation's National
Executive Committee. She spent time travelling internationally focusing on
creches and was again banned on her return to South Africa. When the State of
Emergency was announced, she attended protest marches and began to lose her
friends due to police intimidation. She died from pneumonia in 1983 at the age
of 82.
16. Johnny Issel - Officer
Johnny Issel was a leader of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and is
remembered for the importance he placed on the Western Cape hosting the launch
of this organisation which harnessed the energies and strategy within South
Africa against apartheid under the slogan 'UDF Unites, Apartheid Divides.'
This was in keeping with his strong stand against ethnicism, and a deep
belief in non-racial unity. Issel risked his life by being the first organiser
of 'Grassroots,' an anti-apartheid community newspaper designed to give a voice
to the oppressed peoples of South Africa, in the midst of acute media
persecution. Today, the South African media is enjoying the fruits of freedom,
reporting on any national and international activity without fear of
persecution.
Johnny Issel was a Member of the Western Cape Provincial Legislature between
1994 and 1996.
Provincial Honours categories:
The Western Cape Golden Cross: for exceptional achievement The Order of the
Disa in the following three classes:
* Commander: for rendering excellent meritorious service
* Officer: for rendering outstanding meritorious service
* Member: for rendering noteworthy meritorious service Premier's Commendation
Certificate: for meritorious and exemplary behaviour worth exemplifying
For further information, please contact:
Shado Twala
Spokesperson
Office of the Premier of the Western Cape
Tel: (021) 483 5642
Fax: (021) 483 5636
Cell: 083 640 6771
E-mail: stwala@pgwc.gov.za
Issued by: Office of the Premier, Western Cape Provincial Government
20 March 2007
