Eulogy by Acting President Paul Mashatile on the occasion of the funeral service of late former Minister in the Presidency, Dr Essop Pahad
Programme Director
Comrade Mag Pahad,
Comrades Govan and Amina Pahad,
Comrades Aziz Pahad,
Prof Angina Parekh
Former President Thabo Mbeki,
Comrades and friends.
Today we woke up to the sad news of the passing of a tried-and-tested cadre and leader of the people of South Africa, Comrade Essop Goolam Pahad.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit Cde Essop and his family. It was impossible and most painful to reconcile his frail state with the energetic, assertive, and forthright Comrade Essop I have known throughout the decades of struggle.
Personally, I first encountered Comrade Essop through the archives of the liberation movement, in which he, and his contemporaries feature in photographs on the margins of the 1956 Treason Trial armed with placards and posters outside the court with the unequivocal message: "Hands off our leaders!"
We thus accepted him as our leader because we knew that he grew up at the collective knee of the generation of Oliver Tambo, Yusuf Dadoo, "NT" Naicker, Reggie September, Joe Slovo, Helen Joseph, and other outstanding liberators.
An active member of the Congress Youth Movement, he was one of the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress volunteers who produced and distributed ANC pamphlets and posters in the three years after the 1960 banning of the movement. For his activities against the apartheid regime, he was banned for five years and left the country for exile in December 1964.
His maturity into full membership and leadership of the ANC and the South African Communist Party spoke to the importance of political organisation as a school and teacher in society. He also trained in uMkhonto we Sizwe in Angola.
He represented the SACP on the editorial Council for the World Marxist Review from 1975 – 1985. He was thus one of the leading cadres of our movement and did much to advance the international pillar of our struggle.
Comrade Essop internalised the Marxist adage: "To leave error unrefuted is to encourage intellectual immorality." He was a robust intellectual who always sought the best possible decisions in the organisation’s, the national and ultimately humanity’s interest.
He said about his period in exile: "When you’re in exile, there are times when the light at the end of the tunnel is very dim. You always felt that you were very far away from home."
To underscore his interest in the free and democratic exchange of ideas, he also said: "You had a great amount of time to read, to study, to discuss, to debate, and to get involved in all of these discussions not only with your own comrades but also with many other people. It was a wonderful opportunity to be able to meet representatives of communist parties from all over the world."
This was an all-around public intellectual whose political consciousness was shaped under the aegis of the Congress Movement.
In 1994, he became one of the cadres the ANC deployed into the first democratic parliament, which gave us hope about the future of democratic South Africa. When he left public service in 1994, Comrade Essop established The Thinker, a quarterly journal for discussion, which added to the diversity of opinion in our media and public discourse spaces.
This is yet another of his numerous notable and unerasable contributions to the betterment of our society.
Our movement and society is challenged to construct an environment in which, though they do not become clones, young people become as dependable as Essop’s generation. In this way, the democratisation project does not lose its way.
Essop Pahad has left a void. In his lifetime of struggle, he traversed the world to ensure that our struggle delivered victory to the ordinary masses of our people. We who remain are obliged to spare no effort to ensure that we stay the course.
The words of Nikolai Ostrovsky come to mind: "Man's dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world the fight for the Liberation of Mankind"
He could have been speaking of Essop Goolam Pahad.
On behalf of Government and the people of South Africa, we convey our sincerest condolences to the Pahad family, friends and comrades.
May his soul rest in peace.
I thank you.
