Govan Mbeki

Govan Archibald Mvuyelwa Mbeki was born on 9 July 1910 at Mpukane Location in the Nqamakwe district of the Transkei, a son of the Xhosa people. He made his way to the University College of Fort Hare, then the only institution in southern Africa open to African students, and graduated in 1936 with a Bachelor of Arts in politics and psychology together with a teaching diploma. There he absorbed both the currents of African nationalism and the Marxist analysis that would shape the whole of his life's work.

Mbeki joined the African National Congress in the 1930s and became a member of the Communist Party, teaching, organising, and writing to give the liberation struggle a rigorous intellectual foundation. When the movement turned to armed resistance, he became a leading figure in the founding of Umkhonto we Sizwe and served on its high command, believing that the dignity of his people could no longer wait upon the goodwill of the state.

On 11 July 1963 he was arrested at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, and in 1964 he stood in the dock of the Rivonia Trial beside Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and their comrades, sentenced to life imprisonment. For twenty-three years he was held on Robben Island, where he taught fellow prisoners, deepened his own study, and wrote works of political theory that carried the struggle beyond the walls. He was released in November 1987.

In the freedom he had helped to win, Mbeki served in the new democratic order as Deputy President of the Senate and in the National Council of Provinces before his death in Port Elizabeth on 30 August 2001. Father of President Thabo Mbeki, he is honoured as one of the great teachers of the liberation, a man who bore decades of captivity without surrendering his mind or his hope.