Robala Tau, Ronnie Mamoepa
A colleague remembers a lion of the struggle, a comrade with a sharp wit and firm principles
The death on Saturday July 22 of Molapyane Ronald Ephraim Mamoepa, popularly known as “Ronnie,” reached every corner of the republic less than half an hour after he took his last breath. The official confirmation shortly before midnight provoked social media to go into overdrive and meet the “trending” threshold before daybreak on Sunday.
Since then, the national mood has been as sombre as it has been celebratory of a life lived seriously and joyfully.
Many have recorded and shared tributes to Ronnie Mamoepa, narrating various periods and junctures of his sadly truncated life. Like single snapshots, none of the valedictories can, in fairness, adequately capture a life as unique and extraordinary, yet simple, as his.
Befittingly, the political part that was the enduring descriptor of his life has been a constant theme. Through it, we are able to learn about and appreciate the qualities that made the person who moved in the human body called Ronnie Mamoepa.
One of these qualities is that, imperfect as he was, as all of us are, Ronnie possessed an immeasurable love for human beings and an acute sensitivity to their plight. He dreamed of and envisioned a country and world underwritten by freedom from political, social, economic and other forms of oppression. This drove a teenage Ronnie, a little David, to put himself in harm’s way by taking on the morally perverse and obscenely armed Goliath of the apartheid regime.
Another of Ronnie’s qualities was his consistency and commitment to principle and the truth. For consistently aiming the sling in the direction of apartheid, he was imprisoned and joined hundreds of fellow freedom fighters on Robben Island at the age of 18 in 1980. In contrast, many of his peers (and seniors) did not care about much besides their own personal wellbeing.
Yet another quality was Ronnie’s well-known wit and humour, which he employed to explain personal and official positions in a way that enticed all but the most recalcitrant interlocutor or opponent.
In the years that we worked together, no one, from the president to the most junior staff member, was spared any of Ronnie’s humour. I, too, became a victim. For example, according to Ronnie, my suits were raincoats of the “buy-one-get-onefree” types from Marabastad and my ties were allegedly bought from Pep Stores. And unlike him, a “clever” from Atteridgeville, I was a “moegoe” from the countryside.
On Saturday, Sunday Times deputy editor S’thembiso Msomi took to Facebook to honour Ronnie. The latter’s humorous side is unmistakable: “And so a story broke in the Sunday Times about a decade ago that Groovin Nchabeleng and Ronnie Mamoepa wanted to buy the newspaper’s parent company. The liberal and conservative elements of the media freaked out, believing this to be an attempt by [then-president Thabo] Mbeki and the ANC to grab and silence the newspaper and the media house.
“They confronted Mbeki at a press conference with the accusation that the ANC had sent the two individuals to capture what was seen as a media house and newspaper that were highly critical of his presidency. Mbeki dismissed their concerns and added, as a by the way, that ‘Ronnie doesn’t even have that kind of money’.
“A few weeks later Ronnie finds a couple of us enjoying what we thought was a decent drink. He made fun of us, saying, although the stuff was cheap, we should thank the movement (the ANC) as it had liberated us from umqombothi (traditional beer).
“We retaliated, asking what he knew about expensive drinks when no less than the head of state had told the nation that he had no money.
“‘Chief,’ he said, ‘the president may know many things but he knows nothing about my pocket. I’ll surprise both you and him.’”
That was typical Ronnie — he would retort quickly, pushing the would-be assailant into hoisting themselves with their own petard.
I do not know whether it ever occurred to Msomi and his colleagues during or after that brief encounter that, as a senior government official, Ronnie’s indifference to the president’s view contradicted the then prevailing media consensus about Mbeki’s supposed paranoia, intolerance and Machiavellian streak. But I digress.
One of the minor regrets I have is never having probed Ronnie’s penchant for brass band music. Such was his predilection that he played the melodies in his car, often mimicking the hand gestures of a music conductor. During ceremonial state functions, I sometimes stood at a good enough distance behind him to observe the involuntary movement of his hands and feet as the brass band procession marched forward or, as the case might be, statically performed, in order to afford myself a good laugh and gather material with which to tease him later.
Coming, so to speak, from the same political womb, he being much my senior politically and in years, I learned from and trusted Ronnie’s political insight and viewpoint. I was inspired by his deep concern about the direction the ANC and the country are headed in and his desire that the organisation reverts to an even keel. His ethical literacy and commitment to the cause were impressive.
It is a macabre irony that the principles into which Ronnie was initiated as a young activist in the mid-1970s seemingly had more subscribers then than they do now, as he rides into the sunset.
Unionist Cedric Gina hinted at one possible explanation for this phenomenon in a Facebook comment over the weekend. He wrote: “Sometimes I ask myself when a leader is in their 50s but has no experience of teargas, detention [and] jail … ukuthi wabanenhlanhla bo yena [they were so lucky] when people of his [or her] age have their lives reading like this!”
In its statement of condolence, the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, quite correctly in my view, described Ronnie as “the dean of government communications” who was “always ready to lend a helping hand to his colleagues across government departments”. Also implied here is the value of institutional memory, of which Ronnie was definitely a repository.
Perhaps a more direct challenge to today’s crop of government communicators was proffered by Msomi in a Facebook status update on Monday: “For a young government communicator in these factionalised times: one thing you could learn from Ronnie Mamoepa’s life in government is that, although a party man through and through, he never allowed his personal political preferences to interfere with his work. He served every principal he worked for with utmost loyalty but always understood that this loyalty was to the civil service; the people and the state that employed him and not just the incumbent … Too many these days conflate their state positions with party factions.”
Msomi is correct to caution government communicators, as he should all civil servants, about the perils of conflating the party, intraparty factions and the state. But as he would surely agree, the task of medicating this cancer resides elsewhere and not primarily in the civil service. It is a manifestation of the breakdown of principle to which Ronnie was deadly opposed.
Farewell Ronnie, comrade and colleague. Robala Tau ya Tswako. Setlogolo sa Kolonyane a Mmazwi, Motho wa Moraka a Mmabocha, wa Mokgomo Choeu wa Sethebele sa Nkwe.