Elder from ‘golden generation’ dies at 90
THERE is an African proverb that goes along the lines that, when an elderly person dies, a library burns down.
Another elder from that golden generation in the South African freedom Struggle, Kay Moonsamy, has been laid to rest, days short of his 91st birthday.
In spite of failing health and periodic stays in hospital, his mind was as sharp as a whip. He could remember names and details from 70 years ago and was a veritable walking encyclopaedia of the Struggle against apartheid. He was also a dyed-in-the-wool communist who had a life mission to destroy the capitalist system.
His short biography was told by another communist, Phyllis Naidoo, who painstakingly researched 156 Hands that Built South Africa, a hugely valuable collection of vignettes of the 156 leaders of the Congress Movement, including Inkosi Albert Luthuli, Ben Turok and Bertha Mkhize, who were charged in the 1956 Treason Trial. The book was published on the 50th anniversary of the trial and is now out of print.
For many of the lesserknown figures in the Freedom Struggle, that book is an emotional record of the courageous roles played by their fathers and mothers.
Recording the history of our country has to be a national mission. Too much is being lost as the repositories of that knowledge and experience pass on. One gap was recently filled by Dr Bongani Ngqulunga’s The Man Who Founded the ANC: A Biography of Pixley Ka Isaka Seme. Published by Penguin Random House, it is a valuable piece of research and an elegant read.
The author accessed valuable primary data from, among others, the pages of Ilanga lase Natal.
It was valuable for me to find out Dr Seme came from the rolling hills of Inanda.
Too often we’re deceived into thinking the core of the leadership of the Freedom Struggle came from what is now Gauteng or the Eastern Cape.
It is worth keeping in mind that ANC president Inkosi Albert Luthuli, who penned the exceptional Let My People Go, had his home in Groutville.
Activist poet HIE Dhlomo, who wrote the excellent Valley of a Thousand Hills, also had his home in Inanda.
Phyllis Naidoo who, in addition to the Treason Trial book, wrote a whole series titled variously as Footprints, was born in Estcourt, grew up in Pietermaritzburg and lived in Verulam and central Durban.
Moonsamy was proud of his working-class origins in Overport. At the time of his death, his biography was nearing completion.
It promises to be a fascinating tale of a man who epitomised the words that hung in his study: “All my life, all my strength, was given to the finest cause in the world – the fight for the liberation of mankind.”
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