Legacy of helping save communities from removals
OBITUARY Mzwandile Wilson Fanti Born: July 7 1927 Died: July 15 2020
As the Eastern Cape, together with the entire nation, mourns the death of Baba Andrew Mlangeni, it should not overlook the passing, a week earlier, of his fellow-Robben Islander, Mzwandile Wilson Fanti, at the advanced age of 93 years.
His legacy, however, will live on in communities such as Mgwali, Toyise, Goshen, Mooiplaas, Kwelerha, Balase and Lesseyton, which Fanti, almost single-handedly, saved from destruction during the days of forced removal in the 1980s.
Fanti grew up in the Lujilo farms area of the Stutterheim district. Resorting to migrant labour in Cape Town, he was recruited by “Comrade T” (Christmas Tinto) as a Freedom Volunteer, collecting petitions assembled for the 1955 Freedom Charter in both Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Even after the banning of the organisations in 1961, he continued his work of umrhabulo (political mobilisation) until, in 1964, he was arrested and sent to Robben Island for eight years. Following his release in 1972, the apartheid government banished him to Mgwali mission station. It was one of the worst mistakes they ever made.
Who today remembers the “white corridor”? Running from East London up to then Queenstown (now Komani), the apartheid government conceptualised it as a belt of white farms dividing the “homeland” of Ciskei from that of Transkei. Implemented in the name of land reform, it expropriated the white communities of districts such as Peddie, Whittlesea and Victoria East, with the intention of resettling the black communities of the so-called “awkwardly situated Bantu areas” on the vacated farmlands.
Thus, for example, Peddie coast was set aside for Kwelerha and Mooiplaas, Whittlesea for Lesseyton and Lady Frere, and so on. Mgwali and Toyise were scheduled for forced removal to the former German village of Frankfort.
Among all these threatened “black spots”, Mgwali possessed a special significance. As you enter the village, you are greeted by the great church of Tiyo Soga, the first black missionary of the Presbyterian (Rabe) church, memorialised not only for himself but for Janet Burnside, his Scottish wife.
Mgwali, indeed, stood for everything to which apartheid was opposed: equality, education, non-racialism and the Christian ideal. The government hoped to remove it by stealth, under the radar without public outcry, as they had successfully done with the Tsitsikamma Mfengu community, a few years before.
Mgwali, then governed as part of the Ciskei homeland, was situated 30km from Stutterheim and completely isolated from the mainstream, both geographically and politically.
The trustee of the Church of Scotland, a white lawyer from King William’s Town, willingly agreed to sell the land. On June 3 1981, President Lennox Sebe visited Mgwali and told the community “Mgwali was a gateway for terrorists to enter the Ciskei”. He ordered them to form a “planning committee” to implement the removal. Government employees and landless residents were promised jobs and land. Paramount Chieftainess Nolizwe Sandile arrived a few months later to remind the residents that they had agreed to the move “in principle”, and to ask how they liked the little wooden prefab erected as a sample of their future accommodation.
A huge fleet of trucks lined up behind barbed wire, ready and waiting to transport the people and their belongings.
Invisible behind the fleet lay General Charles Sebe of the Ciskei Central Intelligence Service armed with the arbitrary powers of Ciskei Proclamation R252. Nobody wanted to move but no one except Fanti thought they had an alternative.
Despite his banishment, Fanti continued to work for the liberation movement. Late in 1982, he was arrested in Butterworth, with fellow exRobben Islanders AS Xobololo and Ezra Sigwela, on charges of contacting the Lesotho ANC.
But it was in Mgwali itself that he made the greatest impact. Fully literate and employed as a driver for the local clinic, he was well placed to mobilise those courageous spirits who were still willing to resist, notably the nonagenarian village patriarch, Herman Gija. In October 1981, they established the Mgwali Residents Association (MRA) in opposition to the pro-removal “planning committee”. By then, fortunately, the Presbyterian minister had deserted Tiyo Soga’s church, which became, under Fanti’s leadership, the main base of the MRA.
The “planning committee,” for their part, convened at the residence of the governmentappointed headman. Very soon, the conflict at Mgwali converged with the greater national conflict between civic structures and government-sponsored community councils.
Mgwali was repeatedly raided by security police. Fanti himself was tortured at the Cambridge police station in East London, and, following the national states of emergency in 1985 and 1986, more or less constantly detained.
Isolated though Mgwali was, Fanti was able to connect with the Border Council of Churches, presided over by Reverend James Gawe, who died in a mysterious car accident in June 1982. Even the apartheid government could not very well prohibit the church from assembling on Sundays.
Further afield, the MRA made contact with NGOs such as the Legal Resources Centre and the Grahamstown Rural Committee (later the Border Rural Committee), the Eastern Cape affiliate of the National Council against Removals, which devoted itself to publicising forced removals and providing legal aid to communities.
Fanti attended several national workshops and seminars, and, with his blunt peasant way of speaking, stiffened the resolve of many well-meaning but timid amakholwa from the Natal mission communities. Closer to home, the determined resistance of Mgwali inspired brave men elsewhere — Godfrey Ngqendesha at Thornhill, Leo Mtatsi at Kwelerha, the people of Nkqonkqweni (Peelton), for example — to stand up and preserve their communities and their self-respect.
The resistance of Mgwali eventually reached such a pitch that the SA government had to abandon any pretence of a voluntary removal, and the Ciskei government just wanted out.
By an out-of-court settlement between the MRA and the apartheid government, Mgwali formally dissociated from the Ciskei homeland and returned to SA control. The struggle, however, was far from over. On the one hand were the remnants of the old pro-removal “planning committee”; on the other hand, previously inactive residents, now flocking to join the legalised MRA, regarded Fanti as too extreme.
Late 1985 and early 1986 saw violent clashes between proCiskei vigilantes and Mgwali youth demanding closure of the tribal authority buildings. The government took advantage of the national state of emergency to detain Fanti once again, in July 1986. Fanti was released in May 1988, just in time to celebrate Bawo Gija’s hundredth birthday.
By this time, Mgwali had become linked to the new SA department of “Development Aid” through a “liaison committee”. They did their best to establish a so-called “Gqolonci community authority,” for Mgwali and the neighbouring communities of Toyise and Heckel. Kwelerha/Nxarhuni/Mooiplaas and Lesseyton/Goshen
were to follow.
But it was too little, too late. The heroic resistance of Nkqonkqweni (East Peelton) to forced incorporation into Ciskei (October 1989) and the boycott movements in Mdantsane collapsed the distinction between rural and urban struggles, and finally put paid to the apartheid myth that SA and Ciskei were two entirely different and independent countries. The MRA and several other RAs which the Mgwali resistance had inspired willingly merged with the Border Civics Congress (BoCCO), which eventually became the African National Civil Organisation. In March 1990, only a month after President FW de Klerk unbanned the ANC, a mass uprising and a military coup toppled “President” Sebe and consigned the Ciskei homeland to the dustbin of history.
Mzwandile Wilson Fanti and the Mgwali Residents Association played a small but vital part in bringing about this desirable conclusion. More than that, however, Mgwali set an example of civic leadership, government of the people by the people, which other communities in the region replicated and enhanced.
During his stint as a Freedom Volunteer, the youthful Fanti must have often quoted that part of the Freedom Charter which says “no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people”. During his lifetime, he did much to enable the fulfilment of that dream. He leaves us, as his inheritance, a struggle that still continues.
Mzwandile Wilson Fanti and the Mgwali Residents Association played a small but vital part in consigning the Ciskei homeland to the dustbin of history
Jeff Peires is a former professor of history at the old University of Transkei, and was an ANC MP from 1994 to 1996