Transformed Port Elizabeth
Cape city, captures the struggles township schools and ferried anti-apartheid fugitives
the same time:
They started building one class at KwaZakhele High School, which became Form 4 the following year for the children who had passed Form 3. He moved on to Cowan, adding one class. He went back to KwaZakhele and added one class for Form 5. It was two, two, the classes they built at that time. Then those schools ended up being upgraded because of the classrooms they had built.
By 1979, Qeqe’s efforts had won the support of the Department of Education and the New Brighton community. Molefe, reporting on the progress of the project undertaken by a special committee headed by Qeqe, commented on the ‘great enthusiasm’ shown by parents.
Dan Qeqe’s role in the political activism of the 1970s in Port Elizabeth:
Q*** eqe’s political activism, which saw him play a direct role in student politics, featured prominently in the trial of Saki Macozoma and his fellow student activists. He was then a student at KwaZakhele High School, and had been one of the leaders in the student uprisings of 1977. Following the arrests in 1977 of Saki Macozoma, Shepherd Ngakumbi and Mike Xego,
Qeqe became pivotal in providing financial assistance and logistical support to the incarcerated students and their parents.
The trial of these students, heard in the High Court in Grahamstown, proved to span a lengthy two years. Free of charge, Qeqe routinely put out his Frans, Ngwendu, Qeqe (FNQ) buses, transporting parents from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown throughout the two-year period of the trial. His services even extended beyond the time of their conviction, and throughout the five years of their incarceration on Robben Island, he continued to ferry their parents from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town. At times, when he visited them in prison, he mediated between them and their parents on various matters. McKenzie Sloti remembered:
He organised his bus under the company FNQ. There was a bus that came out every day, going to Grahamstown, taking parents of the detained schoolchildren, so that they would stay for a long time in Grahamstown. They stayed in Grahamstown for long periods because court officials kept on postponing the case. Parents moved from Port Elizabeth in the FNQ bus, organised by DDQ, for free, going to Grahamstown, until the case was through after they were sentenced for five years on Robben Island. He didn’t leave it there. Even after they were arrested on Robben Island, he made plans and visited them now and then, also encouraging their parents. There were meetings held between him and parents … Means were made for their parents to visit their children on Robben Island, that is, for those parents who wanted to visit their children. Even then, DDQ organised, mobilising parents whose children had been arrested at that time. There were a lot of things that DDQ did.
Delivering a tribute to Qeqe at his funeral in 2005, the parent of one of the 1977 arrested students revealed Qeqe’s selfless contribution, one of many that he kept to himself and took to the grave. Of this tribute, Phumla recalled that:
There is a mother, Mrs Gongxeka, I was there mos, at KwaZakhele High School at that time. So what happened, her son was also there. She said she’ll never forget. He transported them, and when they got there in Grahamstown, he bought them food. And then the case was postponed for tomorrow. He secured accommodation for them there. He made them food. And she will never forget.
The radicalisation of Qeqe’s political activism
is symbolised in the leading role he played in ferrying political fugitives into exile, among them Vusi Pikoli, Phakamile Ximiya, Thozamile Majola
and Sizwe Kondile
There were twenty-two, aah, nhe?
The radicalisation of Qeqe’s political activism is symbolised in the leading role he played in ferrying political fugitives into exile, among them Vusi Pikoli, Phakamile Ximiya, Thozamile Majola and Sizwe Kondile, sought by the Security Branch for the distribution of subversive literature. Mrs Majola recalled that they, including her own son, Thozamile Majola, undertook their political work under her nose in the guise of participating at the Ivan Peter Youth Club that she headed. She recalled that, ‘I didn’t know that, here at the club, as they used to frequent there at the club, they were in the struggle. To me, they were just youth.’
The Ivan Peter Youth Club was started in New Brighton in April 1970, initiated by John Kani, Mrs Jumartha Milase Majola and Mr Nyamie Pemba. In its founding papers, the club noted that the year of its founding ‘marked a turning point in the history of New Brighton’s social life’. It focused on social group work in New Brighton and Zwide, purporting to be supporting the Bantu Affairs Administration Board’s motive of lifting the moral standards of the youth and blotting out ‘vulgarism’, which the board viewed as threatening peaceful coexistence in black townships. Regarded as a ‘small woman with a mighty heart’, Mrs Majola had put together a youth programme involving boxing, karate, judo, ballroom dancing, chess and choral singing. In the activities of the Youth Week of 1977, Phakamile Ximiya – one of the youths with whom Vusi Pikoli had skipped the country into exile – participated as one of the judging officials in the table tennis competition.
Crosby ‘Winky’ Ximiya, who was one of the people who drove them into exile, admitted, ‘Thozi Majola, all those guys I used to ferry them, and I’ll go to exile, to Lesotho and Botswana. So now, the system picked up on me here. So I also got locked up.’ Qeqe orchestrated the entire process, working with his trusted and closest associate, Feya Sobikwa. Pikoli remarked, ‘Baas Dan is that type of person who would say something out of place, like, ‘Hey, Feya, I’ve got a parcel for you to keep.’ He’s not asking you. He’s not requesting you. Feya just had to do it. And those parcels are people.’
Rugby, Resistance and Politics: How Dan Qeqe Helped Shape the History of Port Elizabeth by Buntu Siwisa is published by Jacana Media.