Ebrahim’s guidance was still needed
POLITICAL activist Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim’s death comes at a time when his organisation, the ANC, desperately needs his voice of discipline and reason the most.
Speaking at his funeral at Heroes Acre in Westpark Cemetery yesterday, Cogta minister and close friend to the political stalwart Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma said Ebrahim was a comrade with the utmost discipline and poise.
She said his contribution to the organisation was unmatched and his guidance was desperately needed now, when the ANC was battling internal wars.
Ebrahim died on Monday morning after a two-year battle with lung cancer. He was 84. Following Muslim tradition, his body was first taken to the Houghton Masjid. where close family and friends read Islamic prayers as part of his final rites. Among his close allies, political activist Moe Shaik attended the morning rituals and shared some fond memories of his former commander.
Shaik spoke of how Ebrahim joined the liberation movement as a young activist in 1952, and participated in the Congress of the People Campaign, which drew up and adopted the Freedom Charter in 1955. “He was a wonderfully kind soul. I always wondered how he would keep his cool in all he went through,” Shaik said.
Ebrahim was active in all the campaigns of the 1950s, and after the banning
of the ANC in 1960, joined the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe, in 1961 and became part of the Natal Regional High Command. He was arrested in 1963 and was accused number 1 in the Pietermaritzburg sabotage trial, otherwise known as the “little Rivonia trial”.
He was sentenced to 15 years on Robben Island and served his sentence to the last day. He was released in 1979 and was immediately banned and restricted to his home town in Durban. In 1980, as per instruction of the ANC, he went into exile.
After spending time at the ANC head office in Lusaka, he underwent military training in the ANC camps in Angola. He was then deployed by the ANC leadership as the head of the ANC’S political military committee in Swaziland.
In December 1986, Ebrahim was
kidnapped from Swaziland by the SA National Intelligence Service on the orders of the apartheid regime’s top brass and detained at John Vorster Square, where he was severely tortured. He was charged for high treason in a highly publicised trial that lasted until 1989 and sentenced to a further 20 years’ imprisonment on Robben Island.
He was one of a few political prisoners to serve a second sentence on the island. In 1991, the appeal court ruled, in a landmark judgment, that his abduction from a foreign country was illegal, and that the South African court had no jurisdiction to try him. He was released from Robben Island in 1991.
Delivering a tribute yesterday, his wife, Shannon, spoke of Ebrahim’s total commitment to the liberation Struggle.
She said the apartheid state did everything they could to break him
as one of the ANC leaders and once they did catch him by kidnapping him from Swaziland in December 1986, they showed him no mercy.
“He always knew that he would face torture or death, and his abductors, who were apartheid intelligence agents, discussed taking him to the infamous torture farm called Vlakplaas as they bound and gagged him in the car.
“He knew at that moment that he would never in his life give them a piece of information. He always said he would rather die than betray one of his comrades,” she said.
Gauteng Premier David Makhura said Ebrahim – affectionately known as “Ebie” – was part of a special generation who shared a common vision and values, hence the decision to bury him at Heroes Acre alongside Ahmed Kathrada, Yusuf Dadoo and George Bizos.