Manny Gounden – an officer and a gentleman

AS A panoramic view of the history of blacks, the SA Navy’s Salisbury Island base of its eastern command is a conspicuous shift in collective memory and national self-knowing. The name may be somewhat out of place – Salisbury Island – but it tells you that the place is about its history and what black people have accomplished.

The Island’s history has seen it commissioned and decommissioned as a naval base numerous times.

It was during an off period in the apartheid era that the University College for Indians was established there, in the early 1960s.

In 1962 I joined the college’s alumni, which included among others Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and the late Minister of Public Service, Roy Padayachie.

In 1974 the Navy’s first group of Indian recruits arrived on the Island.

“Give us your son and we will give you back a man to be proud of,” was the motto of the South African Indian Corps Training Battalion based on Salisbury Island.

One of the first of a batch of 31 recruits was Warrant Officer Manny Gounden, who was commissioned as an officer to the SAS Jalsena, which in Hindi means “sea warrior”.

Gounden died after a brief illness last Thursday, November 3.

He was born in Lotus Road, Springfield, Durban in 1951, the son of the late Munsamy and Ponnamah Gounden. In his early years he played cricket, taking after his father, who was a groundsman at the Kingsmead Cricket Ground and a member of the Springfield United CC.

Sea

An alumnus of Sastri College, Manny exhibited his love for the ocean when he undertook his first sea voyage as a staff member of William Cotts Shipping.

This opened the way for him to fulfil his larger mission in life – that of being a naval officer.

Paying tribute at Gounden’s funeral at the Clare Estate crematorium in Durban, the SA Navy’s chief director of maritime strategy, Rear Admiral SL Pillay, who represented the chief of the Navy, Vice-Admiral Mosuwa Hlongwane, said Gounden displayed a natural charm and people were inexorably attracted to him.

Pillay said Gounden was a man of rare qualities and of exceptional talent, having made an immense contribution, not only as a sentinel of South Africa’s freedom, but as a diplomat of its democracy.

Pillay said Gounden, the officer and gentleman, often sacrificed his family for missions locally and abroad, recalling in particular his trip to Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago off the southern tip of Argentina.

As a media liaison officer, Gounden left an indelible impression among journalists. I recall the co-operation we got when two vessels of the Indian navy, INS Kukri and INS Gomati, were the first warships to visit the new democratic South Africa.

After his retirement, Gounden offered his service to the Navy on special projects and as a journalist on a local newspaper.

Gounden is survived by his wife Kogie, and his children, Maheshni and Roland.