Cebo Manyaapelo’s send-off
Premier comforts Manyaapelo family
Fundraiser money helped with funeral
The funeral service of the late Cebo Manyaapelo was a small, intimate and brief affair.
A few hundred mourners flocked to the Great Hall of North West University in Mafikeng yesterday morning for the send off of the charismatic broadcaster.
Manyaapelo, who was popularly known as CC, died nine days ago at Mahikeng hospital.
Among the mourners who comforted his wife, Tidimalo, and four children, was premier Supra Mahumapelo who bemoaned the working conditions of freelancers at the SABC.
“I am making a special plea to SABC board members to discuss the conditions which compel some of the people who work within SABC to end up doing freelance work,” Mahumapelo said.
Manyaapelo was one of the many freelancers employed by the public broadcaster, according to SABC spokesman, Kaizer Kganyago.
He explained that the SABC had two dispensations.
“There are people who work fulltime and there are those that are freelancers. Cebo was a freelancer. People choose to be freelancers because they make more money because they don’t get benefits like pension funds and medical aids,” Kganyago said.
This had landed Manyaapelo in financial dire straits when he was diagnosed with colon cancer.
Before Manyaapelo died, his friends, golfers and colleagues at the SABC formed a committee to organise a golf tournament for his benefit. The aim was to raise funds for his rising medical bills.
Committee spokesman Jeff Monnakgotla said even if Manyaapelo had died two days before the tournament, the money helped with his burial.
“We formed the committee after realising that his medical bills were going up and the nature of illness that he was suffering from was not going to end soon,” Monnakgotla said.
Speakers at his funeral praised Manyaapelo for the sterling work he did, not only on radio and television but also in the community.
Some of the recognisable mourners were footballers Marks Maponyane, Hlompho Kekana, Pitso Mosimane, Brian Mathe and Bobby Motaung.
Manyaapelo was laid to rest at Lomanyaneng cemetery.
Mokgwatlheng, you were many things to so many people that no one should claim to know you better than the other.
While your multiple characters never changed the person you were, locating your exactness was an insurmountable challenge.
The good thing in the maverick you, or enigma, as others describe you, was that you got on well with everyone. I’m still to know who your enemy was.
You defied the rules of friendship, but somehow managed to keep friends. How you did that is really puzzling. You did not shed your identity to be submerged in a group.
That you were a “Motswana wa Mokgwatlheng” was written on your forehead. You have always remained truthful to your roots and to yourself; even when telling a lie no one would convince you otherwise.
“Mathousand,” your contribution to the development and sustenance of your Setswana language may have gone unnoticed, but the two awards you received from the Pan South African Language Board and the music industry of Botswana speak volumes.
You single-handedly broke new ground when you unapologetically introduced and popularised Setswana cultural music.
That the premier of North West renamed the Leopark Park Golf Course in your honour captures the influence you had in popularising the sport in the province.
You had a few friends and hundreds of acquaintances, and you always mentioned by name a few in the darkest hours of your life as your condition deteriorated.
In one of your sound clips played at your memorial service you say: “Those that are your friends you will always find around you in your darkest hour.” I can’t agree with you more. We were always a handful around you when your health deteriorated.
In May, your birth month, you took your last trip to Miegdol farm school as part of your annual pilgrimage to deliver health products, including sanitary towels to children, as you have been doing for the past 15 years.
Again in May you took a journey to Kathu in Northern Cape on what was to be your last annual Cebo Manyaapelo Golf Day. These two events are among the many that drove you away from the microphone at Motsweding FM.
You were very young when you joined Bop Broadcasting Corporation in December 1983 after writing your matric exam and even before you had received your results. Bravo!
In the tributes paid to you, one stands out for me as it best described what and who you are. Pitso Mosimane’s eulogy narrates how he ended up sitting on empty beer crates at a sheeben you took him to, in Montshioa township.
“Finding myself at Nimla’s shebeen, at the back of the house with local boys Cebo grew up with, capture the best identity of who he was,” Mosimane said in a TV interview.
Manyaapelo, 50, was buried in Mahikeng yesterday.