Nana Mahomo: PAC leader who helped to put apartheid’s full horror before the world
1927-2014
NANA Mahomo, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 86, was a founding member of the Pan Africanist Congress who made two award-winning films that showed a sceptical world the brutal nature of apartheid.
He became a member of the PAC’s first national executive committee in 1959 and helped to plan its anti-pass-law campaign, which culminated in the Sharpeville massacre of March 21 1960 and the march to Cape Town by township residents six days later.
Anticipating that the campaign would lead to the banning of the PAC and the arrest of its leaders, PAC leader Robert Sobukwe sent Mahomo out of the country to tell the world about apartheid and solicit support. He left South Africa the day before Sharpeville.
Mahomo found that the more he tried to explain apartheid to people, the less they believed him. Eventually, he decided the most effective way of getting the message across was to film it.
“It seemed to me that if you present the public with something visual, something at least their eyes can testify to, you are halfway home,” he said in an interview at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1976.
With no experience and few resources, he started Morena Films with six other South African exiles and two Englishmen.
They produced two 45-minute documentaries. The first, The End of Dialogue, was released in 1970 and won an Emmy. CBS screened a shortened version titled Black View of South Africa.
In 1974, Last Grave at Dimbaza was shown on TV in the US, Britain and Canada. It highlighted the appalling child mortality rate in Dimbaza, a dumping ground in Ciskei for the victims of forced removals.
Last Grave at Dimbaza won awards at the Grenoble International Short Film Festival. Le Monde called it the most remarkable documentary shown at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival.
Even more remarkable was that Mahomo had to supervise the shooting of both films from outside South Africa, because he
If you present the public with something visual, something at least their eyes can testify to, you are halfway home
knew that the minute he set foot in the country he would be arrested.
As it was, the shooting had to be done very secretively using ruses and deceptions to divert the attention of the security police. The footage had to be smuggled across the border.
Five hours of footage had to be hurriedly reshot after it was destroyed in London while being developed. Mahomo suspected sabotage, but he was unable to prove it.
He was convinced that there would be a race war in South Africa. “We are trying to show the outside world that when, not if, a confrontation does take place in South Africa, when the slaughter begins, the world should know why it is taking place,” he said at the time.
Mahomo was born in Vereeniging on August 6 1927, the son of a Dutch Reformed Church minister. He attended Bantu High School in Kroonstad. His English teacher was AC Jordan, who went on to become a legendary lecturer in African languages at the University of Cape Town.
After school, he worked as an assistant secretary to another future legend of academia, Es’kia Mphahlele, before going off to read law at UCT in 1957. He dropped out to help to lead the PAC.
The third great man under whose influence he fell was Sobukwe, to whom he was introduced in 1956 by a friend at Park Station in Johannesburg. Mahomo remembered “this young man carrying a briefcase in a sports coat, smoking a pipe. By the way he held the pipe and dragged on it, I could see he was not an amateur.”
Mahomo was the most senior PAC leader in the Western Cape when Sobukwe summoned him to party headquarters in Johannesburg to organise the anti-pass-law campaign. He left his “protégé”, Philip Kgosana, in charge. The 23year-old Kgosana soon afterwards led the tumultuous march from Langa and Gugulethu to the city centre.
Kgosana was arrested, but fled South Africa while on bail. He was feted by African heads of state, but the PAC expelled him. Mahomo was suspected of being behind this because he saw Kgosana’s celebrity status as a threat to his leadership position.
After leaving South Africa, Mahomo helped the ANC to set up the exiled South African United Front. This was strongly opposed by other PAC leaders and precipitated the first round of infighting that was to characterise the party’s history in exile.
He became a victim of this when expelled in the late 1970s by the then PAC leader, Potlake Leballo. Leballo himself was then expelled and Mahomo was reinstated.
In the 1980s Mahomo lived in Washington DC, where he headed the African-American Labour Centre’s programme of action in support of black, non-communist trade unions in Africa.
It emerged that the centre was a CIA front through which US government money was channelled to pro-capitalist African trade unions, which were discouraged from political activism.
Allegations of financial improprieties and cooperating with the CIA were levelled at Mahomo. These were never substantiated and were suspected of being part of ongoing leadership rivalries in the PAC.
Mahomo, who married a French woman while in exile, returned to South Africa in the early 1990s. He divided his time between Johannesburg and Bayonne in France, where he lived in converted stables in the grounds of a chateau he and his son had bought cheaply.
He pursued several business ventures, including a bakery in Tembisa and a company that developed a widely used land-mine clearing machine.
He also began a donor-funded project to start vegetable gardens at state schools to feed the pupils and earn extra income for the schools. He gave up in disgust when he found that teachers were taking all the vegetables and failing to maintain the gardens.
He is survived by his son, Simon, and grandchildren who live in France. — Chris Barron