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Date
: 16/05/2006
Source: The Presidency
Title: Mbeki: Official funeral of Stella Sigcau
Oration of the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, at
the Official Funeral of Stella Nomzamo Sigcau: Qaukeni, Eastern
Cape,
Your Majesty, King Mpondombini Sigcau – A! Thandizulu,
Your Majesty, Queen Lombekiso,
Your Majesties and Royal Highnesses,
Nkosi Ngangomhlaba Matanzima and other traditional leaders,
Deputy President of the Republic, Phumzile Mlabo-Ngcuka,
Premier of the Eastern Cape, Nosimo Balindlela,
Judge Vuka Tshabalala,
Ministers, Mayors and other elected representatives,
Leaders of our political parties,
Bishop Mgojo and our religious leaders,
Officers, men and women of the South African National Defence
Force,
Fellow mourners,
Mawethu:
We have convened here to say a final farewell to a very dear
daughter of both amaMpondo and the people of South Africa as a
whole, Nkosazana Stella Nomzamo Sigcau, a mere few months after she
celebrated her 69th birthday.
On behalf of our Government and the Nation, I am honoured to convey
our sincere condolences to her brother, His Majesty, King
Mpondombini Sigcau – A! Thandizulu! – and the rest of
the royal family, as well as the children and grandchildren of the
deceased.
I would like to assure all of you, dear compatriots, that we too
share the pain of the loss of your daughter, sister, mother and
grandmother. We hope that the fact that we share your grief will
help somewhat to lighten your burden, as well as rejoice that
Nkosazana Stella Sigcau grew to become a national asset and
heroine, evolving into a beloved mother of the much larger family
that constitutes our nation.
Our government and the democratic state are truly privileged that
we have been given the opportunity to show our deep respect for her
by flying the national flag at half-mast throughout the country,
and, today, by accompanying her to her final place of rest in an
official funeral.
Speaking in my own name, within the context of the obligations
imposed by the office I occupy during the period prescribed by our
Constitution, I must confess that I am greatly saddened by the fact
that Nkosazana Stella Sigcau departed the world of the living
before she completed the tasks she had set herself.
As the current year began, during which we celebrate the 10th
anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution she helped to bring
into being, she asked that I should agree to release her from her
responsibilities as a Minister serving in our National Government.
In this regard, she asked that I should agree that she steps down
from public duty next month, June.
She said she needed the few months to June especially to ensure
that the Expanded Public Works Programme was working effectively,
in particular with regard to the empowerment of women and the
youth, and the improvement of the economic and social
infrastructure especially in the rural areas.
I agreed to her requests, moved by the unselfish spirit that
informed her decision voluntarily to give up her Ministerial
position, so that a younger person could replace her.
I agreed to her requests, inspired by her unwavering commitment to
the end, to serve the most downtrodden and disadvantaged in our
society, especially the women and the rural people.
As a private citizen, after her retirement, she had hoped to use
her energies to continue to lead the rural masses and our people as
a whole, by doing things that would serve as examples of what could
be done to address the challenge of rural development, and what
should be done to reach deep into the store of our traditional
knowledge systems to marshal these, effectively to address the
diverse but related causes of health for all, social cohesion and
ubuntu.
I am saddened that nature intervened to deny her the possibility to
complete her term as a public servant, according to the parameters
she had prescribed for herself to end many decades of public
service.
I am saddened that death deprived her of the opportunity to don her
working clothes and by example, show the millions of our people
what we mean when we say that the freedom we enjoy today has given
all of us the possibility truly to determine our destiny, the
possibility to define what our country will look like
tomorrow.
I would like to say this today, which perhaps I should have said to
Nkosazana Nomzamo Sigcau while she lived, that many in our
generation have felt a spirit of spiritual kinship with her for
half-a-century.
This derived from the fact that in her youth, in the 1950s, she
became a member of the African National Congress Youth League as we
too became, following the example she had set.
Those of us who came after her as students at the Lovedale
Institution looked up to her and others across the Tyhume River, at
Fort Hare, who were inevitably, our seniors, constituting the Fort
Hare branch of the ANC Youth League.
As an activist among these, and together with her comrades, Stella
Sigcau had the rare privilege to discharge her obligations as part
of a youthful contingent of the national liberation movement under
the superintendence of that outstanding son of our people,
Professor Z K Matthews, and others among our national
leaders.
This we can now say that we should not have been surprised that
when she graduated at Fort Hare, she joined the staff of Ohlange
Institute as a teacher. Thus did she choose to serve the nation and
begin her professional life as an educator at a famous institution
established by that outstanding co-founder of the African National
Congress, John Langalibalele Dube.
The young graduate teacher from Fort Hare understood what John Dube
had meant when, using the words and categories of his day, he wrote
in 1907 to his famous African-American mentor, Booker T Washington,
whom he had first met in 1897, saying:
“A great number of civilised natives are anxious to push
forward in spite of the prejudice of our white people. The
condition (in South Africa) is much like that in the Southern
States in America. They want our ignorant people to stay in their
heathen condition so that they can only use them as beasts of
burden. Those who aspire to something higher are not
wanted.”
As a member of the African National Congress and a traditional
African Princess during the apogee of the age of colonialism and
white minority rule in our country, she was determined to
contribute everything she could to ensure that all her people, the
African majority, should no longer be used by the white minority as
beasts of burden.
Many of us present here today will have forgotten the time in 1987
when the then government of South Africa, under the leadership of P
W Botha, proposed the establishment of what it called a National
Council, which would negotiate a new constitution to end the deadly
conflict then gripping our country.
In response to this desperate initiative to perpetuate apartheid
rule, on 9 October 1987, the National Executive Committee of the
African National Congress issued a Statement in which it said
“We wish here to reiterate that the African National Congress
(ANC) has never been opposed to a negotiated settlement of the
South African question. On various occasions in the past we have,
in vain, called on the apartheid regime to talk to the genuine
leaders of our people.
“Once more, we would like to reaffirm that the ANC and the
masses of our people as a whole are ready and willing to enter into
genuine negotiations provided they are aimed at the transformation
of our country into a united and non-racial democracy. This, and
only this, should be the objective of any negotiating process.
Accordingly no meaningful negotiations can take place until all
those concerned, and specifically the Pretoria regime, accept this
perspective which we share with the whole of humanity.
“We further wish to state again that the questions whether or
not to negotiate, and on what conditions, should be put to our
entire leadership, including those who are imprisoned and who
should be released unconditionally. While considering these
questions our leadership would have to be free to consult and
discuss with the people without let or hindrance.
“We reject without qualification the proposed National
Council (NC) which the Botha regime seeks to establish through
legislation to be enacted by the apartheid parliament. This can
never be a genuine and acceptable mechanism to negotiate a
democratic constitution for our country.”
Fellow mourners, you may wonder why I use this opportunity to
remind you of matters past, that confronted our nation two decades
ago. I mention them so that even though Nkosazana Stella Sigcau is
no longer with us, we should never forget what she did then,
publicly to support the historic demands our movement made then,
which ultimately opened the way to the peaceful resolution of the
conflict that had gripped our country for more than three
centuries.
As all of us would remember, at the moment to which I have
referred, Stella Sigcau was Prime Minister of the nominally
independent Republic of Transkei.
We welcomed her accession to this position, in a Republic we did
not recognise, which was a product of the apartheid system,
intended to help perpetuate white minority rule. We welcomed her
elevation because we knew that circumstances has put in a position
of influence, however limited, a patriot on whom we could rely
further to intensify the assault on the apartheid system.
Thus when P W Botha declared his intention to establish his
National Council, quietly we asked Nkosazana Nomzamo Sigcau to
speak out as Prime Minister of Transkei, to restate the demands
concerning the issue of negotiations made by her movement, which
she had joined more than twenty years earlier.
Ever a woman of courage and principle, she did not hesitate to
carry out this request. As she reaffirmed that despite its
so-called independence, the Transkei remained an integral part of
South Africa, she repeated what her movement had said, that any
genuine negotiations had to be conducted with the genuine
representatives of the people, and had to focus on the
transformation of our country into a united and non-racial
democracy.
Unfortunately, as some of our cadres, including Chris Hani and
Charles Nqakula, engaged in preparations to bring her to Harare,
Zimbabwe, to enable our leadership to discuss her tasks as a
long-standing cadre of the ANC, she was removed from her position
as Prime Minister of Transkei.
Stella Sigcau stood out among her generation of fighters for
liberation as a unique individual. A Princess of the Kingdom of
amaMpondo, she was ready to serve as an ordinary cadre of the
African National Congress.
A descendant of a patriotic King of amaMpondo, who had been
transported to and imprisoned on Robben Island in 1895 because of
his opposition to the colonisation of his people by the British,
member of one of the royal families that responded to Pixley ka
Isaka Seme’s call to support the African National Congress at
its formation, first among equals with regard to the heroic Mpondo
peasant masses who participated in the 1960 armed uprising, she did
not use this distinguished political parenthood to claim a special
place for herself among the cadres of our mass army for
revolutionary change.
She understood the related obligations that arose from membership
of our royal families and membership of the national movement which
these royal families helped to form to bury the demon of tribalism,
the African National Congress.
She could therefore serve and did serve as both a royal princess
and a revolutionary cadre of the ANC.
She understood too, that both traditional leadership and leadership
of our national liberation movement derived their legitimacy from
the extent to which they served the interests of the ordinary
masses of our people.
Thus, in as much as Nkosazana Nomzamo Sigcau understood that Inkosi
yiNkosi ngabantu, she also understood that Umbutho we Sizwe
ngumbutho wabantu.
There are many among us today who can tell moving stories about
what Stella Sigcau did to empower them to escape from the confined
world of poverty and disempowerment imposed on the black majority
by colonialism, apartheid and their legacy.
These would tell stories of what Stella Sigcau did to bring dignity
to the rural women of the Transkei, for instance by facilitating
their access to land, breaking an age-old tradition that,
consistent with the dictates of patriarchy, gave the right of
access to communal land only to the male members of the human
species.
Others would recount what Stella Sigcau did, even within the
restricted confines of the Transkei Bantustan, to create
opportunities especially for young African women to qualify as
properly trained professionals, able to take their place in a
modern society as equals with their male counterparts, regardless
of race.
Yet others would recount the determined actions that Stella Sigcau
took, especially as Minister of Public Enterprises in democratic
South Africa, to enable all black professionals, especially the
women, accountants among them, to reach for the skies, by removing
the invisible but real race and gender ceiling that limited the
full flowering of some of the best in our society.
Others still would speak of what she did to create opportunities
within the state-owned enterprises, and the enterprise sector as a
whole, for yet other black people to gain skills and qualify as
professionals, to honour John Dube’s vision that no longer
should our people be condemned to serve merely as beasts of burden.
There are thousands who may not physically be here today, but who
are surely with us in spirit, who would speak of what Nkosazana
Nomzamo Sigcau did as Minister of Public Works especially to
empower women as building contractors and creators of the lived
environment of good roads, modern sanitation, and other social and
economic infrastructure without which we cannot claim that we are
on course to restore the dignity of especially the working people
of our country.
I am privileged to say that I believed that I understood well what
the late Minister of Public Works, uMaStandi to the Ministers and
Deputy Ministers to whom she had to allocate state houses, what she
meant when she said, immediately before her retirement from public
service, that she needed time to ensure that she did everything
that needed to be done to guarantee that the Expanded Public Works
Programme meets the hopes of the poor and disadvantaged, as their
ladder to success and human fulfilment during this, our Age of
Hope.
I am saddened by the fact that Nkosazana Stella Sigcau departed the
world of the living before she completed the tasks she had set
herself.
At the same time, I feel elevated that from near and afar, and for
half-a-century, I could attach myself to such a noble human being
as was Nkosazana Stella Margaret Nomzamo Sigcau.
Many a time, by the manner in which we conduct ourselves, we refuse
to see the jewels that adorn the seemingly mundane activities that
define our daily lives. The seemingly natural failure to see the
stars that light our skies, before they wane and disappear as
nature imposes its dictates, deprives us of the opportunity to sing
the songs of praise that are due to them, while they live.
Nevertheless, having done to Stella Sigcau what we have become
accustomed to do to our heroes and heroines, at her death we
comfort ourselves with the knowledge that whereas we failed to
acclaim what she meant to the nation while she lived, after her
death, we are blessed with many opportunities to continue to
celebrate her life.
This we will do by contemplating every passing day, and interacting
with the products of her noble endeavours, as we, together with
them, strive to restore the full human dignity to all our people
that Nkosazana Stella Nomzamo Sigcau always knew belonged to her
people as their natural right.
Farewell dear friend and comrade. The nation will forever celebrate
what you did to help all of us to regain our dignity as Africans.
What you left undone we will strive to complete.
Therefore rest in peace in the knowledge that we will consider
nothing you sought to be done as done, until it is done. Your
dreams will still come to fruition.
To the Sigcau family, warriors for the emancipation of all our
people in all their echelons, regardless of race and colour, and
gender and age, and ability and geographic domicile, we say, humbly
and with passion – akuhlanga lungehlanga: le nto kakade yinto
yalonto! And thus do we say, death be not proud!
At the end, the very best we can say, which we say in all sincerity
is - farewell! Hamba kahle, Nkosazana yohlanga, qhawekazi
lesizwe!
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