Programme Directors,
Your Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa,
Your Excellency Nangolo Mbumba, Vice President of the Republic of Namibia,
Honourable Mama Graça Machel,
Honourable Ministers, Premiers and Mayors,
Your Excellency Ambassador Cecilia Julin and other Ambassadors and High
Commissioners,
The esteemed Modise and Bokwe families,
Fellow mourners, comrades, ladies and gentlemen:

We have convened here to say a final farewell to a very dear Comrade,
Ambassador Billy Modise. I would like to believe that by now all of us
are familiar with Billy’s biography which, for instance, is contained in
the Obituary which was presented earlier. Accordingly there is no need
for me to recount that biography.

However I must repeat that that biography tells us that for 63 years,
from 1955 when he first went to Fort Hare University College to 2018 when
he finally left us, Billy was a loyal member and activist of the ANC, the
African National Congress.

It therefore stands to reason that that membership of the ANC surely
defined in very good measure who Billy Modise was and dictated what he
did. This is because, as we all know, the six decades during which Billy
was a member and activist of the ANC were very critical in the process of
the making and transformation of South Africa and therefore the evolution
of the ANC itself.

Thus in Billy Modise we have one of those comrades who has been present
as an actor in the process I have just mentioned, of the making and
transformation of our country and the evolution of the ANC. As we all
know, this was a process which, among others included:

a most determined and multi-sided struggle within South Africa, with
the liberation movement broadly united around the Freedom Charter;
combined with,
a similarly determined and truly massive international movement of
anti-apartheid solidarity;

which both offensives, the domestic and the international,

obliged the apartheid regime to enter into negotiations with the
liberation movement to end the system of white minority rule; which led
to the moment when we said ‘free at last’!, followed by
democratic elections since 1994, with the ANC winning all the national
elections during our years of democratic rule; and consequently
South Africa’s assumption of her rightful place in Africa and the rest
of the world, after many years of international rejection and isolation.

All these were each great victories in themselves. As South Africans we
have owed it to the architects of each of these victories to bestow on
them the deserved accolades. And of course those accolades are finally
due to all those, including the masses of our people, whose collective
actions finally brought freedom to our country.

Billy Modise occupies an honoured place among these who must receive
these accolades.

However it must surely be a matter of common cause among all of us that
truly to honour these great patriots requires more than these praises we
must indeed shower on them. What is imperative, in addition, is that we
must do our best to ensure that the example set, and the legacy left
behind by these patriots, should serve to inspire the present and future
generations to emulate that example and build on that legacy.

Accordingly as we say farewell to Comrade Billy Modise with all the due
accolades, we must also surely repeat together – let us nurture a million
more Billy Modise’s!

Last year the then Secretary General of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, joining
the ANC Stalwarts and Veterans among whom Billy belonged, sounded the
alarm bells about exactly this matter – the need to nurture a million
more Billy Modise’s! – when he presented a Diagnostic Report on the ANC
in which he said, among others:

Revolutionary morality is about the leadership of our movement adhering
to higher standards of behaviour…We owe it to ourselves first, the
movement and society, to analyse in detail the implications of a
liberation movement that has ascended to power and, therefore, controls
huge resources. Being in power is rapidly becoming a source of political
bankruptcy, in that members of the ANC fight for deployment either as
councillors, MPLs and MPs – respectively, as if there is ‘no tomorrow’…
It is foreign to our movement for comrades to see deployment as a source
of material benefit rather than the reason to serve the people. These
fights among comrades turn the interest of our people off, and push them
away from the movement.”

It would of course have been a matter of especial concern to all our
people that Secretary General Mantashe was talking about our country’s
governing party. Accordingly the abandonment of higher standards of
behaviour by many within the governing party, Billy Modise’s party, which
SG Mantashe decried, meant, very directly, that this would seriously
undermine the capacity and possibility for the governing party truly and
effectively to serve the people of South Africa.

Thus does Billy’s own party and our society as a whole need to inculcate
in as many of our people as possible the example set by Billy Modise over
many decades, of adhering to higher standards of behaviour, ever
committed to serve the people!

My own first contact with Billy in the context of political struggle was
in 1959. At that time I was a Member of the Executive Committee of the
ANC Youth League at Lovedale High School which is immediately across the
Thyume River from Fort Hare. Billy Modise was then Secretary of the ANC
Youth League branch at Fort Hare.

At that time the Lovedale Youth League branch related to the Fort Hare
ANC Youth League branch as its immediate senior. We therefore interacted
with Billy and his comrades as our seniors.

The matter we sought to discuss with the ANC leadership at Fort Hare as
students at Lovedale High School, a boarding school, arose from the fact
that we were on strike and intended to leave the School as part of that
strike. Our Fort Hare comrades were fully in support of our strike. Now
we wanted them to endorse our departure from our school. Happily for us,
they agreed with us that we should indeed leave school.

We believed that we had good reason why we should get the support of the
ANC leadership at Fort Hare. We were convinced that that support would
legitimise in the eyes of our parents, the ANC as whole, and our
communities, our decision to leave Lovedale without being expelled.

I mention this incident which occurred almost 60 years ago to indicate
the political weight the activist for liberation, Billy Modise, carried,
even while he was part of the youth, having served as Secretary of the
Fort Hare SRC, Secretary of the ANC Youth League at Fort Hare and the
Victoria East ANC region, and member of the national leadership of the
National Union of South African Students, NUSAS, the only non-racial and
anti-apartheid national student organisation at the time.

It was surely a matter of great pride and satisfaction to Billy Modise
that in the years after he left Fort Hare, successive generations of
youth and students in our country continued to play important roles both
in the struggle for liberation and the process of the construction and
development of a democratic society.

Our experience during 24 years as a democratic country has confirmed that
the task of the eradication of the legacy of colonialism and apartheid
and building a prosperous non-racial and non-sexist democracy is indeed
very complex.

Among others this emphasises the great importance of doing everything
necessary and possible to develop and inspire our youth to engage in this
historic process of the fundamental socio-economic transformation of our
country, drawing the necessary lessons from the example Billy Modise set
during his own youthful years!

That same experience of 24 years of democracy has also firmly confirmed
that South Africa is not an island sufficient unto itself. To succeed in
all its endeavours it needs to be fully integrated within Africa and the
rest of the world.

We are indeed very honoured that H.E. Ambassador Cecilia Julin of Sweden
has been able to join this final farewell to Billy Modise, holder of the
prestigious Swedish Order of the Polar Star. In this context I would like
to believe that all of us are very familiar with the outstanding role
Sweden played in terms of the provision of massive support to our
struggle.

As has been said already, we must of course continue to pay the tribute
that is due to Billy for the work he did from 1960 onwards to help build
what became a very powerful Swedish movement of solidarity with the
peoples of South and Southern Africa.

It spoke to Billy’s dedication to the accomplishment of this task that,
as a student in Sweden, he opted to abandon his studies in medicine to
pursue other subjects, which gave him more time to do his political work
both in Sweden and in other Nordic countries. That dedication contributed
enormously to the privilege we enjoy to this day of excellent relations
between Sweden and South Africa, and very warm, genuine people-to-people
relations between our two peoples.

would like to believe that as we continue the work to strengthen our
relations with the rest of the world, including by helping to build a
global movement for the democratisation of the system of international
relations, our diplomats would do their best to learn everything that is
relevant from the work Billy Modise did which helped to win for our
country a genuine friend, the Kingdom of Sweden.

Ambassador Modise hoped that as our country strives to liberate itself
from the negative tendencies which have engulfed it during recent years,
it would also renew its focus on the strategic objective of the
renaissance of Africa, loyal to the long-established Pan-Africanist
traditions of his movement, the ANC.

As he taught at the Namibia Institute in Lusaka to train Namibians who
would help to manage and develop the liberated Namibia, working side by
side with the current President of the Republic of Namibia, H.E. Hage
Geingob, Billy treated this task as an organic part of his life’s mission
as a cadre of the ANC.

He had carried out his work in Sweden and other Nordic countries of
helping to build the solidarity movement I have mentioned, working
together with other liberation movements such as those from Namibia,
Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Somebody like the late Namibian, Jariretundu Kozonguizi, founder of
SWANU, the South West Africa National Union, which ultimately
disappeared, was to Billy a colleague, given that he had been an active
member of the ANC Youth League when he was a student at Fort Hare.

Inspired by his vision and commitment relating to our Continent, Africa,
and the practical example he set, we must pay tribute to and truly honour
Billy Modise by regaining the unqualified respect of the whole of Africa
for our country by doing the good and right things which gave hope to all
Africans, including the African Diaspora.

The departure of Billy Modise from the world of the living confirms sad
news we cannot escape, that an eminent generation in our country which
has been involved in struggle for six decades or more, to change the
lives of all our people for the better, is disappearing for ever.

These are women and men, like Billy Modise, who, throughout their lives,
and despite being confronted by great challenges, have consistently
conducted themselves according to a noble value system, and remained at
all times humble, humanist, never self-serving, permanently ready to
serve the people.

Thus it is that when death robs us of any among the generation of
liberators I have mentioned, this produces a sense of foreboding that
unless we act to prevent this by ensuring that many among the living
emulate our liberators, such as Billy Modise, one day we will wake up and
find that there are none in our country who would conduct themselves
according to the noble value system I have mentioned, humble, humanist
and never self-serving.

Sis’ Yoli and your daughter, Thandi, and the rest of the Modise and Bokwe
families, please accept our sincere condolences at the loss of one very
dear to you, Ambassador Billy Modise.

Our dear Ambassador, our esteemed leader, elder brother and friend,
Comrade Billy, while we live we will do our best to help ensure that the
nation does not lose the extraordinary legacy you have left behind for
its benefit, intent to give substance to what has been and will be said –
that the spirit of Billy Modise lives on!
May the outstanding patriot, Billy Modise, rest in eternal peace.

Thank you.