On The Beaten Track Pod: and welcome back to another episode of On The Beaten Track. I'm your host Rehana ⁓ Thank you so much for coming back this week. I am going to be doing a bunch people today together because there are so many individuals ⁓ that... were really responsible and pivotal in getting this organization, whether it was... SASO BCM or or BPC. mean, I don't know how many times you can change it. So didn't this people that I'm obviously going to focus in on. And then they're just a bunch of people that I'm going to group together. And today is particularly challenging. For me from a pronunciation perspective So many opportunities for me to this up and I apologize from the deep the depth of my soul if do And hopefully you'll forgive me now if you've been following the series we've had story about Steve Biko, Barney Pityana Harry Nengwekhulu arriving at the founding conference of SASO South African Students' Organization at Turfloop you know what they believed and why, know what they were trying to build and at what cost to them. But like I said, movements don't get built by three people or two people or ⁓ one person. they get built by rooms of people each took a road to get there. And when SASO was formally launched at its inaugural conference at the University of the North July 1969, ⁓ other members were elected to its first executive alongside ⁓ the president, and Pityana the secretary, and as main came from different universities, ⁓ backgrounds, and different political histories. What they had in common was that each of them had, by 1969, arrived at the same conclusion, that students in South Africa needed to speak for themselves, lead themselves, and build something. of their own. This episode is about how five of those got Not the You know the philosophy. We've been over it. Their personal journeys and the specific moments, places, ⁓ encounters and experiences. that set each of them the road ⁓ ended in the conference hall at Turfloop The five Petrus Machaka, the first vice president Mokoape became a co-founder of Black Consciousness and a founding member SASO. Winnie Kgware known to the students of Turfloop as ⁓ Manana Kgware, the elder, mother of movement at the campus, who would go on to become first president of the Black People's Convention. Goolam 'Gees' Abram Mayet, Indian medical student from Benoni who was one of Biko's closest friends and named in several accounts as a founding figure. And, Vuyelwa is elected co-secretary at the same founding conference and who is incidentally the person through which Biko met Mampela Ramphela. Five paths, five stories, room. Let's start with Petrus Pat because I cannot call you Petrus . I am sorry, brain cannot put and Machaka together. ⁓ known to his comrades as Pat, was a student at the University of the North in Turfloop when the seeds of SASO was being planted. He was a central figure the Student Representative Council ⁓ that campus, working alongside Harry in the 1960s as the SRC struggled to define the terms of its own existence against a university that was deeply suspicious of any student political activity. As we've spoken about in the past, Turfloop in those years was a peculiar institution. It had been established by the apartheid government specifically to educate the ethnic elites who would staff the Bantustan administrations Lebowa, Venda Gazankulu homelands that the apartheid project was constructing in the Northern Transvaal. Its had imagined it as a factory for compliant professionals who would the system work. it actually produced by the late 1960s, which we've spoken about, was something the government had not anticipated. a campus that had become a central center of political dissent. SRC at Turfloop had years fighting for the right to affiliate with NUSAs, a battle they had lost by 1968 when the university administration formally disallowed the affiliation. But by the time that battle was lost, many other students at Turfloop were no longer sure they wanted to affiliate with NUSAs anymore. Anyway. They had watched the debates between Biko and others, heard the arguments about why black students needed their own organization, and were arriving at their own conclusions. What crystallized things for Machaka and Nengwekhulu specifically was the preparation for the 1969 inaugural SASO conference. Biko had been traveling, building support, so persuading. Biko had been traveling, building support, persuading. the conference confirmed for Turfloop the SRC under Machaka ⁓ and made a decision that put them in direct confrontation with the university authorities. They voted to use SRC funds, student dues, to financially support the conference. The registrar objected. worried about repayment, the SRC stood firm. were entitled ⁓ use or spend the student body's money as they so fit. And they so fit to give the new movement a home and a financial foundation from its very first day. At the conference itself, when SASO's first executive was elected, Pat Machaka was chosen deputy president, the first vice president of SASO ⁓ alongside Biko as president ⁓ the rest of the first executive. He put the institution of Turfloop's student body behind the movement. He had helped make the conference happen. and now he was formally part of the leadership. road to that conference hall, ran through the grinding daily experience of being a student ⁓ an institution designed to constrain him, and the slow accumulation of conviction ⁓ that constraints had to be fought collectively and on his own terms. He did come to that conclusion through a single event. He came to it through the ordinary accumulation of living inside a system that had decided who he was and what he deserved and refusing to accept it. Mokoape came to black consciousness with the history that none of his SASO comrades could match. He had been a political prisoner before the movement he would help found even existed. He was in fact the youngest political prisoner in the history of anti-apartheid struggle. Arrested and convicted at fifteen or sixteen for his participation in the PAC's anti-pass campaign on the 21st of March 1960. Can you believe it? was born in Johannesburg on the 6th of September 1944. His worked as a dispatch clerk for the Elephant Trading Company, before that as a teacher. The family lived in a workers building in a Johannesburg location. When his father was transferred to Pretoria, the family moved to Soweto, He attended Orlando High School. A campus in the heart of Soweto where political awareness not just encouraged but almost impossible to avoid. The school's environment was charged. His years there as records were marked by a high level of political activity. He absorbed it. But Mokoape has described his political baptism as happening ⁓ the PEPCO bus boycott, a campaign in Port Elizabeth against bus fare increases that one of the sharpening moments of community resistance in the late ⁓ 1950s. was ordinary people organize against a system that treated their lives as inconsequential. It gave politics a body, a face, a purpose he could understand. then came Sobukwe When Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe founded the Pan-Africanist Congress in April 1959, breaking with the ANC over what he saw as its accommodation of ⁓ multiracialism its alliance with the Party. Mokoape was drawn to the PAC's uncompromising Africanism. Sobukwe argued that the land of Africa belonged to Africans, that liberation could not be achieved on terms set by or shared with the people doing the oppressing. Mokoape, who was 15 years old, found in Sobukwe a voice that named what he was feeling. When the PAC called its anti-pass campaign for the 21st of March 1960, the day that became Sharpeville Mokoape was there At Orlando, Sobukwe led a group to the local police station to hand themselves in without passes. as an act of deliberate civil disobedience. Mokoape was part of that group. He was arrested. He was convicted. He went to the Old Fort's number four prison complex in Johannesburg. He was 15 or 16. He served three years there. Crazy. came out of number four carrying the full weight of that experience. He had been inside. He had seen what the state was willing to do to people who refused to carry a piece of paper. He had seen Sobukwe in prison. Sobukwe , who was on Robben ⁓ kept in solitary confinement under a special parliamentary act written specifically to keep him incarcerated even after his sentence expired. After matriculating from Orlando High School, Mokoape enrolled at the University of Natal Medical School, the black section at Wentworth in Durban. arrived to find Steve Biko already there, already electrifying, already asking exactly the questions ⁓ Mokoape's history had been preparing him to hear. The became close friends immediately. African history records Biko befriending Mokoape, the two engaging in constant debate about NUSAs, with Mokoape given his PAC background being more immediately and instinctively opposed to remaining inside the white-led organization ⁓ than was at that stage. It's so interesting to see where ideas ⁓ collide and ⁓ when look at from a different perspective, how they start ⁓ becoming or the same ⁓ right? Because Mokoape was older most of his students, and already been a prisoner of conscience most of them ⁓ any political experience at all. That history gave him a particular authority in the conversations at Wentworth about what black students should do next, a particular impatience with any argument that suggested the system could be worked from the inside. was one of the people who helped turn those conversations at Wentworth into the December 1968 consultative meeting that led directly to SASO's founding conference the following July. When the inaugural conference was held at Turfloop, Aubrey Mokoape was there one of the founding members of an organization whose animating ideas his own life had been reaching towards for a decade. Then we had Winnie Kgware. Winnie Kgware was not a student. She was 50 years old when SASO was launched. She was a teacher. She was the wife of the rector of the University of the North. And she was for the students at Turfloop something that none of them could quite replace. a wise elder who had made a home available to them, had protected their right to meet when the university administration tried to take it away, and who had earned the honorific. They gave her Manana, the mother. was born Winnie Monyatsi in Thaba Nchu in the Orange Free State in 1970s, a full 30 years before any of the students she would later shelter and support. She trained as a teacher, William Kgware and when her husband was appointed the first Black Rector of the University of the North in the early 1960s, She moved with him to the Turfloop campus. Living on her university's campus whose administration was deeply suspicious of political activity, she did not become a passive bystander. She had been active in the Young Women's Christian Association. She had toured the United States with her husband in 1962 and 1963, spending six months there and coming home as the records describe it. empowered by the projects and organization of African-American women. she had seen ordinary black women in America building for their communities in the face of their own system of racial oppression. When the government banned students from worshipping on the Turfloop campus, an that seems ⁓ comically unless you understand that any gathering of Black students was regarded as a potential threat, Kgware organized a prayer group in Defiance. She held it in the Rector's residence, the building that was supposed to represent the authority of the university administration. became the meeting point for its most rebellious students. When the university Christian movement was banned from campus, students found themselves without the space to meet. Kgware made the same offer. Come the rectors residence. The irony was almost too perfect. The students who were being excluded from the official life of the institution being welcomed into its most official domestic space by the women who lived there. She was elected to the executive of the newly formed UCM in 1967, a body that, you'll know from early episodes, is of the two organizational tributaries ⁓ through SASO emerged. Her presence there was not a coincidence. She had been building the conditions that made student organization possible at Turfloop for years before SASO existed as an idea. When SASO was formally launched in 1968, she was there. The records say she played a leading role in its formation that the students valued her specifically for what none of them had, strategic and emotional maturity. She was not the fire. She was the ground the fire could safely burn on. She knew how institutions worked. She knew what authorities were watching for. She had decades experience navigating a world designed to make black people invisible and powerless. And she used that experience to make sure that the students ⁓ not make avoidable mistakes. Her road to the founding of SASO was not a road traveled in one direction for one generation. It was a road built over 50 years of living with dignity in a country that rewarded neither sharing what she learned with everyone young enough to still be building their lives on it. She would go on to be the first president of the Black People's Convention in 1972. When Steve Biko was murdered in September 1977, security forces stopped the bus carrying mourners to his funeral in Ginsburg in the Eastern Cape. Kgware then 60 years old, stepped off the bus and hitchhiked to the funeral. She was not going to be stopped from paying her respects to someone who she had helped bring into the world of political action. She died in 1998. In 2003, five years after her death, was awarded the Order of Luthuli in Silver It was late, but it was deserved. Goolam Mayet was known to everyone mattered as Gees He was an Indian medical student from Benoni, east of Johannesburg, a town that was in the geography of apartheid's ⁓ racial predominantly white and Afrikaner with Indian and coloured communities in designated areas of its margins. Growing up Indian in Benoni in the 1950s, that must have been an experience. ⁓ meant growing up with your place in ⁓ racial hierarchy made very clear and very constraining from the earliest age. He enrolled in the medical school at the black section of the University of Natal at Wentworth. Under apartheid's university segregation, this was where black-colored and Indian students who wanted to study medicine had to go. campus, one drawing together students from across racial categories ⁓ that apartheid system has spent decades insisting were incompatible. The Alan Taylor residence where Biko lived became the intellectual and social center for what would become the founding circle black consciousness. Goolam Mayet was one of Biko's closest friends in the residence. ⁓ these were thrown together by the apartheid system ⁓ into a living space and they were arguing constantly, productively about where they stood and ⁓ what they going to do about it. Mayet particular contribution to this conversation was the perspective of someone who had been racially classified Indian under apartheid. which carried a different set of restrictions, privileges and indignities from those experienced by African students, but which nonetheless placed him firmly outside the white South African world that ran the country and set its rules. The question that BCM was beginning to formulate of who counted as black and whether colored Indian people should be part of the unified Black Liberation Front one that Mayet lived from the inside. This is one of the things that is easy to miss about the founding circle at Wentworth. The Black Consciousness Movement is sometimes described reductively as an African nationalist movement. from its earliest days, in its innermost circle, it included Indian students like Mayet Strini Moodley, the Black of Black Consciousness. was deliberately, explicitly inclusive of all those oppressed by racial capitalism, African, and Indian. inclusivity wasn't an afterthought or political calculation. It was there in the founding friendships. Mayet was there alongside Mokoape, Nengwakulu and others as part of who with Biko went on to found the Black Consciousness Movement. He was part of the conversations at Wentworth that led to the December 1968 Consultative Meeting. He was part of the inner circle from which everything else grew. After the founding years, Goolam Mayet, like several others we know, has left a public record than his significance in the founding moment would suggest. What sources make is that he was there at the beginning and that he was a close friend of Steve Biko during the period when Biko was thinking his way towards black consciousness, that the conversation at the Alan Taylor residence would not have been the same without him. we move on to Vuyelwa Mashalaba There's a detail in the history of this movement that deserves to be dwelt on. One of the people elected to the founding executive of SASO at the inaugural conference in July 1969 was a woman. She was elected co-secretary alongside Barney Pityana of the new organization. And she is also in the documentary record, person that introduced Steve Biko to Mampela Ramphela. ⁓ Through Vuyelwa Mashalaba, Biko met Mampela Ramphela, who began her second year of medical studies at the University of Black Section in 1968. A connection made by Mashalaba changed the shape of the movement. Mashalaba was, like Mayet and Mokoape, a student at the medical school at Wentworth. She was part of the inner circle at the Alan Taylor residence, the small group that was doing the thinking, having the arguments, building the relationships from which SASO emerged. in the life and politics of Steve Biko. The author describes her as one of Biko's close friends before the others arrived. Steve had a lot of close friends, Everybody was his friend. Sounds like my husband. Her road to the founding conference was the road of black woman navigating simultaneously the racial injustice of apartheid and the gender injustice of a society and a liberation movement that did not always make space for women's leadership on equal terms. she was elected co-secretary at the founding conference is a marker of her standing in the founding circle. that the name is less prominent in most accounts of BCM than those of a male counterpart is a marker of something else. Mashalaba's name was woven into the founding social fabric of the movement from the earliest days. Mashalaba's presence on the SASO founding executive matters not just as biographical fact but as a correction of reading of black consciousness as a movement built only by men. The founding conference elected two secretaries. One Barney Pityana the other was Mashalaba. Both names belong in history. Both names deserve to be said these five people, five different roads to same room. Pat Machaka, who arrived through the grinding institutional battles of Turflop SRC, fighting for the right to affiliate, then deciding affiliation wasn't what they wanted and using the student body's own money to give the new movement its home. Aubrey Mokoape, who arrived having already been a prisoner for his beliefs before most of his comrades had formed any political beliefs at all, carrying the weight of Sharpeville and the PAC and the Old Fort and three years of imprisonment into conversations about what Black students should do next. Winnie Kgware, who arrived not as a student, but as the woman who had made it possible for students to meet, who had turned the rector's residence into a sanctuary, who had 50 years of accumulated wisdom about how to survive and build inside systems designed to crush you, and who understand that what the students needed was not just ideas, but ground to stand on. Goolam 'Gees' Mayet arrived one of Biko's closest companions in the room where the thinking happened first. The Allen Taylor residence in Wentworth. Where small group of young people who were working out in nightly arguments what they believed and why. Mashalaba arrived the person who made one of the movement's most important connections, who introduced Biko to Ramphele and who was elected to the founding executive of SASO as one of its two secretaries. What held them together was not identical polities. Mokoape came from the PAC tradition. Kgware came from the UCM and the women's organizations. Machaka came from the SRC battles of the Northern Transvaal. came from the specific experience of an Indian student navigating apartheid's racial classification. Mashalaba came from the inner-most workings of the founding friendship group. What held them together was this. they had each through different, completely paths, arrived the same conclusion. That black people in South Africa needed to speak for themselves, lead themselves, and build something of their own. That the tools of the oppressor's ⁓ system, the tools of white liberal sympathy, was not sufficient. first act of liberation was to refuse the identity the system had assigned to them and claim their own. They that conclusion ⁓ into conference hall at Turfloop in July 1969. They built something with it and what they built changed everything that came after. a very ⁓ important lesson to draw from episode. These five completely different people, individuals, stances, groups, experiences. yet they stood together and they constructively... went through a consultative phase to understand what they as a group with these different experiences and with these different ways and thinking that they came up with something that was cohesive, that was practical, that made sense, that could light the fire, could get people thinking about themselves differently. That all brought them together into that one room with something that so simple yet so powerful was born. liberate ourselves from our own internal ⁓ racism, build for ourselves, to care of our people and speak for ourselves. And that's amazing. Thank you so much for joining me this week. I'll see you next week where we'll be looking at Strini Moodley Bye! ⁓