Nokwe to be reburied at West Park cemetery
The reburial in Johannesburg will be addressed by the ANC President, Cyril Ramaphosa, and other senior leaders.
Nokwe was the first African advocate of the Supreme Court and he became a powerful voice in the struggle against apartheid.
In 1963 he began a life in exile and from Zambia he served as the ANC's Director of International Affairs.
Nokwe died in Lusaka in 1978 at the age of only 50 after struggling with his health.
For decades he remained buried in exile but his remains were repatriated to South Africa last year.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
eNCA
40 minutes ago
- eNCA
ANC won't do away with B-BBEE
GERMISTON - The African National Congress insists Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment is here to stay. It says while BEE implementation is under review, there is no intention to abandon the policy. READ | Discussing BBBEE redress policies effect on the economy The ANC NEC is meeting in Germiston, four months after its last meeting. The Committee also resolved to continue efforts to mend relations between Pretoria and Washington. eNCA's Moloko Moloto reports.
IOL News
an hour ago
- IOL News
'Propaganda masquerading as strategic realism'
Palestinian children clamour for a meal at a charity kitchen in the Mawasi area of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. Image: AFP Ziyad Motala There is a certain predictability in the Sunday Times' editorial arc of late, an increasingly tired soliloquy in praise of empire, veiled in the language of pragmatism and national interest. But even by its declining standards, the paper's recent conduct reveals something altogether more disquieting: an abdication of journalistic integrity in favour of ideological alignment with Zionist hasbara and Washington's punitive caprice. For months, the Sunday Times stonewalled a public inquiry, refusing to disclose that its columnist, S'thembiso Msomi, had taken a trip to Israel and written an article in April 2025, a reverent portrayal of Israeli resilience masquerading as impartial analysis, which was funded by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. This silence was not inadvertent. It was calculated. Only this past Sunday, after a formal complaint was lodged with the Press Council, did the paper grudgingly acknowledge this inconvenient fact. The admission came in the form of a subdued notice buried deep within the paper, accompanied by the usual euphemisms of 'clarification' and 'apology.' One suspects the intent was plain: to bury the admission and hope the public would move on, none the wiser. This is no minor infraction. The Press Code is unambiguous: publications must disclose when a third party finances the cost of news gathering. Failure to do so compromises not only the perceived neutrality of the journalist but the editorial independence of the publication itself. The Sunday Times, one of South Africa's prominent newspapers, violated this basic tenet of ethical journalism and only confessed months later when cornered. But Msomi's subsidised propaganda piece is merely the tip of a much larger ideological iceberg. For some time now, the Sunday Times has become a dependable sanctuary for pro-Israel apologetics and the exculpation of American imperial tantrums. William Gumede's April 27 supplication for normalisation with Israel was not just intellectually lazy; it was ideologically revealing. That his organisation, Democracy Works, has itself been the recipient of funding from several dubious foreign entities raises questions about whether we are reading South African analysis or something concocted in the backrooms of Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C. Not to be outdone, David Bruce, in a piece on July 18, urged the ANC to 're-engage' with Israel, as though genocide were a minor irritant to be filed under diplomatic collateral. This week, Richard Gumede once again joined the chorus with a patronising lecture about South Africa's 'anti-American' posture, couched, of course, in the language of concern for ordinary South Africans. He argues that the ANC's refusal to grovel before Donald Trump's grotesque 'America first' foreign policy is somehow an affront to rational diplomacy. It is a line of reasoning so bankrupt, so wilfully ahistorical, that one wonders whether Gumede has mistaken State Department press releases for political philosophy. To Gumede, the refusal to embrace the punitive actions taken by the United States against its adversaries, China, Russia, and Iran, is symptomatic of ideological recklessness. That these are states with whom South Africa has longstanding economic and strategic ties is brushed aside. That they are themselves frequent targets of American hostility for daring to act independently of Washington's diktats is of no concern. And that Donald Trump's America is perhaps the least principled, most corrupt and least coherent United States government in recent memory is something Gumede conveniently omits. Let us be clear. No state, regardless of its alliances or ideological pretensions, should enjoy impunity for violating international law or trampling on human rights. Those who commit war crimes or persecute their people must be held accountable without exception. Yet to invoke China, Russia or Iran as stock villains to deflect from the horrors in Gaza is not only evasive, it is intellectually bankrupt. Any person possessed of even modest moral clarity can see what is unfolding there: a sustained campaign of collective punishment, bolstered by the silence and acquiescence of the self-styled democratic West. Only a fool believes the United States has a principled interest in human rights. The historical record is unambiguous. So long as the foreign despot salutes the American flag and pledges fealty to Washington, tyranny becomes tolerable, and repression conveniently overlooked. It is particularly rich that Gumede offers up corruption as one of the United States' primary concerns with South Africa. One must ask: Is this the same United States whose president auctioned off foreign policy to the highest bidder, made his inaugural visits to the gilded palaces of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, and returned with real estate contracts for his family? Is this the America whose transactional foreign policy includes deals with murderers and autocrats in exchange for arms deals and hotel licences? If so, Gumede's invocation of corruption is not just misguided. It is obscene. Equally revealing as what the Sunday Times chooses to publish is what it deliberately leaves out. While major newspapers across the globe devoted front pages this Sunday to the deepening famine in Gaza, where Israel stands credibly accused of weaponising starvation against a besieged population, the Sunday Times offered not a single article on the subject. Instead, readers were served yet another polemic lamenting South Africa's supposed diplomatic 'missteps' for refusing to placate the unplacatable. At the very moment when two respected Israeli human rights organisations, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, joined the growing international consensus that Israel is committing genocide, the Sunday Times chose to publish yet another piece dismissing South Africa's ICJ application as nothing more than political 'lawfare.' This posture is part of a broader pattern of editorial capture. In an earlier column by Rowan Polovin on May 18, the Sunday Times provided a platform for the chair of the South African Zionist Federation to distort history, sanitise Israeli apartheid, and peddle neocolonial binaries between the "West" and global irrelevance. Polovin's article was not journalism. It was propaganda masquerading as strategic realism, replete with the ugliest strands of ethnic chauvinism and settler-colonial nostalgia. This is not journalism. It is ideological mimicry. The Sunday Times' descent into apologetics for Zionist repression and American belligerence reflects a broader pattern among certain elite opinion-shapers in South Africa. They dress up subservience and Israeli apartheid as realism, and fealty to empire as prudence. But the effect is the same: the slow domestication of South African political discourse in service of foreign powers whose only consistent principle is the ruthless preservation of their interests. In an age when facts are politicised and justice is routinely subverted, affectations of neutrality serve only to mask complicity. The Sunday Times has not simply abdicated its duty to inform. It has aligned itself with the architects of obfuscation, giving comfort to power, to oppression, and Israeli apartheid, something unimaginable in a democratic South Africa bending to the whims of Donald Trump. * Ziyad Motala, Professor of Law, Howard Law School ** The views expressed in this article are necessarily those of The African, IOL or Independent Media.
IOL News
2 hours ago
- IOL News
Liberators in Dire Need of Political, Moral Cleansing
(From left) Swapo president Nutembo Nandi-Ndaitwah, ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa and former Frelimo president Joaquim Chissano at a working dinner held at Mahlamba Ndlopfu, Pretoria on July 26, 2025. The ANC hosted a Liberation Movements Summit in Ekurhuleni, Gauteng on July 25-27, 2025. Image: GCIS Zamikhaya Maseti The ruling African National Congress convened a landmark Liberation Movements Summit from 25 to 27 July 2025, gathering six Southern African liberation parties including MPLA (Angola), SWAPO (Namibia), FRELIMO (Mozambique), ZANU PF (Zimbabwe), and CCM (Tanzania) to deliberate on the theme: 'Defending the Liberation Gains, Advancing Integrated SocioEconomic Development, Strengthening Solidarity for a Better Africa.' Conspicuously absent, however, was Zambia's United National Independence Party (UNIP), the liberation movement led by the late President Kenneth Kaunda. This party offered refuge to the exiled leadership of the African National Congress and embraced thousands of young South Africans who crossed borders to join the national liberation struggle against apartheid. The ANC, as a liberation movement, had its headquarters in Lusaka under the protection of UNIP, and the Zambian people sustained its operational lifeline. The organisers of the summit have not explained this omission, and it stands as a glaring historical oversight in any attempt to reconstruct the liberation narrative of Southern Africa. Any honest retelling of Southern Africa's liberation history is incomplete without recognising Zambia's indispensable role, under the leadership of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) and President Kenneth Kaunda. While not always armed with material abundance, Zambia carried the weight of regional liberation with unmatched moral clarity and unwavering solidarity. Lusaka was not just a geographical refuge for exiles; it was the beating heart of a pan-African revolutionary conscience, hosting the ANC's headquarters, training camps, political schools, and underground logistics. The Zambian people paid a heavy price, including economic sabotage, border raids by the apartheid regime, and relentless pressure from the West. Yet Kaunda's government never wavered. It chose principle over profit, and African unity over diplomatic convenience. That such a pivotal liberation movement was absent from this summit should not be taken lightly; it reflects a growing trend of selective memory that must be confronted if we are to truly reclaim and revitalise the liberation legacy. The summit made several significant resolutions. It reaffirmed support for the liberation of Western Sahara, condemned all forms of foreign domination and neocolonial interference, and called for deeper ideological and practical cooperation between liberation movements. The parties committed to revitalising South–South solidarity, advancing youth mobilisation and political education, and accelerating regional economic integration through shared development frameworks. In addition, the summit called for party-to-party diplomacy beyond state platforms, recognising the strategic value of liberation movements coordinating across borders to influence global governance, trade, and peace agendas. These resolutions, if translated into action, could mark a turning point, shifting these movements from commemorators of the past to architects of the African future. This was not a nostalgic gathering of revolutionaries trading memories over aged slogans. It was a solemn reaffirmation of purpose, a strategic recalibration of the post-colonial project amidst a volatile global order. What emerged was clear: the legacy of liberation is not a finished chapter; it is an unfinished struggle, and those who led us into freedom must now lead us into transformation. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad Loading The liberation movements in the Southern African region have not been able to dogwatch one another, to speak frankly, honestly, and without diplomatic pretence. At no point did SWAPO, FRELIMO, CCM, or MPLA rise with principled courage to say, for instance, to President Robert Mugabe, how you are governing Zimbabwe is unjust and unsustainable. The ANC, however, attempted what it called quiet diplomacy in Zimbabwe, urging the Zimbabwean leadership and people to resolve their problems internally and to avoid relying on externally imposed solutions. Unfortunately, that quiet diplomacy did not yield the desired results. The suppression of opposition parties and the stifling of democratic space persisted. This absence of honest, fraternal correction among liberation movements has weakened the moral centre of the liberation tradition itself. One hopes that this revived Party-to-Party diplomacy will correct that historical failure. It must not be reduced to celebratory declarations and performative solidarity. It must have political dog watching as a central tenet, a principled, fraternal mechanism through which liberation movements hold one another to the revolutionary values they once embodied: honesty, people-centred governance, democratic integrity, and moral courage. Not loyalty to incumbency, but loyalty to the people. The liberation movements must be brave enough to confront the objective reality of the evaporation of the liberation heritage. The fact of the matter is that across the African continent, the very parties that ushered in political freedom, that dismantled colonial rule, and held the dreams of the masses, are no longer the governing parties. In Ghana, the Convention People's Party (CPP) of Kwame Nkrumah, the first to proclaim African independence, has faded into political obscurity. In Zambia, UNIP, once the bastion of Southern African solidarity under Kenneth Kaunda, has been swept aside. In Kenya, KANU (Kenya African National Union), the liberation party of Jomo Kenyatta, has long ceded power. Here at home, the ANC of Nelson Mandela, once the symbol of global moral authority, has been partially dislodged from power. It now governs in coalition with its ideological and historical adversaries, a profound moment that should signal not a tactical adjustment, but a generational reckoning. The liberation movement, as we know it, stands at a precipice. The question these Parties must collectively ask is not cosmetic or electoral, it is existential: Why has this occurred? Why have the liberation movements, once cherished as the custodians of the people's hopes, been relegated to electoral decline, coalition compromise, and in some cases, outright irrelevance? And more importantly, what should be their collective response to this objective reality of downward swings, fractured mandates, and the political displacement of liberation itself? This is no longer a theoretical concern. It is an urgent summons for introspection, ideological recalibration, and coordinated strategic renewal across the continent.
