Nyameka Goniwe obituary: Activist, politician and social worker

Born: June 3rd,1951
Died: August 30th, 2020
Nyameka Goniwe, an activist, politician and social worker who survived the death of her husband in one of apartheid-era South Africa's most brutal extra-judicial killings and went on to campaign in vain for his assassins to be brought to justice, died on Saturday in Cradock, South Africa. She was 69.

She was awaiting the results of a coronavirus test, which proved negative, and the cause of death was not known, a nephew, Mbulelo Goniwe, said.

Local authorities in Cradock, in the Eastern Cape region, said she had displayed symptoms such as headaches and shortness of breath and had been in self-isolation.

Nyameka Goniwe was propelled to global prominence in 1985 as a 33-year-old mother of two when a hit squad abducted her husband, Matthew Goniwe, and three other men as they travelled by car from Port Elizabeth to Cradock, where Matthew Goniwe was a schoolteacher and political leader.

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The men were taken to an area of dunes along the Indian Ocean coastline, and they were repeatedly stabbed and then set on fire by their attackers – all security police officials, both black and white. The intention was apparently to silence the men, quash resistance and to present the murders as an example of black vigilante violence.

One of the assailants, Johan Martin Van Zyl, testified at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998 and offered a detailed account of the killings of the four men – Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkhonto, Fort Calata and Sicelo Mhlauli – who came to be known as the Cradock Four.

Van Zyl was seeking amnesty in return for a confession of what he depicted as political acts in the struggle against foes of apartheid. His application was refused but, despite his admission, he was not brought to trial.

The funeral of the four men drew huge crowds and turned into a defiant statement of the anti-apartheid cause. But it also presented the newly widowed Nyameka Goniwe with emotional challenges as she wrestled with her loss.

Shortly after the funeral at a dusty soccer stadium in Cradock’s segregated black township, where the Goniwes lived, South African authorities declared the first of two states of emergency that served to deepen their country’s international isolation and, paradoxically, to hasten the end of apartheid with the country’s first democratic elections in 1994 after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.

When he visited Cradock in the 1990s, Mandela called the slain activists “the true heroes of the struggle”.

They have to show us remorse, that they're sorry for what they did

Yet, Nyameka Goniwe’s own story offered a granular counterpoint to the big-screen moments in South Africa’s modern history, tracing the hardship facing spouses of imprisoned activists; the brutality of their abrupt and often unexplained loss; and evoking one of the most tortured conundrums of the post-apartheid era: How could survivors come to terms with the actions of perpetrators?

“They have to show us remorse, that they’re sorry for what they did,” Goniwe told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, long before Van Zyl’s testimony.

“I don’t say that, I mean, it would immediately make us happy,” she said in her statement to the commission. “It’s a challenge. We’re going to be challenged in that kind of way and grapple with that, inside, and it will take a long time. Healing takes a long time.”

Nyameka Puwani was born on June 3rd, 1951, in Cradock and trained as a social worker. Her parents were farm workers. She married Matthew Goniwe in 1975 and they had two children – a daughter, Nobuzwe, and a son, Nyaniso. A year later, Matthew Goniwe was charged with political activism and was jailed until 1981 under the Suppression of Communism Act.

“My ordeal started then,” Nyameka Goniwe told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, describing the strains of life divided between her studies in social work at the University of Fort Hare in Alice, South Africa; the needs of her youngest child who was cared for by Matthew Goniwe’s family in Cradock; and her efforts to support Matthew Goniwe in prison.

In 1982, the family moved to Graaff-Reinet in the Eastern Cape before being transferred to Cradock where, in the years before Matthew Goniwe’s death, the township became a crucible of unrest that threatened to embolden disaffected black South Africans across the land.

In her account of those years, Nyameka Goniwe focused on her husband’s deepening involvement in marshalling black dissatisfaction to the extent that the township effectively slipped beyond white administrative control. “Running battles between the police and the youth became the order of the day,” she said. Again her husband was detained only to be released as revolt deepened.

After her husband’s death, Goniwe was active in efforts to promote social change, particularly in rural areas of South Africa. She later became a mayor and speaker of the local municipality council in Cradock, a position she occupied at her death. – New York Times