Address by COSATU General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, tIn Memoriam: Beyers Naude, 12 JSeptember - 2004

 

Zwelinzima Vavi, General Secretary, COSATU, at Regina Mundi, Soweto, 12 September 2004

Dear friends,

We are gathered here together to celebrate the life of Beyers Naude, a great hero of our people to whom we all owe a great debt.

For those of us in the labour movement, the most recent memories of Oom Beyers arise out of his work on the board of the Job Creation Trust. From 1999, union members donated a day’s pay to the trust in order to help uplift our people and stimulate employment – a critical task for all of us. Ultimately, their donations came to R90 million; put together painfully from the little each member earns a day.

We had to entrust these funds, the workers’ hard-earned money, to people of particularly high standing and integrity. There is no surprise, and then, that Oom Beyers came high on the list. Thanks to his assistance and wisdom, together with other leaders of our people, the Job Creation Trust has contributed to creation of thousands of jobs. This is only a tiny dent in the unemployment problem, but it is an important start in building solidarity.

Oom Beyers’ work on the Job Creation Trust is just a tiny particle of his overall contribution to our country. He was a man of the cloth who understood that a basic teaching of the Bible is the need for equality, respect and dignity for all people. Unlike many others, who use the Bible to justify oppressive systems, he saw that religion has no meaning unless it can liberate the minds, not only of the oppressed, but also of the oppressors.

The memorial services of Beyers Naude coincide with the commemorating the death of one of the bravest heroes to be produced by the resistance movement - Steven Bantu Biko. Steve Biko taught us to be proud of the fact that we were blacks at the time when apartheid sought to make us believe that we were inferior. Steve Biko through his black consciousness movement played a pivotal in the liberation of this country. If the Vorster regime allowed him to leave, Steve Biko would be in the forefront of building a non racial society fighting hand in glove with Beyers Naude in the non racial movement that united the black oppressed and white compatriots around a common programme of action to end national oppression – the ANC.

For my generation, Beyers Naude was critical as the face of the non-racial struggle. What deepened our conscientise in our township in the eastern Cape was the brutal killing of a black liberation hero Steve Biko, by white, Afrikaner policemen. Not surprisingly, then, we saw the struggle in terms of racial oppression, and set out on the revolution with immense hatred of whites in general and Afrikaners in particular.

Over the years, we came to appreciate that the struggle could not be understood in that way. When our teachers in the movement wanted to demonstrate this, they couldn’t just point to Joe Slovo – for one thing, we all just said, well, he’s a Jew, a survivor of the Holocaust, he’s different. It was important that they could point to a pure, pure Afrikaner, with the accent and culture, whose origins could not be mistaken.

Together with other leaders like Slovo, Bram Fischer, Helen Josephs and Ruth First, Beyers Naude over time became a symbol of the non-racial resistance to apartheid. These were the group who played a central role in ensuring that the ANC matured from a “native” Congress to a real African Congress, uniting all our compatriots.

Let us use this time and place to thank Oom Beyers for his extraordinary efforts and dedication to our common cause. Let us also thank his family for supporting him the face of insults and hatred from much of his community as well as the illegal minority state.

Oom Beyers lived to see ten years in our country of the freedom and democracy for which he fought through so many dark days. He helped in those ten years to address the deep-seated problems that remain – above all the poverty and unemployment that still plague too many of us. It is now up to us to build on his legacy to consolidate our victory with stronger efforts to transform the economy and society toward equity and prosperity, to consolidate the People’s Contract to Fight Poverty and Create Jobs.

The baton has now been handed over to us, to emulate his example of humbleness and selflessness to put the needs of our people first. His spear must not be allowed to lay on the ground. Let us peak it up to realise his dream of building a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous South Africa.
Workers and working class as whole must pick up Oom Beyers spear and surge forward to finish his long journey.

Long live his spirits
Long live his memory
Forward ever and backward never
An injury to one is the injury to all
Amandla – power to the people