Peter Mokaba

Peter Mokaba, political activist and politician: born Pietersburg, South Africa 7 January 1959; President, South African Youth Congress 1987-91; President, African National Congress Youth League 1991-94; Deputy Minister of Environment Affairs and Tourism 1994-99; married (one son, one daughter); died Johannesburg 9 June 2002.

The Medical Research Council in Cape Town has stated that more than half a million people have already died of Aids in South Africa, and that 40 per cent of all deaths between the ages of 15 and 40 are Aids-related. The organisation UNAids puts the number of deaths at twice that.

Peter Mokaba, political activist and politician: born Pietersburg, South Africa 7 January 1959; President, South African Youth Congress 1987-91; President, African National Congress Youth League 1991-94; Deputy Minister of Environment Affairs and Tourism 1994-99; married (one son, one daughter); died Johannesburg 9 June 2002.

The Medical Research Council in Cape Town has stated that more than half a million people have already died of Aids in South Africa, and that 40 per cent of all deaths between the ages of 15 and 40 are Aids-related. The organisation UNAids puts the number of deaths at twice that.

The UN estimates that South Africa has more HIV-positive people than any other country in the world: in large part a result of the systemic disruption to stable sexual relations caused over more than a century by the migrant labour system, enforced by Britain as the governing power in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War. As the funeral hearses daily carry off the young in the townships and rural areas in South Africa – the economically active among the population, and small children – it must seem as if the country has exchanged apartheid for Aids.

Now, once again, a leading militant in the struggle against apartheid has died young, with both himself and his organisation, the African National Congress, vehemently denying any link between his illness and Aids. The phrase in South Africa is: Peter Mokaba, former President of the ANC Youth League and ally of Winnie Mandela in the storms of the 1980s, was an "Aids denialist". The death happens, that cannot be denied, but politicians (the soon-to-be-deceased included) exert themselves to deny the suggested cause.

Mokaba, a member of parliament and deputy minister in the government of Nelson Mandela, was 43 when he died of acute pneumonia linked to a respiratory problem, following an illness of three years.

Born into a poor labouring family, he was expelled from school as a troublemaker in the student revolt of the 1970s, working later as a garden "boy" while trying to make up for his lost education.

Mokaba became famous, or infamous, for his frequently shouted slogan at mass political gatherings in the 1980s and early 1990s: "Kill the farmer, kill the Boer!" He was elected President of the South African Youth Congress (Sayco) in 1987, towards the end of the period of mass township revolt in which he won his spurs with repeated arrests and two jail sentences. Sayco was effectively the old ANC Youth League under another name, while the ANC remained banned. (Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, the former ANC President in exile, had all cut their teeth in political struggle in the Youth League in the 1940s.)

After the ban on the ANC was lifted, Sayco was dissolved into the current ANC Youth League, which Mokaba headed as President from 1991 to 1994. The specifically racial incitement of his slogan "Kill the Boer!" was in sharp divergence from the non-racial conception of the old Congress Alliance. In the same spirit, he attended the court hearings at which Winnie Mandela was convicted of kidnapping and assaulting the murdered teenager Stompie Moeketsi Seipei, although at the time of her sentence Mokaba was no longer present.

Elected to parliament in Cape Town in the first non-racial elections in 1994, Mokaba became Deputy Minister of Environment Affairs and Tourism in Mandela's post-apartheid government, a post he held until Thabo Mbeki became President in 1999. His tenure as head of the National Tourism Forum was characterised by revelations that he had paid himself the equivalent of US$71,000 over and above his salary as an MP, in contravention of the ANC code of conduct requiring public disclosure of extra earnings. This was no barrier to him remaining a member of the ANC national executive and being appointed head of its election campaign team.

Despite his lack of any substantial scientific training, Mokaba vocally supported Mbeki in repudiating the link between HIV and Aids, and had condemned Aids drugs as poisonous. Asked recently by the ANC to desist from making statements on HIV/Aids following an official change of stance by the government, he repeated his contention in interviews only three days before his death.

HIV and Aids, he stated, were part of an "international Western plot" to wipe out blacks and "regain colonial control" in Africa. Anti-Aids drugs were a fraudulent stunt to bring "profits for the pharmaceutical industry". It was a rhetoric that obscured as much as it revealed about Africa's lack of access to the resources of modern medicine. A profound cultural hostility to acknowledging the nature of a sexually transmitted illness has created a bizarre and life-threatening ideological climate.

In terms of candour on the issue of the Aids catastrophe in South Africa, Mokaba the politician was part of the problem. The South African public now expects the pronouncements of its most senior political leaders about Aids not to carry conviction: an outcome corrosive of the democratic process.

In terms of the scale of the catastrophe in southern Africa, as viewed from Britain, one would think it were another planet.

Paul Trewhela

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