In the film “The Lion of the Desert”, the Libyan leader who fought against Italian occupation refused to denounce the anti-colonial struggle of his people in exchange for his release from prison. Omar Mukhtar is seen towards the end of the film requesting water to wash his hands and pray before they hanged him to death. Without flinching, he’s heard thanking God for allowing him to die in the hands of his enemies.
To die in the hands of his enemies was the honour Cde Gomolemo Mokae was denied by the soulless and treacherous thugs who took his life under the veil of the night. The two bullets that struck his arms revealed that he was fighting to save his life to prolong his suffering on this earth. The bullet in the chest suggested that the cowards breached the security of his home to assassinate Dr Mokae.
Just think of how many times Cde Gomolemo escaped death during his fearless leadership of the Liberation Struggle under the auspices of AZAPO. The expression of escaping death cannot be an accurate one, for Gomolemo was so daring that he repeatedly and consistently called the death’s bluff. And death often escaped his life. It has to be the irony of life that the bullet of the enemy missed, while the bullet of those he fought to liberate hit.
I’m of the view that Gomolemo’s life could be summarised in three themes:
1. The Needle to Heal the Body
2. The Pen to Heal the Mind
3. The Sword to Heal the Land
The common thread that combines the themes is the Healer.
He spent years in the Medical Faculty of the University of Natal to learn to use the Needle. Why did he enroll at that university? Was he on an academic mission to revenge Biko’s denial of the Needle by the same university? Yes, it is in the so-called “Black Section” of that university that Biko was denied the Needle.
With the Needle, the Healer Mokae pierced to save and prolong the lives of his people. His Healing mission was more of a calling than transactional. Perhaps that’s the hidden reason he gave his hair the liberty to grow as it wished. He was ready to defend it with his life against the “Ceasars”. I beg your pardon; I mouthed the Scissors, and handed the “Ceasars”. And so I write to right the “Ceasars”, for the Healer had nothing to give to the Ceasars but to the People. In this regard, our Healer sometimes Needled his needy People free of charge.
Gomolemo was perhaps influenced by Biko’s refusal to have the System frustrate his purpose on Earth. When the University of Natal denied Biko the Needle, Biko built Zanempilo Clinic and invited black medical doctors to come and Needle the people under his able supervision. That positive defiance must have pierced Gomolemo’s veins.
To the Needle, Gomolemo added the Pen which articulates the Word. It was in this space that he became an author, novelist, journalist and screen writer. This wordsmith played with words when he titled one of his books “Short, Not Tall Stories”. You would have expected him to say “Not Long Stories”. If you know what his Black Consciousness thinks about the term “Coloured”, you would realise that he was being creatively provocative when he titled his biographical work “Robert Mcbride: A Coloured Life”. It being Black, there was definitely “Colour” in that life. Of course, we are not colour-blind in the Black Consciousness Movement.
When they said it was “mass struggle”, this master of polemics disagreed and said it was “mess struggle”. He was critiquing the ugly part wherein black people who were reluctant to join or support the “mass struggle” were terrorised and sometimes killed. To him it could never be “Cry Freedom” but “Cry Slavery” if Biko was reduced to a footnote in a film script where Donald Woods was the book.
Yes, the Pen spits the Word. Yet before there was the Pen, there was the Word. In the beginning, that is. It was in this wordy space that Gomolemo was also a moving, flowing, flying and gliding Poet. He wrote and recited a number of poems.
He heard them saying “the pen is mightier than the sword”. He disagreed. In the Liberation Struggle of the landless and the enslaved, the pen can never be mightier than the sword. Instead of choosing one over the other, Gomolemo chose to twin the Pen and the Sword. I don’t know if he read the Bible. By that I’m not asking if he believed in the Bible. But we know that his father was a Methodist priest; and that Gomolemo grew up in the church.
Granted this background, we have to take the risk to assume that he knows something about the Biblical verse that says, “If you don’t have a sword, sell your garment and buy one” (Luke 22:36). Knowing that the enemy that was out to kill him was armed, Jesus prepared for that battle by arming his soldiers. Strangely, cowards choose not to see this fighting verse and rush to the surrendering one where Jesus instructs Peter to:
“Put your sword back into its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 22:56).
The context here was different. Though Peter proved his commitment to Jesus by cutting an enemy’s ear, the strategist Jesus was quick to see that the sword would not work under the circumstances where they (Jesus and Peter) were encircled and overwhelmed by a heavily armed enemy.
Taking the Luke Option, Gomolemo twined the friendly piercing Needle with the hostilely cutting sword. In this space he was active in the armed struggle alongside the AZANLA Combatants. He healed the wounded guerillas and provided the AZANLA bases in Zimbabwe with medicines. He provided Safe Houses for guerillas and also helped them with transport and their general needs. He was never scared to travel to Zimbabwe and visit the AZANLA bases. In this regard, he died a Military Veteran.
A spiritual mystery Gomolemo shared with Biko was that both looked a bit dignified for their ages. Biko’s photos were taken in his 20s, yet in them he looks like they were taken yesterday when he would have been in his late 70s. I wasn’t surprised when a BC elder told me I was to speak at Gomolemo’s funeral as a youngster mentored by Gomolemo, while the senior Towers would speak as his peers. The elder was genuinely surprised when I revealed that Gomolemo, who’s a year older than me, was in fact my age peer. However, the elder was not wrong. Before he could surrender, I was quick to rescue him by assuring him that Gomolemo was his intellectual peer – not mine. He was miles ahead of me. In fact, it was blasphemous for the two of us to be intellectually spoken of in one sentence. He was a peer only chronologically, and never intellectually.
That Gomolemo was ahead of his time, makes me to have no intellectual existence whatsoever. A zero. There is a sense in which Gomolemo must have been a product of reincarnation. That transmigration of some soul from an “ancient” or ancestral body into a newly-born baby. He must therefore have lived on this earth long before he was born. That being before his time, was what made him to be ahead of his time.
Eulogising Gomolemo at his funeral, I spoke of a spiritual connection between him and Biko. In death, Gomolemo was resting on a pool of his own blood in the prison of his house. His body was beginning to decompose when his disappearance was noticed by a child who missed playing with him. Towards death, Biko was lying in a pool of his own urine (water) in prison circumstances. In similar ways, they both had slightly lost the full function of their minds. Biko, due to brain damage caused by police torture. Gomolemo, due to a stroke caused by the torture and scars of landlessness and oppression.
Both Biko and Gomolemo are united in the story of Jesus towards “death” and in “death”. Gomolemo’s blood finds representation in Jesus’ blood oozing from his wounds, while Biko’s water is represented by the water that oozed from Jesus’ flank when he was cut by the sword. That Sword re-emerging in a different context.
If Gomolemo’s disappearance was noticed by a child, the appearance of a dying Muntu kaMyeza of AZAPO was discovered by a child. Ironically, Gomolemo rose through the ranks to later assume kaMyeza’s position of being the AZAPO Secretary for Publicity and Information. Technically, Gomolemo made us not to miss the irreplaceable kaMyeza.
Spot the difference. When they wanted to claim the June 16 Uprisings by claiming that they were underground during that time, kaMyeza retorted and said they were six feet underground and too deep to resurface. When they envied the blossoming of the BCM and claimed that they were the ones that handed the baton to the BCM, kaMyeza made it clear that the runner who picked up the dropped baton could not return it to the dropper. They just had to run with the baton to the finishing line.
As my small and inkless pen dries and drops, I also stiffen my body and extend my Black Power Salute sky-high to Dr Gomolemo Mokae who’s resting in the bowels of the thorny earth.
Let this black noise keep the revolutionary Gomolemo awake.
Qekema is the President of AZAPO
