Scores of South African Communist Party (SACP) members converged on Diepkloof Hall in Soweto on Friday night to prepare for the arrival of struggle stalwart Moses Kotanes’ mortal remains on Sunday.
The venue is just a stone’s throw away from the home that Kotane lived in before going into exile in Tanzania in 1963. He was buried in Moscow, Russia in 1978.
Kotane was a long-time General Secretary of the then Communist Party of South Africa, a member of the African National Congress’s National Executive Committee and a trade union activist.
He together with fellow comrade in arms, JB Marks’s remains will finally land on home soil with a high level delegation led by Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mtethwa.
SACP Politbureau member and keynote speaker at the event Charles Sitsubi says Kotane epitomised the unity that should exist between workers and within the tripartite alliance.
The remains of the two men will arrive in the country on Sunday at the Waterkloof Airbase and an official reception will follow later that afternoon.
Kotane’s widow Rebecca says her heart will finally find peace with the arrival of her late husband’s mortal remains on home soil on Sunday.
Kotane’s wife, herself a political activist and a participant in the 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings, last saw her husband over 10 years before his death in Russia and was not permitted by the apartheid government to attend his funeral.
She remembers his last words to her before he left. “When he was leaving he said ‘My wife I work for the nation and wherever I go and I die there the people should come first and the family after’ and I always knew when he left that he is a man of the people.”
The reburial of the remains of Kotane will take place in Pella the North West on March 14.
– By Busi Bopela
