Vuyisile Mini was born in the bustling and rapidly developing Port Elizabeth in 1920. But the development taking place on that important dock-side was not for the benefit of the Black workers who were paid minimal wages by the bosses. His father was involved in the desperate struggle to raise a family on these wages.
When he was a boy of ten, the workers in the nearby East London went on strike to try to improve their situation. The strike was broken by scab labour, and most strikers lost their jobs. The Government demonstrated its ruthlessness, by later removing most of the strikers from the city to remote areas where employment opportunities were virtually nonexistent.
This pattern was to emerge again and again. It did not daunt the militancy of the workers, however. It is a tribute to their dogged determination that they continued to fight, despite being beaten back, and to fight back again.
Mini himself became part of this struggle at the age of seventeen. He joined the fight against bus fare and rent increases and the crippling injustices perpetrated against people who could barely afford food. He was active in local campaigns against the mass removal of Africans from Korsten, Port Elizabeth, where he lived.
In 1957, the stevedores in Port Elizabeth struck. This strike received international publicity when convict labour was brought in to break it. The South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and African National Congress (ANC), as well as other organisations, protested vehemently against this intrusion of convict labour and appealed to international bodies to help them in that struggle. The International Transport Workers` Federation threatened to call on workers in other ports to refuse to handle goods loaded at Port Elizabeth. The stevedore companies panicked and the Minister of Labour announced the immediate withdrawal of convict labour.
Eventually the Government took revenge. When the stevedore companies offered an increase of 15 pence a day, the Minister of Labour withheld his permission and ordered a Wage Board inquiry. The result of this inquiry was that the workers did not receive the 15 pence increase offered by the employers.
There were many more dock and transport strikes in this period. Most ended in the same way. The Government representatives stepped in, even where companies were prepared to negotiate and complicated the situation. Police were often brought in to clear striking workers out of their living areas, and to bring in scab labour from remote areas.
Government intervention to stem militant trade union action took a new turn. The law was manipulated to harass trade union leaders on political charges and thus remove them from their place of organisation.
Through these kinds of experiences, trade unionists became aware that trade union activity was really part of a wider struggle. The intervention of the State in factory floor disputes showed workers only too clearly that the exploitation of African workers was but an aspect of the overall oppression. Workers not only had no right to strike, but they also had no right to choose where to live, no right to vote, and no representatives in Parliament. The union struggle, trade unionists came to realise, could not be divorced from the struggle for freedom.
The ANC grew rapidly in strength in the decade after World War II. It formed an alliance with Indian and Coloured and white movements, which became known as the "Congress Alliance" and together they launched the Campaign of Defiance against Unjust Laws in 1952.
Vuyisile Mini was then the Secretary of the Dock Workers` Union and the Sheet Metal Workers` Union, which were both affiliated to SACTU. A father of six, he volunteered to take part in the Defiance Campaign, and was sentenced to three months` imprisonment for entering railway property which had been reserved for whites only.
Because of his arrest, he lost his job as packer in a battery factory. After release, he combined his trade union activities with political work and became Secretary of the Cape region of the ANC.
The State machinery was soon busily seeking other means of harassing the people`s leaders. In 1956, it arrested 156 persons of all races and charged them with treason. One of these was Mini. The trial dragged on for four years, disrupting the lives and work of the accused and their families, before the State case collapsed and all the accused were freed.
Through all his arrests and victimisation, Mini reacted with that great gift which heartened all who heard him - his singing. His own compositions, which he sang in a magnificent bass in meetings, in prison and during the mass trials, were militant at times:
("Look out, Verwoerd, here are the Black people");
and at times, nostalgic, especially the song composed during the long and wearying Treason Trial, which expressed the yearning of the accused to return home:
("Take up your things Brother and let`s go, They are waiting, our mothers and fathers, at home")
The feelings in this song have now taken on a new dimension for all those South Africans who live as refugees from the land of their birth.
Mini, however, also loved classical music. He sang in various choirs, including the Port Elizabeth Male Voice Choir. Some of the choirs of which he was a member included whites who were not connected with the struggle for freedom. He joked about this afterwards, saying he had carried the "gospel of Congress" further by way of song. This allusion to the gospel refers to a song Mini had composed during the Defiance Campaign:
("Let this gospel spread and be known through the world")
The early 1960s saw an all-out campaign by the racist regime to smash the popular movements. The oppressed people had seen all their appeals ignored and the doors to peaceful protest bolted by the National Party leaders, who had been schooled in the ideology of Nazi Germany. The popular movements therefore took to direct action in the form of limited acts of sabotage against Government installations.
While working in the Port Elizabeth Local Committee of SACTU in 1963, Mini was arrested along with two other prominent ANC members, Wilson Khayinga and Zinakile Mkaba. All three were charged with committing acts of sabotage and complicity in the death of a police informer in January of that year. (None of them were charged with participation in the shooting of the informer: four others were subsequently tried on that charge).
The accused men, as well as all the witnesses who gave evidence against them, were held in solitary confinement under the "90-day law". This law, enacted in May 1963, allowed the authorities to detain any person without charge for successive periods of 90 days. Most Africans held under the Act were tortured severely. Some committed suicide during this period of confinement; others are known to have died under circumstances which have never been explained. These were the conditions under which statements were extracted or even dictated to the detainees by the police.
The three men were eventually brought to trial in Port Alfred, hundreds of miles from their home town of Port Elizabeth, thus making it difficult for their families and friends to visit. Further, the attorney briefed for their defence was forbidden by the authorities to leave Durban, making proper defence and a fair trial impossible.
The three men were sentenced to death in March 1964. Appeals, calling on the South African regime to refrain from executions and release prisoners, flooded into South Africa from all over the world: telegrams, statements and letters came from the Presidents and Prime Ministers of many States; from Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of the United Arab Republic, on behalf of the Conference of Non-aligned States; from U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations; from trade unions and private individuals all over the world. The United Nations Security Council called on South Africa to renounce the executions. The United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid did all it could to press for the liberation of South African prisoners. All these efforts were in vain, however. Mini, Khayinga and Mkaba were hanged in Pretoria Central Prison on November 6, 1964.
In a statement Mini wrote from the death cell, he recounted that a Captain Geldenhus and two other policemen had come to see him in the cell. The statement read:
"They then asked me about Wilton Mkwayi (2) . They said I saw Mkwayi in January 1963. I said `Yes.' They asked me if I was prepared to give evidence against Mkwayi whom they had now arrested. I said `No, I was not.' They said there was a good chance for them to save me from the gallows if I was prepared to assist them. I refused to assist.
"They then said, would I make the Amandla salute when I walked the last few paces to the gallows. I said, `Yes'. After a few more jokes of that nature, they left. Vuyisile Mini."
It became known soon after their execution that the three patriots, Mini, Khayinga and Mkaba went to their deaths singing Mini`s beloved freedom songs.
One of the few people in a position to recount the last moments of Mini, Khayinga and Mkaba is Ben Turok, former Secretary of the South African Congress of Democrats, a white organisation allied to the ANC. Ben Turok was serving a 3-year term of imprisonment at Pretoria Central Prison at the time the three workers` leaders were executed. In an account which he wrote for Sechaba, the official organ of the ANC, he said:
"The last evening was devastatingly sad as the heroic occupants of the death cells communicated to the prison in gentle melancholy song that their end was near... It was late at night when the singing ceased, and the prison fell into uneasy silence.
"I was already awake when the singing began again in the early morning. Once again the excruciatingly beautiful music floated through the barred windows, echoing round the brick exercise yard, losing itself in the vast prison yards.
"And then, unexpectedly, the voice of Vuyisile Mini came roaring down the hushed passages. Evidently standing on a stool, with his face reaching up to a barred vent in his cell, his unmistakable bass voice was enunciating his final message in Xhosa to the world he was leaving. In a voice charged with emotion but stubbornly defiant he spoke of the struggle waged by the African National Congress and of his absolute conviction of the victory to come. And then it was Khayinga`s turn, followed by Mkaba, as they too defied all prison rules to shout out their valedictions.
"Soon after, I heard the door of their cell being opened. Murmuring voices reached my straining ears, and then the three martyrs broke into a final poignant melody which seemed to fill the whole prison with sound and then gradually faded away into the distant depths of the condemned section."
(1) Article written by E S Reddy, in "Notes and Documents", No. 31/74, November 1974. This biography of Vuyisile Mini, published on the tenth anniversary of his death, was based on information provided by the the South African Congress of Trade Unions.