Obituary in Sechaba, December 1988
Sello Moeti was born on December 1, 1953, in Waggendrif (Cullinan),
about 45 km east of Pretoria, the seventh child in a family of nine children.
The family moved to Mamelodi in 1961. Sello began school at Morotele Lower
Primary, moved to Mogale Higher Primary, and then to Mamelodi High School,
where he obtained a first class pass in the Junior Certificate in 1974.
Even in Form One of high school, his resistance to the hated Bantu Education
was evident. Sello loved debate, and engaged in intense discussions with
family and friends. Highly perceptive and politicised from his early years,
he had a strong awareness of oppression and degradation.
He was in one of the earliest groups to join the ANC following the victory
of FRELIMO in Mozambique. A few months before the 1976 Soweto uprising,
he left South Africa and went to Mozambique, where, through FRELIMO officials,
he sought contact with the ANC. Talking to a friend about this experience,
he said that he had been inspired by the victory of the Mozambican revolutionary
war, and greatly influenced by the political programmes from Radio Mozambique
which he used to monitor regularly with his close friends in Mamelodi.
He arrived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, while the Soweto uprising was still
at its height.
Reflecting the impatience of that generation, Sello demanded that he, together
with others, should quickly be given military training in order to go back
and meet the challenge of the fascist apartheid regime. This group was
undeniably motivated by the most militant of revolutionary spirits, but
they also reflected the immaturity of their generation at that time. They
had a limited perception of the problems then confronting the ANC. Anger
against the Boers had to be reinforced by the analytical ability to situate
the Soweto uprising in the context of the overall struggle, and not only
the armed struggle.
Sensing this analytical deficiency in the Soweto generation, the ANC leadership
organised political classes to be conducted for them. It was in those political
classes that Sello distinguished himself in his grasp of the political
problems in South Africa. His ability to make objective assessments increased,
and his contributions in the class tended to be less emotional, and more
calm and reasoned.
Here, Sello developed his own personality, and developed a partisanship
to the ANC that reflected his depth of understanding of the problems that
made it impossible for the armed struggle to grow at the rate he demanded.
Observing his political qualities, the ANC leadership selected him to join
a small group sent to the Soviet Union to study political propaganda. What
had inspired Sello in Radio Mozambique was now to be expected from him
when he came back from his training to broadcast on Radio Freedom.
The strategic thinking in the leadership at that time was that the ANC
needed to develop cadres who would be responsible for the Radio Freedom
stations all over southern Africa, since that phase of our struggle depended,
almost exclusively, on the successful conduct of political education and
propaganda among the oppressed people. Sello's group was the first-ever
group after the Soweto uprising to leave Dar es Salaam to acquire training
and skills, and also the first from the Soweto generation to train in skills
of that kind.
Sello found a particular interest in political propaganda. Political training
did not change, but only developed, his personality. He liked argument,
but not for its own sake. Highly principled and incorruptible, he demanded
from others what he demanded from himself. He judged people by their innermost
qualities. When he detested people, it was for their lack of principle,
sloppiness and inattentiveness to the problems of the people. It mattered
little to him what position a person held in the ANC; as long as there
was a point to challenge, he did it with the tenacity that did not augur
well with those few who always expected praises in the assessment of their
work. This characteristic was with him throughout the period of his work
in the ANC.
In Luanda, he was made deputy head of the Radio Freedom unit, working closely
with a group of comrades who subsequently became his close friends. Careful
in selecting his friends, and also difficult to make friends with, Sello
carved for himself a unique and at times controversial character. For those
who were far from him, he was simply an arrogant young man, but for those
who were happy enough to have his confidence and be close to him, he was
a sensitive and highly cultured human person. He was forthright and straightforward
almost to a fault. His hatred for corruption was not only directed against
others, but was an important index of his own moral standing in the organisation.
If anybody thought that Sello would abandon these qualities over the years,
they were proved wrong. Fortunately, the ANC was able to read in them the
potential for an uncompromising young revolutionary, who was soon made
head of the Radio Freedom unit in Dar es Salaam.
Dar es Salaam, however, was to be a place where Sello's health would seriously
deteriorate, as he got repeated malaria attacks which inevitably contributed
to the lowering of his general resistance and immunity to disease.
So frequent and devastatingly severe were these attacks that, when he arrived
in London from Dar es Salaam, the doctors told him his white blood count
was very low and that therefore his resistance to infection was also low.
Sello's health was never to be the same again; where others would normally
take the full stress and strain of work, Sello's response became that of
a nervously wrecked, and at times highly explosive, personality. And this
ate up the very intellectual engine that nature had endowed with extraordinary
reasoning powers, and a uniquely solid and forthright personality.
One of Sello's closest interests was the development of armed struggle
in South Africa. His skills, however, took him to a battlefield of a different
type, and required him to employ a different weapon in the same fight -
his pen. He wrote skilfully, using the sharp language that derived partly
from his political anger, but also partly from his own cultural background
among the militant BaPedi people of King Sekhukhune, whose reputation at
one time was to rout the Boer invaders so mercilessly that they fled to
Pretoria.
Sello left unfinished work. He was working on a book on the struggle of
the women of South Africa, having selected as his focus of study Lilian
Ngoyi and Elizabeth Mafekeng. He also left the unfinished manuscript of
a novel which he began in Dar es Salaam, but could not complete because,
according to him, people would "expect a perfect work from a mind
as critical as myself."
Towards the end of his life, he was studying the counter-revolutionary
strategy of the Pretoria regime.
Sello strongly suspected that he might die, but faced this possibility
with extraordinary courage. Those who went to see him in either Homerton
Hospital or St. Mary's, intending to give him inspiration, came back themselves
inspired by him. He died in the early hours of October 27, 1988, and was
buried in Highgate Cemetery. Sello's mother was there during her son's
last days, and was also present at the funeral, which was conducted in
a fitting, political manner.
As Sello liked to say: Uyadela Wena Osulapho! (Happy
are you, who are already grappling with the enemy!)
Lala Ngoxolo, ndoda Yama
doda!