Govan Mbeki

Govan Archibald Mvuyelwa Mbeki was born in Mpukane, in the Transkei region of South Africa, on the ninth of July 1910. He took his undergraduate degree at Fort Hare in 1936 (politics and psychology) and a teaching diploma at the same institution. He taught at Clarkebury Institute and Healdtown through the late 1930s and 1940s and edited the political journal Inkundla ya Bantu (The Forum of the People) from 1938 to 1944.

He joined the African National Congress in the late 1930s and the South African Communist Party in the early 1950s. His 1964 book The Peasants' Revolt (written while in detention awaiting the Rivonia Trial and smuggled out for publication) was the foundational analytic work of South African rural political economy and shaped the strategic framework of the ANC's later land-redistribution program.

He was a co-founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961 alongside Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Joe Slovo. He was arrested at the Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, Johannesburg, on the eleventh of July 1963 — in the operational raid that initiated the Rivonia Trial. He was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment with Mandela, Sisulu, and seven others on the twelfth of June 1964.

He spent twenty-three years on Robben Island (1964-1987) and a further two years at Pollsmoor Prison before his release in November 1987. He served in the post-apartheid Parliament from 1994 and as Deputy President of the National Council of Provinces from 1997.

He was the father of Thabo Mbeki — the second post-apartheid President of South Africa.

He died at his home in Port Elizabeth on the thirtieth of August 2001, age ninety-one.

He is honored here as the ANC theoretician whose 1964 book on rural political economy shaped the post-apartheid land program.