HEADLINE:   Obsession    

PUBLICATION: Sunday Argus

PAGE NUMBER: 5

AUTHOR:     Zubeida Jaffer

DATE:       2001-09-01 22:00:00

Obsession with putting pen to paper

THEY sit facing one another in the sun-filled lounge. He speaks. She writes. An old man nearly ninety years of age and a young woman barely 20 years old.

It had become a daily ritual for the ageing Govan Mbeki to dictate the history of Port Elizabeth to his assistant, Veliswa Nxiweni. She put the final touches to the script just days before his ninetieth birthday on July 10, 2000. 

His obsession with committing word to paper wove through all his adult life. Trained as a teacher, he penned his first book shortly after graduating from Fort Hare in 1937. The ways in which migrant labour and peasant farming impacted on rural poverty were to be themes he continually returned to over the years. His best known book, The Peasants' Revolt, was considered a key text on rural South Africa.

Mbeki was born on July 8, 1910 in Mpukane, a small village in southern Transkei. He was the youngest of eight children. He was named after the most famous missionary educator of the Eastern Cape, William Govan, a Presbyterian minister and principal of Lovedale. 

After he moved to Port Elizabeth, the visitors did not flood in as he was accustomed to in Cape Town. He was particularly saddened by the fact that he seldom saw his son Thabo. "Well, I want to see him," he said. "But now I tell myself that he has a job of work to do." 

His wife Epainette, too was an infrequent visitor, having chosen to make a life in the Transkei. While the two remained married, they shared little of their later years together. 

He has been described by some as one with ruthless determination. Mac Maharaj, in the collection, Reflection in Prison, says his iron will and firmness of resolve shone through all the time. But Maharaj also commented on "his soft-spoken calm and gentleness". 

He loved orchestral music and was also a great lover of nature. His working life revolved around teaching, journalism and political organisation.