ANC hero George Mbhele remembered

The Citizen

28-05-2025

The KZN ANC interim fundraiser, Nomagugu Simelane-Mngadi, addressed scores of ANC members at the George Mbhele memorial lecture at the Adventist Youth Camp in Anerley last Saturday.
Simelalane-Mngadi said that not all ANC heroes were famous and that they were gathered to remember a man whose story is rarely told.
'The name George Mbhele does not easily roll off many people's tongues. This is because, way too often, we tend to only speak of the struggle for our liberation using names that became famous. We usually pay tribute to Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu, Winnie Mandela, and many others and rightly so; because those leaders made a great contribution to our liberation. But today, we have an opportunity to go deeper to take an unusual, but equally important route and remember those who were just as brave and committed, but whose names don't get mentioned every day in our public discourse. Comrade George Mbhele is one of those heroes,' she said.
According to Simelane-Mngadi, Mbhele was a teacher, a husband, a father, a leader, and a freedom fighter at Umzumbe Fairview Mission in 1930, and joined the liberation struggle due to his strong sense of justice and patriotism.
'He was the second-born of four brothers and was the first in the area to gain an MBA degree from the University of Fort Hare, even though his father was a farm worker earning peanuts. Mbhele witnessed the repressive laws of apartheid first-hand as they stripped black South Africans of their land rights and dignity, such as the Group Areas Act, which forced people out of their homes to make way for whites-only areas,' she said.
Also, Mbhele was a teacher at Lamontville in Durban where he also operated as an ANC youth leader. Twice, he was held on 90 days without trial in solitary confinement due to his political activism.
'In 1961, along with Govan Mbeki and Johnny Makhathini, Mbhele worked with Albertina Sisulu to help recruit nurses from South Africa to work in Tanzania. This was after an exodus of British nurses after Tanzania attained freedom. He was arrested in May 1963 and put in solitary confinement for 11 months before being sentenced to four years' imprisonment on a charge of being an active member of the ANC,' said Simelane-Mngadi.
She said Mbhele was taken to Pollsmoor Prison, before being moved to Robben Island, where he stayed behind bars until his release in 1968.
'Mbhele served time alongside Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, and other great leaders of our liberation struggle. At the time of his arrest, his wife, Sibusisiwe Mbhele, was a nurse at King Edward VIII Hospital. She was left alone to raise their two children Njabulo (3) and Duduzile (2),' said Simelane-Mngadi.
Mbhele's wife then became the family's sole breadwinner, but authorities forcibly removed her from her workplace for questioning, and she was eventually dismissed from the hospital and banned from working as a nurse.
'On his release in 1968, Mbhele was given a banning order from gaining employment as a teacher, attending church, or having more than two visitors at his home. The couple also had to report to the police station twice a week. On the ANC's advice, they left for the UK on April 10, 1970. He was offered a history teacher's job, after a headmaster read about his story in The Guardian newspaper. His wife also got a nursing job. The family moved to Zimbabwe in 1982, but his wife sadly died in 1987 after a visit to South Africa,' she said.
In 1991, Mbhele returned to South Africa with his second wife, Ellen and her children, and became the deputy principal of Fairview Mission School, where his own journey had started.
'In February 1994, Mbhele was shot dead in his office at school, just two months before South Africa's first democratic national elections on April 27, 1994. He was shot by two young boys who came to the school wearing khaki uniforms and gave him a letter to read, but suddenly shot him dead,' said Simelane-Mngadi.
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