Once more death has visited us without warning, to take away from us a star on our galaxy of heroines and heroes that, for many years, served as one of our guiding lights as we traversed the stony path to a future world of a dream that had to be realised.
Joyce Lesawana Kgoali had to us become the Chairperson. I have heard her voice and obeyed her commands as she chaired the National Parliamentary Caucus of the African National Congress. I have heard her voice and followed her directions as she chaired the National Council of Provinces.
Unhappy circumstance has now decreed that we will forever be denied the opportunity fondly and respectfully to presage our words uttered in her presence, with the respectful salutation - Madame Chairperson! Once more and too early in the life of our infant democracy, death has taken away from us one of the midwives of our season of hope.
I have the privilege to present to the nation what might serve as Joyce Kgoali's epitaph. I speak of a possible epitaph she herself proclaimed in March 1999, as she celebrated new achievements of the women of our country, made possible by the emergence of the great spaces of light born of the freedom for which she had fought.
She was speaking of life and not death, of what the women of our country had to do to walk into the space of light when, five years ago, she said: "Women are expected actively to heal our nation. We cannot afford to be paralysed by pain, fear and ignorance. We have all been given an opportunity to learn from each other. As a woman ready to lead a male dominated department I was paralysed, though at first, when I looked around me, I knew I could fail the women of this (country) by not taking the opportunity to rise beyond my fear. Today, standing in front of you I feel humbled and honoured with the support I have received from (the women of South Africa)."
Today, fully ten years after our liberation, standing before the confined world of the sarcophagus that contains the mortal remains of the great being that was our Madame Chairperson, we must admit to what she said. Our nation needs still to heal its wounds, to temper the lingering pains and assuage the persistent hurts.
We must admit to what she said, that women are expected actively to heal our nation. We must do this because the person who presented this challenge to our women and our nation, our Madame Chairperson, had earned the right to demand of all of us that we should open our ears, our eyes and our minds to what she said and did.
She earned that right not because she demanded it. She acquired it not because she sought it. She became our teacher because of the moral power and authority she accumulated, derived from her selfless service as a foot soldier for freedom.
A woman of the people, she did service as a workers' leader, a women's leader, a people's tribune, our Madame Chairperson, because the people themselves, the ordinary masses from whom she came, saw in her a trustworthy servant whose only life purpose was to serve the people of South Africa.
They saw reflected in their mirror one of their own, a replica of themselves who, nevertheless, had the moral courage, the intellectual capacity and the depth of passionate commitment to cultivate and project the vision that set her apart, but did not separate her from the ordinary folk whose aspirations defined who she was.
And yet this quiet titan in our ranks, a heroine who was prepared to risk her life to give freedom a chance to emerge out of the chrysalis, spoke still of the fear of failure. The fact of the freedom we had won through the struggle she waged told her that new struggles remained to be waged and new victories won.
These new struggles demanded of the new combatants for the victory of the vision a better life for all that they should liberate themselves from the paralysis induced by the sustained pain of past wrongs, fear of the future and the ignorance imposed on the majority in the past to ensure its permanent oppression.
Accordingly, as she read out her epitaph, our Madame Chairperson, Joyce Kgoali, spoke out and said "we cannot afford to be paralysed by pain, fear and ignorance". She said that whatever the new challenges we had to confront as a reward of freedom, we had to take the initiative to plough virgin land and thus rise above our fears of venturing into the unknown.
She said we have a duty to refuse to be imprisoned by the past, such that that past imposes such shackles on us that we would fail to respond to the challenge to build a society of hope that would arise out of a catastrophic past of hopelessness and despair.
She said that the women of our country had to generate the courage to lead our country to realise its objectives of reconstruction and development. She said that if the women of our country aware of their tasks in this regard, sustained the fight for progressive change, as the women who bestowed on us the gift of August 9th, our National Women's Day, did, they would enjoy the gift of the support and solidarity of all the women of South Africa.
She said that the opportunity that freedom gave to the women of our country to learn from one another, together to correct the mistakes that will inevitably be made as they work to create the new without the benefit of precedent, together to learn how to lead, whereas in the past the women had no choice but to be the led, the women engaged in struggle for progressive change should know that in the end, they will feel humbled and honoured with the support they will receive from the women and people of South Africa.
We have gathered to say our last farewells to our Madame Chairperson, Joyce Kgoali. But we shall say those farewells not to bid farewell to what she did and what she stood for.
Instead, as we part with her, we feel duty bound to defend what she stood for, to complete the unfinished work she would have done if death had not cut short an extraordinary life that would have blessed us with an expansion of our frontiers of freedom.
Our country has great need of such patriots and heroines as Joyce Kgoali was. She came to stand on the high pedestals she occupied not because she was a product of a clever public relations exercise.
She became one of our lodestars because the ordinary things she did as a fighter for liberation and an architect of a new society of hope communicated the message that the ordinary masses, the wretched of the earth, must and will be the true architects of the new South Africa we are working to build, the new South Africa that inspires millions in Africa and elsewhere in the world to sustain their conviction that it is possible to create a new social order that serves the interests of the people.
She became who she was because she was a worker who never forgot what it is to be a black worker, and never turned her back on or betrayed the struggle to realise the aspirations of the working people.
She became who she was because she was a black woman who never forgot what it is to be a black woman, and never turned her back on or betrayed the struggle to realise the aspirations of the black and other women of our country, Africa and the world.
Her presence among us, a combatant for the realisation of the aspirations of the workers, the women and our people as a whole, guaranteed that the democratic order would not lose its way. It made certain that the democratic revolution would stay on course with regard to its tasks, to advance the interests of our working people, and remain loyal to the fundamental task to secure the liberation of the women of our country.
The democratic revolution in our country is in its infancy. It has just begun the task to eradicate a legacy of three-and-a-half centuries of unjust rule that imposed a life of misery on the overwhelming majority of our people.
The problems we have still to overcome are many and varied. Joyce Kgoali knew these problems well. She knew them not because she had read about them in books. She knew them because she too had experience of them.
Because she knew what it meant to be oppressed and discriminated against because of the colour of her skin she engaged in struggle to defeat the evil system of apartheid and eradicate racism from our midst.
Because she knew what it meant to be forced into the condition of poverty, to suffer from the dehumanisation imposed by poverty and want, she engaged in struggle to create the conditions that would permit our nation to join together to strive for the realisation of the goal of a better life for all.
Because she knew what it was to bear the burden of triple oppression because of her gender, she made certain that the emancipation of the women of our country became a defining feature of our democracy.
The long road we still have to travel to answer to the pain she and her people suffered because of unjust rule requires that we should have others such as her in the vanguard. It requires that the nature of the progressive change we seek should be defined by the thoughts and deeds of courageous patriots such as Joyce Kgoali.
We mourn her untimely loss because the tasks of the day do not permit that we should be robbed of her leadership. We grieve at her departure because we know how difficult it is to find genuine cadres of progressive change who are not driven by personal ambition but are truly committed to serve the people.
As we bid her farewell, it is our duty to make the solemn pledge that we will always emulate her example and honour her memory by faithfully continuing the struggle to which she dedicated her life.
I am privileged to convey the condolences of our government and our people as a whole to her dear husband, Godfrey Nhlanhla Simelane, her mother, her children, her grand children and the rest of her family.
Farewell Madame Chairperson. Farewell Comrade Joyce. You did all you could to heal the nation. Though you are no longer with us, your memory will never perish. May you rest in peace.
This is an edited version of the oration delivered at the funeral of Comrade Joyce Kgoali, 28 November 2004.
