In Honour of Comrade Naledzani “Nale” Mashapa

Teacher of the revolution, Commissar of the Mass Democratic movement

There are losses that strike a particular institution with particular force. For a school built to teach the craft of leadership, few wounds run deeper than the death of a great teacher. It is in that exact grief that the OR Tambo School of Leadership bids farewell to Comrade Naledzani “Nale” Mashapa, former President of the South African Students Congress and one of the finest political educators our liberation movement has known.

Long before titles attached themselves to his name, Comrade Nale was simply the comrade you sought out when an argument needed clarity and a struggle needed direction. He came of age in politics in the 1990s, amid the ferment of the student movement, at the very moment young South Africans were deciding what kind of country they would inherit and what they were willing to risk to win it.

His first great battle was fought over the schoolroom and the lecture hall. He refused to accept a freedom in which quality free education didn’t exist. He organised, debated and mobilised for an education that opened its doors to the children of the working class instead of auctioning learning to whoever could afford the highest price. That fight carried him upward through the structures of SASCO, from the campuses and provinces where he first learned to organise, until the students of this country called him to the presidency of the South African Students Congress.

Seniority never changed  him, only gave him a greater platform to teach. Those who served under his leadership remember a man who held real authority without ever lording it over anyone, who listened far more than he postured, and who measured himself not by the offices he occupied but by the comrades he managed to lift alongside him. He understood power as a responsibility to be discharged, never a prize to be hoarded.

This was the heart of the man: a commissar and a political educator in the truest meaning of those words. He believed that ideas were the real weapons of the oppressed, and he spent his life placing them in other people’s hands. A passing conversation with Comrade Nale could become a seminar. An ordinary branch meeting could turn into a master class in strategy. He gave away what he knew freely, refusing to treat knowledge as private property, because he grasped a simple truth: a movement survives only when it reproduces itself in the minds of the young. That conviction is the founding purpose of this School, which is why his passing is a loss of one of our own.

We would honour such a man poorly if we honoured him with sorrow alone. The fitting tribute is to keep teaching what he taught: to school a new generation of cadres, to guard the freedoms already won, and to press forward until poverty, inequality and exploitation are driven from our society for good. Let those he educated now go and educate others. A teacher’s work outlives him only when his students refuse to let it die.

To the Mashapa family, who gave so much of him to the rest of us, the OR Tambo School of Leadership offers its deepest and most sincere sympathy. To the comrades, friends and former students who feel his absence today, we grieve alongside you, and we make you this promise: the lessons he leaves behind will not be buried with him.

Lala ngoxolo Commisar, a luta continua.

-ENDS-

Issued by the OR Tambo School of Leadership

For enquiries contact:

Lerato Ndlovu on +27611648742, email: info@ortamboschool.org.za