Tribute to Ṅaledzani “Shakes” Mashapha by David Makhura on behalf of the National Executive Committee of the ANC

20 JUNE 2026

Our Dear Mother Vho-Dorah Mashapha,
Comrade Shakes’s beloved Wife, Mrs Fhatuwani Mashapha,
Daughter Masana,
Brother and comrade, Dr Rendani Mashapha,
Sister Thinamaano Nemadzhilili and the entire Mashapha family;
Members of the clergy;
Traditional leaders;
Ministers, MECs, Parliamentarians and Councillors;
National, Provincial and Regional Leadership of the ANC-led Alliance and the rest of the mass democratic movement;
President of SASCO, Former Presidents of SASCO and activists of the student and youth movement;
President of the People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO) of Swaziland;
Comrades and friends;
Fellow mourners:

Today we have come from all over the country to bid farewell to our Comrade, Ṅaledzani Mashapha, known to many as Comrade Ṅale or “Shakes”. On behalf of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress (ANC), I wish to convey our heart-felt condolences to the Mashapha family and the community of Phiphiḓi.

As his comrades and friends, we too share in the incalculable pain inflicted by his passing eight days ago. However, even in our grief and pain, we will not allow death to deny us the possibility to celebrate a life which has made an impact far beyond the valleys, rivers and mountains of Phiphiḓi village.

We are bidding farewell to a commissar par excellence, a Marxist intellectual, master of polemics, an outstanding teacher, resolute internationalist, and a true patriot. We are sending off the second President of the South African Students Congress (SASCO).

Ṅaledzani Mashapha has been described by his generation as a professional revolutionary and this perfectly captures his life and legacy. He was one of the finest products of the generation that answered President Oliver Reginald Tambo’s call to make apartheid unworkable and to render South Africa ungovernable.

Comrade Shakes’ was a life of courage and conviction. It was a journey dedicated to the struggle for the total emancipation of the oppressed and exploited masses not only in South Africa but across the world. His profound life and eventual departure are intertwined with the history he helped to shape. There is, accordingly, something symbolic about the timing of his departure.

On the 12th of June this year, former Turfloop student leaders gathered at the University of Limpopo to commemorate the occupation of the campus by the apartheid army forty years ago. These are the generations of students from the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s which the apartheid regime subjected to the indignity of studying under the barrel of a gun. They transformed classrooms and lecture halls into sites of resistance and converted youthful anger into organised political action.

And it was on that very day, the 12th of June, that the tragic news of Comrade Shakes’s departure reached us. History had paused and called his name onto the roll of honour of patriots who, like him, lived a life of sacrifice for a cause far greater than themselves.

Why was he called in the month of June and on a day so significant to the student struggles he had led? Had Comrade Shakes negotiated with God to call him on a day of some relevance to these struggles?

Some are likely to think of Comrade Shakes’s departure in June as a coincidence. Others may see it as providence. People of Faith will surely say: “this is the day that the Lord has made”. Amen!

But Comrade Shakes would have another view: “point of order Comrade David…can we debate this matter.”

Since his passing, many tributes have spoken of his organisational roles, leadership positions, contribution to student politics and his role in the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the trade union movement.

This track record of service undoubtedly deserves recognition. But if we reduce Comrade Shakes to the positions he occupied, we diminish the true significance of his life because he was much bigger than political office. He was much bigger than titles. Instead, he belonged to a rare category of professional revolutionaries whose greatest contribution was not the positions they occupied, but that they never paused or altogether ceased to involve themselves in struggle.

They never stopped believing in the people. They never wavered in their commitment to serving the people. And they never abandoned principle for convenience.

Professional revolutionaries are not defined by their material possessions, but what they impart and how they impact the lives of others. Put in another way, they are not defined by what they accumulate, but what they give away and leave behind.

Comrade Shakes leaves behind an enduring legacy of strong organisations and leadership collectives. He leaves behind a life of resilient ideas which inspired enduring institutional legacies. He leaves behind generations of activists whom he mentored. He leaves behind intellectual and political traditions that he defended and promoted. He leaves behind values that continue to shape lives and worthy of being defended and emulated. He leaves behind a standard of political commitment against which current and future generations will be measured.

In this sense, Comrade Shakes remains very much alive because ideas do not die, principles do not die and convictions do not perish. The dreams of freedom and the ideals of liberation will not be extinguished. The struggle is not over.

As we have already stated, one of Comrade Shakes’s defining characteristics was his profound love to learn and to teach. He taught and trained comrades tirelessly. He was gifted with a razor-sharp mind and a great sense of humour. Indeed, his quick wit was unmatched; his humour was disarming.

He interrogated everything and studied and read everything voraciously and relentlessly from mathematics, science, philosophy to astronomy. He regarded knowledge not as a privilege but as a human right and its pursuit a revolutionary duty.

In an age increasingly dominated by performative politics and radically-sounding rhetoric, Comrade Shakes reminded us that genuine revolutionary politics, transformative leadership and activism require intellectual substance and ideological content — not empty sloganeering.

Comrade Shakes was impatient with people who did not read and those whose stock in trade is to noisily regurgitate fashionable but meaningless slogans. He understood that ignorance can never liberate a people, arguing that our generation made a mistake when at some point in the mid-1980s we shouted, “liberation before education”. He believed that activism without disciplined study is doomed to become mere noise, akin to the Shakespearean ‘“sound and fury signifying nothing”.

Cde Shakes encouraged us to continue to study. But we must heed his warning: a degree that does not enhance your intellectual agility and capacity to serve your people is not worth the certificate and the gown. Passion without incremental political consciousness and a better understanding of the mammoth task of tackling challenges of development only serves personal ego and pomposity.

As Julius Nyerere counselled, Africa needs radical scholarship that boosts the cadre’s capacity to do transformative and emancipatory politics. Listen to what Mwalimu says about the purpose of education: “The education provided must therefore encourage the development in each citizen of three things; an inquiring mind; an ability to learn from what others do, and reject or adapt it to his own needs; and a basic confidence in his own position as a free and equal member of the society.”

In this regard: “Those who receive this privilege [of education] therefore, have a duty to repay the sacrifice which others have made. They are like the man who has been given all the food available in a starving village in order that he might have strength to bring supplies back from a distant place.”

A revolutionary intellectual, Comrade Shakes consumed Marxist classics and an avalanche of other texts about the history of liberation struggles all over the world. He read every book that’s worth reading and mastered the strategy and tactics of the National Democratic and Socialist Revolutions the world over.

But what distinguished Comrade Shakes was not simply what he knew. He had the rare gift of making complex ideas accessible. He illuminated difficult concepts with remarkable clarity and, in doing so, transformed theoretical propositions into practical lessons. He made education an instrument of empowerment; one which, as Nyerere put it, enables recipients “to refuse the wretchedness of mind” so as to “to develop the resources of Africa.”

And through that gift, he became one of the great political educators of his generation.

Comrade Shakes loved and enjoyed a good debate. To him, debate was an art form like playing a piano was to the late piano maestro, Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand).

He relished polemics, particularly dismantling ideas with which he disagreed. His Leninesque rhetoric was the stuff of legend.

If you have never had a disagreement with and got ridiculed by Comrade Shakes, he didn’t take your ideas seriously.

When he agreed with you, he did so with passion and would subsequently defend you anywhere and anytime including in his early morning dispatches and rejoinders when most of us were fast asleep. Comrade Shakes understood that ideological struggle is essential for the defense and advancement of any liberation and transformation project.

Many of us gathered here experienced his famous interventions, sharp and penetrating questions and, devastating critiques that came from his uncompromising insistence on intellectual and ideological rigour. He was, by conviction, an unrepentant subscriber to the aphorism of Karl Marx: “To leave error unrefuted is to encourage intellectual immorality.”

When he challenged your argument, you knew you had entered serious territory. When he disagreed with you, he expected you to think deeper and thereafter read wider. And when he ridiculed your argument, it was often because he believed you were capable of doing better. No hard feelings; he would bear no grudges.

Beneath all this was someone who was profoundly democratic and lovely human being: He respected ideas enough to engage them. He respected people enough to challenge them. And he respected truth enough to change his own position when the evidence demanded it.

That is intellectual honesty, a quality that is increasingly becoming rare in our time.

Comrade Shakes was a Young Lion who understood that youth is not merely a biological stage. Combined with political consciousness, the energy of youth was a revolutionary force he deployed to change the course of history.

When apartheid sought to silence young people, they organised. When apartheid sought to intimidate them, they resisted. When apartheid sought to break their spirits, they intensified the struggle from classrooms to campuses, villages to townships and community halls to underground structures. They built movements that changed the course of history. Comrade Shakes was among the finest representatives of his generation.

For more than four decades, he remained loyal to the cause not only when it was fashionable or rewarding but especially when it was difficult. More so when personal sacrifice was required and conditions were unfavourable. He remained steadfast, consistent, disciplined and committed.

As we reflect on his life today, we must ask ourselves the fundamental question: What lessons can future generations draw from Ṅaledzani Mashapha’s life?

There are many lessons and I would like to put forward a few:

Firstly, read as much as you can and think critically. Secondly, be a life-time activist, educator and an organiser. Thirdly, defend your convictions with courage at all times. Fourthly, the struggle is not over: continue the struggle for a better life for all, including the struggle against all anti-people tendencies such as greed and corruption. Fifthly, serve the people with commitment, talent and skill. Sixthly, invest in others and build a pipeline of leaders steeped in the values of collective leadership. Seventh, remain humble before history.

Comrades and friends,

We need to emphasise that the struggle did not come to an end when our country became a democracy in 1994. Democracy is not just about voting. It is about a better life, all-round development and complete socioeconomic freedom.

Our nation faces many challenges of poverty, unemployment, equality and social fragmentation. We have a crisis of values. Greed and corruption threaten to consign us into a malaria infested marshland.

At moments like these, we need many people like Ṅaledzani Mashapha. We need moral clarity and courage. We must raise the standard of leadership across all sectors because it has fallen to the lowest common denominator.

To the Mashapha family, we say: thank you for sharing Ṅaledzani with us. Thank you for the sacrifices you made. Thank you for supporting a man whose life belonged not only to you but an entire movement, a generation and a nation.

Today we return Comrade Shakes to the soil of his ancestors. We return him to Phiphiḓi and Vhembe District, a region of the great warrior King Makhado Tshilwavhusiku Ramabulana, Alpheus Malivha, Tshifhiwa Muofhe, George Ramudzuli, Mmbengeni Kone, Samuel Mugivhela Tshikhudo, Ntshengedzeni Carlton Ṋengudza, Tendamudzimu Ratshiṱanga, David Mbulaheni Malada, Pandelani Ramagoma, Collins Chabane, Joyce Mashamba, Amos Mbedzi, Rashaka Ratshiṱanga, Dean Tshenuwani Farisani, and other departed freedom fighters in Vhembe and beyond.

Today Ṅaledzani Mashapha joins this rich constellation of the pantheon of patriots who are watching over us! We return him to history and the future because his voice will continue to echo loudly in the campuses and political classes of the OR Tambo School of Leadership.

He will be remembered as someone who built the movement and mentored student and youth leaders, transformed institutions and tirelessly defended the ideals of the National Democratic Revolution. In short, he will be remembered as a Professional Revolutionary.

Aluta continua.

Farewell Commissar Shakes. Tshimbilani zwavhudi, Ndou ya Nngwekhulu tsha Ha-Madzhiga! Amandla!