Steve Tshwete

Cabinet minister in the new South Africa

Steve Tshwete, political activist, military commander and politician: born Springs, South Africa 12 November 1938; Political Commissar, Umkhonto we Sizwe 1988; Minister for Sport and Recreation 1994-99; Minister for Safety and Security 1999-2002; married (two children); died Pretoria 26 April 2002.

Steve Tshwete, South Africa's Safety and Security Minister, caused tremors when in April last year he accused three prominent and named members of the ruling party, the African National Congress, of conspiring to overthrow or harm President Thabo Mbeki. (In the ANC in exile, such a charge would have had very unfortunate consequences for those accused.) Mbeki said he supported the police investigation. But in December Tshwete conceded that no such conspiracy existed and apologised to the "plotters".

As a cabinet minister in the first post-apartheid government, a leader of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress within South Africa and in exile, a long-serving prisoner on Robben Island and a commander in the ANC/SACP military wing in exile after his release, the life of Steve Tshwete suggests some of the difficulties of the government of the New South Africa.

Men reared in the certainties of Brezhnev-era Soviet-type Marxism found themselves in government in South Africa in an era of US-led globalisation. The beliefs with which they entered the 1980s were undermined within 10 years by the collapse of the Soviet Union, by the need to adapt to the capitalist "new world order" and to South Africa's capitalist inner structure, and then, within a further 10 years, by the replacement of a Marxian-derived anti-colonialism by a global Islam Militant.

The anti-colonialist jihad of Tshwete's day had certain fixed points: a generally secular mindset, a notion of progress, the belief that the Soviet Union had found the answer to social and national inequalities, and a general distinction between civilian and military targets. However, when Tshwete and his immediate superior, the ANC/SACP leader Chris Hani, directed bombings towards civilian "soft" targets within South Africa in 1988 they were repudiated by the ANC President, Oliver Tambo, leading Tambo to replace Tshwete as Political Commissar of the ANC/SACP military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Shortly afterwards Tshwete was appointed to the ANC's ruling National Executive Committee.

Both before and after the return of the exiles, Tshwete was an effective speaker to keyed-up crowds. As an underground leader of the United Democratic Front before going secretly into exile, he told a crowd of 70,000 at a mass political funeral that they should burn the country to the ground so that a new society could emerge from the ashes of apartheid. Immediately before the massacre of ANC demonstrators by pro-apartheid troops at Bisho in the Ciskei in the eastern Cape in September 1992, he fired the unarmed crowd to defy the troops with an exhortation to "drive the pig from the barn". In the slaughter that followed, 28 were killed and more than 200 wounded.

Tshwete was Minister for Sport and Recreation in the first post-apartheid government formed by President Nelson Mandela in May 1994. Arrested as a young militant in 1964, he had spent 15 years on Robben Island alongside Mandela.

Though born in South Africa's industrial centre in the Transvaal, he grew up like Mandela, Tambo, Hani and Mbeki in the Xhosa-speaking eastern Cape – the region that has provided the ANC for over half a century with its core political leadership.

Paul Trewhela