Very rarely do we hear of the passing of a person that all are asking if it is true or not. The meaning of untimely is in this instance not one of those associated with compliance nomenclature to announce death or conclude an obituary piece. Untimely has in this instance a meaning beyond our unfair expectation for death to be timely. Lasi Chikane's passing on is a very timely untimely affair. It hurts.
In our youth years it was fashionable to get a message about a meeting point. The meeting point was where we would be standing and waiting for a signal to follow someone who would lead us to either the venue or the second meeting point. At the venue we would meet as young lads, or youth with the ambitious zeal to change South Africa. Young as we were we saw ourselves as a thread that connects the entire struggle system against apartheid. Lasi was one of those that selected the meeting points. He became a meeting point for most of his life.
In the meeting there would be cell chairpersons. It is in one of these secret and somewhat underground meetings of the ANCYL, before its unbanning, that our experience of a patience to listen, synthesise and draw a conclusion on the way was honed. It was the process of circulating chairperson-ship that equalised us to live the actual meaning of comrades in the struggle. Armed with scanty and in some instances very deep Marxist tools of analysis, we were able to have a characterisation of the balance of forces in Mamelodi, Tshwane, Pretoria, PWV Region, and ultimately South Africa. Lasi was one of the chairpersons who chaired sessions that agreed on the rotation system
In our sub-20s in age, we traversed the world of politics from bread and butter issues of rent paying being associated with funding the apartheid regime to understanding economic sanctions as a terrain of struggle. Our relationship with criminality was theorised within a sieve of the lumpen amongst us that required revolutionary morality as a corrective interpretation rather that legitimising apartheid policing as a panacea to our problems.
We became mandarins of people's power. We took charge of ailments in our environment and created an alternative public works program whose legitimacy was anchored on a zeal to prepare ourself for a government of the people. In this life experiences we created our own policing systems that had D1 as the Supreme Court for the entire township. We did this out of our love for a free South Africa. Lasi comes from D1, he was born in the alternative judiciary space. He agreed with many that it was wrong to be vigilante but correct to protect society.
Yes, it is in these spaces that we would give each other tasks whose collective implementation produce a series of actions whose impact redefined how the entire youth cohort we belonged to related with authority. We identified from amongst ourselves those that had to leave the country to join MK, we recognised those that were intellectual amongst us, we organised across sectors and focused on the young therein. Using our primary and high school alumni as a network of nodes through which the influential amongst us could be harnessed into correct energy to tackle the anti-apartheid enterprise. Lasi was a nodal point whose connecting threads went beyond the borders of Mamelodi. He was an alumni of many alumni.
It was in these spaces that Lasi Chikane became the taskmaster we all respected. In a soft, thin, somewhat sopranoish voice he would laughingly demand accountability for assignments. He was a Mamelodian par excellence. He refused to his last day to see himself outside the definition of an activist. As late as last week Thursday Lasi Chikane was at a meeting he part organised at DITSONG Museum of Cultural History. The meeting, according to him, was a Pretoria Activist Forum Meeting. I asked him who will be there, he retorted, just be assured that it is a faction that belongs to no faction, but a faction ya 'makhomo'.
His famous way of characterising comrades as 'makhomo' gave a different meaning of the comrades he interacted with. He was a fisher of 'marginalised' comrades or 'makhomo'. He had time for all generations. He would give collegial space to 'ma-grootman' as he incisively differed with them, he would chastise those in his generation as he gave insights informed by his proximity to Bra Moss and elderly comrades of the movement.
He was an institution of Mamelodi, Mamelodi was institutionalised in him, he was not only a person in Mamelodi, but a person of Mamelodi. He will be dearly missed by us, you, those and them that knew him. His Soul will find it difficult to listen when we say to it that it must rest in peace. If he arrives anywhere in the afterlife, they better have a ANC branch, otherwise saying may his soul rest in peace will be our compliance to convention statement, that will be a sure lie.
As we mourn Lasi Chikane, we should do so understanding that for every tear we shed, it waters the tree of activism he was known to have nurtured. His passing, in youth month, should remind us of the purposes that defined our morality in leadership.
The Lasi we knew was a silent hero. He was our hero, because in Mamelodi, our "own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, we admire those who fight the good fight".
In Mamelodi, and indeed South Africa, most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The Lasi Chikane type will always be remembered. They were the best of us. They became our timely best and our untimely worst. And there are a few who were a bit of both.
Sleep well comrade Lasi, sleep well LEKHOMO LA MAKHOMO. I will pay the R500 bill at DITSONG you asked me to settle for what may arguably have been the last Pretoria Activist Forum meeting you attended. I wonder who was there.
As we sang... athiyoyo athiyoyo, iyoha itoha, o thina asibasabi
Thank you for a fitting tribute. Are there any annual lectures organised in his Remembrance?
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