A retired Albany Museum genealogist is saddened by the distorted facts about Siphiwo Mazwayi displayed on a plaque in the Joza post office named after the struggle hero.
A retired Albany Museum genealogist is saddened by the distorted facts about Siphiwo Mazwayi displayed on a plaque in the Joza post office named after the struggle hero.
Ndumiso Tafana was a close friend of Mazwayi and he claims that some things written on the plaque are untrue.
Firstly, it reads that Mazwayi was killed after being sold out by informants.
Tafana says it was not informants who led Special Branch members straight to Mazwayi, but an unsuspecting young child living in the house.
"The boy was still very young so when the cops burst into the house and asked where Siphiwo was, the boy blindly told them by pointing at the chimney where he was hiding and that cannot amount to sell-out."
The plaque also says that Mazwayi was instructed to blow up an old paraffin depot, but he refused. He argued that too many innocent civilians would perish in the subsequent explosions.
Again Tafana says this information is incorrect.
According to him, it was another comrade who was instructed to sabotage the depot, but couldn't recall his name.
Still according to the plaque, after the closure of Fort Hare by Ciskei Government on 19 July 1980, Mazwayi quietly returned home.
Tafana said, "We held a meeting on the 17th of July and we decided that all Grahamstown comrades studying at Fort Hare should return home and we left Alice on 18 July."
Fort Hare was never actually closed that year, Tafana says, because he knows students who wrote end-of-year exams in 1980. Among those students was Mthuthuzeli Koliti who is now the principal of Nombulelo Senior Secondary School.
"I am very hurt by this distortion of history about my best friend and it is more disturbing that an institution like the Albany Museum doesn't have anything about our local hero," Tafana told Grocott's Mail.
He had developed a close friendship with Mazwayi during their school years before they both attended the same university. They were both active in student politics and rugby.
Albany Museum historian Amy van Wezel said she wasn't even aware that a post office had been named after Mazwayi.
"Unfortunately we do not have any helpful information at our museum as our library has records of earlier history," Van Wezel said. "You must understand that Siphiwo Mazwayi's era is quite recent."
In an interesting twist, Makana municipal spokesperson Mncedisi Boma said if anyone is to blame for the false facts on the plaque, it's Tafana. Boma said he was the one who supplied them with the information in the first place.
And Tafana makes no bones about it.
He deliberately gave them bits of misinformation when he realised the municipality wasn't planning to pay for the interview conducted with him in 2012.
"I asked them whether there will be any compensation, because I don't work, and they said no."
Tafana said he heard that other people had been paid for interviews, and until he's rewarded he won't share the wealth of information he has about Mazwayi.
The man behind the name:
Siphiwo "Tomato" Mazwayi was born in Grahamstown in 1957.
He went to Makana Primary in Joza and Nathaniel Nyaluza High School in Fingo Village where he matriculated in 1976.
In 1977 he started studying law at Fort Hare University and became involved in student politics. It is believed that he left the country to receive military training abroad in December 1981.
Five years later he returned. He was killed by Transkei police in Mount Fletcher on 28 January 1988. He was 31 years old.
The post office in Joza was named after him and quietly opened for business on 3 April 2000. His legacy was commemorated at Noluthando Hall, Joza, on 2 October 2004.
Source: Makana Municipality document compiled from the 2012 interview with Tafana
