Figure of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, a tireless traveling companion, and captivity of Nelson Mandela, Andrew Mlangeni died at the age of 95 years. It is the president of south africa Cyril Ramaphosa in person, who made the announcement in a tweet. He said ” having learned with deep sorrow of the death in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, Andrew Mlangeni. He had been hospitalized on July 14 in a hospital in Pretoria for abdominal pain, according to the presidency.
His death ” marks the end of a generation and place our future in our hands “, the president added in a press release. And the head of the current State knows what he’s talking about, he was at the side of these men accused of terrorist acts, and was waiting for a strong release.
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Andrew Mlangeni, the last co-accused
Andrew Mlangeni, accused number 10, was the last survivor of the Rivonia trial (1963-1964), during which several members of the african national Congress (ANC), including Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, or Ahmed Kathrada, had been sentenced to life in prison.
This trial has gone down in history as Nelson Mandela, now thirty years later, in 1994, the first black president of South Africa, had made a political forum, through a speech long three hours in front of the judges of the court of Rivonia, attracting the attention of the world on its cause. And calls from all over the world had called for the release of the accused, including the united Nations and the world Council of peace. It was on April 20, 1964.
Andrew Mlangeni, born June 6, 1925, the ninth child of a family that will count up to fourteen. He joined the youth league of the ANC in 1951 and was among the first to be sent for military training outside the country to China. It is upon his return, in 1963, he was arrested and charged by the State for the recruitment and training of an armed force on the national territory. He ultimately spent twenty-six years behind bars, jailed most of the time on Robben Island.
It was “the last monument of a generation of courageous South Africans who have given up their freedom, their career, their family life and their health for all of us to be free,” responded the Nobel peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu, a companion of struggle of Nelson Mandela. “It is now up to younger people to take back the stick of a witness that they held, and to complete the path,” he added in a press release.
The racist regime of apartheid, against which the ANC has fought, is officially fell in 1994, but disparities between the black majority and the White is still evident in South Africa.
The ANC has paid tribute Wednesday to “the one (s)es-combatants the most notable, “which” believed that the freedom of the people was more important than his own life “.
A man of the shadows
If it was released in 1989, Andrew Mlangeni was given a role in withdrawal from the sidelines, as he liked to say. “I’ve never been at the forefront of the ANC “, he said in a documentary of 2013 on the years before his imprisonment. He was a member of the national Assembly from 2009 to 2014, by which date he retired. In his last years, he has been chairman of the integrity committee of the ruling party, the african national Congress, which was mandated to investigate allegations of corruption against its leaders, particularly Jacob Zuma, the former president. In his case, Mlangeni said : “I have not been in prison for twenty-six years for people to rob the poor. “
In 2018, Andrew Mlangeni had walked the red carpet in Cannes with the team of a documentary on the trial of Rivonia, The State Against Mandela and the Others (The State against Mandela and the other). Referring to the trial where Mandela said he was “ready to die,” Mlangeni told have shared this feeling. “We were almost certain to be hanged, but we were ready. “He leaves behind two daughters and a son in sorrow, while his wife, with whom he remained married for over fifty years, died of cancer in 2011. Recently, another condemned at the trial Rivonia, Denis Goldberg, has passed away at the age of 87 years, last April.
also Read Nelson Mandela : the anniversary that wakes up the memory of his speech in the Rivonia
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Mandela : his words still resonate Nelson Mandela : the anniversary that wakes up the memory of his speech in the Rivonia “trial against Mandela and the other” : where co-defendants of Madiba speak
