Govan Mbeki; S. African President’s Father, Activist

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  Govan Mbeki, the father of President Thabo Mbeki and a revered leader of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid, died early Thursday at the age of 91.

Mbeki, who spent 23 years in jail with former President Nelson Mandela under apartheid, died about 2 a.m. at his home in the city of Port Elizabeth after a long illness, Thabo Mbeki’s office said in a statement.

Best known to younger generations for his relationship to his more famous son, the man affectionately known as Oom Gov, or Uncle Gov, was a political leader in his own right.

“South Africa today mourns the passing of one of Africa’s great sons,” Mandela said in a statement. “We salute a comrade and friend, a leader in struggle, one of the intellectuals of our movement and a fellow member of a generation that has given so much to the shaping of our country.”

The South African and U.N. flags flew at half-staff over a conference center in Durban, where a world gathering on racism begins Friday.

Mbeki was born July 9, 1910, in the Nqamakwe district of Transkei, a black “homeland” treated by successive white governments as a labor pool for South Africa’s developing economy.

The son of a Xhosa chief, he worked as a messenger and newsboy in Johannesburg as a teenager and attended mission schools. “I saw the poverty of the black Africans,” he wrote. “Where I lived--in the city and in the suburbs--police raids were always taking place. Either they wanted to check our passes, or were looking for illegal drink.”

He decided to fight apartheid before enrolling in the University of Fort Hare, where he completed studies in politics and psychology and earned a teaching diploma in 1936.

He joined the African National Congress while still a student in 1935, was elected national chairman in 1956 and later served as secretary of the high command of the organization’s military wing. He was also a member of the previously outlawed South African Communist Party.

As a young man, Mbeki worked as a teacher and journalist under the oppressive and racist government policies that preceded the creation of the apartheid state in 1948. But his political activities twice led to his dismissal.

Detained repeatedly, he went underground in 1963 and was arrested during a police raid on the headquarters of the ANC’s military wing in Rivonia, near Johannesburg.

Alongside Mandela and other ANC leaders, he was tried for sabotage and sent to Robben Island, a penal colony off the Cape Town coast, to serve a life sentence. With Mandela and other imprisoned ANC leaders, he turned it into a virtual university that eventually trained two generations of black activists.

While in jail, Mbeki completed an economics degree. The University of Amsterdam also awarded him an honorary doctorate in social science for his book “South Africa: The Peasants’ Revolt,” which he began on rolls of toilet paper and smuggled out of prison.

A fellow inmate, Thami Mkhwanazi, recalled that Mbeki never went to see films and watched television only for the news. But on the weekends, he would strum his guitar and sing Afrikaans folk songs.

At his release in 1987, three years before Mandela was freed, he did not renounce violence or his Marxist views. “The ideas for which I went to jail and for which the ANC stands, I still embrace,” he told Time magazine. He also said he had no regrets about the sacrifices he had made for the liberation struggle.

His release was meant as a conciliatory gesture to spur black-white dialogue and was a prelude to the freeing of other prominent black nationalists, including Mandela, whose long incarceration ended in February 1990.

Of his son’s ascension to the presidency, Mbeki said he could never have predicted it. But, he added, “I feel fine--not because he is my son, but because we have a man in that position to carry on with the work of the ANC and the people of South Africa.”

After the 1994 elections, which saw Mandela become South Africa’s first black president, Mbeki was elected deputy president of the Senate. He later served in Parliament’s lower house.

In an April 1999 interview, Mbeki said he considered himself lucky to have lived long enough to see the country’s liberation struggle bear fruit.

“Very few of us who have been so long in the ANC have lived to experience the changes that have taken place,” he said. “I’m happy about that.”

In addition to his son, he is survived by wife, Epainette, and three other children. Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.