Obituary: Philip Kgosana, accidental leader of historic Cape march

Philip Kgosana, who has died at the age of 80, led 30000 migrant workers on a 12km march from the Cape Town townships of Langa and Nyanga along the N2 and De Waal Drive into the palpitating heart of the city.

It was March 30 1960, nine days after the Sharpeville massacre.

He was 23 and a political novice, thrust almost overnight into leading the PAC in the Western Cape after the more senior and experienced leaders had been arrested.

The march came after several days of strike action in support of the PAC's anti-pass campaign. It started on the spur of the moment after police raided the townships shortly before daybreak and beat and arrested migrant workers in their rooms in an attempt to break the strike.

The march began without Kgosana, who said he was trying to evade arrest at the time.

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He had to hitch a ride with an American journalist from the Christian Science Monitor to get to the front of the march.

A less likely leader of such a march would have been hard to imagine. Whereas 99% of the marchers were Xhosa-speakers from the Eastern Cape, he was a recently arrived outsider from a tiny hamlet north of Pretoria.

Xhosa was his fifth language after Sotho, Tswana, English and Afrikaans.

These were men who attached great importance to age and seniority, yet most of them were old enough to be his father - tough, calloused, cynical migrant workers who might have been expected to dismiss him as a boy.

Accentuating the impression of youth were his slight build and the fact that he was wearing short pants that made him look like a schoolboy.

He said he wore them because he had nothing else to wear. The jacket he wore was a gift from his headmaster, as were his shoes, which were so small he had to cut slits in them so that his feet would fit. He wore no socks because he didn't have any.

His jersey and shirt were given to him by an older PAC leader when he left the country.

And yet he wielded an authority over the marchers that was absolute.

As he testified at a subsequent commission of inquiry: "When I told them to stand up, they stood up. When I ordered them to go back quietly, they went back quietly."

This was just as well, because during the course of the march he held the fate of Cape Town, and possibly the country, in his hands. Had he lost control of them, there would have been a bloodbath.

Or if he had decided to stick to his original intention and march them to parliament.

When he got to the top of Roeland Street, leading down towards parliament, he saw that it was surrounded by armoured cars and heavily armed police and troops, and had the presence of mind to steer the marchers to the nearby Caledon Square police station instead.

By this time the city was in a state of severe shock and paralysis, with the doors to schools, businesses, shops and everything else, including the police station, locked and barred while the terrified occupants expected the worst.

An urgent call had gone out to the commanding officer of Cape Town's police, Colonel Ignatius Terblanche, to get to Caledon Square immediately.

Around 15,000 marchers were crammed into the square by then, the rest having been told by Kgosana to wait outside the city along De Waal Drive.

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What Terblanche saw made him fall to his knees in the police station and pray.

He had no shortage of military hardware at his disposal and the justice minister, Frans Erasmus had ordered him to open fire. But he knew that then "all hell would break loose" and he refused, which pretty much terminated his career. Instead, he walked out with a couple of senior officers, all of them unarmed, to find the leader.

The first thing he requested of Kgosana, "as one gentleman to another", was to ask the crowd to be quiet.

Kgosana was given a police loudhailer and, sitting on the shoulders of his lieutenants, said to the marchers in English: "Let us be silent ... just like people who are going to a graveyard."

There was immediate and complete silence.

He told Terblanche he wanted to meet the justice minister to discuss their grievances, which included being assaulted and arrested by the police.

Terblanche promised that he would arrange a meeting, but first Kgosana had to send his followers back to the townships. Then report to the police station at 5pm.

The marchers returned to De Waal Drive and walked in silent, controlled ranks through white suburbs onto the N2 and back to their townships without incident.

The day before the anti-pass campaign started, Kgosana had rehearsed them for this eventuality when he addressed a mass meeting and conveyed to them PAC leader Robert Sobukwe's command that there should be no violence and that, if ever ordered to disperse peacefully, they should do so.

When he came to Caledon Square at 5pm expecting to meet Erasmus, he was, on the minister's orders, arrested and held in solitary confinement for 21 days.

Kgosana was charged with incitement to public violence, breaking the pass laws, and marching to Cape Town without the permission of the town clerk.

After nine months in jail he was granted bail, skipped the country and spent the next 36 years in exile.

He underwent military training in Ethiopia, completed degrees in economics and public administration at the University of Ethiopia and Makerere University in Uganda, and worked for the UN Children's Fund in Africa and Asia.

Kgosana was born in 1936 in Makapanstad in the then northern Transvaal, the son of a poor rural pastor. He was past 17 when he started high school in the Pretoria township of Lady Selborne.

He was inspired by the sight of 20,000 black women marching to the Union Buildings in 1956 to protest against the extension of the pass laws to women.

He wanted to be a pharmacist, but discovered that blacks were barred from the profession.

His overt intelligence and assertiveness made such an impression that a bursary was arranged for him to study economics at the University of Cape Town.

Just before leaving, he heard Sobukwe address a midnight crowd in a church and was immediately captivated.

When Sobukwe came to Cape Town a year later to lay the groundwork for the PAC's anti-pass campaign, Kgosana offered his services.

When he arrived in Cape Town, he was destitute and moved into barracks for migrant labourers in Langa. Even here he couldn't afford the rent until he got a handout from prominent white liberal and son of a former governor-general Patrick Duncan.

He shared a tiny cubicle with an illiterate migrant who worked in a canning factory and sat up with his friends all night drinking and singing while Kgosana was trying to study first-year economics.

In January 1960 he became regional secretary of the PAC for the Western Cape and dropped his studies to focus on politics.

Three months later he became, for a day, the most powerful black leader in the country.

After returning to South Africa in 1996, he ran a successful 8.5ha citrus farm in the Winterveld, north of Pretoria, and helped launch the Winterveld United Farmers' Association.

He died of colon cancer and is survived by his wife, Thungthung, and five children.

1936-2017