The Big Read: Truest tribute to the great is to spurn greed

On Saturday we learned that one of the most remarkable people of our times, Epainette Mbeki, had died.

The sad news reminded me of my first meeting with MaMbeki, as she was affectionately called.

It was 1999 and, together with a few other hardy journalists, I was following Thabo Mbeki on the election trail. That day, on a sweep through Eastern Cape, Mbeki visited his mother.

The road to the village from Mthatha was long, winding and confusing. And photographer Elizabeth Sejake and I got lost.

Finally, thanks to numerous directions phoned to us by Sophie Mokoena, of the SABC, we arrived.

The small, dignified ceremony to welcome Mbeki was in full swing. This was not an election event. There were about four journalists, some elders and relatives of the Mbeki family.

When we arrived the sheep slaughtered to mark Mbeki's return was being consumed.

It had been a long, exhausting election campaign, but Mbeki was at his most relaxed: he invited us into one of the huts where he was eating with village and family elders, and he happily tore at the meat like everyone else with his fingers.

It was MaMbeki's day, though. She was one of the most clear-eyed, no-nonsense, eloquent people I have ever met.

A former teacher (and she still taught children arithmetic and literacy in the village at the time) and SA Communist Party member, she spoke briefly about the burden of leadership.

She said it was incumbent on our leaders, such as Thabo Mbeki, to change the lives of the poorest people, such as those in the village. She was angered by the poverty around her but she very quickly asserted that Mbeki must never, ever do anything for her village.

His duty was to all of South Africa, not to her village. It explains very powerfully why he never felt the need to upgrade the road to her village during his presidency. She was a true character, a marvel to converse with, and a fountain of knowledge.

MaMbeki is not the only one. In the Sunday Times there was a fulsome tribute to Ayesha Dawood, one of the 1956 Rivonia treason trial's last survivors, who died aged 87.

To read the story of her life puts many of us to shame.

After she left school at 15 to help run the family shop in Worcester, Western Cape, one of her duties was to read to her father from the newspaper every day. This is how the cruelty of the apartheid regime came to her - the evictions, the introduction of segregationist laws and the trampling on human dignity.

Dawood became an activist, was subjected to long terms in solitary confinement in prison, and was stripped of her dignity and rights.

But, as Chris Barron wrote, "Dawood was a quiet, contained, 'ordinary' person who showed extraordinary courage and tenacity when the situation required. Apartheid was that situation."

Barron also wrote about the life of Nana Mahomo, the PAC leader exiled by the liberation movement the day before the Sharpeville massacre.

Mahomo, with others, produced two award-winning documentaries in the 1970s that brought the horrors of apartheid to the international community.

Now Mahomo is dead. So is Dawood. So is MaMbeki. They follow a long list of "ordinary" extraordinary people - men and women of courage, honesty and integrity. They follow Walter and Albertinah Sisulu, Joe Slovo and others.

Soon they will all be gone.

When I read about our government institutions evicting people from shacks in the middle of winter with nary a thought about alternative accommodation I wonder what all those greats would say.

When I read about the greed and corruption that spring up wherever many of our so-called leaders appear, I wonder what example we are setting for those who will come after us.

I wonder, too, how we will behave when these stalwarts are all gone, when there is no one to warn us against the current culture of "eat, eat, eat and eat now".

Those of us who remember all those stalwarts have a duty to uphold their values and their principles. It is not enough to stand up and quote them, then rush off to receive a bribe.

It is imperative that their values imbue our daily lives and interactions. This is the key to a greater future for our country and for our children.

There will be a lot said about MaMbeki this week. Tributes will be paid and many will rush to her humble home to bear witness.

Many will also return to their homes and to their desks, away from the media spotlight, and keep quiet while all around them greed and corruption eat away at our land.

It is not the way to pay tribute to these greats.

It is not the way.