The mental turmoil started on Saturday morning at about 9.45am when my son Mpho forwarded a message that read in part: “Just got a call that Jessie is now back home — having been diagnosed with cancer there is nothing more they can do, she is now in the ‘end of life’ stage ...”
Since she took leave from her duties as deputy secretary-general, effectively the secretary-general in the absence of the incumbent, I had tried to reach her to say, hang in there, friend.
In between, some moron had taken it upon themselves to spread a rumour that she had died, forcing her to record a video message that it wasn’t true. The message on Saturday said it could be days or weeks “or less”. I recoiled at the thought of Jessie lying in wait for the imminent inevitable. I lost a brother to cancer and have some idea of the excruciating pain families endure.
By Sunday morning she was gone. I wondered whether it was better that she was out of the pain, and as her daughter Zoe said in the message read at the funeral service, all they know now is that she is free from the agony from which she tried to shield them by claiming she wanted to be alone.
Yasmin Jessie Duarte had all the hallmarks of many short people — short fuse and ready for combat any time, anywhere, with anyone. We would get into many debates on the phone over stuff I’d have written or allowed to be published. A Marxist through and through, she saw everything through a class struggle prism.
When the debates were longer, we took to having tea at Killarney Mall, where, away from the prying ears of the telephone listeners, she could talk more openly about the situation in the ANC and her frustration with how very few, even in the leadership, bothered about what the ANC really stood for. “I am not going to stand again, I am tired of all the nonsense,” she once told me.
You know me, I am a Newclare girl, so I needed to go to some meeting and the driver wasn’t there. The rest is history but I learnt my lesson. It wasn’t good.
— Jessie Duarte after an accident in a government vehicle, which she drove without a licence
At one of these teas, when I was on the SABC board and we were trying to retrench some workers, she said: “It doesn’t matter how desperate your situation is, there is no way you are going to retrench workers from a public entity on the eve of an election. Are you campaigning for the DA?”
I told her she needed to get her government to make funds available, but her point was “not now”. Later when I was out of the SABC and the ANC was itself retrenching workers, I phoned and said “so now you can retrench, but we couldn’t?”
“Shut up, wena,” she said, laughing.
If Jessie decided she could trust you, she could talk about anything. One of the things we discussed was a very painful period for her as MEC in Gauteng, when she had driven a government-issued vehicle and got into an accident. There were attempts to fudge the issue of who was driving. A hearing into the matter found her guilty. She left the MEC job.
“You know me, I am a Newclare girl, so I needed to go to some meeting and the driver wasn’t there. The rest is history, but I learnt my lesson. It wasn’t good.”
In the middle of the meltdown the ANC is going through, this diminutive woman stood between utter chaos and the semblance of normality. She would preside over press conferences and answer both real and stupid questions. Now and again the “Newclare girl” would flare up and tell reporters where to get off.
But Jessie was a communicator at heart who understood the value of information, of media and media freedom. When I was asked by the print media owners and Sanef to set up the Press Freedom Commission, it was clear to me the buy-in and participation of the ANC were critical.
She was chairing the communications sub committee and was therefore my point person. I explained to her what the PFC would do, which was to look at the regulatory framework of print and digital media and make recommendations. It was chaired by the late then-retired chief justice Pius Langa. The idea of the PFC arose from an ANC conference resolution, proposing the establishment of a media appeals tribunal, which could even punish journalists.
After listening to my pitch she said: “So why don’t you just say you want to stop the media tribunal?”
“Well, because I know you know,” I said and we laughed. She then told me there was a communications sub committee meeting that weekend where she could make some time available for me to speak. “I won’t be there, so they will fry you with no-one to come to your aid. But I hope you guys are not going to just whitewash this thing and allow journalists free rein. I no longer trust you journalists and some of the things you write about us.”
“How can you think Pius can whitewash anything? The commission has only one former journalist, the rest come from trade unions, legals, auditing and marketing. Relax, you will be proud of our work,” I told her.
The meeting with the committee was difficult, but in the end, after I had left, they agreed to participate. When the work was done, I called her and asked to brief her of the outcomes before the launch. She assembled members of the sub committee. Always the team player.
In the end, at the launch of the report, secretary-general Gwede Mantashe stood up and declared that the ANC fully endorsed the findings, and called on the industry to implement them. And so it came to pass that the regulatory framework in place today was to a large extent facilitated by Jessie’s understanding of the need for an independent but co-regulatory framework that would underpin media freedom.
The fact that I had this access to her didn’t immunise me from her sharp tongue. One day she told me “you must be smoking your socks” after an argument. Later when I reminded her she laughed: “Did I really say that to you. You must have deserved it,” and more laughter.
Caught between a clique of has-beens who mouth Marxist slogans, while in reality pining for a return to unbridled looting, and a capitalist president and his own clique who see capitalism as the panacea to all problems, Jessie held her own, doing what she knew to be right, following her own internal Marxist dictates and beliefs, based on resolutions of the movement she was now leading. And so it was that she had to see to it that her direct boss Ace Magashule stepped aside, and we all wondered what she made of the self-inflicted wounds of the scandal that has brought the Tshivenda word, Phalaphala, into the national lexicon.
As I sat watching the funeral service on TV on Sunday, with the internal turmoil reaching fever pitch, there was a lump in my throat at different intervals of the service: that long obituary which was a catalogue of selfless commitment to freedom at all costs; the glimpse by Zoe of the pain of the last days and hours; the picture imprinted in my mind of a shaven Jessie, with all those brown locks gone.
My friend, a co-soldier in the struggle to free all of us from the shackles of settler colonialism, was no more. And so I say about her as I said to her when her brother Achmat Dangor passed on: Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun. From Allah we come and to him we all shall return.
Salaam, my sister.
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