Obituary: Martha Mahlangu - Mother of hanged MK cadre

Martha Mahlangu, who has died in Pretoria at the age of 89, was the mother of Solomon Mahlangu, who was hanged in 1979 for his part in the killing of two people in central Johannesburg.

1924-2014

Solomon's death sentence was widely considered a grave miscarriage of justice and provoked an international outcry. He subsequently became one of the most revered martyrs of the struggle against apartheid.

Martha worked as a domestic and was saddled with bringing up six children on her own after her husband, Solomon's father, left the family in 1962, when Solomon was six.

One day in September 1976, Martha returned home to find that Solomon, her second-born child, had vanished. He had not said anything to her and she had no clue where he might be.

Several days later, the father of a friend of Solomon's came to tell her that the young man had left the country and she must not look for him.

He had left to be trained as a soldier for the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, in Angola and Mozambique. Although he wrote to a friend, he never wrote to her.

One day in June 1977, Martha heard on the radio that "terrorists" had killed some white people. Then the police came and searched her house without telling her who or what they were looking for.

After a while, they started looking for his clothes. She told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that she then asked them "if they had found this person whose clothes they were looking for". They told her that they had found him in the mountains of Middelburg, the town where she had been born on June 15 1924.

When she asked whether she could go and see him, they said no, they would tell her when she could go to see her son.

A month later, Solomon wrote to her to say that he was in John Vorster Square. She went there but was not allowed to see him. She was told to come back the following week.

"I went back the following week and I found him," Martha told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She was told she could speak to her son but could not talk to him about the case, where he had been or what he had been doing.

"We just sat there. We didn't know what to talk about because we were not allowed to talk about his case and where he had been, and we just looked at each other and I left him there."

Only when his case began did Martha hear that her son had been arrested under the Sabotage Act.

She travelled from Pretoria to the Rand Supreme Court in Johannesburg every day to attend the court hearing, and as a result lost her job.

She was asked by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission how she felt when she heard the judge telling her son that he was going to hang.

"It was really painful to me as a parent," said Martha. "I didn't know who to share this with and what I could do to save my child. I really didn't have anything to save my child with."

In court, she heard that her son and two companions had returned to South Africa through Swaziland, armed with AK47s and a hand grenade. When accosted by a policeman while boarding a taxi for Soweto, they fled.

Solomon and a friend, Monti Motloung, rushed into the John Orr's Gogh Street warehouse to hide. They found two white employees there and Motloung shot them.

Motloung was so badly beaten by the police after his arrest that he sustained brain damage and was declared unfit to stand trial. Although the court found that he had fired the shots, the judge decided that Solomon had shared a common purpose with Motloung to use their firearms should the circumstances arise.

The judge refused Solomon leave to appeal, as did the appeal court in Bloemfontein. He was hanged on April 6 1979. He was 22.

Martha became a member of the Federation of South African Women, the ANC and the ANC Women's League. She was active in community development initiatives in Mamelodi, east of Pretoria.

Martha said in an interview in 1999 that Solomon had wanted to be a schoolteacher.

"He was very conscientious and humble. He stood firm and unshaken in his beliefs."

In her old age, she said: "I miss him even more."

Martha attended the state of the nation address in parliament this year as a special guest of President Jacob Zuma.

She is survived by two children.