Galpin Gilbert Tozamile Matshayana, who died in Mthatha last month at the age of 90, was a teacher, author and member of Poqo, the once-feared military wing of the PAC.
He played a role in one of Poqo's bloodiest operations in which about 60 Poqo cadres attacked a road construction camp on the banks of the Mbhashe River, between Mthatha and Engcobo, with pangas on February 2 1963 and hacked five white people to death.
He was among those arrested for the attack. Thirteen of the attackers were sentenced to death and hanged. Matshayana's direct involvement could not be proved. The charges against him were reduced to being a member and participating in the activities of a banned organisation, for which he was sentenced to five years on Robben Island.
Great love
His great love was always teaching, and while on Robben Island he started an informal school teaching literacy and numeracy to his fellow political prisoners.
Among his pupils was the future president, Jacob Zuma, and future deputy chief justice, Dikgang Moseneke, who was sent to Robben Island when he was 15 and imprisoned for 10 years.
Matshayana was born in Clarkebury, in the Eastern Cape, on March 6 1927.
After matriculating by correspondence through Union College he completed a high school teacher's diploma at Clarkebury Teachers Training College and began working as a teacher.
His decision to become actively involved in the struggle for liberation was strongly influenced by the way his father was treated by apartheid authorities.
His father trained as a carpenter for three years in Clarkebury. But having passed the course he was denied a certificate without any apparent reason. Matshayana believed the withholding of certificates was a ploy to prevent black people from competing with whites in the workplace.
Matshayana wrote the earliest books about Poqo in Xhosa. They were never translated into English.
He never spoke much about his role in the Mbhashe "skirmish". He said he was an invisible force behind the operation, which was designed to send a message to the apartheid regime that the killing of black people, such as during the PAC's anti-pass campaign in Sharpeville in 1961, would be avenged by the killing of whites.
On his release he was served with a two-year banning order and restricted to the magisterial district of Engcobo.
He went back to teaching and was the principal of Clarkebury Primary School from 1974 to 1983, when he was made an assistant circuit inspector of the Elliotdale-Mqanduli districts in Transkei...