SIBUSISO ELIAS MKHWANAZI

Gold miner turned NUM organiser who taught a thousand shop stewards to stand their ground

Baba Sbu Mkhwanazi used to say he had spent half his life underground and the other half arguing, and that only one of those had ever frightened him.

Born in the dry hills of Msinga in 1946, Sibusiso left school after Standard Six to herd his father's cattle. At twenty-one he was recruited to Vaal Reefs gold mine near Orkney, where he spent the next two decades as a rock-drill operator, two and a half kilometres below the surface. He wrote letters home in a careful hand, learned fanagalo from men from six countries, and watched too many friends carried out of the cage.

When the National Union of Mineworkers was formed in 1982, he was among the first to sign up. A year later he was elected shop steward. He became known for his preparation: he read every safety regulation, memorised the clauses, and brought a hand-written list to each negotiation. Dismissed in the great mineworkers' strike of 1987, along with tens of thousands of others, he was taken on by the union itself in 1988 as an organiser, and spent twenty years visiting mine hostels across Gauteng, training stewards, and insisting that a rockfall was never an act of God but a failure of planning.

He studied labour law at night at the University of the Witwatersrand, married Gladys Ndlovu in 1972, and raised four children in a rented house in Jeppestown. He loved amasi with phuthu, Zulu maskandi on a Sunday radio, and Kaizer Chiefs, whose gold-and-black scarf he wore to every union meeting that fell on a match day.

Baba Sbu died in June 2021, after a short illness, during the dark months of the third wave. He leaves his wife, three children, and thirteen grandchildren, and a generation of miners who still say, 'Baba Sbu taught me to read the clause.'

“A rockfall is never an act of God. It is a failure of planning.”