ANCWL SADDENED BY LOSS OF MAMA RUTH MOMPATI
12 MAY 2015
The African National Congress Women’s League feels a deep sense of loss at the passing on of Comrade Mama Ruth Mompati earlier this morning at the age of 89 years. Mama Ruth Mompati was a distinguished member of a generation of women in South Africa and the ANC who gave selflessly, without expectation of praise or reward, of their lives to the struggle for the liberation of South Africa and her people.
She made an invaluable contribution to the moulding and guiding of successive generations of women in the movement; she nurtured and mothered activists serving as a bedrock of our organisation during the dark and turbulent years of exile and banishment.
As a founder member of Umkhonto weSizwe and Secretary General of the ANC Women’s League, Mama Ruth Mompati and her comrades led from the front to emancipate the South African people from the bondages of apartheid colonialism. Regardless of the role she was playing or the area in which she was deployed, Comrade Ruth served the organisation with unwavering commitment and absolute dedication. Her own family lent Mama Ruth to the people of South Africa so she could wage our common war often at great distress and sacrifice to their own comfort.
It is these values of putting the course of the people first, fearlessness, courage and determination that the ANC Women’s League implores young women and South Africans in general would emulate as we continue with the work of building a free and united South Africa.
We lower our revolutionary banners in honour of this incomparable stalwart of our movement and commit ourselves to pick up the baton that is being passed to us by the generations of Mama Ruth Mompati and her compatriots. Tirelessly, we will work to ensure that the struggle they had devoted their lives to continues and that we can never justly claim to have realised their vision until the dream of a united, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist society is realised.
The ANC Women’s League sends its deepest condolences to the Mompati family and the countless comrades who considered Comrade Ruth Mompati a mother, a community builder and a liberator. May she rest in peace comforted by the knowledge that she played her invaluable role, driven by the love for her people, in building this South Africa which is intent on realising the ideals of our people concretised in the Freedom Charter she was, in whatever small way, part of crafting.
Statement issued by Angie Motshekga, President, African National Congress Women’s League, May 12 2015
