Dr FM Lucky Mathebula (Prof)
Founder SRC President, 1985.
Transvaal College of Education

When the news of Sello Mpya (Jele), known to us with affection and familiarity as Two-Two, reached me, it arrived with the terrible finality by which a living presence is converted into memory. The sadness was not mine alone. It settled, I am sure, among many of us who knew him, walked with him, laughed with him, and shared with him the urgent dreams of our youth. Death always forces upon the living a difficult question: what did this person mean to us, and what remains of that meaning when the person is no longer physically present? In short, how do we remember him?

Two-Two was a happy soul, but not in the shallow sense in which happiness is often mistaken for noise. His was a deeper gift: the capacity to enter a space and enlarge its humanity. He brought love, laughter and the highest measure of joy that a particular moment could carry. “Monate” defined who he was to those he allowed into his circle.

We met as young men at the Transvaal College of Education. Our parents, families and benefactors had sent us there to prepare for what was, at its best, a labour-of-love profession. We understood our commission to be larger than employment. We were being formed to become educators of the next generation, custodians of minds still innocent enough to be shaped by conviction, discipline and example. The monuments of our work would not be statues or titles, but learners: those who passed through our hands and carried forward something of what we had received. What they became, as we ourselves became part of the work of our own teachers, is a form of foreverness no death can truncate.

At TCE, what ultimately defined our relationship was a higher-order commissioning. We pursued it instinctively, perhaps even secretly, without always knowing how each of us had been formed to execute the mission with such seriousness. We were young, but we were not frivolous. We were youths carrying a bigger mission. If there was a verse in the liberation movement’s dictums that summoned us as young people of that era, it was the one that conscripted us to the liberation of our people.

We understood that,

“The primary task of the ANC remains the mobilisation of all the classes and strata that objectively stand to benefit from the cause of social change. The dictum that the people are their liberators remains as relevant today as it was during the days of anti-apartheid struggle… For it to exercise its vanguard role, the ANC puts a high premium on the involvement of its cadres in all centres of power. This includes the presence of ANC members and supporters in state institutions. It includes activism in the mass terrain of which civil society structures are part. It involves cadres in the intellectual and ideological terrain to help shape society’s value systems. This requires a cadre policy that encourages creativity in thought and practice and eschews rigid dogma. In this regard, the ANC promotes progressive traditions within the intellectual community, including institutions such as universities and the media”. 

We understood this dictum after graduating from the elementary school of COSAS politics. We believed in the collective influence of teachers in society, and we sought to change how TCE imagined its purpose beyond the acquisition of a qualification.

In many ways, we were cadres who understood the influence every single student at TCE would one day have on society. We saw, in those future teachers, professionals whose reach into innocent minds could be more enduring than the power of mass media systems. We saw the hundreds of thousands who would make up the teaching profession. We saw the millions of learners who would pass annually through the hands of teachers. We saw ourselves as a thread connecting liberation content with future educators.

Two-Two, the reluctant Jele, a relative to one of the trusted leaders of the ANC and part of the original OR Tambo leadership cohort in exile, brought to us a dimension of ANCness that only he and Ronnie Ntuli mastered. They became political elders without ever imposing themselves as such. Their authority was conferred by the respect of our TCE leadership cohort. Yet, despite his access to explosive political material and to umrabulo of a special kind, Two-Two chose a quieter political profile. He projected himself, instead, as a fun-loving person, never allowing lineage or knowledge to become an instrument of distance from others.

Together with Ronnie, Nomzamo, James, Reuben, Mpumi, Sipho (BISTO) and Lasber, we later cherished the opportunity given to us by the cohort of students who elected us to lead them. History, not fate, defined our mission. The collective that was behind us included Morris Lechaba, Geoff Ringane, Benjamin Ntuli, Stella, and several other young men and women who went on to lead the country in various capacities. Some, such as Reverends in far lands like Bobby Musengwa, became formidable sports administrators, and yes, the current Secretary of the South African Teachers Union and President of the World Teachers Association is an alumnus of TCE and a former leader of the SRC Two-Two founded.

Two-Two was a wordsmith of note, with a Charles Dickensian instinct for prose and a Nkrumahist commitment to consciencism in his philosophical temperament. He played the piano with great finesse. In the music room, before or around SRC meetings, he would play his famous song “Let it be”. He had that unique African voice that drew people toward him and, by extension, toward us.

Together with Lasber, they were MAJITA a ko Pheli. What I remember most is his somewhat disorienting Afro hair, which never quite yielded to the discipline of an Afrocomb from Mpumi and Nomzamo, and the network of women around the magnet that the SRC had become. Na sa kame meriri da man!! Mpumi le Zamo had the permanent task of always saying, “Tshwara kamo, lokisa meriri!!!”

His spirituality carried something of Davidian rebelliousness, Joshua’s courage and Caleb’s support for those who lead. Two-Two went for an altar call at several Sunday night services. He was convicted by the power of the TCE altar, the same altar from which many of us sat and fed on the word of God. It was also the altar through which we found language, courage, and fellowship to confront the shackles of oppression that bedevilled us as a cohort of transit students. Like many of us, we sustained our repentance in ways that remain a matter between each of us and the God we all know, TCE made sure we knew about.

Two-Two commanded graceful power among us, a power that did not distort who he was. His life was less about asserting status than revealing his true self and allowing others to shine in the process. His courage was held together by compassion. He mastered his emotions in ways we did not fully understand, especially as we later came to know more about what he endured as the son of Josiah Jele on a campus like TCE. He was persecuted in silence. His ultimate exclusion from becoming what we were all there to become became testimony to the burdens he carried with dignity.

As he unfolded into his career as a diplomat, he entered a calling many of us had already glimpsed at TCE. He remained, in a profound sense, the founder SRC leader responsible for our relations with the outside world. He understood the relationship’s meaning beyond the immediate confines of TCE. In diplomacy, he became more fully what he had already been among us: a bridge, a bearer of message, a human corridor between worlds.

We will miss his giggles, his sopranoic voice, his mpaketsane walk and his steadfastness. We will miss the moral lightness he carried without ever being morally light. We will miss the way he made seriousness bearable and struggle human.

As I reflected when Ronnie Ntuli passed on, let me now say: yes, Two-Two, “it was the best of times…I wish you knew that our times were young men’s and women’s dreams. We remain behind, knowing that there is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair, but with you, we declare victory over death because in you we knew a man who would give his life to keep a life you love beside you.”

From all of us who knew him, walked with him, learnt from him and were enlarged by his presence, we release him not into forgetfulness, but into that deeper archive where a life of courage, fellowship, laughter and service continues to instruct the living. Go well, Two-Two; your laughter has fallen silent, but your light has not gone out.

What shall we do, then, with the memory of Two-Two, if not carry it like a quiet flame across the unfinished road of courage, fellowship, laughter, service and the enduring labour of making struggle human?