Govan Mbeki, a South African liberation leader who sent his eldest son, Thabo, into the anti-apartheid struggle and lived to see him become president of South Africa, died Thursday in the coastal city of Port Elizabeth. He was 91.
A teacher by training, Mr. Mbeki was a soldier in spirit and soon abandoned schools for politics, writing and organizing his way into the vanguard of the liberation struggle and eventually into prison, where he spent 23 years, many of them alongside Nelson Mandela and other leading foes of the segregationist apartheid regime.
The oldest of those convicted in the so-called Rivonia trial, in which eight African National Congress leaders were sentenced to life in prison in 1964 for plotting against the government, Mr. Mbeki was something of a father figure among them, said Ahmed Kathrada, one of the other defendants, in an interview Thursday from Cape Town.
“Naturally, we looked upon him with a great deal of respect, for his wisdom, his worldliness, his courtesy, his patience, his concern and his compassion,” Kathrada said.
Govan Archibald Mvunyelwa Mbeki was born in Transkei and grew up there, in what is now the country’s Eastern Cape Province. Educated at mission schools, he went on to study at the University College of Fort Hare, often spoken of as the intellectual cradle of the anti-apartheid movement.
While the Rivonia trial would make Mr. Mbeki and the other defendants famous, the man known to his friends as Oom Gov, or Uncle Gov, had done earnest grass-roots work for years before that.
In rural areas, he helped peasants organize simple agricultural cooperatives and wrote a pamphlet explaining how to replicate his work. As an editor of New Age, a national newspaper that opposed the apartheid regime, he chronicled the growing fight against apartheid being fought in the hinterlands. His first book, “South Africa: The Peasants’ Revolt,” memorialized the late 1950s uprising.
As repression intensified and New Age was banned, Mr. Mbeki was driven underground. In 1963, he and seven other leaders, among them Mandela, were arrested on a farm in Rivonia, near Johannesburg.
Tried on charges of trying to overthrow the government, they were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Mr. Mbeki is survived by his wife, Epainette, and their four children.
