Leader of Anti-Apartheid Movement Dies in Exile

MAPUTO, Mozambique — Moses Mabhida, who organized trade unions in a lifelong struggle for black workers’ rights in South Africa and headed the South African Communist Party, has died at 62, it was announced Sunday.

Mabhida was party secretary-general and a senior executive of the African National Congress when he died Saturday of a heart attack in Maputo, capital of Mozambique, the official Mozambique news agency said.

He had lived in exile for 25 years.

A communique from the ANC office in Lusaka, Zambia, praised Mabhida as “a great revolutionary” who worked for “the total isolation of apartheid South Africa.”

Joined Communist Party at 19

Born in Pietermaritzburg, Mabhida was a shepherd who came under the influence of Communist and ANC advocates at school. He joined the local Communist Party at age 19. On party instructions he became a union organizer, working with blacks in the rubber, chemicals and railway industries, and later organized port, bakery, laundry, bus company and dairy workers.

In 1959, he organized a boycott to protest conditions under which black prison inmates had to harvest potatoes. Sought by police for acts of civil disobedience, Mabhida fled the country in April, 1960, when race turmoil provoked a state of emergency.

He began rising through the ranks of the ANC which, like the Communist Party, was outlawed in South Africa. In 1963 he was appointed to a full-time post with the ANC.