MINI, VUYUSILE
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Vuyusile Mini (1920-1964) achieved prominence as a trade union organiser and political activist in African nationalist causes.
PHOTO CAPTION: Mini, Vuyusile SOURCE: EA LIBRARY
Born in Port Elizabeth, he acquired very little formal education, completing elementary school only. As a teenager, he began participating in labour strikes and joined in the protests against the forced removal of people from his location, Korsten. He earned his living as a packer in a battery factory.
He joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1951 and was jailed for three months the following year, during the nationwide Defiance Campaign against unjust laws, for entering railway property reserved for whites. He later became secretary of the Cape ANC. In 1956, with 155 other leading opponents of the South African government, he was arrested and charged with treason.
The Treason Trial dragged on for four years before all of the accused were acquitted. Mini was also a leading figure in the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), where he served as secretary of the Dock Workers’ Union and Sheet Metal Workers’ Union.
In 1963, while working in Port Elizabeth as a SACTU organiser, he was arrested along with Wilson Khayinga and Zinakale Mkaba and charged with 17 counts of sabotage and complicity in the murder of a police informer. The three were convicted and sentenced to death in March 1954. Despite a flood of appeals from the international community, they were hung in November 1964.
The father of six children, Mini is also remembered as a poet, singer, and composer of protest and religious songs.
ROBERT EDGAR
