Celebrating the Life of a True South African Hero, Sunny Girja Singh

It is with great sadness that we say good bye to a true hero of our struggle for liberation - Sunny Girja Singh - who passed away just days before his 87th birthday. Sunny was in the trenches from a very young age in Durban and was one of the earliest MK recruits in 1961. He would tell us about how he and his comrades would have to carry sticks of dynamite from the quarry in brown paper lunch bags on the bus to his MK unit’s hide away where as young amateur revolutionaries they would make explosives to target the apartheid state infrastructure.

Sunny and his comrades were fearless and faced down death as they lay explosives on electricity pylons, at times taking out the electricity down the whole Durban coastline. They eventually worked out how to set timing devices so that they could be back at home in their beds before the explosives went off. The Security Branch were always suveilling them, making their missions dangerous high stakes operations that could at any point lead to torture and death.

Eventually one of their own comrades was caught and gave them up in an about turn that was almost unimaginable. Sunny was eventually caught along with 18 others, and stood as accused number two in the Pietermaritzberg Sabotage Trial of 1963, also known as the Little Rivonia Trial, alongside Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim who was accused number one, Billy Nair, Curnick Ndlovu, George Naicker, Shadrack Maphumulo and a number of others.

Sunny endured horrific treatment in detention in Leeukop prison after his arrest in what is now Sunninghill, Johannesburg, where the prisoners were continuously beaten by the warders and kept in decrepit conditions.

The sabotage trial brought heavy sentences on the accused, with all 18 accused being sentenced to Robben Island in 1964, Sunny for 10 years. The prisoners arrived months before Madiba arrived on the Island and the conditions in the early period was indescribable - no toilet paper, ice cold showers in brackish water, abusive daily physical strip searches, inedible and inadequate food with no protein or fruit.

The beatings started from the day they set foot on the island and the forced labour in the stone quarry was back breaking and if they didn’t chip enough stones to fill the quota measured by a triangular instrument they would be denied food for the coming weekend. They slept on harsh sisal mats with threadbare blankets on the icy cement floors of the prison with the light perpetually kept on and the wind howling. The worst part was the 8 hours of hard labour in the quarry along the sea where they were issued little clothing to protect from the bitterly cold Cape Town weather. Sunny lamented in particular the cruelty of making the prisoners wear the same work uniforms daily in the dusty, dirty quarry for an entire week before they would be washed on Saturdays.

It was a torturous daily routine but Sunny and his comrades refused to let their spirits be broken and constantly ensured that the morale of the political prisoners was kept high in defiance of the regime’s brutality. They formed their own political structures within the confines of the prison.

It was the 1960s, and the prison authorities, in what was arguably one of the worst penal colonies in the world, very deliberately suppressed any news getting to the political prisoners. Sunny was made head of News, where he and George Naicker were responsible for smuggling in newspapers where possible and disseminating news to the prisoners. With his sharp political acumen and analytical capabilities, Sunny was well suited for the role. At one stage he was tasked with smuggling in a transistor radio, which he described as a Herculean task. The penalty for which was severe - being confined for indefinite periods in a straight jacket.

Communication with the isolation cells where Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada were incarcerated was difficult. Sunny had recalled that some of them worked in the kitchen and two of them were shoe repairers. They managed to get them to put the plastic packet containing the news in the boiling porridge. When it reached the isolation section, whoever was responsible for serving the porridge under the careful eye of the warder discreetly picked up the plastic bag.

Sunny served his sentence to the last day and after his release he went straight back into the trenches of the ANC’s underground structures, ultimately ending up in Funda camp in Angola for military training. As Comrade Muntu has recalled, Sunny was the Section Commissar in 1977 at the Funda Camp, with Cde Gayo Nxumalo, Santana Ntombela, Carlos, Senzeni, TNT, Mogoerane (Seiso - later hanged in Pretoria) and many others. He was later deployed to Maputo as Treasurer in the ANC structures working under Jacob Zuma.

Sunny was given this role by the ANC leadership as his ethics were beyond reproach and he could be trusted to ensure that the resources of the organisation were only used for their intended purpose. Throughout his life Sunny was held in high regard for his honesty and integrity as a disciplined comrade. In those years of deprivation in Maputo where food was scarce and rationed, Sunny found ingenious ways of sourcing needed items and ensuring comrades could survive. He became used to slipping in and out of Swaziland and was fondly known as Bobby by his comrades on the ground. As Helen Passtoors from Special Ops remembers, Sunny loved children and would go out of his way to look after the children of comrades based in the frontline states, making him a much loved figure.

After the signing of the Nkomati Accord, Sunny and a number of comrades had to move to Lusaka where he ended up providing logistical support to Operation Vula. He then was deployed to the Netherlands where he opened the first ANC office, and supported the robust efforts of the anti-apartheid campaign in that country.  Sunny was well versed not only in revolutionary ideology but in international relations and global geopolitics which were put to good use. He facilitated Madiba’s first visit to to the Netherlands in 1990.

Sunny returned home in 1991 and made a valuable contribution to the transition to democracy, ultimately joining the senior ranks of the new South African crime intelligence and forging its transformation.

In his retirement Sunny threw his energies into preserving the history of the liberation struggle, by establishing a museum at the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban which became a place comrades would gather to remember and recount their history to the younger generations, and to discus important contemporary issues affecting the nation.

Sunny was a comrade who never lost his moral compass and had immense compassion for those still struggling for a better life in South Africa. His steadfastness to his ideals meant that he never stopped fighting for what his original MK comrades had fought for and also articulated at the time of the Freedom Charter - a South Africa for all those who live in it and a more equal society.

* Shannon Ebrahim writes in her personal capacity.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.