Remains of SA’s pan-African nurse Kholeka Rosemond Tunyiswa to be repatriated

The African National Congress (ANC) is in consultation with the family of Sister Kholeka Rosemond Tunyiswa and government about the return and preparation of the burial of the nurse’s remains in South Africa.

She was part of the SA nurses recruited to fill the gap when British nurses abandoned Tanzania, then Tanganyika, in the wake of independence in December 1961.

The group of nurses was recruited by the ANC following the mass exodus of British nurses who opted to return to Britain rather than work under a black government.

Filling the gap

“This behaviour of the Brits was motivated by Tanzania obtaining its independence on 9 December 1961,” the ANC spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri said in a statement.

She said the country’s first president on independence Julius Nyerere approached ANC acting president at the time, Oliver Tambo, for assistance with recruitment of SA nurses to alleviate the inevitable gap that would arise.

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Notwithstanding its banning, Bhengu-Motsiri said the ANC rolled out a successful recruitment drive that saw exemplary nurses like Tunyiswa taking up the call.

Tunyiswa subsequently played a meaningful role in Tanzania as well as in the ANC in exile, Bhengu-Motsiri said.

Group of 20

She said in addition to capacitating nurses of Tanzania, South Africans like Tunyiswa assisted many ANC activists in transit to Dar es Salaam.

“They also provided other exiles with basic needs like food, accommodation, and transport money. Kholeka Tunyiswa is reported to have worked in Tanga and Iringa in her earlier days of stay in Tanzania. She then later worked at Mwananyamala, Magomeni, and Mnazimoja which are hospitals in Dar es Salaam. She then retired in 1991,” Bhengu-Motsiri said on Human Rights Day.

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She said the “Group of 20”, as the nursing sisters who went to Tanzania came to be known, represented a form of cooperation between Africa’s liberation movements that has come to cement relations and cooperation.

Memorial service

Bhengu-Motsiri said the programme must be inscribed in history books as an affirmation of a connection and mutual support between South Africa’s African National Congress and Tanzania’s ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi.

She said Tunyiswa died on 5 March 2023 at the ripe age of 90 years while in Tanzania and was cremated in a private family ceremony.

The nurse’s ashes are to be returned to her hometown of Gqeberha where she was recruited by ANC struggle stalwart Govan Mbeki, with a memorial service scheduled for Wednesday.

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