Vuyisile Mini (8 April 1920 – 6 November 1964) was a trade unionist, Umkhonto we Sizwe activist, singer and one of the first African National Congress members to be executed by apartheid South Africa.
He was also a founding member of the Port Elizabeth Stevedoring and Dockworkers Union, which embarked in the 1950s on one of the longest protests for a wage increase, and fought against the use of convicts for strike breaking.
He was arrested and detained along with Govan Mbeki, Temba Mqota, Raymond Mhlaba, J Makgatho, F Matomela, Alvin Bennie, Frances Baard, Norman Ntshinga, V Bisset, S Ndzube, Father Mark Nye, H Stanton, Dr Colin Lang, John Brink, Chief Albert Luthuli, Peter Tsele, Titus Maimela, Samuel Maimela, Peter Brown, Dr Hans Meidner, Dr G M Naicker, M P Naicker [Durban editor of New Age], Helen Joseph, and many others under the State of Emergency declared under the Public Safety Act on 30 March 1960.
They were charged with 17 counts of sabotage and other political crimes including complicity in the January 1963 death of Sipho Mange, an alleged police informer.
He recalled the last moments of Mini (44), Khayinga (38) and Mkaba (35) life in Sechaba, the official ANC journal: The last evening was devastatingly sad as the heroic occupants of the death cells communicated to the prison in gentle melancholy song that their end was near...
Evidently standing on a stool, with his face reaching up to a barred vent in his cell, his unmistakable bass voice was enunciating his final message in Xhosa to the world he was leaving.
In a voice charged with emotion but stubbornly defiant he spoke of the struggle waged by the African National Congress and of his absolute conviction of the victory to come.
Murmuring voices reached my straining ears, and then the three martyrs broke into a final poignant melody which seemed to fill the whole prison with sound and then gradually faded away into the distant depths of the condemned section.After his 1964 execution, Mini was secretly buried in a pauper's grave at Rebecca Street Cemetery in Pretoria.
One of his children, Nomkhosi Mini became a member of MK and survived a March 1979 South African Defence Force attack on the Novo Catengue camp in Angola.
His words composed during the Treason Trial, Thath' unthwalo Buti sigoduke balindile umama no bab' ekhaya (Take up your things Brother and let's go, they are waiting, our mothers and fathers, at home), came to take on new associations as the forced relocation scheme of apartheid made Black people refugees in the land of their birth.