Riverlea, a former coloured township under the mine dumps of South Africa’s first gold mines near Langlaagte, got little of the wealth the community was built on. Poor and ragged, like all the group areas created to feed the apartheid economy, there were no gold nuggets there, except for many exceptional people who joined the ranks of activists to fight the state’s separatist policies.

Ignatius ‘Nash’ Jacobs was one of them. The activist and politician who last held the position of ANC General Manager died of colon cancer this week at the age of 57. The years from 1976 were a step-change in the war against apartheid as young people inside the country took the lead and organised into various organisations and movements to make the country ungovernable. He was one of them.

Lawrence Jacobs, an older brother, said that in 1980 he took the young Ignatius to a meeting addressed by the community leader Ralph Peffer. The ANC deputy secretary-general, Jessie Duarte, was also there. Jacobs was hooked on activism from then on as he formed part of the cadres who closed schools and ran resistance campaigns against the apartheid government’s efforts to co-opt Indian and Coloured people into the system. 

Charismatic and a natural leader, Jacobs was “firm and focused”, remembers Duarte. “He always believed apartheid would be defeated.” Lawrence says his brother took the same attitude to cancer. “He approached it with willpower and said ‘if the Boers (apartheid apparatchiks) couldn’t kill me, this won’t’.” His cancer went into remission but returned at the end of 2019. 

Duarte remembers Jacobs as a take-no-nonsense guy. When activists started a bread-making business for Riverlea Extension, a section of the township home to a largely unemployed community, he shut it down when the women who were meant to run it chowed the money.

Jacobs was from a big family and politics ran in its blood. His brother, Nathan, was also a local councillor and he died in 2019. A death in the time of Covid-19 is a double tragedy. It means that Jacobs’ funeral can only be attended by fewer than 50 people and Lawrence says this means the entire family won’t be able to be present. Instead, he is being mourned on Facebook where numerous cadres and activists remember him as a shaping force in their lives, either as young activists or when he helped them set up their own businesses. “He joined the ANC when it was extremely dangerous to do so and when personal rewards were unheard of,” said the ANC in a statement.

Within the ANC he is remembered as a talented organiser of political campaigners and a nimble lobbyist. He had concentric networks as is clear by the range of people who are posting messages about him.

With a storied political career, Jacobs chose not to go to the national Parliament after the first democratic elections in 1994 but became a member of the provincial legislature. He was a member of the executive council (MEC) for Education, Transport and later for Social Development.  He comes from a family with many teachers and he taught at Noordgesig High School for a short while. After a falling out with ANC Treasurer-General Paul Mashatile, who was the Gauteng chairperson at the time, he left provincial politics and ended his political career as ANC GM. This is a relatively recent portfolio created to manage the affairs of the governing party which has grown in size and structures.

Jacobs always retained strong links with his ‘hood: his brother says the family still gathers on the first Sunday of every month at his late mom’s home in Riverlea. Jacobs quit the ANC after the last election after an influencer newsroom effort to fight the election on social media went south.  It wasn’t a happy parting and while he was visited by political comrades from near and far after he fell ill, some blood family members are not entirely happy with Jacobs’ second family – the ANC. But Lawrence says, “He was not somebody who held grudges. (But) on one occasion, he said to me: you know who your comrades are.”

Jacobs was a founding member of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation and joined the board at the request of Kathrada when it was chaired by President Cyril Ramaphosa.

“He was worried about the direction of non-racialism in South Africa,” says the Kathrada Foundation director, Neeshan Bolton, who saw him several times through his illness.

“He was worried at a representative level (of the ANC) about a glaring absence of non-Africans and he was concerned about the overall discourse of narrow nationalism.”

Until recently, the ANC has been scrupulous about ensuring that its leadership make-up at all levels of the party reflects the country’s diversity.  But that is not an imperative any longer.

Jacobs is survived by a large extended family and by his wife Amelia whom he met in the first grade at school, and three children. Eight weeks ago, he became a grandfather for the first time. DM