Maputo — Moses Mabhida, former general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), who died of a heart attack in Maputo in 1986, is on his way home.

His body was exhumed from Maputo's Lhanguene cemetery on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, religious and political ceremonies in his honour were held, before the coffin is flown back to his native province of Kwazulu-Natal.

A large South African delegation, including Mabhida's elderly widow, Lena, and other members of the family, attended a service at a Maputo Methodist church, followed by a political even commemorating Mabhida's life.

The deputy president of South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC), Jacob Zuma, who was the ANC's chief representative in Maputo in the 1980s, recalled how he and Mabhida had once shared the same house in Maputo.

Later, his duties as SACP general secretary ensured that he spent much of his time in Lusaka, where the exiled party had set up his headquarters. But when he fell ill, he asked to return to Maputo, a request that Mozambique's first president, Samora Machel, readily accepted.

Zuma gave a moving account of Mabhida's last hours. He had rushed to his bedside on hearing that Mabhida's health was rapidly deteriorating. "He opened his eyes and looked at us, closed his eyes, half opened them again, then died in our arms", he recalled.

In addition to his role in the SACP, Mabhida was a member of the National Executive of the ANC, and a senior figure in the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU).

Zuma said that it was SACTU, in consultation with the ANC, that sent Mabhida out of the country in 1960, "when the situation in South Africa was becoming unbearable, to mobilise support for the anti-apartheid struggle among the working people of the world".

He went on to become the first political commissar of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, "and was thus in charge of the political life of our army".

"Comrade Mabhida was an example of how it was possible to be a member of three organisations and to cement the alliance between them", declared Zuma. "In this he saw no contradiction".

After the death of ANC President, and Nobel peace prize laureate Albert Luthuli, in 1967, the post of president lay vacant for a period - but Oliver Tambo was universally recognised as the head of the organisation, "and Moses Mabhida was his number two", Zuma added.

In his travels across Africa in that period, Mabhida cam to know Samora Machel at Kongwa, the first training camp that the Tanzanian authorities allocated to Frelimo. "They were both leaders in the camps of their movements", said Zuma. "They used to sit together and imagine the time when South Africa and Mozambique would be free".

Exhuming the body of Mabhida was a sad occasion, Zuma acknowledged, but it was also "an occasion for us to regain our strength and inspiration, to celebrate the life of a leader and of a revolutionary".

Inevitably, thoughts went back to the day of Mabhida's funeral, on 29 March 1986, when Samora Machel, Oliver Tambo and the then chairman of the SACP, Joe Slovo, stood beside the grave, and pledged undying solidarity between the Mozambican and South African peoples.

Machel had declared "We shall be the guardians of his body.

Men who die fighting, who refuse to surrender, who serve the people and their ideals to the last breath, are victors. Moses Mabhida is a victorious combatant".

Mabhida's body will now return to South Africa, where he will be reburied in Pietermaritzburg on 1 December.