South Africa Celebrates Pioneering Anti-Poverty Activist

South African scholars and activists ranging from pioneers of the black consciousness movement of the 1960s and 1970s to liberal academics gathered in St George's Cathedral, Cape Town, on Monday May 2 to pay tribute at the funeral of their colleague, Francis Wilson, who spent his life challenging apartheid policies and exposing the exploitation of Southern African mineworkers by mining companies.

In the words of the eminent academic, Dr Mamphela Ramphele, Wilson pursued scholarship "that challenged the ivory towers of academia not to avert their gaze from the ugly realities of poverty, inequality and inequities of racism, sexism and other forms of exploitation." In an evaluation of his work, journalist Pippa Green wrote that Wilson's experience down one of South Africa's deep-level mines "put him on a lifelong path of exposing how pernicious the system of migrant labour was, not only for South Africa but for the region."

One of his most important initiatives aimed at addressing the sources of poverty in South Africa was the organisation of major studies of the issue, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, in the 1980s and again in 2012.

At the funeral, figures including Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana, general secretary of the SA Council of Churches (SACC) and an associate of murdered anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, and Dr Hlophe Bam, who formerly chaired South African's electoral commission, described Wilson's upbringing and life in a non-racial tradition as the descendant of missionaries and scholars who worked in the black communities of the Eastern Cape province. His mother, Professor Monica Wilson, was a pioneering anthropologist who studied at Cambridge University in Britain in the 1930s and went on to do research in Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa.