Obed Bapela

Bapela was born on 28 February 1958 in Alexandra, a township outside Johannesburg in the former Transvaal Province.[1] He was the eldest of seven children, with four brothers and two sisters.[1] With their mother and stepfather, they lived in a one-room house in Alexandra, except for a brief period in the late 1960s, when Bapela lived with his grandfather in Ga-Masemola in the Northern Transvaal.[1]

Bapela's first substantive involvement in political organising was during the 1976 Soweto uprising; still in high school, he was involved in the protests in Alexandra and became a student activist in the aftermath.[1] He and other activists were expelled from their school in 1978,[1] but he earned several tertiary certificates and a diploma in journalism.[2] He trained as a cadet reporter at the Weekly Mail, in a cohort of trainees that also included Ferial Haffajee.[3]

At the same time, his involvement in anti-apartheid activism intensified in the early 1980s. In 1979, he joined underground structures of the African National Congress (ANC), which at the time was banned inside South Africa;[2] in his ANC activism, he worked closely with Paul Mashatile and other activists in Alexandra.[4][5] He was also a member of the Congress of South African Students, and in 1983 he became a founding member both of the Alexandra Youth Congress and of the United Democratic Front. He was later the deputy president of the Alexandra Youth Congress.[2]

In May 1986, he was elected as publicity secretary in the executive of the Alexandra Action Committee, chaired by Moses Mayekiso;[6] his involvement in the committee led to his indictment in the Rand Supreme Court on treason charges, with Bapela, Mayekiso, Richard Mdakane, and two others accused of attempting to render Alexandra "ungovernable".[7] He was detained on several other occasions in the 1980s[3] and remained on trial between 1987 and 1990.[2] The ANC was unbanned in 1990 during the negotiations to end apartheid, and Bapela became involved in the party's newly re-established overt structures, serving as regional secretary of its PWV regional branch from 1991 to 1994.[2]

In the first post-apartheid elections in April 1994, Bapela was elected to represent the ANC in the Gauteng Provincial Legislature. He served a single term in his seat, leaving in 1999.[8] During the term, he chaired the legislature's portfolio committee on safety and security.[9] In the same period, he was Deputy Provincial Secretary and then Provincial Secretary of the ANC's Gauteng branch.[10][11]

After that, in 2000, Bapela was assigned to the ANC's headquarters at Luthuli House, where he was the party's coordinator for international relations.[12] He joined the National Assembly in 2002, filling a casual vacancy.[8] He has served continuously in the National Assembly since then:[13] he was elected to a full term in the seat in the 2004 general election and later was appointed as chairperson of the assembly, deputised by Andries Nel.[14] He also remained involved in foreign policy; in 2005, the Mail & Guardian named him one of 100 people who would "shape South Africa in the decade ahead", in his case as "a growing force in foreign affairs".[15]

Bapela met his first wife, politician Connie Bapela, in 1981; they had three adult children before she died in February 2018.[28] In October 2019, he announced his engagement to Palesa Ngomane, a civil servant from Mpumalanga.[29]

Bapela's parliamentary residence in Cape Town was burgled in 2005.[30] In February 2016, he was admitted to Milpark Hospital with minor injuries sustained in a car accident on the N12 highway near Fochville, Gauteng.[31]

• History of the African National Congress
• Politics in South Africa
• Provincial governments of South Africa

• Obed Bapela at People's Assembly
• Testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission