01/09/2026
Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana (1899 – 1995) was a South African activist. He was born in the Orange Free State and worked as a teacher, miner and journalist. Mofutsanyana became an active member of the Communist Party of South Africa and the African National Congress. He studied in the Lenin School in Moscow in the 1930s where he strengthened his political knowledge. For most of the 1930s he was on the party's political bureau, serving as general secretary until 1939 when Moses Kotane assumed the position. In the 1940s he chaired the party's Johannesburg district committee and also served on the central committee and as editor, from 1945, of Inkululeko, the Communist paper. He was one of those charged with fomenting the African mineworkers' strike of 1946. In 1937, 1942, and 1948 he ran as a Communist candidate for election to the Natives' Representative Council but was always defeated. Mofutsanyana attended the meetings of the All African Convention (AAC) in 1935 and 1936, each time being elected to the AAC's executive committee. His more long-term concern, however, was with building the ANC into an effective organisation, and in 1937 he joined J. B. Marks, S. S. Tema, and others in reviving the Transvaal ANC. Under A. B. Xuma in the 1940s he served on the African National Congress's (ANC) national executive committee as an advisor on labor matters, and in 1943 he was one of the signatories of Africans' Claim. He was on the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of South Africa when it was banned and dissolved in 1950 and was one of the foremost among those who worked to build the South African Communist Party underground. He went into exile in 1959. Source: SAHO, Pzacad
