Ongkopotse Tiro demonstrated honesty without fear: Prof. Pityana

Co-founder of the South African Student Organisation (SASO) later called SASCO, Professor Barney Pityana, says Onkgopotse Tiro demonstrated honesty without fear.

Pityana delivered a keynote address at the Onkgopotse Tiro Memorial Lecture at the University of Limpopo.

Black Consciousness member, Tiro bravely took on the apartheid regime through his speech as president of the students’ representative council (SRC) at the University of Limpopo in the 1970s.

He was later killed with what is believed to be a parcel bomb sent to him by the apartheid government while in exile in Botswana in 1974.

Pityana says Tiro led with honour,

“The authorities – all the apartheid government authorities and the Bantustan authorities who were there – he challenged them to recognise that black people are not there to be pushed around and Bantu education was never going to succeed in thinking that all that blackness was about to be pushed around. He challenged them about the education he received, about the degree that he was graduating in on that day,” says Pityana.

Tiro’s family says the memorial lecture held in his honour is an indication that his death was not in vain.

Tiro’s brother, Mookami, was also speaking during the memorial lecture.

Mookami Tiro says the lectures bring comfort to the family.

“I’m not going to report what they said as I said. I request that you teach us about Onkgopotse. To the family, he was a son, a brother, a cousin, an uncle and to the nation he was a teacher, a leader, a liberator and a freedom fighter. These lectures are to the family’s sources of inspiration and comfort that we have lost a brother which we never knew (and) that he never died in vain,” says Tiro.