Fikile Mlotshwa, a community activist best known for being the first person to win the Sowetan Woman of the Year Award in 1987, has died.
The 82-year-old woman passed away on Sunday.
According to her heartbroken daughters, Mlotshwa was not only a mother but also an Africanist, a community worker, a lover, a woman of God and caregiver.
Beyond the public eye, Mlotshwa was a mother who valued simplicity and strength, they said.
Speaking to Sowetan just a few days after her mother’s passing, Thandi Mlotshwa, 50, described her mom as a phenomenal woman with an angelic voice.
“My mom always emphasised prayer. She would say, ‘Do the good things anyway. Do not expect to be praised or rewarded. Don’t want something in return, but always do everything with God.’ She was a woman of prayer.
“She would always say, ‘I don’t go to traditional healers, and I don’t use muthi.’
“She always emphasised prayer,” Thandi said.
She said since her mother’s passing on Sunday, the family has been having a very difficult time.
“We are celebrating her life and being very grateful to God that he gave us a mother. She was a very simple woman. She would tell us that when she dies, she wants the cheapest coffin. When we went to the parlour with my siblings and were looking at coffins, we all laughed because there was no way we were going to bury mama in a cheap box,” she said.
“She would say, ‘Save money and bury me in a tomato box.’
“She loved flowers, and we are grateful that we were able to give her the flowers she deserved.”
Her other daughter, Zozizwe Mmusi, 47, described her mother as strict and straightforward. According to Mmusi, she always tells her sister that she wishes she had her mother’s ability to say what she feels and not cater to people.
Her mother, she recalled, would always say, “If you don’t like it, say so.”
“But she would not say it rudely; she had a way of saying it most humanely. Above all, she was a community worker and an Azanian,” she said.
“She believed in Africanism like there’s no tomorrow. It’s really a lot, and we don’t know how to go forward.”
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Mmusi said outside of community work, family was everything to her mother.
“We came first, even when she was sick. She always cried for her siblings, always wanting them to be next to her. She was a loving person with a calm, beautiful voice.
“And we are going to honour her by living up to what she taught us, which was humility and kindness. She taught us to love everyone, especially one another,” she said.
Mmusi said because her mother worked in the community and with families that were often left broken after deaths as well as siblings fighting each other, she drilled it into them not to fight.
“She really loved us all, always saying that we will need each other. She stayed with my sister full time, and she would say to my brother when he visited, ‘when I am no longer around, do not abandon her; look after her,’ because of what she saw, and it brought her fear,” she said.
“We will continue her legacy by loving each other and teaching our children. Continuing to teach her children about that kind of love.”
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