The district municipality with its offices in the impressive building in Oosthuise Street is called Gert Sibande.
Some readers may wonder where the name comes from.
The Eastvaal District Council was renamed Gert Sibande in February 2003 in honour of Richard Gert Sibande
who was known in the ANC as the “Lion of the East” for his political and trade union work in the Eastern Transvaal.
Gert Sibande was born in Ermelo in 1901 from a family of farm labourers and was one of the 156 accused activists in the Treason Trial in 1956. He spent 20 years working on different farms in the Eastern Transvaal and never stayed on the same farm for long, because he liked to argue about working conditions on the farms.
In the 1930s Gert started a Farm Workers Association, the first organisation in South Africa to fight for farm workers’ rights. In 1947 he helped Michael Scott and Ruth First in their press exposure of the near-slavery conditions of Africans on Bethal farms. In 1953 he was deported from Bethal after being hounded by authorities.
He was banished from Bethal to Komatipoort where he founded the Plantation and Allied Union and continued to work for the ANC after he was banned. He spent his last days in Manzini, Swaziland where he died in 1987 and was buried there. He is survived by five children.
In his honour, the Mpumalanga Government named one of its district municipalities after Gert Sibande. In April 2007 he was awarded the order of Albert Luthuli in Gold by Pres Thabo Mbeki and was also awarded the order for his contribution to the struggle for the improvement of farm workers’ working conditions.
The GSDM serves these local municipalities: Msukaligwa (Ermelo), Govan Mbeki (Secunda), Chief Albert Luthuli (Carolina), Mkhondo (Piet Retief), Lekwa (Standerton), Dr Pixley Ka Seme (Volkrust) and Dipaleseng (Balfour).
