Tzaneen community mourns former first lady of GTM
Tributes have been pouring in after the recent death of the former first lady of the Greater Tzaneen Municipality (GTM), Foni Mushwana.
She is the wife of Greater Tzaneen Municipality’s Mayor Othaniel ‘OJ’ Mushwana who led the municipality between 1996 and 2011 during three terms in office. She suffered from dementia in the last four years and went into a coma on December 11 last year.
She spent December in Tzaneen Mediclinic and was later transferred to InterCare Silver Lakes where she spent six weeks. She was transferred to Goue Jare’s old age home in Modjadjiskloof a week before she passed away. Mushwana was a Member of Parliament (MP) for five years and before that, she was the Khujwana education circuit manager.
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She was also the principal of three schools, a teacher, and the first South African Democratic Teachers Union  Gender Forum leader. Mushwana was the first person to fight for black learners’ rights to attend Tzaneen Primary School after 1994. In 1996, when Phindile Mushwana, her daughter, was accepted at the school, she ensured that English was established as a teaching medium at the school.
Her second son, Octavious (Tovy), says the family will miss her unconditional love, her jokes, her dance moves, and the songs that she regularly sang to them. She leaves behind her husband OJ, three children, Octavious (Tovy), Xongile and Phindile and also seven grandchildren
