Source: "Pen Pictures of South African Communists", in Umsebenzi, organ of the South African Communist Party, vol. 1, no. 2, 1985; page 7.
Moses Kotane was born at Tamposstad near Rustenberg in the Northern Transvaal in 1905. After only a few years of formal schooling, he worked as a photographer’s assistant, domestic servant, miner and bakery worker. He joined the ANC in 1928 and the Party in 1929. In 1931 he became a full time functionary of our Party. He was a member of the Bakers’ Trade Union and in 1929 was elected Vice Chairman of the South African Federation of Native Trade Unions. In 1931 Kotane joined [Albert] Nzula as a pupil at the Lenin School in Moscow. When he returned in 1933, Kotane was elected to the Political Bureau of the Party and became its General Secretary in 1939, a position which he held until his death in 1978. In 1943 he served on the ANC Committee which drafted the historic document, African Claims, and in 1948 was elected to the National Executive Committee of the ANC. He was arrested in the Defiance Campaign of 1952, the Treason Trial of 1956-61, and the Emergency of 1960. In 1962 he was placed under house arrest. The following year he was sent abroad by the ANC and CP to help organise the external apparatus of the liberation movement. During this period he served as Treasurer-General of the ANC. On his 70th birthday he was awarded Isitwalandwe-Seaprankoe and the Soviet Order of the Friendship of the People.