18 June 1942 in Mbewuleni, a small village in the former homeland of Transkei, now part of the Eastern Cape. The second of four siblings, he had one sister, Linda (born 1941, died 2003), and two brothers, Moeletsi (born 1945) and Jama (born 1948, died 1982). His parents were Epainette (died 2014), a trained teacher, and Govan (died 2001), a shopkeeper, teacher, journalist, and senior activist in the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Both Epainette and Govan came from educated, Christian, land-owning families, and Govan's father was Sikelewu Mbeki, a colonially appointed headman. The couple had met in Durban, where Epainette had become the second black woman to join the SACP (then still called the Communist Party of South Africa). However, while Mbeki was a child, his family was separated when Govan moved alone to Ladismith for a teaching job. Mbeki has said that he was "born into the struggle," and recalls that his childhood home was decorated with portraits of Karl Marx and Mahatma Gandhi. Indeed, Govan named him after senior South African communist Thabo Mofutsanyana. Mbeki began attending school in 1948, the same year that the National Party was elected with a mandate to legislate apartheid. The Bantu Education Act was implemented towards the end of his school career, and in 1955 he arrived at the Lovedale Institute, an eminent mission school outside Alice, as part of the last class which would be permitted to follow the same curriculum as white students. At Lovedale, he was a year behind Chris Hani, his future colleague and rival in the ANC. Mbeki joined the ANC Youth League at age fourteen and in 1958 became the secretary of its Lovedale branch. Shortly afterwards, at the start of his final year of high school, he was identified as one of the leaders of a March 1959 boycott of classes, and was summarily expelled from Lovedale. He nonetheless sat for matric examinations and obtained a second-class pass. 1960–62: Johannesburg In June 1960, Mbeki moved to Johannesburg, where he lived in the home of ANC secretary general Duma Nokwe and where he intended to sit for A-level examinations. The ANC had recently been banned in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre, but Mbeki remained highly politically active, becoming national secretary of the African Students' Association, a new (and short-lived) youth movement envisaged as replacing the now illegal ANC