On December 9 1982, I should have died. I was a bumptious teenager, suffused with revolutionary fervour and full of beans. The surfeit of beans had led to a misunderstanding with Sis Limpho Hani, resulting in my departure from the apartment I occupied at Kuena Flats, just behind the Victoria Hotel in Maseru.
Sis Limpho held sway over the apartment, procured through the good offices of a friend of hers, a Lesotho national. That was customary operating procedure, as most proprietors would not rent their properties to ANC exiles as they occasionally invited reprisals from the apartheid monstrosity.
This would prove to be my salvation as about six weeks after I left it would be one of the 12 ANC residences attacked on that December day in 1982, a Thursday. The guy I shared the apartment with — Matikwane “Guinea” Seroto, who had, second to Chris Hani, been most responsible for my tutelage in revolution — was killed.
The boers would also mistakenly strike the next-door apartment to Sis Limpho’s, killing a Lesotho national, Matumo Ralebitso, the daughter of Lesotho’s then ambassador to Mozambique. Through a cosmic quirk I avoided certain death that morning, a denouement entirely ascribable to the above-mentioned misunderstanding.
On the evening of December 8, ANC intelligence head in Lesotho Jeff Maqethuka told me I would be taking over the provision of security that evening for the exiled Thembu monarch, King Sabata Dalindyebo, from Gibson Njenje, who had arrived on or around that day with the king from Maputo.
Maqethuka intimated that he planned to take Njenje on a night out on the town. Unhappily I obliged, miffed that Njenje was being feted while I was being dragooned for duty. It is something Njenje and I still get a kick out of.
I headed over to the Lithabaneng neighbourhood where the king was ensconced — in a block of flats owned by the very ambassador to Mozambique whose daughter would be killed later that night. The building was referred to as Ha-Ralebitso.
Just before 1am on December 9 a volley of guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy armaments began their symphony of death.
We were accustomed to armed incursions in Maseru from the Lesotho Liberation Army (LLA), the military arm of the Basutoland Congress Party, which, supported by the boers, was conducting an insurgency against the government of prime minister Leabua Jonathan.
Five minutes later Sis Mpumi Setsubi, who lived in that apartment block, came over to inquire if we should evacuate. A total of 17 ANC members and their families were living in the building, including Jerry Modisane, a lawyer and erstwhile president of the South African Student Organisation, and Girlie Pikoli and her daughter Zukiswa — who was about 12 months old at the time and is now a Daily Maverick writer.
I asked Setsubi to wait a bit as I was still evaluating the situation. Three minutes later, as the sound of guns and helicopters intensified, it became clear that this was no run-of-the-mill LLA incursion and, accordingly, I issued the instruction for all 17 to evacuate to a mountainside nearby. I then returned to my rampart outside in the dark.
At about 2.45am I spotted movement. A mixture of fear and excitement gripped me. This was every young revolutionary’s wet dream — an eye-for-an-eye and a tooth-for-a-tooth encounter. But instead of an exchange of fire, someone shouted: “O seke oa rethunya (Don’t shoot us).” It was the guy I lived with, Raymond “Teboho” Maele from Bloemfontein, and Mzwakhe “Andile” Cikozani, from Qonce (then known as King William’s Town).
They could not see me in the dark but had imagined where I would be. These two brothers had walked, leopard-crawled and done everything possible to come to our rescue, convinced we had come under attack. It had taken them almost two hours to get to me, about 3km away. Such was the intensity of boer traffic that night, helicopters with flashlights, roaring armoured trucks and the like. They owned the night. Maele and Cikozani would walk for only a few minutes and would be forced to take cover and crawl to avoid being detected. But they had inched forward towards their imperilled comrades — cavalry to the rescue. What those brothers did is inscribed in my soul for eternity. It was the true meaning of comradeship.
The guns soon fell silent and we determined that the raid was over. Together we retrieved the 17 souls from the mountainside, and along with an ex-Robben Islander, Ntate Maru, a tough old codger with a black belt in karate, set off to establish if we had in fact been the targets of the raid.
Our first stop was the apartment complex where the three of us lived. Maele and Cikozani had left the place two hours before. Could it have come under attack in that time? ANC firebrand Tony Yengeni also lived there. It was untouched.
These were a bunch of cheerful, hope-filled youngsters, who had just escaped apartheid rule and here they were, brutally exterminated
We then made our way to Lower Thamae, where newly arrived comrades from home stayed in a place nicknamed Cuba. There we were confronted with the gory confirmation that we had indeed been blitzed as we encountered 10 bodies lying all over each other, riddled with armour-piercing bullets.
It was a grisly spectacle. These were a bunch of cheerful, hope-filled youngsters who had just escaped apartheid rule and were on their way to school at various locales around the world, and here they were, brutally exterminated.
We moved on. From Qualing to Upper Thamae to Lower Seoli we encountered an orgy of death and destruction.
We proceeded to my old neighbourhood of Kuena flats, where we found my mentor, Guinea, lying dead on the forecourt. Under overwhelming fire he had jumped from his apartment on the third floor, breaking his legs, whereupon he was shot dead as he lay immobilised. I found myself muttering under my breath: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” We also encountered death’s visitation to the flat next door to Sis Limpho’s. By then, she and her three daughters, aged two, four and 10, had safely retreated.
Our next stop was Ha-Hohlo, where Mathabatha “Booker-T” Sexwale, Tokyo’s elder brother, lived with his family. The place had been incinerated. There was no possibility of any survivor.
We proceeded to the Florida neighbourhood, where the chief representative of the ANC in Lesotho, Zola Nqini, lived. The horror of death once more greeted us, including of Nqini himself.
It was while we were there talking to the survivors that the governor of the Lesotho Reserve Bank, Hae Phofolo, dropped by to inform us that Booker-T and his family had made it and were safely at his place. Booker-T was one of the few who were fortunate to be armed that day and had fought valiantly, breaching the boer encirclement of his home and leading his family to safety. His daughter, the media personality Kay, only eight years old at the time, sustained wounds requiring treatment.
There were so many dead at Nqini’s place but one of the inhabitants, Mthobeli “Trinity” Zokhwe, a former Kaizer Chiefs midfielder, was unaccounted for. His wife Busi had overheard the boers saying: “That other terrorist tried to get away but Fernando got him.”
She was convinced she had become a widow. And the name Fernando connoted the presence of members of the notorious 32 Battalion, made up of renegades from the former Portuguese colonies, which had become the bane of liberation movements in its utter savagery.
But the Trinity story had a happy conclusion. Trinity was in the habit of going for long jogs at around 11pm, when the streets were quiet. So at about the time the raid began he had just returned from his jog and was bathing in the outhouse. He had been confronted by two gun-toting boers as he was washing. Trinity had grabbed one of his assailants and thrown him against the other and they both crashed down as he made his escape. He vaulted over the gate and melted into the night.
He hid in the veld, giving him a vantage point to watch the unfolding drama. After the raid was over at around 3am, he had made his way to a local woman’s place nearby.
When the woman opened her door, there was this naked man on her doorstep with blood caked all over him. You can imagine how frightening that must have been after such a dramatic night of thunder and lightning. But Trinity’s protective deities once again interceded as she obliged him despite her trepidation.
But at daybreak she kicked him out with clothes to cover his naked torso. “What will the neighbours think?” she had said. She was a married woman and the thought that people would imagine she had been cavorting with another man while murder and mayhem reverberated all round was mortifying.
We lost 30 comrades and 12 of our Basotho brethren in that two-hour blitz.
Njenje and I were assigned the task of interviewing the survivors to construct a comprehensive picture for the leadership in Lusaka. We would learn of the final words of Ligwa “Zakes” Mdlankomo: “I am dying. Dying for my people. I am dying for our freedom.”
We also encountered the painful realisation that the carnage that night had been rendered easier by the internecine divisions among us.
We had been alerted to the possibility of a raid through information smuggled from the bowels of Vlakplaas by Xolile “Shepard” Salati, who despite being in the bosom of the enemy had remained faithful to the ANC’s ideals.
On receipt of that information, relayed through Shepard’s cousin, Wandile Ondala, Chris Hani travelled to Maseru from Maputo to warn us that the boers were planning a major strike against us.
ANC intelligence issued an advisory for the comrades to be armed and where possible not to sleep in their homes. Mystifyingly, the ordnance department, which oversaw weaponry, refused to arm the folks on the bizarre rationale that the guns were not meant for our “comfort and security” in Lesotho but for inside South Africa, the theatre of battle.
Consequently, on that night you had freedom fighters cowering under their beds, impotently awaiting their deaths. In their published analysis of the raid the boers attributed its success to “divisions and a financial crisis in the ANC in Lesotho”.
You would think the ANC would have internalised the lessons of Maseru. The divisions among us caused avoidable deaths 40 years ago. Today those divisions, turbocharged by the suppuration of filthy lucre, have brought the ANC to the brink of extinction as a force for good.
The ANC will meet in conference in December exactly one week after the 40th anniversary of the massacre. Will it use this occasion to finally effect its much ballyhooed renewal, transforming itself into an entity worthy of the Maseru victims, reconnecting and recommitting to a battered populace for whom the liberation dividend is increasingly a chimera?
• Oyama Mabandla is chair of the council of advisers at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection
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