Tiego Moseneke was the most influential leader of our generation of student activists in the 1980s.
Throughout that period, he bestrode the Wits University political landscape like a colossus. However, that did not prevent some radicals from crossing swords with him.
To say I was his political rival would be more self-flattery than reality, but still we clashed across the black political aisle more often than either of us would care to remember.
Moseneke and I first met as law students at Wits in 1983.
He was a year or two ahead of me. In those days black students were not allowed to enrol at white universities, even if they had been admitted by those institutions.
We were not allowed to stay on campus and had to trudge back and forth to our segregated residence at Glyn Thomas House on the grounds of Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto.
As a black student you walked the streets of Braamfontein at your peril. You could be arrested under any of the panoply of pass laws that turned upstanding black people into overnight criminals.
To be sure, we lived in the lap of luxury at Glyn Thomas. We enjoyed fancy dining facilities, tennis courts, swimming pools, a bar and our own individual rooms.
Our motto was “Glyn Thomas, Our House, Our Home!” I never understood why white people would congregate a bunch of angry young black people in one segregated space and expect us not to conspire against them.
Soon after I settled into my room Moseneke came knocking. He wanted to know if he could put a poster on the door advertising a meeting of the Azanian Students Organisation (Azaso).
Azaso had been formed in 1978 as a student wing of the black consciousness-inspired Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo). However, in 1981 Azaso repudiated black consciousness philosophy, broke away from Azapo and embraced the ANC’s ideology of nonracialism.
While Azapo advocated a blacks-only strategy of political organising, the ANC advocated working together with whites. This became the dividing and often deadly line in black progressive politics in the 1980s.
Mosdeneke had come as a representative of nonracialism, but no sooner was the poster up than three other students also came knocking — Kwezi (Bra K) Kobus, Moreilane (Raikes) Moreilane and Linda (Tshiz-burger) Mtshizana.
They asked me where I was from — and of course they knew I was from the cradle of black consciousness, Steve Biko’s hometown of Ginsberg township in King William’s Town.
They asked if I did not consider it a betrayal of my homeboy that I should on my door have a poster of an organisation that had betrayed Biko by abandoning black consciousness.
While Azapo advocated a blacks-only strategy of political organising, the ANC advocated working together with whites. This became the dividing and often deadly line in black progressive politics in the 1980s
My 17-year-old mind quickly realised that I was caught in the middle of something much bigger than myself. I was the target of a political recruiting drive by the respective organisations.
The Biko gambit worked, and I joined the Azanian Student Movement, which was formed to fill the void left by Azaso.
Our answer to Moseneke’s charisma was the late Kabelo Lengane. The Sowetan ran a story with their photographs across its front page.
You would have been forgiven for thinking we were in the middle of a sports derby, except the stakes were far more serious, as we would see in the subsequent years, as the rivalry turned into unspeakable violence.
I did not see Moseneke until I came back from graduate study in the US in the late 1990s.
He invited me to Jabulani Bar at the Hyatt Hotel in Johannesburg, the favoured haunt of the emergent black petit bourgeoisie. We chewed the fat until the wee hours about the latest goings-on in the country and in his organisation, the ANC.
I remember asking why his generation of student leaders had gone Awol from the site of action and left the space to a rather questionable cast of characters. With time he surely would have made it to the presidency of the ANC, I said.
He had started a law firm and the possibility of leaving the people he had hired seemed to lie heavily on his conscience. But I could sense that things had changed for him — he could not fit in the culture of the ANC.
It is one thing to admire something from a distance, and quite another to experience it at close hand.
The reason for our meeting was that I was planning a book of profiles of black student leaders at Wits during our time (please don’t ask about the book).
Years passed but we later reconnected and sat down for an interview. I was interested as much in the origins of his leadership as I was in the substance of his political thinking, and that is what I want to share.
We started by talking about his ability to enthral and capture the imagination of thousands of people.
He had been a champion debater at Hebron High School in the homeland of Bophuthatswana. He remembered that “it was a very good school but it was in Bophuthatswana. [Lucas] Mangope actively sought to persuade my father to come and become minister of education, which of course my dad dismissed with contempt.”
He was expelled when he refused to join in singing the homeland’s national anthem. “The lyrics were hysterical”, he recalled, “something like 'we have attained our freedom without a drop of blood'.”
He subsequently matriculated with flying colours from Mamelodi High School in Pretoria.
In those days Anglo American offered bursaries for black students who wanted to go to Wits. The student cadets, as they were called, would spend a year at company headquarters before university. The aim was to turn them into loyal company men.
“I was being groomed for leadership at Anglo and I would come out and become an Anglo man. When I left matric I wanted to go to engineering school but I ended up doing a BCom.”
To be a refined Anglo man however required that one used proper diction and elocution. He had benefited from his father being a teacher but the finer points were left to his Anglo mentor John Burton.
“Before I went to Wits I spent a year at Anglo attached to Burton — absolute ‘pommy’. His brief was to polish me. He said to me, 'Tiego, when you speak to people don’t let your voice betray your emotions. Speak in monotones. Don’t get close when you speak to them. Don’t put your elbows on the table. Watch cricket, not soccer.’”
He put that training to effective use during our debates. My mentor Saths Cooper would send me out to debate Moseneke but I never stood a chance.
An example is the campaign I ran for the presidency of the Black Student Society (BSS) against Dali Mpofu in 1985. As a black consciousness organisation we were not recognised by the university because we were not open to white students.
That meant we did not receive the funding allocation that other student organisations received. And so we figured that if we took over leadership of the BSS we would be able to get university funding without compromising on our blacks-only strategy.
The hypocrisy of the university lay in that BSS received funds because it worked with white students in the National Union of South African Students (Nusas).
Mpofu was also popular with the student body, but Moseneke was his drawcard at a debate that took place at the social science building.
Moseneke went first and roused the crowd to its feet. I thought I was holding my own in response until students started filing out. They were there for the main act and now that the act was over, they would rather go back to class than listen to the rantings of a radical. Needless to say, Mpofu beat me hands down and we failed to capture the BSS.
Moseneke described his mandate from the ANC as follows: “At Wits you needed a personality that had cross-over appeal. It was not enough to mobilise the 200 black students on campus but the 20,000 white students.
"Our mission was to win the support of these young whites away from the regime. We thought that through them we could affect the attitudes of their own parents.”
However, even the radicals within Azaso — Bheki Mlangeni, Chris Ngcobo, Derrick Masoek, Lawrence Boya — were not pleased about him having high tea with the deputy vice-chancellor for student affairs, Mervyn Shear, on the 11th floor of Senate House.
I was particularly upset when he allowed himself to be persuaded by law professor June Sinclair that we should call off one of our marches because we would be met by the wrath of the police.
We embarked on the march any way and found ourselves on the other side of the prison bars at Hillbrow police station. But it was Moseneke’s connections with Shear and attorney Kathy Satchwell that got us released.
Indeed, even those of us who were opposed to white paternalism benefited from our privileged status as Wits students. The university would send a lawyer to secure our release — until PW Botha did away with all those niceties when he declared states of emergency in 1986 and 1987.
Moseneke explained the relationship with Shear as follows: “We were incredibly fortunate to have had Shear in the position he was in at the time. In typical liberal tradition he held matters like academic freedom sacrosanct. He wanted to ensure that the university could teach what it wanted and admit whomever it wanted and conduct itself in a manner that it chose.
“The radicals were asking why we were faffing around with academic freedom instead of making the country ungovernable. For me it was an organising tool. I palpably saw the university turn from narrow concerns with academic freedom to national questions of social justice.”
Hey Tigga, man, we were incredibly lucky to have you as our lodestar. Robala ka kgotso ntate.
• Mangcu is professor of sociology and history at George Washington University in the US.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.