To approximate a latter-day simile, if there is any one reason why former Botswana National Front vice president, Kopano Lekoma is still alive, it is because in the second weekend of December, 1988, he partied like a New-Year’s Eve reveller at Lion’s Park. On his way to Ditlharapeng, a Borolong village which is just a grenade’s throw away from the Botswana-South Africa border, he stopped over for a house party he encountered in Francistown on Friday and another in Mahalapye on Saturday.
Supposing Lekoma hadn’t punctuated his trip, his life would definitely have come to a full stop at the able hands of Eugene de Kock, commander of a South African Police death squad called Vlakplaas.
The squad’s kill rates were egregiously high and not for nothing did de Kock come to acquire the sobriquet “Prime Evil.” With the aid of the equally flagitious South African Defence Force commandoes, de Kock’s men quick-stepped north across the border to carry out a night raid on Lekoma’s house in Ditlharapeng as the owner was knocking back a couple and being serenaded with golden oldies at a party in Mahalapye.
This raid bore too many surface similarities to the one that occurred three years earlier in Gaborone on June 14, 1985. To this day, Motsei Madisa still asks herself how the Boer commandoes missed her house which was just a hop and skip away from that of Michael Hamlyn which was bombed to smithereens, the occupants incinerated in the process. As the bomb blasts made their debut in charts of civilian-neighbourhoods sounds, Madisa’s main concern was not her own safety but that of her seven-year old niece who was in the house with her, along with some Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) cadres.
“Those are the Boer commandoes,” she remembers one of the MK cadres saying repeatedly as the cacophony of blasts tore into the still of the night.
In moments when thoughts are all astray, the mind naturally loses its grip on reality and believes the impossible can be possible. Paralysed with fear, the adults in the house tried to divine, in hushed voices, whether there was a way they could ensure the child’s life was spared. In the most hopeful scenario, they beguiled themselves with the possibility of negotiating a safe passage for the little girl when the commandoes eventually came around while they surrendered to their fate. In reality though, Vlakplaas’ M.O was to attempt to kill any and everything with a pulse when it struck a target.
Fortunately for him, Monageng Mogalakwe (now a professor at the University of Botswana) was hundreds of kilometres away in Gantsi on an assignment of the Applied Research Unit in the Ministry of Local Government and Lands – as it then was. In terms of telecommunications infrastructure, the Gantsi of 1985 was just tortoise-crawling out of the 19th century, thus the post-raid morning found an anxious Mogalakwe huddled over a two-way radio set, desperately cold-calling the ministry’s headquarters in Gaborone to learn of the raid and of Motsei’s fate. By luck, an officer in the Social and Community Development department, Nonofo Molefi (current minister of transport and communications) happened to be passing by the radio room and answered the incoming call.
What Lekoma, Madisa and Mogalakwe have in common is that they were underground operatives of MK, the armed wing of the African National Congress. With the apartheid government dead and buried and de Kock serving a 212-year sentence in the C Max section of the Pretoria Central Prison, it is safe now to tell the stories of Batswana operatives who, at grave risk to life and limb, played a vigorous and determined role in the liberation of South Africa.
As a young boy growing up in Mafikeng, Lekoma took interest in the ANC politics, mainly because one of his relatives, Dr. Modiri Molema, was the party’s secretary general and as a 10-year old, participated in the 1952 defiance campaign by smashing shop windows in the town centre. However, he himself came dangerously close to having a police officer hurl his little his body into those same windows hadn’t a strange woman protestor leapt forward, planted herself between the window and the police officer, yelling as she did: “Ijoo ngwanakee!” (Oh! my child!)
“I started hating Boers that day,” Lekoma remembers.
He formally became a member of the ANC when he enrolled at Moeding College in 1959.” He says that practically all teachers at the school, who had been recruited by Bangwato regent, Tshekedi Khama, were members of the ANC. Upon leaving Moeng in 1963, he took a clerical job with the Bechuanaland Protectorate in Mafikeng but was soon transferred to Mahalapye. Lying smack along one of Africa’s major transportation corridors, Mahalapye was the ideal place for MK cadres to refuel on their way to and from the ANC’s headquarters in Lusaka. Lekoma found himself having to play host to waves of ANC youths who had been referred to him by Dr. Molema.
The deluge of South African youth into Botswana would come in 1976 following the infamous Soweto Uprising. Having enrolled for a Botswana National Front’s study group at Molefi Secondary School where she was a Form 4 student, Madisa was within the right political circles to come into contact with successive waves of South African refugees pouring in. Given its location and level of development, Mochudi hosted one of the largest geographic concentrations of those refugees. At one point, Madisa pleaded with the late Bakgatla traditional leader, Kgosi Linchwe II to provide accommodation for the youths roaming Mochudi and thus the village community hall became a refugee camp of sorts.
Students at the University of Botswana and Swaziland in Gaborone also found themselves having to play host to the South Africans. One of the main objectives of discriminative systems is to dehumanise the purported social inferiors by subjecting them to a ceaseless slew of indignities. Having fled South Africa with little more than the clothes on their backs and their way of life upended, the refugees found themselves homeless and penniless in a strange land and almost turning feral. A member of the Student Representative Council at the time, Mogalakwe says that the refugees, some of them his age mates, were sleeping rough around the campus “like rabbits.” Taking pity on them, he and other Good Samaritan students would extend a regime of small kindnesses (mainly accommodation and food) to them.
After passing her General Certificate of Education, Madisa came to UB where she was introduced to the campus network of South African refugees.
“At the time there were many South Africans here who were either studying or teaching. I met the likes of Wally Serote – the writer – with whom I’d discuss political issues,” Madisa says.
As Mogalakwe found out on a trip to the intervarsity games in Maseru, the surveillance capacity of the apartheid government was so extensive and fearsome that it had managed to pick up the farrago of anti-apartheid rhetoric that was being spouted on campuses in Frontline States like Botswana.
Passing through the South African border into Lesotho, he was only dimly aware that something was wrong when an immigration official told him: “You are not supposed to be here.” On the way back, he was arrested, taken to a police station in Ficksburg and locked up while the police consulted their superiors in Pretoria. On being released he was sent back into Lesotho from where the National University of Lesotho flew him to Gaborone. Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from the Department of the Interior in Pretoria, notifying him that henceforth he required a visa to enter South Africa. Essentially, he had been declared a prohibited immigrant. With the proposal Madisa would put to him soon afterwards and his response, his visa exemption could definitely not be lifted.
After graduating from UB, Madisa had gone to work at Moeding Secondary School. That should have distanced her from the nexus of liberation-struggle activity but the opposite happened. The ANC would, without a subject’s knowledge, assess their level of emotional investment in the struggle and decide whether such person could be trusted with highly secretive work. Madisa got high marks when she was subjected to this vetting process and was soon inducted into a realm strictly roped off to run-of-the-mill sympathisers. The golden ticket notwithstanding, her new assignment was fraught with peril. Her staff house in Moeding started harbouring groups of MK cadres who would sneak in at night and steal away early in the morning. Each group had a special knock. Madisa gives, as an example, one whose members would toss three pebbles on the roof of the house to announce their arrival.
In 1984, when Madisa took a job with UB and her relocation to Gaborone represented an extraordinary turnaround for her underground work. With the struggle having intensified, orders were relayed to her from the MK command in Lusaka that she should look for more safe houses. Her local handler was another UB staffer called Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile. One of the rules was that all information was to be committed to memory to obviate the obvious risk of writing things down.
“Up to this point I hadn’t involved Mogalakwe,” she says. “I just used his house as my own safe house.”
That changed with the instruction from Lusaka. Not only did Mogalakwe’s house join the roster of MK safe houses, the owner himself was sucked into the armed wing’s undercover work. Mogalakwe says that he still remembers the day one of the MK cadres said to him: “We have been talking about you in Lusaka, and we think we can use you.” Naturally he was thrilled to bits: “I was excited: so they know me in Lusaka? I said to myself. I knew the expression “use you” was a back-handed welcome into the MK underground.”
By day he was a regular civil servant working in the Applied Research Unit in the Ministry of Local Government and Lands but after hours and on weekends, he took on a new role.
“I became a terrorist-collaborator. Motsei drafted me into it. Me and her were very close – we still are,” Mogalakwe says.
One of their roles was to provide familial support to the MK cadres passing through Gaborone from and to Lusaka, some of it moral. He remembers that they both took some cadres staying at Motsei’s house to the UB40 concert at the national stadium “just so they could have a good time and unwind after what would have been a nerve-wrecking operation in South Africa. That was important because on a normal struggle day, fun never featured on the order of business. When they would stop over at Mogalakwe’s house, the cadres would be carrying war weaponry and part of what was supposed to be down time would be used to strip the interior of the cars and hide the weapons which would then be smuggled into South Africa and distributed to internal units.
“There was an understanding that information would be shared on a need-to-know basis because there was always the danger that if one knew too much and was arrested, interrogated and tortured, they would spill the beans, and endanger missions,” he explains.
He remembers one of the cadres telling him that with the kind of information he had about MK operations, there was no way he could allow himself to be taken alive. True to his word, when his unit was ambushed by the SADF in the former Bophuthatswana, the MK cadre fought to the last bullet and was killed in action.
In Lekoma’s case, weapons – mostly AK 47 rifles, were hidden in large suitcases in the transit house he operated in Ditlharapeng as well as in nearby ploughing fields. A goodly number of cadres also cycled in and out of this house. This operation went smoothly until 1988 when Lekoma was arrested by the police during a visit to South Africa and, by his reckoning, interrogated for some five hours. As a student in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, he had studied a course in military theory but, by his account, had never put his learning into practice. During this interrogation he was horrified to learn how much dirt South African intelligence had on him.
“They told me that I operated a transit house in Mokatako. They told me the date I was born, the names of the schools I had gone to, the date when I first went to Moscow and the type of plane I flew in and the number of the residence block I lived in while there. They also knew that I had, at different times, spent my holidays in Czchekoslovakia, Britain, Germany and Holland. When they told me that I had done military training in Russia and held the rank of general in the Red Army, I got really scared and thought they were going to send me to Robben Island,” says Lekoma, referring to the Indian Ocean hell-hole that the apartheid government buried Nelson Mandela in for 27 years.
MK’s standard recommendation to its operatives was that they took some civilian job to cover up their activism. Around this time, Lekoma was working for the MLGL and in trying to weasel his way out of the interrogation room, he told his captors that as a Botswana civil servant he could not participate in political activity and (truthfully) that he did not have a house in Mokatako.
“They said to me: ‘You don’t seem to be who we are looking for but if you are, your parents will either be grieving for you pretty soon or you will lose your house in Mokatako.’ Thereafter, they let me go,” he says.
Although it was a vastly superior operation, the apartheid security apparatus did not always get and execute missions on the basis of good intelligence. According to Madisa, often the security agents would take too long to act on intelligence and when they did, it would be stale. She hazards the guess that she escaped the 1985 raid because the intelligence the raiders had was not up to date. In Lekoma case, the information about the transit house was plain wrong. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – a body set up by the South African parliament to confront the raw and ugly truths of apartheid – learned years later, the information had been supplied by the Bophuthatswana intelligence services. A year later when they got it right, Lekoma did indeed lose his house.
Mogalakwe and Madisa never came into the hands of the South African police but even then, the local security police were never out of the picture this side of the border. One day as Mogalakwe was pulling up outside Madisa’s house for a regular update, when another car (an Opel Rekord) parked behind him and from it shot out a man who hurried over and told him: “We are looking for you.” He tried to play it cool, nonchalantly telling the stranger, whom he quickly determined was a Special Branch officer, that he would go to the station later. However, the officer was insistent – and grew stern.
“Now! We want you now!’” he commanded.
At a point where Mogalakwe wanted to resist, really out fear than bravado, Madisa had come out of the house and advised him to comply with the officer’s instructions. From Madisa’s house to the Special Branch offices at the main mall, Mogalakwe recalls being sandwiched between two Special Support Group (SSG) officers wearing bullet-proof vests and clutching AK47 rifles pointing skywards.
“It was a really frightening experience,” he says.
He was not taken inside the station but two senior officers whom Mogalakwe still remembers as Superintendents Dingalo and Muyaluka, came out to ask him questions him in the courtyard.
“What surprised me most, however, was the complete lack of anger and hostility on their part. They asked me where I had hidden the weapons and admonished me for endangering national security. There was no anger, no hostility as to make one think that they were two uncles admonishing an errant nephew. I later realized that they just wanted to keep me busy whilst scouring my yard for signs of any fresh diggings.”
Madisa had similar run-ins with the local security police but in all the times that she would be picked up at random without an arrest warrant, she always got kid-glove treatment. Following the 1985 raid, she says that MK cadres began to carry handguns for personal protection and when security police called at her house one day they found one during a search. She was taken to the Central Police Station but when they got there the arresting officers just left her in the charge office and disappeared. After a long wait, a desk officer who had noticed her idling asked: “Ma’am have you been attended to?” Naturally the answer was in the negative and not taking too much interest in the purpose of her presence in the charge office, the officer told her she could leave.
Sixteenth century England introduced the saying “a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse” to its sayings to denote acquiescence with an undertaking that is borderline illegal. Mogalakwe says that years later after his and Madisa’s experiences, he came to realise that the Botswana government – including the security police – adopted a “nod-and-wink” policy to deal with underground liberation struggle operatives because it was itself sympathetic to the liberation struggle, although they had to balance that with the national interest. He maintains that the police knew what they were doing, purposefully hovered at the periphery and only stepped in when they felt that these operatives were about to cross the line.
However, while the Special Branch) would wink and nod to Batswana harbouring MK cadres and the jewellery of their trade, SADF commandoes were consistently merciless. Madisa says that when the commandoes intensified bombing raids in the Frontline States, she asked Mogalakwe to establish more safe houses where cadres could deploy. Even then, danger still lurked around every street corner and to prepare for when she would have to disappear into thin air at a moment’s notice, Motsei kept a travel bag packed with all overnight essentials. One tip-off was delivered by Professor Kgositsile who called at her house at around nine at night on a rainy day and told her to scram toot sweet.
She relives the danger of the day: “Once we knew there was going to be a raid, we had to get out of our houses immediately.”
In this case, “we” includes all operatives in the Frontline States. Infiltration worked both ways because in the same way that the apartheid regime had wormed its way into MK ranks, the ANC also had its spies in SADF. Thus when word got out that a raid was to occur one night in 1987, Madisa rushed to Mogalakwe’s house to alert him. In the house she also found Mogalakwe’s girlfriend (now wife) who in her condition of a seven months pregnancy, had to be assisted to jump over the back fence as the party fled on foot before the arrival of the Boers.
“You never knew how far the Boers were and as soon as you got the message you had to flee immediately,” Madisa says.
The option of using Mogalakwe’s car was out because there was fear that it would be an easier target if the SADF commandoes were waiting in the dark some in front of the house. The following morning, it turned out that Maseru – and not Gaborone, was the target but there was the luxury to wait while raw intelligence was being refined.
Following the precipitous decline of apartheid South Africa and with his clout having withered irreversibly, de Kock appeared before the TRC to apply and was granted amnesty for his role in the Ditlharapeng raid. Lekoma says that the ANC has promised to build him another house. Mogalakwe and Madisa are still working at UB – like Lekoma, the former is BNF while the latter belongs to the BCP under whose ticket she has ran for parliament.
The ANC has not forgotten friends who came to its assistance in its long hours of need. When the party turned 100 this year, the trio was invited to the Bloemfontein extravaganza in their personal capacity by ANC’s secretary general, Gwede Mnxashe. Although he knew that the invitation was a standard letter sent to thousands of other people around the world, Mogalakwe says that it gave him a great sense of emotional and spiritual fulfillment.
