One of the last survivors of the Lesoma Ambush still in service took his last salute on June 30, thus ending 35 years of a career in uniform.
Brigadier Benson Bosetswe Mogamise was a sergeant, five months away from his 25th birthday, on that afternoon of 28 February 1978, when the Botswana Defence Force suffered its heaviest blow. Soldiers of the Rhodesian army that was fighting a losing war against the liberation movement crossed into Botswana and laid an ambush in an unprovoked attack that would turn the world opinion against Ian Smith’s regime.
When the guns fell silent, 15 BDF soldiers had died ÔÇô some charred almost beyond recognition.
The fortunate ones, such as Mogamise, escaped by a stroke of luck and spent many hours wandering in the bush, parrying danger from predators.
He was one of the BDF’s first instructors at its inception in April 1977, transferring from the Police Mobile Unit. At the beginning of February 1978, a class of recruits had just completed its basic course, and they were sent on a trip to Kasane. As one of the instructors, Mogamise accompanied the men. He was meant to be back by end of that month to begin training a new intake of recruits. On the last day of that trip, his life would change forever.
The soldiers were having lunch when two teenagers on bicycles reached their camp to report that some Rhodesian military aircraft had been flying suspiciously around the village. Since Mogamise’s platoon was on standby, he was ordered to get his men ready to investigate what had just been reported by the emissaries.
The platoon searched around Lesoma Village’s environs, but there was no sight of any strange goings-on. Unbeknown to the BDF men, the Rhodesians had crossed into Botswana and laid an ambush on the Lesoma valley. It was into this death-trap that the BDF’s three Land Rovers drove into on their way back to camp.
Mogamise was in the rear vehicle, and it was the one that was fired at first. He took the first shot that ripped part of his left jaw. He remembers those life-changing moments: “I saw a spark, but when the bullet hit me I didn’t feel anything. I only got to know that I had taken a shot when the guy next to me said, ‘O hudilwe (you’ve been shot at)’. For some fleeting moments, I was just numb…On realising that we were under fire, I went out through the window and crawled outside the ambush range.”
At that moment, two things were uppermost in his mind: to avoid capture, and to evacuate what he terms the “killing zone”. Thirty years later, the pain is palpable when he talks of the helplessness he felt when he caught glimpses of his colleagues being butchered, with the injured thrown into the bonfire of burning Land Rovers.
For him, help would only come close to midnight. By then, he had had to contend with predators that were probably attracted by the smell of blood, and a heavy downpour that left him soaked. In a rudimentary act of self-administered first aid, he had stripped part of his uniform to tie the dangling jaw to his head.
Mogamise spent six months recuperating at Princess Marina Hospital. By November, he felt adequately recovered that he begged to go on a field trip to the place at which he nearly died. Though his immediate supervisors turned down the request, the army’s deputy commander, Ian Khama, stepped in, and sanctioned the trip.
“I was shown the place where I was shot, and where my colleagues died. I was quiet, but the inner sadness was overwhelming. It was my way of coming to terms with what had happened, and the beginning of a process to close that chapter in my life,” he explains. “I didn’t want the Lesoma incident to be the end of a normal soldier’s career for me…I knew the risks of a soldier’s life. I kept going on border patrol duties…At the time, unlike now, there was no counselling. Occasionally, I would get flashbacks of the ambush.”
He believes the Lesoma Ambush was an important lesson for BDF, and that any criticism must be done within the context of the challenges associated with building an army from scratch in a time of war, while adversaries had sophisticated war machineries that had existed for much longer.
“The BDF was less than a year old. We had no equipment… We really didn’t have much. With hindsight, some people say the ambush could have been avoided… Some say we shouldn’t have used the same route twice. That could well be so, but at the time we did not have the benefit of hindsight,” he says.
Perhaps as an act of atonement, though his family comes from another Chobe Village, Kachikau, he has chosen to make Lesoma his home.
“Part of my body is buried in Lesoma. The village is part of my history. Even the people of Lesoma have accepted me as one of their own,” he says.
He has had to explain this decision to his children (two sons and a daughter) ÔÇô born in 1978, 1979, and 1987. The eldest was born six months after the ambush, and Mogamise jokes that, “they all found my face deformed”. In an attempt to put them in the picture, he has taken his children to the scene of the ambush to view the area where he nearly lost his life.
A year after Lesoma, Mogamise was sent for training that would determine his military career for over 20 years. He attended an explosives course in Britain. With the training from this, and other similar training programmes, he was tasked with founding what would become the Corps of Engineers ÔÇô a company that grew from 15 men. He spent 27 years at Corps of Engineers, rising to command it. His first transfer in that period only came in March 2007, when he was made Chief of Staff of the Ground Forces Command.
Having risen to be the highest ranking among the men who saw action at Lesoma, he puts his success down to hard work.
“I went through vigorous training in many countries. That equipped me to meet any challenge that came my way. Over the years, I learnt how to interact with people of different backgrounds. That helped me as I rose to leadership positions. To command and lead is a rare privilege and opportunity to learn a lot. There are a lot of challenges when you lead people from different backgrounds,” he points out.
I ask him what he is going to miss about the army.
“I am going to miss my colleagues, and fellow generals,” he says, and then adds: “I will miss the uniform, of course. But what can I do? In life, there is always time to get in, and to get out.”
Now that he has the time, there is going to be a lot of traversing the Chobe District to reconnect with rela
