WHAT WAS LINDIWE SISULU'S UNIVERSITY IN EXILE?

I’ve been to  court, court of senior military judge that is, as of this morning, Mr President.  I'm disappointed no end.

This is not what I had expected from a Minister of Defence still owing my lawyers around R300000  for the High Court engagements she brought upon herself  by initially hiding several documents immanent to any Preliminary Investigation to a fair trial on the charges laid against Phiri as far back as hoary 2001 March 09.

In any case, the senior military court judge and first one to be punctual among all the judges over my matter since 2001, said to see me again March 31^st 2011 WITH A DEFENCE COUNSEL.

I subsequently drove to my surprise with a very PROFESSIONAL prosecutor to the unit (down the Valhalla suburb of Pretoria) Legal Sattelite Office-Legsato Thaba-Tshwane commanded by one Mr Matjila, a remarkable character who has never set a foot wrong treading on the footsteps of a Mr Bailey Sekgomotso Mmono himself in turn a blue-eyed boy of now-retired Mbeki-era military-legal major domo (a Mr Dunstan Smart who is a South African Navy general/admiral and for me also the real father of the ongoing victimization of all those who talk about prostitution-for-promotion and other forms of corruption of the poor Zuma's SANDF today). 




There the prosecutor, per my own request pointed me to a number of prospective defence counsels from which I made my choice: the professional South African Air Force's Colonel Modula friendly, broad- and open-minded with a liberal splash of the spice of sagacity dulling all of his sense of humour even in its believe-you-me bucketfuls to come like: "If General Norman Yengeni wants now to  play lawyer for you in my place, Phiri, he is welcome to continue those secret meetings he is planning with General Matanzima's messengers which he claims are on the way for you in his own office; but wouldn't it be prudent for General Norman Yengeni to first apply to be a member of the SANDF legal fraternity and let the powers-that-be check if he is legally qualified to practise law and hence take my position?"

So round one of Lindiwe Sisulu’s resumed victimization of Phiri went well, if ever a victimization can be said to go well!

I’d thought, though, that before I go to sleep tonight, I might try to answer the question: "WHICH UNIVERSITY DID LINDIWE SISULU GO TO IN ORDER TO LEARN THAT HER OWN THEMBU TRIBE IS THE SUPERIOR TRIBE WITH MEMBERS OF ALL OTHER TRIBES SUBJECTED TO VEXATIOUS MILITARY COURT TRIALS FOR  TEN YEARS WHENEVER THEY EXPOSE VERITABLE CORRUPTION BY MEMBERS OF HER TRIBE?"

I think I’ve got the answer: SHE WENT TO THE UNIVERSITY OF EXILE!

A Camp In Exile: The Masuguri Military Camp belonging to APLA (Azanian People’s Liberation Army) the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress  of Azania (South Africa) was not a monotony of orders, but there were also moments of diversion and moments a lot lighter than petty politics.

One of those attractions was “NOLIZWE THE HUNTER AND HIS DOG THAT SAVED HIS LIFE FROM A TANZANIAN HUNGRIEST PYTHON”

Just the other day, this hunting specimen complete with dog and other accoutrement, not to mention a frightening scar between his tibia and fibula to show for his near-death experience, related to us how he was going to love his dog till the end of his earthly life.

My mind as Blogger is capable of overstaying a thread, particularly one about death, near-death by a snake and even a boa constrictor....




...But,for a more serious, if enticing, thread to the Nolizwe theme,  here is the question: did my Hunter Comrade Nolizwe return to South Africa with his beloved dog? 




Did Nolizwe succeed in convincing APLA that the canine exercise was worth the effort?  Did the aircraft crew allow it?  Did the United Nations High Commission for Refugees itself have a provision for animals to be “repatriated” to South Africa?  Surely, a Tanzanian animal kept by a South African as a pet was by that virtue also a South African animal worth “repatriation” together with the owner.  


Or am I missing the point of international law here?


If not so, why were Tanzanian women married to South African men “repatriated” together with their husbands?  Or is it a mere farce to declare that, not ‘a woman’, but “man’s best friend is ‘A DOG’”?




Thembu Tribalism and Eastern Cape Regionalism kicks in for repatriation: Blogger can state for a fact that, despite UN's sayso, Blogger's first wife, Iringa-bound Leonilde Makafu was rejected by APLA's operatives Mr Benson Mandindi and Monezi Gcilitshe (members of Nelson Mandela's Xhosa-speaking Thembu tribe which to this day in South Africa rules government whoever the President may be,  with impunity committing all kinds of crimes and corruption to stay in power with the help of some former white European settlers who still have links with secret foreign organizations bent on dividing and ruling South Africans in order to bring unto us a Libyan-Gaddafi situation as a first step towards toppling President Robert Mugabe's government up north and having a final grip on the land of Zion/Azania for British benefit till the Messiah himself comes).

Brown Study: Geopolitics is not my forte and so I am half-heartedly hankering after my original thread about the death at Ruvu, the nearness thereto, and the snake; but maybe I should broach the subject of the food chain/pyramid individuals of whose apex too often freely give back to lower species.  Maybe the brown study is my forte.

In any case, for him to gain a near-death experience, Nolizwe had had as per usual gone hunting around the gracefully-flowing Mto (River) Ruvu whose bridge hugs your bus 10 minutes before Mlandizi if your safari necessitated a prior meeting with your cousins you last partook a meal with some 10 to 100 million years before.




Cannibalistic Cousins: Concerning these ancient cousins, I read in 2009 along the road from Iringa and close to Morogoro there is a hotel or similar facility where you can bivouac for hopefully a last night or so in anticipation to making yourself lunch to your particularly leonine cousins at Mikumi Game Reserve.

Anyway, here we are assuming you had not been mouth-watering enough for those masters of Mikumi fangs, talons and canine teeth.  Non-organic and putrid you, reeking from tobacco impregnated with mothballs, dare you tantalize?

Wheezing you, gasping for air from the fumes of low-grade alcoholic beverages, dare you imagine beastly Mikumi's pristine appetite deigning your protein impressive enough for a meal?

No, you definitely attracted no man-eater towards invading your cabin and making a meal of you in any Steven-Spielberg fashion worth a mention!   


Escape from Mikumi to Dar es-Salaam: You were a reject with the Mikumi Game Reserve population even before they'd considered your alimentary value; and so too with your more immediate cousins in Morogoro City even before they considered your gregarious attributes.  Where have you seen a smoker's guffaw congregated around with any measure of proximity?




So now you are heading for Dar es-Salaam where with a bit of hope the sharks and naval scavengers may shred and feed on you with not even a single polluted scruple, but before that prospect, the experience and the experiment en-route remain galore.

So your underbelly sphincter (euphemism for the obvious) will feel the bridge’s aerating pump which sets into motion an aura reverberating up till Medulla Oblongata who will in turn report to the neocortex. Except “aerating pump” will now be replaced by “asphyxiating bump”.

Then you must know for sure you are indeed crossing the Ruvu River. Looking to your left, if with luck, you may just see the ghost of South African Hunter, Nolizwe, complete with his dog, hunting  for hare while a python is hunting for him!  Problem: all of that will lie within the realms of your imagination.  Nolizwe is as of this writing probably still alive somewhere in South Africa.  We definitely cannot vouchsafe the whereabouts of the dog, to say nothing of its longevity: 1987-2011 is quite a time-span even for us humans!

The Real Camp and Exile Life for Protagonist Phiri and Antagonists: Let us leave Nolizwe now, he is too frivolous.

I will introduce to you Freedom Fighter Colonel David Bhasikidi Maswanganyi. 

Maswanganyi is the first one to arrive on the scene when I get due for practically taking some lessons on just how stupid we soldiers are supposed to be when acting particularly under orders vis-a-vis the individual’s own free will.  Here follows the late Maswanganyi’s practical lecture to Phiri.

The great people and state of the United Republic of Tanzania, just like a few others like Zimbabwe, China and Libya (...ever wondered why too many of the too few of us in South Africa would like Gadaffi to survive the military onslaught?...) amongst a few others, were still graceful enough to defy the sea of Soviet-drunk regimes who all over the world were busy  kicking out the PAC far away from their proximities. 

So I met Maswanganyi in 1989 at Mlandizi’s Ruvu/Masuguri Military Unit belonging to the Azanian People’s Liberation Army-APLA, the military wing of the then Mlambo-led Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (South Africa). 

Here are the circumstances.

It was an ordinary military camp with a commander, the man second in-command and all these other officers whose rank and importance least bothered me.  I was barracking at the Masuguri military camp for one reason.  I was receiving the semblance of the basic military training in “a standing army”,  I had missed back in South Africa and as far back as 1976 when I was trained in the basic usage of a firearm, trained there as an individual by another individual. Accordingly, the mostly Xhosa-speaking Masuguri Military Unit of APLA top brass (maybe even verdant with envy about that) knew I was on brief transit. I was on my way to receiving propaganda training, a schooling which would entail prior acquisition of a two-year diploma as a journalist at the otherwise un-military, Dar-es Salaam-based Tanzania School of Journalism (now “School of Journalism and Mass Communication-SJMC" ).

Too often in the broad liberation movement dominated by the Makwetu-Tambo regionalism of the Eastern-Cape born, the departure for schooling by an individual cadre was  often prescribed by ethnic qualifications, jealously guarded against tribes other than Eastern Cape.  

Academic courses spelled another excuse for “breaking away from the strict military situation” .         Courses were just another means of enjoying yourself with local ladies Zambian, German or whatever nation you were sent to for studies while passing your course or failing it remained a non-issue.   In this devilish,  potpourri and hyperbole complete with the  titivation, accentuation and incantation over the super-virtues of this one ethnic group (the Xhosa-speaking Thembu tribe of  Mandela and Sisulu from the Transkei), we also discover the supposedly secret kiss between what was then a scented-and-spiced-up bouquet  and what is now a wreath adorning a putrefying tribal corpse on one hand, and the Chariot of The Passionate Three C’s on the other.

Here, just like AIDS activists were to discover the similarity in the cavernousness of the letter C and the grave, people’s own cash, cars and cellphones dug their graves for them!!   Small wonder that with the advent of this HIV AIDS scourge (a disease that in Africa seemingly started with the rich, the travelled and the exposed in terms of communication and the otherwise quintessential clothing), by the end of  the second decade of liberation (and still counting)  the mortality of those Eastern-Cape-born speakers and South Africa’s novo riche disproportionally soared. 

From Tanzania through the rest of the globe, the Oliver Tambos, the Clarence Makwetus, Stanley Mabizelas, Monezi Gcilitshes and the Benson Mandindis, all Eastern-Cape natives and  supposed revolutionary leaders of the broad liberation movement, continued in their private capacity to excel in the one area they were actually very dedicated in.  Exiles’ camps were turned into ponds of cloning and each tent of the guerrillas a food pyramid with its apex being a Thembu or at least someone with Eastern-Cape links, a sickness that over the past 17 years of our freedom has come to be a reality emblazoned into the minds of the Sisulus who still think it kosher to mistreat a non-Eastern-Cape Phiri despite a mountain of evidence that suggests it is the Thembu elements and other Eastern-Capers lined against Phiri who are at fault.

Like water skimmers zigzagging the ponds, fellow-Eastern-Capers were to cruise and criss-cross the continent and the world for repeated studies to empower them while the non-Thembu and  the non-Eastern-Cape tadpoles were left well below the surface of  importance where often they were left to choke from the murk and the mud, committing suicide through various means in the process. 

Alas, all that effort at making sure fellow-Eastern-Capers were changing colleges every year even if they failed on every one of those attempts, had an unintended but not-surprising effect.  The favoured Eastern-Cape students (in exile we called them “professional students”) who refused to countenance any book open but dissimilar to a local woman’s spread panties only succeeded in turning themselves into florists too often stung by bees, even the bees of the viral world.

Despite being mere florists, come day of Liberation  Mandela and Mbeki still gave them important jobs as generals and captains of the security of the Republic which is why crime will never be solved in South Africa just as long Thembu tribalism and Eastern-Cape regionalism is being tolerated.

Now, the combination in one person of a florist and a well-paid general will naturally succeed like success in  attracting even more of the ladies with their false and counter-productive promise for a lesser viral load.  On a good day the general will bark promises for more discipline in his directorate and more management of the crime situation in South Africa.  But that too is hot air from a virally-diseased mind.

Being a mere florist, the general ultimately prepares to concentrate on pushing daisies in earnest ten years into the  Mandela -ushered freedom.  Everyone can see the general is sick but no one dares speak medical boarding for that is blasphemy when the general comes from the Thembu tribe of the venerable Nelson Rolihlahla  Mandela !

Whether he be a captain of industry, a captain of security or a captain of service delivery, he will one day die in that clover.  We will go to a political rally which they will dub a state funeral where he will be lionized by the most stupid of speakers who will torture our ears with their cacophony.  We go back home wondering why we wasted a Saturday for such a funeral; but before we know, his mantle is taken by YET ANOTHER EASTERN-CAPER AND THE CYCLE IS TAKING A BRAND NEW ROUND! (This is what every good politician tells us will continue happening until Jesus the Lord comes back!  I doubt this very much; and if the ANC is serious about ruling for at least the next 100 years which of course it can do and I personally wish it to, it must tackle this mostly-Eastern- Cape Thembu tribalism right now!)

One such character gaining from Eastern-Cape  tribal clover was to return to South Africa post 1994 to become a governmental spokesman in the Gauteng Province.  This one, he was for the entire four years when a government of  Mandelaque Eastern-Capers from 1994 turned me into a hobo by means of a crass denial that I’d fought for freedom too, since, for them “having fought for freedom in any noteworthy earnest, you had to be speaking the mother tongue Xhosa and if not you should at least not be talking about the dastardly tribalism too many Eastern-Cape leaders of the struggle had made themselves guilty of right in the middle of the struggle against apartheid!

Another fellow (to be nameless after his burial in Mofolo Soweto several years ago) who was to die an SANDF general around 2005, had been notorious for accumulating the Cars Communication-means-with-the-diseased-sexual-partners and the kingly Cash by wangling liberation funds and what little Organization of African Unity stipends issued for the benefit of Voice of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania and Its Military Wing the Azanian People’s Liberation Army journalists like Phiri/King thus making sure my then expectant wife and I starved for having written about the existence of Eastern Cape regionalism and tribalism in both the ANC and the PAC prior to 1994.

One of the particular comrade’s sadistic jokes against Phiri whenever I’d make a mistake with my broadcasts due largely to the privation and starvation that Dar es Salaam’s Makwetu-Gcilitshe Headquarters had instituted against me and my first wife was “blundered again, Mordecai King! Proof and [evidence enough that Tanzanian education for journalists where Manyanya Phiri-Mordecai King qualified was inferior to Zimbabwean where Comrade Stolen Cash  had graduated]” and in IsiXhosa he would say: “Bebanibamba baniyeke esikolweni senu samaSwahili e Tanzania School of Journalism apho, Mordecai King”.    The list is endless and I say let them rest in peace even though I am still not in any peace as their sister Lindiwe Sisulu is still victimizing me to this day for the same reason of regional tribalism pro Eastern-Cape.  They died young and greedy for the ranks and the rungs in a power ladder created outside of Africa by former colonial masters of the continent, keen on divide and rule!

We have rambled for too much already, and shame on you for having followed me without question!   Let us now revert to the issues of APLA’s Ruvu Masuguri Camp and maybe the issue of my friend, Comrade Maswanganyi.

The commander of the unit at Ruvu was a member of the High Command of APLA, a Colonel Mpazamo Yonana handsome, sagacious, charitable, but war-hardened and incredibly cruel under provocation.  He was to retain his rank as colonel even under integration with the SANDF post-1994 where he was to succumb to some inexorable microorganism around the mid-2000’s.  He was Xhosa-speaking to a Phiri since rendered suspicious of Xhosa-speakers, particularly the Thembu of the species , what with Phiri’s fresh memories of recent extra-judicial killings of non-Thembus back at Morogoro’s Mazimbu and Dakawa controlled by the likes of Xhosa-speaking-, Eastern-Cape-born Stanley Mabizela who had smartly put the abovementioned settlement under the command of fellow-tribespeople Comrades Moredi Motau and Mary Ngozi”.

Moreti Johannes Motau (with bared teeth) born Tuesday, 10 March 1953 

For all intent and purposes of Phiri’s understanding then, Maswanganyi could have been anything then between a very intelligent troop or an officer of note in command of a contingence that had arrived to Ruvu from the main APLA training area in Bagamoyo close to Dar es-Salaam.  Their presence in  the Masuguri Military Unit in Ruvu, to their own thinking, translated to the pro-Yonana availability of a human stamp for military authority, the very elixir for the  Phiri-type lackadaisical soldiery native to the Ruvu camp. “WE WILL TAKE AN ORDER AND IMPLEMENT IT ROBOTICALLY EVEN IF OUR POLITICAL TRAINING MILITATES AGAINST SUCH IMPLEMENTATION.”

The day before, I had been tasked by Colonel Mpazamo Yonana then unit commander and member of the venerable High Command of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army: “Mordecai King!” he’d commanded through his midge for a dental gap.

“I know that logistics is neither your forte nor your corps. However, you know as well as I do that you have a knack for the pot which brought you close to my logistics men and women. You are generally as physically fit as you are, mentally.  You will have guessed right if you think our logistics section here demands a lot from soldiery in terms of  physical acumen.   For that reason, I need your  assistance for the logistical task tomorrow.

“Join tomorrow as commander of the logistics section leaving Masuguri for Mlandizi Bus Station, which is some 15 kilometres from here.”  Colonel Yonana ordered  me. As if to confirm a new-arrival‘s grasp of the local geography he added:” You will recall that bus stop on the road between Morogoro and Dar es-Salaam, won’t you?”

If, from either the  Morogoro or from Tanzania’s most industrialized city Dar you should be bussed through that area (it is the most memorable means) you will know you are at Mlandizi when a handful of hawkers bring all of them only metres from your starved jaws: roasted corn, roasted peanuts and cooked ones, boiled egg, all-so-fresh nanasi and  machungwa that you will be unsurprised to see a ladybird gracing your lunch!

Morogoro, in particular needs closer examination.  Three of Eastern-Cape’s most prominent but controversial leaders in orchestrated simultaneity again like water skimmers, were to meet in Morogoro in 1969.  Thence they were to leave South Africa with its current  legacy of near-indelible Eastern-Cape tribalism and regionalism.  From it grew all other current Mbeki-Zuma-era ills like the xenophobia that post liberation was to come down and attack the very Tanzanians (among other black nationalities present in South Africa from upper north) that proffered the Oliver Tambos, Tennyson Makiwanes and Chris Hanis of the day asylum and training ground for their liberation combatants.

As you read further just note that when Polish immigrant Janus Walusz in 1993 gunned down Chris Hani in Benoni, he gunned down a South African hero nonpareil, at least in the eyes of the bereaved South African  populace.  However, one of the most sobering things you can read about South African history is the fact that the great Hani and superhero was himself infected to the core with the virus of Eastern-Cape regionalism.

....Hani drafted a memorandum to Tambo in which [he and his fellow-Xhosa-speakers] charged the leadership with incompetence and living luxuriously in exile.  The document, which became known as the Hani Memorandum, contained a scathing critique of the leadership’s apparent failure to recognise and give attention to those soldiers who participated in the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns.

....Tambo treated the memorandum as so serious a challenge that he called a meeting attended by all guerrillas and members of the ANC who were in Zambia. In an emotional speech, he expressed anger at the attack on Moses Kotane, who had suffered a stroke, and was in a hospital in Moscow. Remarkably, however, according to Matthews, there was no official discussion of Hani’s memorandum by the ANC leadership. Instead, Tambo proposed to the National Executive Committee (NEC) that a ‘consultative conference’ be held.  Some leaders, such as Modise, called for severe action to be taken against the signatories to the memorandum, and anyone who sympathised with their views. Mavuso Msimang recalled that Modise wanted the MK critics to be tried before a military court:  Modise was the commander of MK, and of course wanted these people to be treated in a military fashion. They were soldiers, they signed the oath and if they were guilty of this type of thing, they should be brought before a court martial and shot.

Tambo was deeply disappointed by Hani’s criticism and allegedly initially dismissed the memorandum as an ethnic vendetta.

He apparently believed it was no coincidence that the memorandum was signed by ‘Xhosa-speaking members from the Eastern Cape. These accusations were levelled against leading members who were not Xhosa-speaking, and excluded Xhosa-speaking leaders like Tennyson Makiwane’.

Matthews viewed the bulk of accusations against individual leaders as exaggerated. Even before Hani’s release, he said, there was discontent in the camps, possibly instigated, in some cases, by opponents of the movement.  ‘One Bonga [Thami], and another one who later turned out to have been a spy, stirred up all sorts of things; that leaders are travelling up and down in the world, and nothing is happening.... Accusations against people like Kotane were unfounded, and these people exploited Kotane’s absence in hospital to vilify him,’ according to Matthews.

....A memorandum from Ben Turok, a member of the SACP based in Dar es Salaam, supported Hani’s criticism of the leadership.

From here you are only a stone’s throw from understanding the mind of  Ms Lindiwe Nonceba Sisulu and the cobwebs in her brain.  You discover her politically growing up in the same pro-Eastern-Cape exile conditions as Hani.   You find that, even though now she serves in a Zuma cabinet position sworn to adherence to an RSA  constitution inimical to racism and tribalism, Sisulu still finds it normal to continue victimizing non-Eastern-Cape-born Phiri in order to cover up for her own father’s fellow-Eastern-Cape-and-touted-Mandela-relative-the-SANDF’s Winnie Ntombizodwa Bobelo-Zini who corruptly fornicated her way up to generalship with at least one immediate supervisor Mr Raymond Athlolang Lentsoe.

Hani’s exile life will deservedly get sizeable focus in this post, but before him it’s best to dwell on the controversial person currently occupying the portfolio of being President Jacob Zuma’s Minister of Defence and Veterans Affairs.  It is now an open secret that Your Excellency Zuma choice for your defence is “Zuma’s hot number”  and she the  one who now in cahoots with her fellow-ethnic-group-Eastern-cape born generals like Mr Temba Templeton Matanzima is unlawfully dragging non-Xhosas to high courts and her military courts providing them with neither defence counsels nor funds to pay their own private lawyers in the process.

She happens to be a woman who was groomed, schooled and succoured in Swaziland under the wing of the African-nationalist-minded  royal nephew (King Sobhuza II) of pan-Africanist minded Pixley Ka Isaka Seme and founder of the ANC on the bastion of anti-tribalism.

Her current tribalistic actions will later compare as even more inexcusable than those of Hani who apparently never went in any ideological university-of-life-school of the Seme extended family as did the Sisulu children like Lindiwe who was together with the  Mandela children and larger  Mandela family under succour of the Seme extended family, together with  Nelson  Mandela himself (although he is thankless in his biographies about Seme’s contribution to his life, inclusive of Seme’s training him in earliest career as a lawyer, the law articles).

Let us for the moment dwell on the environment where Lindiwe Sisulu has been as of today, 17 March 2011, been busy resuming her  victimization of  Phiri in her military kangaroo court just as her father’s own fellow-Eastern-Capers had been victimizing other South Africans in exile.

Page 637 OF Sweden And National Liberation In Southern Africa: Volume II: Solidarity And Assistance 1970 – 1994 by Tor Sellstrom, which you can buy and should buy on line if you’re really interested in finding out how we as a South African nation ended in the current mess is available here.

Footnote on page 637, under the topic “Queen Regent Labotsibeni” (Sobhuza’s grandmother):

The Swazi royal house was closely associated with the formation of [the African National Congress] in 1912 (cf. Peter Walshe: The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress 1912-1952, C. Hurst & Company, London, and University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970, pp.30-40.  On Sobhuza and ANC, see also Hilda Kuper: Sobhuza II: Ngwenyama and King of Swaziland, Duckworth, London, 1978, passim).  In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela describes Sobhuza as “an enlightened traditional leader and also a member of the ANC” (Mandela op. Cit., p. 482).  After Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Island, Winnie Mandela placed their daughters Zenani and Zindzi at boarding schools in Swaziland, where Zenani in 1977 married Prince Thumbumuzi, a son of King Sobhuza.  Walter and Albertina Sisulu’s son Zwelakhe and daughter Lindiwe also studied and lived in the country, as did children of other South African nationalist leaders.  The relations between ANC and Swaziland were thus complex and contradictory. This could be illustrated by the following anecdote, related by Stanley Mabizela to the author in the early 1980s: After a shootout between the Swazi police and ANC freedom fighters, Sobhuza summoned his Police Commissioner and [Stanley] Mabizela to the royal kraal.  After hearing the two parties’ versions of the events, Sobhuza was most upset.  Calling the Swazi Commissioner of Police “a dog” and ordering him to leave by crawling backwards, [the King] turned to Mabizela and said: “[Ngitawutsini kuLabotsibeni] What shall I tell Labotsibeni?” (Author’s recollection, Labotsibeni died in 1925)

As of this thankless day, the Lindiwe Nonceba Sisulus, the Ntombizodwa Bobelo-Zinis and the very children and relatives of both Mandela and Sisulu who were protected by the Swazi Kingdom during the struggle, are now practising tribalism against South African citizenry and members of non-Eastern-Cape populace like ethnic Swazis,  Basothos and others.  There is even tribalism against non-Eastern-Capers of her very own South African National Defence Force as well as those who are members of the very ANC of which she is supposed to be a senior member, and the ANC that King Sobhuza II and his grandmother Labotsibeni loved and cofounded along Seme in 1912, respectively.




Even His Majesty Sobhuza never dreamt that by demonstrating his loyalty to the South African people in front of Mabizela, he was casting  pearls before swine as Mabizela was to move from Swaziland to Tanzania where he oversaw the spawning of Eastern-Cape tribalism in Seme’s ANC camps and settlements like Dakawa and Mazimbu, the same tribalism that today emboldens Sisulu to drag Phiri to her military court for blowing the whistle of corruption perpetrated by Mandela relative, General-by-virtue-of-sex-favours Bobelo-Zini

But now a detour to History and personal accounts relating how a Chris Hani shell-shocked from the military campaign of Wankie in the then Rhodesia (British colonial name for Zimbabwe), in quite a spectacular way if not a diabolical one, returns to demand from his civilian leaders his own pound of flesh.

It turns out that he is angry since, because of high infiltration of the liberation movement by enemy agents, the colonists forces had decimated them.


Chris Hani had survived to apparently come back to Tanzania in search, but very livid search, of his scapegoat.

The annals of history as the one quoted above, display Hani the Eastern-Caper as sturdy and bold like the bas-relief.  The annals display the rest of the leadership around him (those who had no native links with the Cape) a weather-beaten and dull collage of pictures that could be pushed and prodded at will without anyone seriously complaining.

As such, the “wrong-doings” of non-Eastern-Cape leaders were exaggerated here whereas both Oliver Tambo and Tennyson Makiwane, the latter having to succumb in 1980 to the gun of MK Cadre David Simelane for an apartheid agent then resident in the infamous Transkei Bantustan, were no strangers to the trappings of a South African struggle waged from London and other world capitals trendy with leggy women and lugubriously lacklustre with lucubrations and other personal sacrifices for national struggle.

Oliver Tambo then not only essentially protected Chris Hani from a trial by a military court, but for some marvellous wriggling mechanism, Hani is himself seen over the years emerging as one of the stalwarts of not only the ANC and Umkhonto WeSizwe, but also of the South African Communist Party whose cadres, by the way, are also supposed to be “the best that the liberation movement could offer” (meaning no one dared cast aspersions of tribalism against communists).

The irony of life is that it is because of that wriggling that earned Hani the premature bullet of anti-communist Janusz Walusz in a street in Boksburg. The rock of ages that with hammer and sickle had been cleft for him to hide himself from accusations of both tribalism and a firing squad for post-Wankie insubordination in earlier years crushed him to death several years later very much like the idiomatic vengeful dish best served cold!

Having saved his own skin while it lasted, it is still a conundrum as to how and why Hani failed to impress it upon his fellow-Eastern-Cape tribal brother Tennyson Makiwane that it pays to become a communist (if only to cocoon yourself beyond reproach of being accused a tribalist).  It remains a mystery because, from the day that the ANC emerged from the Morogoro conference (Oliver Tambo’s answer to the grievances penned by Hani ex-Wankie) Makiwane is reported to have worked against the pro-communist resolutions of the conference, resolutions that came in the form of allowing whites, Indians and coloured a greater say in the affairs of ANC.  Of course, the issues of white participation and communist involvement were intertwined then since most communists in those days tended to be whites.

Like he had done with Chris Hani, once again Oliver Tambo pussyfooted for six solid years on taking action against Makiwane.  It was only when the survival of the ANC became untenable with Makiwane’s activities, that Tambo succumbed to the view the former (Transkeian) be given the boot. 

Yet by that time, Makiwane, with the indirect support of the legacy of Hani, had already laid a firm foundation in exile for the dictum “Eastern-Cape-born leaders are beyond reproach in the broad liberation movement, whereas non-Eastern Cape persons will be easily hauled over the coals for the flimsiest of reasons”.

This particular result of tribal brainwashing is, by the way, the ethos through which Eastern-Cape born Thabo Mbeki was acting when, riding roughshod on a principle of law where criminality goes hand-in-hand with the determination of intent or intention (except in of course in Mbekiite parlance) suspended from government his non-Eastern-Cape born then Deputy President Jacob Zuma only to give Zuma’s mantle to the wife of fellow-Eastern-Caper Bulelani Ngcuka.

This Thembu tribal-us and tribal-them attitude amongst one too many prominent Eastern-Cape politician of all political parties, one must add, is the umbrella under which Lindiwe Sisulu acts today.  She will continue of course...the design of tribalism was long steeled in exile by the Hanis, the Tambos and the Makiwanes...unless my President, Zuma, Msholozi, Nxamalala, calls a halt to her shameless and illegal deeds in her own  department which ignobly prides itself with an overrepresentation at highest rank of demographics favouring her Eastern Cape where the Phiris of her department are treated like 10-year-old furniture deserving no promotion despite education, experience and service more than most of Sisulu’s Eastern-Cape-born generals today.

Incidentally, to go back to the Tambo tribal pussy-footing for his fellow-Eastern-Cape troublemakers, even the assassination of destructively reactionary Tennyson Makiwane clearly did not per order come from Tambo.  It would seem like ANC cadre Good Guerrilla Trained Both Militarily And Politically David Simelane took his own initiative in doing the honours of removing Makiwane from society! EASTERN CAPE WILL ALWAYS PROTECT EASTERN CAPE AT ANY PRICE TO SOUTH AFRICA, WHICH IS WHY SOUTH AFRICA IS BUSY ROTTING TODAY WITH MANY INDIVIDUALS PUT AT HIGH POSITIONS BUT UNMOVABLE BECAUSE THEY COME FROM THE VERY EASTERN CAPE WHERE POWERFUL POLITICIANS LIKE SISULU ENSURE THEIR SAFETY TO STAY PUT!

I had nodded in appreciative acquiescence, and so he continued:

“Mlandizi indeed!  There you make sure that after the purchases, inclusive of particularly the spoilable pork, you and your people leave Mlandizi by 12HOO failing which you run the risk of getting either the pork sniffing its way to putrefaction in the heat of this tropical sun or the resultant afternoon rain may come down so hard as to cut you guys out before you return with particularly the pork which spoils so easily.   And this is all if you are lucky; for the worst-case scenario is you will get both your tractor stuck in the mud and you will be marooned by the rain.  So, and to reiterate, move out of Mlandizi just as soon as you acquire your consignment”

“Yes, Comrade!” I responded at attention.  It was very rare that exiled commanders of the broad liberation movement appreciated you for both your brains and your to tbrawns.  Too often, you were condemned to being one of either “the reactionary intellectuals” or “the robots impervious to the drills and teachings of the political commissar”.  All in all, you were “doomed if you do and doomed if you did not”.

Eastern-Cape-born Commander Mpazamo Yonana talks to me a day after a very sad run-in between me and his fellow-tribesman chicken-farming Mr Gqwashu who had accused Phiri of ‘stealing money belonging’ to his bird-farming business and I had reported this provocative accusation to Commander Yonana without hope this matter will be any fairly resolved.  In my four years of exile in the camps of Seme’s ANC who had formed the organization on the back of eradicating tribalism, I HAD NEVER SEEN A XHOSA-SPEAKER ACTING OTHERWISE THAN FAVOURING HIS FELLOW-XHOSA-IN ANY DISPUTE.  Why would Yonana be different in relation to Gqwashu?

The chain of command here magically served as the spring in the foot of this drama.  I naturally could not go straight to Commander Yonana about the complaint, but, for fear of breaking the chain of command, I had to go via his sidekick, a tall and truculent fellow who spoke Shangaan/ Tsonga.  He went by the sobriquet of “Muzi”.

No sooner had I reported the Gqwashu accusations than I began to regret it.


I had expected the powers that be to give Gqwashu a chance in self-explanation, but instead I got the impression they were out to impress me that they were not at all tribalists.


Poor Gqwashu was assaulted and told in no uncertain terms never again to attempt matters of tribalism in the Azanian People’s Liberation Army and the mother body Pan Africanist Congress of Azania.

If I’d thought the  Gqwashu retribution was sufficiently severe to rest the matter there, it was because I had as yet not seen the response from Colonel Mpazamo Yonana, the Camp Commander.  His response was to startle me no end since he was with xenophobic Gqwashu not only co-speaking the language of Xhosa, but was to come much later that evening when I’d thought the Gqwashu matter been put to bed.

Where the commander was coming from so late at night would also be interesting off the point.  It was an arrival from one of his apparent nightcaps which he, as a rule, would take some southbound drive 15 minutes away from the military camp in his white Landover, too often driven by yet another Xhosa-speaker 1955-born Sipho Patrick Matolweni aka “Sputla”.

Plainly I was never ever sure whether he was going there for a drink or in  search of the fairer sex or both.  But something had always troubled me about his evening drives after he had one day in my presence inadvertently uttered his misplaced lasciviousness. 

In the same direction he usually drove resided a forty-fivish buxom school teacher for a girlfriend to him; she always looked like she was any moment eager for the colonel’s command “Roll over”.  




Nearer to the military camp there was also the apparently “more difficult” wife of a friendly Tanzanian national.  Because her blood boasted  links with the nurses reportedly sent from South Africa around the early 60's  to assist the Nyerere government immediately after uhuru, we saw her husband as a uSibali, Shemeji and Ndugu (if not downright Comrade in struggle) and never to take advantage of his wife’s friendliness towards us.  Yet Yonana in front of his fellow tribesman Sputla would make no secret that, military headquarters being his second name, he was dying to try with her the “downquarters thing”, if you know what I mean. He made no bones about the fact that even though her husband treated us South Africans as brothers to his family, he, as he would put it in his much-relished IsiXhosa in a paraphrase of a Biblical verse: “seek ye first isilonda, all else can follow”.

Many moons down the line, I was therefore not surprised when Leonilde Makafu, my first wife, complained that Yonana had wanted to sleep with her, which rejection became one of the harbingers to our ostracization by the Makwetu exile headquarters in Dar es-Salaam but a few months before Sabelo Phama was to die in that dramatic car accident to which I will return in the few days to come on this self-same post.

But to return to Masuguri.  Suspense faithfully preying on my peace of mind also succeeded in playing the faithful companion to me.  I waited anxiously to see how I, through my innocent complaint, was going to divide the venerable Azanian People’s Liberation Army.  I was cock-sure Yonana was bound to descend hard on Tsonga-speaker for the overzealous punishment meted on Gqwashu.

The Land Rover splattered mud around.  With a sound like that of a deep-voiced man clearing the  throat with angry splutters the product of British motor engineering declassified the fact of its presence.

Then there were the usual few clearly-audible sputters from the exhaust pipe followed by the sudden death of the engine and  its silent exclamation mark for the colonel’s statement “ The Lion is Back!”

But for this powerful signature, I was already dozing off on my bed next to Gqwashu’s with a ward still clearly nursing some sore muscles and ligaments after the day’s treatment and in fact even macadamization of his ribcage per bare knuckles and shod toes.  Indeed the psychological makeup of a PAC cadre was many many years later to be clarified to me by a statement made by no less a person than then PAC President Motsoko Pheko himself when, warning his political opponents, he warned that [let no man mistake the civility of another man for docility].  On any normal day, Muzi Tsonga and more Mpazamo Yonana were anybody’s idea of the friendliest and most entertaining company and that is why the Steven Spielberg I had been dished earlier on in the day had plainly jolted me.

I anticipated a quarrel at the HQ as I was convinced that one of the many other ex-Eastern-Cape combatants in the unit had already phoned Yonana about the unwarranted or overwarranted assault on Ggwashu.

Indeed, my anxiety did pay off, albeit in neither the tender nor the kind I had expected.  Instead, I in fact heard a hard knock on my bungalow shared with Gqwashu.  It was Commander Yonana himself breathing fire and brimstone and making an unmistakable demand for Gqwashu’s presence at the HQ in minutes.

Fresh in Gqwashu’s mind were memories of infraction of APLA rules.  Needless to say, he jumped out of bed and trailed Yonana.  I too, reasonably suspicious that this could be a continuation of the fire I had ignited with my complaint, sat up on my bed and awaited a “call-up” or something: surely the command structure would at some stage need to quiz me in detail before deeming punishment necessary to the tribal suspect.

I shiver to write that while I sat contemplating the act of joining Gqwashu to either corroborate what I’d said about him or to supplicate in his behalf if need be, the door to our bungalow violently swung open once again except, this time around, it was with a Gqwashu who was bleeding tons from every orifice I could see in that twilight of the lantern.

I was perturbed to see Comrade Mpazamo Yonana accompanying a badly-bleeding man with a kick even as he uttered the frightening warning: “You try and divide the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania with tribalism again, YOU ARE DEAD.  Take this for your last warning, Gqwashu!”

I went to sleep deeply ashamed but by no means remorseful.  The Pan Africanist Congress I (then a schoolboy in South African’s Amsterdam) had joined eleven years before back at home, was still as strict as ever with its principles, ONLY A BIT MORE STRICTER!

So this fateful morning I leave with a contingent of logistical know-alls for Mlandizi, pork among all other items on my mind.  With us too was the second in command, the man of the Tsonga language and I still do not know why he’d joined us for the command would have been given him to oversee the operation had his involvement in this op been planned with his supervisor, Yonana.

Things went well on our journey thereto.  I was expecting our mission together with the journey back would go as smooth.  Nothing usually happens on a journey as slow as a tractor, unless of course you start poking things into some crevices to test the power in the engineering behind the tractor in motion.  None of us were in that mood; but when we arrived at Mlandizi to put an hour on top of our logistical acquisition pork and all, something happened to the workings in the engineering called an individual human brain.

Scientists tell us even a 11-month-olds “know” that rungs of authority rule on Earth, but you’d expect a second-in-command of a military unit to know that authority should not be abused.  Yet Tsonga-speaking Muzi was now refusing to [take lectures] from [Unit-newcomer] Mordecai King/ Manyanya Phiri as to when to leave Mlandizi for the journey back to the camp at Ruvu.

Supported by the logistics fellows, I tried in vain to plead with him it was high time we left, but for that he showed us his big black and fat behind.

Since Mordecai King was not going to try to be any better at licking, I told Muzi: “Listen, Comrade.  I am leaving for Masuguri now since I have some other chores to do back at the unit.”  I did not have anything to do, but I just wanted to avoid accusations that I had defied express orders of the unit commander to come back in time before the unpredictable rains of the tropics played Old Harry with our logistical plans.

“Go home to the unit lines, Mordecai King, go!” he barked notwithstanding the fact that beside him stood a sculpture of a princess with the most placid of ways, standing as the veritable piece she was of female Tanzania, the world’s most underrated beauty.  She was a nymph buxom with the sable enhanced by the neatest set of cowries, her masquerade for denture about which I’d heard is the hardest in a human being and is usually found among those who live around Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro Mountain.

“This may rate newsy to you, but we have been ferrying logistics for years already between Mlandizi and Masuguri quite incident-free while you were wasting your time with the Charterists.”

“Charterists” is the derogatory but well-warranted name given to ANC members by some members of the Africanist school of liberatory thought in South Africa, all due to the adoption of the Freedom Charter by the ANC, a document that became the main bone of contention half a century ago, resulting in the splintering off of the PAC from the mother body, the ANC.

Charterist me, I started trotting off down the main road towards Masuguri (the direction of Morogoro, rather than Dar es-Salaam).  I had hardly made the distance till my unit lines under 45 minutes when the rain came down cats and dogs.

The streams and rivers were swollen for the rest of that afternoon and evening but I on my bungalow bed was more relaxed than the aquatic world.  It was only very late in the evening, close to midnight, when I heard the belated bedtime footsteps of the unit’s logisticians accompanied by the Unit’s Tsonga-speaking second in command, Muzi.  Even they died down as the welcome of their own bungalows got the better of them.  The following day was going to be the issue and reason for this record.

I was still sleeping the following morning when a rude awakening took place, courtesy the Unit’s second in command who, back at Mlandizi, had viewed his own amorous intentions over a girl as more important than national orders of the unit commander:

“Phiri!” the lieutenant colonel blurted in my direction. “ I want to see you joining this morning’s rescue team out as of now for the pork and other spoilables stuck in the mud 3 km away!”

“Like hell I will join them, Colonel!”  I never minced my words. “ Never especially when, before my departure from Mlandizi yesterday, I had personally requested from you the contingent leave as early as possible while you had other plans”.

“Mordecai King!” the man retorted in fury.  “Wena u-no-m-sila ‘You...you-own-one-tail’”

What he really meant in that Zulu language is that I, having only recently arrived to Masuguri, was in his view already wagging my tail and getting too big for my boots.

‘Tsonga’ was indeed a big man.  But I was not going to be intimidated by his size.  Nor his cruelty on Ggwashu the day or so before.  Nor the presence of Third in Command one  Comrade Scratch (nom de guerre), a Venda-speaking fellow who had joined our unit together with the contingent of Bagamoyo supersoldier.  I did not join the struggle at the tender age of 15 to enable those in power to abuse that power; Boer or black, I would stand my ground, and I did.

A Black-cat peanut-butter bottle on my window sill, like many other things in the life of a guerrilla, had taken a new role bar peanut butter.

I still do not understand how that paint-filled bottle metamorphosized in the brain of “Tsonga” to either a tool of discipline or, to follow his logic, an anvil with which to stretch Phiri’s boots crimped by the rain the previous day.

Before I knew it (even though it was already known by Scratch’s mouth standing agape and his arm lame where he could have stopped a madman) the bottle came flying.  It’s target, the bridge of my nose.  It had the hallmarks of unique and novel preferences over the cream-white liquid with which I had intended to renovate my bungalow shared with Xhosa-speaking Gqwashu.  Instead, the renovation of my nasal cavities were now at issue and for the commonplace threads of the Phiri painter’s brush the novelty was now for slivers from the intended impact of the Muzi bottle against the face.

As I ducked, I recall never feeling so angry in my life.  My downward movement was also an instinctive lunge forwards.  My right arm like an engine piston was violently stretched by a  jerk that threatened to tear every shoulder ligament as my dense and furious fist was being propelled towards the pig.  If the son thought that despite his size, he was still going to use cowardly methods to beat me, I was going to show him through fair and square means I was still going to smack him: the fight in the dog but not the size of the dog!

‘Tsonga’ must have taken it very negatively but stoically, that sting on his solar plexus.  He surprised me when he grabbed me rather than, at least groping; my intentions had been to bowl him over with that one strike!

 I gathered myself fast enough to read his intentions.  He wanted to use his size to make up for his shortcomings in fisticuffs; but I was still going to show him there are always some advantages for a light-weight wrestling a heavy weight.

The bungalow door boomed open as the giant hit my body against the door frame on our way out, a married mass of two un-gay bodies.  Before we landed outside to a full glare of APLA guerrillas inclusive of ‘Kalf Namane’, I remember getting angrier just from the glimpse of my spilt paint and my broken peanut-butter bottle.  I remember taking courage from the fact that, Scratch, the man who was supposed to have joined “Tsonga’ in pummelling the hell out of an upstart, was still standing there, arms folded appetite whetted, the sadistic king in the movie “The Gladiator”, just on the verge of licking his lips with every imminent spurt of the blood.

Naturally I hit the grassy ground hard on my back, a human mountain smothering me.  Yet it was Moses that had gone for the mountain in that way and no sooner did I hit the ground than I’d swung myself up the mountain praying and pummelling him ‘come nice’.

Now there is no way you can think clearly while your cranial jelly is being shaken, your beige and grey quaked.  Even the most cowardly act is acceptable under those circumstances. So Tsonga bit my right triceps very hard.

“Dare you even bite me you cowardly sun of a bravo!” I shouted as I ripped my flesh free from his incisors.

There was a roar of laughter from the squad of guerrillas assembled to watch the engagement; but if a boy in a fight bites you, it’s a message he is defeated.  So, as soon as I was out of the mandibles, I left the insect still lying there on the ground, to his own shame. Yet I fully understood I did not have any home any more in Masuguri, having humiliated the second in command.

I walked up the make-shift road, cattle kraal to my right, thinking hard: “What now, Mr Phiri? Where are you going to? And what are you going to do?”

It is at that moment that Maswanganyi came to me like a knight in a shiny armour.

He was one of an entire company of APLA forces en-route to the camp from some mundane task if not their regular morning exercises.

“Mordecai, whereto in this tearing hurry?” he asked.

“I’ve just messed up ‘Tsonga’, the second in command, in a fight.” I replied.  “He was trying to force me to a rescue mission which he had caused yesterday by hob-nobbing with Mlandizi prostitutes when we had to return in time before the capricious afternoon rains”

“So, where are you going now?” Maswanganyi drove his point home.

“I’m trying to see if I can reach Mlandizi in time to find Colonel Yonana.  I want to report the incident to him before ‘Tsonga’ puts his devilish spin on it”

“Oh well, you had better hurry because if ‘Tsonga’ gives us an order in the next five minutes ‘Catch Mordecai and mete out discipline, we will probably beat you to death’.”

I got the message.  It built the spring in my sprint.

I must have sprinted too fast in that 1987 for not only did I find Colonel Yonana at Mlandizi the same afternoon who resolved the problem, but I found myself in 2001, some 14 years of full circle, face-to-face again with Maswanganyi, still robotic, only now a colonel of the South African National Defence Force rather than a captain in charge of an APLA company in search, but still frozen nonetheless to his obsequiousness to authority, rather than being merely observant of military rules and regulations as any good officer should do.

He was still frozen in time, as it were.  Frosted from toe to eyeball, with the white of his corneas the answer to doubting Thomas’s all and sundry.

I leave him frosted for now to go back earlier in time, to the year or two before coming to Masuguri.  I am explaining now how I had come to be generally gatvol of exiled guerrillas.

I had arrived in Dakawa in the year 1985, having been dispatched by no less a comrade than Chris Hani himself.  All these years from 1985 until early 2011, I was convinced his intentions were genuine, but the more I look at him and the actions of other Xhosa-speakers that are at variance with their words, I have now concluded he was dumping in.

Dakawa was hell on earth, run by one Xhosa-speaking woman called Mary Ngozi, then the wife of Mike Ngozi.


For the day, suffice it to write about the questionable ways people disappeared and then were reported dead or never reported to this day.  Also there were accidents that too many of us thought maybe they were not real accidents, judging by the way the Mary Ngozi administration had treated the deceased prior to their demise.  Two of the supposed victims of a similar  accident I knew.  They both of them had had hard times just before they were whisked away from Dakawa to die in the “accident” (with one Thiza Shabangu getting a completely crushed skull where the lorry tyre had supposedly caught him....)

So, let me start with Thiza Shabangu, son to a prominent clergyman in some corner or other of South Africa, he used to say.  He was a stockily-built cadre about four years my senior with ample sideboards on his face, a compensation for his balding head, I would say.  He also sported piercing eyes that were small for his large head and he would ogle you up his forehead, as if to enlarge the eyeballs in the process.  An incurable lover of American jazz (whose whole range he could dissect for you from Commercial to Fusion), he was Camp 18’s chief cook when he first arrived in Dakawa, from, supposedly, Angola.  And a damn bloody good cook he was!

His scrupulousness with the hemispherical tripod pot must have convinced the Ngozi administration a similarly-spherical infant’s bum could benefit a lot from the same scruple and care:  Thiza Shabangu came to join me as the second ever male house father  at the Ruth First Day Care Centre, Camp 16.

I could see he had the love for the children, and he got along very well with all of us, together with the principal, Comrade Queen Zondo.

Now one day Thiza landed into trouble for ‘selling to the Mabana Villagers merchandize belonging to the Day Care Centre’.  What confused me about the charge was that I had not heard the principal say to us some goods had gone missing.  Besides, Comrade Queen was such a kind soul that so often when kids had outgrown articles she used to give them to us to do as we saw fit.  Could it be that Thiza was accused of selling that which he had been lawfully given?  Could it be just a ploy to oust him from a Ruth First which had gradually become popular with menfolk who had initially despised the sight of Terence Qwabe/Manyanya Phiri carry infants to and fro between the prefab shelter and the bathroom?

I have never had the answers.  I was there, though when Mary Ngozi Judge Jury and Prosecutor tried the case

“Thiza, you know the story already from the quizzing and grilling you got from imbokodo last night, but our security not only found the clothes among the peasants who said they bought from you, imbokodo also  tells me from their interview of you, you are indeed the culprit.” Ngozi said.

“I did not sell those clothes.”

“You did.”

“I did not, Comrade Mary.”

“You did, Comrade Thiza.”

So gross were these kangaroo-court proceedings (Mary Ngozi at the helm) that the whole thing degenerated into an altercation.

“If I keep on telling you I’m innocent while you insist I’m guilty, well then, do with me as you please, Comrade Mary.”

Mary Ngozi did just that: removed him from the Day-Care-Centre and within a month, out of Dakawa to meet his suspicious fate.

I stand to be corrected, but in retrospect, I think even the supposedly stolen goods were not there for an exhibit during the “trial”.  There were not even any neutral person who represented Thiza as the security man accompanying Mary Ngozi, Queen Zondo and I were mere spectators.

In fact, what riles me to this day is what right did people like Ngozi have to determine a particular ‘thief’ had to be tried and sentenced by them, while another , by the Tanzanian government?  Mary Ngozi herself, her right-hand man Mojo (Present-day Lieutenant General Motau) walking forever all-smiles and abreast if not sheepishly in her wake, had a year before, briskly and successfully approached the Tanzanian police over a young, Shangaan-speaking cadre from Alexander Township, a John who used to speak his language in a most melodious way, a sing-song fashion with a touch of sadness in his coarse but small voice.  John had allegedly stolen Camp 18’s electricity generator (if not actually rubbed Ngozi and her ilk the wrong way by demonstrating the camaraderie with which Dakawa residents would mix with the local Tanzanians in defiance of her dominant Eastern Cape spousal tribe’s call to “stay away from the smelly locals”). 

The complete story of that young comrade, and his fate shall be left for others to account. Suffice it to say prior to his problems with the administration, he had frequently told me and one Comrade Tosh Williamson how one senior female administrator had made frequent sexual advances to him, and fearing victimization by her well-placed husband, he had pulled a Joseph-Potifar-wife on her. 

John had also revealed that his alibi in connection with the missing electricity generator was being turned against him.

‘Seeing that in the night it disappeared I had been away to a Tanzanian village, Comrade Terence Qwabe.” he had said.


“I have in their logic to be the one who must have come back at night to steal the machine with my Tanzanian co-perpetrators”.

Even though the Tanzanian state seemingly found no reason to prosecute Mary Ngozi’s suspect, the young comrade still and very simply disappeared.  I harbour serious doubts if he ever made it home during the repatriation process.  John’s story is particularly poignant for me because he was one of the few fellows who had been with me on my meeting with Comrade Jacob Zuma back in Mozambique some four years before.


Can Mary Ngozi and Mojo, wherever they are now, please confirm  that Young-man John did return to Alexander, Johannesburg; and if not , then what happened to him?

To come back to the second case whose fate was reported as having ended with ‘the accident that killed Thiza and some eight others’.

Let us first see this matter through the eyes of a child, Boniswa, daughter of a Mozambican mulatto woman and a charming Sotho-speaking cadre whose duties included the driving of one of those blue coloured Niva vehicles in Dakawa and Mazimbu, was one of the pupils of my class at the Day Care Centre.

Boniswa, like two other children I will come back to if I ever expand these Dakawa experiences, exhibited all the characteristics of a child from a troubled home, if Albert Bandura’s works and the works of other similar great minds in Psychology were anything to go by.  Considering that I had never been a specialist myself in infant psychological problems, I initially took Boniswa for another temporarily troubled child who would ‘grow out of it’.  However, visiting Camp 17, 300 metres from Camp 16 one day, I think I came like an octopus around its prey to grasp and suck in Boniswa’s problem.  Her parents were not getting well along which was the best-case scenario!

There was also the fact that her mother was most probably the victim of sexual harassment, abuse or even rape by at least one of the ‘big shots’ of the Mary Ngozi and Mojo’s Dakawa Camp.  One particular usual suspect was a fellow who went by the name of Comrade Never Khalema.  He lived in Camp 16.  And there follows the story how matters came to a head just after this clarification.  Reporting to Mary Ngozi any sexual abuse of women was futile.  It was the report of similar abuse that not only reached Mary Ngozi’s deaf ears for months on end just as current abuse of women by some Lindiwe Sisulu’s  generals and colonels enjoys no audience, on one occasion comrades (Cecil Nduli, Maboafela Tsabedze of around Sebokeng, Gauteng, and Comrade Professor were summarily fired by Tanzania’s ANC supremo, Stanley Mabizela who had descended on Dakawa from Dar es-Salaam breathing fury like a monster escaping a 3-D screening of Jurassic Park).

Now we can go back to that little tot, Boniswa, her father and her mother.  Were they themselves really safe from monsters?

Arriving at Camp 17 where the cadres had made some sort of a party, I was highly titillated to find the cadres singing and clapping hands around a track-suited, light-skinned and somewhat tiny figure dancing the ndlamu dance so elegantly I thought only Zulu-speakers could do.  Coming closer I discovered the dancer was Boniswa’s father, aged about 30!

To this day, the beauty of that dance remains indelible and invaluable in my mind because I thought “how wonderful it could be if we could perfect in our Dakawa community that intertribal culture which the Mabizela-led Xhosa-speakers of the community and other individual opportunists born in Stanley Mabizela’s Eastern Cape were busy destroying by publicly and without impunity preaching Xhosa tribalism?”

Oh yes, that dance was to remain etched in my mind the result of  the same craftsmanship with which Eastern-Cape Regionalists like Motau, Mabizela and Ngozi were drilling their tribal putrefaction...others may argue perhaps that Mary Ngozi was probably born in Mozambique fair enough but since she was married to a Roman she was seen to be even more Roman than the native Romans did in their worst Romanness!

You would, for example, regularly hear a particular Xhosa-speaking drunkard in the full hearing of the entire Ngozi administration screaming tribal expletives with impunity every other drunken night.

“Us Xhosas,” he would start once the home-distilled gin gongo, akin to a Japanese tsunami, had washed through his dendrites killing thousands of his neurons on every such spree.  “I say we are ruling you here in exile and we will rule you in a Democratic South Africa too”. 

In the same night another madman and occasionally a madwoman too if of the same mentally- and ethnically-diseased grouping would go for the jugular vein:  “You Zulus would get serious positions in the ANC too, only if you were educated enough, but alas, you are so school-shy that even your Jacob Zuma is a mere standard 2-leaver that we Xhosas are busy doing a favour with the high position he is enjoying...anifundanga!”

These statements would have passed for bad jokes (what the great nation of Tanzania calls utani) had it not been that the entire ANC administration in Tanzania was giving substance to these inebriated ramblings.  Stanley Mabizela’s administration was sending to colleges and to other opportunities predominantly Xhosa-speakers or those who had maternal or parental connection with them, all to the exclusion of native Transvalers (‘we’ll show them, coming from Soweto doesn’t necessarily make you a smart one’) and ex-KwaZulu-Natal comrades (“People of Traitor Mangosuthu Buthelezi”).

There was even more substance to the bellowing of the drunken Thembu bull unleashed by Eastern-Cape born Stanley Mabizela because, no sooner had Boniswa’s father driven back to Camp 16 where he and his family stayed, commotion erupted. 

Simultaneous loud voices of men, coming in spasms of excited unison like a hundred commentators on one tennis match featuring a Williams titan or a boxing match with Baby Jake Matlala is what captivated my attention as I was just considering a walk back to my prefab.  I then retraced my steps to rejoin the body of Camp 17 comrades who were also nursing a prick to their curiosity, not knowing by then that indeed a prick was in action at that moment down at Camp 16.

Presently, we heard a loud thud which succeed to solicit female voices for a hitherto all-male rappers’ choir and later we were to learn that the  windscreen was smashed from the front of the Niva driven by Boniswa’s dad!

The dancer to Zulu music had returned to his home to find the tall and athletic Never Khalema sexually molesting his wife, and he, like any man would, gave a veritable fight.  In the ensuing scuffle things, including the car, were smashed.  Never, the well-built fellow whose incessant smiles belied his inconsiderateness defiantly and slowly sauntered back to his house.


The ughs and ahs we had heard were moments when the lanky Never, in the altogether, would periodically lunge back to block a blow or even to wag a finger at the smaller but aggrieved man even as his prick was also wagging in the process!


Cadres who co-witnessed the incident, joked for days about the shape of his endowment. 

Bud to you, Reader (whether you be my President Zuma with a clue or anybody else who’d maybe never had an idea what mental torture exile had inflicted on people like Sisulu and Phiri), TWO-YEAR-OLD BONISWA HAD BEEN THERE FOR THE ENTIRETY OF THE EPISODE!

I was particularly hurt by this incident because, as a house father to Boniswa and same-age kids, I worked very hard to keep them mentally stable and receptive to menfolk, then comes a member of Mary Ngozi’s administration to shatter those young fragile minds just because of his failure to control his own penis!  I still shudder to think what life Boniswa is living today with men.  I will be surprised if she is happily married.  I think it shattered Boniswa psychologically.  THE SADDEST OF ALL PARTS OF THIS STORY IS: THIS IS WHAT IS STILL GOING ON IN THE SANDF TODAY UNDER LINDIWE NONCEBA SISULU AND SHE THINKS IT IS NORMAL, HENCE WHISTLE-BLOWERS LIKE PHIRI ARE CHARGED BY HER INSTEAD OF BEING SUPPORTED.  WHAT DEMOCRACY IS BEING SPAWNED THEN IN THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA IF PSYCHOPATHS OF EXILE ARE ALLOWED TO RUN THE SHOW WITH IMPUNITY?

Never himself was married, with a boy child, too, the age of the selfsame Boniswa.  It was said his wife had gone to college or something during that incident, not that her presence would have made a difference though.

What happened to Never thereafter?

Never, like his name, “Never”, was never taken to the police or at least brought to book by the Ngozi-Mojo-Mabizela administration (He apparently was one of the infallible, chosen few of the administration pretty much like criminally-minded Bobelo-Zini is treated with impunity by her tribal sister, Ms Lindiwe Sisulu).


At least neither Stanley Mabizela nor Mary Ngozi told us about any such negative orders and never was around with us for as long as I can remember after that incident.  In fact, Never was to remain in Dakawa for at least two more years while Boniswa’s father was immediately sent away to die in a ‘mass accident’ that was Never fully explained.

Since I came back home I have never met Never, although I’ve clapped eyes on his very humble wife, an apparent medical officer. Some rumours (but these are strictly rumours I would Never tie my name to while soldering some truths to it) have it that over and above his usual calling as a guerrilla, Never was occasionally used by some individual corrupt leaders who had no blessing whatsoever from President Oliver Tambo, to assassinate own forces who criticized them too much.  The rumour concludes that he died back here in South Africa, killed by his own Mercedes-Benz when he rolled it, “if he rolled it himself or having somebody else stage-rolling it for him seeing that at that particular point of life Never had picked up a fight with one of the most feared guerrilla leaders of Umkhonto Wesizwe” known to the Blogger.

The best thing for me to write now is: NEVER KHALEMA!   IF YOU ARE STILL ALIVE, PLEASE SEND ME AN EMAIL ON THIS BLOG AND MAYBE ALSO EXPLAIN YOURSELF WHY IN THOSE MID-EIGHTIES YOU USED TO THINK WOMEN BODIES ARE THE PLAYGROUND FOR YOUR SADISTIC MIND?

The reader of my Blog may wonder out loud why I write a rumour about Never where it concerns his activities as a professional assassin for own forces.  The answer is simple: if indeed he was such a character, it goes a long way into explaining how POSSIBLY Boniswa’s father, Thiza Shabangu and the six or so other comrades of that ONE INCIDENT actually died in that questionable accident.  WAS IT AN ACCIDENT OR WAS IT THE WORK OF A MOST PROBABLE AND OBVIOUS ASSASSIN?

Karma indeed if Never indeed died indeed in the same way he IF indeed he killed others indeed in that fashion!

At about that stage of my years in Dakawa, particularly after landing in Morogoro Central Prison (where I met face-to-face with some of the most gruesome murderers you could find in any organization anywhere on earth, led by a fellow you called Stalin.  Through a torture method to put you off your food with a weak stomach, Stalin and his two accomplices were in Morogoro prison for murdering a Zulu-speaking fellow, Comrade Giovanni whose crime had been to complain too much why he, among too many of his fellow-Zulu-speakers from KwaZulu-Natal had been refused scholarships for years while Stalin’s Xhosa-speaking fellow-tribesmen were leaving for various scholarships monthly if not weekly with the blessing and under the unofficial but clearly-visible programme of ex-Eastern-Cape Mr Stanley Mabizela.

Even though Mazimbu and Dakawa had more than their fair share of wanton murderers and serial killers of own comrades mostly for reasons of challenging Thembu tribalism, more victims of unnecessary death were not killed per se.  They simply succumbed to psychologically horrid conditions they were placed under in our Dachau camp. Many cadres who were dumped into Dakawa in turn dumped their own minds cracking under the  emotional strain of being forced to stay year in and year out between two alcoholic beverages that came in the shapes of mtama from the  village of Mabana and mnazi from Mvomero.  Folklore had it that the latter, which is brewed from the milk of coconut, is the African grandfather to Viagra. 

I know that while I drank the liquid my interests were so wide on one of those days I dated my oldest girlfriend to date!  But then I have also never been to any place in that Republic where I was not at one stage given banana food, the unsung hero of the bedroom. Let me invite readers of my blog to go find out for themselves, if to leave me here for more serious and sadder matters.

If I were a psychiatrist, I would but  imagine a combination of alcohol and the aversion towards contact with female sexuality an affliction which needs must come with any serious bout of  neurosis (the mother of suicides) is not assisted by the smallest leg among the three feeling like one of the bigger two.

Coming to mind is a gentleman called Comrade Fourbob on whom God Almighty allowing I will dilate one day.  He had come from all the way from White City Soweto, the people who were friends to Blogger from 1994 to 1998 to join the struggle only to be found dead in his tent one morning, possible suicide, without firing one bullet against the apartheid regime and most probably without having one cent paid to his family back in White City for his family losing a bread winner to the anti-apartheid struggle.

There was also this one-time commissar, Philemon or Something Ndlela and father to then three-year-old father Lenin (South African guerrillas of both the ANC and PAC were too fond of naming their kids after foreign freedom fighters while ignoring local names like Sekhukhune, Shaka and Hintsa). Commissar Ndlela reportedly committed suicide after about four years denied a scholarship especially one which was  supposed to have taken him to Korea.

There were also those who simply lost their minds without killing themselves.

Coming to mind is one John Solwazi, an elderly cadre from Bergville, KwaZulu-Natal.  He so daily raved about the injustices of the Ngozi-Mabizela administration that, one day, on the border of insanity, he left his Camp 17 tent to go and climb up a 10-metre-high water-tank nearby where he babbled a number of blasphemously nonsensical statements like “he was Jesus Christ”.

So, for thirty minutes I to no avail tried to coax The Messiah into making his Second Coming down to no avail.  Most other comrades who had seen so many acts of insanity before simply shrugged their shoulders off while a few callous ones gave the incident an honest-to-goodness guffaw half of which was directed at me for caring. 

When I finally succeeded to bring the Son of Mary back from his artificial mountain, I thought I should also try to bring His mental state back to terra firma again: I guess I have a natural empathy for people, and the books I was reading on child psychology only enhanced my understanding with people.


 

Reaching the tent of a John who silently declared that for seven days or thereabout water was a foreign thing for anything else under that tarpaulin, I once more coaxed the Prince of Peace, if into a disrobing on which exercise he embarked without one hesitation.

Until that day, I had never known that there is a nurse in me and before long I was giving Comrade John Solwazi, a man old enough to be my father, a good scrubbing.  Indeed, it was for the first time I’d ever washed an adult man like a baby but the second time it was with the corpse of my younger brother Peter in a mortuary back in South Africa where my maternal aunt Mrs Bella Mnisi as a rule flatly refuses the washing of relatives by mortuary staff which she calls the nadir of a curse for family survivors. 

Back in Tanzania and under that Solwazi tent, I rummaged through for fresh clothing which I found and made him wear, whereupon I threw the dirty ones into a tub for a wash long overdue.

“Comrade John Solwazi, are you hungry?” I asked him in Zulu.

“I’m famished, Comrade” he queened colourfully for a response, in illness or in wellness never the one shy to relish any other language like he did his native Zulu in discourse or in chorus, the lightning rod of his fame.

I responded by getting him food from the kitchen, which he munched silently, but soulfully and musically reported the fact when he was done.  He was as loud as only he could be, thanking Soviet assistance to the great ANC.

“Soviet people, Lovely nation

Here we are far from home!

We shall need you we shall love you

For all the things you’ve done for us”

I’d always eschewed the syntax but understood the sentiment!   Let me hear someone again say God never loved Soviet communists and I will make them read that story of Jesus John Solwazi from Bergville!

That was only a snippet from my stay with the Pixley ka Isaka Seme’s African National Congress in exile.  I wish this organization well on the eve of its 100^th year anniversary in 2012.  Without the ANC, none of us would be free today, least of all free to write what we like as Comrade Steve Biko can be paraphrased, writing to our head of State and Commander in Chief, President Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma.  May his ANC find its moral barometer as espoused by Seme at the turn of the nineteenth Century.