June 16: A reflection on safe havens for apartheid liberationists
Lesang Maswabi | Friday June 16, 2023 10:43
After living with and amongst families of both fallen and surviving heroes and heroines of the apartheid for many years, recently I was privileged to meet some who had returned from exile and have since taken Botswana citizenship.
Local entertainer Paul Kgosidintsi a long-time friend of some of the locally based South Africa’s liberation struggle heroes is organising a commemoration event this coming weekend.
The event is some sort of get-together for both former activists and those who hosted them here in Botswana.
One of the aims of the event is to sensitise Batswana and those beyond the borders about the events of that fateful day in 1976. Kgosidintsi has specifically invited people such oBrian Sekwele, a person I have also known personally over years and had a chance to interview at a prelude meeting to the event. I was also introduced to Kgosietsile Seretse at the host’s place.
The Soweto demonstrations which Kgosidintsi’s friends mentioned and participated in were primarily sparked by the rise of the Black Conscience Movement (BCM) and formation of South African Students Organisation’s (SASO) protests against the introduction of the Bantu Education Act of 1953 by then apartheid South African government. That occasion spread to many student communities across South Africa.
Those particular year’s events and ones that followed thereafter would be documented through various media platforms from radio, television, print media and later books. Some of the students who sparked the protests/strikes sought refuge in the neighbouring Southern African countries such as Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and Tanzania and as far as Nigeria.
Some of our families and friends ended up hosting liberation activists in their own homes. To the children of these host families most of those activists were only introduced as “uncles and aunts”. Their true identities were kept highly secretive to the children because they were actually on the run from the oppressive and highly dangerous apartheid security forces.
These young men and women were at times hosted for a day, two, week to a month before they suddenly disappeared from homesteads to mysterious destinations that were kept secret not only to the children but parents too. They would go only to resurface some two to three decades later. Some of these “uncles and aunts” unfortunately before being transferred to their training camps abroad, faced their demise either through natural causes or were assassinated by the secret security forces of South Africa. In next week’s segment I will feature extended experiences of the respective activists including accounts of those that hosted and provided safe passage to the fleeing freedom fighters.