Peleng remembers Mandela
Gothataone Moeng | Friday December 13, 2013 17:22
The two services could not have been more different. Ninety-one world leaders, including American President Barack Obama and President Ian Khama, attended the Johannesburg service held at FNB Stadium.
In Lobatse yesterday afternoon, people thronged Peleng Community Hall for an altogether low-key event that both celebrated the life of the man who spent more nights in Peleng than in South Africa between 1961 and his arrest in 1962, and remembered the role played by Fish Keitseng and the township of Peleng.
Guests included historian and government spokesperson Jeff Ramsay, legislator Nehemiah Modubule and the Keitseng family. Keitseng, who had become close to Mandela during the Defiance Campaign of 1952, hosted Mandela and other South African freedom fighters in transit from South Africa to other African countries.
Perhaps the modesty of the Peleng service was fitting, for this small unassuming township played a vital but often overlooked role in the South African liberation struggle. Back in January 1962, Keitseng's humble homestead in the heart of the Peleng became the first port of call as Mandela began to travel throughout Africa to promote the armed struggle and the military wing of his African National Congress (ANC), Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK).
Keitseng's house itself was a shabby ramshackle that, as Keitseng remembered in his book, 'Comrade Keitseng: Memoirs of a Motswana in the ANC,' did not even have a door. But small, incomplete or not, this house has become a material testament of Peleng's special place in the region's shared freedom struggle, as Ramsay pointed out yesterday.
This small, incomplete structure was to become a safe house and a significant transit route for ANC activists. According to Philip Segadika, Chief Curator at the National Museum and Art Gallery, this house at one time played host to 40 members of MK in the first-ever ANC conference held outside of South Africa following the movement's decision to take up arms in the fight for freedom from apartheid.
It was here that the ANC formally embraced its definition as a liberation movement.
'In the parlance of the liberation struggle, Peleng in the early 1960s was a small but absolutely critical liberated zone where freedom fighters could swim in relative safety. One hastens to say 'relative' because in looking back, we should not overlook the danger that was all around at that time.
'All but forgotten bombings took place here (including inside Keitseng's yard), disappearances took place here, agents and double agents lurked in the shadows here. But this community, during the last years of colonial overrule in our country, was already liberated in its spirit of cosmopolitan resistance,' Ramsay said yesterday.
Ramsay said Mandela, like Keitseng and the other heroes of their generation, succeeded against all odds not because they saw themselves as heroes, but because they acted as humble disciplined cadres of a revolutionary movement.
'It is therefore appropriate that in remembering Mandela, we also remember his fellow comrades, including some of the citizens of this country without whose contributions the legacy of Mandela and the history of this region would have been very different,' Ramsay said.
Yesterday, the High Commissioner of South Africa to Botswana, Mdu Lembebe, acknowledged the role played by Keitseng and other residents of Peleng.
'Generations of South Africans will forever remain indebted to Fish Keitsing for availing his house as a safe haven,' he said.
Rhoda Sekgororoane, executive member of the Association of South Africans Living in Botswana (ASABO), founded in the late 1970s and officially launched in May 1996 by Mandela when he was on a state visit to Botswana, said it was fitting for Lobatse to hold a memorial service in Peleng.
She called the township a place that everybody in Botswana would like to be associated with, saying the people of the township should feel blessed to have played host to such a great man.
'Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela's life and passing on should redefine the meaning of hero. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela's life and passing on should redefine the meaning of freedom. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela's life and passing on should give fresh meaning to democracy,' she said.
Ramsay reminded the audience that Keitseng and other residents of Peleng who protected South African freedom fighters risked their own lives in the process. In an interview with Mmegi after the memorial service, Keitseng's widow recalled a 1973 explosion in her homestead that luckily did not claim any lives.
She said a car was parked in the yard, and that the people who placed the device there must have banked on the fuel in the car engulfing the whole yard in flames. However, the car did not have much fuel and had been parked in a sandy area as a precaution for just such incidents, she said.
She struggled to describe her feelings of living with such risks, safe to say that she was often benumbed but concentrated on the work that needed to be done, which was generally taking care of her 'guests.'
Seatlasaone Keitseng, first-born son of Keitseng, described Mandela's passing as the beginning of the third phase of the struggle, the first phase having been the apartheid period and the second the years of Mandela's presidency.
Mandela was also Keitseng's lawyer during the latter's activist days in South Africa. Seatlasaone said because of the common trait the two anti-apartheid heroes shared, their relationship must have been interesting.
'What I have observed is that they were both stubborn. My father, once he was convinced of something, it was very difficult to change his mind. And my father spoke about Mandela almost every day, and spoke often about his principled approach to things. When he (Mandela) was committed to something, he didn't change easily,' he said. Mandela died on Thursday December 5, 2013.