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 Off-target though her dream was, Rhoda Sekgororoane nonetheless had a vision of the attack. In the dream, President Hotel was collapsing in a cloud of rubble and just as she woke up sweating, there was a loud explosion that jolted her completely out of her sleep. "It was not uncommon then for the Botswana Defence Force to carry out military exercises at night. At first, that is what I thought it was," Sekgororoane remembers 21 years after the event. From where he had put up for the night in Broadhurst, Cedric Bapela also heard a similar explosion and thought the same thing as Sekgororoane. It was the defence force alright but its abbreviation did not start with a "B" and as both found out the following day, it certainly was not playing harmless war games. When Botswana was counting its dead, the perpetrators of the act; commandos from the South African Defence Force had crossed back into their country and the apartheid government was congratulating them on a job well done. Arriving at the office that morning, Sekgororoane found a white South African friend holed up inside. He asked her to take a car to Michael Hamlyn, a friend and fellow countrymen. She did, but upon arrival at Hamlyn's place found that where there once stood a house there was a heap of dynamited rubble where two lives had been brutally taken. At the brutally efficient of hands of the SADF's killing machine had also fallen Lindi, George Phahle and his visiting brother in law, Dick Mtsweni, Basi Zondi, Thami Myele, Michael Hamlyn and Duke Machobane. In their afterlife, the remains of these people lay side by side at the Gaborone cemetery in Extension 14. Every June 14, friends and South African High Commission staff take time in the morning to spruce up the graves. The Phahle's and Mnyele have since been exhumed and their remains reptriated to South Africa. "The killings happened a long time ago but the memory is still fresh in our minds and they will never be erased," Bapela said after the cleanup. Members of the BDF also pay respect to their own dead who were killed by the Rhodesian army in 1978. The cleanup is done by the civilians joined by the BDF members at the mass grave of the 15 soldiers who died at Lesoma. Before laying a wreath, the South African High Commissioner led the singing of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrica, then said a rather long prayer in Setswana, liberally peppered with Sotho, in which she prayed for continued kinship between her people and Batswana. The cleanup should be done more often. The graves are overgrown with weeds and rains have washed the earth, as that on Machobane's grave, away. The good news is that from this year on, graves of other South African refugees who died and were buried in Gaborone during the struggle against apartheid will receive the same attention as those of June 14 victims. During the Wednesday cleanup and remembrance, they also went about identifying some more graves of those South Africans. Central to that process was Bapela who came to Botswana in 1981 as a refugee and has compiled a list of graves whose whereabouts were hitherto unknown. Botswana's former ambassador to the United States, Zacchariah Matthews, is also buried at the same cemetery. Twelve years after his country gained independence, Bapela is still in Botswana and has no plans to go back any time soon. A University of Botswana graduate, Bapela lives in Bontleng, works as a business consultant and is currently pursuing a PhD programme in business planning with a United Kingdom university. "When South Africa gained independence, I didn't feel it was necessary to go back home. I had a job here and had come to love Botswana. If you stay in a place for too long, it becomes extremely difficult for you to uproot yourself," he says. However, not all South Africans who took refuge here feel the same way as Bapela. One reason often given is that Botswana was not as committed to the liberation of black South Africans as other countries in the region like Zimbabwe and Zambia. Botswana's stated policy was that it was not to be used as a launching pad for military attacks against its neighbours. Former foreign affairs minister, Dr Gaositwe Chiepe says that she feels that she and her cabinet colleagues were on the right foreign policy path. "We made the right decision because otherwise the South African army would have exterminated both us; Batswana and the refugees. The reason behind the policy was to protect both us and them and be in a better position to help them in their struggle," says Chiepe, who is now retired. Bapela also rejects the assertion that Botswana somehow collaborated with the apartheid regime. "Blanket statements are never helpful in helping one understand a situation. Of course anybody can make an assertion either way about Batswana's helpfulness or otherwise at the time and actually quote a real example to back up their assertion. The problem comes when people want to generalise on the basis of a particular instance. At the time of the struggle, many of us moved from house to house because landlords would kick us out once they discovered that we were South African refugees. It would be wrong to make a generalisation about how Batswana related to South African refugees on the basis of that because there were a lot of Batswana who put their lives on the line for us," he says. Sekgororoane was among those who made such sacrifices and she remembers making countless cross-border trips to South Africa smuggling mail. On one such mission, she nearly had her head blown off by a wheelchair-bound Boer shop owner who was pissed off that a black person could have the audacity to ask to use his toilet. Even just being simple friends with South African refugees was a huge risk. Gertrude Selolwane, who at the time of the raid worked at the ministry of foreign affairs as a protocol officer, had become very good friends with the Phahle couple. Hours after the bombing, she jumped out of her skin when she heard a knock on her bedroom. "Everyone who was a friend with South African refugees was a target and I feared that they had come for me," she says. The knocker was not a South African commando but a neighbour who had come to tell Selolwane that a frantic woman on the phone back at her houses needed to talk to her fast. The message from the other end of the line still rings in her ears to this day: "Gertrude, the Boers have killed your friends. George and Lindie are dead". The Phahles, whom Selolwane's mother jokingly called "Makatangas" after Zimbabwean freedom fighters of the Rhodesian era, had become good family friends. Like everyone else, if she could press a button somewhere and forget June 14, 1985, Selolwane would. Bapela says that while forgiving is the best course of action, actually doing it is extremely difficult. The best course of action, Chiepe says, is to ensure that what brought about that horrible day never happens again. "The home environment would be a good place to start. Parents should make sure that children don't live in an environment that breeds hate and violence," Chiepe says.
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