Lobatse is particularly bereaved
Douglas Tsiako | Sunday December 8, 2013 19:45
Only they did not know, that the presence of the man who caused more than a little stir in the then Bechuanaland Protectorate, especially among British officers of the small police force who felt a strange obligation to defer to apartheid South African Police (SAP), would make them an important part of the history.
But it is doubtful that outside the circle of that stalwart of South Africa’s liberation struggle, Rivonia trialist Fish Keitseng of Lobatse, the party that received Mandela numbers more than the fingers of one hand, Keitseng himself having long departed.
In 1959, this Motswana man had been deported from South Africa where he had been active in the ANC Underground. Partly because of the overwhelming terror of the notorious SAP that was known by the telling sobriquet of Satan
After People, there was little warning that Keitseng would play a more critical role in the course of South Africa’s liberation struggle from his native land of Bechuanaland and Lobatse a significant part in the changing course of South African history. Before the decision to launch armed struggle was made, Nelson Mandela recognised that it was vital to cultivate a network of friends in the international community, and Bechaunaland became the natural point of entry and departure for the outside world.
It was thus here, specifically Lobatse, that the man who would become a co-founder of the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe, came to make the first crucial contacts that would take him further into the hinterland of Africa, including Algeria where he received military training in 1962.
Infact, it is coincidence beyond words that his life-long friend who welcomed him to his country, the freedom fighter and former President of Algeria, Ben Bella, should have died on Wednesday this week, also at the age of 95, only one day before his comrade-in-arms.
In its small way, Lobatse was becoming the nexus and meeting point of revolutionaries whose energies were focused on attaining freedom for their peoples.
When the insignificant house that he lived in at the famous high-density neighbourhood of Peleng proved to become a trap for kidnapping by SAP agents who were all over the place, Mandela would melt away into the hills that surround Lobatse.
The sheer hubris of his friend Hilda Bernstein, who clearly enjoyed these daring border-jumping missions with Mandela, is evident in her writings of this time in the life of the world’s pre-eminent liberation stalwart.Years later, Mandela would explain why the ANC decided to move towards armed struggle in his now famous book, Long Walk to Freedom:
“The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight.
That time has come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defence of our people, our future and our freedom.”
And at the Rivonia Trial in1963 where he appeared with Keitseng:
“We believed that as a result of the government’s policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable. Above all we want equal political rights. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites of the country because the majority of voters will be Africans.
This makes the white man fear democracy. But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all.” He may have won freedom by means that included armed struggle because it was ultimately necessary to take that route, but in the end Nelson Mandela came to the best qualities in all of us. And today the little town in southeastern Botswana stands at a crossroads.
About to become a ghost town, it has the potential to prosper on many fronts, including as a free trade zone. It sits at a key junction on the coast-to-coast route of southern Africa.
This monument to Nelson Mandela and other stalwarts of the wider struggle for liberation in southern Africa, including Mozambiques Samora Machel, should not be allowed to wither away. Though South Africa is mired in a holdover to the apartheid past, and Botswana was never quite free of the stranglehold of white supremacy, the beacon of Mandela will be a greater legacy that shall filter through every frontier of resistance to good reason.
To that end, Lobatse must forever stand as a threshold to freedom by hosting a man who stubbornly believed in the essential goodness of humanity.
It must have been with this in mind that the former South African Deputy High Commissioner to Botswana, M. Mjikeliso, always complained that the history of Botswana’s part in his country’s struggle for liberation was poorly recorded.
The envoy repeated this in September and made a call for redress when he spoke at a combined commemoration of the fallen heroes of Lesoma, the June 14, 1985 raid by apartheid South Africa’s airforce and commandoes on Gaborone, and Botswana’s 47th anniversary of independence at Gaborone’s Old Cemetery at Extension 14 in September. Allah’u’Abha Tata!