The day the SADF bombed my village

GREG KELEBONYE
Staff Writer | Friday June 18, 2010 00:00

 

There were six altogether.  Two huge ugly fish-birds and smaller ones, although by no means smaller than what the residents of the budding village of Mogoditshane were used to.

Their combined drone shook the ground and the houses and rendered all other noises ineffective. The birds stopped singing and took off in fright. 

As the helicopters disappeared on the other side of the village, one of the big ugly fish-birds went to and fro, over people's houses, spooking dogs out of their senses and shaking trees, leaving them naked as the cold and dry leaves came down in a whirlwind. 

Legs dangling from the clumsy flying dark green metal fish, the pink human species who grinned foolishly and made thumbs up to the wide-eyed residents below looked even more alien in their green camouflage. 

Someone hollered: 'Ke masole ba tlile go gasa tsie' [It's soldiers, they have come to spray the locust!']. This was during one of the worst locust attacks this side of the country had witnessed in recent memory.

The amazed and excited villagers had no idea that what they were about to witness was not a spraying of locust with insecticide, but a deadly spraying of bullets on innocent civilians.

The day, Monday, June 14, 1986 would go into the annals of history as the day that apartheid South Africa attacked their village. The racist South African Defence Force (SADF) had, with great impunity, deployed its special forces to 'finish once and for all' the 'terrorists' - the Umkonto we Sizwe (African National Congress) and Azania People's Liberation Organization (AZAPO) and other liberation movement cadres and their families, friends and sympathizers.

They bombed indiscriminately and killed, in the process one Jabulani Masalila - may his soul rest in peace. The Jakalas Number 1 born Masalila was just unlucky. There could have been many others killed that day.

In fact, the SADF had in the past year on exactly the same day, bombed a number of houses in the White City/Bontleng and Tlokweng areas, where they had killed a number of people. Some commemoration of the slaughter of men and women and children by the racist regime it was.

One of the two big choppers was hovering over the north western skies of the village, at one point stopping motionless in mid-air, in great arrogance, goliath style within shooting range of the Botswana Defense Force (BDF) missiles, when the clatter of the repeated fire of the machine guns and the grenade explosions reverberated.

The firing started when I had gone into the house to get my school bag.  As my brother hollered for me to get out of the house I heard also, the deafening roar of the grotesque chopper.  It flew so low that I could clearly make out the individual, now stone-faced faces of the soldiers. 

Dark, tangible fear tugged at my stomach, its hideous tentacles wrapping around me as I saw my family lying belly down against the cold ground.  For a fleeting second I recalled the curfew days in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) when an ugly bearded red-neck had shoved a shotgun at my father and demanded he tell the soldiers who had just trooped into our home where the 'other guerillas are'. 

Only the intervention of another man - must have been his superior officer had stopped him from blowing off Dad's head.  Dad was no guerrilla fighter and the very following day he made us pack the few belongings we possessed and brought us back home to Botswana.

On the day the black choppers came, my uncle, brother to my father, was visiting with us. It was his idea that everyone should lie on their bellies when the shooting started. As for him, he disappeared behind the barn as soon as he had uttered the instruction, military-style, to lie down.  I still ask myself if uncle Biki had thought the choppers were Ian Smith's soldiers coming for him.  The machine guns' clattering stopped and the choppers sailed out of the village, diminishing into little black dots as they headed back South.

Then two amber-red comets swooshed across the sky. Someone at the BDF was sending a message to these murderers that next time the missiles would land in their ugly choppers.

The place where the rest of the choppers had landed - the Maipei ward on the eastern side of the village was the true manifestation of the SADF mission.

The people here still carry the mental scars from that day. Even the trees and some houses tell the story - the racist enemy having eternally engraved them with its machine gun bullets and grenades.

' I woke up to the massive droning outside. I could hear the noise under my pillow and I thought to myself that a train must have derailed to this side of town. I went to enquire and found a swarm of camouflaged soldiers crouching on their bellies just in front of our house,' Mavis Diamo recalls.

'A massive, massive dark green helicopter hovered over our house. Then the men were shouting at me to get away and started pelting me with something - I thought it was stones. I took off in fright towards our neighbour's house. Since the soldiers were scattered around the entrance to our yard I ran to the back where I scaled the fence. I found one of my sisters advanced in pregnancy, trying to do the same thing. My other sister, whose baby was a couple of months old had taken refuge in the family pit latrine. She joined us and we all ran towards our neighbour's place. The lady of the house, fearing the soldiers were looking for us tried to chase us away, but we went right past her into the house scared beyond endurance. My sister had even dropped the bed-sheet wrapped around her and had not bothered to look back as we distinctly heard the machine guns firing and the men calling out for the owner of the yard to come out.  Minutes later, when the choppers had left and the BDF arrived we joined the mass of people who converged at our house. Most of the houses in the compound were riddled with bullets.  People were crying. Jabulani, the village veterinary extension worker and Mogoditshane Fighters player had been killed in the shooting. We could not make head or tail of the whole thing. Why would they kill Jabu? And who were they?' says Diamo.

A hundred meters from the Diamo's another family was being subjected to much trauma - from the time the choppers landed. For this family, they knew they would not make it from the moment the gentleman of the house identified the SADF soldiers.

'One of the choppers perched right in front of our house while the big one sat guard in this empty adjacent yard. The soldiers pelted our housekeeper, who had gone to do some laundry at the tap with rubber bullets and instructed us to go back into the house,' says Mmamerafe Molebatsi.

'The soldiers found me ironing my husband's military uniform. When he told me that the soldiers were enemy soldiers from the SADF I wanted to hide the uniform, but he told me to forget about it. We threw the kids under the bed and awaited our fate. We came out of the house when the helicopters left as people, among them our church priests came streaming into our home. They were all thinking that we must be dead.'

The whole thing traumatised Molebatsi so much that she moved, together with the children to her mother's place on the other side of the village. The SADF guns and the roar of the choppers still roared in her mind.

'I remember one day a tractor collided with a car along the Molepolole Road. I was terrified when I heard the noise as I thought the soldiers were back. I decided I needed to stay in a quieter place - if only for my maternity period. So I moved to our lands at Gakuto. But here I was equally petrified by the noise of the planes that pass closer to the village on their way to landing at the airport.'

Molebatsi's children were equally traumatised. Her eldest son, Nicholas, then only five at the time says for a long time he dreaded the noise of helicopters.

'I would be with friends and a helicopter would pass. I would be scared stiff as I recalled how we had been thrown under the bed, my little heart thumping with fright as the world rumbled around our house,' says Nicholas.

'This is one memory which will follow all of us to our graves, yet it appears no one, even government wants to talk, let alone remember it,' he says, biting his lower lip with emotion. The choppers drone, the loud banging, and the helpless feeling still visit Nicholas occasionally. It is the same dark relentless fear that many children have had since that day.

All of them adults now, they can still see the black, lazy choppers and the pink faces of the soldiers. They can hear the reverberating sound of the machine gun fire and the detonating grenades. Today they tell their children about the day the SADF brought Armageddon to their little village.