Linchwe held ANC weapons

MONKAGEDI GAOTLHOBOGWE
Staff Writer | Monday May 14, 2012 00:00

 

It has been revealed that Kgosi Linchwe II of Bakgatla was a key member of the African National Congress (ANC) underground military machinery that operated in Botswana in the 70s up to 1992.

Former South African president Thabo Mbeki, who was the guest speaker at Sir Ketumile Foundation annual dinner, revealed this on Friday night. Mbeki says he told this story to show that Botswana was genuinely a Frontline State, and despite its vulnerability to possible reprisals by the apartheid regime, it played a critical role in the struggle to end the apartheid system.

According to Mbeki, Linchwe II was identified as the channel through whom to pass all manner of military weapons from other countries to Botswana.  Mbeki described this project as 'ANC underground machinery in Botswana'.

Mbeki said this secret had never been known but stressed that he was proud to let the cat out of the bag. 'I can, today, say that the late and outstanding Botswana and African patriot, Kgosi Linchwe II, was part of the machinery we established, which enabled the ANC to pass war material through Botswana, to enable us to carry out military operations in South Africa.'

The weapons would then end up in South Africa where they were used in guerrilla warfare by the ANC military wing.

The former South African president made the revelation on Friday as he praised Botswana leaders' roles during the dark days of apartheid. Mbeki revealed for the first time that Kgosi Linchwe II, who died in 2007, was identified as a key member who received, kept military weapons in Botswana before passing them on to ANC freedom fighters in South Africa.

And when the guerrilla war ended, Mbeki says the ANC hierarchy used the 1992 Bafana Bafana versus Zebras game in Gaborone to meet with Linchwe II and device a strategy to distribute the weapons in his control to the police.

Mbeki said the strategy was that Linchwe II, as a tribal leader, would plant the  weapons at various places and then phone the police claiming that he had intelligence information to the effect that weapons of war were hidden at such locations.

Mbeki says the likes of Sir Seretse Khama and Sir Ketumile Masire knew about the ANC underground project in Botswana and supported it silently, to avoid provoking the apartheid regime in Pretoria. In fact Mbeki says at one point when he was caught by the apartheid agents in Zimbabwe trying to flee South Africa, officials in Botswana organised an escape route in a plane, finally landing in Tanzania and then England.

Mbeki also recalled that the late ANC president Oliver Tambo attended Botswana's 10th independence anniversary celebrations in 1976 as a guest of Sir Seretse Khama's government.  He also revealed that the then Botswana Police commissioner Simon Hirschfield had arranged an undercover operation that was intended to airlift the late Steve Biko from the magisterial district of King William's Town in the Eastern Cape to Gaborone at night  to meet with Tambo and immediately fly back to King William's Town the same night, so that by  sunrise, when the South African Police might check on him, he would be back in his house.

However that operation failed after the apartheid police learnt about it because all of a sudden the South African police mounted open and visible surveillance over Biko on a 24-hour basis. This meant that he could not leave King William's Town secretly.