Peleng: The township that forgot Mandela

GOTHATAONE MOENG
Staff Writer | Friday June 28, 2013 00:00

 

At the front of the yard stands a half-destroyed red-brick structure matching a similar one behind the main house in the yard. A new addition around the compound is a silvery mesh-wire fence.  The main house is unpainted and corrugated iron-roofed, with a black tag identifying the house as No. 03290.  It is at this address that Africa's favourite statesman Nelson Mandela spent some days back in 1962 in transit to the Tanzanian capital of Dar-es-Salaam, at the hospitality of Fish Keitseng.

Keitseng, born in Kanye in 1919, was co-accused with Mandela and 153 others in the notorious Treason Trial that lasted from 1956-1961. After his 1959 deportation from South Africa, Keitseng settled in Lobatse, and for years provided a safe house and transit for African National Congress (ANC) freedom fighters.  Keitseng died in 2005, and was posthumously awarded the Order of Luthuli in Silver by the South African presidency.In his memoirs, Comrade Fish: Memories In The Anc Underground (compiled by Jeff Ramsay and Barry Morton), Keitseng writes that the house that went on to provide temporary refuge for people like Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Oliver Tambo cost him only 21 pounds.'It was just made out of soil, wood plus thatch,' he writes in the book.

During a visit to the compound this week, the Mmegi team found only a family of lodgers who were not only reluctant to talk about their current home's storied legacy, but also professed not to know anyone around who knows anything more. In this part of Lobatse, the story of Madiba's two-week stay and that of his subsequent jaunts in and out of the town in transit into other African countries, seems to have been neglected to become a sort of myth. A number of people have heard the stories about his stay, but the older people who would have had the more concrete details have since died.

Anna Modise, 86, was born in Peleng and has lived in the township her whole life.  She tells the Mmegi team that she remembers the story of Mandela's stay in Peleng, but she never saw the man. 'I myself never saw him, but I heard about him from Mma-Keitseng.  When she had visitors, she would let some of us know, but we never saw them,' Modise says. She admits that back then she knew the name Mandela, but did not have any real appreciation of the ANC luminary. At the prompting of Mmegi and some of her children, she tries to remember some of her age-mates who may have some more information, but every time she remembers a name, it turns out the person has since passed on.

The Mma-Keitseng she refers to is Mrs Sina Keitseng, who hosted Mandela alongside her husband. She died last year in Lehurutshe, South Africa. In 2009, South African president Jacob Zuma awarded her the Order of Luthuli in bronze for 'her outstanding contribution to the struggle and for providing safe passage to many exiled cadres in Botswana during the struggle against apartheid,' according to SABC News.com. The Keitsings played host to Mandela in January 1962 as he prepared to travel across Africa to promote the armed struggle of the ANC.  Legend has it that at the time of Mandela's visit, the Keitsengs were in the process of extending their house so Mandela, along with his travel companion Amien Cajee, had to share a room with the couple.

Writes Keitseng in his memoirs: 'One day I was in my room, plastering the walls in the afternoon, and I had not been contacted by the ANC about any people coming.  Then I saw Mandela stopping by my house in a car, driving with an Indian chap.'  Keitseng writes that he gave Mandela a small room that 'didn't even have a real door, just a piece of wood hanging from the wall. Keitseng writes further about how Mandela, then only 44-years-old, woke him up at 5am to do some training.

'We went on top of a big hill, Peleng Hill, crossed it, and then went by the Kanye road until we went on top of another hill near Bathoen Siding.  You know, Mandela used to eat just once a day.  Also, if we stopped somewhere to rest, he used to read books.  He said he was teaching himself how to be a freedom fighter.' In another part of Peleng stands the John Kgaboesele home, believed to also have offered Mandela refuge, albeit for only one or two nights. Kgaboesele, a government clerk, was regarded as the Kgosi of Peleng Township until he became active in politics. Alongside his long-term partner, known only as Mma-Leshwane, Kgaboesele offered refuge to many freedom fighters from the Southern African region, notable among them Samora Machel, who went on to become the president of Mozambique.

'There was always a group of people milling around.  I didn't know that these were people involved in politics,' remembers Kgaboesele's son Motlhalefi Kgaboesele. He admits that he was 17 years when he came to live with his father's family in 1967, and did not live with the family when they hosted the famous men. He offers a reason for the lack of information around Peleng's famous visitors as part of the secretive atmosphere of that time, when information falling into the wrong hands could have proven fatal.  Last year, the National Museum declared the Fish Keitseng Safe House a national monument. In 1990, when Mandela was released from his 27-year incarceration at Robben Island, he undertook a whirlwind 45-day foreign tour that began in Gaborone.