Tsiako explains Newslink to young scribes

| Monday May 27, 2013 00:00

The rulers of apartheid South Africa had long decided that the war should be fought on all fronts, two of which were 'Total Onslaught' on the enemy by military means while winning 'the hearts and minds of men' by means of disinformation and propaganda. Newslink Africa, whose theatre of operation was the Frontline States, was the crystallisation of the latter and had two main aims: to destroy the image of the liberation movement, especially the ANC, in exile while promoting apartheid, especially the National Party as its anchor, in the outside world. Botswana was the launch pad and first leg of a project that was intended to spread next to Nambia before expanding to the heartland of the ANC in Zambia and the rest of southern Africa.Thankfully, Tsiako - who was the newspaper's second editor after Nicholas Sebolao - said the project failed in its aims for two main reasons: He took advice, even instructions, directly from the ANC in Lusaka whenever he was confronted with a matter that could have a bearing on the liberation struggle.  The other reason was that he was a firm believer and upholder of the principle of no interference in the newsroom by management.He recalled that an attempt was actually once made during the campaign against dredging of the River Boro when he was in Maun. After staff contacted him by phone to inform him of this surreptitious development, he left management - especially an ex-Rhodie and Selous Scout named Neil Burrows, who was the MD - in no doubt that it must 'back off', he says. 'So much for the intelligence service of southern Africa's bulwark against communism that enjoyed the support of the West and the Zionists who have occupied Palestine since 1948,' Tsiako commented dryly.He is adamant that the staff of Newslink were completely unaware that they were - as he put it - potentially 'in the heart of the whore' until he received a phone call from Anton Harber, the fearless co-editor of The Weekly Mail (now Mail & Guardian), the Johannesburg weekly in the mould of the alternative press that was a thorn in the side of the apartheid regime, sometime in early August 1992. After both men thought they had detected the presence of a wiretapping device on the line, Anton decided to press ahead with the purpose of his call, saying the matter was too serious to postpone even for a moment longer 'because you are sitting on a powder keg, Doug, to put it mildly'. 

The Weekly Mail had spent the previous six months investigating Newslink and would start publishing a series of deadly exposes in three weeks whence. Newslink, Harber continued, was an extremely dangerous propaganda project of the South African Defence Force. As a matter of fact, he pressed on, the general responsible for the project was in the process of defecting to the ANC but was then at a safe house arranged by The Weekly Mail en route to Lusaka. ''Thankfully, our investigations show that you and your colleagues have no idea what is going on,'' Tsiako quoted Harber as saying. Harber then invited him to speak with the general, in case he was in any doubt of what he was hearing. He was not.  Astounded, perhaps, that he and his colleagues had been pussyfooting with the devil without quite knowing it.  They had had their suspicions, afterall. For one thing, the capo dei capi of the team entrusted with implementing the nefarious project was a generous stocky specimen named Abel Rudman who was the proud owner of a vintage limousine that had once been the official car of the man credited with conception and implementation of apartheid who was Prime Minister of the heretical state from 1958 to 1966, Henrik Verwoerd. For another, a young Afrikaner meisie who worked at project headquarters in Centurion near Pretoria had told Tsiako about her father's 'unnerving' friendship with fiendish Europeans and Americans from dangerous rightwing organisations in Europe and the US, and how these men regularly brought Gatsha Buthelezi, then the head of a exceedingly malevolent force at the beck and call of apartheid South Africa's National Party government, Inkatha, to conclaves at her parents' home. And then there was the 'consultant'  - a young intelligent, sauve and well-groomed gentleman who, in addition to his patina of good heath and hint of material success, dressed rather too well for a white man in Africa. The trouble with Allan Sole was that inspite of his confidence, he always seemed exceedingly perturbed whenever Tsiako assured him that a future South Africa under a democratic ANC government was both inevitable and imminent and that that government would include the South Africa Communist Party. Further, Burrows' management team included a pastor who had worked in Mozambique, invoking spooky images of bodies of gun-toting, Bible-thumping chaplains who had fought alongside Renamo and apartheid South African aggressors to reverse the gains of the socialist government in that country. 'The Religious Right and fascists have come a long way,' says Tsiako. But unlike Allan Sole, Burrows was a man of inferior intellect and manifestly limited education who wore his cheap white shirts with their short sleeves turned inside out to reveal sagging biceps. The ex-Rhodie knew no better than to gloat about how he and his fellow Selous Scouts used to maim and murder Zimbabweans in the bush during the liberation struggle, thinking his audience of Batswana found great entertainment in his bloodcurdling accounts of crimes against humanity that were obviously embellished. Always clean-shaven, he had the round face of a happy puppy and eyes the glistening brown of the semi-precious stones of Bobonong. Standing ramrod, which he couldn't quite achieve because he had a slight slouch, he cut a 'kiss madolo' figure that tapered downwards like a giant mermaid's. With a flabby belly that dominated an ample torso, Burrows presented the picture of an animated caricature. Says Tsiako: 'One look at him, and you went away thinking he might have done better a dog trainer because he had the image of one with the suitable canine instincts. Besides, being a racial bigot, the god-forsaken bloke must have felt a stronger affinity for dogs than he had for 'darkies.''

Everyone thought his delightful wife, Irene, was too good for him. She was petite of build, neat - if a touch chic - of dress, and almost proper of manner. 'Except for a little air of racial superiority, it was difficult to see what else she had in common with her wretched husband who seemed to regard the world as a massive smoking zone,' Tsiako says.At any rate, in turn Tsiako told Harber that he would 'take the bull by the horns' before resigning at the end of the month. He immediately took his friend and colleague, the late Rampholo Molefhe, into his confidence before the two men decided to confront management about the bloodcurdling revelations. Tsiako says when they did, the denials were so total that some of the employees left the open meeting completely thrown and bewildered. After consulting with their colleagues, he and Molefhe then took the next step and duly informed the Department of Foreign Affairs before Tsiako resigned, 'both to set an example and in protest', at the end of August. The exposes, run in concert by The Weekly Mail and Mmegi, then followed. It was a matter of extreme disappointment when the nefarious band of villains dismantled their equipment, including what was the biggest printing plant in Botswana then, at leisure and left the country literally with a swagger. When junior police and immigration officers tried to intercept them, once at the plant on New Lobatse Road and once at Tlokweng bordergate, an order came 'from above' to let them be. Unbeknownst to anyone then, especially Tsiako and Molefhe, even greater frustration was in store when Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission could not sit in Botswana because the government said it could not guarantee the safety of witnesses!

At any rate, as Tsiako told his audience in Maun recently, the addition of the so-called 'soft power' of propaganda to apartheid South Africa's 'Total Strategy' was linked to the failure of the regime to launch what it had proposed to call the Coalition of Southern African States as a Bulwark Against Communism by which it had hoped to undermine and eventually dismantle SADC after Botswana's founding president Seretse Khama successfully formed the latter in 1980 as an economic version of the Frontline States by means of which the region would reduce dependence on the pariah state.  He says a little known cultural organisation that operated from a nondescript house in Gaborone's high-density neighbourhood of Bontleng was largely responsible for the complete failure to take off of Prime Minister PW Botha's anti-communist sphere. Medu Art Ensemble immediately got to work a day after Botha had announced his ambitious plan on television. In less than a week, South Africa was awash with posters, placards and pamphlets explaining the macabre nature of Botha's proposed coalition as a ghoulish ploy to ensnare the independent states of southern Africa in a more vicious grip of the white minority regime. To this arsenal of counter-propaganda, which was infiltrated and distributed by a network of underground activists, was added Sechaba, an influential quarterly in which the leadership of the ANC, the Southern African Communist Party (SACP) and progressive journalists wrote compelling articles that was also distributed to governments around the world. According to Tsiako, Medu was a creature of the ANC's cultural desk that relocated from Lusaka to Gaborone when Botswana assumed an increasingly central role in what the ANC saw as a final assault on the apartheid regime in the 1980s. He says although Medu did engage in genuine cultural activities, especially photography and theatre productions, its unstated and perhaps more important purpose was to act as a cover for cadres, and increasingly commanders, of its military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK). 'Botswana was walking a tight rope during the so-called Cold War that was always very hot in southern Africa,' he recalls. 'While the UN - and the League of Nations before it - was of the position that third countries had a duty to extend men, materials and territory to legitimate liberation movements - which South Africa's ANC and the PAC, Namibia's SWAPO, Mozambique's FRELIMO, Angola's MPLA and Zimbabwe's ZAPU and ZANU certainly were - Botswana could not quite do so because reprisals were a real and present danger and South Africa enjoyed the support of the West, including Zionist Israel, in its hostile stance against any country that 'harboured' these movements which the West regarded as terrorist organisations in much the same way that it does Al Qaeda today.'Even so, precarious as the country's situation was, because Botswana could not very well ignore the moral imperative to welcome refugees, it pronounced a policy around this position that said it would not allow its territory to be used as springboard for attacks on any of its neighbours. However, the practical reality was that the country was the most frontline of the Frontline States, which meant different things to different people, posing a threat to some and offering opportunities to others. It was perched perilously in the middle of a racial maelstrom or sat strategically on a high plateau from which to unshackle the sub-continent from the sacrilege of white supremacy.'

Tsiako notes that the West's overarching policy of containment of Soviet expansion meant that although Botswana's principled position was admirable, if perhaps also pathetic, apartheid South Africa was a natural ally and effective anti-communist tool. Hence proxy forces, especially Renamo in Mozambique and UNITA and FNLA in Angola, received massive assistance in the form of men and equipment, including sophisticated spying equipment, to keep the communists at bay. Tsiako observes: 'There were subliminal connections subterranean sympathies between the Western world and the apartheid regime because the supreme Western power, the United States, had not quite recovered from the Atlantic slave trade that spanned the 16th and the 19th centuries and the tumult of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The shared antipathy for communism was also a powerful motive.'In order to secure for itself a 'cordon sanitaire' for itself, South Africa - with backing from the US and US and Belgian-installed Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaire - had occupied Angola in August 1975, just months before the country's independence in November 1975, prompting Cuban intervention to secure the integrity of the new state. This meant that until the early1990s, landlocked and multi-racial Botswana was hemmed in by antagonistic forces of white supremacy and imperialism on all sides, including the Caprivi Strip - apartheid South Africa to the south and southeast, occupied Namibia to the west, with only a sliver of friendly Zambia to the north.Says Tsiako: 'In the grand scheme of things, apartheid South Africa's naval port of Simonstown and occupied Namibia's Walvis Bay dovetailed perfectly into NATO's geopolitical strategy. Hence the attempt - supported by the so-called Western Contact Group after Chester Croker became Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs - to secure a separate dispensation for Walvis Bay when independence finally came to Namibia in March 1990. Simonstown was considered vital to the security of oil supplies to the West and to deter a potential Soviet naval build-up in the Indian Ocean.'

Indeed, an ad in the New York Times of 21 March 1975 noted that an average of 2,270 ships were passing the Cape of Good Hope per month carrying vital supplies, including 20 million tons of oil 90% of which was destined for Europe. The Suez Canal was closed at the time, resulting in a trebling of naval traffic passing the southern tip of Africa. Read the ad: 'Even with the canal re-opened, it future is uncertain, and its use in this day of supertankers, limited. Simonstown near Cape Town is the only adequately equipped naval base in the Southern Hemisphere between South America and Australia. It has a highly sophisticated communications surveillance system covering an area of 5,000 sea miles.' The ad concluded: 'In this way, we are contributing to the protection of the vital southern sea lanes.' It then queried: 'But should we alone be responsible?'The ad identified its concepts as 'military Bases.' It was addressed to: 'Department of State, Fance, Paris. North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Secretary of State. South Africa Cape Town. South Africa Pretoria. United Kingdom London.'

Nevertheless, the comprehensive strategy of the ANC was working in the 1980 to 1990 deaced: On the sporting and cultural level, the apartheid regime was never more isolated as more and more countries cut links; on the economic level, sanctions were biting as more and more multinationals disinvested and governments punished those that traded with apartheid South Africa; on the political front, the country was ungovernable as the United Democratic Front (UDF) rose to the forefront to orchestrate the organised chaos of young South Africans.  The white minority regime was lonely, desperate and dangerous.But to return to his newsroom, Tsiako told his audience in Maun that if he could not get through to Lusaka, the man who would eventually become the first High Commissioner of democratic South Africa, Oupa Mokou, was also always on hand to brainstorm with. In addition, his friend and colleague, the late Molefhe, was working closely with the PAC, the two of them making for a solid fortress of writers who spared little to advance the course of the liberation struggle. The others were the late Nicholas Sebolao and Sekgopi Tshite, as well as Grace Mosinyi, Gale Ngakane, South African Andrew Molefe and Botsalo Ntuane who, although a part-timer because he was a university student then, was an invaluable all-rounder. Barry Baxter, English journalist that Burrows hated and wanted to eject from Newslink, needs special mention because he facilitated the breaking of the expose in Mmegi. This writer, who was the News Editor, completed the team.

Newslink was decidedly the best-resourced newspaper in Botswana at the time. In addition to a common fleet, Sebolao, Kuhlman and Tsiako each had a company car and a book of coupons for petrol. Inside the Editor's office - a cubicle, really - a small refrigerator stocked with an assortment of soft drinks and an array of alcoholic beverages - beers, brandies and whiskeys - was never allowed to run empty. A similar fridge was in Burrows' office while the boardroom boasted a much bigger one. In addition, Irene, the ex-Rhodie's beautiful wife, used every opportunity to make delectable comestibles available. Yet everyone used these 'resources' with commendable restraint and moderation.Tsiako says even though the world was readjusting in accordance with the rapid dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and CODESA was well underway in South Africa, he was still Deputy Secretary-General of the Federation of Southern African States (FSAJ) whose Chairman was Thabo Mbeki, from the time he was the head of the information and propaganda desk of the ANC in exile, primarily because the situation was in a state of flux, thanks to the continued existence of an apartheid-sponsored third force whose aim was to marginalise the liberation movement by 'taking out' some of its key members.And indeed people were being killed. For example, the life of SACP leader, MK chief of staff and Nelson Mandela's most likely future heir to the presidency, Chris Hani, was ended by a bullet fired by Polish assassin, Janusz Walus, in the driveway of Hani's Boksburg, Johannesburg home on 10 April 1993. Before then, on 16 February 1991, ANC human rights lawyer Bheki Mlangeni's brains were blown out by a Walkman parcel bomb, while Tsiako's friend and handler, Bachana Mokwena, was killed in a freak 'accident' after apartheid death squads loosened the nuts and bolts on the wheels of his car at Mlangeni's funeral. Mokweana and his delightful wife, Miriam, had returned early to South Africa so he could help in the negotiations. Miriam was subsequently confined to a wheelchair, a shadow of her former self.

The objectives of FSAJ were two-fold: put the liberation movement on the offensive by talking directly to its leaders, thus putting the apartheid regime on the defensive by, among other means, reducing use of copy from Western news agencies that routinely cast the liberation movement in a negative light.But Newslink was not the first time the apartheid regime had attempted to launch a 'soft war' offensive. Botha's predecessor, the notorious John Vorster, launched a propaganda war that entailed the transfer of 64 million rand from the defence budget in order to bribe selected Western news agencies, purchase the Washington Star newspaper, influence the opinion of the Washington Post, and persuade a Dutch publisher to extend secret support to a new pro-apartheid news magazine, To The Point, among numerous other things. After efforts to purchase The Rand Daily Mail (now defunct) failed, the slush funds were also used to establish The Citizen, the only English Language newspaper that viewed the world through the eyes of Vorster's minority regime at a crucial time in the evolution or deterioration of apartheid when the National Party inaugurated the so-called Tri-cameral Parliament for whites, Indians and Coloureds on one hand and balkanised the country into ethnic-based 'homelands,' on the other.

At the same time, Pace, a glossy news magazine that professed to encourage black enterprise and celebrate black success, appeared with extravagantly ritzy pictures and vacuous content. Its target was to counter Drum, then a more incisive black news magazine that focused on issues and often exposed apartheid's worst excesses than the prosaic fare that characterises the indigestible rag that it is today. Tsiako observes: 'But unlike in Africa's oldest democracy, apartheid South Africa's Info Scandal resulted in the resignation - in disgrace - of Vorster and his cohorts who had actually conceived the idea after a commission of enquiry concluded that the prime minister had known 'everything' all along. Vorster fell from grace along with his Minister of Information, Connie Mulder, and the Secretary of Information in the ministry, Eschel Rhoodie, among others. The Rand Daily Mail exposed the scandal at the beginning of September 1978. Vorster stepped down on 20 September 1978. By contrast, Batswana are suffocating under an immeasurably corrupt government that is made up of a band of rapacious racketeers and cunning compradores.'

In Tsiako's view, there are disturbing elements of the behaviour of apartheid South Africa's National Party in today's Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority whose thrust is to legalise the ruling Botswana Democratic Party's monopoloid hold on the Department of Information and Broadcasting and its aggressive opposition to attempts enact a freedom of information law in Botswana. 'By contrast,' says Tsiako, 'the world finally recoiled from the apartheid regime because of the horrific pictures - often live - of untrammelled repression it saw on SABC television.' But in his view, one of the most glaring similarities between Botswana and apartheid South Africa, one that is difficult to understand in view of the country's precarious position during the Cold War and its recognition of its obligation to refugees, is how Radio Botswana news readers referred to liberation movements as terrorist organisations. Tsiako worked there from the late 1970s to the early 1980s and says he was always getting into trouble because would not do so, insisting on editing agency copy because he considered it to be at variance with African perspectives. He remembers that it was not until the appointment of Mogolori Modisi as Director of the Department of Information and Broadcasting that he succeeded in changing this state of affairs. 'Botswana, the most frontline of the Frontline States; apartheid South Africa, the world's polecat state,' he comments wryly.He concludes that whatever happens, Botswana will have to come to terms with its recent history eventually. Until it does, Batswana will never know how to contrast the degree of compulsion from the apartheid regime that their government came under against the extent of its complicity with the pariah state. Thankfully, he says, with regard to the campaign against the dredging of the River Boro, support came from unlikely quarters. Tsiako fondly remembers receiving a call from a top envoy at one of Botswana's foreign missions that informed him that UNEP was following developments with keen interest.