Lobatse is particularly bereaved :: Mmegi Online

While South Africans and the rest of the world will mourn Nelson Mandela, a few contemporaries of the giant who still live in a little town in southeastern Botswana - insignificant from a global perspective because it is hardly more than a dot on the Map of the World - will remember playing host to a future non-racial South Africa in the 1960s.

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.

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