BOOK EXTRACT: Weapons, guerrillas and money — how Chris Hani built smuggling routes into SA

The secret machinery

From Lesotho, Chris Hani built an underground network for moving weapons, guerrillas, money and political material into South Africa. Some of its most effective operatives looked like ordinary tourists and carefree young men travelling to music festivals.

What made a lot of these armed propaganda operations possible was Hani’s resourcefulness in smuggling weapons into South Africa. One example involved Limpho Hani’s place of employment, the Lesotho National Tourist Office.

Hani got to know the driver, Mashapha Nkuebe, who ferried tourists from different parts of South Africa into Maseru in a Toyota HiAce minibus with the company name and contact details on the sides. They would then travel to various tourist attractions throughout Lesotho. Nkuebe travelled all over South Africa, right up to Botswana and Mozambique. Hani recruited him to transport arms and ammunition in his vehicle to some of the cities as he ferried tourists. Hani would personally load the “parcel”, as Nkuebe called the AK-47s, grenades and ammunition, at Sekhoane Lebentlele’s place near Iketsetseng Private School, and Nkuebe would cross Maseru Bridge or Van Rooyen’s Gate in Mafeteng or Telle Bridge in the southernmost district of Quthing and drive through the night to East London or Matatiele where the “parcel” would be received by a sleeper who would then take it to a designated arms cache. Sometimes the sleeper was in the minibus all along, disguised as a tourist.

Nkuebe would then return to Lesotho with a new batch of innocent and fresh tourists.

He remembers one occasion when they got caught on their way from Sterkspruit with a few tourists and some MK guerrillas in the mix. The MK folks had AK-47s in their luggage, although the weapons were dismantled and the parts were not in the same piece of luggage. As soon as they crossed Telle Bridge they were searched by the Lesotho Mounted Police who found the AK-47s and took everyone to the charge office at the Quthing police station. The cadres denied any knowledge of the weapons. They had to call a lawyer, Mr Khalaki Sello, himself an ANC operative, who drove all the way from Maseru to Quthing.

Sello’s negotiations with the police were successful. Everyone was released, but the police confiscated the weapons.

On another occasion Hani himself was in the minibus – as Ntsaluba once told me, “Comrade Chris would not give you an assignment that he himself would not undertake”. They were planning to drive to Ficksburg in the Free State on the other side of the border post bridge. But before crossing the border, some of the comrades, including Hani, were dropped downstream on the banks of the Caledon River. Nkuebe took the rest of the passengers who had proper passports to the official border post. On the South African side they were arrested. The minibus was searched thoroughly. The Afrikaner police were calling Hani’s name. They knew from their intelligence that he was supposed to be in the vehicle.

“Which one of you is Hani?” they asked, holding up pictures and looking at the faces of the tourists.

It was obvious that some informer had spied on them and had told the police that they were going to have Hani in their hands that day. Of course Hani was not there. That was when Nkuebe realised it had now become dangerous to use his employers’ vehicle to ferry likhukhuni and their weapons back and forth. Also, he would have lost his job in the tourist office, which was a government agency, had they discovered his subversive activities.

After Hani left Lesotho, Nkuebe did not continue smuggling weapons. But it is obvious that without people like Nkuebe, a Lesotho citizen who had nothing personally to gain from these activities and was never paid a cent for them, the ANC would not have succeeded in committing some of its sabotage inside South Africa.

There were other Lesotho citizens who continued working with Hani even after he left Lesotho. One of them was his brother-in-law, Mophethe Sekamane, Limpho’s youngest brother. Mophethe remembers when he first met Hani. He had heard about him when his father told him, “Your sister is married to a certain Chris Nkosana in Zambia”.

After about eight months or so, Chris and his father, Ntate Gilbert Hani, came to his home to see his father, Ntate Sekamane. He was introduced to Chris as his brother-in-law. Mophethe didn’t know what the visitors spoke about with his father, but the visit was quite short. This is most likely the occasion Ntate Hani raised the issue of bohali and Ntate Sekamane pooh-poohed it.

From then on Mophethe sometimes visited the couple at their home.

One day Chris said to Mophethe, “I am new here. I need some assistance. Bring me four or five friends of yours that you trust. Don’t bring them all at once. I must meet them individually.”

The 19-year-old Mophethe recruited his friends of roughly the same age group, Reggie Tekateka, Moss Nkofo, Bonner Nelson Seakhoa, Chuku Ntšihlele and Bataung Mohapeloa. Hani met them separately and convinced most of them to work with him to advance the freedom struggle of the oppressed people of South Africa.

At the end of the day, only the last three joined Mophethe and worked for Hani.

The four young men, Sekamane, Seakhoa, Mohapeloa and Ntšihlele, were generally seen as nice-time boys from good middle-class and upper-middle-class families who hired minibus vehicles from Hertz or International Freight and Travel Services (IFTS) to attend music festivals with their girlfriends in South Africa and neighbouring countries.

The ostensible mission of these boys was music and fun. But their true undertaking was the smuggling of stuff for Hani. Or the smuggling of Hani himself, as was the case on one occasion when he asked Mophethe to take him to an ideal place in the north of Lesotho where he could cross into South Africa undetected. Mophethe took him to Butha-Buthe, but Hani was not satisfied with the lay of the land. He finally chose Maputsoe in the Leribe district, a very busy and crowded Lesotho border town that neighbours Ficksburg in the Free State. Hani crossed into South Africa and disappeared for a week or so. Mophethe didn’t know where he went.

The jolly friends were couriers extraordinaire who would dance for the whole night at a music concert or gatecrash a party in Gaborone, Botswana, and then load boxes and suitcases of political contraband into the minibus the next morning, such as copies of the ANC mouth organ Sechaba. They crossed back into South Africa and distributed them in various cities on their way back home to Maseru.

Chris Hani and Lambert Moloi trained them on how to handle firearms so that they would be able to protect themselves if they were confronted by the police or by the enemy in any form. They were also given false names. Bonner’s nom de guerre was Solomon Cindi.

They ferried stuff – quite often boxes whose contents they did not care to know – from Hani in Maseru to Siphiwe Nyanda or Jacob Zuma in Mozambique.

In Swaziland the contact person was Stan Mabizela, a teacher at one of the high schools in Manzini. Once a month or so they would courier stacks of cash from Maseru to Mabizela.

Mabizela obviously was the equivalent of Hani in Swaziland because from him they would get guns and other small weapons that came from Mozambique, and they would convey them to Hani in Maseru. They would take more guns from Hani in Maseru and transport them to the Free State and the Eastern Cape where someone would be waiting for them.

Trained guerrillas came from Angola empty handed and found arms and ammunition at prearranged caches. It was easier to escape detection that way. Bonner believes that if Solomon Mahlangu had entered South Africa unarmed, with weapons waiting for him at some cache, he would not have been caught and his mission would have been accomplished. Unfortunately at that time, June 1977, Hani hadn’t yet started his programme of planting arms caches at strategic places in the country. Guerrillas entered the country carrying their own arms and ammunition in those days.

“At border posts and roadblocks Boers would let us pass,” says Bonner. “They saw us as fun people with girls and music.”

They also transported ANC leaders. Bonner remembers once transporting Jacob Zuma from Lesotho to his base in Swaziland.

They did this until they saw their names on wanted posters at border posts. They knew immediately that the security police had got wind of them. They had to escape from Lesotho. The ANC sent Bonner to Bulgaria, where he studied journalism. On his return, he worked for the Lesotho Ministry of Foreign Affairs and joined the Lesotho diplomatic service.

Even as a diplomat, Bonner continued to work with Hani, sometimes using the diplomatic bag to carry letters and small parcels for him. Hani had long left Lesotho by then and was based in Zambia. Once Bonner visited him in Lusaka and Chris boasted about him to his comrades-in-arms: “These are my soldiers!”

Matli, who was recruited into the ANC from the University of Fort Hare where he was in his third year of a law degree, was with Mengistu in Lesotho where he stayed with Zola Nqini, who was later killed in the Maseru raid of 1982. He moved in with Hani in “Moscow” and became his bodyguard after receiving rudimentary training in handling a pistol and an AK-47. He also received lessons on the history of the ANC and the split with the PAC because of the Freedom Charter and such clauses as “South Africa belongs to all who live in it”. He remembers how shocked he was when Hani told them the Boers belonged to South Africa just like any other South African, Black or White. This was a revelation to him, because in his political orientation the Boer was the enemy and had to be swept into the sea.

“Comrade Chris told us we had lived with the Boers for centuries now,” Matli recalls, “and we could not say just because they abused us, they didn’t qualify to be citizens of this country. It’s one reason I always say Chris made us humans. Chris raised us not only politically but as wholesome people.”

Matli was highly impressed by how Hani could be surrounded by BCP/PAC people and comfortably express his political opinions among them, sometimes winning them over to his side.

He remembers Chris saying, “You see, comrades, this is one thing that makes me have a different political outlook. You are new as you’ve just arrived to join the ANC. Some of you arrived as former members of the PAC and some as members of other organisations. You must never make the mistake of thinking you are better than other people, those of a different ideological world view. Don’t focus on the differences between yourselves and them, but on what unites you. What unites us all is the common enemy – the apartheid government.” DM

Zakes Mda is an acclaimed novelist, playwright, poet and painter. His other books include Ways of Dying, The Heart of Redness, Little Suns and The Zulus of New York. He is the recipient of South Africa’s Order of Ikhamanga in Silver.

Chris Hani: A Life of Courage and Compassion is published by Penguin Random House South Africa and retails for about R390.