considered several plans, only to discard them for one flaw: transportation. The cars Drake could hire had licence plates from Johannesburg or the seaside city of Durban; a group of young black men travelling in a vehicle from those areas, the scenes of much violence, was sure to attract the attention of the police. Drake confided his frustration to a friend, Reverend Legotlo, a clergyman and political activist who had great sympathy for the uprising. Reverend Legotlo offered to drive Tsietsi across the border in his car. Its licence plates from Pretoria, the country’s capital and an Afrikaner stronghold, would be less conspicuous.
Drake sent an urgent message to Tsietsi that he needed to see him immediately. Despite Drake’s insistence that it had become too dangerous for him to remain, the youth was in no mood to discuss his departure from South Africa. ‘I don’t want to leave the struggle,’ Tsietsi kept repeating. ‘What good will I be in exile?’
‘You’ll continue the struggle outside the country,’ Drake suggested gently.
It took Drake several sessions of such exchanges to convince Tsietsi that he would have meaningful work to do in exile. Tsietsi finally agreed to go, on the condition that Barney and Selby accompany him. As part of his preparations, Tsietsi paid a final visit to Khotso, bringing him a large number of pamphlets; Khotso had been designated as the next SSRC president in the event something happened to Tsietsi. ‘I’m going to have to go sooner or later,’ Tsietsi told his friend. ‘Be very careful after I’ve gone. Don’t be reckless. Don’t sleep in the same place twice in a row. Be sure to see Drake at least once a week.’ With that, Tsietsi bid Khotso farewell.
Tsietsi also went home to say goodbye to his family. His arrival astonished Nomkhitha; she had just read a story in the newspapers, planted by Drake, that Tsietsi had fled South Africa. Tsietsi was delighted by the ruse. Now the road is clear to go, he explained, but would not tell his parents when he was departing or his destination for fear of further implicating them. Nomkhitha kissed and hugged Tsietsi; she clung to him for an extra second, not wanting to let him go. Yet she knew he would be safer outside the country. Nomkhitha took comfort in the belief that he would soon be back; if the uprising continued apace, South Africa would be liberated in just a year or two. Joseph said he wanted to pray. The family formed a circle, joined hands and bowed their heads as Joseph intoned a prayer for his son’s safety. Then Tsietsi left, with a smile and wave of his hand as he vanished into the night.
Drake determined that the youths would leave on August 23 in the evening. On the day of his departure, Tsietsi was interviewed at length by a journalist from Thames Television in London. The reporter and his camera crew were filming a programme on the uprising in the townships and arranged, through Drake, to speak with the student leader. Drake fixed a rendezvous at the Planet Cinema in Fordsburg, an Indian neighbourhood. Tsietsi, Barney and Selby were picked up in front of the cinema and driven to a house in Hyde Park, in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, for the interview. Tsietsi took an instant liking to the reporter and his colleagues, all of whom had the given name of John; he called them ‘The Johns’.
The programme was broadcast in Britain several days later. Entitled There Is No Crisis, it opened with pictures of Soweto in flames. ‘Since June the 16th,’ the voice-over explained, ‘when South African troops and police opened fire on a peaceful schoolchildren’s demonstration, the white government has presided over the largest massacre of its black population since South Africa came into existence. Hundreds of blacks have died, thousands have been wounded. Yet the white Prime Minister says there is no crisis.’
‘The killing started in Soweto, the huge black township outside Johannesburg,’ the narrator continued. ‘On June the 16th, Soweto’s schoolchildren gathered in protest against the introduction of compulsory teaching in Afrikaans, the main dialect of the ruling white minority. They met dogs, tear gas and bullets. The schoolboy who led the protest was nineteen-year-old Tsietsi Mashinini.’
The film cut to Tsietsi dressed in a knitted cap, open shirt, bell-bottom trousers and takkies (sports shoes), sitting in the garden of the house in Hyde Park. He talked about the confrontation between the police and the students. Despite official claims to the contrary, Tsietsi said he knew for a fact that more than 300 people had died by the first weekend of the uprising. He and some friends went to the government mortuary to look for people who were missing and saw bodies with numbers pasted on their foreheads ‘packed like potato sacks’. The highest number was 353.
Tsietsi explained the despair that Bantu education caused. ‘The black student in South Africa’, he said, ‘is being fed the type of education that will domesticate him to be a better tool for the white man when he joins the working community. School libraries, school books, they’ve got nothing to do with civics or anything that is affiliated with politics. We’re fed a lot of fiction stories. We don’t get much works on democracy, communism.’
The interviewer interjected that Tsietsi was most likely being described up and down the country as a communist. Tsietsi scoffed at such a classification. ‘It’s just that in South Africa,’ he replied, ‘if you’re not doing what the government expects you to do, then you’re a communist, of course.’
Producing an edition of The World, the interviewer showed Tsietsi the headlines: ‘Soweto Workers Stay At Home.’ (It was the first day of the second stay-away.) ‘I’m very, very happy,’ Tsietsi said. ‘The idea is that we blacks in South Africa don’t have arms. The only thing we can hit at the system with is to cripple the economy of the country and make our faint cries reach the ears of the authorities. Because apparently if we demonstrate, they just shoot at us. And if they don’t shoot, they detain a whole lot of students. Now we are trying to be as peaceful as possible. Detain the parents at home and the parents are with us and they are prepared to stay at home as long as the students want them to stay at home. With this, we believe the authorities will feel the pinch and some way or the other will have to succumb to our demands.
‘The system has done so many things and so much harm to my people,’ he continued, ‘that the people are no longer interested in having equal rights with the white people of South Africa. They want the tables to be turned so the white man can get a taste of his own medicine and feel what it is like to be oppressed.’
The film cut to a still picture of Tsietsi with his arm raised in a black power salute. ‘Now at nineteen,’ the voice-over explained, ‘Tsietsi Mashinini can expect at best a lifetime in jail if he is caught. As it is, Colonel [J.P.] Visser, head of Soweto CID, has put a 300 pound price on his head. That’s about a year’s pay for a black domestic worker.’
Returning to the Hyde Park garden, the interviewer asked Tsietsi if the police were liable to shoot him on sight. ‘Oh yes, sure,’ Tsietsi replied. ‘What Colonel Visser has been doing is he went to the Black Parents’ Association members and told them that he has official and positive reports that I have a machine gun in my hand. As far as I see it, he has just been trying to create an atmosphere where I can be declared a dangerous element so that when they meet me they don’t want to take me to court and be involved in a lot of legal intricacies. They just want to shoot me on sight and get it over with.’
Interviewer: ‘Realistically, looking at what you’re up against, is not a possibility somewhere in the back of your mind that this might be a futile struggle?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Tsietsi replied. ‘Whatever happens, the black people shall achieve what they want. We are aware that is a long struggle, but in the very near future, we will be what we want to be.’
The reporter, John Fielding, accompanied Tsietsi and his colleagues back to the Planet Cinema after finishing the interview, unaware that the young men were poised to flee the country. (The programme, when it was broadcast, would take note of the fact.) He pressed his business card into Tsietsi’s hand: call me if you’re ever in London, he shouted out the window as the car sped down the deserted
