and Reverend Legotlo awaited the three youths in the shadows of the cinema. Drake explained the escape plan: the minister would drive them the 650 or so miles to the Botswana frontier, which Tsietsi and his friends would have to cross on foot. The minister, meanwhile, would pass through the border checkpoint legally with his car and wait on the other side to take them to Gaborone, the capital. Reverend Legotlo gave the fugitives church-going clothes to don as a disguise. If the police stopped them along the road, the minister would say they were travelling to a church conference in Botswana.
Drake gave each of the youths 100 rands and wished them Godspeed. ‘Don’t let me rot in Botswana, Godfather,’ Tsietsi whispered in Drake’s ear, hugging him.
‘I give you my word,’ the older man replied.
No one spoke on the journey to the border. Tsietsi and his colleagues were terrified of what might happen when they began their trek on foot; they knew the South African army had orders to shoot anyone trying to cross the frontier. The minister was also grim-faced, checking and re-checking his rearview mirror. As he feared, the group got stopped behind a long line of other vehicles at a police blockade several miles before their destination. Tsietsi and his friends pulled their hats low over their foreheads but remained upright, visible to anyone who cared to look inside the car. Reverend Legotlo hurried outside to the rear of his station wagon and pretended to fix the licence plate.
‘Has my bishop already gone through?’ he asked the policeman who slowly made his way around the vehicle, glancing in the windows. ‘He was on his way to a conference in Botswana.’ When the security officer responded that the bishop had indeed passed the checkpoint some time earlier, Reverend Legotlo feigned alarm at being behind schedule – and the policeman waved the car around the barricades.
Reverend Legotlo let the three youths off at a place where they could slip through the border fence. Tsietsi and his colleagues had to navigate a stretch of farmland; by now, the sun had set and the three could barely make out the little huts that littered the landscape. They were afraid of stumbling on an army patrol. In their agitation, they forgot the minister’s directions and lost the way. The young men wandered about blindly all night. Exhausted, cold, wet from an intermittent rain, they had despaired of finding the crossing when a South African farmer, a black man, came upon them as the sun was rising. The farmer showed them the path. With a considerable expenditure of spirit, the youths managed to traverse the border and run to a grove of trees in Botswana, where they collapsed.
The second stay-away that Tsietsi and the SSRC planned was a great success. Owners of factories and shops in the Johannesburg area estimated that as many as 80 per cent of their employees failed to report for work; this, with less intimidation by students at railway stations and bus stops. It seemed the SSRC’s pamphlets had had an effect. Only a group of Zulus, who lived in an enormous hostel for migrant labourers, remonstrated against the students’ dictates. Incited by the police, the workers went on a rampage through parts of Soweto, attacking residents and their houses.
Mpho got swept up in the events. He became very busy after Tsietsi’s escape, which he and his family read about in the newspapers. Being Tsietsi’s brother gave him a certain cachet. Suddenly, he was surrounded by people who wanted to be his friend. This new-found celebrity caused him much anxiety. Now Mpho felt compelled to perform impeccably, to produce precisely the right answer when asked a question. At times, he resented the attention, suspecting that people sought him out not for his own sake, but because he was Tsietsi’s brother. (His younger siblings would share this feeling.)
The uprising of June 16 and the subsequent protests were a kind of crash-course in politics for Mpho, as they were for thousands of other township youths. The youngsters went from ignorance to activism virtually overnight. Years later, Mpho would remember it as a simple, almost idyllic time of political thought. He and his friends did not bother themselves much about doctrines or ‘isms’, as Mpho called them; in their minds, this was a fight between black and white. South Africa was their land, and they would wage war to the death, if necessary, to regain it. Never again would the arguments seem so explicit, so utterly right.
It was Mpho’s job, as an SSRC representative, to translate these sentiments into action. He spent his days visiting the handful of schools under his purview. Class attendance was still sporadic; students dressed in their uniforms every morning and went to school, but not to study. Instead, they waited for instructions from the SSRC leaders. Mpho strove to keep the youngsters engaged. This is only the beginning, he reassured them when the SSRC called for another three-day stay-away on September 13, the start of the revolution. He urged the youngsters to draw their parents into the protest.
With the succession of his friend Khotso Seatlholo as president, Mpho now was actually closer to the inner workings of the SSRC. Khotso entrusted Mpho with pamphlets to distribute in his territory. (In contrast with Tsietsi, who had held himself aloof from his brothers to avoid accusations of nepotism.) Together, Mpho and Khotso went to a famous sangoma, a witch doctor, to obtain safeguards against arrest. The sangoma made the two friends eat a special meal fortified with meat. He tied small vials filled with dark, evil-looking material – muti, or medicine – around their arms with the admonishment they must not eat fried foods, such as chips, that were prepared in shops. Pork was often cooked in the same oil; the muti would be rendered ineffective if exposed to pork.
Dee also found himself an object of attention because of Tsietsi’s aura. It was particularly true with girls; the Mashinini name seemed to have a magical effect on them. Whereas previously and with much trepidation, Dee had had to initiate relationships, girls now flocked to him. They wanted to talk about politics. And Dee, who never shone in school or in social settings, suddenly could speak with confidence. That he possessed such an ability came as an epiphany to him. Dee felt he had acquired a kind of certitude in being a Mashinini; it surmounted his shyness and allowed him to come into his own.
Dee never returned to his studies after June 16. Instead, he formed a gang with about a dozen young men from the area. Dee, at the age of fifteen, was the youngest; most of the others worked at jobs during the day and gathered at a safe house in the Mofolo section of Soweto at night. The refuge, a small garage attached to a ‘matchbox’ house, belonged to a woman the youths called Mama. She offered the sanctuary out of sympathy for the uprising, furnishing it with a few cots, blankets and pillows. There the gang cooked their evening meal and discussed the next day’s scheme. The young men became a surrogate family for Dee; he visited his parents only during daylight hours when the police presence lessened, staying long enough to bathe and change his clothes.
The gang had no formal ties to the SSRC. Instead, Dee would learn from Mpho what actions the SSRC planned and set off with his group to attend to enforcement. Dee’s freelancing caused Mpho much irritation. Once, he arrived at a school to find Dee already informing the students of a particular SSRC strategy. The gang’s favourite project was ‘educating’ the Zulu labourers who had opposed the stay-away. With the authorities inciting the hostel dwellers to violence, the youngsters’ hostility shifted to the Zulus; they were seen as substitutes for the police. Almost every night Dee’s gang engaged in battles with the workers. The Zulus tied red bandannas around their foreheads, the youngsters donned white ones, and the two groups would go to war on the streets of Soweto with knobkerries, axes and knives.
One night, Dee and his gang got word that the Zulus were planning to attack an area in the western part of the township. The youths decided to launch a preemptive strike. They made bombs out of bottles filled with sand and petrol; the smashing of the glass against the sand when the bottle was thrown created enough friction to ignite the petrol. The gang also armed themselves with stones and other projectiles. They did not want to be drawn into actual physical battle with the strapping, fit labourers; they knew the results could be lethal. Then Dee and his gang made their way to the hostel where the Zulus were holding a meeting. The youths discharged their weapons; the ensuing skirmishes between the two sides continued for a week.
Mpho
