moment of truth finally came at the beginning of August 1961, after weeks of speculation and uncertainty. Rusty Bernstein came to Andrew after a meeting of the Johannesburg region of the SACP and gave him a verbal invitation to a meeting in the basement of a shop in Commissioner Street in the Johannesburg city centre. ‘He warned me not to tell anyone about the meeting – only those invited were to know about it,’ he remembers. The shop belonged to an unnamed Indian businessman. Because of the instruction not to tell anyone about the meeting, Andrew was also reluctant to enquire about its purpose and the details of the others expected.
When Andrew got to the venue, he saw the Indian businessman who owned the premises for the first and last time. At the meeting he found Hodgson, Abel Mthembu, Joe Gqabi and Rusty Bernstein. He knew Hodgson and Mthembu to be getting on well together as former soldiers in the Second World War – they were experienced military men. ‘That alone gave me an indication of the purpose of the meeting. It was about military action. But I still wondered about the role I would play in the armed action and how that role would position me not only in the ANC but in the struggle in general.’ Hodgson led the discussions. ‘I soon learned that he was already a leading expert in explosives within the MK establishment.’ The purpose of the meeting, Hodgson told them, was to make final arrangements for the first group of people to be sent for training as members of the ANC armed wing. The military wing of the ANC was finally taking off and this group was to be the first to be trained and deployed on the ground to start its activities. Six of them were selected for training – Andrew, Gqabi and Mthembu from those at that meeting. Others were Mhlaba (who was to come from the Eastern Cape), Mkwayi and Naidoo, whom the ANC had already deployed abroad on different missions but were to join the military training in China. ‘We were told that a very comprehensive military training programme had been arranged with China and all six of us were to be trained there in the next few weeks, for at least a year.’
Andrew was a functionary of the SACP and an active leader in the Transvaal provincial structure of the ANC as well as a respected and recognised member at national level. Mthembu was the deputy president of the ANC in the Transvaal, and a fellow resident at Dube in Soweto. ‘Together we had founded the Dube branch of the ANC and later the Soweto regional structure,’ recalled Andrew. Gqabi was from Aliwal North in the Cape Province and one of the active ANC members during the 1950s. As a photographer and reporter for the Johannesburg-based militant newspaper, the New Age, he had been exposing many hidden crimes of apartheid. ‘He was one of those detained during the 1960 state of emergency and one of the bravest journalists of the time.’ Mhlaba and Mkwayi both hailed from the Eastern Cape and were renowned trade unionists. ‘We were told that Mkwayi had been advised by the ANC to skip the country, and that Naidoo was studying in London.’
Hodgson had told them that Joe Matthews had arranged a small plane to come from Lobatse to fetch them at an airstrip in Serowe, a small town in southern Botswana. Andrew had first met Joe Matthews when they both attended St Peter’s school. ‘He had become a senior ANC and SACP member and was practising as a lawyer in Lesotho.’ From Serowe they were to be taken to Mbeya in Tanzania, where contact had been made with Frene Ginwala, who was to handle them from there. ‘Frene, a South African, was said to be running a business and a newspaper in Tanzania after leaving her family in London where her parents were also running a business,’ explained Andrew. The group was not told about the route from Tanzania, and none of them asked about it.
The trip to China was not an easy one. The first challenge was to get travel documents for those who were based in South Africa (Mkwayi and Naidoo were in a better situation as they were out of the country already). ‘Coming out of South Africa was one of the most difficult steps. We all knew that getting travel documents from the South African authorities was practically impossible. Even trying to get them was a risk no one was prepared to take.’ But Andrew devised a plan. He offered to use his link with his mother-in-law, who was already staying in Francistown, where she had established herself as a respected faith healer and prophet. He and his wife June had made several visits to Botswana since his mother-in-law had moved to Francistown with their first-born daughter Maureen, and in the process he had familiarised himself a bit with the country and the culture of the people there. He went to the Botswana consular office in Johannesburg to seek documentation that would help him and his comrades to skip the country. The office was manned by African citizens of Botswana who spoke Tswana, similar to his own Sotho. He asked one of the officials to arrange documents showing that he and his three comrades were taxpayers in Botswana. ‘That would be enough to confirm us as citizens of Botswana and allow us free movement in the country and passage to other countries from there,’ he recalled. When his request was accepted, he agreed to pay three pounds for each document and arranged to come back at a later date, after having raised the required amount.
‘I reported back to Bernstein and Hodgson, who approved the plan and gave me twelve pounds for all four documents.’ But that was not all. For the four comrades to be real citizens of Botswana they had to do more than get the documents stating they were taxpayers. They also had to get names that could be associated with Botswana people – Mlangeni, Mhlaba, Mthembu and Gqabi were names that would raise suspicions. A group of four people, all claiming to be Botswana citizens and none with a Tswana name, would be strange. Worse, only one of them could speak a language close to Setswana. So each was given a new name. ‘I became Percy Mokoena,’ recalled Andrew.
Throughout the preparations for the journey Hodgson and Bernstein were the main men, their commanders. Slovo and Mandela were nowhere near at that time. Andrew’s observation was that the top command structure of the ANC armed wing was already in place and it involved at least Mandela, Slovo, Hodgson and Bernstein, as far as he could ascertain. There could be others, he thought, but these four were definitely there and in charge.
The final plan of travel was that they were to be split into two groups. Moses Kotane was also on his way out of the country, attending the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 17 to 31 October in Moscow. Kotane, whom Andrew and others of his generation called ‘Malume’, was going to be one of the over 80 representatives of foreign communist parties. ‘He had a direct invitation from Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,’ boasted Andrew. It was decided that he should accompany Mthembu, Gqabi and Kotane to Botswana and then come back to Johannesburg to wait for Mhlaba, who was coming from the Eastern Cape.
At the beginning of October the command came for Andrew to drive Kotane, Gqabi and Mthembu to Botswana via the Martin’s Drift border gate near Groblersbrug in the north-western Transvaal. The arrangement was that they should not tell anyone in their families, not even their wives, as part of managing the information as tightly as possible to avoid arrest. But that was not going to be. Gqabi and Mthembu told their wives the truth, and so did Andrew. June was even kind enough to prepare a large piece of cold meat and a bag of oranges as their provisions for the trip. Gqabi came from Mofolo in Soweto and joined Andrew and Mthembu at Dube. They picked up Kotane and drove out of the country at night, arriving at Serowe in the early hours of the morning, around five-thirty. The advantage was that the border officials spent all hours at the border gate and it was only a matter of waking them up to process them in. They, too, seemed cooperative. As Andrew had often crossed that border to visit his family, his face was a familiar one.
The trip was tiring. Having only eaten cold meat and oranges on the way, they needed some coffee to warm up and perhaps cheer their spirits a bit. But the shops were still closed and they had to wait for another two hours to get a cup of coffee. They had been told that the plane was to arrive at around two in the afternoon and that it was the only plane due in the area that day. The airstrip was small and quiet – they learned that the Botswana government used it to distribute mail in the district.
After the coffee they parked the car in the bush near the airstrip and settled down to take a nap under some trees. In the afternoon Kotane called them to wake up. He said he had heard a lion roaring earlier, while they had been asleep. When he had got them thoroughly terrified, Kotane shouted, ‘It was Mlangeni snoring like a roaring lion!’
At
