all night to Dar es Salaam. Frene was waiting for them. She took them to the hotel and advised them to rest, saying that she would come and take them to the authorities the next day to arrange their further travel. Their next destination, she said, was Khartoum in Sudan, through an Ethiopian airline.
Frene came to their hotel the next morning and, after giving them a short lecture on the do’s and don’ts, took them to the Dar es Salaam immigration office. Among her instructions was that they must tell the truth to the authorities: that they were from South Africa and that they were political activists and had no travel documents. Mhlaba was the first to go into the office with Frene while Andrew waited outside. After some time, he came out with his documents. Then it was Andrew’s turn and Frene was there to assist him as well. The officer asked Andrew where he was from.
‘Botswana,’ he answered.
Frene froze immediately and the official looked surprised. Frene intervened and told the official that Andrew had made a mistake because although the duo had travelled via Botswana they were both from South Africa. ‘He came with Ray. They’re both political refugees,’ she said.
The official told him to use South Africa as his country and not Botswana which they had only passed through on their way to Tanzania. Nevertheless, he processed the documents. As they left the office and joined Mhlaba outside, Andrew experienced Frene’s ire. She asked, angrily, ‘How can you make such a terrible mistake when I advised you properly?’ Andrew had nothing to say. He apologised and said he may have missed that point. ‘Her beauty never faded in the midst of anger,’ he later remarked. And Frene would later describe Andrew as ‘intelligent despite his rudimentary mistakes’.
Andrew Mlangeni had a remarkable ability to place the liberation struggle ahead of his own ego, instinctively ever-ready to improve himself and learn from others. His respect for strategic knowledge trumped gender, age, distinctions or prejudices. Frene, considerably younger than him in years and in membership of the movement – and a woman at that – was a journalist and adviser to Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, soon to be the president of an independent Tanzania. Her experience, skill and a self-assurance beyond her years had been noted by Walter Sisulu, who recruited her to assist the liberation movement in directing the South African struggle warriors to negotiate their way around Africa and beyond. ‘She was pretty, and younger than both of us. But she had a commanding attitude, spiced with genuine authority. We just followed her instructions,’ Andrew remembered. Her role was specifically to receive them and hand them over to those who would despatch them to the country where they would receive military training. As Frene later put it, her role was ‘only to receive trainees and exiles from South Africa’. The ANC separated the roles of receiving members from those of despatching them. ‘Those of us who received trainees and exiles didn’t know anything about what those who despatched them to training centres were doing. It was all about security protocol,’ she recalled.
Frene briefed them about their route to Ghana. They were to travel the next morning and sleep over at Khartoum, getting a flight to Ghana via Nigeria the following day. She was not going to fly with them to Ghana, but Makiwane would be there waiting for them. ‘We understood Makiwane to be the man responsible for despatching us to China, and the role he later played confirmed that.’ On 5 November, Frene took them to the airport, where they took a flight to Khartoum. At Khartoum airport they were given forms to complete. In the space for nationality, Andrew wrote ‘African’ and this sparked a debate. The immigration official explained that ‘African’ meant nothing as every citizen of Africa, including himself, was an African. Again, Mhlaba had been smarter than Andrew, and correctly written ‘South African’. The embarrassment was between him and the official this time around, but Andrew wondered if some of his slip-ups would jeopardise their trip further on. He was determined to improve his alertness.
The city was very hot, even though the sun had already set. Because they had plenty of time, they decided to take a walk through the streets of Khartoum. The city itself seemed friendly and safe. On one street they came across a group of six boys of African ethnicity like themselves, different from the Arabs of the city. The boys asked where they were from. Mhlaba and Andrew said they were from Dar es Salaam and asked the boys where they were from. The boys said that they were from Darfur in the south and were studying at the local university. They asked Mhlaba and Andrew to come and address them at a meeting later that evening on serious matters affecting Darfur people. Nervous about their status in the country, Mhlaba and Andrew said they were unable to do it. Later, when they were to learn about the issues between South and North Sudan, they remembered this incident and realised that the problems had long been there.
They landed in Nigeria the next afternoon. Some of the passengers disembarked at Lagos airport while those who were heading for Accra in Ghana, as they were, remained on board. It was extremely hot but that was not an issue any more – a soldier had to endure all sorts of weather and living conditions. After all, they had left bad living conditions back home and did not rule out even harsher conditions in the future. By the time they arrived in Accra it was early evening. Makiwane was already waiting. After helping them through the airport procedures and immigration authorities, he warned them that there were Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) people around the corner and advised using a different route to avoid contact with them. Rivalry had increased since they had both gone into exile. Constant fighting for space had caused tension and mistrust between the two liberation movements. ‘They already know there are South Africans coming,’ Makiwane said.
They later learned that the PAC people in question were Peter Raboroko and Peter Molotsi whom they knew very well, having been close comrades before they left the ANC. Andrew thought it would have been nice to see them, but kept it to himself and opted to sheepishly follow Makiwane as he took them to a hotel in Accra where they were to stay until they were ready to proceed to their next destination.
It was the eve of the queen of England’s visit to Ghana, Friday 17 November 1961, and the hype of her visit was everywhere. The streets she was going to use were already decorated, as were the public places she was going to visit. Apart from these obviously attractive additions, Andrew found Accra generally a noisy city, a feeling echoed by other members at the time. ‘There were so many taxis on the roads, each constantly hooting for passengers.’ Only their hotel rooms were safe from this deafening noise. Makiwane had told them that they were to stay in Accra for four days before proceeding to China via two other stops. Andrew and Mhlaba found Makiwane, like Frene, to be very efficient at coordinating their travel. During their few days’ stay in Accra, he took Andrew to the Ghanaian authorities and got him the travel documents for China. He then took Mhlaba to the Guinean embassy, for his travel documents (Andrew was to travel as a Ghanaian and Mhlaba as a Guinean). On the first day of their stay in Accra, Makiwane finalised their travel documents and on the next day he took the two to the Chinese embassy to visit the authorities there, including China’s ambassador to Ghana, Huang Hua, a man in his late 40s. Then they were free to walk the streets of Accra.
On the morning of the fourth day they boarded a plane to Prague, arriving at around four in the afternoon. The weather was cloudy and it was already dark. The next day they boarded another plane to Moscow, and after a few hours connected from there to Irkutsk. The plane had left in the evening and arrived in the early hours of the following day. They were supposed to fly immediately to Beijing in China but bad weather prevented them from taking off. For three days they could not fly, and had to stay in a hotel. Andrew enjoyed the breakfast at the hotel. ‘Every day I ate twelve boiled eggs with bread and coffee. Ray ate only six.’ But each morning they lamented that they had not travelled such a long journey only to be stuck there enjoying breakfast. During their stay in Russia, the authorities had tried to suggest a safer route via Mongolia, but the Chinese authorities had advised against it, suggesting instead that they stay there until the weather allowed them to fly directly to China. ‘Mongolia was a socialist state close to Russia. We did not understand why the Chinese were not comfortable with our travel through it but we never bothered to ask.’
Only on the fourth day was the weather good enough
