days were far from carefree. During one year he developed pneumonia and had to be admitted to hospital. The illness had been caught late and his condition deteriorated quickly and he lapsed into a coma. The hospital contacted his mother and told her that he had died. She rushed to the hospital beside herself with anguish.
In the depths of his coma, Ting Ting found himself in a room filled with a radiant light. He felt his sister Sesi pulling at him, away from the comfort of the room. After a while he woke up to see his mother at his bedside.
Once he’d recovered, Ting Ting was enrolled at another primary school in Mamelodi. One of his teachers, a Mr Babsie Mkhize, habitually beat the children. The disruptive Ting Ting with his squint became a special focus for Mkhize. He mocked Ting Ting’s squint so cruelly that Ting Ting thought of running away. But he didn’t want to disappoint his family. His mother particularly.
The one thing that Ting Ting wanted most was a bicycle. He nagged his father, unable to understand why his father wasn’t obliging. One day his father snapped at him, ‘And what will the family eat if I buy you a bicycle?’ It was a rare outburst from this calm man who never raised his voice and Ting Ting never asked for a bicycle again. One day, he decided, he’d earn money by working as a gardener and support his entire family.
He looked for work on weekends in the white suburb of Silverton. He got his first Saturday job with an Afrikaans family. The work was not difficult and they paid him two rand.
It was his first sustained contact with whites, and although the family was not unpleasant to him, he noticed his tea was served in a jam tin and his plate of food was put on the ground, the way you would feed a dog. Ting Ting was impressed by the furniture in the house and asked his mother how whites could afford these things and why black people had nothing. His mother retorted, ‘If you ask questions like that, you will end up on Robben Island, like Mandela. Just be thankful that you have a job and are not in jail.’
At school Ting Ting’s good academic record continued. His ambition was to become a dentist – surely education would open opportunities for a better way of life? Then in June 1976, the world changed. After the uprising in Soweto, Ting Ting was elected onto the Student Representative Council at his school. The SRC met regularly and picked up on the issue of Afrikaans being forced on the students as the language of instruction. As it happened, Ting Ting was completely fluent and at ease in Afrikaans but that was not the issue. It was not the language of his choosing. In July 1976, the students of Mamelodi were boycotting classes and targeting liquor outlets as they believed the government used alcohol to turn blacks into ineffectual drunkards. Bottle stores were set alight. So were municipal buses.
Ting Ting was at the forefront. He enjoyed the excitement and the action. It was a wild power he had never known before and everything seemed possible. Schooling was disrupted to such an extent that it ceased. The headmaster threatened Ting Ting with expulsion if he didn’t stop stoking unrest. In response Ting Ting organised demonstrations against the headmaster who sought police protection. Ting Ting was expelled.
In early 1977, Ting Ting found employment at a salary of R90 a month. The money was welcome as his mother no longer had her job as a domestic worker. She now sold vegetables on the roadside and did not make much money, returning home at night to cook the evening meal, mute from exhaustion. Despite his job, Ting Ting continued his activities as a student organiser and became active in community affairs.
One day while visiting his father at the construction company in Silverton, Ting Ting witnessed the behaviour of a young white man towards his father. The man drove up to the entrance gate and shouted, ‘John, open the gate,’ blustering and gesticulating rudely.
Much offended, Ting Ting told the driver not to speak to his father in that way. An argument started that was only stopped when Ting Ting’s father intervened. Enough, he said to his son. Or he would lose his job. The young white man drove off. Beside himself with anger, Ting Ting’s father instructed his son never to visit him at work again. Powerless, Ting Ting promised to stay away.
In 1978 Ting Ting was arrested during a protest march in Soweto and detained in a police station. The sheer power of the police, their weaponry, armoured vehicles and equipment, the radios constantly crackling with reports, the helicopters disgorging police and troops, made him question what chance he and his comrades had with their petrol bombs and stones.
That year, an MK member, Solomon Mahlangu, was convicted of murder and charges under the Terrorism Act and sentenced to death. He was a man from Mamelodi; in fact, his family lived not far from Ting Ting’s home. The campaign to keep Mahlangu from the gallows captured the popular imagination and became a focus of political mobilisation, culminating in an all-night vigil. Ting Ting convened the meeting and in the early hours of the morning made a passionate speech. ‘If he is hanged,’ he told the gathering, ‘I am going to take his place and I urge all those who are able to do the same.’ His plea was met first with silence then with applause. Ting Ting realised he had crossed a line: he would now be a marked man as there were bound to have been security police in the crowd. Early the next morning the radio carried news that Solomon Mahlangu had been hanged at Death Row in Pretoria Central Prison.
The customary place for the State to bury those it hanged was the Mamelodi Cemetery. Ting Ting and Mahlangu’s mother rushed to the cemetery to retrieve the body before it was buried by the authorities, without prayers and ceremony. The cemetery was deserted. Instead, Mahlangu had been buried at the Atteridgeville Cemetery.
By the time they got there, some fifty activists had gathered and others were arriving. Armed police in riot gear faced the crowd. An officer with a loudhailer intoned monotonously: ‘This is an unlawful gathering, you have three minutes to disperse or force will be used against you.’ The crowd moved forward. The police fired teargas canisters and then charged, wielding batons and sjamboks. In the chaos Ting Ting escaped. Solomon Mahlangu was buried in the cemetery in a plot marked only by the number of the grave.
During the next few days Ting Ting moved between the houses of his friends. He had word from his mother that the security police were looking for him and he should not come home. He decided that he would leave the country and go into exile. He would become a soldier.
Without being able to say goodbye to his family, Ting Ting made his way to Mozambique and joined the ANC. He was warmly welcomed by a thickset man who appeared to be in charge of the new arrivals. Later Ting Ting learnt the man’s name was Jacob Zuma.
Like Jabu, Ting Ting ended up in the Matola transit house with its orchard of mango trees. Before being sent to Angola for military training he was asked to choose a nom de guerre. He chose ‘Qondile’, meaning ‘Bells’, which, he thought, chimed nicely with his name.
14
In the surgery in Pretoria Maximum Security there is little small talk after the ritual weigh-in.
Ting Ting leads the discussion. ‘I know that there is still a lot of work to be done but we want you to be aware of our thinking. We want to ask a question. What is the consequence of us not giving evidence? We ask this because we have a problem, and that is we are not prepared to take the stand and deny that we have done the things that we have done. I say this because the acts described in the charge sheet were committed by us as soldiers of Umkhonto we Sizwe, and we will not distance ourselves from what we have done.’
Jabu adds, ‘In any event, we have confessed in writing to all of these acts, so how can we now deny them?’
I look from one man to the next. They gaze back, earnest, solemn. ‘Well, let me deal with your first question about the implications of your not going into the witness box to give evidence. In a criminal trial, if the accused plead not guilty and then
