yesterday on charges of public violence arising out of disturbances at the university earlier this month’. According to the article, ‘those in court yesterday were part of a group of 22 arrested’. The authorities had apparently decided to let two of the detainees go.13 It would seem that the protesters were charged with public violence, not high treason as Magashule claimed.
The report from 19 May proved particularly useful. It included the initials and surnames of all those who had been arrested, bar the two who had been let off the hook. Accordingly, one ‘E. Marashula [ sic]’
was detained and charged. (A later report, in a partial correction, listed
‘Elias Magashula’ as one of the accused.)14 The report also named ‘B.
Mlangeni’. This would be Bheki Mlangeni, one of the men Magashule referred to in his ANC Oral History Project interview. Mlangeni was later killed in a bomb attack planned by apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock. 15
One former Fort Hare student who helped plan the protest action confirmed to me that Magashule was among those arrested and shed more light on the events of 1982. ‘Fort Hare did not have a student representative council [SRC], so we banded together as the Azanian Students Organisation [AZASO],’ this source told me. ‘We planned to
disrupt Sebe’s visit to the campus because we did not recognise his government’s authority and we wanted to get rid of him.’
As with COSAS, Magashule also claimed to have been a member of AZASO: ‘And when I went to Fort Hare I became a part of AZASO. ’16
But my Fort Hare source tells a different story. ‘I was in my second year in 1982 and I knew all the activists on campus,’ he said. ‘Ace was not among those I knew to be activists, and he certainly was not a member of AZASO. He definitely did not help plan the disruption of Sebe’s visit.’
There was also never any intention to assassinate Sebe or any other member of the Ciskei government. ‘We [AZASO] planned to disrupt the visit,’ my source indicated, ‘[but] there was no plan to kill Sebe.’
In the chaos that broke out after the Ciskei police arrived on campus, the authorities rounded up anyone they could catch. As a result, Magashule may have become an accidental activist that day. ‘Some of the people who were detained were part of the planned action against Sebe, but others were just bystanders,’ my source said. ‘I think Ace was unlucky to have been apprehended.’
According to this source, AZASO members helped raise funds for their detained fellow students. The organisation also sought the services of attorney Hintsa Siwisa to represent the group. ‘That is when I first heard about Ace Magashule, when we had to get legal assistance for those who were detained,’ my source explained.
Before the uprising, Magashule was apparently not a regular fixture at political gatherings on campus. ‘There were AZASO meetings on campus where people like Bheki Mlangeni made speeches that lasted until 3 a.m. Ace did not attend any of these gatherings before the unrest during Sebe’s visit,’ the source said.
Magashule and his co-accused were eventually convicted on charges relating to ‘public violence committed at a university’. They were each given ‘a fine of R400 plus a suspended sentence of 300 days’
imprisonment’. But the case went on appeal and dragged on until 1985, when Ciskei’s Supreme Court dismissed the appeals and increased the sentences. Magashule was among sixteen of the accused whose sentences were increased to jail time ranging from one to three years. 17 It was still a far cry from being found guilty on charges of high treason, and by all indications Magashule did not end up serving any of his prison time.
Court records and old newspapers provide clues as to where Magashule may have found the creative inspiration for his story about the supposed assassination attempt and subsequent ‘treason’ trial.
In a summary of the protest action in their appeal ruling, the Ciskei Supreme Court judges noted the following: ‘During the confusion of the riot appellants Nos 1 and 2 brought a thick pipe filled with cement and stone and some 90 cm long and together they threw it through the left side of the rear window of the motor vehicle in which Mr Namba Sebe [another brother of Prime Minister Sebe], the then Minister of Transport, was travelling. He was seated at the left rear of the vehicle and on reading the record one can only conclude that it was merely fortuitous that he was not killed or at least very seriously injured.’
Magashule, who was listed as appellant No. 12, was not responsible for the attack on the minister’s car. 18
In addition, at the time of the students’ court case, a terror trial was being heard in the Ciskei Supreme Court. Four men from Mdantsane outside East London were accused of being members of the then banned ANC, participating in terrorist activities and recruiting people
to undergo military training. 19 These sound like the kind of struggle activities Magashule would later claim to have been involved in.
In 1984, after completing his studies at Fort Hare, Magashule enrolled for a Higher Education Diploma at the University of the Witwatersrand, but he was only there for a few months. ‘I couldn’t survive because I did not have the money, so I left Wits, it was around March or April,’ he said in his ANC Oral History Project interview.
He then began working as a teacher. After a stint at Moqhaka Secondary School in Sebokeng, he returned to his old school, Phehellang Secondary in Parys, in 1985. A source from this phase of Magashule’s life said he taught English and Bible studies.
It was in November 1985 that he ran into trouble with the apartheid government’s notorious police force. While he was teaching at Phehellang, he was nabbed by the police under Section 29 of the Internal Security Act. The Act allowed for political detainees to be held in solitary confinement so that they could be interrogated.
‘I spent nine months in solitary confinement,’ Magashule later recalled. ‘That’s the most terrible and horrible type of detention. That’s the worst time in my life because I was alone in the cell. I wanted to commit suicide. ’20
He repeated this story in a 2008 interview with journalist Fiona Forde:
‘I can assure you that Section 29 is serious torture. You know, I wanted to commit suicide after that. I was completely and emotionally destroyed.’21
My source, who was around at the time, remembered the arrest but seemed to recall that Magashule was detained for six months, not nine.
‘The police alleged that he was encouraging unrest in Tumahole and in
the general area,’ the source told me. ‘He was held at several police stations in the area during those months, including the one at Koppies
[a small town near Parys].’
This wouldn’t be Magashule’s last encounter with the apartheid security forces.
2
Hillbrow days
At some point after his ‘treason’ trial at Fort Hare, Magashule slipped into the secretive world of the ANC’s underground armed struggle, at least according to his own recollection.
An article penned in 2014 by two of Magashule’s spokespeople for the government-owned magazine Public Sector Manager included a description of the then Free State premier’s alleged clandestine activities for Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC’s armed wing.1 The tax-funded puff piece’s introduction is a clumsy attempt at espionage prose in the vein of a John le Carré spy novel:
The Jan Smuts International Airport in Johannesburg is packed to capacity, with people coming in and out of the country, and some travelling locally. A lanky fellow with somewhat of an unkempt beard, clinching onto his teddy bear, snakes his way through the imposing crowd, and makes his way to customs.
This was during the 1980s when Ace Magashule used to go in and out of the country as a courier. He would travel to the ANC offices in Lusaka to get money and smuggled it back into South Africa. At times, he would also take many people out of the country for military training.
‘I had to carry cash with me so I stuffed the money into a teddy bear. I would deliberately carry more than two bags and at the airport would ask someo
ne, preferably a white lady, to help me. “Please lady, I have a lot of luggage. Please hold this teddy bear for me,” I
would beg. After we had passed through customs, I took the teddy bear back saying, “Thank you very much, have a good day,” before disappearing into the airport crowd. It was an exciting and dangerous life. ’2
I showed the piece to one Free State politician who had spent a considerable amount of time with Magashule in the 1980s. His unequivocal assessment of the teddy-bear story was that it was
‘bullshit’. ‘I was with Ace the whole time during those years, and I can guarantee that it did not happen,’ he told me.
A second source, who also spent time with Magashule during the 1980s, agreed. ‘It is true that Ace worked with money for struggle operations, but that thing is not true,’ this source said. ‘It simply did not work like that.’
Several other ANC stalwarts and former MK operatives agreed that Magashule’s teddy-bear tale sounded outlandish. ANC veteran Khulu Mbatha, who wrote Unmasked: Why the ANC Failed to Govern, said it was highly unlikely that an underground operative would have used such tactics to bring money into the country. ‘There was nothing like that in those days,’ Mbatha told me. ‘Even if this were an actual MK
method of transporting money, a real MK operative would not dare to disclose this.’
Another former MK operative, who served in one of the government’s intelligence agencies after 1994, called Magashule’s story ‘unrealistic’
and ‘bizarre’, telling me, ‘This is not how an MK operative would have gone about it.’
Magashule’s interview for the ANC Oral History Project included further details about his alleged cloak-and-dagger activities: ‘Well, we
were all over the country. We’ll pretend to be lawyer[s] sometimes, put on a tie, take a bag, stay in hotels, change names, facilitate certain things, when people were coming into the country we had to look after
[them by] giving them some money.’
From his own telling, it would appear that Magashule was a point man for operatives sneaking back into the country from one or other of the ANC’s foreign bases: ‘We would welcome them and accommodate them, brief them about particular areas where they were supposed to go and operate from. That’s the type of work we were doing.’
Elsewhere in the interview, Magashule elaborated on this responsibility. ‘And what happened, as I said, a lot of comrades were infiltrated into our townships, they would engage us and we wouldn’t know that this man comes from exile, is in the underground. As people were engaging in that struggle people would identify that this one can go for a crash course, come back, and be trained quickly and sent back into the country to fight. Others were trained inside the country.’
When asked how and by whom he had been recruited into MK, Magashule replied: ‘There’s an old man from Bophelong [near Vanderbijlpark], we always referred to him as “old man”, I [have] just forgotten his surname … ntate Soku or something like that in Bophelong. He was the main person who was actually recruiting people in the underground.’
A former MK member from the area around Parys disputed Magashule’s version. This source was able to provide detailed information on the ‘old man’ and his underground cell. ‘That man
[Magashule] referred to was Ernest Sotso. It is true that he recruited people into MK, but Ace was not one of them.’
My source said that he worked with Sotso during that time, and that
he would have known if Magashule was part of this network. ‘If Ace was really recruited by Sotso, he would have had no problem remembering his name and surname.’
He added that Tate Makgoe, the current member of the executive council (MEC) for education in the Free State, was a member of that MK cell. ‘Ask Tate if Ace was in that cell, or if he was even in MK,’ he urged me. Unfortunately, Makgoe chose not to respond to my queries.
When asked to provide a more concrete description of his role in the MK underground for the ANC Oral History Project, Magashule seemed vague on the details: ‘Well, I have done a lot of groundwork internally in the country. As I said there was this internal high team, in the early 80s, ’83, ’84 upwards. That’s when we became more active in the underground work.’ He added that he had been ‘given some instructions to remain in the country, [to] remain operating underground’.
My source from MK in the Parys area asked who gave Magashule these instructions. Papi Kganare was also curious. ‘Who else was in his cell? Who was his commander? Ace has not been able to provide such details because he was not in MK,’ he insisted.
According to Magashule, he interacted with and received instruction from the very top echelon of the ANC’s leadership structure in the late 1980s. When asked about his commanders for the ANC Oral History Project, he replied with the following: ‘As I said I’ve been working with, eh … some of those comrades have passed away who were my commanders. One of my commanders was a simple guy called Benji Tsholota. You know, because of my high-profile activities I was not made any commander I was just commanded by young guys of which I appreciated. But there were guys from exile in the underground who
commanded me the likes of Winnie Mandela had direct contacts with Chris Hani and, as I said, Steve Tshwete and many others … Steve Tshwete, Chris Hani, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma – those four … I was in the main accounting direct in the underground to comrade Chris
[Hani]. But I would always … At times when I left the country to go to Zambia I would meet the four.’
Kganare struggled to believe any of this. ‘Chris Hani is dead, so he can’t verify this, but there are people who worked with Chris who can verify,’ he said. ‘When did Chris mentor him and where?’ And the former MK member from the Parys area said the only Benji he knew from that time was a student leader who had no affiliation to MK.
Requests sent to then ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe to help fill in some of these blanks went unanswered, as did queries sent to the Thabo Mbeki Foundation about Mbeki’s interaction with Magashule during that time.
For someone who claims to have been so prominent in the struggle movement that he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Hani and Mbeki, Magashule left a surprisingly faint mark in the memories of his struggle contemporaries. This holds true for both the movement’s underground and formal structures.
Mbatha said he first heard about Magashule at the ANC’s forty-eighth national elective conference, held in Durban in 1991, after the unbanning of the ANC the year before.
One of my sources, the former MK member turned government spook, said he never encountered Magashule during the struggle. ‘I did not meet him in my world,’ he maintained. ‘I only got to know about him after the unbanning.’
Written accounts of the period reflect a similar dearth of information
concerning Magashule’s role in the struggle. Hugh Macmillan’s The Lusaka Years: The ANC in Exile in Zambia, 1963– 1994 does not mention Magashule once. If Magashule did indeed meet with the ANC’s top brass at the organisation’s Zambian base, it had to have been a highly secretive affair, for Macmillan’s thorough study of that epoch does not reference any such meeting.
Thula Simpson’s Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle is equally silent on Magashule’s alleged involvement in underground activities. Simpson’s book has been praised for being ‘brilliant at laying out events and actions carried out by both prominent and less known members of MK’. 3 Magashule, who claims to have held such an important position within MK that he reported directly to someone of Hani’s stature, must feel aggrieved at being overlooked by Simpson.
To be fair to Magashule, there does appear to be some truth in his narrative. Between 1985 and the end of the decade, the UDF’s ability to operate as a unified resistance movement was severely hampered by successive states of emergency, the detainment of its leaders and, eventually, the apartheid government’s decision to ban the organisation. 4 It was during this troubled phase of the UDF’s existence that Magashule did in fact att
ain a degree of prominence within the movement. It was also during this time that he played a role in something at least resembling an MK cell. Sources who were at his side or who had contact with him in this period were able to verify this.
In 1986, in the depth of winter, President P.W. Botha’s government declared yet another state of emergency. In the evening after the announcement, Magashule and a group of about twenty comrades from Parys arrived at Matthew Chaskalson’s home in Johannesburg.
Matthew’s father, Arthur, had been part of the legal team that had
defended Mandela and his fellow accused in the Rivonia Trial in 1963–64, and he would later become South Africa’s chief justice. In the 1980s, Matthew was making his own mark as a lawyer, and his home would sometimes be used as a temporary place of shelter for activists.
‘Ace was the leader of this group of people from Parys who were now on the run because of the state of emergency,’ Chaskalson remembered.
‘They were sleeping on the floor at my house for a couple of days, and I was trying to find them more permanent accommodation.’
Eventually, Chaskalson found an apartment for Magashule and some of his associates in Hillbrow. ‘I paid the first month’s rent, and after that I didn’t really see much of Ace again,’ he recalled. ‘He was an enterprising guy, so he soon tapped into other sources of funding to sustain himself.’
This marked the start of Magashule’s time in ‘internal exile’ in Johannesburg, which would last from mid-1986 to 1989. One source who was at Magashule’s side during this period said the group did start functioning as an MK unit, and did report to the top brass.
‘This was a difficult time for the entire movement, also for the underground structures,’ this source told me. ‘The government crackdown that came with the states of emergency disrupted everything, so we had to make other plans … We were instructed by Chris Hani, Mbeki and Tshwete to operate from Johannesburg because things were too hot on the ground in rural areas like the Free State.’
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