Parcel of Death: The Biography of Onkgopotse Abram Tiro

To Moleseng Anna Tiro

Gaongalelwe Tiro

Parcel of Death

The Biography of Onkgopotse Abram Tiro

PICADOR AFRICA

First published in 2019 by Picador Africa

an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag

x

19, Northlands

Johannesburg, 2116

www.panmacmillan.co.za

isbn

978-1-77010-649-9

e-

isbn

978-1-77010-650-5

© 2019 Gaongalelwe Tiro

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form,

or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any

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and civil claims for damages.

Editing by Sean Fraser and Ester Levinrad

Proofreading by Wesley Thompson

Indexing by Christopher Merrett

Design and typesetting by Triple M Design

Cover design by publicide

Cover image courtesy of Gallo Images/Sunday Times

Contents

Foreword by Mosibudi Mangena

Prologue

Chapter 1 Blown to smithereens

Chapter 2 Child of rivulets

Chapter 3 Nascent years

Chapter 4 Disrupted schooling

Chapter 5 Thrust into a political vortex

Chapter 6 Baptism of fire

Chapter 7 DNA of courage

Chapter 8 The Tiro Affair

Chapter 9 Religion and radical politics

Chapter 10 Inspiring young minds

Chapter 11 Black Consciousness roadshow

Chapter 12 Escalating the struggle

Chapter 13 Conspiracy to kill

Chapter 14 Remembering Tiro

Appendix

Acknowledgements

Select bibliography

Foreword

A biography of Onkgopotse Tiro is long overdue. It is rather surreal that a personage of Onkgopotse’s calibre, who was at once a catalyst and an active change agent in the South African struggle for freedom, would not have a book written on his life until 43 years after his brutal death. In Parcel of Death, Gaongalelwe Tiro pulls together various facets of Onkgopotse’s short but eventful life. Even those of us who worked with Onkgopotse and think we knew him still have a lot to learn through this book.

The Tiro Affair, which was triggered by Onkgopotse’s now famous valedictory speech at the 1972 graduation ceremony at the University of the North (Turfloop), now the University of Limpopo, threw black universities throughout the country into turmoil. Many students terminated their studies, went into serious political activism and got arrested, while some went into exile. Even students at a few so-called white universities, such as the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town, found themselves involved in protests and clashes with the police. In this sense, the Tiro Affair gave impetus to the struggle for freedom, while at the same time completely changing the life trajectory for many young people. Some of those people who played sterling roles in the resistance against oppression continue to engage prominently in the political life of contemporary South Africa.

I first met Onkgopotse at the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) General Student Council in Hammanskraal in 1972. The ructions at university campuses, in which he had played such a critical role, were still simmering. He was rather calm and measured in his demeanour and interventions for someone who was at the centre of such a big storm. He was not one to make bombastic, reckless and demagogic statements. Even when some students stood up to propose that SASO consider violent forms of struggle, he remained restrained. That was not because he did not believe in armed struggle, but like many of us in that Council, he did not deem it appropriate to articulate such a position in an open forum like that.

We met several times thereafter in the SASO offices in Braamfontein in the first half of 1973. At the time, Onkgopotse was working with Harry Nengwekhulu and I was the national organiser of the Black People’s Convention (BPC). The three of us had agreed, as organisers, to share notes from time to time. Tiro’s discipline and uprightness came through constantly, leading some of us to consider him too austere for his age.

There is no doubt that his upbringing and religious affiliation played a substantial role in his highly disciplined behaviour. Eric Molobi, a fellow Black Consciousness adherent and Seventh-Day Adventist Church member, who found me on Robben Island in 1976, was also highly disciplined and steadfast in his beliefs.

It was Eric Molobi who gave me the low-down on Onkgopotse’s murder when he arrived on Robben Island. He described the room in which Onkgopotse was murdered as a horror scene and how, at the mortuary, he could only recognise his forehead: the rest of his face blown away, along with his hands and front.

In Parcel of Death, Gaongalelwe provides us with a powerful lens through which we may understand Onkgopotse. His childhood was difficult. His mother, Moleseng Tiro, and the extended family who brought him up, were people of limited means. They struggled to put him and his four siblings through school. Onkgopotse had his schooling halted in one instance due to financial difficulties. As a youth, he even had to work at a mine to earn some money for the family – an experience of hardship, pain, exploitation and racism that went a long towards shaping his future political activism.

The resistance against the imposition of passes on women by the Bahurutshe ba Moiloa in 1957 disrupted schooling in the area. Chief Abram Pogiso ‘Ramotshere’ Moiloa supported the struggle against the passes and was exiled to Ventersdorp, from where he subsequently fled to Botswana. He continued his opposition to oppression in exile, leading to the recruitment of some young people to be trained abroad as freedom fighters. This must have made a huge impression on the young Onkgopotse. The disruption of education by the imperatives of the struggle for freedom did not start at Turfloop as far as Onkgopotse is concerned. His Bahurutshe community had long exposed him to this kind of sacrifice.

For many decades, freedom fighters leaving the country for Botswana or coming back into the country were harboured, fed and guided by the communities around Onkgopotse’s Dinokana. They understood the movements and routine of the security forces, and thus knew how to sneak around them. It is this community, which always cocked a snook at the oppression and injustice, that brought Onkgopotse up. He and his family personally accommodated freedom fighters in their home and helped them to skip the country.

Onkgopotse’s emergence from the patriotic environment created by the Bahurutshe might explain, at least in part, his taking to Black Consciousness like a duck takes to water. Black Consciousness provided the much-needed framework for the articulation of the problem of settler-colonialism and the required response by its victims. He became one of the most ardent and energetic proponents of the philosophy, spreading it everywhere he went. He did that in his village, at the University of the North, at Morris Isaacson where he taught after his expulsion from Turfloop and in the southern African region, particularly after his election as president of the Southern African Students’ Movement (SASM).

His political activism within the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, challenging the church’s racial discrimination against its black congregants, was most remarkable. His mobilisation of especially young members in combination with the direct attack of racial practices within the church changed the fortunes of its black members for good.

Tiro did not only espouse African continental solidarity as he did in his graduation speech at the University of Limpopo, but he demonstrated his commitment to it through his excellent work in the SASM. He fervently believed that the fate of the African continent lay in the collective hands of Africans working together.

Throughout the book, Onkgopotse comes across as a man of principle, action, courage and conviction. He not only urged his comrades to be prepared to make huge sacrifices for the cause, but he led by example. He said what needed to be said at Turfloop, regardless of the consequences for himself. He paid the price for his teaching of relevant history at Morris Isaacson High School and his spreading of Black Consciousness among students in Soweto, having to leave his family and country when his activism put the forces of the regime on his tail as they tried to put him under a banning order. Finally, the regime caught up with him and murdered him with a parcel bomb. His assertion: ‘It is better to die for an idea that would live than live for an idea that would die,’ had an echo in his own fate. In addition to his eloquence, these are probably the attributes that earned him so much respect and the following of so many people.

When the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo), started working towards bringing his remains back to South Africa for reburial on 22 March 1998, it found ready collaborators who supported that effort. Some people contributed cash, an undertaker offered to bring his remains from Botswana to Dinokana free of charge and another donated a tombstone. That talked to the respect Onkgopotse commanded among many in South Africa.

The narrative in Parcel of Death leads the reader to realise that the stories of Onkgopotse Tiro, Tsietsi Mashinini, the Soweto uprisings of June 1976, the murder of Steve Biko and the banning of the Black Consciousness organisations in 1977 are part of an integrated continuum.

Considering Onkgopotse’s immense contribution to the struggle for freedom, it is appropriate that his death is observed every year by Azapo and the University of the North, which runs the annual Onkgopotse Tiro Memorial Lecture in a hall named after him. At the lecture in 2018, learners from the Onkgopotse Tiro Comprehensive School, near Mahikeng, performed a play, celebrating his life, that brought tears to many eyes in the audience.

This is a valuable book and I am honoured to have been approached to write its foreword. Big kudos are due to the author, Gaongalelwe Tiro. For generations to come, the book will be a source of information and inspiration.

Mosibudi Mangena

June 2019

Prologue

No struggle can come to an end without casualties. It is only through determination, absolute commitment and self-assertion that we shall overcome.

– Onkgopotse Tiro¹

Onkgopotse Abram Tiro has an unenviable claim to renown. He is the first South African freedom fighter the apartheid government pursued beyond the borders of the country to have been assassinated with a parcel bomb.² At a time when a confident regime believed it was unassailable and in complete control, the militancy and zeal of Tiro and a golden generation of anti-apartheid activists caused panic. Together, they had successfully conquered the fear that besieged opponents of white supremacy in the years that followed the crackdown of the early 1960s.

The apartheid regime had banned liberation movements – most notably the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania – and incarcerated, exiled or forced underground their members and leaders. Some activists, entirely demoralised, abandoned the struggle altogether.

It was specifically the pass laws – aimed at keeping black South Africans out of urban areas and controlling their movement and access to jobs – that were met with fierce resistance. On 21 March 1960, the regime responded and unleashed excessive force, killing 69 protesters in the Vaal township of Sharpeville. Two days later, it banished PAC leader, scholar and freedom fighter Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe to the Northern Cape and initiated a court trial for ‘incitement’. He was subsequently, on 4 May 1960, found guilty and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment at Pretoria Central Prison.

The regime intermittently arrested scores of activists as it continued with its clampdown. In 1963, it jailed another PAC leader Jafta ‘The Tiger of Azania’ Masemola for acts of ‘terrorism’ and kept him imprisoned on Robben Island for 26 years – one of the longest terms ever served behind bars on Robben Island by a political prisoner in the history of South Africa. In the same year it arrested ANC leader Nelson Mandela and charged him with inciting a worker strike and sentenced him to five years. In 1963, apartheid securocrats rounded up other ANC leaders, put them on trial with Mandela for terrorism and sentenced them to life imprisonment. Both the ANC and PAC had, in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre, decided to take up arms and respectively launched military wings Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and Poqo, which evolved into the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA).

Meanwhile, other struggle leaders left South Africa to mobilise international support for the armed struggle and to continue the struggle. The initial wave of exiles included Oliver Tambo from the ANC, Yusuf Dadoo from the South African Indian Congress and SACP, and Potlako Leballo from the PAC. The regime had, however, succeeded in paralysing the liberation movement, but – more consequentially – had knocked the morale of the oppressed and instilled fear among them. The struggle against apartheid entered a moribund phase.

Then, in the late 1960s, there emerged a new type of freedom fighter, steeped in the philosophy of Black Consciousness. The black power movement in the United States of America was an immediate inspiration. But the new generation of activists developed an ideological framework that meshed ideas from the black radical tradition passed down through generations at home, the rest of Africa and the diaspora.

They embraced African and later ‘Black’ Consciousness spirit and activism espoused by figures such as Marcus Garvey, WEB Du Bois and Booker T Washington up to the newer, younger Black Arts and Black Power figures such as Le Roi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

The Négritude anti-colonial cultural and political movement from the 1930s that Francophone intellectuals and activists Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor and Leon Damas pioneered contributed important ideas that the local Black Consciousness movement appropriated. The new-age activists read widely and engaged with ideas of a variety of other leading revolutionary theorists such as Paulo Freire, Amílcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda and Sobukwe.

Steve Biko emerged as the leading theorist of the Black Consciousness generation in South Africa. Through the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO), established in 1968 and officially launched in 1969, he and others mobilised university students behind this philosophy. Black Consciousness advocated taking pride in being black and rejecting subservience and paternalism. It preached boldness in the fight against racism. Leading the charge was Mthuli ka Shezi, boldly confronting a white railway worker for hosing a group of black women waiting for a train in Germiston. He was killed at the same railway station when his adversary spotted him days later, on 16 December 1972, and after a brief scuffle shoved him in front of an oncoming train. Ka Shezi became the first martyr of the then-nascent Black Consciousness movement.

In the same vein, Tiro demonstrated reignited courage among the oppressed when, in 1972, he delivered a speech at a graduation ceremony at the University of the North, now the University of Limpopo. It echoed the simmering new mood. He was scathing in his critique of apartheid, especially the system of education, which was designed to keep blacks in bondage. It had particularly riled him that white people managed and controlled the university, widely known as Turfloop after the farm on which it was built, while it was established exclusively for black students. The Turfloop Testimony, as the speech later came to be known, triggered a series of events that culminated in Tiro’s brutal assassination in exile in neighbouring Botswana in 1974.

The courage he exhibited on the day of his speech and the fact that his message resonated with black people in the audience worried the authorities, who summarily expelled Tiro from the university. The protest that followed his expulsion led to many other students at Turfloop and beyond suffering the same fate, while others left of their own accord to pursue the struggle for national liberation. But nationwide protests at black universities after his removal still failed to earn Tiro a reprieve. Even when white campuses at the universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand joined their counterparts, the authorities stuck to their guns. Tiro went on to teach History at Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. It was during his short stint there that he cemented his place in the history of the freedom struggle.

With a keen interest in mobilising the youth to fight for freedom, Tiro preached Black Consciousness to his students and the communities with which he interacted. In the process, he influenced many young people who went on to play a crucial role in the 16 June 1976 student uprising and the larger liberation struggle. Among them was Tsietsi Mashinini, a student at Morris Isaacson – regarded by many as ‘the cradle of resistance’ – who subsequently became the primary leader of the 1976 uprising. Though Tiro had died two years earlier, the June 1976 turning point in the anti-apartheid struggle was in many ways a culmination of the efforts of his generation of activists.

Together with many of his peers in the struggle, Tiro walked in the footsteps of the great African warriors who resisted colonial occupation, assuming the mantle of resistance kings Dingane ka Senzangakhona of the amaZulu, Hintsa of the amaXhosa, Sekhukhune of the Bapedi and Moshoeshoe of the Basotho. Tiro’s Batswana clan the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa royals, notably chiefs Ikalafeng Moiloa and Abram ‘Ramotshere’ Moiloa, also distinguished themselves in the fight-back of the indigenous populations against land dispossession and colonial oppression.

For his contribution, Tiro paid the ultimate sacrifice. His cross-border assassination in Botswana on 1 February 1974 beckoned a wave of similar atrocities of parcel bombs that claimed the lives of martyrs Boy Adolphus Mvemve (killed in Zambia two weeks after Tiro), Jeanette Schoon (blown up with her six-year-old daughter, Katryn, in Angola in 1984), Philemon Mahlako and Ruth First (murdered in Mozambique in 1979 and 1982 respectively).

The pre- and post-apartheid authorities failed to bring Tiro’s killers to justice, and neither did they make any discernible, credible effort to do so. His mother, Moleseng Tiro, died a broken woman in 2003 after her plea to the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for an investigation into her son’s death was not heeded. ‘Tell the world that the government has forgotten about us – the victims,’ she told Drum magazine in 2002.³

The only consolation was that she realised her lifelong wish to bury her son in the land of his forebears in 1998. The Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo) helped the Tiro family to repatriate the remains of their son and rebury them in Dinokana, Zeerust, where he was born. Back in 1974, the apartheid authorities would not allow them to bring back his mortal remains for burial in South Africa.

Azapo is a direct ideological successor to the broader Black Consciousness movement, specifically the Black People’s Convention (BPC) that SASO founded in 1972 to take the struggle beyond university and college campuses and into black communities. The tertiary students also worked with the South African Students’ Movement (SASM) to mobilise high-school pupils. Eventually, on 19 October 1977 – a day dubbed Black Wednesday – the apartheid government banned BPC, SASO, SASM and other Black Consciousness-inclined formations. These included the Union of Black Journalists, Black Community Programmes Limited, Black Parents’ Association, Border Youth Organisation, Soweto Students’ Representative Council, Association for the Educational and Cultural Advancement of the African People of South Africa, Black Women’s Federation and National Youth Organisation.

Other entities that were also banned were the Medupe Writers’ Association, the Natal Youth Organisation, the Western Cape Youth Organisation, the Eastern Province Youth Organisation, the Transvaal Youth Organisation, the Zimele Trust Fund and the Siyazinceda