Memories of the struggle – The Mail & Guardian

Popo Molefe, author of Quiet Activists Peter Present, Zac Yacoob and Brian Hermanus at a UDF rally.

OOn the morning of June 8, 1986, we received a message from Jane telling us that we were finally going home. Once again, we were unprepared and had not been fully informed of our upcoming journey, our return home. We quickly said goodbye to our comrades and were driven to the airport.

On the way, Jane and Nkosi revealed to us that we were flying to Botswana and had booked a room at the Gaborone Sun Hotel. We were also given only $78 each to get from Botswana to Cape Town. No explanation was given as to why we had to rush, and there was no discussion about our mission to get home or who we were to meet once we got to Cape Town.

Nkosi guided us through customs. In (my wife) Bibi’s bag there were still some traveller’s cheques that we had not declared when we arrived in Zambia. I remembered the problem I had with the bank in Botswana and I knew that if they discovered them and realised that we had not declared them when we arrived, we would face a similar problem.

I discreetly told Nkosi about the problem. Bibi handed his bag containing the checks to Nkosi and, once through customs, he handed the bag to a customs officer he knew. The customs officer then quickly returned the bag to Bibi without searching him. We had a hard time getting there, but we were finally safe and ready to fly to Botswana.

The airport in Francistown, a small town in eastern Botswana near the border with Zimbabwe, was hot and stuffy, with no air conditioning. We hung around the airport for a few hours, waiting for our connecting flight to Gaborone.

It was only when we arrived at the Gaborone Sun that we realised that the ANC had booked us into a rather expensive hotel, leaving us to pay for our accommodation in Botswana and our return to Cape Town. The only thing that perhaps stopped us from panicking was that we had now reconnected with our families. At this point, we were still pretending to be travelling with all our relatives except my father, and it was during a conversation with him that I told him of our dire financial situation.

Bibi and I could only sit in our hotel room most of the day, only coming down to eat. We knew full well that the South African security services had agents in Botswana.

One afternoon, shortly after we arrived, the phone in our hotel room rang. Alarmed, Bibi and I turned to each other.

“Who could it be?” I wondered aloud… No one knew we were there. “Should we pick up the phone or let it ring?” Bibi replied.

I picked up the phone.

“What did you say, Peter? Ek is here by ontvangs,” said the person on the other end of the line. “Kom asseblief af – ek wag hier vir jou.” (How are you, Peter? I’m here at the reception – please come down.)

If ever my mind tried to make sense of a situation and failed, it was there. Afrikaans was common. It must have been the person’s native language, I thought, but not the Cape Town or Johannesburg accent. It was a white person’s voice. Could it be that a member of the South African security services had tracked us down?

I had to stand there silently for a moment, trying to take it all in. Bibi and I looked at each other as I asked, “Met wie praat ek?” (Who am I talking to?). Having answered in Afrikaans, it was Bibi’s turn to give me a blank stare.

“Come on down to the reception and we can talk.”

With a brief “OK,” I hung up the phone.

I told Bibi what the person had said and she was equally convinced that we were dealing with a member of the South African security services. But what could we do? He knew we were there… Our options were: I went down alone, we both went down to the ground floor or we left the hotel undetected. The latter option then meant that we would be forced to find somewhere to hide in Gaborone.

It was one of those moments where any decision we made could have easily been the wrong one. If we decided to leave, we would need time to pack. Then we would have to figure out a way to get out of the hotel without being noticed. And, of course, they would probably have taken into account that we would try to escape.

We then agreed that we would meet in the hotel lobby rather than on the streets of Gaborone. I would go down alone and leave Bibi in the room. So it was with extreme reluctance that I went down.

I had no idea what this person looked like, but as I walked across the floor, I scanned the area for a suspicious-looking white person. At the front desk, I told the receptionist that I was waiting for someone.

She pointed out a man to me.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Not only was our visitor not a white security guard, but rather a black man, dressed as a priest. His first words were that he had been sent by Dr. Allan Boesak.

I was so relieved that I immediately called Bibi from reception. That is how we met Walter Paul Khotso Makhulu, Bishop of Botswana, Archbishop of Central Africa (Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana) and President of the All Africa Conference of Churches.

We would later learn that he helped many other people like us who were in desperate situations.

Unbeknownst to us, my father had contacted Boesak and told him about our financial problems. Boesak had, in turn, contacted Archbishop Makhulu, who provided us with the money to pay for the remainder of our hotel stay and our return to Cape Town. He had also hosted us in his home, invited us to spend a few days with him, and introduced us to his family and some of his friends.

One of the families he introduced us to was that of Dorothy Froese. Dorothy was a single mother of three children: boys John and Meraffe, and a little girl named Tebogo. We visited them on several occasions and during this time I quickly became attached to Tebogo, who must have been two or three years old at the time.

I have very special memories of the time when we would read passages from her storybook to her during our evening visits. In this way, Bibi and I had another perfect alibi to prove that we had visited people and places in Botswana that were not connected to the ANC.

At the time, however, even though he helped us from the first moment we met him, I was still hesitant to trust him completely. It was nothing personal; it was simply the way I was programmed to react whenever I met a stranger.

I think we often underestimate the reality and the danger of the infiltration problem at the time. At one point he showed us some photos. In one of them he was standing next to Boesak. To me this was physical proof of his connection to Boesak and it finally allayed my fears.

We could not be more grateful for all the help we received from these two pillars of the struggle. If we had not received financial support, we would have had to make contact with the ANC in Botswana and enter the country illegally. As a result, we would not have been allowed to return home and our lives would probably have been very different. At the time, we never told him that we were MK soldiers returning from training and that we were on our way home to help liberate our country.

He, for his part, never asked us why we were in Botswana. In a way, he understood.

On June 12, 1986, four days after our arrival in Botswana and the day before our scheduled departure, a national state of emergency was declared in South Africa. All political activities, including funerals, were severely restricted and monitored. As we watched the news from our hotel room in Gaborone, Bibi and I knew that this would impact our ability to enter the country safely and travel to Cape Town.

Silent activists is published by Quickfox Publishing.