The Unsung Hero

Written by Sam Mathe
Tuesday, 05 July 2011 14:14

Andrew Mlangeni is a golf enthusiast with an impressive collection of silverware in his cabinet. In his Dube, Soweto home, he is well loved for his philanthropic causes – including donating blankets to the needy during the annual Christmas lunch he hosts. In parliament Mlangeni, 85, is a guiding light to the country’s younger leadership. Sam Mathe gets up close and personal with the sagely octogenarian who did time with Mandela on South Africa’s own Alcatraz.

Few revolutionaries or freedom fighters were born with silver spoons in their mouths. Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and Indian nationalist Mohandas Gandhi were notable exceptions. Lenin was born into a family of Russian nobles with a schoolteacher mother and a father who was a senior government functionary in the affairs of school education. Indeed he never made any attempt to hide his aristocratic upbringing and in fact argued in his revolutionary writings that intellectuals with bourgeois backgrounds had a duty to spread revolutionary ideas amongst the working class.

Gandhi was also of aristocratic background, both parents being members of India’s upper caste. His father was a highly ranked official in one of India’s princely states during the British colonial rule.

In 1925, just a year after the death of Lenin, the year when Gandhi took a break from challenging British colonial rule and started focusing on forging unity between India’s warring political parties, a revolutionary was born on South African soil. His name is Andrew Mlangeni, and he would become a member of the Young Communist League and a secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa.

Raising a revolutionary
Mlangeni’s revolutionary politics were forged in the crucible of township poverty, apartheid oppression and disenfranchisement. The family lived in Prospect Township, a mixed area where Indian merchants and Chinese fah-fee runners lived cheek by jowl with their African tenants.

“The houses belonged to Jewish property developers, and African parents were charged exorbitant amounts in rental for small rooms,” Mlangeni recalls.

Housing for Africans in the city was a big headache for white authorities as most rural folks migrated to Johannesburg in search of jobs and a better livelihood.

By 1932 Orlando East, the nucleus around which Soweto was born, was established by the city of Johannesburg as a solution to the housing problem and slum conditions in places such as Doornfontein. When more houses became available in 1938, the Mlangeni family eventually moved to Orlando East. With a large household of a widowed mother and 11 children, life was not easy for the Mlangenis.

Some of the children were taken in by relatives; Andrew went to live in the Orange Free State townships of Bethlehem and Kroonstad for a short time. On his return to Orlando in 1939, he went to live with an elder brother in Pimville where he started his primary schooling at the age of 10 under the tutelage of Catholic missionaries.

While school provided in his intellectual needs, a job as a golf caddy provided some desperately needed pocket money.

“At 12 I was already an experienced caddy at golf courses around Crown Mines and Turffontein,” he says. “I could earn some cash that I’d use to buy myself some khaki shirts and short trousers.”

Some of the money came in handy in the Mlangeni household to augment the earnings of his mother – a domestic worker who washed suburban folks’ clothing to keep the wolf from the door. It was on the golf course, at the age of 12, that he started smoking – a habit he still indulges.

“It was customary for white women golfers to offer a caddy a cigarette to hold while she was putting. You were expected to take a puff from her cigarette. If a ‘boy’ refused, he was regarded as disrespectful of the ‘madam’ and could be expelled from the golf course,” he explains.

It was a habit that he took to Robben Island in 1964.

“For the first few months it was difficult to find tobacco on the island,” he remembers. “We relied on picking up stompies thrown around by warders on our way to the quarry. At the time I really wanted to quit, but Walter Sisulu told us: ‘Chaps, we’re already punished. Why do you punish yourself more by giving up something you’ve been enjoying for decades?’ If it weren’t for him, I probably would have succeeded!”

Despite the challenges township life threw at the young teenager, he was a bright pupil who was focused on his studies. After obtaining a standard six certificate at Musi High in Pimville, he enrolled at St Peter’s in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, where he met some of the country’s most brilliant students, students who later became prominent South Africans – the likes of Joe Matthews, Alfred Hutchinson and Tamsanqa Wilkinson Nkambule, who later became a great mathematician and legendary headmaster.

His maths and science teacher was the late former ANC president Oliver Reginald Tambo.

“He was a very good maths and science teacher and very popular with students,” Mlangeni recalls. “We also had a very good headmaster, Mr DH Darlings from the UK. His cousin was a geography teacher and a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society.”

Mlangeni’s involvement in student politics started in 1944 – the year the ANC Youth League was formed – when one Victor Moorosi, a fellow student from Pimville, formed the Pimville Students’ and Ex Students’ League.

Andrew Mazibuko was elected secretary with Mlangeni as his deputy. The idea behind the league’s formation was to mould students into becoming useful members of the community by engaging in social activities that would enable them to learn about positive values such as discipline. The other aim was to introduce them to civil politics. It was around this time that Mlangeni and his cousin Eric Ntshatshe started discussing the possibility of forming a student branch of the ANC Youth League.

“We approached Mr Tambo for advice,” Mlangeni says. His response was, “If you still want to remain students at St Peter’s, don’t form it because you’ll be expelled.”

So they dropped the idea and joined the Young Communist League instead. Here, Mlangeni operated on the same cell as Ruth First, who was a Wits student at the time and a crusading journalist writing about the exploitative and semi-slavery conditions of black farm workers. Another white female member of the Young Communist League was Elsa Watts, who acted as a tea lady for the others.

“For black guys to be served tea by a white woman was like freedom itself,” he remembers.

The ANC journey
He eventually joined the ANC Youth League in 1951 and started serving in various capacities from 1954 onwards, including chairperson, treasurer and secretary of the Dube branch, a model township in Soweto where he’d acquired a house after his marriage in 1950. The role of secretary was particularly significant because, as he puts it, “A secretary is the lifeblood of any political party. You’re basically an administrator responsible for all party documents and membership.”

By 1959 he was secretary of the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal region, the biggest in the union with 29 branches. When the movement was banned in 1960 and the leadership resolved to adopt an armed struggle, Mlangeni was one of the six leaders who were chosen for military training. The others were Raymond Mhlaba, Wilton Mkwayi, Joe Gqabi (later assassinated in Zimbabwe), Steve Naidoo and Abel Mthembu, who later turned state witness during the Rivonia Trial. Mlangeni’s military training included sabotage, guerrilla warfare and radio communication – his speciality.

“It takes months to learn the codes of radio communication, but my maths background came in handy,” he explains.

By 1963 the ANC high command had already established sabotage units countrywide – operating from a remote farmhouse on Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, north of Johannesburg. Here the leadership operated underground under assumed names to evade the security police, with Nelson Mandela masquerading as a gardener and cook under the nom de guerre of David Motsamai (“Walker”).

“As a decision-making body of MK, the high command had decided that during these sabotage missions taking of lives was to be avoided. But the units on the ground were faced with a dilemma: how to bomb targets without taking lives,” Mlangeni says.

The high command was left with no choice but to accept that eventually there will be human casualties (soft targets) during these sabotage missions. The high command acquired a farmhouse in Rivonia that became the MK headquarters. The house belonged to Arthur Goldreich, an award-winning painter and a member of the Communist Party, with outbuildings of thatched bungalows.

“Mandela was the first to occupy one of these outbuildings, and we met every Monday in the evenings. The plan was that we had to be visible during the day, to be seen by township folks to allay suspicions while in actual fact we were operating semi-underground. At night we would go into hiding.”

At the same time, Mlangeni travelled widely in his Zephyr Zodiac, touring the republic to visit other branches to explain the bombings by the “ANC in action”.

“During these travels I wore a large beard and disguised myself as ‘reverend Mokete Mokoena’. I travelled to Durban, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town recruiting people for military training,” he says. “But as a hardened communist, I’d long forgotten most Bible verses and had to revisit them – especially the Lord’s Prayer – in order to make a convincing priest.”

The special branch of the police was closing in on the cadres, and on the night of 11 July 1963, a police raid on Liliesleaf and the houses of leaders such Andrew Mlangeni led to the arrests of 19 men who were members of the ANC and the Communist Party.

Mlangeni says he never expected leniency from the authorities.

“So life imprisonment didn’t come as a surprise to me,” he explains. “I’d read books on other people’s struggles in the world, and I expected to be arrested one day. But I was already steeled physically and mentally.”

The father of four says the biggest challenge while on the island was not being a father to his children as they were growing up. “It was very painful,” he says.