Surrounded by a black border, an obituary appeared in a banned exile journal in August 1992 which read:
BONGANI NTSHANGASE
Bongani Ntshangase, a former teacher in South Africa and at the ANC school Somafco at Mazimbu in Tanzania, where he was highly regarded, was shot dead in Natal on the 21st of May [1992].
Mr Ntshangase had been in South Africa for a short time after being repatriated from Kenya, where he had fled with his wife Linda after being released from an ANC prison inTanzania on 1 August 1991. He and four others were released after a campaign by Mrs Ntshangase and the pressure group Justice for Southern Africa. A press release concerning Mr Ntshangase and a suspected purge of Zulu-speaking members of the ANC in Tanzania was reported in January 1992 in Searchlight South Africa, No 8 (pp 29-32).
In a letter to Justice for Southern Africa of 14 August 1991, Mrs Ntshangase wrote that fellow Zulu-speakers in Tanzania were ‘in peril...both from the ANC and the Tanzanian government'. She felt ‘absolutely insecure' and thought that she ‘might be assassinated'. She felt the same fear for her husband and his colleagues.
Our sympathy goes to Linda and the family of Bongani. The grief they feel makes us even more determined to campaign for Justice for Southern Africa.
(published in Searchlight South Africa, London, August 1992 (issue number 9, page 8)
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I wrote the obituary, having previously been in correspondence with both Linda Ntshangase and Bongani. I still have their letters. To this day I still do not know who killed Bongani, or in what circumstances, or what has happened in the life of his wife Linda in the 19 years since he was killed. Perhaps somebody can provide some information, via the editor of Politicsweb.
Justice for Southern Africa was based in London and was really just a single person - a wonderful British colleague, a full-time schoolteacher and former Labour Party councillor, Bill McElroy - and myself, together with a few members of a splinter fraction of a British trotskyist group, the Workers Revolutionary Party. No other left-wing group, or any other group, supported us.
The obituary of Bongani followed a previous unsigned public statement written by me for Justice for Southern Africa, which my colleague Baruch Hirson and I published in January 1992 in Searchlight South Africa, No 8. Issued initially as a press release on 22 August 1991, its title was: "A Purge of Zulu-speakers in ANC camps in Tanzania?"
A period of discriminatory behaviour against isiZulu-speaking members of Umkhonto we Sizwe at Kongwa camp in Tanzania in the mid-1960s was reliably reported by the former MK soldiers Thula Bopela and Daluxolo Luthuli in their autobiographical study, Umkhonto we Sizwe: Fighting for a Divided People (Galago, Alberton, 2005).
My article in Searchlight South Africa from January 1992 - only four months before the murder of Mr Ntshangase - provides a background for understanding one of the sources of the overturn of President Thabo Mbeki and his apparatus in party and state at the ANC elective conference at Polokwane in December 2007, as well as current tensions in the ANC.
The obituary of Bongani Ntshangase and the earlier article on the treatment of Zulu-speakers in ANC camps in Tanzania are both accessible online, through the websites Aluka Archive (available to universities, see here and here)
and Digital Imaging South Africa (DISA) based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (open access, see here and here).
The text below reproduces the article I published in Searchlight South Africa No 8, page 29. The representations referred to were made by Bill McElroy and myself.
A terrible searching light is shown here on profound issues which have yet to be resolved, both within the ANC and within South Africa itself.
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Chauvinistic harassment of Zulu-speakers in ANC camps in Tanzania in 1991, following the township slaughters on theWitwatersrand
As early as the 1960s there were reports of ethnic conflicts in the ANC camps in Tanzania. During the 1970s and 1980s misgivings were frequently expressed among exiles that privileges tended to accrue to Xhosa-speakers. In this respect, the feared security chief Mzwandile Piliso was regarded as particularly culpable. A major theme in the mutiny in Umkhonto in Angola in 1984, however, was the prominent place among the mutineers of young Xhosa-speaking soldiers who were strongly critical of all forms of corruption, including ethnic favouritism. (Four of the five authors of the history of the mutiny in Searchlight South Africa No 5 are Xhosa-speakers). [This text is available as chapter 2 in Paul Trewhela, Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO, Jacana, 2009]. The following press release from the British-based pressure group Justice forSouthern Africa indicates how far ethnic hostilities had deteriorated in the camps by mid-year.
Ten Zulu-speaking members of Umkhonto were imprisoned in June, apparently following the non-fatal stabbing of an ANC member, Martin, at Mazimbu at night-time. Although subjected to brutal abuse by Tanzanian forces, they were not charged by Tanzanian courts. Eventually, after an intensive campaign led by Mrs Linda Ntshangase, her husband Bongani Ntshangase and four others were released at the Tanzanian Prime Minister's office on 1 August, where they were also informed that they had been expelled from the ANC. The demand throughout of Mrs Ntshangase was that her husband be charged or released.
Bongani and Linda Ntshangase later fled to Kenya, following threats from Tanzanian officials that Mrs Ntshangase had embarrassed the state. At the request of Mrs Ntshangase, the campaign Justice for Southern Africa had appealed on behalf of the arrested men to the British Foreign Office, the Tanzanian High Commission, Amnesty International and the ANC secretary general [then Alfred Nzo]. An account of the arrests was broadcast on the BBC World Service on 17 August [1992].
As late as the end of September, however - long after statements by ANC leaders Nelson Mandela, Pallo Jordan and others that all ANC prisoners had been released - there was information that the following ANC members remained in prison at Ruth First prison (Plot 18), Dakawa, in Tanzania: Justice Gumbi (Monde Masike), Albert Bhengu (Vuma Mbhele), Terror Wonder (Shabalala Bra Bhengu), Schaft Lwane Khoza, George Kitseng and Vusi.
By October, it appeared that ethnic-related violence in the camps had sharply increased, leading to real terror and one death. It was also suspected that prisoners continued to be held at the Ugandan Air force base in the Lowero region of Uganda.
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The text of the press-release "A Purge of Zulu-speakers in ANC camps in Tanzania?", issued 22 August 1991, which was published underneath the statement above, will appear on Politicsweb tomorrow.
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