(From the Sunday Independent, 19 December 2004)

There is a champion in all of us. I found one where I least expected to - in Lionel Baker, a member of the former British South Africa Police (BSAP). Baker convinced former members of the BSAP living in KwaZulu-Natal and Britain to reconstruct the final hours of ANC guerrilla Basil February’s life, and to help locate his grave in Zimbabwe. This was almost 40 years after February’s death.

Baker’s group has also offered new information on how James Masimini, another member of the Luthuli Detachment died, and a lead on where he and four of his comrades are buried. Baker was born in South Africa in 1939 and grew up in Durban. He moved to Rhodesia in 1957 and joined the BSAP.

In Rhodesia he met his late wife, Frances Bovington, a junior schoolteacher recruited from Britain. Baker was part of the BSAP support team for the Rhodesian army in Operation Nickel when it had to stave off a joint offensive by the ANC and the Zimbabwean African People’s Union in August 1967.

With the positive intervention of Baker, I entered into a dialogue via email with a small group of BSAP members. They eventually agreed to help with information on how February died, and with identifying the location of his grave.

Additional information supplied could also help locate the graves of other Luthuli Detachment guerrillas, thus bringing closure to something that happened 40 years earlier.

A big factor in their decision to help was that February was a medical student at the University of Cape Town when he left South Africa to join Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC’s armed wing.

This BSAP group has reconstructed the final hours of February’s life. They say their version is accurate. They are thereby helping to answer the question: what really happened? They have also revealed that February, Masimini and four of the other Luthuli Detachment members were given paupers’ burials.

What makes February and - to some extent - Masimini different to the other Luthuli Detachment members who fell during this episode is that they were both alone when Rhodesian security force members killed them, so their ANC comrades could not definitively account for the circumstances surrounding their deaths, unlike those who fell during battle.

Of further historical significance is the fact that the BSAP members are willing to recount their experiences during August and September 1967. Many books have been published on “the bush war” in Rhodesia, but none significantly recounts the personal experiences of the Rhodesian security forces during Operation Nickel.

The co-operation by the BSAP members speaks of their need to tell their side of the story in their own words, and to give their account of events as they unfolded. This augurs well for the process of writing history in South Africa and enriches our understanding of the past.

In 2003 I nominated February posthumously for a national order. February was the first ‘Coloured’ MK guerrilla to fall during the struggle for liberation. The text motivating my nomination was largely based on my mini thesis, ‘The ANC’s First Armed Military Operation: The Luthuli Detachment and Wankie Campaign,

July-September 1967.’

In the early 1980s, the late Dullah Omar, then a practising attorney, first told me the story of February and James April. They were the best of friends and comrades, who so believed in their Marxist ideals that in 1964 they joined the ranks of the liberation movement.

February and April were so-called Coloureds of “slave descent”. They were politically associated with the Non-European Unity Movement in the Western Cape. Omar acted on their behalf when they were detained.

After the 1960 Sharpeville and Langa shootings and the banning of meetings of organisations such as the ANC, February and April decided to adopt the strategy of painting graffiti slogans. They were caught in the act in Wynberg, Cape Town, and charged with malicious damage to property.

Constant security police harassment followed, and in 1964 both men left the country without telling their families, fearing for the latter’s safety. They disappeared into Botswana and joined MK.

When next their families heard of them, it was 1967. Notorious security police officer Spyker van Wyk broke the news to the February family by saying: “Ek het net vir jou kom sê jou vark is dood.” (“I just came to tell you your pig is dead.”)

April was imprisoned in Botswana with Chris Hani and other MK members convicted of carrying weapons of war into Botswana. Later, in 1969, the Organisation of African Unity managed to intervene, and the guerrillas were released from prison and flown back to Zambia.

Meanwhile, overcome with grief at his son’s death, the late Paul February poured out his heart to Omar. His lament: I do not know how my son died, nor do I know where he is buried.

To mark the awarding of the posthumous national order to the February family, I wrote two articles for The Sunday Independent. I wrote about Basil February in heroic terms, which is the way he is remembered in popular history.

Lionel Baker then responded with a letter, “Setting the record straight about Basil February” (December 14, 2003). He argued that I should interview members of the former BSAP if I wished to know what really happened.

I responded by saying that no matter how February had died, the fact that he was willing to sacrifice his life for a free country made him a hero. So began my initially antagonistic relationship with Baker through the media.

When first I spoke to Baker on the telephone, however, my first remark to him was: Would he help me to find out the details of how February died and where he was buried?

After almost a year of correspondence via post, telephone and email, I flew to KwaZulu-Natal at the beginning of December 2004 to meet Baker. He was gracious and had arranged for me to meet another BSAP member at his home on the North Coast.

Although both were involved in Operation Nickel in August and September of

1967, neither was present when February died. Instead, they told me what had been told to them by the person who shot and killed February.

Baker emphasised that the BSAP had not fired a shot in more than 60 years before the fateful event involving February, on August 15, 1967 - a record unmatched by even the British Police.

Baker said the BSAP was a proud and honourable force dedicated to the people. The function of members of the BSAP was to fight crime and track criminals. The community respected Rhodesian policemen - a concept alien to most South Africans previously.

According to Kees Maxey in, Fight for Zimbabwe: Armed Conflict in Southern Rhodesia Since UDI (Rex Collings, London 1975), the BSAP played a military function during the Mashona uprisings of 1896 and 1897.

For the next 60-odd years, theirs was a policing function. This gradually changed as the bush war progressed, until the BSAP was once again playing a military support function.

Baker convinced his former colleagues to assist me with ongoing research on the Wankie campaign and Operation Nickel, and in finding the graves of Luthuli Detachment members interred in Zimbabwe.

The new information they provided gives us hope of identifying February and Masimini’s graves, and the graves of some of the others. Although we have some way to go, there is hope that we can give them a proper burial at home. Baker has given us the key to past mysteries and the chance to bring healing to the loved ones of some who fell far away from home so many decades ago.