There is a fundamental flaw in the second edition of Hani: A Life Too Short, the biography of Chris Hani by Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp, which was published last month by Jonathan Ball. In addition to repeating the same flaws as when it was first published in 2009, despite the authors' claim to have "found out more about his life" (p.x), the new edition poses an important question: are some former leaders of the African National Congress beyond critical investigation?
Compared with the first edition, which I reviewed in an article, "Chris Hani: A problem of history" (Politicsweb, 23 October 2009), the problem is worse today.
There is now further evidence which the authors failed to investigate for their new edition: above all, the question whether Hani, as chief of staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe.(MK) and soon to become general secretary of the South African Communist Party, did - or did not - order the political murder in Mthatha on 13 June 1990 of his former bodyguard in exile, Sipho Phungulwa, a veteran of Quatro, the ANC's wartime concentration camp in Angola.
The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission outlined the facts of the case as follows:
“Mr Sipho Phungulwa was part of a group of exiles who were held in ANC detention camps in Angola. The group included Mr Mwezi Twala, Mr Norman Phiri, Mr David Mthembu and Mr Luthando Nicholas Dyasop. They returned to South Africa along with fellow exiles and prisoners and approached various organisations, including the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) for assistance in exposing the hardships they had endured in Angola. Phungulwa was shot dead in Umtata on 13 June 1990, apparently while he and Dyasop were trying to seek an audience with the Transkei ANC leadership.”
This is not completely accurate. A more detailed and reliable account of what happened is set out in the July 2021 book Out of Quatro: From Exile to Exoneration by Luthando Dyasop, Phungulwa's fellow former Quatro prisoner, to whom his memoir is dedicated. Thula Simpson decribed Dyasop's memoir on its back cover as an "essential account", and Rev Prof Barney Pityana described it on the front cover as "told with simplicity and honesty. A MUST-READ book".
Told in detail and movingly in Dyasop's memoir, he, Phungulwa and their colleagues had taken part in the ANC's biggest crisis in exile as part of its army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, during the Cold War in Angola. As soldiers of the 1976 generation comprising the overwhelming majority of MK forces in Angola in the mid-1980s, they had rebelled against what they perceived as MK's despotic and autocratic administration as well as corruption among its leaders, demanding to be sent back to fight in South Africa, instead of in a war they considered not what they had left South Africa to fight.
Engaged in war against Unita, the tribal enemy of Angola's MPLA government, they had withdrawn en masse from the conflict on the Eastern Front in Angola in February 1984. Returning to Viana camp outside the capital, Luanda, they demanded a meeting with the MK High Command, electing a Committee of Ten from their members to represent them.
When Chris Hani, as MK chief of staff, came to Viana with his bodyguards, he ordered the troops to surrender their weapons. When they refused, firing shots in the air, Hani called in armoured personnel carriers of the MPLA government's presidential guard to surround the dissident troops and, if necessary, blast them into submission.
Under threat of being massacred, they surrendered their weapons. The ANC's KGB and Stasi-trained security department, known as Mbokodo ("the grindstone"), then arrested a range of ANC/MK members perceived as leaders of this pro-democracy revolt, arrested and tortured them, with many being sent over time to Quatro prison camp.
With the end of the war in 1988 in terms of the Crocker Accords - involving withdrawal of Soviet, Cuban, ANC and SWAPO forces from Angola - Quatro prisoners were released and transported as free ANC members to Dakawa camp in Tanzania, taking an active role improving living conditions in the camp.
A democratic election of all ANC members in Tanzania in September 1989 then chose a number of former Quatro prisoners as their top leaders. The ANC's National Executive Committee in Lusaka, with Hani as a member, then ordered all elected committees in Tanzania to be disbanded, sending Hani and his Fort Hare fellow student, Stanley Mabizela, to Tanzania to disband the elected committees.
Early in 1990, following the unbanning of the ANC and the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, former Quatro prisoners in Tanzania including Luthando Dyasop, Sipho Phungulwa and their Quatro colleagues then feared for their lives, one group fleeing north to Nairobi in Kenya, and a second group including Dyasop, Phungulwa, Mwezi Twala and others fleeing south via Malawi. They were arrested and imprisoned in Malawi, and handed over the apartheid regime's security police, who flew them back to South Africa on 24th April, releasing them after a brief period in detention in Barkley West.
This was the background to when Dyasop and Sipho Phungulwa returned together in June 1990 to their homes in the Eastern Cape, after ten years or more in exile, going first to Phungulwa's family in Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) and then to Dyasop's mother in Mthatha in Transkei. Dyasop relates how being held in detention, they had been unable to meet up with the ANC’s welcome committee, which included Walter Sisulu, which had been expecting them.
From press reports during their detention – gleefully shown to them by their police jailers – it was evident to these ANC dissidents that the top ANC leadership had bought the line fed to them by Mbokodo, that they were ‘mutineers’ and ‘spies’ for the South African security services.
They had then held an impromptu press conference in Johannesburg on 15th May 1990, the day after their release from detention, in an attempt to clear their names and calling for the formation of a commission of inquiry into the horrific abuses committed by Mbokodo in exile. This helped to initiate a series of commissions, leading eventually to the Truth and Reconciliation, appointed by Mandela's government.
With their former Quatro colleagues scattering back to their families across the country, Dyasop and Phungulwa made their way first to Queenstown in the Eastern Cape, then to Port Elizabeth, and finally Mthatha, where they arrived on 5th June 1990.
On 11th June they went to the ANC office in Mthatha to arrange a meeting with ANC local leaders, in order to explain what had happened in MK in Angola and in Tanzania. On the afternoon of 13th June, when they had intended to explain themselves as arranged, they arrived at the ANC office shortly before 2pm but were made to wait, and wait, and wait, with a man coming in, who spoke to the ANC official and inspected their faces. They realised that the meeting was not going to happen and headed off, taking a taxi back to Luthando's family home.
As they alighted opposite Dyasop’s home, they noticed that they had been followed from the ANC offices by a Beige Peugeot 404. The man whom the two had earlier seen at the ANC office and who had stared intently at them, got out of the back of the Peugeot and hailed them as he came towards them. This man then suddenly took out a Scorpion pistol and shot Phungulwa dead. In that moment Dyasop was able to flee, narrowly escaping with his life.
Over the following years a considerable amount of information has emerged about those responsible for Phungulwa’s assassination, and the attempt on Dyasop’s life. Those directly involved in the hit - Ndibulele Ndzamela, Mfanelo Matshaya (who pulled the trigger) and Pumlani Kubukeli - applied for amnesty from the TRC in 1998. A fourth person involved, Akga Thia, was by then deceased.
According to Kubukeli’s own account, as set out in an article published earlier this year on the Calusa website, as well as in media interviews commemorating Hani’s own assassination in 1993, he and Matshaya “had been trained in Angola, East Germany and Yugoslavia” after going into exile, and had become senior military officers. Kubukeli further states on his LinkedIn page, available online, that he was trained at Teterow in the former German Democratic Republic (DDR), in 1983/84. This would have involved being trained as a political security agent by the DDR security police, the Stasi.
Kubukeli reported in an interview, "Umkhonto fighters tell their stories", published in the Sowetan (18 October 2015), that he had been Hani's bodyguard at Viana camp outside Luanda in Angola in February 1984 when Hani tried and failed to suborn the MK troops of the June 16 and Moncada detachments into surrendering their weapons.
As the Sowetan reported, Kubukeli's account "documents the events of February 1984, when the Committee of Ten was elected in Viana camp on the outskirts of Luanda, Angola, to represent the demands of MK troops to the ANC leadership".
Three years after the drama at Viana camp in Angola, they were both part of the Zola Dubeni Icing Unit which was meant to infiltrate into South Africa with the purpose inter alia of assassinating “askaris” - the ANC term for former members of the liberation movements who had been “turned” and were now working for apartheid state security services.
Yet the South African state had clearly been forewarned of their exact plans and infiltration route and they were arrested on 27 July 1987 as they tried to enter the country posing as (unarmed) civilians at the Makgobistad Border Post in Bophuthatswana. In his article on the Calusa website, Kubukeli comments: "let me go back to the ultimate betrayal of our unit. Our mission was clear, we were assassins. We were poised to eliminate targets that were to be pointed to us by the Military Headquarters and most of all, we were to eliminate Askaris (sellouts) like the ones who sold us out!"
After their detention they were held in prison in Bophuthatswana until 1989 when they were transferred across to the Transkei. They were released from prison, along with other MK and Apla members, after General Bantu Holomisa took power there in a coup.
Before the TRC Amnesty Committee on 3 November 1999, Matshaya reported that as members of the hit squad, he and Kubukeli and Ndzamela had been acting on their own volition, but sought to justify the operation on the basis that Phungulwa and Dyasop were “askaris”. Matshaya was asked on what basis this unit had come to this decision. The transcript goes as follows:
CROSS-EXAMINATION BY MR MAPOMA: Thank you sir. You attacked the deceased because you say he was an Askari? Was Mr Dyasophu [sic] also an Askari?
MR MATSHAYA: Yes, the both of them, they were Askaris.
MR MAPOMA: Did you make something to establish that they were in fact Askaris, did you investigate that?
MR MATSHAYA: There was no investigation as such, because they publicly declared on TV, the publicly spoke against the ANC on TV, they called themselves the new ANC, that Chairman Twala. There was a group of them, after they defected from the ANC.
Evidently, the term "askari", as used by Mbokodo, was defined so broadly it could be used against a huge range of political critics of ANC conduct, who had no connection at all with the apartheid regime.
The great question that went unexamined by the TRC, and which remains unanswered to this day, is whether Chris Hani had a hand in ordering the assassination of Phungulwa and Dyasop? This is especially relevant, since Phungulwa and Dyasop on the one hand, and Hani on the other, had been on opposite sides in Angola in the greatest crisis of the ANC in exile, continuing as a fundamental issue under ANC government up to today: the issue of democratic accountability.
It is an issue I addressed in an article, "A death in South Africa: The killing of Sipho Phungulwa", published less than a year after his murder in a banned exile magazine, Searchlight South Africa (January 1991).
I noted that six months before the murder, Hani and Stanley Mabizela, his fellow student from the university of Fort Hare, had carried out an undemocratic action at Dakawa in Tanzania at the end of December 1989, on behalf of the ANC National Executive Committee.
They had expelled Phungulwa and other Quatro veterans from positions to which they had been democratically elected by all ANC exiles in Tanzania in September 1989.
The article was republished in my book, Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Jacana, 2009).
I wrote that "Phungulwa fought alongside his prison comrades from Quatro to reverse this system of administrative decree. At the annual general meeting of the Zonal Youth Committee (ZYC) in Dakawa [in Tanzania] on 14 December [1989] - in the presence of the SACP leader Rusty Bernstein, of the Regional Department of Political Education - he argued that ANC officials should not dictate 'who should be elected'.
"He opposed the idea that individuals elected to the Regional Political Committee should agree to participate in an appointed 'dummy structure'. A person who was elected by the people, he stated, 'should serve the interests of the electorate not certain individuals. As the ANC has taught us, we should elect people of our choice', (minutes, signed by Neville Gaba, 28 December 1989)."
In his 2021 memoir, Dyasop states that he and fellow Quatro survivors were "not hesitant in believing that Chris Hani, who was in Transkei at the time, had a decisive hand in the murder. ... Anyone in a lower position than Hani could not have ordered Sipho's death." (pp.210-11)
Hani had already returned to South Africa at the time of the assassination. In the new edition of their book, as in the first edition, Smith and Tromp report again that "Hani landed at Jan Smuts Airport on 28 April [1990], setting foot on South African soil for the first time in years." (p.214)
Certainly, quite apart from having a motive to do so, and already having been back in the country by this point, Hani was in a position of authority to order the assassinations. Kubukeli and some others applied for amnesty for an armed robbery, for which he and his associates had been arrested, convicted, and imprisoned.
This was granted by the amnesty committee in 1999 which stated that Kubukeli was at the time of the commission of the offences a member of MK and “was deployed in Umtata and reported directly to the Chief of Staff of MK, the late Mr Chris Hani.” It continues:
“As part of his functions, the applicant had to train recruits in the use of weapons and was also responsible for providing food for the recruits during training. It seems that the Umtata division of MK had budget constraints and the required training was being stifled because of a lack of funds needed to purchase firearms and food for the process. As a result of the precarious financial position, the matter was discussed with the chief of MK [Hani] and it was decided that alternative means, including robbery, in order to obtain the required finance, should be employed.”
If Hani had been consulted over the relatively minor matter of armed robbery, it seems unlikely he would not have been required to take a decision on the assassination of such high profile dissidents as Phungulwa and Dyasop.
There was also ample time to consult – in person or by telephone, depending on where Hani was at that moment - before they visited the ANC office in Mthatha on 13 June 1990, following their previous visit to the office together with Dyasop's sister two days previously, when they had asked to speak with a senior representative of ANC.
It has also subsequently emerged that Kubukeli and Matshaya worked after the murder as bodyguards for Hani and also for Nelson Mandela and OR Tambo.
This issue came blazing into life again over the past five months, with a primary focus on Kubukeli. A TV segment on eNCA under the headline, "Chris Hani: Former bodyguard tells his story", dated 11 December 2022, states that Kubukeli worked closely with Hani in exile, before his return in 1987 as a member of a hit squad, and had been "assigned as Chris Hani's bodyguard shortly after he had landed" in South Africa.
In an interview on SABC last week on Tuesday 11th April, following the graveside commemoration of Hani, Kubukeli stated that he had continued to work as Hani's bodyguard until the year before Hani was shot, in other words 1992, when Kubukeli had returned to the Transkei.
The murder of Phungulwa would certainly have been reported up the MK chain of command, and did not meet with Hani’s disapproval.
In the second edition of Hani: A Life Too Short there is no discussion of this, even though Dyasop’s memoir had been published two years previously. The confirmed facts of the assassination are once again bizarrely described as a “legend” and a “story” that “persists to this day”. The authors state that the “men fingered for Phungalwa’s murder – Ndibulele Ndzamela, Mfanelo Matshaya and Phumlani Kubukeli – were granted amnesty by the TRC in 1998 in connection with the incident.” They do not mention the close relations of these men to Hani or discuss Dyasop’s allegation of Hani’s probable responsibility for the hit.
There is something very wrong when the second edition of a biography of such a high-profile political figure, issued by an elite publisher, Jonathan Ball, fails to investigate a claim like this, without even acknowledging it.
The same is true for the short biography, Chris Hani, by Hugh Macmillan, published by Ohio University Press in 2021. As with Smith and Tromp, the author provides no satisfactory examination of Hani's retribution against the 1976 generation in exile.
As it is, Smith and Tromp's second edition ends in its last 30 pages with a paean of praise for ... Julius Malema, the "commander-in-chief" of Economic Freedom Fighters, whom they describe as an "exceptional leader". (p.300) A glowing citation by Malema on the back cover of Jonathan Ball's second edition praises "Chris Hani's DNA".
That says it all.
This is no way for the biography of a major political leader to be written, reproduced now in a second edition.
