In the book Voices from the Underground, 18 members of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Ashley Kriel Detachment (AKD) tell their stories of what it was like to be a freedom fighter in the 1980s and their lives since the fall of apartheid. Here is an extract by Cape Times Editor Aneez Salie, one of the contributors and former AKD commander.
Ashley Kriel and I flew together from Angola to Lusaka, Zambia. Both of us were to serve in the same detachment as Ashley Forbes and Peter Jacobs. I was to command the detachment.
The months that Ashley and I spent together in Zambia are some of the most memorable of my life. We spent about four months in Chilanga Township, a distance outside Lusaka. We stayed in a small two-bedroom house with a South African nursing sister who had been involved with the PAC and was living in exile, and her niece.
Over decades, Zambia’s president Kenneth Kaunda had provided shelter for exiles from every country and every group in southern Africa, and as a result Zambia paid a heavy price at the hands of the boere, the Portuguese and Rhodesia.
Ashley and I walked every day, and ran through the farmlands most days to stay fit. We frequented the Chilanga Club, which had a full-sized billiard table beside the bar, a swimming pool and tennis courts.
The locals knew who we were and that our house sheltered MK soldiers. Although we had no money, we were able to barter our clothing for food. At times, we did not get enough supplies and our neighbours, many of whom were poor, taught us how to cook pap with a relish of pumpkin leaves.
The house we shared with the nurse and her niece was only slightly bigger than a typical South African township house. Ashley and I had two single beds in one of the bedrooms. Sometimes we talked all night, and before we knew it the sun would be rising.
Before Ashley Forbes and Peter left Lusaka, the four of us met and strategised about our work back home. We set up lines of communication so that when Ashley Kriel and I returned we could work together.
The day finally arrived when Ashley and I were to return home. We were driven to the Lusaka International Airport, where we met Chris Hani and Charles Nqakula before departure. Chris Hani’s wife, Limpho, was also there, on her way to her family home in Lesotho.
Ashley and I boarded a flight to Gaborone. Botswana was not always very receptive to the ANC, because apartheid security forces often conducted cross-border raids that resulted in civilian casualties. MK had therefore organised forged passports for us with false names, which enabled us to pass through customs at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport without problems.
Our first night in Gaborone was surreal. After living in the camps in Angola, and in Chilanga Township alongside poor neighbours, we were put up in the Gaborone Sun, a luxurious five-star hotel.
Ashley returned to South Africa a few days before I did. Before I left to join him, Ashley Forbes and Peter in Cape Town, I had to set up a communications and supplies pipeline between Gaborone and Johannesburg. Other MK units from Cape Town had been caught when they communicated directly with the ANC in Botswana, so we formed a unit of our detachment in Johannesburg in order to protect ourselves and secure our communications from being tapped and traced.
Shanil Haricharan, whom I had met at a mutual friend’s flat in Hillbrow in 1987 before I went into exile, was the first person I deployed to command the Johannesburg unit. Shanil had returned from the Transkei, where he was an MK operative in 1986. He recruited Richard Ishmail, and I put them in touch with our commander in Botswana, James Ngculu.
When I had completed this task, I went to Cape Town, where I connected with my brothers Seiraaj and Mogamat, as well as Johnny Issel, Zubeida Jaffer, and Shirley Gunn’s mother, Audrey. Audrey’s house was on Bolus Avenue in Kenilworth, and it was my first stop after returning to Cape Town.
At one point, Audrey feared the security police had pitched up outside her home. She panicked and tried to hide all trace of my presence there, grabbing the washing off the line and hurriedly stuffing it into her aged mother’s overnight bag. Fortunately, it was a false alarm. Granny was surprised to find my underwear stuffed in her bag, which made us all laugh, and it’s a story that Audrey still finds hilarious.
I struggled for some time to make contact with Ashley Kriel, Ashley Forbes and Peter Jacobs because the lines of communication we had set up in Lusaka had broken down.
Struggle icon and Umkhonto we Sizwe commander Ashley Kriel File photo: Supplied
I was not prepared to wait endlessly, doing nothing while risking capture or death, so I made my way back to Gaborone, crossing the border using my fake passport. I made contact with Charles Nqakula. ‘My God,’ he said when he saw me, ‘you must like exile!’
I explained my predicament: contact with the other three had been lost. He instructed me to link up with Tony Yengeni’s detachment and I supplied the number of a public phone box in Cape Town where Tony could call me on a particular day and time.
On Monday 13 July 1987, the comrades in Gaborone escorted me to a Botswana border post to cross into South Africa again. Just before I crossed, one of them stopped me.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘your friend Ashley Kriel was killed four days ago.’ Anger and devastation raged through me. Why hadn’t the ANC told me? ‘They knew you would be extremely upset, seeing how close you’d been,’ said the comrade.
He explained that he was telling me because it was important that I knew what the prospects were if I returned to South Africa. Alternatively, I could abort my mission, turn around and stay in exile with no questions asked. But turning around was not an option; I had to persevere for Ashley. I crossed over the Ramatlabama border post into South Africa and made my way to Johannesburg to link up with Shanil.
The first thing I did was drive to a shopping centre in Roodepoort and buy the Weekly Mail to find out what had happened to Ashley. It was such a struggle to take in all the details that at one point while driving to Shanil, who was staying illegally with a Namibian friend in the nearby white suburb of Newlands, I completely lost track of where I was. It was frightening. This event marked the start of my time in the military underground in South Africa.
Back in Cape Town, on the day I’d arranged to receive Tony Yengeni’s call, I waited at the designated phone box at the specified time, but the call never came. Usually, we did not wait more than five minutes for contact of this nature, but I waited for twenty. Mogamat was with me.
After a while, we saw some white guys who looked like cops driving off very fast down a one-way street and figured they must have been watching the phone box. We decided to leave.
Later, we found out that Tony had been caught using a phone box behind the Baxter Theatre in Rondebosch on the day I was supposed to hear from him. I suspected that he had been in direct telephonic contact with the comrades in Gaborone and the call had been traced. It was for this reason that our detachment had set up our own structures and did not communicate directly with Gaborone, but went via our unit in Johannesburg.
I was then put in command of a new detachment that the ANC and MK leadership had named in honour of Ashley Kriel. I linked up with Shirley, who had received military training with MK in Angola and Cuba. Shirley was meant to be with special operations, but with permission from our ANC commanders in exile, we started operating together.
I asked Shirley to co-command the detachment, whose jurisdiction would include the coloured, white and Indian areas in the Western Cape. These communities made up the majority of the Western Cape population. We were instructed not to operate in the black townships because we would have stuck out.
First, we had to secure a safe underground base from which to live and operate. We rented a tiny, one-roomed flat without a kitchen, above Second Beach, Clifton. Then we started building the detachment by recruiting key youth, such as Melvin Bruintjies.
We set about establishing a Western Cape Regional Political Military Committee (RPMC), which was the overarching structure necessary to implement our ‘people’s war’ strategy and tactics. We understood that no group of trained guerrillas would be able to liberate our country alone.
The purpose of the RPMC was to link the military leadership to the political leadership. Our work would be informed by the political conditions on the ground. Shirley and I chaired the committee along with Johnny Issel, who provided political input, and Melvin, who was chief of operations. Shanil continued to head up the Johannesburg unit, linking us to Gaborone and Lusaka.
Over time, we set up AKD units in Bonteheuwel, Macassar, Mitchells Plain, Hout Bay, Paarl and Athlone. The RPMC met to assess the political and military situation and determine what our responses should be.
Voices from the Underground Eighteen life stories from Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Ashley Kriel Detachment is published by Penguin Random House South Africa and retails at R320.