Lesotho, the hole in South Africa’s heart

(The Star op-ed 10 July 2015)

- Michael Schmidt

When I was growing up, Lesotho was a mystical mountain kingdom where black and white boys enjoyed true friendship as in the idyllic 1975 film e’Lollipop, which I probably saw at the old Star Drive-in, perched on top of a hillock of mine tailings just south of Johannesburg’s city centre. Of course that dream was as fake as the brutal reality that unfolded across South Africa just a year later, for Basotholand was born in warfare as a redoubt against the Zulu, British and Boers, and has suffered from insurrection ever since independence.

And with Sunday Times reporting last weekend that Lesotho is on the verge of sliding back into military dictatorship, “as the army unleashes a reign of terror… arresting, torturing and killing opponents,” the mountain kingdom has entered another period of armed crisis. This is despite South African Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa’s shuttle diplomacy over recent months in an attempt to stamp out the fires – which is as starkly at odds with President Nelson Mandela’s gunboat diplomacy in invading Lesotho in 1998, as it is with Thabo Mbeki’s alleged clandestine diplomacy in the 2000s with the SA Police Services kidnapping Basotho opposition activists.

Lesotho’s remote geography, as one of only three countries in the world entirely surrounded by another state, not to mention an economy almost entirely made up of foreign aid, earnings from the Southern African Customs Union, and remittances from migrant labour in South Africa, is dominated by its industrial neighbour which lies coiled around Lesotho like a fat python whose inconsistent foreign policy towards Lesotho has helped fuel the conflict there.

By legend, a man named Lepoqo of the Bamokoteli tribe, with cheekbones as steep as the mountainsides he rode, earned his chops in the late 18^th Century in a raid in which he emasculated his enemies by shearing off their beards, the sound of the shears giving him his battle-name, Moshoeshoe. When he succeeded his father as chief of the Bamotokeli in 1820, he united the refugees and his tribe into the Basotho nation and built a defensive position at the Mountain of the Night, or Thaba Bosiu.

Incorporated as a British protectorate in 1868, the vertiginous snowcapped Maluti gained independence in 1966 as Lesotho, and a great-great grandson of its founding father, King Moshoeshoe II, took the throne under a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral parliament dominated by the Basotho National Party (BNP). But peace did not come with independence: the 1970 nullification by the BNP of elections widely believed to have been won by the opposition Basotholand Congress Party (BCP) caused such instability that in 1986, a military coup d’etat transferred executive and legislative powers to the king, who ruled under the advice of a Military Council headed by General Justin Lekhanya, although in 1990 Lekhanya stripped Moshoeshoe II of his powers and exiled him. Lekhanya intended to restore civilian rule, but as experienced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the communist coup attempt of 1991, the old guard’s fears of change saw him toppled in a coup the same year.

Moshoeshoe II was succeeded by his son Letsie III who ruled under the 1993 constitution which cut the king out of political life, still BNP-dominated, but who abdicated in favour of his father in 1995. Yet stability remained illusory as Moshoeshoe II was killed in a car accident and Letsie III had to reassume the throne – this time with political ambitions, for the liberation of South Africa in April 1994 had raised high expectations of change in Lesotho and the country was wracked by mutinies in police, army and prison services. In August 1994, Letsie III lead a faction of the military in staging a coup.

International pressure forced the king to revert to civilian rule within a month, but the damage was done and another incendiary cycle was initiated, with a critical split in 1997 in the ruling BCP which saw veteran leader Ntsu Mokhele take two thirds of MPs with him to form the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD). The LCD won the 1998 elections with 79 out of 80 seats, but despite a Southern African Development Community (SADC) commission ruling that the LDC landslide was legitimate, opposition parties, and in particular the BCP-linked military, refused to believe this was so.

Violent protests in Maseru set the stage for a mutiny by junior officers who believed they were toppling a corrupt edifice of South African-swayed senior officers and politicians. The panicked LDC government appealed to SADC for assistance and on 22 September 1998, SANDF and Botswana Defence Force armoured columns rolled into Maseru under SADC auspices, while SADF parachutists secured key points such as the Lesotho Highlands hydroelectric system. I was present and the shock of the invasion was intense: Maseru was looted and burned by armed mobs outraged that SADC armoured vehicles had stationed themselves on the grounds of the Royal Palace, traditionally seen as a sacred safe-haven; and SANDF armour suffered an eight-hour fire-fight at the hands of rebels armed with recoilless rocketry, in capturing the main Makoanyane Military Base.

At diplomatic level, South Africa made the mistake of claiming the mutiny was a coup attempt, which infuriated the opposition all the more. Many Basotho I spoke to at the time feared that South Africa was staging a thinly-disguised annexation of Lesotho as its tenth province. I assured them that South Africa wanted to control their water supply without the burden of healthcare for mountain peasants. Ironically, there is a move within Lesotho to have South Africa annex it – largely driven by migrant labourers who want to be able to move freely and repatriate their earnings easily, and is strongly supported by the ANC-aligned National Union of Mineworkers.

Even Lesotho Foreign Affairs Minister Mohlabi Kenneth Tsekoa stated in 2013 at a ceremony to consolidate cultural ties and enhance business flows between the countries that “Lesotho and South Africa have been one from time immemorial.” At the time, Khadija Patel quoted Johnny Steinberg, writing for the Institute for Security Studies in 2005 , as saying that commentators had argued “that the raison d’etre for Lesotho’s sovereignty vanished at the end of apartheid, and that political incorporation into South Africa is inevitable – or at very least, highly desirable – in the long run.”

But before we get all revanchist and start planning ski lodges in the Maluti, we have to decide what our policy towards Lesotho truly is. Mandela’s kragdadigheid was replaced under Mbeki by a sneaky practice – if not policy – of the SAPS kidnapping opposition activists, for example the abduction by helicopter from her place of exile outside of Bloemfontein of BNP Women’s League deputy leader Malefa Sefora Maphaleba in October 2004. I interviewed her for Saturday Star and she told me that she had been interrogated for eight hours in a remote forest about Basotho politics by policemen who all the time held over her head the threat of forcibly returning her to Lesotho where the previous year she had suffered torture for eight days at the hands of the Royal Lesotho Mounted Police. That threat was real enough as another prominent opposition leader in exile in South Africa had been kidnapped by the SAPS, bundled into the boot of a car and illegally driven across the border into Lesotho to be handed over to his pursuers.

Lesotho remains the hole in South Africa’s heart; ignored for much of its existence, yet desired for its water and cheap labour, then battered in the ring by continual shifts in South African policy which stoked internal fires. It deserves consistent assistance to become a full democracy at last.

·         Michael Schmidt is a veteran investigative journalist and defence correspondent. He has written about the 1998 invasion of Lesotho and the illegal rendition of foreigners by the SAPS in his latest book, Drinking with Ghosts: the Aftermath of Apartheid’s Dirty War (2014).

Lesotho: the bitter harvest of Mandela's gunboat diplomacy

This is the bitter harvest of the seeds sown by Mandela's gunboat diplomacy in the illegitimate SANDF-BDF invasion of Lesotho in August 1998 to crush a pro-democratic mutiny aimed at these same military strongmen who now run Lesotho as their fiefdom (although we lied to the international community and pretended it was a coup d'etat). Read my field reports from that mutiny, and about how the SAPS has been involved in kidnapping Lesotho opposition politicians, in Drinking with Ghosts:http://www.timeslive.co.za/…/…/Reign-of-terror-grips-Lesotho

A great review by Ian Edwards (GIBS) in the SA Journal of Science

Drinking with Ghosts: The Aftermath of Apartheid’s Dirty War is a powerful work dealing with South Africa’s violent political struggles, its political transition, and the ways dark and secret pasts continue to haunt post-1994 South Africa. South Africa’s modern political history is covered in an ever-increasing number of books, both scholarly and more popular. Similarly, there is an ever-increasing amount of scholarly work concerned with trauma, forgiveness and reconciliation. Taking their cue from the post-1994 South African government’s internationally heralded Truth and Reconciliation Commission, many research and publicly engaged institutes now address these very issues.
Schmidt’s book is quite different. He doesn’t share the notion that forgetting can be part of healing, and is sceptical of narratives of the ‘miracle’ ‘Rainbow Nation’ or the ‘New South Africa’. Whilst respecting the scholarly, he will have none of the celebratory. Schmidt’s view is succinct: South Africans will neither reconcile nor develop a common humanity unless its many hidden and covered-up abodes of darkness and terror are exposed, confronted, and written into history.
This book is also unlike other recent books by journalists writing within this broader field. It is not a biography, such as that of Eugene de Kock, or ghost-written accounts of tortured victims of MK camps in Angola. It’s not a conspiracy story on the trail of red mercury, or ‘reds under bed’. Nor is it in the heroic grensvegter mould. Nor is this a current journalist publishing in book form lengthy texts of his own press reports. The journalist’s personal story of self-enlightenment is not highlighted over the real story – as it is in a recent study of the Marikana massacre. Nor is it a cut-and-paste book from journalists’ courtroom media tweets amidst international press attention. Nor is this journalism as exposé making or celebrity seeking. And, the book is well published – by the Human Sciences
Research Council’s BestRed imprint – and includes scholarly footnotes, a bibliography and index; all of which are refreshingly different from other recent publications in this genre.
This is ‘dark and stormy night…’ journalism, but only in one breathless sense. There are plenty of dark nights, conspirators and conspiracies, burning dwellings, atomic explosions, different poisons, armoured battles the likes of which were last seen in Africa in 1943, global geo-political plots and calculations, and ruthless plotters and calculators. There’s a sniper rifle to be aimed at Mandela that passes hands between the two major political adversaries. And there are plenty of bodies – tortured,
screaming, writhing, poisoned, burning, rotting and, in their many hundreds, being thrown alive out of aeroplanes over the Atlantic. There are many hanging questions – which in a novel would be mysteries and riddles. But this is not creative writing. As Rian Malan rightly observes, here is a ‘high speed ride through the nightmares of recent South African history, with a nerveless, dead-eyed journalist at the wheel’ (back cover).
But this book is more than what South Africans would usually see as South African history. It has a truly southern African and global reach. Schmidt understands his southern Africa better than most. Implicitly he sees an area with vital common threads. This area was not just within the imperial sway of European powers. Nor was it just colonial penetration – ports, towns, plantations, mines, roads and railways. The greater southern African area was a vast area of settler colonialism. The challenge to these settler societies involved Marxist–Leninist or Maoist national liberation movements – all of which embraced various forms of armed struggles in a Cold War environment. So too Schmidt challenges South Africans’ senses, from the National Party’s to liberation movements’, of their uniqueness and exceptionalism. South Africa bore marked similarities to the military dictatorships of the South American region, particularly Chile. Botha’s mirror image was Pinochet. They were cold warriors using terror as a means of internal repression and part of a wider geo-political bulwark against communist expansion. Schmidt challenges liberation movements’ triumphalist narratives of democratic transition. Post-apartheid South Africa is a child of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Cold War. As Schmidt sees it, from 1990 to 1994, international and national political forces, crossing the previous Cold War political divides, came together to hammer out the political
consensus on which the new South Africa was founded. For Schmidt it is these forces which have no interest in uncovering the country’s dark and haunting pasts.
As an investigative journalist, Schmidt has real concerns over the direction his chosen craft is taking. For him, investigative journalism is being supplanted by reporters presenting incidents in isolation. Without giving names he gives examples of such conduct. Schmidt has two core conceptual and methodological understandings. He recognises the difference between what the French refer to as verité (truth) and veracité (veracity). He sees both the historian and the journalist as having as their task the search for veracity, rather than truth, for there are many truths, yet it is out of verifiable, established facts that the strands of different, sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, and often illuminating truths emerge. (p. ix)
To gain this veracity he employs what he refers to as ‘forensic meditation’. Using his investigative work on the Marikana massacre he develops the point further: …in returning to the scene of a massacre – walking the paths of the killers to their termini, re-interviewing the victims and perpetrators, reconstructing the details and teasing out discrepancies. I have been 2 km down the Implats platinum mine, on the stopes where the rock-drillers sweat in 55 °C heat, the air thick with the bite of ammonia. I’ve yet to see our  journalists walking the paths of the rock-drillers they are reporting on. (p. 307–309)
What this means is that Schmidt needs to ask people question after question, find primary material sources, and find people to assist him. He is dogged in all regards, sometimes with absurdly amusing consequences. Importantly, this book is based on his notebooks, with some tidying up. It is so rare that journalist’s notebooks make it into archives. This book is thus a fascinating look inside the craft of a good investigative journalist in a very dangerous high-stakes world. Indeed the book is comprised of such notes, placed within wider contexts. One chapter begins with comment on judicial hangings in South Africa, to which is attached, appropriately, his January 2005 note of his investigations in Upington into the events of November 1985 and the ‘Upington 14’ and how these
issues carry forward into the present.
Evelina de Bruin was the only woman amongst the ‘Upington 14’ sentenced to death for the murder of a municipal policeman in 1984 amidst street protests, rallies and running battles with police, who had opened fire on and tear-gassed protestors. Schmidt interviewed her in 2005. Ouma de Bruin has forgotten her name, but the only other woman then on death row was a meisiekind – a girl – from the Western Cape. She had just been moved to ‘Die Pot’, the preparation cell, and was to be hanged the following morning. As the ‘fat warders’ took her to the gallows, she called out to De Bruin ‘… I have hope that the cup that is passed to me will pass Ouma by’. In 1991, De Bruin and her husband
and the other ‘Upington 14’ walked free, the Appellate Division having reduced their sentences to suspended sentences on the lesser charge of public violence. By that time they had spent 2 years on Death Row.
Sadly her husband died 10 years after release, wracked by traumatic memories of the gallows doing its ‘hungry work’. And, in a grotesque nuance altogether in harmony with so much else in this book, the only person who did give his life for the ‘Upington 14’ was their defence  lawyer, Anton Lubowski, who was gunned down by an operative of the appallingly misnamed South African Police’s Civil Cooperation Bureau outside his Windhoek home in 1989 (p. 284–289).
But, as Schmidt believes, the cup must pass to us. ‘[O]ur beloved fractured would-be ‘nation’ is withdrawing again into mutually hostile racial laagers [so] it is time that we sit down together and drink with our ghosts’ (p. xiv). South Africans across the political spectrum have to unravel their own version of the Chilean ‘Pact of Forgetting’. Across South America their ‘drums of bones’ are beating as they now seek to come to terms with their brutal age of the generals. Our ‘drums of bones’ are already beating. With the recent xenophobic killings, the imminent Constitutional Court hearing into why the state has consistently shied away from prosecuting the security policemen responsible for the death in detention of MK operative Nokuthula Simelane, and with ‘Prime Evil’ Eugene de Kock now seemingly assisting authorities with more than finding long-lost and ill-buried corpses of people who were brutally killed, the timing of that ghostly wake may come sooner than expected or preferred. For South Africans, a first date with our ghosts, and subsequent ‘daylight’ (p. 356), is to read the gritty body of this book. Schmidt could win prizes for this work. All South Africans will benefit by
reading this book, episode by harrowing episode.

Franschhoek Literary Festival 2015

I am pleased to say that I'll be visiting the Franschhoek Literary Festival on the evening of 16 May to hear the announcing of the Alan Paton Award shortlist and I'm looking forward to chatting to my fellow authors!

DWG on the 2008 Pogroms - and my new take on the problem as terrorism & genocide

In Drinking with Ghosts, I wrote about visiting Atteridgeville, Tembisa, Jeppestown and Soweto, in September 2009 to revisit the causes and aftermath of the 2008 Pogroms. At Madelakufa, I interviewed Mozambican Paul Nhanguva, 40, who said: "I am not afraid... If [the attackers] knew what they are doing to their own future, they won’t do it again. I have lived through two wars [in Mozambique] and can go without food for five days, but they have never seen war. They are like children playing with matches – and they will burn their own house down!” Last week, The Star ran my op-ed on my argument that the current attacks should be treated by the police as terrorism under the 2004 Terrorism Act, and prosecuted as intent to commit genocide under the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide:http://www.pressreader.com/…/20150…/283334700826459/TextView

DWG long-listed for the 2015 Alan Paton Award

I'm proud to announce that Drinking with Ghosts has been long-listed for this year's Alan Paton Award - up against some really stiff and extremely able competition. Congratulations to all my fellow authors on the list - and I'll no doubt be seeing many of you at the Franschhoek Literary Festival next month! http://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/sunday-times/20150405/283609578705717/TextView

Robert McBride, an intriguing yet divisive character

Read the DWG section on my rather unique relationship with McBride, straddling my friendship with his sisters and one of his Magoos victims' only-child daughter. Here's City Press' take on his suspension this week: Robert McBride suspended