One of South Africa’s most prominent black anti-sanctions campaigners, Archbishop Mzilikazi Fanie Masiya, is a former policeman who turned to crime, was convicted twice and took part in a spectacular jailbreak in Pretoria in 1978. And he has freely admitted that what he called ”The One Million Anti-Sanctions Signatures Campaign”, which he launched last year with much publicity, was started by a white businessman who brought him in ”to make it seem like a black initiative”. Masiya, 36, was also booted out of his stronghold, the United Apostolic Ministers Council in Africa (Uamca) early this year for making unauthorised statements on behalf of Uamca and for attacking leaders like Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
An investigation into Masiya’s past revealed that, after leaving school with his Junior Certificate, he joined the police in 1973. He said in an interview that he did so because he could find no other work. He was trained in counter insurgency work and turned, in his words, into a ”killing machine”. Although some people have alleged that he shot a number of youths during the 1976 unrest, Masiya claims he was unable to shoot rioting youths ”because they were my own people”. In 1977, he was arrested and charged for pilfering arms from the Mabopane Police Station, where he was posted. He was sentenced to two years and was due to face 14 further charges of robbery, murder and theft. He was accused of going on a reign of terror while a policeman, committing armed robberies and killing a man called Philemon Shisana while trying to stop a fight in an illegal shebeen he ran from his home near Hammanskraal.
However, Masiya took part in a dramatic escape from Pretoria Maximum Security Prison on June 25 1977, when he and a number of dan-gerous criminals used blankets to scale the walls. He was rearrested in February 1978 in Gazankulu. He was sentenced to a further six months for the shebeen murder and served three-and-a-half years for other crimes before being granted remission. He was released in 1981. Masiya said it was during his period as a fugitive that he read a book by Martin Luther King and turned to religion. He said his anti-sanctions campaign was started by whites. He was brought in by the owner of a Johannesburg travel agency, which he declined to name, ”after they realised they couldn’t get anywhere overseas on their own without blacks,” Masiya rejected with contempt suggestions that he was state-funded. His funds are paid by multi-national and local companies, including petroleum manufacturers, he said.
Masiya is the leader of the Jesus Christ for Peace, Council for Apostolic Churches in Southern Africa and the Christian Development Fund in Southern Africa, all of which campaign against sanctions and conduct their business from Van Erkoms Building in Pretorius Street, Pretoria -next door to police headquarters. He claims that these organisations command the support of 3,5-million members, but as an archbishop he has no known church denomination nor any known mass following. When he launched his ”million signature” campaign last year, he led a march of 35 elderly people clad in Zionist church garb. The event received massive publicity in the government supporting press and television.
He claims to have collected 500 000 signatures, but when it was pointed out that most appear to be signed with the same handwriting, he said this was because many people could not write and his fieldworkers had filled in the forms for them. The president of Uamca and leader of the powerful United Immanuel As-semblies of God, Archbishop Joseph Selekisho, said Masiya had been or-dained a bishop by Uamca because, although he had no congregation of his own, he had started the Jesus for Peace Interdenominational Movement in 1986 – Elias Maluleke
This article originally appeared in the Weekly Mail.
