Charlene Smith
General Andrew Masondo, an African National Congress political commissar in Angola in the 1980s, this week apologised to the brother of the man whose execution he ordered in 1981.
Masondo and Mzwai Piliso, the ANC head of security at that time, have widely been held responsible for letting conditions in Angolan camps get out of control in the early 1980s with beatings, torture and executions becoming commonplace.
Masondo told former chief land claims commissioner Joe Seremane: “I would never have done something for personal gain or a personal vendetta. There may be a possibility that I did things that were wrong and for that I am sorry.”
Seremane has been trying for the past two years to learn how and why his brother, Timothy, was executed, and pleading for his remains to be returned to South Africa for burial.
Masondo told him the ANC was investigating whether it was feasible to exhume and return to South Africa the bodies of exiles who died or were executed.
The two men were brought together by film- maker Kevin Harris for a documentary to be screened on SABC2’s Issues of Faith on December 6 and 13.
In a moving two-hour meeting at Pretoria’s Anglican cathedral, the men – who were on Robben Island together in the 1960s as jailed ANC supporters – frankly and sometimes emotionally dealt with the fact that in 1981, Masondo ordered the arrest of Timothy Seremane for damaging ANC vehicles.
Masondo, now a white-haired general in the South African National Defence Force, said it was during Timothy Seremane’s incarceration that evidence came to light that he was a police spy. He said the decision was taken by him and other top ANC members, all of whom are now dead, including Thomas Nkobi, Piliso and others, to execute him.
Masondo said he could not recall who shot Seremane, but it may have been Gabriel Mthembu, who at the time was the 19-year-old commander of Quatro, and is now a senior member of the National Intelligence Agency. Requests to interview Mthembu were vetoed by his seniors.
In interviews done by Harris in the course of the six-month project, top former security branch officers have denied that Seremane was a spy working for them.
Masondo too had had a difficult life. He was tortured on Robben Island. His wife was in a train accident on the way back from visiting him in jail and part of one leg was amputated. She had to flee South Africa, and her amputation festered. She died in exile in 1990.
The wife of Masondo’s eldest son was killed by a bomb placed inside a television given to her by a South African police agent in Harare in 1987.
Masondo said he understood how family members of ANC officials could, or did, become spies. “When I came back from Robben Island my children were angry. They said, `You used to be a lecturer at Fort Hare, but then you went to jail and we all suffered.’ And they … blamed their suffering on the movement.”
Masondo told Joe Seremane that he had not been aware that the man he knew as Kenneth Mahamba was Joe Seremane’s brother. “This was not a personal thing. In a war situation you have people who are very different. Our troops were getting killed, in Zimbabwe we buried pieces of some of them, they were very frightened, people react differently.
“I’m the only person who went to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [to testify in a closed hearing about the death of Seremane] without a lawyer. I have experienced pain too as a husband, as a father. I cared about those troops.
“But in the course of a revolution certain things happen, decisions are taken. Now it is difficult to understand what happened then; the pressure of the enemy is not seen. You can start something with a good intention to satisfy some people, but you hurt others. There are people who do wrong things for their own purposes, but there are people who do wrong things defending the revolution.”
Joe Seremane asked Masondo for forgiveness “for all the things my brother may have done to harm people too”.