I wish this nightmare would just go away, but I am sure that the actual participants in the nightmare wish for its ending with many times more fervour and passion than I, a mere observer on the sidelines, could ever muster. And yet, as an observer, sitting so close to the action that I can feel the breath of the protagonists on my face, I too become a stakeholder.
This agony of two men trying to resolve an issue of blood and redemption becomes my agony too – not least because both men are close friends of mine. The
matter of blood between them prevents them being friendly to each other. I, understanding both sides of the story, am caught in the frozen space that divides them.
I had come across Mandla Langa’s angry poetry in the early 1970s. We finally met in 1977, when he had recently jumped the border and gone into exile from the cauldron of South Africa, a black consciousness activist now settling into the bosom of the exiled African National Congress – although not without a certain amount of kicking and screaming on his part.
We met in Lagos, both ANC delegates to the Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture that was taking place there at the time. The bush of hair on his head was even thicker and angrier than mine. After all, he had just emerged from the belly of the beast, and his deepest instincts were to destroy those who had thrust himself and his people, our people, into this life of torture.
We hit it off immediately. The relationship, although tested by the demands of punishing work schedules, has remained strong through to this day.
I met Pal Martins some time after I returned to South Africa in 1992. The struggle, the shooting part of it, anyway, was technically over. Pal was one of the new breed of black professionals who hung out in Yeoville, jovial, politically acute, someone with whom, as we got to know each other, I could exchange confidences and opinions about the state of the nation and the world at large. Pal had previously been an ANC guerrilla, like Mandla, and had seen a considerable amount of action in the field.
Freedom comes through the barrel of the gun, we used to sing. Both Mandla and Pal had made sacrifices few of us would have dared to make in the cause of freedom. They were in the same guerrilla army, although they did not know each other at the time.
Mandla’s elder brother Ben was also in that army, an Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) operative working underground in the Pietermaritzburg area. He and Pal were close friends, trusting each other implicitly, as is essential in those precarious conditions. And, as is the way in the relentless logic of such stories, Mandla knew Pal’s elder brother, also an MK operative. It was all in the family.
On the night of May 20 1984, Pal Martins approached Ben Langa’s Pietermaritzburg apartment in the company of two other MK men, armed with orders from the high command in Angola. Pal knocked on the door. When Ben opened, Pal hung back as his two companions, Sipho Xulu and Lucky Payi, entered the apartment. They shot Ben Langa dead at point blank range.
“The truth,” says Pal Martins, “is that we [Ben, Xulu, Payi and myself] were all betrayed. Ben trusted me to open the door when I knocked at night. Xulu and Payi, as MK soldiers, trusted and believed in the ANC and its appointed commanders to carry out orders, without questioning the origins or motives [of those orders]. I held the movement in such high regard as not to question [instructions] sent from the front.”
The instructions on which they were acting were accompanied by the explanation that Ben Langa was a spy for the apartheid government, and had already betrayed several comrades. He had to be eliminated.
The climate of betrayal was very real. But this was a sophisticated manipulation of that inevitable wartime paranoia. It turned out that the high command had issued its instructions based on disinformation supplied by another highly trusted MK man, who turned out to be a double agent for the South African security services. The hit on Ben Langa had been set up from Pretoria.
Pal Martins managed to slip out of the country into exile shortly after the assassination of Ben Langa, and reported to the MK command.
Xulu and Payi were caught in Mpumalanga a month after the killing. They were tried by the state, and executed for the murder of Benjamin Johnson Langa on September 9 1986.
The judicial process by which they met their fate was presumably unaware of the fact that the murder had been committed at the behest of the security apparatus of the very state that they so loyally served. Three state-inspired murders for the price of one.
The political leaders of that same state apparatus have steadfastly denied any know-ledge of such intricately evil operations carried out in their name. Instead, the senior officers who oversaw those operations have been ducking and diving through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) amnesty hearings, mostly denying responsibility for what transpired.
Mandla Langa and Pal Martins have also been putting forward their cases to the TRC -the Langa family to finally clear Ben’s name, and Martins to secure amnesty for his part in the killing. The man-made gulf that separates former comrades-in-arms is infinite and permanent.
So you see why I desperately want this nightmare to go away. But it is the victims who are paying the price all over again for a savage war that was thrust upon them. The words “liberation” and “victory” too often leave a bitter taste of ashes in the mouth.
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