The Lydenburg farm, Boomplaats, in the then Eastern Transvaal, was purchased by Africans in the early 1900s, before the 1913 Land Act prohibited such transactions. The community on the farm Boomplats, according to my late mother, Lydia Matshidi Rasethaba, was the landowner, under a Chief Dinkwanyane. This community regarded the land that they occupied in Boomplaats as something worth fighting for. One rainy night in 1961, when I was only three years old, the police came and demolished their homesteads and forcefully removed them to arid and unproductive land.

The New Age, an influential newspaper in Johannesburg from 1953 to 1962, dispatched Andrew Mlangeni and Joe Nzingo Gqabi to cover the removals when the Dinkwanyane community was forcibly removed. The two were arrested by the police as they left the African ‘reserve’.

The exclusion of this event from this book was better explained by Andrew Mlangeni when he said that there is so much to relate about his life that he could not tell it all. Hopefully, as time goes on we shall have the benefit of learning more, as more and more veterans tell their stories and corroborate what happenned.

It took months of persuasion and convincing to get Andrew to relate his life experience. The answer was always that ‘my organisation, the ANC, has not yet released me to tell its secrets’. As a loyal servant of the African National Congress he was reluctant to divulge its secrets. Once he agreed, it was a kind of reflection of the reality of life in South Africa during the 1960s. This was the time of radical and defiant campaigns against the apartheid regime and its beneficiaries, whose racist thinking sought to impose on the masses of the people their backward doctrine of ‘separate development’.

At a meeting of the Umkhonto we Siswe (MK) High Command convened to discuss, inter alia, a report on MK trainees who had just returned from China, it was established that the Chinese assessment had identified Naidoo as the most gifted and had the most initiative, but he also had a weakness – laziness. The report further identified that Gqabi was also smart, but his weakness was that he was too ambitious and wanted leadership positions regardless of his ability.