MK veterans told to document their Struggle experiences

UMKHONTO we Sizwe (MK) veterans have been encouraged to document the struggles they endured in the course of fighting for the country’s liberation while stationed across the continent and other parts of the world.

This was the message from Themba Linus Dlamini, a veteran of the ANC’s armed wing, at the launch yesterday of his autobiography, titled Politics Is A Dirty Game in Durban.

The book, a collaboration with the Department of Military Veterans, is an account detailing the challenges Dlamini faced in the Struggle for liberation, both in exile and as a political prisoner on Robben Island. He spent 18 years on the island before being released in 1979.

Dlamini was part of the group of MK freedom fighters in the Luthuli Detachment, the first MK unit that crossed the Zambezi River into the then Rhodesia in 1967.

Addressing over 100 MK veterans, Dlamini said: “My plea to you gentlemen is that we should write because there are many things that our people should know about the liberation movement.”

Dlamini said he was not pleased with how the democratic dispensation had unfolded and said that the only solution to the plight of black people in South Africa was a revolution.

“We are in a problem today because the ANC has created a middle class and we are now facing that middle class. Without a revolution nothing will change in this country,” Dlamini said.

Kwazi Mshengu, the ANC Youth League chairperson in KwaZulu-Natal, said the book launch was a lesson from the Struggle veterans on commitment and discipline towards their revolution.

“They (Struggle veterans) sacrificed with everything that they had for us to be here today, living under a democratic South Africa.

“What is important for us, as a lesson from here, is to commit ourselves to work to build a South Africa where future generations will say this is a better South Africa than the one we are living in today,” Mshengu said.