Nicky Hlongwane: MK fighter who led operations inside SA
1953 - 1986
NICKY Hlongwane was small in stature but had the heart of a lion. He was a man of very few words who preferred action to talking.
Talking was a luxury he’d never been able to afford; he got no further than primary school because his father walked out on his family one day and Nicky had to find whatever work he could in the streets of Alexandra township, Johannesburg.
From the start his life was a fight for survival, and he learnt to be resourceful and resilient. He was highly intelligent, never happier than when playing Scrabble or strategising over a chess board. He exuded a quiet authority. These are the qualities that future South African National Defence Force chief General Siphiwe Nyanda was looking for when he put together the first special five-man, or G5, Umkhonto weSizwe military unit, in 1977.
The order to prepare such a unit, the first to be sent into South Africa, came from ANC president OR Tambo, who designated 1979 the Year of the Spear to mark the centenary of the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879 when the Zulu impis of King Cetshwayo inflicted defeat on the British.
By January 1979, Tambo said, he wanted an MK unit to be making its presence felt inside South Africa to send a message to both the apartheid regime and demoralised black South Africans wondering what had become of the armed struggle.
Hlongwane was not a man of war by nature. If he’d had the choice, he said, he would have been a professional musician. In his early teens he got hold of a guitar and between selling fruit and vegetables and clothes, taught himself to play.
By age 17 he was good enough to make money playing Friday nights for the Geminis, considered “prep school” for those aspiring to play for the Movers, who were really hot in music-mad Alex. His elder brother Oupa played for the Movers.
By this time Hlongwane had been recruited into the ANC underground, such as it was. When the student uprising erupted in Soweto on June 16 1976, Hlongwane and other members of the underground in Alex helped organise marches in the township.
He was in the front ranks of the first big march in Alex, on June 18, when police opened fire and killed one of the other leaders.
Over the next few days 43 people, many of them pupils, were shot and killed in Alex. This was too much for Hlongwane. In mid-July he was in the first post-1976 group to leave South Africa and join MK in exile.
From Swaziland he was sent to Mozambique and Tanzania for basic military training, and then to the Soviet Union. When he got back Nyanda selected him to be the first commander of the first MK unit to be infiltrated into South Africa.
On the eve of their departure one of the five committed suicide, which did little for their nerves. For the time being, at least, the hopes of liberating the country rested on the shoulders of 25-year-old Hlongwane, Solly Shoke (current chief of the SANDF), Marcus Motaung and Simon Mogoerane.
They made their way to Hammanskraal outside Pretoria, to Soweto and to the East Rand with their AK47s and explosives.
They couldn’t risk staying more than one night in any one house. They caught the train every day to “work” along with thousands of other commuters. On Friday evenings they took care to be seen returning from work with “payday” groceries.
One of the most dangerous early missions was recruitment for the armed struggle. There were no textbooks teaching them how to do this. It was a matter of trial and error.
Their next mission was to hit police stations, and they needed to prepare secure bases for themselves and incoming G5 units.
They used abandoned mine shafts, and constructed dugouts on farms. They lived with their arms caches 20m into these shafts.
Using dugouts on farms was even riskier. Any sign of suspicious activity and the police would comb the area with sniffer dogs.
They sprinkled snuff and pepper over the top layer of soil hoping to disguise the smell of explosives.
Their dugouts were so well camouflaged that once some people on a farm had a braai on the ground above their heads while they sat in terrified silence, hardly daring to breathe.
Meanwhile, they planned a fullscale assault on their first target, Moroka police station in Soweto. In May 1979 they walked in and opened fire, killing four policemen.
More police stations and a magistrate’s court followed, and more deaths. There was a massive manhunt and in 1981 police pounced on the guerrillas’ dugout on a farm in Hammanskraal after being tipped off.
Motaung, who was shot in the groin, Mogoerane and a cadre from another G5 unit, Jerry Mosololi, were arrested, tried and hanged in 1983.
Hlongwane and Shoke escaped back to Swaziland, high on the security police’s most-wanted list.
From Swaziland, Hlongwane planned and directed further operations in South Africa and sometimes participated himself.
In 1986 he was assigned to collect a load of weapons that had been hidden in a cache in the bush in Swaziland.
On his way back he and his two comrades noticed they were being followed and made a dash for Manzini. On the outskirts of the city the car rolled and Hlongwane was injured. After two months in a coma he died.
His remains were returned from Swaziland in January this year, and were buried in Alex yesterday.
His wife, Nomonde, whom he married in Lusaka in the late ’70s and who was pregnant with their first child when he was killed, died in South Africa in 2000.
Hlongwane, who was born on January 25 1953, is survived by his sons Lindile and Given. — Chris Barron
Nyanda selected him to be the first commander of the first MK unit to be infiltrated into South Africa