The burro of state security

So there was huge controversy raging on social media following the death of Lucas Mangope, the 94-year-old former leader of the Bophuthatswana Bantustan, who also happened to be one of PW Botha’s favourite Bantus. It started with some of his former “Bophuthatswana subjects” singing his praises, some even suggesting that even though he was an apartheid apparatchik, life was great under his puppetship. Hogarth knows that, in Africa, we do not speak ill of the dead. But he does wish he could hear the reactions of one member of the animal kingdom. It was, after all, Mangope who once ordered the massive slaughter of donkeys in his fiefdom.