Brave youngster fought for his mother’s freedom
29 years after being hanged, Michael Lucas’s body should go home
THE MOTHER of one of the 86 activists who were executed in Pretoria during the apartheid era quietly commemorated the 29th anniversary of her son’s hanging on Saturday. Michael Lucas was a budding 24-year-old youth activists in the township of Bongolethu in Oudtshoorn when he was hanged on March 25,1988. He would have been 54 this year.
Lucas was arrested and convicted for the murder of a bus driver who was shot and killed during the height of the Struggle against oppression.
From 1985 to 1990 the small township of Bongolethu was the focus of PW Botha’s apartheid government, which eventually saw the township being placed under a state of emergency and a curfew imposed.
Many of us were rounded up by security police and the army. We were detained and interrogated. Many others, which included some of our leaders, and I were charged for several politically related crimes.
The charges varied from furthering the aims of banned organisations to subversion and public violence.
Many of my fellow activists were charged with murder, arson, sabotage and terrorism. Some were convicted and sentenced to prison. The Struggle that was waged by youths in Bongolethu and Oudtshoorn spread.
It ignited activism in other areas around the Karoo and the Southern Cape region (now Eden region).
Lucas was one of the Bongolethu youth whose activism and steadfast resilience against apartheid brutality was an inspiration.
He never gave up. Instead Lucas showed the sort of bravery that one could liken to Che Guevara, the revolutionary who criss-crossed mountains with a few men or at times alone in the pursuit of justice for his people. This is the Lucas we commemorated last week. His mother, Mama Yan, who visited him up until the last hours before he was hanged, said Lucas had never accepted that other people should fight for the freedom of his mother.
She said she had told her son to stay away from the other Struggle youth.
He asked her why someone else’s children and husbands should die for her freedom.
When the judge told Lucas that he would be hanged if he didn’t speak the truth, his mother pleaded with him to do so.
Lucas told his mother: “My mother, why do you want to slide in the butter under which other people’s children were jailed or killed? “I must do my part for you.” Before passing sentence, the judge asked him why they were fighting.
He answered that his people didn’t have homes or schools and they stood in long queues just to get water.
This was the Lucas I knew, who during the height of the Struggle showed signs of wanting nothing less than to see the apartheid police, who were terrorising the Bongolethu community, being driven out of the township.
I remember on the night of June 14, 1986 our township was besieged by the army.
President Botha had just declared a state of emergency.
Our township’s name, Bongolethu, was in the Government Gazette as one of the townships that should be raided. We watched the army moving in that evening. It was the first time I had seen a yellow police Nyala.
Soon we became engaged in fierce battles with the army. We had only stones to use as weapons but the police and army wasted no time in shooting at us.
This is when the elusive Lucas showed his stone-throwing skills.
We were told that some of the cops who were driving in the Nyalas were taken to hospital during the clashes.
This was when the police and army swooped in and made hundreds of arrests in Bongolethu.
Lucas’s energy, enthusiasm and dedication inspired many of the youth in the township.
Many of us believed he was arrested and sentenced in haste – a case of pure revenge on the apartheid government’s part.
It took a month from the time Lucas was arrested until his trial was finalised.
Never has a “murder” trial and sentencing been done in such a hurry.
It is something the Oudtshoorn residents were questioning then and which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission questioned during its hearings on the atrocities of apartheid in Bongolethu.
As the Ministry of Justice prepares to exhume the bodies of the activists who were hanged during the apartheid era, it would a fitting closure to Mama Yan, the family and the community of Bongolethu to finally see the remains of Lucas exhumed and handed back to his family for a proper and dignified burial.
Surely such a gesture would bring a dignified closure to a painful 29 years during which Mama Yan and her family have been acutely aware of Lucas’s body buried in an unknown grave somewhere in Pretoria.