Book on life and times of martyr Abram Tiro fills gap
REVIEW
Parcel of Death By Gaongalelwe Tiro (Picador Africa)
Parcel of Death is a gift for South African history fanatics and deals with a favourite revolutionary — Onkgopotse Abram Tiro — who was killed by an apartheid parcel bomb in 1974 while in exile in Botswana shortly before the 1976 uprisings.
History recognises Tiro only in brief mentions.
Tiro’s legacy needed a well-written book to keep aloft an otherwise dimming name. Gaongalelwe Tiro, his direct relative, does just that with Parcel of Death.
The book is a much-needed addition to the limited literature on black history, especially that which deals with young martyrs such as Tiro, Abraham Mashinini and many others, who were inspired by the now-nearly dormant black consciousness ideology, and who the apartheid government feared and killed.
The book features interviews with Tiro’s close confidants as well as prominent people alive today who were present in Tiro’s time.
Tiro’s revolutionary spirit was indeed contagious among his peers. After the infamous speech he delivered in 1972 while a student at Turfloop (now University of the North), which sharply criticised the Bantu Education Act of 1953, and later became known as the ‘Turfloop Testimony’, an angered establishment expelled him, and all but one of the 1,146 students protested. Because he had been expelled he could not attend the protest.
This protest led to the expulsion of the rest of the student population, some of whom had come from as far as Zimbabwe and Namibia. History has linked Tiro’s expulsion with the emergence of the South African students’ movement in 1972, inspiring the “Alice declaration” by the SA Students Organisation, led by Themba Sono, Barney Pityana and Nengwekhulu.
The book lends the reader a lens with which to see Tiro’s revolutionary process — he was the first black student to buck the trend and use a graduation ceremony, in his case at Turfloop University, to make a political statement.
This trend, good or bad, has now spilt over to funerals — the attendance of which is the favourite past time of politicians.
At the time Tiro was lambasted even by leaders in the black community for using a valedictory service to make a political statement.
The way the apartheid government silenced him is testament to how it feared
Tiro’s ideas.
The author paints a graphic picture of his uncle’s death that haunts the reader throughout this well-written page turner.
Tiro was the first person to be parcelbombed by the apartheid government. The explosion destroyed the windows, ceiling and even a stove of the house he had been living in, in Botswana. The parcel bomb had been delivered bearing the postal stamp of a left-leaning movement that had been infiltrated by apartheid SA’s biggest spy, Craig Williamson.
Tiro’s comrades initially had to lie to Tiro’s mother so that she would not ask to see his body, as there was little she would have recognised.
Others who fought against apartheid have films and books written about them; this has not been the case with Tiro. No-one has written his story up until now.
Goangalelwe’s book fills a void in SA history — and a significant one at that.
The author details how final-year black students went to their valedictory service as ordinary students and left inspired by Tiro’s stinging words which criticised the then-government’s Bantustan proponents, Bantu education and pliant black leaders.
Goangalelwe provides the reader with a powerful perspective from which to see what lit Tiro’s fire: from land dispossession and the emasculation of the Bahurutshe and their leader, with whom Tiro shares a name and possibly a lineage.
Goangalelwe’s book reminds us how it took years to repatriate Tiro’s body after the new dispensation was achieved. Indeed, he was not affiliated with the ANC but his bombing certainly shook the world and gave resolve even to ANC cadres.