How Sikhakhane first met former chief justice Pius Langa and struggle lawyer Victoria Mxenge

“Most people think I met Bab’uLanga, [pictured] as a judge, but the first time I met him he came to take me out of a police cell,” says Sikhakhane. Langa was with Victoria Mxenge.

Sikhakhane had been arrested alongside Peter Kerchhoff. “I think they really wanted Peter, I just happened to be there,” he says.

He was bundled into the police van with Kerchhoff.

From inside the police cell, he says, “I heard this woman fighting at the counter, telling the police, ‘Release this child now!’ And it was Victoria Mxenge. And Bab’uLanga was quiet. But stern. But she was ...” Sikhakhane gesticulates. “And I didn’t know them at all.”

This was the start of a close relationship with both of them, says Sikhakhane.

When Mxenge was assassinated in 1985, Sikhakhane and his comrades walked and hitch-hiked the 90km from Pietermaritzburg to Durban to pay their respects. could kill him.

But there was mist that day. And when they put him down and instructed him to walk, he fought. “I don’t mean to boast, but I’m a black belt. And I was very fit back then.” And he ran.

The police told his mother he was dead. The neighbours gathered, rituals were performed. But in truth he had hidden and ultimately found his way to Johannesburg, a move organised by his ANC comrades, who he had asked to tell his family he was still alive.

Sikhakhane lived on the streets of Johannesburg for three months — November, January and February — before he could find a non-government school that would give him a teaching job. He had been banned from teaching in government schools.

It was an old story. The same thing had happened to him when he had started as a teacher at the beginning of 1987. He would apply, he would be accepted, only to be told that the police had been there and he no longer had a job. Or he would start and then, through police pressure and harassment, he would be fired.

It was hard because he was the last-born and wanted to secure his family financially, he says.

Though he trained to be a teacher, Sikhakhane did not come from a middle-class family. His father was a labourer, earning about 60c a day cutting trees for Sappi.

His mother did occasional jobs for neighbours and a Mr Ruth, the white farmer whose farm extended over land that was once the Sikhakhanes’ and on which their ancestors’ graves lie.

But his mother believed in education and he was smart. He was accepted at the Pholela Institute, a school that he “should never have been at” because it was attended by middle-class African children — children of nurses and teachers. Former Constitutional Court justice Sandile Ngcobo is an alumnus.

For the duration of his stay, Sikhakhane had just one shirt and a single pair of trousers. He never had a textbook.

One of the biggest influences on his early political development was a schoolmate at Pholela, Zweli Nzuza, now a bishop. Before Sikhakhane even knew about Sharpeville, Nzuza was making an impassioned address at the school to recognise March 21 to commemorate the day police killed 69 people in a passbook protest.

When he started at the school, Sikhakhane did not attend the school’s social functions. He stayed in the dormitory. He did not have anything to wear.

Nzuza proposed that, as an act of political defiance, the two would wear their school uniforms to social functions — even to the matric dance. “He knew I had nothing and didn’t want me to face the humiliation alone. So he invented something to cover for me.”

It was only when he became a lawyer that he was financially secure. It was Chris Hani who told him to go back to university, Sikhakhane said.

When Sikhakhane was arrested in 1991 with his MK commander, Aubrey Matshiqi, it was Hani who bailed them out. “He said this ANC one day may be nasty to all of you and in future may turn against some of you. So be independent. Go and further your