Then McCabe turned his attention to Mhlaba.
‘And what’s your name?’
Mhlaba gave his Tswana name. When asked what he was going to do in Francistown he answered that he was going to buy cattle from ‘Percy’s mother-in-law’.
‘Where do you stay in Botswana?’ asked McCabe. Mhlaba had no idea. He didn’t know anything about Botswana.
‘I stay in Port Elizabeth, in South Africa,’ he answered cautiously.
‘Then how will you get your cattle there?’ asked McCabe.
‘I’m going to buy cattle, but most will be kept here for some time,’ replied Mhlaba.
‘Who is your traditional chief in Botswana?’ asked McCabe. Again, Mhlaba couldn’t answer.
‘Are you going to Rhodesia?’ McCabe asked. Andrew answered that they were going to Francistown. McCabe then said he wanted to search their luggage. That was a serious problem because their suitcases could implicate them. Nevertheless they could not refuse to be searched.
In Andrew’s suitcase, McCabe found two letters from the wives of Gqabi and Mthembu. He opened the envelopes at once and read them.
‘Are you going to Ghana?’ he asked them.
‘No, we are going to Francistown, sir,’ answered Andrew.
‘Then where are you taking these letters?’ he asked.
They were silent. Then, ‘I don’t believe you guys,’ he said.
The time was around ten o’clock and the two comrades were tired and hungry. The interrogation continued. Eventually, Mhlaba asked to go to the toilet and McCabe directed him around the corner, remaining in his office with Andrew. They looked at each other but said nothing. Time was ticking on and Mhlaba came back to find them still staring at each other in silence.
He took his seat, looked down and said, ‘Yes, sir, we are going to Ghana.’ Andrew was stunned. He wondered whether Mhlaba had lost his mind. He gave McCabe another quick look.
McCabe looked them both over. ‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth all this time? I would have released you a long time ago. My concern is about the security of Bechuanaland and not all the other countries. If you are only on the way to another country I have no problem.’
Andrew lifted his head, hardly daring to believe his ears. While they were still wondering whether they were really free McCabe said they had wasted his time but the discussion was over and they could go. Andrew said, ‘It’s late now. We’re tired, hungry and have nowhere to sleep. You will have to help us with food and accommodation.’
McCabe called his wife and came back to tell them he could help with accommodation but not food, as she had only prepared enough for the family. He took them to his house, a very short distance away, and they met a pretty wife of Asian descent. He showed them where to sleep and asked what time they were going to board their plane. They told him it was around seven in the morning. He asked them to be up and out by five so that no one would see them leaving his house.
Before they went to bed they had a friendly discussion with him and discovered that he was not a bad man at all. By five o’clock they were out of the house and on the way to the small Lobatse airport where they waited for over two hours for their plane to arrive. When it came and they boarded they realised that there was no food. They were now to spend the whole day without food – and it was a nine-hour non-stop flight from Lobatse to Mbeya.
Their brief was that once they were in Tanzania Frene Ginwala would come and fetch them and take care of their further destination. Andrew was wondering where the ANC representative in Tanzania, Tennyson Makiwane, was, or what his role was going to be in their trip. Makiwane had been a colleague of Gqabi’s in the New Age newspaper, and another fearless journalist whom he knew slightly. He had since left the country and was working for the ANC’s external mission in East Africa.
It was about four o’clock when they got into Mbeya. The sun was still up. At the hotel Andrew used a public phone to call Frene. He told her that ‘Percy’ and ‘John’ had arrived and asked her to come for them. She, too, had been briefed. She told him she was very far from where they were, in Dar es Salaam, where they were supposed to join her the next day. It had been raining heavily, and the roads were terrible. Therefore it was difficult to travel by road all the way to Dar es Salaam, where they were to catch a bus. The alternative was a train from Iringa, not too far from Mbeya. Frene said they were free to choose.
The following morning Andrew and Mhlaba caught a bus to Iringa. There were two routes from Mbeya to Iringa, they were told, but the other one was said to be impassable. The roads were very bad, untarred and destroyed by rain. They were poorly maintained as well. ‘The bus was not in good condition. It travelled very slowly, and huffed and puffed almost the whole morning to reach Iringa,’ recalled Andrew. The trip was at a snail’s pace. The train left Iringa railway station in the evening and travelled all night to Dar es Salaam. Frene was waiting for them. She took them to the hotel and advised them to rest, saying that she would come and take them to the authorities the next day to arrange their further travel. Their next destination, she said, was Khartoum in Sudan, through an Ethiopian airline.
Frene came to their hotel the next morning and, after giving them a short lecture on the do’s and don’ts, took them to the Dar es Salaam immigration office. Among her instructions was that they must tell the truth to the authorities: that they were from South Africa and that they were political activists and had no travel documents. Mhlaba was the first to go into the office with Frene while Andrew waited outside. After some time, he came out with his documents. Then it was Andrew’s turn and Frene was there to assist him as well. The officer asked Andrew where he was from.
‘Botswana,’ he answered.
Frene froze immediately and the official looked surprised. Frene intervened and told the official that Andrew had made a mistake because although the duo had travelled via Botswana they were both from South Africa. ‘He came with Ray. They’re both political refugees,’ she said.
The official told him to use South Africa as his country and not Botswana which they had only passed through on their way to Tanzania. Nevertheless, he processed the documents. As they left the office and joined Mhlaba outside, Andrew experienced Frene’s ire. She asked, angrily, ‘How can you make such a terrible mistake when I advised you properly?’ Andrew had nothing to say. He apologised and said he may have missed that point. ‘Her beauty never faded in the midst of anger,’ he later remarked. And Frene would later describe Andrew as ‘intelligent despite his rudimentary mistakes’.
Andrew Mlangeni had a remarkable ability to place the liberation struggle ahead of his own ego, instinctively ever-ready to improve himself and learn from others. His respect for strategic knowledge trumped gender, age, distinctions or prejudices. Frene, considerably younger than him in years and in membership of the movement – and a woman at that – was a journalist and adviser to Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, soon to be the president of an independent Tanzania. Her experience, skill and a self-assurance beyond her years had been noted by Walter Sisulu, who recruited her to assist the liberation movement in directing the South African struggle warriors to negotiate their way around Africa and beyond. ‘She was pretty, and younger than both of us. But she had a commanding attitude, spiced with genuine authority. We just followed her instructions,’ Andrew remembered. Her role was specifically to receive them and hand them over to those who would despatch them to the country where they would receive military training. As Frene later put it, her role was ‘only to receive trainees and exiles from South Africa’. The ANC separated the roles of receiving members from those of despatching them. ‘Those of us who received trainees and exiles didn’t know anything about what those who despatched them to training centres were doing. It was all about security protocol,’ she recalled.
Frene briefed them about their route to Ghana. They were to travel the next morning