Jos Moshobane died in 1986 after being detained, just one of the many students who made Turfloop a liberated zone in a time of oppression, writes Jubie Matlou.
Josephine “Jos” Sekgana Moshobane died pursuing a noble cause: freeing her people from racial oppression and exploitation. She died after being tortured and injured by apartheid security police while being held in solitary confinement.
She was held for three months under the notorious Section 29 of the Internal Security Act, which provided for indefinite detention for interrogation, without access to lawyers or family members.
She was released from the infamous Haenertsburg police station, outside Polokwane, into the custody of her uncle, the late Serepe Moshobane, who had been her high school principal and who was then the dean of students at the University of the North, also known as Turfloop University.
Hundreds of students converged at the university’s main entrance to give her a heroine’s welcome. But she couldn’t appreciate the rousing reception: she had lost memory and orientation, and could not recognise members of her family and friends.
There are reports from fellow comrades that the security police had “paraded” Jos Moshobane in front of student activists on campus, telling them they would meet the same fate if they continued their revolutionary activities.
Moshobane’s precarious state of health meant she could not continue her social work studies, and her family took her home to care for her. She spent Christmas 1985 with her family before going for surgery for what turned out to be a brain haemorrhage.
She was admitted to a number of Gauteng hospitals, including Leratong and Chris Hani Baragwanath, to remove blood clots from her brain. She died on April 3, 1986, in Leratong Hospital, five months after being freed from detention.
Her detention followed her short visit to Gaborone, Botswana, during the 1985 university winter holidays to meet exiled liberation movement operatives.
I gathered at the time these operatives were former Turfloop students, and that Moshobane’s soulmate was among them.
These short sojourns in neighbouring countries were becoming too frequent for internal activists in the mid-1980s to be given “crash courses” in Marxist revolutionary theory and the handling of explosives, arms and ammunition.
The switch to providing military training for one or two weeks to internal activists does not suggest the liberation movement’s military camps in the Frontline States were bursting at the seams with young people who left the country after the 1984 Vaal uprising and the aftermath in a host of townships. Rather, it was an immersion strategy inspired by liberation movement leaders’ visit to North Vietnam.
General Vo Nguyen Giap – a highly decorated veteran of the Viet Minh resistance against Japanese occupation during World War II – advised the ANC that liberation movements did not need forests and mountains for their operatives to infiltrate the country. Their operatives needed to live among the people, who would provide them with food and shelter, he said.
Is it not time to declare the Oasis Motel in Gaborone, Botswana, a national monument for accommodating hundreds of underground operatives in the 1980s?
In its January 8 annual statement broadcast over Radio Freedom, the ANC called on the “young lions” to “render the country ungovernable and apartheid unworkable”.
The apartheid regime responded with a state of emergency, initially for Gauteng townships, and later for the country.
Turfloop University was the nerve centre of this unfolding wave of uprisings in the north. Turfloop assumed this revolutionary leading role from the time of martyrs like Onkgopotse Abram Tiro, who was killed by a parcel bomb after fleeing to Botswana following his historic address at a graduation ceremony in the early 1970s.
Another martyr was George Shope, who was found dead in his room in unexplained circumstances. He was the son of ANC veteran Mark Shope. One can also recall Njinga Sindane, from Dennilton, Mpumalanga, who abandoned his studies, went for military training outside the country, and died after being wounded in an exchange of fire with the security police on his return. All these heroes and heroines bore testimony to the role Turfloop University played in the Struggle. Turfloop was a de facto “liberated zone”.
Rejoice Mabudhafasi, now the deputy minister of arts and culture, was a librarian at the university and a leader in the Mass Democratic Movement. So was philosophy lecturer Louis Mnguni, now ambassador to Nigeria.
What made Turfloop so attractive to political activists and students in the 1980s?
Turfloop was more than a fount of knowledge, it was an oasis of revolutionary ideas. Newly released political prisoners from Robben Island took refuge on the campus to spread the “gospel” of the revolution. They included Jerome Maake, Eleck Nchabeleng, and the late Peter Mokaba and Shakes Makhado.
As repression took its toll on other black campuses, more and more students flocked to Turfloop. Fort Hare University, in the then-Ciskei, came increasingly under the jackboot of General Charles Sebe.
At the University of Zululand, on October 29, 1983, a protest organised by the Azanian Students Organisation (Azaso) against an Inkatha-sponsored ceremony to commemorate the death of King Cetshwayo turned into a bloodbath. Inkatha impis raided the campus, five students were killed and many were injured.
The Ngoye Massacre was a watershed between the ANC-aligned mass organisations and Inkatha, foreshadowing the internecine violence that plagued the country in the early 1990s, on the eve of its transition to democracy.
Student activists such as Solly Mollo, now of the National School of Government, and Jakes Motswaledi fled to Turfloop to continue their studies.
The struggle to establish student representative councils (SRCs) in teacher training colleges led to the death in detention, at the hands of the Lebowa homeland police, of Ngoako Ramalepe, a student leader from the Modjadji College of Education in then-Gazankulu.
When the University of Venda was established, Jerry Ndou, now ambassador to Zimbabwe, used to make “pilgrimages” to Turfloop for political support.
Student mass meetings were a political lecture in their own right. Benjamin Mphiko, known as the “Chinese Philosopher”, Tekere Tlhakung and Ike Motloung engaged in animated polemics as they sought to sway student opinion in favour of a resolution. SRC president Joe Mokhosi tried to ensure “sanity and rationality” prevailed.
The “liberated zone” status was short-lived. With the declaration of a national state of emergency in 1986, Turfloop was under military siege. Prominent activists took cover. Some went into exile, while others went to Wits and the University of the Western Cape to study.
Turfloop was also a melting pot of talent. In the late 1970s it had a team in the second division of the Professional Soccer League. Alfred “KK” Lentsoane (Moroka Swallows FC) and Harris Choeu (Mamelodi Sundowns) were two soccer stars who went to the university.
Turfloop also boasted a host of artistic, musical groups and societies from Rastafarians, to classical music and jazz.
Prominent poet Lesego Rampolokeng studied law before venturing into the arts.
Azaso was the “ruling party” on many a campus in the 1980s. Established as a Black Consciousness student organisation, it adopted the Freedom Charter.
Among its early leaders were Mathume Joe Phaahla, now deputy minister of health, Billy Ramokgopa, now at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Nelson Mandela School of Medicine, Tiego Moseneke from Wits, and Bongani More from Rhodes.
Jos Moshobane had numerous contemporaries at Turfloop who have become prominent, including Minister of Transport Dipuo Peters.
At a night vigil on the eve of her burial, the priest had just concluded a prayer and a short service for relatives and neighbours, when buses carrying Turfloop students roared into Tokisho Street in Zone 4, Diepkloof.
The small white marquee outside the Moshobane home was suddenly overflowing with mourners. The singing of revolutionary songs and chanting transformed a sombre ceremony into an eruption of anger at the apartheid regime.
When the sun rose, neighbours opened their doors to provide ablution facilities for hundreds of students.
The funeral service took place in the marquee. The long procession made its way across Soweto to Chiawelo’s Avalon cemetery.
The route was punctuated by traffic, security and other police, some in uniform, others in civvies.
The ring of steel around the township was not unexpected, given the militancy of Diepkloof. The conduct of the mourners was disciplined, and no incidents were reported.
Overhead, the black cloud that had followed us from Avalon began to rumble, and the heavens opened. I thought: a heroine has been laid to rest. She must be at peace, relieved of the pain and suffering of the preceding five months.
* Matlou is spokesman for the Independent Communications Authority of SA. The Josephine Moshobane Memorial is an initiative of the Department of Arts and Culture and the ANC’s Diepkloof branch. The memorial stone was unveiled at the Avalon Cemetery, Soweto, on Friday, following a memorial service at the Ekhaya Centre, Zone 4, Diepkloof.
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