TODAY I am taking the unusual step of repeating an adapted version of a column I wrote seven years ago, a column used as the foreword to Gabrielle Lubowski’s book, On Solid Ground.
I remember with awful clarity where I was on the night of September 12, 1989 – 25 years ago today. I was at home, in Kommetjie, when my telephone rang. It was my old friend, Danny Tjongarero, calling from Windhoek, incoherent, in tears. “Anton’s been shot. He’s dead.”
Slowly the story emerged: Anton Lubowski had received a telephone call from an associate, asking what time he would get to his house at number 7, Sanderburg Street, Windhoek. As he arrived just before 8.30pm, a gunman fired seven shots from an AK-47 into his body, with an eighth shot fired from a smaller calibre handgun into his head, the coup de grâce.
Not long after, the then South African minister of defence, Magnus Malan, made the outrageous claim that Anton was working for South African military intelligence at the time of his assassination – and produced alleged payslips to “prove” it.
This claim has been comprehensively rubbished by numerous investigations, not least by the Mail & Guardian, which, in 1999 exposed a military intelligence network that approached Anton via an official in the French embassy, posing as Swapo sympathisers who wanted to help the party in the run-up to independence elections. They paid money into his bank account to buy furniture for the Swapo offices – these were the “payslips” Malan produced.
According to the M&G, “Lubowski, who initially trusted the businessmen who approached him, found out they were not the Swapo enthusiasts they claimed to be. He was shot dead after he actively started to work against them and after attempts to blackmail him into co-operating failed”.
Rhodesian-Irish mercenary, Donald Acheson, was detained the day after the murder. He has been repeatedly linked to the South African military’s murderous Civil Co-operation Bureau and its most reviled villains, Staal Burger, Chappie Marais, Ferdi Barnard, Calla Botha, Slang van Zyl and Wouter Basson.
Anton Lubowski was one of my closest friends. I worked in Namibia as a correspondent from 1983 to 1985, and we quickly developed a close bond. I sat with him as he, a half-German, half-Afrikaans white Namibian, agonised about his decision to go public about joining Swapo.
We had many braais where we endlessly debated the future of Namibia over fine red wine and whisky. Many was the Friday night that Anton would hold forth – and he had a commanding presence – at the bar of the Windhoek Press Club.
He was peripherally involved when Max du Preez, Peter Kenny and I put together a rough, roneoed satirical newsletter called The Spike, which mainly took the mickey out of the incredibly pompous South African administrator general, Willie van Niekerk. Van Niekerk, in turn, evidently demanded that military intelligence investigate who was behind the newsletter, which he saw as being subversive. We rolled around laughing at that – we freely handed out copies in the Press Club at a token R1 a time to cover our printing costs.
I remember passionate legal debates between Anton, Hartmut Ruppel, Dave Smuts and Pierre Roux over human rights cases they were defending, and their agonising over the fate of victims of Koevoet torture they were trying to save.
And I’ll never forget the tears rolling down Anton’s cheeks one night at State House, Lusaka, after first Sam Nujoma, then Hidipo Hamutenya, and then Kenneth Kaunda gave him huge bear hugs as they welcomed into their fold the man reviled in Windhoek as “the white Swapo”.
Twenty five years down the road, it is a national disgrace, a scandal, that Anton’s South African assassins have never been prosecuted. The evidence, I am told, is all there. It is the political will that is lacking.
In an anguished plea, his widow, Gabrielle and their children issued a statement marking the 25th anniversary of Anton’s assassination which concluded: “We have followed every avenue available to us to have this case solved. We have just found closed doors. There is no one, not one, who is willing to solve this case. We have recently requested a meeting with the Swapo Executive and there is an agreement to meet with us early next year. Our request is to have Anton’s legacy restored and Namibian history be rewritten – giving him the place he deserves: fighting a just cause and giving his life for his country.”