PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE IN PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA He was 17 years old when he traded his school uniform for military fatigues and joined the armed wing of the African National Congress in its struggle to overturn the apartheid state in South Africa. Lesley Kgogo was born in South Africa and grew up in Johannesburg.
He was one of the hundreds who traveled to other nations to train and sleep in bush camps before returning to the United States to join the insurgency that eventually helped to bring down the authoritarian white-minority regime.
In protest, Mr. Kgogo slept outside the African National Congress’s headquarters in Johannesburg more than 40 years later, in a democratic South Africa now led by the African National Congress. He joined dozens of other former combatants who claim that the government they helped install has overlooked their enormous personal sacrifice.
These veterans are suing for benefits that they claim were promised to them when the military forces were abolished years ago – pensions, housing, and scholarships for their children, among other things.
The 58-year-old Mr. Kgogo, who lives in Soweto, said, “I liberated the country, and people are reaping the rewards of that liberation, but I am still nothing, and my government does not even respect me.”
Some of these veterans of South Africa’s liberation war attracted the country’s attention last week with an aggressive protest that resulted in the arrest of 53 of them and their imprisonment. They were arrested on Tuesday and accused of kidnapping.
They claim that the allegations stem from an event last Thursday when the veterans locked themselves in a hotel ballroom and refused to allow Thandi Modise, the country’s minister of defense and military veterans, to leave. Two other government officials were jailing her at the time of her arrest. After nearly three hours, the veterans were detained by police, who burst down the door.
The protesting veterans said their discontent had reached boiling point but that the authorities’ response was overblown.
One group of South Africans who battled to liberate the country from apartheid served in the new administration. In contrast, others went on to become wealthy business entrepreneurs, using political ties they had developed during their exile. However, the reality is that many others have plunged into poverty and misery, prompting a group of disgruntled former warriors to seek their part of the riches of liberation.
The South African administration has acknowledged that dozens of former liberation warriors have not received the perks that they were promised. On the other hand, Officials pointed the finger at many roadblocks, including an out-of-date database and the very definition of what constitutes a veteran. Nevertheless, it is estimated that there are at least 20,000 veterans of liberation movements in the country and that the government has compensated 495 of them since 2016, provided trauma counseling to 4,500 veterans and their families, and promised to repatriate the remains of dozens of fighters who died in exile since their deaths.
Ms. Modise, who was once a guerrilla fighter, said that, before the escalation of hostilities on Thursday, she had joined veterans in singing liberation anthems, “since those were our songs, too.” “We were not threatened; we were just uncomfortable with being imprisoned against our will,” she explained afterward of her politically awkward encounter with her old comrades.
When she was recently appointed as Defense Minister, she pledged to look into why the veterans had not received their entitlements. Earlier this month, she met with veterans as part of a task team established by President Cyril Ramaphosa in November to overcome bottlenecks in the delivery of government benefits.
On Tuesday, an overflowing tribunal inside a prison where the apartheid state murdered many liberation-era fighters heard the charges against the 53 veterans. Among those indicted were several women. A judge released 42 of them on bail of 500 Rand (approximately $34 per person) but held 11 others in detention due to prior offenses on their records. At the next hearing, which is planned for February, prosecutors did not rule out the idea of prosecuting them with terrorism in addition to other crimes.
Mr. Kgogo and his companions, clad in worn-out fatigues, chanted old liberation songs in front of the prison.
As has been the case with many other government service programs in post-apartheid South Africa, allegations of corruption and inefficiency have been leveled against the distribution of veterans’ benefits.
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Veterans of the liberation war, primarily Black men and women, complain that their benefits are unequal to those received by their white counterparts who served in the apartheid government’s army during the liberation struggle.
“We need to ramp up the support that the government needs to give to people who dedicated their lives for the struggle,” said Lindiwe Zulu, South Africa’s minister of social development, who was also a combatant against the apartheid regime.
After passing a law in 2011 recognizing all former combatants of any military organization as veterans, South Africa established the Department of Military Veterans, which alleviated the suffering of formerly liberated political prisoners. However, it did not go far enough for many to fill the void left by the dissolution of their units after the end of apartheid.
“We took them to the camps and never taught them anything other than how to use an AK-47,” said retired Maj. Gen. Keith Mokoape was in charge of the training and recruitment of dozens of fighters during the conflict in Somalia.
Mr. Kgogo’s experience was typical of others like him. After leaving home as a youngster, he trekked across the border into neighboring Botswana to join forces with the armed opposition, camping in the jungle and training in makeshift camps.
To get an understanding of the Cold War military competence of its Cold War friends, the African National Congress (A.N.C.) dispatched him and others to Cuba, the Soviet Union, and North Korea, among other places. However, in 1979, some of the terrorists managed to get back into South Africa and bombed police stations, railway lines, and an oil refinery owned by the South African government. In addition, they engaged in cross-border attacks and proxy warfare throughout southern Africa against the predominantly white South African army.
However, the painful experiences Mr. Kgogo and others brought back were mostly forgotten by a post-apartheid South Africa confronting other issues, such as unemployment and corruption, as a result of the mission’s failure.
“We had nothing, and we didn’t have any money.” “You came back with the same things you left with,” Mr. Kgogo observed. Because the governmental stipend offered to children of soldiers was never paid, he claims his son was forced to abandon his university studies entirely.
The military returned when the African National Congress (A.N.C.) was establishing itself as the government of South Africa, with activists and politicians jostling for a position in the new bureaucratic structure.
Some fighters accepted to be absorbed into the South African National Defense Force. Still, they found it difficult to follow commands or fight side by side with white officers who had been retained, even though they had been their sworn opponents previously.
Masechaba Motloung, who trained in Uganda from 1990 to 1994, was downgraded to a lower level due to this decision. She stated that she eventually resigned out of frustration.
After serving as a major in exile in Tanzania for a number of years, Mduduzi Chiyi was redeployed to the South African National Defense Force, where he claims his white comrades looked at him with mistrust and ordered him to serve their tea. Mr. Chiyi, who is one of the veterans who are protesting, has also resigned from the military.
Others claimed that they accepted a small pension income but that they quickly slipped into poverty due to a lack of formal education and psychiatric assistance.
In an interview, General Mokoape admitted that “it was a case of each soldier for himself.”
According to him, “people have fallen between the gaps” in society, and the latest demonstration is “an expression of that.”
Some veterans are now forced to sleep under bridges and rummage through trash cans for meals.
After the war, Stanley Ndlovu worked as a documentary filmmaker for the African National Congress (A.N.C.), which led to a post-apartheid position as a filmmaker for the state broadcaster. “I trained a lot of people during the short years I spent in the camps,” he said. “Some of them I come across on the street, scrounging for food from the garbage can, and I feel sorry for them.”
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