Veteran of the Wankie Campaign, Leonard Nkosi, is Killed
On the evening of Saturday, 10 September 1977, Leonard Mandla Nkosi (aka “Derek”), who was one of the Commanders of the joint Umkhonto we Sizwe-Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (MK-ZIPRA) Wankie Campaign, was in bed with his wife, Doris, at their home in KwaMashu, listening to a radio broadcast of a boxing match.
After turning off the lights, Nkosi heard a loud bang, which was part of a salvo of bullets that had been fired through their bedroom window. When Nkosi leant over his injured wife, he felt a warm fluid. And when he got out of bed to check on his brother-in-law, who was sleeping in another room, he collapsed in that room with blood spurting from his mouth, nose and chest, and died shortly afterwards, as another bullet was fired at his back.
During the Wankie Campaign in Rhodesia, difficulties that the Tsholotsho Group and the Luthuli Detachment encountered close to the Botswana border, Nkosi deserted the Group and after some few months sneaking and hiding in Rhodesia, he ultimately entered South Africa by train in December 1967. He surreptitiously managed to get to his place in KwaMashu, Durban, but was later betrayed to the authorities by one of his family members and arrested by two policemen in May 1968. He then decided to join the apartheid police and rose to the rank of Sergeant.
Another version of how Leonard Nkosi managed to get home in Durban was that he ostensibly handed himself o
