Michael Dingake Arrested in Figtree, Rhodesia

Michael Dingake Arrested in Figtree, Rhodesia

On 8 December 1965, Michael Kitso Dingake, a member of the African National Congress (ANC) Secretariat, based in Ramoutsa, in Bechuanaland, was on a Lusaka-bound train as it was passing into Rhodesia. After receiving a transit endorsement on his passport, and as the train was approaching Figtree, about 130 kilometres from Bulawayo, two detectives entered the train compartment, and asked Dingake for his identity. When he told them his name, one of the detectives introduced himself, as Officer Barry McKay, that he was from the Bulawayo British South Africa Police’s (BSAP) CID, and he had information that Dingake was an ANC member.

Dingake disagreed, saying the detective was misinformed, after which he was taken from the Figtree station to Bulawayo Police Station where he was led into the charge office. At the police station “half-dozen police voices were chorusing to me, ‘Khulul amanyathelo! (Take off your shoes) Khulul amanyathelo! Khulul amanyathelo!’” (Dingake, 1987). After McKay had discussed certain matters with the Rhodesian police officers in the Bulawayo Station charge office, he left Dingake, and the policeman in charge informed him that he was under arrest.

Michael Dingake, a Bechuanaland (now Botswana) national, joined the ANC in 1952 and served in various roles in the organisation’s structures. He took part in all the campaigns of this period from the Defiance Campaign to the anti-pass campaign and the burning of passes after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Dingake went into hiding after the Rivonia raid and arrests to lead the ANC underground. During the underground period, Dingake maintained that “Within the liberation movement there was much confusion … Loyal members of the organisation, lacking close contact and guidance, swayed with the wind … The general euphoria of the pre-State of Emergency had been interrupted … The experience was sobering to some of us who, for the first time, lived and worked practically under conditions of illegality.

For Dingake, “The task of organising and maintaining underground machinery was an uphill battle. Activists had to learn new methods and acquire different techniques of operation. Not only that, we had to change ourselves to adapt to new conditions. There was an element of demoralisation induced by the state of emergency. While the liberation struggle had not been crushed … [t]he ban and the State of Emergency undermined the mood of enthusiasm, disrupted the trend of mass political involvement in the fight against oppression and triggered minds in search of novel solutions to the political problem of the country. … Underground work is hard, demanding and pregnant with hazards. Only the truly dedicated, selfless and disciplined cadres are suitable for the underground” (Suttner, 2003).

Dingake was appointed publicity secretary of the ANC’s National Secretariat and served on the South African Communist Party’s (SACP) Johannesburg district committee. As a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) unit in Alexandra, he was ordered to withdraw from MK and concentrate on the political wing. He then served on the ANC’s first underground Transvaal regional committee with Duma Nokwe, Alfred Nzo, Thomas Nkobi, Isaac Makopo and Henry Makgothi, before some members of the committee were shifted to the Secretariat. Dingake’s work was largely in the ANC, but his major role after the Rivonia arrests was to link senior ANC members who had to leave the country with the MK exit transport system.

In December 1964 he left South Africa for Bechuanaland when Josiah Jele and McDonald Masala were arrested. The External Mission pressed Dingake to leave for Botswana, where it was presumed he could operate in relative safety and became the external contact for the Johannesburg underground machinery. He was involved in arranging for recruits to be sent outside the country for military training and establishing an effective propaganda mechanism. According to Dingake, propaganda became a priority. pamphlets and leaflets “were mainly produced to refute government claims that the ANC had been crushed”. These pamphlets and leaflets were used by the ANC to commemorate certain historic events, such as 26 June, Freedom Day, and to boost morale among its membership. Political slogans were also painted on the walls of buildings in urban areas.

Apart from South Africans fleeing political persecution by the apartheid government, there were citizens of Bechuanaland who were sympathetic to the cause. Besides, Dingake, sympathisers and activists such as Fish Keitseng, Klaas Motshididi, Mack Mosepele and Mpho Motsamai played important roles in assisting recruits to move through Bechuanaland on their way to Tanganyika (Tanzania), and later to Zambia. These sympathisers, whose contributions varied, included Anderson Tshepe, a Francistown resident, who had obtained military training in China, and they worked as drivers and provided safe houses when Fish Keitseng asked them to.

After his arrest in December 1965, Dingake was detained for just over a month before being driven to Beit Bridge, on 7 January 1966, where he was illegally handed over to the apartheid South African Security Branch. Despite him being a ‘British protected’ Bechuanaland citizen, the Rhodesian BSAP officer went through the motions of returning Dingake’s passport. However, Lieutenant Dirker, a notorious Security Branch officer, snatched the passport from the Rhodesian officer’s hand. When they drove through the border post into South Africa, Dingake was forced to lie down on the back seat of the car with a gun to his head. There were no witnesses to his entering South Africa.

He was then illegally transferred to Pretoria, where after severe torture at the hands of Major “Rooi Rus” Swanepoel and others, he was charged with sabotage. On 6 ·May in the Pretoria Supreme Court, Michael Dingake  and Isaac Heymann were sentenced to fifteen- and five-years imprisonment respectively. They were both found guilty on charges of being members of the banned Communist Party. Dingake was also found guilty of having procured people for training and of obtaining information for the Communist Party, the African National Congress and Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Dingake had been under intense surveillance. He knew that Bechuanaland was still a satellite of apartheid South Africa, and Rhodesia had just confirmed a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) under the Ian Smith racist regime. Ultimately, the Botswana “pipeline,” both going north and returning southward, eventually closed down after independence in 1966 until the mid-1970s, as Seretse Khama’s government “turned its back on support for armed struggle” for fear of retaliation by its powerful neighbour, on whose economy Botswana depended.

How did it all begin? On 24 November 1965, Dingake received a phone call from Tennyson Makiwane, who suggested that Oliver Tambo, Moses Kotane and the rest of the external ANC leadership were going to have an important meeting in Lusaka, and they would like Dingake to attend as the main contact in Bechuanaland. When Makiwane confirmed with Dingake that he was coming, he wanted to know how was he going to make it to Lusaka, and Dingake informed him that he was going to go through Rhodesia.

On 6 December 1965, following this telephone discussion, Makiwane sent an urgent message to Dingake under the nickname of “Richard”. Dingake’s capture in Rhodesia was part of an orchestrated plot between the apartheid South African and racist Rhodesian security services. He was forced to travel overland through Rhodesia and he made the journey, at the leaders’ request. Indeed it became a perilous adventure destined to culminate in disaster. According to Fish Keitseng, “Others were also becoming suspicious. Dingake was captured by the Boers in Rhodesia after being told to come by Makiwane. He was very suspicious before he left, but decided that it was his duty to go.”

Keitseng maintained that “Some years after that, when the ANC sent guns from Lusaka to Botswana with Kanyile, Makiwane was accused of giving information to the South Africans. That is when the South Africans co-operated with the police here, who went and took all the ANC guns before they tortured Kanyile. A few months later, I saw Makiwane in town here, in the Gaborone mall. I never knew he was supposed to be coming. He just said he was going around, and didn’t say anything about what the movement was doing. His eyes were just like a snakes’ eyes. … By this time I knew he was a spy.”

Sources:
Wikipedia.
South African History Online (SAHO).
Padma Bahadur Khatri, “Report of the Special Committee on the Policies of Apartheid of the Government of the Republic of South Africa”, United Nations General Assembly, Twenty-first session, Agenda item 34, 25 October 1966.
Michael Dingake, “My Fight Against Apartheid”, Kliptown Books, 1987.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Vol. 2”, TRC, 29 October 1998.
Raymond Suttner, “The African National Congress (ANC) Underground: From the M-Plan to Rivonia”, South African Historical Journal, No. 49, November 2003.
Gregory Houston, “Chapter 15: The Post-Rivonia ANC/SACP Underground”, The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 1, 1960-1970, South Africa Democracy Education Trust (SADET), 2015.
Thula Simpson, “Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle”, Penguin, 2016.
Garth Conan Benneyworth, “Trojan Horses: Liliesleaf, Rivonia (August 1962 –11 July 1963)”, Historia, Vol. 62, No. 2, November 2017.
Garth Benneyworth, “Bechuanaland’s Aerial Pipeline: Intelligence and Counter Intelligence Operations against the South African Liberation Movements, 1960–1965”, South African Historical Journal, 04 December 2017.
Barry Morton and Jeff Ramsay, “Comrade Fish: Memories of a Motswana in the ANC Underground”, Revised Internet Edition, January 2018.
Arianna Lissoni, “Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK): The ANC’s Armed Wing, 1961–1993”, Oxford Research Encyclopaedias, 22 December 2021.

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