MK Cadres Granted Amnesty for Dissident Phungulwa’s Death

MK Cadres Granted Amnesty for Dissident Phungulwa’s Death

On 27 June 1990, Luzipho Dyasophu (aka “Chauke”) and some of his fellow former African National Congress (ANC) Camp 32 Rehabilitation Centre inmates, in Angola, were attempting to make follow-ups with Archbishop Desmond Tutu regarding his commitment to an inquiry around the palpable murder of Sipho Phungulwa (aka “Oscar Sizwe”).

Dyasophu and his colleagues had written a letter to Archbishop Tutu, which they delivered personally to him on 21 June 1990 in Oxford, the United Kingdom, where he was receiving an Honorary Doctoral degree. They were pursuing Tutu about his steadfast support for an inquiry into the death of Phungulwa, who was also their fellow inmate in Camp 32, colloquially referred to as “Quatro” (named in Portuguese after the notorious Johannesburg Fort, which was called “Number Four”).

Phungulwa and Dyasophu and most of those who were making this follow-up with Tutu were companions that had been arrested together in 1984 by the African National Congress (ANC) following the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Mutiny in Angola. They had been transferred to a camp in Dakawa, in the outskirts of Morogoro, in Tanzania. A large number had then left Dakawa and illegally crossed the Tanzanian border to Nairobi, Kenya, and ten others to Malawi, in January and February 1990, following their dissatisfaction with political processes in the ANC. This occurred on 24 December 1989, after the newly elected leadership of the region, the Tanzanian Regional Political Committee (RPC), that was constituted by most of them was disbanded by the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC).

On 16 September 1989, at the annual general meeting attended by several top-ranking ANC leaders, two former mutineers were elected to the leading positions on the Regional Political Committee (RPC). The two ex-prisoners from Quatro chosen to represent thousands of exiles in Tanzania were Omry Makgoale (aka “Sidwell Moroka”, also known as “Mhlongo”), who was appointed as chairperson of the RPC, and Mwezi Twala (aka “Khotso Morena”), who was elected organising secretary. Both had been members of the Committee of Ten, elected in MK Viana camp on the outskirts of Luanda, to represent the demands of the armed personnel of Umkhonto to the ANC leadership in the middle period of the mutiny in 1984.

Sipho Phungulwa fought alongside his prison companions from Quatro to reverse this system of administrative decree. At the annual general meeting of the Zonal Youth Committee (ZYC) in Dakawa on 14 December – in the presence of the South African Communist Party (SACP) leader, Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, of the Regional Department of Political Education. According to the minutes of the ZYC meeting, Rusty Bernstein argued that ANC officials should not dictate who should be elected. He opposed the idea that individuals elected to the RPC should agree to participate in an appointed “dummy structure”. A person who was elected by the people, he stated, “should serve the interests of the electorate not certain individuals. As the ANC has taught us, we should elect people of our choice”.

The ten who deserted the ANC to Malawi, including Phungulwa and Dyasophu, arrived in Johannesburg from Tanzania, on the afternoon of 24 April 1990, after having initially been repatriated from Malawi. Following their arrival in April, they were arrested by the apartheid South African Police in Johannesburg and were released on 15 May 1990. After their release, the following day, they addressed the media, wherein they criticised the ANC, its leadership and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Command Structure.

Responding to their various allegations, ANC chief of intelligence, Jacob Zuma, took issue with the ex-detainees, claiming that a statement at their press conference that the ANC was holding more than 500 dissidents was false and that the correct figure was just over a hundred. Zuma publicly accused all the ANC prisoners with responsibility for “participating in assassinations and spying”. According to Jacob Zuma, “There were people with instructions to sow discord within our forces and our membership, to raise complaints about petty things and to aid a situation of uncertainty, even with specific instructions to organise mutiny”.

On 13 June 1990, Phungulwa and Dyasophu visited the ANC Office in Umtata, to speak to the chief representative of the ANC in the former Transkei Bantustan, in order to explain the situation of the ex-mutineers. A prior appointment had been made with the ANC office in Umtata. When they left the office, they noticed two men, which included Mfanelo Matshaya and Ndibulele Ndzamela, who had been tracking their movements since they arrived in Umtata, as they suspected them to be working for the enemy. When Phungulwa and Dyasophu left in a taxi, they were followed by two vehicles, a beige Peugeot 504 driven by Ndzamela, with Matshaya on the passenger seat, and the other car occupied by Pumlani Kubukeli and Akga Thia.

When the taxi reached Ngangelizwe Township, it stopped, where Dyasophu and Phungulwa disembarked, joining the crowds that were mingling around. Matshaya got out of the Peugeot and approached Phungulwa, who as a trained soldier, sensed the threat and threw a jersey over Matshaya’s face. Immediately, Matshaya opened fire, hitting and killing Phungulwa with a bullet from a Scorpion sub-machine pistol. Meanwhile Dyasophu managed to escape, and disappeared into the crowds. Even when Matshaya fired his pistol into the air to scare the people off, he could not identify Dyasophu, and they then sped off in the Peugeot.

One of those who were involved in the pursuit of Phungulwa and Dyasophu, Ndibulele Ian Ndzamela, and his co-accused Pumzile Mayaphi, were on 7 February 1990 released by General Bantu Holomisa after he unbanned all political organisations in the Transkei Bantustan. They were convicted of murder and sabotage and sentenced to death for the April 1986 bombing of the Wild Coast Sun Casino, at Mzamba, in Transkei, that left two dead and three injured. In a sworn affidavit, Mayaphi said the bombing was “within the ambit of the political objectives of the African National Congress” and followed “a senseless massacre of our people by the SADF (South African Defence Force) enemy forces” in Lesotho at the beginning of 1986.

On 13 August 1998, the Amnesty Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) granted amnesty to “three members of the African National Congress’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) for the murder of Sipho Phungulwa, whom they described as a ‘defector’, and the attempted murder of Nicholas Luthando Dyasophu”. The Amnesty Committee stated that Ndibulele Ian Ndzamela, Pumlani Kubukeli and Mfanelo Dan Matshaya “were part of a group of four MK members who decided to kill Sipho Phungulwa and Luthando Dyasophu, former exiles who defected and became ‘askaris’”.

Nevertheless, regarding the matter of ANC prisoners in Quatro and in other detention or rehabilitation centres were undertaken to be resolved by the Skweyiya Commission. In August 1991, Mandela met 17 former prisoners released by the ANC from its prison at Mbarara in southern Uganda, whom he described by contrast as “genuine comrades”. Mandela stated that the ANC had undertaken to investigate every complaint made by its dissenting former members – “the allegations which were made against them, how they were detained, their treatment in prison, the allegation that they were assaulted, (and) that their property was taken away from them”.

Furthermore, Mandela stated: “We are going to go into all those issues, and every single case is going to be thoroughly investigated”. Within a fortnight, on 11 September 1991, Mandela announced the formation of a commission of inquiry made up of three jurists, Thembile Louis Skweyiya, Bridget Mabandla and Charles Nupen.

Sources:
South African History Online (SAHO).
Amnesty International, “Torture in ANC Camps”, Amnesty International, AI Index: AFR 53/27/92, 2 December 1992.
Sikho Ntshobane, “Call to Do More for Ordinary MK Veterans”, Dispatch, 01 October 2018.
Paul Trewhela, “Chris Hani: A Question Still Unasked”, Politicsweb, 17 April 2023.
Paul Trewhela, “How Cadre Deployment Began”, Politicsweb, 11 August 2022.
SAPA, “Instant Amnesty for MK Bombers”, South African Press Association, 28 April 1999.
Paul Trewhela, “Within the Secret State: The Directorate of Military Intelligence”, Searchlight South Africa, Vol 2, No 4, January 1992.
Paul Trewhela, “A Death in South Africa: The Killing of Sipho Phungulwa”, Searchlight South Africa, Vol 2, No 2, January 1991.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report”, Vol. 2, 29 October 1998.
Thula Simpson, “Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle”, Penguin, 2016.
Paul Trewhela, “Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO”, Jacana, 2009.
Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp, “Hani: A Life Too Short”, Jonathan Ball, 2009.

Castro Khwela
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