On 28 January 1982, the Senior Staff Officer of apartheid South African Military Intelligence’s liaison project with Swaziland, dubbed “Operation Santa”, met with the Chief of Staff of the Royal Swazi Defence Force (RSDF), Lieutenant Colonel Jameson Ndzimandze, to receive a report on growing anxiety in Swaziland regarding the presence and activities of the African National Congress (ANC).
According to Ndzimandze, certain political, military and security leaders were concerned about the activities of the ANC and its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in the Kingdom. Earlier in the month of January, the Kingdom’s Minister of Foreign Affairs delivered a document to Pretoria containing an official request for assistance in efforts to eliminate the ANC in Swaziland, as well as to protect the Kingdom against possible ANC reprisals.
The geopolitical changes in the 1980s and the increased radicalisation of the South African domestic scene, led apartheid South Africa to view the entire region as an operational area. The struggle for change in South Africa became a regional war. Given the alteration of the balance of political forces in the region, with the independence of Angola and Mozambique, South Africa could no longer rely exclusively on its economic power or even its diplomatic leverage to contain the growing revolutionary situation, and had to resort to military means to protect the apartheid system.
The immediate manifestation of this campaign was to punish th
An accurate and well-written account! I was at the University of Swaziland from 1983 to 1985, and experienced the heavy clamp-down first-hand. By the way, the word “compatriot” means “fellow citizens”.