The Abduction of Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim from Swaziland

On the evening of 15 December 1986, at around 22:00, when the Chairman of the ANC’s Regional Political-Military Committee in Swaziland, Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim, was watching television with his gardener, Dumisani Zwane, at an underground house in Mbabane’s Pine Valley, he heard a knock on the door. He asked Zwane to go and find out who was it. When Zwane opened the door, he found two black men in overalls requesting spanners to fix their car that had broken down along the road. “Roynie”, Zwane called Ebrahim, “there are some people who want to borrow a wheel spanner”, he said.

After listening to the two men, Ebrahim went with his keys to his own car that was parked outside the house. When he was about to open the boot, the two men pointed firearms at his head, and one of them said. “If you make a noise or shout, we’ll kill you”. They then informed him that they were South African policemen, and they forced him back into the house where they also held up Zwane. They then tied Ebrahim’s hands behind his back and dragged him to his bedroom where they instructed him to sit down. After ensuring that Zwane was still lying face down, they threatened to shoot him if he continued to look at them.

His captors, who were South African National Intelligence Service (NIS) agents, held him at a house overnight in the garage bound and gagged.

In the early hours of the morning of 16 December 1986, he was taken across the border fence from Swaziland into South Africa in what became an illegal cross-border abduction that would in later years become a case study in law schools internationally. Once inside South Africa, his captors were unsure of where to take him and had been discussing Vlakplaas, but after consulting with the head of NIS, Niël Barnard, they were instructed to take him to police headquarters, known as Compol, in Pretoria.

On arrival at the Compol building, the Commanding Officer asked him how he felt to be kidnapped on December 16, the day that Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) was founded in 1961.

Ebrahim was taken to John Vorster Square where he was tortured 24 hours a day for 10 days with the Special Branch pumping loud piercing noises electronically into his specially built cell. This method of torture was meant to breakdown the nervous system of the victim with the hopes of making them lose their mind. He was unable to eat, sleep or lie down and would pace his cell endlessly.

The state attached Ebrahim to the trial of MK operatives Mandla Maseko and Simon Dladla who had also been based in Swaziland and were accused of planting land mines on white farms in the border areas. The State tried to build a case that Ebrahim had given Maseko and Dladla military instructions even though he had nothing to do with their operations. Securing a guilty verdict would have enabled the state to argue that Ebrahim should get the death penalty.

After a lengthy period in detention and awaiting trial, Ebrahim went on trial for High Treason in a widely publicised trial which saw international solidarity groups demonstrating for his release, with these taking place in various places abroad, including London.

At his treason trial, the state claimed that Ebrahim had become a leading MK organiser and chairman of the ANC’s Regional Political-Military Committee which co-ordinated ANC structures in Natal. During the trial he was betrayed by the former intelligence chief of the Transvaal machinery, Glory Sedibe (aka “Comrade September”), who had himself been abducted in Swaziland, “turned” by his captors and retained as an intelligence source first by the apartheid Security Police, and later by apartheid Military Intelligence. Sedibe testified as the apartheid state’s witness as the infamous “Mr X” who provided false evidence against Ebrahim, claiming that he had provided military instructions.

The Judge said in sentencing that Ebrahim hadn’t learnt his lesson during his first incarceration on Robben Island for 15 years, and he was sentencing him to a further 20 years on the Island. Exactly 10 years after his release from the Island in February 1979, he was sent back to the Island in February 1989. Three years later in 1991 he won his case on appeal at the High Court as he had been illegally kidnapped from a foreign country. He was released from the Island, and a few months later all political prisoners were released.

Ebrahim, popularly known as Ebie, was born on 1 July 1937 in Durban in 1937 to parents, Hafeeza and Mohammed Adam Modan, who were of Indian origin. Ebrahim’s schooling was taken care of by his grandmother after the authorities denied him primary school admission, stating that schools for Indian students were full and could not admit him. This continued for five years until he was ten. He then joined a government funded school, The Hindu Tamil Institute.

Ebrahim had joined the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in 1952 during the Defiance campaign. As a member of the NIC, he was a delegate to the Congress of the People that adopted the Freedom Charter in 1955. Along with Ronnie Kasrils, Ebrahim was a founding member of MK in Natal in 1961, and headed the Durban central unit that carried out sabotage campaigns against government installations. He was arrested in 1963 under the Sabotage Act, detained and appeared as accused number one in the Pietermaritzburg Sabotage Trial that included 18 other activists. The judge sentenced him to 15-years of imprisonment on Robben Island, and he was incarcerated in 1964.

Ebrahim was released from prison in February 1979, with the condition that he did not participate in any political activities. He then went into exile in 1980 at the instructions of the ANC and underwent military training in Angola for six months before being deployed to Swaziland.

Ebrahim served as deputy foreign minister between 2009 and 2015, and a member of the national executive of the ANC for over 26 years between 1991 and 2017. He passed on 6 December 2021 at home in Johannesburg. What is intriguing about Ebrahim, is that he maintained throughout his life that he would never have done anything differently and that the struggle for political and economic liberation was his life.

ALUTA CONTINUA!

Castro Khwela
Good morning fellow Compatriots!