On 10 December 1963, a group of forty Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) recruits landed in Odessa, in the Ukraine part of the Soviet Union for military training. The youngsters were taken in a big Morris truck driven alternatively by Mzewu Ntsele, Johannes Tau-Tau and Joe Modise from Dar es Salaam through Nairobi, Kenya, and on to Juba in the Sudan.
From Juba they were escorted by riverboat along the Nile to Khartoum. On the afternoon of their sixth day in Khartoum, the forty recruits were flown by the Russian carrier Aeroflot to Cairo, Egypt, and from there to Odessa, Ukraine.
When their plane landed in Ukraine, they were then driven to the camp of the Military Academy of the Soviet Union, the Red Banner Combined Arms Command School, approximately 8 km east of Odessa’s Black Sea Harbour. At the Academy, there were two sections: the Red Army Soviet officers section; and the other section, which held freedom fighters from various parts of the world.
The following day they were addressed by the Camp Commandant, Colonel Zscizserin, and his Lieutenant Colonel Pronibrakiz, that they were going to be trained for nine in months in guerrilla warfare and return to South Africa to fight.
The MK trainees were commanded by Joe Modise (aka "Thabo More", with the Commissar being Moses Mabhida, who had been honourably recalled by the Movement from being the representative of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) at the World Federation of Trade Unions in Prague, Czechoslovak
