To Minus Mashinini 24 years on!

Minus Mashinini’s Lecture on his 24^th Commemoration:

Session 1:

‘’Fighters fight for fruits of freedom forever. Fighting fire with fire, flying 
freedom

flag for fellow countrymen and women. Forgetting to figure out their future and meaning of freedom till they are finished.

Minus Mashinini 1986 Maputo

Born as Sibusiso Saul Mashinini and, passing on as Minus MaQuestion Kgosing, is to live in two worlds as one mortal being multitasking at all times, having a responsibility remaining vigilant not to be unmasked. This phenomenon of living as a binary existence, on its own has all the hallmark of a make believe movie.

When somebody gasp the last breath, taken away as a member of the Mashinini and Moloi family and, at the same time whisked away as member of the family of fighters. In the wake of his passing on, such persons live behind correlating legacies, which is only noticeably precise, on those who watch this soul with interchanging personalities grows before their eyes.

But, underneath the enfant terrible, there’s one in two in you, and two in one in you. This spiritual alignment bellies the fact that you are a spiritual entity, with a human being experience. The extent of your dual life and extent of your duplicity made you to hide in twin skins, operating undetected in some of the toughest countries with toughest conditions.

Traveling mother earth and living two lives at once, armed with one soul, is a gift bestowed on a chosen few who boast the traits of being able change role within a wink of an eye. In the eyes of those who lived with you, they not only knew how a calculating operative you were. But, they also respected you for your insightfulness and sense of deeper community commitment.

In the streets, within the proletariats you fitted so well acclimatizing yourself with dialects spoken in the host country, dressing like them and sounding like them. In the struggle streets, within your comrades, you never even at once disappointed. You are exceeding expectation when assigned to execute any mission.

Your chapter of existence is certainly a story of triumphant against the mundane of life, whilst trapped in one body, but having dual spirits. To a larger extent your life epitomises and encapsulates a feat of epic proportion. To drive yourself to unknown countries at a tender age of fifteen enlist as a selfless soldier and live within a family of fighters, leaving behind your favourite family and friends behind, is to be born with a unique DNA.

To switch on and off your personality, from civilian to a commander at breath taking speed, within one lifetime defeats ones imagination. Choosing the trenches as opposed to the meandering lifestyle of the township life is to go for the jugular instead of jaundiced joy. 

Of course during your lifespan, you managed to play your balancing act exceptionally well. Behaving conventionally in the company of ordinary people, playing meek if need be, praying guardedly when required to do so and partying hard when time permitted.

For as long as you are in the community of guerrillas you were a lethal ‘Spear of the Nation’ A god of guerrilla par excellence in the truest sense of a word. Whenever duty calls you invited the gods of war to guide you in the Eastern Front a warzone teeming with enemies, who once drove a bullet and lodge it on your shoulder in Swaziland.

Who were those security police after? Was it Sibusiso Saul Mashinini or Minus MaQuestion Kgosing they were gunning for or tailing? At the time, when you were bleeding profusely after your car veered off and capsized down the slope. Did you process the pain as a Siemens twin who was blessed with the gift of changing your legend from a peasant to a political person?

In the final analyses in my books that's living a life of two extreme identity, both of which marked by triple Ts, (triumphant times, troublesome times and traumatic times). For those closest to both Sibusiso and Minus: they had, had to straddle two divide and countenancing with the idea of understanding who they were dealing with at different intervals.

In the eyes of your own family, where you spent fifteen years of your teen, including your friends and your neighbours you remained an enigma. When your mortal remains touched down at Jan’s Smuts Airports, they were all left with a task of pondering and piecing together a puzzle with jumbled pieces.

To this day, everybody within your circles are still left with monumental assignments, same as your comrades you undertook daring missions with as part of the Ordnance Department. We all ask: what happened to Sibusiso? Unfortunately, answers to such questions were not even forthcoming even from the Truth and Reconciliation Committee.

Your mom Catherine Nomoya Mapule Mashinini nee Moloi and your dad Johannes Delane Mashinini may their soul rest in eternal heaven of their ancestors, never got answers until they were called to serve in the paradise of the Mashinini and the Moloi. As I pen this elegy, I am yet to know what happened.

On the other end of the spectrum, Minus' adopted family of fifteen years, where he spent his exiled years. His closest comrades, and families who raised him as one of their own, were also picking pieces of a complicated and complex puzzle painstakingly trying to make out what became of Minus in his last hour. Answer to such a question is as elusive as the character Minus played in real life.

A child is born and is christened Sibusiso Saul Mashinini, his native political conditions drives him to dare the apartheid regime. He pays a heavy prize like many of his comrades. Sibusiso once said to me in Maputo.

"War is not about fighters kissing their enemy on a battlefield and walking away laughing.  War is about fighters, killing their enemy on a battlefield and walking away laughing!"

The very child Sibusiso Saul Mashinini, upon arrival in the heart of strife torn adoptive country Angola where he stayed in the backwater of Saurimo an area overrunned by Unita Rebels (in Lunda North Province). He is reborn in a country teeming with Cuban soldiers and defenders from (MPLA) Movimento Popular de Libertacão de Angola Portuguese: (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and learn to speak fluent Spanish and Portuguese amongst several other languages.

His prowess as a young selfless soldier is harnessed. He once again is baptised with an ambiguous alias Minus MaQuestion Kgosing. He will then go to Odessa in the Black Sea formerly (USSR) "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" to study Military Science specialising in Armoury, Intelligence, and other military courses. It is at this stage that Minus has had to travel extensively staying in Somalia, Swaziland, Ukraine and other parts of Eastern European countries where he went to for refresher courses.

In all these years spanning a period of fifteen years, he survived in the bushes as the (HOD) Head of Department of the Ordnance Department under the leadership of Job Shimankana Tabane aka Cde Cassuis Maake, a senior member of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP) and Umkhonto we Sizwe,

Cde Cassius Maake who was instrumental in training Minus was assassinated in Swaziland in 1987. The body bag containing mortal remains of his protégé were collected by the family at Jan Smuts Airport with bruises suggesting a brunt object has been bludgeoned on the face of the decease. And the family has had to salute their son lying motionlessly.

The likable young guerrilla passed on, in a mysterious circumstance in Zambia, Lusaka. His lifeless remains received by his family, friends and neighbours minus its private parts, with one eye gorged had the hallmarks of both his names Minus and MaQuestion. The family searched for answers and question, Minus MaQuestion's death became a riddle.

What's in a name the family and friends asked? Minus' dare devil underground guerrilla skills, and his canny intellect of smuggling Stalin Organs, pushing them inside the country amongst other military hardware he and his comrades infiltrated had to smuggle from the Eastern Front to inside the soil of his native country is a tale that sounds like township legend.

The reels of conquest and instalments undertaken by comrades of Minus MaQuestion Kgosing stature although most of them not decorated with military honours, bellies stories of conquer by those children who like a candle that burn its wink during turbulent weather conditions continue to have a flicker of hope.

These comrades had one thing in common. They loved their country and were prepared to give their only lives for freedom. Minus and many of his comrades-in-arms in the trenches, were armed with anecdotes which remains untold. If one is given a chance to tell the story, you could make an epic war thriller touching on young children who left their motherland in a quest to free their country from the yoke of apartheid.

At fifteen Sibusiso Saul Mashinini etched his signature in the student political tapestry. He was a student at Orlando West Junior School. Then, unknown to his parents was the fact that he was recruited at an earlier age to join a group which was organising the June 16th upheavals at the DOCC hall under the noise of the South African Police stationed at Orlando Police Station.

Here's where the trick of having more than one identity as one person define your entirely lifespan. Before leaving home, Sibusiso Saul Mashinini had participated in the formation of the Soweto Student Representative Council. On the day on the upheavals on June, 16th, 1976, his picture appeared in the front page of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail carrying a knobkerrie decked in his white school shirt emblazoned with a message: "We don't want to learn English in Afrikaans!"

A neighbour Ms Mkhuma, who worked at the Star Newspaper, mother of the former editor of Pretoria News Zingisa Mkhuma delivered the of copy of the publication to his parents. Every time, on the day of the student protest there was running gun battle outside and the toll were collated on Radio Zulu, for Sibusiso Saul Mashinini's parents the consequence were dire to contemplate.

Then, their son was in hiding, he kept dying with countless innocent victims of the peaceful protest. At a time Sibusiso resurfaced, he brought home packets of children skim milk, loot relieved from delivery trucks, which were targeted and torches by students.

The very same year during the month of August Sibusiso Saul Mashinini were to die in the face of his family, friends and neighbours. A search for him everywhere proved fruitless. Him and some of his friends left for Swaziland from his parents’ home veranda, pretending he was going to perform ‘Whose to be blamed?’ in the Eastern Transvaal. In this production penned by Seth Mazibuko he played a lead character.

No one knew the whereabouts of a youngster who appeared in the font page of a newspaper. To a certain extend many children had disappeared without trace. So it was common knowledge to conclude the inevitable had happened. There were many unmarked graves, with countless missing children unaccounted for by the authorities.

In 1979, with intensification of the insurrection by the 1976 June Detachment, in Sibusiso's family every cadre killed in the streets of South Africa their son died with those ambushed in the cross fire. In subsequent years Sibusiso came back to life again. He had sent his family a picture of him taken in the USSR, wearing fashionable European label. There was no telling he was Minus MaQuestion Kgosing.

The same night Orlando Police Station came under heavy bombardment. The content of the letter was poetic and brief. "Mama Ghosts of Gods of Guerrillas guided is the Gift of the Oppressed. Today a terrorist trek the trenches. Tomorrow a terrorist buy time for his remains not to be thrown onto a tomb!"

When Minus was finally reunited with his parents, Sibusiso had changed his identity. He was operating in the Eastern Front between Swaziland, Mozambique and South Africa. He was now deployed and tasked with infiltration armoury in the country, through a sophisticated network. He kept his clandestine operation a secret to his parents. His legend was that he had studied Cinematography.

Yet he himself involved them in delivering Death Letter Bombs (DLBs) in the country. It was going to be the last time they saw him alive. He wrote a premonition laden letter, after he was ambushed in Swaziland, arrested in Machava Maximum Security Prison in Maputo, and recalled to Zambia. Before his last days on earth, he wrote: Mama and everybody please sing me this song – ‘Baba Bathethelele’ colloquial meaning "Father forgive them!"

The dichotomy of living two lives, one as Minus Ma Question and the other as Sibusiso Saul has its quandary. Minus’ date of passing on is unknown. Some claimed he died on the last 20th October 1990, other put it as the 26th October 1990, and this may be a tale of one who lives a life of Dr. Jackyll and Mr. Hyde. Warriors never die they journey to other worlds.