This freedom was never free. And yet, I am often told to forget – to move on, as though memory is something to discard. But memory is not a burden. It is evidence. It is testimony. It is the archive of a life shaped by history.
I was born into that history in New Eersterus, a rural village in Hammanskraal, about 40 kilometres north of Pretoria, then under Bophuthatswana. The village itself was born of displacement in 1969, when Africans were forced out of Eersterus after it was declared a “Coloured area” under the Group Areas Act. But even that was not the beginning. Before Eersterus, there was Lady Selbourne – a thriving, multiracial suburb in Pretoria – declared a white area and dismantled by apartheid. Its residents were scattered across racial lines: Africans to Mamelodi and Eersterus, Indians to Laudium. Lady Selbourne became to Pretoria what Sophiatown was to Johannesburg: a memory of coexistence destroyed by design.
New Eersterus carried the scars of that history. It looked older than the place it replaced. It was one of many neglected villages in Greater Hammanskraal, where the state provided almost nothing. Only Temba township received meaningful support. In the villages, we built our own schools; the government sent teachers only after we had done the groundwork. There was no running water, no sanitation, no electricity, no policing. There was a clinic – understaffed, under-resourced – serving not only New Eersterus but neighbouring villages like Stinkwater, Trust Farm, Mogogelo, and Dilopye.
Before moving to New Eersterus in 1973, my family lived in Stinkwater. The name tells its own story. We drank from wells we dug ourselves, water heavy with fluoride that stained our teeth and weakened them. Between Stinkwater and New Eersterus lay a river in name only – just sand. We called it “Santeng”, a place of sand. Nearby stood the ancient Tswaing crater, a reminder that even the land carried a deeper history than the one imposed upon us.
In New Eersterus, we settled in Block B, among those displaced from Eersterus – people of different tribes and even different countries, like Shumi, the Malawian shoemaker. We were all forced into a Bantustan that was meant to define us, limit us, contain us.
Schooling was a daily struggle. I walked long distances between New Eersterus and Stinkwater, faced the weather, and endured a bully who turned my journey into a tollgate, demanding my lunch money. Fear and exhaustion led me to skip classes, and I failed Standard One (now Grade Three). Repeating at a closer school, Kgomba Primary School, gave me a second chance. Years later, that same bully – now a broken man shaped by the same system – apologised to me. I accepted. Apartheid did not only divide us; it deformed us.
Life in the village offered little beyond survival. Soccer on Sundays, alcohol and long stretches of unemployment defined the rhythm of existence. Education beyond standard eight required travel to distant schools – Dilopye, Majaneng, Temba or Mabopane – journeys many families could not sustain.
But resistance found its way into our lives. My Rustenburg cousin, Oupa Dube, introduced community theatre after coming to live with us. When he left, I formed my own group – writing, directing, producing plays inspired by the Heinemann Publishers’ African Writers Series (AWS). That was the beginning of my political awakening. Our work challenged the Bantustan system, and though it made schools uncomfortable, we continued. Silence was never an option.
In 1982, I launched a handwritten newsletter, The Fortune Teller, while at Ngaka Maseko High School in Mabopane. It circulated quietly, sometimes too quietly, as classmates kept copies for themselves. Debate became another arena of growth. The poetry of Ingoapele Madingoane, “Africa my Beginning, Africa my Ending”, stirred something deeper in me – his words banned in South Africa but alive in our consciousness.
By 1983, we organised student uprisings at Ngaka Maseko High against the education system. Raids followed. Detentions followed. We demanded the release of our comrades such as Dithako Nakedi before returning to class. Even in buses, we turned journeys into platforms for political education.
In 1984, I went to the University of the North (Turfloop) and formally joined student structures. Back home, I transformed our drama group into the (New) Eersterus Youth Organisation, affiliating it with the United Democratic Front (UDF) – the first in Bophuthatswana to do so. We mobilised relentlessly, both on campus and in our communities.
But my political journey had already been shaped by earlier influences – quiet, powerful and sometimes mysterious. There was a karate instructor, Stanley Molefe, who simply disappeared from the village in 1981. Later, rumours confirmed he had left the country to join the African National Congress in exile. His absence spoke louder than words.
Then there was another figure – an unassuming man in overalls who lived among us in Stinkwater. Humble, approachable, ordinary. Until one day, we heard that guerrillas had been arrested. When their photos appeared in the newspaper, I recognised him. It was Benjamin Moloise. He and others were sentenced to death. In 1985, while at Turfloop, we held a night vigil in their honour before their execution – singing, chanting, refusing to let silence claim them.
There were other stories too – whispers of cadres arrested while hiding in a hole, planning to attack the SAP Training College in Hammanskraal. Only later did I learn that among those who survived were figures like General Solly Shoke and Ngoako Ramatlhodi, who fled into exile.
It was also in 1985 that I was recruited into the ANC’s Regional Underground Command by Dr Molefi Sefularo. My task was to recruit others and help establish the Duma Nokwe Moretele District Command. I underwent crash courses in armed combat in some awkward village near Mahikeng. After my release from detention in 1988, while working as a journalist for Learn & Teach, I continued this training in Botswana.
My fellow youth leaders in New Eersterus – Backos Mahlangu, Richard Selemogo Maleho, Daniel Mabena and Obed Lebudi – and I were on the wanted list of activists, marked and monitored as part of a broader crackdown on dissent. We never slept at our homes, as they were often raided without warning. We moved from one house to another as a security precaution, living in a constant state of alertness and uncertainty.
While at varsity, my comrades back at home were constantly detained and tortured by the Bophuthatswana police, their experiences a brutal reminder of the risks we all carried. Three villagers were shot in cold blood by the Bophuthatswana police, their lives taken for daring to exist within a system that denied them dignity. Our protests were simply calling for government to provide us with basic services – water, electricity, roads – things others took for granted. We wanted the Bantustan system to be dismantled, root and branch.
In 1987, as a student leader at the university, I was detained indefinitely under the State of Emergency. I was kept in solitary confinement in Polokwane and Mokopane Police Stations for three months, cut off from the world and from any sense of time, before I was moved to Polokwane Prison, where I met a number of comrades from the university and from across the then Northern Province. We were 19 sharing a single cell, bound together by circumstance and conviction. Only my parents and one sister were allowed to visit me – as each detainee was given permission to nominate only three family members – making every visit both precious and painfully limited.
Detention is not only physical suffering; it is psychological erosion. I spent nine months in police stations and prison in the Northern Transvaal until I was transferred to Pretoria Central Prison – where I was kept for a further four months, each day stretching the limits of endurance.
Yes, the trauma of detention isn’t just torture and abuse, but psychological damage too: uncertainty and anxiety that linger long after the cell doors close. Post-detention, I still can’t stand the sound of a bundle of keys, or the harsh, metallic opening of a burglar door, because it takes me back to solitary confinement – those moments when, at 3:00 in the morning, I would hear keys jangling and a door being forced open, and I knew my torturers were coming for me. To this day, I separate each door key in my house – no heavy bundle, no echo of that sound that once signalled fear.
My maternal grandfather died while I was in detention; I couldn’t attend the funeral, denied even the dignity of mourning. I learnt after six months that my girlfriend was pregnant, and she wasn’t allowed to visit me because we weren’t married – another quiet cruelty of the system. My son, Thabang, was born while I was in detention, and my sister brought the two-month-old baby for me to see him through a prison window – a moment of joy and pain held together by glass and distance.
My studies were disrupted, my path altered. I completed my degree under difficult circumstances, but could not pursue teaching as planned. Even then, there were quiet acts of resistance – like the principal, Emmanuel Motolla of Ntswane High School, who helped me complete my teaching practice on paper, defying instructions from the Bophuthatswana police.
Democracy in 1994 changed the material conditions of our lives. For the first time, the state reached us: water, electricity, roads, schools, social grants. What we had fought for began to take shape.
Years later, in 1996/97, I returned to these questions academically. At the University of the Witwatersrand, I completed my MA dissertation critiquing the television documentary Ulibambe lingashoni – Hold up the Sun, a five-part series chronicling the history of the ANC. That work reaffirmed something I had already lived: movements – like ANC – endure beyond their leaders. They are tested, strained, sometimes faltering – but they persist.
So, my village had no services provided by government until the African National Congress took power in 1994. We got running water, electricity and the some of the major roads used by public transport were tarred – visible signs of a state that had finally begun to recognise our existence and our dignity. The democratic government built us an extra primary school and two high schools without the residents paying “building funds,” as we were forced to do under Bophuthatswana. We even named one of the high schools after the first victim of Bophuthatswana police brutality, Fonko Rapelego. The elderly and children receive grants, bringing a measure of relief to households that had long survived on very little. There are school feeding schemes – for some children from indigent families, what they receive at school becomes their main meal of the day, a humble but profound intervention in the cycle of poverty.
So, besides the opportunities I got from working in the public service and the transformation laws that made it possible for a corporate like Heinemann Publishers to appoint me as the second Black publishing director of a mainstream publisher – and thus making me the youngest publishing director of a mainstream publisher in 1994 – Freedom Day is worth celebrating for me.
It is not an abstract ideal, but a lived reality shaped by change, access, and possibility.
So, happy Freedom Day to all.
Freedom was never free. And forgetting has never been an option.
Happy Freedom Day to all.
Tujenge Afrika Pamoja! Let’s Build Africa Together!
Enjoy your weekend.
Saul Molobi (FCIM)
PUBLISHER: JAMBO AFRICA ONLINE
and
Group Chief Executive Officer and Chairman
Brandhill Africa™
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