Thabang Makwetla
I am honoured and privileged to pay tribute to Fish Keitseng on behalf of Africa’s oldest organisation, the ANC of South Africa, in which he spent most of his prime life promoting its vision and passionately fighting for the realisation of its ideals.
As with many individual lives, Rre-Fish Keitseng's life was shaped by the evolutionary changes in the society in which he was born. His life was only a microcosm of a more considerable social commotion engendered by much bigger and stronger forces beyond the world he lived in.
The phenomenon of colonisation, as it happened everywhere, pulled together previously geographically dispersed communities that lived separately. The emergence of markets for commodities and labour led to the formation of nation-states. The experience of Southern African communities was not different in this respect.
The dramatic industrialisation of South Africa’s colonial peasant economy was driven by the discovery of Diamonds in Kimberly in 1866 and Gold on the Witwatersrand in 1885. This significant economic boast created an enormous pull for labour as far afield as Malawi for decades later. As part of this region, Batswana became part of this economy, hence the story that has brought us together today.
Rre Keitseng was part of the large-scale urbanisation of South Africans and those looking for jobs from neighbouring countries in response to the demand for labour by South Africa’s war economy of 1939 to 1945. This generation of urban dwellers swelled the ranks of South Africa’s working class and its organisations. Their militancy decisively changed the trajectory of South Africa’s liberation movement, the ANC.
Scholars of ANC History and South Africa’s Resistance Movement argue that it was only post-WWII, with the emergence of cadres like Fish Keitseng in significant numbers, that the critical mass of the ANC leadership became leaders with a working-class background in contrast to the earlier period when the organisation was pioneered predominantly by the African intelligentsia, while at the same time appreciating the material historical context of the genesis of the national liberation movement in general, across the globe.
The super-exploitation and draconian worker-employer relationship that defined apartheid capitalism created conditions conducive to militant views among workers. Hence, Fish Keitseng is a product of the trials and tribulations of South Africa’s labour struggles, which were intrinsically linked to the secondary political status blacks were accorded then. This logically made Cde Fish (as he was fondly known among his colleagues) and many of his contemporaries find an empowering home in the ANC.
In 1956, Fish Keitseng became one of the 156 luminary leaders who were arraigned on charges of Treason and stood trial for advocating for the fundamental rights of South Africans as enshrined in the Freedom Charter. It is this leadership that canvassed and propagated the vision on which the new South Africa was established today.
In life, some things do happen for a good reason. The deportation of Fish Keitseng after his acquittal from the Treason Trial back to Botswana was a blessing in disguise. In December 1960, at the Annual Conference of the SACP following the Sharpeville Massacre, the party leadership resolved that “The people’s movement could no longer hope to continue along the road of exclusively non-violent forms of political struggle, and to do so would lead to paralysis of the movement in the face of new government tactics, and the disillusionment and spread of defeatism among the people”.
Put differently, this means the organisation was faced with its demise. In a leaflet issued by the High Command of Umkhonto we Sizwe on the 16th of December 1961, the leaflet declared that: “The people’s patience is not endless. The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit, and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power to defend our people, our future, and our freedom.”
Looking at what followed, there is eloquent evidence that Fish Keitseng was more than ready for the challenge and the road ahead. If it had not been for his zealous interventions and facilitation, many of the foundation plans and emergencies surrounding the decision to take up arms would have been embarrassed. From the commencement of this chapter, it was evident that the lives of its participants were at stake. However, Fish Keitseng remained undeterred in facilitating the vital movement in and out of South Africa that the ANC required.
Paying tribute to the legacy of Walter Sisulu at the moment of his demise, Thabo Mbeki, former President of the ANC and the Republic of S Africa, had this to say, “Our country and people are blessed with many heroes and heroines. These are men and women who elected to dedicate their lives to the service of the people. They were prepared to sacrifice everything, including their lives, if this was necessary for the betterment of the condition of the people. They were ready to act thus, not to earn praise or to receive any reward. At all times they swore never to betray their cause and their people, regardless of the price they might have to pay. They acted to satisfy their consciences that they had done all they could to serve the people of our country... Yet, as extraordinary as our heroes and heroines are and have been, they are human beings who are produced by the same society that produces all of us. They are in every respect ordinary human beings, who have nevertheless shown themselves capable of doing extraordinary things”.
In his acclaimed book Umkhonto we Sizwe—The ANC’s armed struggle, Thula Simpson, a senior lecturer in the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies at the University of Pretoria, provides a blow-by-blow account of the hectic days surrounding the decision to take up arms. The centrality of the role played by Fish Keitseng colours that landscape: from conspiring to ensure that Madiba travels to Addis Ababa to attend the meeting of the Pan African Movement of East, Central, and Southern Africa, the precursor to the OAU on behalf of the ANC as tasked by the NEC, to fetching him back from Tanganyika after his military training in Ethiopia. Furthermore, Fish was involved in the dramatic escape via Botswana of Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe, two of the four Rivonia Trialists who escaped from prison before the Trial commenced, resulting in the bombing of their rescue aeroplanes and Fish Keitsing’s own Land Rover used to drive them from Lobatse to Francistown.
Notwithstanding the above exploits, Rre-Fish Keitseng's most monumental contribution will always remain his facilitation of the historic Lobatse Conference on October 27, 1962, when he offered his homestead in Lobatse as the venue.
The banning of the ANC in March 1960 presented, (to use a fashionable cliché) an existential crisis. There was a pressing need for both the external mission and the leadership inside the country to confer on a range of organisational challenges which were increasingly becoming pronounced since the organisation was banned and some of its leaders banned and banished to remote corners of the country. The decision to take up arms in response to the intense repression that came with the banning of the organisation was not officially fully canvassed and adopted as the new way forward.
For the first time, the ANC accepted to continue its existence as an underground organisation and embraced the armed struggle, further defining how it would operate inside the country. This found expression in the resolutions that the conference adopted.
Among others, the Lobatse delegates resolved:
- To inculcate among the people a spirit of sacrifice and loyalty to the cause of freedom,
- To enforce strict discipline, ensure the observance of the security rules by members and to take steps to discourage loose talk, gossip-mongering and unnecessary curiosity among members,
- To raise the organisation of the freedom fighters to full strength in all areas; and
- To carry out the national program of political education for members and people in general to ensure a high standard of political consciousness and understanding.
Today, it can be said that our journey has come full circle. March 28 marks twenty years after Fish Keitseng bowed out from the world of the living when our organisation the ANC is faced with the threat of being decimated again in South African communities, calling for its members to emulate the courage demonstrated by Fish Keitseng and his peers when they were confronted by a situation just as dire, if not worse than this moment.
The loss of majority support by the ANC in the last elections of the 29th May 2024 is a matter of deep national concern in our country. The history of South Africa over the past century has indeed been the history of the liberation struggle waged by the ANC. This humbling experience beckons all South Africans who consider themselves revolutionaries worthy of the heritage bequeathed to us by legends such as Fish Keitseng, and the names are many, to reflect deeply, honestly, and with an enormous sense of responsibility about how we got here.
We owe it first to our people, we owe it to progressives everywhere, and we owe it to committed practising revolutionaries worldwide. This we are obligated to do to honour and respect the sacrifices of the authors of the democracy we have in our country today.
Our mistakes must be generously shared as lessons that must benefit everyone. However, our most important responsibility as the ANC is to fix our mistakes expeditiously and to claw back demonstrating discipline and determination in our work. We must take to heart the lesson that the people come first.
Amidst the flurry of views about what we did wrong, we must also admit that it is not easy to change human beings. This remains a humbling and elusive mission in the remaking of society. Human solidarity happens in flows and ebbs and requires constant vigilance around factors that nature or erode it, in the engineering of society.
Marxist dialectics postulate the important reality that in life nothing remains the same, the only constant variable in life is change itself. This notion deserves more attention among social reformers than it enjoys at times.
We believe the ANC needs peacetime heroes like Rre-Keitseng because just as in war, the building of a better life requires fearlessly selfless patriots. Bravery is not a conduct to be associated with war only, because as a human attribute bravery is essentially about selflessness. This event is to us a moment to further rededicate ourselves to the ideals that Fish Keitsing lived and died for.
* Thabang Makwetla is a member of the ANC NEC. He occupied various positions in the South African government, including as Deputy Minister of Defence. In the 1980s he was the overall commander of the ANC’s political and military underground activities operating from Botswana.
** This is an edited version of his address to the memorial lecture of Fish Thatoyaone Ntwaesele Keitseng, in Gaborone, Botswana March 28, 2025.
*** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.