happened. On 5 May 1982 , the Daily Dispatch reported on the ‘tense
atmosphere’ at Fort Hare following Sebe’s run-in with the students.
Major-General Charles Sebe, the prime minister’s brother and Ciskei’s
director of state security, told the newspaper that twenty-two people
had been arrested on the campus and that they were to be charged in
accordance with the Riotous Assemblies Act.^12
On 19 May, the Daily Dispatch followed up on the story, reporting
that ‘twenty people appeared in the Magistrate’s Court [in Alice] ...
yesterday on charges of public violence arising out of disturbances at
the university earlier this month’. According to the article, ‘those in
court yesterday were part of a group of 22 arrested’. The authorities
had apparently decided to let two of the detainees go.^13 It would seem
that the protesters were charged with public violence, not high treason
as Magashule claimed.
The report from 19 May proved particularly useful. It included the
initials and surnames of all those who had been arrested, bar the two
who had been let off the hook. Accordingly, one ‘E. Marashula [sic]’
was detained and charged. (A later report, in a partial correction, listed
‘Elias Magashula’ as one of the accused.)^14 The report also named ‘B.
Mlangeni’. This would be Bheki Mlangeni, one of the men Magashule
referred to in his ANC Oral History Project interview. Mlangeni was
later killed in a bomb attack planned by apartheid assassin Eugene de
Kock.^15
One former Fort Hare student who helped plan the protest action
confirmed to me that Magashule was among those arrested and shed
more light on the events of 1982. ‘Fort Hare did not have a student
representative council [SRC], so we banded together as the Azanian
Students Organisation [AZASO],’ this source told me. ‘We planned to
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