Gangster State

commanded me the likes of Winnie Mandela had direct contacts with
Chris Hani and, as I said, Steve Tshwete and many others ... Steve
Tshwete, Chris Hani, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma – those four ... I was
in the main accounting direct in the underground to comrade Chris
[Hani]. But I would always ... At times when I left the country to go to
Zambia I would meet the four.’
Kganare struggled to believe any of this. ‘Chris Hani is dead, so he
can’t verify this, but there are people who worked with Chris who can
verify,’ he said. ‘When did Chris mentor him and where?’ And the
former MK member from the Parys area said the only Benji he knew
from that time was a student leader who had no affiliation to MK.
Requests sent to then ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe to help fill in
some of these blanks went unanswered, as did queries sent to the
Thabo Mbeki Foundation about Mbeki’s interaction with Magashule
during that time.
For someone who claims to have been so prominent in the struggle
movement that he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Hani and Mbeki,
Magashule left a surprisingly faint mark in the memories of his
struggle contemporaries. This holds true for both the movement’s
underground and formal structures.
Mbatha said he first heard about Magashule at the ANC’s forty-eighth
national elective conference, held in Durban in 1991 , after the
unbanning of the ANC the year before.
One of my sources, the former MK member turned government
spook, said he never encountered Magashule during the struggle. ‘I did
not meet him in my world,’ he maintained. ‘I only got to know about
him after the unbanning.’
Written accounts of the period reflect a similar dearth of information