group wasted valuable resources meant for their home province while
doing very little to further the cause. ‘We told those guys that the
security police wanted them to be in Hillbrow so that they couldn’t do
any damage on the ground in the Free State,’ said a former UDF
member from Bloemfontein.
‘Myself and many other comrades who are still alive were very active
in the then Orange Free State at that time,’ Bloem said in a public
statement after Winnie Madikizela-Mandela passed away in April
2018. ‘We were harassed and tortured by the brutal apartheid police.
All that I know of Ace, is that he was staying in [the] Fontana Inn in
Hillbrow, Johannesburg, with a group of youngsters from Parys.’^6
As the struggle against apartheid intensified during the late 1980 s, the
faction that broadly aligned itself with Lekota wondered whether
Magashule and his Hillbrow group were not in fact hampering the
liberation movement’s operations.
A source sympathetic to the Hillbrow group’s struggle legacy said
Magashule and his comrades had little choice but to go into hiding in
Hillbrow. He used the Free State Youth Congress as a case in point.
The UDF-aligned Free State Youth Congress was established
primarily to mobilise non-student youths in the Free State, but
circumstances forced its leadership to begin operating from
Johannesburg in the period after the first states of emergency. ‘One of
the [Free State Youth Congress] leaders was arrested near Sasolburg,
which showed that it was necessary to move the whole operation to
Johannesburg,’ this source told me. ‘It was just easier to blend in and
disappear in Hillbrow.’
Two sources from his Hillbrow days explained where at least some of
Magashule’s cash came from: fundraising. ‘Ace was very good at
nora
(Nora)
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