Gangster State

Then, on 2 February 1990 , President F.W. de Klerk made the
landmark announcement that would pave the way for South Africa’s
transition to a democratic state. Nelson Mandela would be released
from prison, and the ANC and its affiliates were officially unbanned.
Magashule jumped at the opportunity to go home. He boarded a bus
bound for South Africa around the time of De Klerk’s announcement,
one of my sources told me. He had been in exile for a total of just five
months, although he later claimed it was ‘almost 18 months’.^19
Circumstances appar​ently did not allow for Adelaide to travel home
with him, and so he left her, pregnant and alone in a strange country.
Magashule relished being reunited with his family in South Africa.
‘The fact that the ANC was unbanned and we had to come back home
and be welcomed ... our friends were there, our mothers were still
alive, my mother was still alive and my brother. Everybody was happy
for us to come back, I was also happy,’ he said in his ANC Oral History
Project interview.
Back in Tanzania, Adelaide gave birth to Magashule’s daughter,
Thoko, in July 1990. Father and daughter were reunited about two
decades later, by which time Magashule was premier of the Free State.
Any lingering anger Thoko may have felt at being abandoned with her
mother in a foreign country was likely assuaged by the contracts she
later clinched from her father’s provincial government.