Pretoria, South Africa – Leslie Kogogo was 17 years old when she traded a school uniform for military uniforms and joined the armed wing of the African National Congress in the fight to overthrow the apartheid regime in South Africa. He was among thousands who trained and slept in Bush camps in other countries and then returned to join the rebellion that eventually helped topple the oppressive white-minority government.
More than 40 years later, in a democratic South Africa led by the African National Congress, Mr Kagogo found himself sleeping outside party headquarters in protest last week. He joins dozens of other former fighters who say that the party and government he helped establish has overlooked his great personal sacrifice.
They are demanding benefits they say were promised to them years ago as armed units were disbanded – pensions, housing and scholarships for their children.
“I liberated the country, people are taking advantage of it and I am still nothing, not even respected by my own government,” said Mr. Kagogo, who is 58 and Live in Soweto.
The South African government has acknowledged that dozens of veterans had not received their benefits, but blamed the old database and barriers, including deep divisions between the veterans themselves.
Long overlooked, some of these stalwarts of South Africa’s liberation struggle caught the nation’s attention last week with a confrontational protest that saw 53 of them jailed. He was charged with kidnapping on Tuesday.
Police and prosecutors say the charges came as a result of an incident last Thursday, when veterans locked the doors of a hotel ballroom and refused to let Thandi Modise, the nation’s defense and military veteran. He was kept along with two other government officials. After a struggle of about three hours, the police broke the door and arrested the old man.
Protesting veterans say their frustration had boiled over, but the authorities’ reaction was exaggerated.
Ms Modise, once a guerrilla fighter, said before tensions rose last Thursday, she was joined by veterans who were singing the liberation anthem, “because they were our songs too.” Later, she said of her politically awkward face-off with her former teammates, “We weren’t threatened, just uncomfortable with being held against our will.”
He was recently appointed Defense Minister and promised to look into why veterans did not get their benefits.
53 veterans – many of them women – were charged in a packed courtroom inside a prison where many Liberation-era veterans were executed by the apartheid regime. A judge on Tuesday granted 42 of them 500 rand bail – about $34 each – but kept 11 in custody because of former convictions. Prosecutors also did not rule out the possibility of imposing terrorism charges against him at the next hearing in February.
Outside the prison, Mr. Kagogo and his comrades sang old Liberation-era songs, some wearing faded clothes, others wearing T-shirts with slogans such as “What was taken from the gun will be returned by the gun. “
Ms Modise and two other top government officials were meeting with veterans in November as part of a task force set up by President Cyril Ramaphosa to break down barriers to benefits.
Like many government service programs in post-apartheid South Africa, the distribution of veterans’ benefits such as health care and housing has been plagued by allegations of corruption and mismanagement.
Liberation War veterans, mostly black men and women, also allege that their benefits are unequal to their white counterparts who formed part of the apartheid government’s army. South Africa’s Minister of Social Development, Lindiwe Zulu, who also fought the apartheid regime, said, “We need to extend the support that the government needs to give to those who gave their lives for the struggle, such as People who feel like they are ignored.”
In 2011, South Africa passed a law which recognized all former fighters of any military organization as veterans, and established the Department of Military Veterans, which, among its other responsibilities, was supposed to address the plight of former freedom fighters. For many, this did nothing to address the vacuum left by the dissolution of their units at the end of apartheid.
“We took them to the camps and never taught them anything other than AK-47s,” said Major General Keith Mokope, who was responsible for training and recruiting dozens of fighters.
As a teenager, he moved a lot to neighboring Botswana to join the armed resistance, sleeping in the bush and training in threadbare camps.
The African National Congress, known as the ANC, sent him and others to Cuba, the Soviet Union and North Korea to learn the military expertise of their Cold War allies. Some broke back into South Africa and bombed police stations, railway lines and a government oil refinery in 1979. He raided across the border around South Africa and fought an all-white South African army in proxy wars.
But Mr. Kagogo and others returned with something other than painful stories, forgotten by post-apartheid South Africa as it battles new unemployment and corruption.
“We had nothing, we had no money. You came back with what you left,” said Mr. Kagogo.
Soldiers returned as the ANC was reestablishing itself as the government of South Africa, with activists and politicians scrambling for a place in the fledgling bureaucracy.
Some fighters agreed to join the South African National Defense Force, but struggled to take command or fight side by side with white officers who were retained but who were once their enemies.
Some, such as Masechba Motlong, who trained in Uganda from 1990 to 1994, were demoted to lower ranks. She said she eventually resigned in despair.
Maduduzzi Chiyi was a major in exile in Tanzania when he was redeployed to the South African National Defense Force, where he said that white allies treated him with suspicion and ordered him to make his own tea. Mr. Chiyi, one of the protesting veterans, also left the army.
Others said they took meager pension payments, but soon fell into poverty, with little formal education and no psychosocial support.
General Mokoep admitted in an interview, “It was each man for himself.
“People fell between the cracks,” he said, and the recent protest “is an expression of that.”
Some former fighters, such as Ms. Modise, Minister of Defense, rose up in the ranks of the new government. Others became successful business owners in order to capitalize on forged political ties in exile.
However, others sleep under bridges and dig in dustbins for food.
“The few years I spent in the camps, I trained a lot of people,” said Stanley Nedlov, who in his post-apartheid job as a filmmaker for the public broadcaster spent his role documenting the armed struggle for the ANC. played. “Some of them I meet on the street, collecting food from the trash, and I feel for them.”
John Eligon contributed reporting.