Thembile Ndabeni
“No struggle can come to an end without casualties. It is only through determination, absolute commitment and self-assertion that we shall overcome,” Abram Ramothibi Onkgopotse Tiro once said.
South Africa’s history is not only written in ink but also in tears and blood. This means it is with pleasure and pain. Tiro is among those whose history is written in blood. Since we cannot change the part written in blood, it would have been better if all the truth came out and remorse was shown. It is unfortunate that the cold-blooded killers who ruthlessly murdered unarmed people hid until their deaths. Others did not want to show remorse but went scot-free.
By the way, history is repeating itself as their offspring are racially discriminating, beating up and killing the same people their fathers, grandfathers and uncles did.
Tiro is one of the human beings who did not just sacrifice his achievements as a black person but put his life on the line for his people. He was a teacher. What is amazing is that at that time, a teacher was a respected person and seen as successful. But for him, status and individual success did not matter while black people were under the yoke of oppression. What mattered was to see black people free from the conditions that degraded them.
Therefore, the decision he took was conscious and therefore, he was clear about what he was facing. Wherever he was, he was spitting fire, and the fire he was spitting spread and caused damage in one way another.
“When OR Tiro, a black student at the University of the North, was expelled for a public attack on the white control of black universities, a wave of support for him developed in the other English-language universities, black and white” (Davenport,1987: 427).
Support spread all over, with the police having to intervene in areas like Johannesburg and Cape Town.
His life came to an end in Botswana when he was completing a form to continue his studies through Unisa. A parcel was handed to him by a student by the name of Lawrence, supposedly from the International University Exchange Fund. As he opened it, a parcel bomb exploded and killed him.
The parcel bomb was the evil plan of “civilised” people who believe and consider themselves a master race created by God to be in charge of other people. After he fled the country, they chased him beyond the borders into Botswana.
They never did not come out to show remorse; some died without clearing their conscience while others continue to live with their conscience.
Some belong to the parties voted and canvassing to be voted in by the very people Tiro died for.
In the foreword of the book about Tiro, written by his nephew Gaongalelwe Tiro, his comrade, Mosibudi
Mangena, gives an account of how Tiro died: “It was Eric Molobi who gave me the low-down on Onkgopotse’s murder when he arrived on Robben Island.
He described the room in which Onkgopotse was murdered as a horror scene and how, at the mortuary, he could not recognise his forehead: the rest of his face blown away, along with his hands and front.”
That he was not known even in the school where he taught is an embarrassment to the school and the Department of Basic Education (DBE). The school is supposed to be proud of him and inform learners about him even if it is not part of the curriculum. That could be done without interrupting the curriculum. The DBE should be ashamed of itself that until now, the curriculum is not transformed so that the likes of Tiro are part of it.
The last and the worst thing is the disappointment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) failing to investigate his death. Yet the lead was there; an apartheid government spy, Gordon Winter, revealed in his book, Inside Boss, who killed Tiro.
It was the Z squad, a Bureau of State Security covert unit. PW Botha, the former head of the apartheid regime who was responsible for many deaths, flatly refused to testify before the TRC and apologise for apartheid.
Ndabeni is a former history tutor at UWC and a former teacher at Bulumko Senior Secondary School in Khayelitsha.
Cape Times