The untold story of a young operative in the liberation struggle: Nozizwe Mabaso-Mhlongo's testimony

IOL News

29-04-2025

The NPA has reopened the inquest into the death of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Luthuli.
Image: File
In a testimony at the Pietermaritzburg High Court, Nozizwe Mabaso-Mhlongo, 62, recounted her extraordinary childhood experiences as an unknowing participant in South Africa's liberation struggle, revealing how she became a secret operative for none other than the legendary Albert Luthuli.
Mabaso-Mhlongo, whose parents were closely connected with the Nobel Peace Prize-winning ANC president general, shared her memories during the ongoing inquest into Luthuli's mysterious death
She said the struggle icon, her parents, her primary school class teacher, and an Indian shopkeeper were her handlers who used her to transport sensitive and incriminating political documents.
She read an affidavit, which she prepared five years ago.
Luthuli was killed on July 21, 1967, in Stanger, north coast, in what an inquest presided over by Magistrate CI Boswell held the same year revealed was a goods train accident.
Mabaso-Mhlongo joined several witnesses whose testimony since the start of the inquest disputed the findings of Boswell.
The Tuesday proceedings were adjourned abruptly when witness Mahomed Manjoo, who followed Mabaso-Mhlongo, became emotional and cried.
Manjoo worked at the Stanger Hospital as a patient admission clerk when Luthuli was brought in. He said that when he realised that the person who was sleeping unconsciously on the stretcher was the world-renowned Peace Prize winner, he immediately phoned an ANC office in Stanger.
Mabaso-Mhlongo's family relocated from Ladysmith to Stanger before she was born, after her father survived several attempts to kill him by white owners of a farm he worked for.
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Her father, Stimela Mabaso, left the farm with the help of a generous white man to secretly ride a goods train to Stanger. Luthuli gave him accommodation in a shack and also employed him as a manager at Luthuli's Nonhlevu general dealers.
This was the same shack, which was situated next to Luthuli's shop, where Luthuli and other freedom fighters, including the late IFP president Mangosuthu Buthelezi, would use as their strategic venue to hold secret political meetings, believing that the apartheid special branch members would not suspect what it was used for.
She said her father became part of the meetings, which often took place at night and on rare occasions during the day.
She said during the many meetings held, her mother would not only provide meals for the attendees, but she would also be on the lookout for special agents and alert the attendees.
She was relating to the court what her mother had told her when she was grown up.
'At one stage, my mother spotted a vehicle approaching, which she thought was police who might have been aware that a meeting was held in the shack.
'She grabbed all the papers that were being discussed and put them in a pack and put them on her back and because I was little, she also put me on her back (to conceal the papers), she picked up a hoe and proceeded to the sugarcane fields to work,' said Mabaso-Mhlongo.
Mabaso-Mhlongo said it often happened that when she was a learner at Lloyd Primary School, she would secretly transport minutes of political meetings to Nyuwane shop, which was owned by an Indian businessman she only knew as Mr Goolams.
In the morning, her mother would pack her brown school bag and lock it with a padlock and instruct her to take it to school without a key to open it and hand the bag to her class teacher.
The class teacher would keep the bag without opening it and give it back to her after school. She would then take a bus to the Stanger CBD to meet Goolam.
This was something that Luthuli could not do as he was banned from leaving the Groutville area and was under heavy police surveillance.
She said Luthuli would give her a strict instruction not to open the bag and not to tell anyone about the secret meetings.
'After school, I would be told to take the bag to KwaNyuwane shop, which belongs to Mr Goolam, who would buy me fish and chips and give me sweets, and I would be very happy,' he said.
The remains of a railway line where Inkosi Albert Luthuli was injured before succumbing to death at Stanger Hospital in 1967.
Image: SABC News screenshots
Goolam would then hand the locked bag back to her to take to her father.
'This went on until Luthuli passed away,' she said.
She said she was very close to Luthuli, who would often make her read the newspapers.
She said Luthuli also loved children but would irritate them by stopping them from playing their favourite games to make them read the bible, sing and pray.
She said she knew Luthuli as her grandfather and it was only many years later, after Luthuli had died, that she learned that they were not related.
She said on return from school on the fateful July 21, she first learn that Luthuli, whom she referred to as Mkhulu or grandfather, had died.
She heard her father telling the curious elders that he had been struck by a stick or a steel bar.
I heard that people who worked in the sugarcane fields saw him approaching the field along the railway line, but after a goods train had passed, they could not see him.
'They rushed to the spot where they last saw him, only to find him lying there in a pool of blood,' she said.
Luthuli died at the Stanger hospital a few hours later after the accident.
'The death of Mkhulu left me traumatised and I stopped going to the railway line because I feared that people who went there would be hit by the boers to death.
'We used to love going to the line to pick up sugarcane, but we stopped after Mkhulu's death,' he said.