Forgiveness and the
fight for freedom
by Yee-Liu Williams
A
terrorist or a freedom fighter? Letlapa
Mphahlele a black South African, atheist
and ex-combatant demonised the people
he was fighting against and stands as a
controversial figure who ‘had no choice to armed
and violent resistance’. From prisoner to guerrilla
combatant, he rose from a fledgling cadre to senior
command in the Azanian People’s Liberation Army
(APLA) – the armed wing of the Pan Africanist
Congress (PAC). As a youth, on the run seeking
refuge across the African continent he endured a
turbulent, nomadic life in exile for nearly 20 years.
He defied South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC), in which individuals, in return for
amnesty, can ‘declare their past crimes and admit
remorse’, and escaped criminal sentence for his
command in the Heidelberg Tavern massacre (1993)
responsible for the killing of four civilians.
Following Mandela’s release from prison
in 1990, South Africa looked forward to its first
multiracial elections with the hope and optimism
for racial reconciliation in dismantling and tackling
the decades of oppression, poverty and inequality.
As an anti-Apartheid revolutionary, political thinker
and philanthropist, Letlapa walks in the shadow
of the late Mandela (Nobel Peace Prize,1993).
With continuing violence and no ceasefire by
the South African Defence Force (SADF), this
triggered a train of retaliatory attacks by the black