Check out this article: Book Excerpt: South Africa's Brave New World by RW Johnson<http://bookslive.co.za/blog/2009/05/20/book-excerpt-south-africas-brave-new-world-by-rw-johnson/> by Ben - Editor on May 20th, 2009 [image: South Africa's Brave New World]<http://bookslive.co.za/bookfinder/ean/9780713995381>Author RW Johnson may be a lightning-rod for controversy, but his latest book, *South Africa’s Brave New World <http://bookslive.co.za/bookfinder/ean/9780713995381>*, has attracted admiration from many whom one would have thought might take positions against it (including Shaun de Waal<http://reviews.bookslive.co.za/blog/2009/04/21/carrot-vs-stick-shaun-de-waal-vs-paul-holden-on-south-africa%E2%80%99s-brave-new-world/> ). One of the most remarked-upon sections of the book is Johnson’s Christopher Hitchens-like “case against Joe Modise”, which implicates the latter in the 1993 assassination of SACP head and struggle hero Chris Hani. Penguin Books has graciously agreed to let BOOK SA take a stick out of Johnson’s bundle of dynamite for this week’s magazine feature. The Hani – Modise chapter is too long to run in its entirety but even the sliver below will have you glued to your screen:
** * * * * * * ** *The Friends of ‘Bra Joe’* The big question about Modise was whether, like so many in the ANC, he was actually a spy for the other side. Or other sides, for once an ANC activist had decided to pass intelligence to ‘the Boers’, it usually followed that he was ready to make similar deals with the CIA, MI5 etc. (Passing information to the Stasi or KGB was, for most, just a matter of revolutionary duty.) The evidence against Modise is overwhelming. While most of the ANC leadership in Lusaka kept their addresses a close secret for fear of attacks by the apartheid forces, Modise’s house in the upper-income suburb of Avondale was no secret and yet he seemed confident that he would not be an assassination target. There were also a large number of other incidents all suggesting that, to put it mildly, Modise’s loyalties were complex. He and his henchman Tom Nkobi were so obviously taking their own cut from the stolen cars racket – and driving such beautiful cars themselves – that President Kaunda of Zambia once called Modise in and warned him not to flaunt his wealth so, for even Zambian cabinet ministers could not obtain such cars. [32] In 1981 Modise was arrested in Botswana for illegal possession of firearms – but reportedly he was also carrying an unexplained stock of diamonds. In 1989–90 he was caught crossing the Kenya–Uganda border with large amounts of foreign exchange which, he claimed, was to buy food for MK guerrillas – though in fact their food came from quite another source. Then in 1985–6 he sold a weapons cache kept near Saurimo (Angola) to a Unita agent acting for Jonas Savimbi, the ANC’s sworn enemy. [33] Everything about their life in exile and Modise’s post-1994 career also suggests that Modise and Nkobi were both informants for the apartheid security police. Certainly, when I interviewed operatives of the old apartheid security police (some by then in Mbeki’s employ), I found they universally agreed that Modise had been a police informer. As the MK commander, Modise had also been primarily responsible for the brutal torture inflicted on MK dissidents in camps such as Quatro. The Motsuenyane Commission, one of several bodies to probe these shocking events, heard that Modise held the lives of his MK soldiers so cheap that he would even send them into South Africa on shopping expeditions for himself.34 In Lusaka Modise had shared a house with a cocaine dealer, known only as Mister Stevens. It was generally assumed that Joe was using his contacts to make money out of the drug trade too: he would, after all, stop at nothing and in any case other high-ranking ANC folk were known to be involved in the drug trade too. [35] When De Klerk opened the floodgates and Modise returned to South Africa along with the rest of the ANC leadership, Mister Stevens had come winging in on the back of MK to expand several already thriving rackets. Within a year Stevens had several clubs in Hillbrow and Yeoville, all fronts for cocaine dealing and hot liquor which would be ‘mis-delivered’ by truck-driving comrades in Cosatu. By the end of 1996, however, the Nigerian druglords had moved in and paid the police more, so Stevens found many of his joints closed down. A gang war ensued – it all got very messy, with sex parties for ANC leaders mixed in with a lot of trade in coke and Ecstasy, hand grenades over garden walls, prominent jazz musicians and other celebrities feeding their coke habit while moonlighting ex-MK elements carried out drive-by shootings. No one who witnessed the Johannesburg high life (low life?) of those years will forget the excitement, the crazy contradictions and the sheer violence of it all. Somewhere en route, Modise discreetly disengaged himself from Mister Stevens, having, after all, bigger fish to fry. In exile he had become a friend and confidant of Solomon Mujuru, the former Zanu guerrilla commander in Zimbabwe, who had parlayed that position into becoming one of the country’s largest landowners. Modise, impressed by his example and aware from the Zimbabwean case of just how lucrative the kickbacks from military contracts could be, was determined to become the first ANC Defence Minister, a post he saw as a passport to great wealth. No sooner had he returned from exile than he began to meet with the foreign arms dealers now swarming to the country in search of the inevitable post-sanctions arms deal. The greatest threat to Modise’s position was Chris Hani. After the ill-fated Wankie campaign of 1967 (an attempted MK incursion through Rhodesia) Hani had written a bitter memorandum of complaint to the ANC leadership about the comparison between the hard life of the MK troops and ‘the perks and privileges’ enjoyed by their leaders, who showed no vigour in prosecuting the war. Hani attacked Modise by name [36] and, as we have seen, Modise responded by attempting to have Hani executed. Hani survived – belatedly, Tambo protected him – but as he rose through the ranks to be Modise’s No. 2, the undeniable hero of the MK troops, he became Modise’s rival as the real head of MK. Once the exiles returned Hani became an obvious candidate for Minister of Defence. Worse still, after the 1992 ANC conference he seemed likely to overtake Mbeki and win the race to succeed Mandela. Naturally, Modise threw all his weight behind Mbeki, for he simply could not afford to see Hani elevated further. The resulting alliance between Mbeki and Modise was the pivot on which ANC politics turned. Even those willing to ignore Modise’s generally unsavoury reputation often kept their distance because of Modise’s responsibility for the torture in theMK camps in Angola, now likely to get a further airing at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). But Mbeki seemed oblivious to such concerns and was happy to embrace Modise. This also brought him close to Modise’s associate, Mzwandile Piliso, the notorious former head of ANC security who in 1992 had happily admitted to the ANC’s Skweyiya Commission that he had personally tortured suspects in the Angolan camps. Piliso was such a byword for brutality that hewas shunned by most: indeed, Modise and Mbeki were the only ANC leaders to attend his funeral in 1996. To the stupefaction of many, Mbeki later had the government’s Intelligence Academy in Mafikeng named after Piliso, saying he had ‘fought a struggle for democracy’. Similarly, when the TRC Report was issued in October 1998 Mbeki stunned many by opposing its publication because of its condemnation of the human rights atrocities in the MK camps, although, with Mandela happily supporting publication, this left Mbeki part of a losing minority. This was remarkable behaviour. At a moment when many of those involved in MK were keen to distance themselves from the dreadful atrocities in the MK camps, Mbeki, who had never done MK service and was clean on the atrocities issue, was risking his good name by standing up for the likes of Piliso and Modise. There could be no greater testament to just how determined Mbeki was to maintain his alliance with Modise. *The Killing of Chris Hani* During the liberation struggle the Soviet bloc had poured arms into MK. With the armed struggle suspended the question was what would happen to all this valuable hardware. Modise knew that the arms would deteriorate if left untouched and he was also both in touch with arms dealers and aware of the caches’ market value. According to an affidavit signed by the Mpumalanga ANC youth leader, James Nkambule, Modise sold off one of these caches for $2.5 million in 1993, keeping the matter secret from the ANC leadership and pocketing the money himself. [37] Hani learnt of the deal, confronted Modise, and warned him that if he did not inform the ANC about it then he, Hani, would. Two weeks later Hani was shot dead. Hani was assassinated by the far right – by Janus Walus, a Polish immigrant, in league with Clive Derby-Lewis, a far-right MP. But there has always been a gap in the official account, causing many to believe that Walus, wittingly or not, must have received help from within the ANC. Hani was gunned down outside his house in Boksburg on a day when his bodyguard had the day off. The far right, it was claimed, were the last people likely to know such crucial details as which was Hani’s house, that Hani had spent the night before the murder with a lover at a hotel near Johannesburg airport, [38] and which days his bodyguard was off duty. Clearly, Modisewas a prime suspect for having facilitated the assassination. He had every motive to want Hani dead – and had, indeed, tried to kill him before. As MK commander he was privy to MK intelligence and its contacts. Moreover, like the apartheid security police, the ANC underground had long since become semi-criminalized (more exactly, both had fully criminalized operatives within their ranks) and they shared many of the same contacts. One such contact was Shariff Khan, then Johannesburg’s king of Mandrax dealing, who carefully maintained good relations with both sides. His son-in-law Ramon, an ANC double agent, actually warned South Africa’s military intelligence of a plot to assassinate Hani just before it occurred. [39] This drugs underworld had no connection with the likes of Walus and Derby-Lewis but it certainly had links with Joe Modise. *Notes* 32 Sole, ‘The Real Joe Modise’. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. This was confirmed by Modise’s batman in testimony to the TRC: he had been sent into South Africa to buy Modise expensive shoes and suits. See obituary by Trewhela, loc. cit. 35 Private sources. Allegations of drug dealing were to haunt another prominent ANC exile, Tokyo Sexwale, who always indignantly rejected them. 36 Sole, ‘The Real Joe Modise’. 37 Ibid. 38 The Star, 6 Oct. 1997. 39 Sole, ‘The Real Joe Modise’. ** * * * * * * **
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