By Helen Nyambura
MOROGORO, Tanzania (Reuters) – When Monica Mathe married
her South African husband, she also married his ideals,
embracing the beliefs of an exiled member of the anti-apartheid
African National Congress.
Elias Mathe fled white rule in his homeland in the 1970s
and underwent military training in Tanzania, where he met and
married his wife.
“I was a freedom fighter and got all the rights accorded to
one,” said Mathe, who works as a nurse in a hospital on the
outskirts of the central Tanzanian town of Morogoro.
“I got free education paid for by the ANC on this very
campus,” she said as she carefully wrapped steel surgical
instruments in green hospital linen.
When apartheid began to crumble in the mid-1990s, Mathe’s
husband went home. He never came back and never sent for her.
Mathe is one of scores of Tanzanian women who married
exiled ANC fighters and who now, more than a decade after the
end of apartheid, feel cheated and forgotten either by the men
they married or the movement that came to dominate their lives.
Tanzania, one of the so-called Frontline States which
hastened the end of white rule by pressing for sanctions and
assisting the exiled ANC, trained more ANC fighters than any
other African state during the 27 years that anti-apartheid
icon Nelson Mandela was imprisoned.
The ANC set up camps in central Tanzania and many men took
Tanzanian wives. The women worked for free in the ANC camps and
were promised wages once the fighters secured majority rule.
They were told they would be embraced into the wider ANC
family and live better lives as citizens of South Africa.
ABANDONED
When the apartheid system finally fell apart in the
mid-1990s, many ANC men living in “Frontline States” like
Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique headed home. Some
took their families but others left alone, promising to return.
In many cases, the men re-married when they got home and
made no provisions for the “exile families,” a senior ANC
official in Johannesburg told Reuters.
The ANC has no public position on the problem, but
officials say privately that every conflict leaves deep wounds,
citing the families left behind in Tanzania as well as the many
ANC members who disappeared during the years of apartheid.
The tales of those left behind in Tanzania differ in the
detail, but the sense of betrayal is the same.
Anna Bhutto carefully stores away the only thing that links
her to her father — a photo of him in an officer’s uniform.
He left to study in Zimbabwe when Bhutto was 4 and she has
not seen him since.
“This guy has betrayed us, he has denied his children. He
knows he left children behind but … he does not care.”
Monica Mabuya’s South African husband died in Tanzania,
leaving her with four children. She still lives near the farm
where they once reared pigs to feed ANC fighters living at the
nearby Solomon Mahlangu ANC camp.
The camp is now a university campus and still goes by the
name of Mahlangu, a 23-year-old hanged for murder by the
apartheid government during student unrest in the late 1970s.
When Mabuya’s husband died, the ANC took her and her
children into the Mahlungu camp and took care of them.
But when fighters began to return home, she and her family
were left behind with other widows.
“They gave me a card to say that I am ANC. They knew I
helped the ANC,” she said. “When leaving, they should have left
me the pig project to support my children.”
The ANC widows of Morogoro say a representative of the
South African Embassy visited them once and took down their
names but there has been no contact since.
Richard Ndlovu’s South African father died when he was a
teen-ager but he still speaks the Zulu his father taught him.
He lives near Bhutto in a mud-brick house with his disabled
mother, sister and wife. They scrape by on his wages from
casual labor and the money his sister makes selling charcoal.
Ndlovu, 30, is happy to stay in Tanzania but he would like
some help from his father’s homeland.
“The solution is not going to live in South Africa. Life
can be anywhere if you have a way to live,” Ndlovu said in
Zulu.
“All we ask you (the South African government) is to help
us. We are tired.”
Comments