But just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse for him, the Mandela administration hauled Mangope before what was probably the democratic dispensation’s first two commissions of inquiry involving a high-profile politician, with dire repercussions. On the strength of the findings of one of the commissions, the Bophuthatswana division of the high court convicted Mangope for theft and fraud involving millions of rand in taxpayers’ money and that of the impoverished Bahurutshe-Boo-Manyane villagers in Motswedi, near Zeerust — conduct that had taken place during the Bophuthatswana days. He managed to escape jail time, having taken advantage of Judge Tom Mullins’ sentence, which included the option of a fine.
Owing to the glowing testimony given on his behalf in mitigation of sentence for the infrastructural development he had achieved in Bophuthatswana, Mangope was labelled “the man who nearly made the apartheid system work” by the prosecution. Bitter and resentful over how he had been treated, he proceeded to reinvent himself. He launched the United Christian Democratic Party (UCDP), believing he had enough electoral support to dislodge the governing ANC, at least in the North West. He went on to become the leader of the opposition between 1999 and 2009 in the North West legislature.
In the UCDP, which he founded as the Bophuthatswana Democratic Party in the 1970s, strife set in, the rank and file accusing Mangope of being a dictator. Before long, he was unseated yet again — this time from control of the UCDP, a move that sent him into effective retirement.
Meanwhile, away from the public eye, Mangope had been weathering one personal storm after another, with violence eating away at his family. Three of his siblings died under brutal circumstances in 1991, two of them having been murdered by their own children, and the other killed by a nephew. Moreover, in his later years Mangope would struggle to come to terms with the death of two of his sons, both of whom also died violent deaths in 1998 and 2016.
These were some of the many intriguing episodes in Mangope’s eventful life that drew me to his story. My only regret in relating the narrative of this jumped-up traditional leader and former schoolteacher, who had been ANC stalwart Oliver Tambo’s student and former Robben Islander Andrew Mlangeni’s schoolmate at St Peter’s Secondary School in Rosettenville in the 1940s, is that I never got to sit across the table from him and reflect on his polarising legacy.
Lucas Mangope: A Life by Oupa Segalwe is published by Tafelberg.
Life of a polarising president | Oupa Segalwe on writing ‘Lucas Mangope: A Life’
Lucas Mangope, the Bophuthatswana leader ‘who almost made apartheid work’, flirted with the white right wing and was convicted of large-scale fraud, leaving an intriguingly chequered legacy behind him
Image: Supplied
A barefoot and pyjamas-clad Lucas Mangope was relieved when President PW Botha’s combatants from across the imaginary border in Pretoria arrived at the Independence Stadium in Mmabatho just in time to rescue the Bophuthatswana leader from R4 assault rifle-wielding members of the homeland defence force.
Working with a political nemesis of his, a section of the force had toppled Mangope on a rainy February 1988 day at gunpoint and held him, along with some members of his cabinet, in captivity for 15 hours in a VIP suite at the sports arena.
Hitherto, Mangope, who died in 2018 aged 94, had been at the helm of Bophuthatswana, a play-play apartheid state, for a little more than a decade, much against the run of play.
But the ill-fated Rocky Malebana-Metsing and Warrant Officer Timothy Phiri-led coup d’état would serve only to foreshadow the drama that lay in wait.
As the political winds of change swept through the country after FW de Klerk’s unbanning of liberation movements and release of political prisoners in the early 1990s, Mangope told his counterparts at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) to go jump. From then on, he and the IFP’s Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi chose to consort with right-wingers when everybody else rallied behind the idea of a nonracial, democratic South Africa. He would maintain this stance after Codesa, turning down the ANC’s offers of influential positions in the post-apartheid administration.
Because of this ill-considered posture, Mangope would be deposed again — and for good this time — in another coup after a bloody and ruinous popular uprising in Mmabatho in 1994. Bophuthatswana having gone belly-up, South Africans, including former homelanders, proceeded to unite and usher in the democratic order, with Nelson Mandela in charge.
Reflections of 1994: ‘I am proud to have been intimately part of this beautiful, imperfect journey’
But just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse for him, the Mandela administration hauled Mangope before what was probably the democratic dispensation’s first two commissions of inquiry involving a high-profile politician, with dire repercussions. On the strength of the findings of one of the commissions, the Bophuthatswana division of the high court convicted Mangope for theft and fraud involving millions of rand in taxpayers’ money and that of the impoverished Bahurutshe-Boo-Manyane villagers in Motswedi, near Zeerust — conduct that had taken place during the Bophuthatswana days. He managed to escape jail time, having taken advantage of Judge Tom Mullins’ sentence, which included the option of a fine.
Owing to the glowing testimony given on his behalf in mitigation of sentence for the infrastructural development he had achieved in Bophuthatswana, Mangope was labelled “the man who nearly made the apartheid system work” by the prosecution. Bitter and resentful over how he had been treated, he proceeded to reinvent himself. He launched the United Christian Democratic Party (UCDP), believing he had enough electoral support to dislodge the governing ANC, at least in the North West. He went on to become the leader of the opposition between 1999 and 2009 in the North West legislature.
In the UCDP, which he founded as the Bophuthatswana Democratic Party in the 1970s, strife set in, the rank and file accusing Mangope of being a dictator. Before long, he was unseated yet again — this time from control of the UCDP, a move that sent him into effective retirement.
Meanwhile, away from the public eye, Mangope had been weathering one personal storm after another, with violence eating away at his family. Three of his siblings died under brutal circumstances in 1991, two of them having been murdered by their own children, and the other killed by a nephew. Moreover, in his later years Mangope would struggle to come to terms with the death of two of his sons, both of whom also died violent deaths in 1998 and 2016.
These were some of the many intriguing episodes in Mangope’s eventful life that drew me to his story. My only regret in relating the narrative of this jumped-up traditional leader and former schoolteacher, who had been ANC stalwart Oliver Tambo’s student and former Robben Islander Andrew Mlangeni’s schoolmate at St Peter’s Secondary School in Rosettenville in the 1940s, is that I never got to sit across the table from him and reflect on his polarising legacy.
Lucas Mangope: A Life by Oupa Segalwe is published by Tafelberg.
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