Sechaba "Comrade Charles" Setsubi, who has died at the age of 70 in Kagiso on the West Rand, was a soft-spoken teacher who became a hitman for Umkhonto we Sizwe, responsible for one of the most high-profile and controversial assassinations in the history of the struggle.
He assassinated senior ANC and SACP member Tennyson Makiwane in June 1980 after the ANC became convinced that Makiwane was feeding information about MK operations to the Kaiser Matanzima regime in the Transkei.
Setsubi, who used the pseudonym Charles Bronson, was based in Lesotho at the time. He was working under the command of Chris Hani, to whom he was very close, establishing underground units in the Eastern and Western Cape. He knew the area well, having grown up near the Lesotho border in Matatiele, and was in and out all the time, recruiting cadres and setting up cells.
It was decided that Makiwane, a well-connected former member of the national executive who was expelled from the ANC in 1975, posed a threat to those involved in the operation both in South Africa and Lesotho, and that he should be eliminated.
Acting under the direct orders of Hani, Setsubi went to the Transkei where he hunted Makiwane down and shot him. His role was not revealed in his lifetime.
Setsubi, who was born in the Eastern Cape on January 15 1948, joined the ANC underground in 1970 while a student at the University of Fort Hare. In 1971 he was selected to be part of a group of guerrillas who would be landed with arms and ammunition on the Transkei coast to start a rural insurrection.He and other operatives were prepared for this mission in Somalia, where they boarded a small, and not entirely seaworthy, ship called the Aventura, which had been loaded with arms.
The Aventura had constant technical problems. Before reaching South Africa it broke down and the mission was aborted.
Setsubi went into exile in 1975 with his wife Mpumi, who was a fellow student at Fort Hare and who, like him, was a teacher by profession.
In 1982 he was sent to study at the Institute of Social Sciences in Moscow, unofficially called the International Lenin School, where he stayed until 1984.
The SACP, of which he was a member, sent to Moscow only those comrades who had proved themselves in the party and the struggle. So being selected to go there was a great honour.
At the Lenin School he studied Russian, Marxism-Leninism, political economy, Marxist-Leninist philosophy and the history of the international communist movement.
On his return he worked at MK central operations headquarters in Lusaka under Joe Modise. The role of the central operations HQ was to develop the armed struggle in South Africa. Setsubi was involved in bringing cadres from training camps in Angola to Lusaka and infiltrating them into South Africa via Botswana.
He helped open an alternative route across the Zambezi River to Zimbabwe and from there to South Africa. He often accompanied cadres along this route and helped smuggle them across the border into South Africa.At 2am on May 3 1989, he was part of a 21-strong MK special operations group that crossed into South Africa from Botswana in three blacked-out vehicles with five Russian-made mortars and 350 mortar shells.
Their target was the South African Air Force's secret Three Satellite radar station in Klippan, in the western Transvaal, which they almost entirely demolished, causing an undisclosed number of casualties in the process, before heading back to Botswana unscathed.
It was the most successful cross-border operation of the struggle.
Between 1990, when the ANC was unbanned, and 1992 Setsubi served as ANC military attaché in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
After 1994 he became co-ordinator of student internship at the University of Natal, Durban campus, and served the ANC government in various capacities, including chief of staff in the office of the MEC for sports, arts and culture in North West province and manager of the Centre for Research and Community Development.
In 2011 he became a full-time member of the SACP central committee, dealing with political education, ideological training and veterans' pensions.
In 2017 he helped broker peace between the SACP and the MK Military Veterans' Association, which had been attacking each other publicly over the association's close relationship with the Guptas. He is survived by his second wife Joyce and three children...