After the raid into Lesotho on Thursday, 9 December 1982, I started writing about my comrades and the raid generally. When we sought help for our traumatised comrades, we found minimal medical help that would suit politicos.
One medico, in need of therapeutic help, himself, advised me at 5am one morning that the patient had to externalise his/ her trauma. Until some of us could be sent out of Lesotho amateurs engaged in this "externalising" exercise.
We were unable to sleep in our homes unless family in our homes or ex-patriate friends visited. With their cars parked in front of the flat we hoped to be frightened, they would be death squads away. We mostly slept in cars or in homes of friends. As results I kept all the typed material on the raid in various homes around Maseru.
When South Africa closed the borders to Lesotho and demanded our exit, I had already been given a new contract the Lesotho government as their Chief Legal Aid Counsel, then Minister of Interior, on 8 September 1983, said that he been warned by South Africa that the 21 ANC members would be killed if they had not left Lesotho on Saturday morning (24hrs later). He assured me that I was on that list.
At first I refused to leave till I heard that oxygen required for a patient on the operating table was held up at the border. The regime refused to allow it to be brought in. I knew then that I had to leave.
On the Saturday (3/9/83), not knowing that it would be my last in Lesotho, I bought some white pansies, (that was the only colour at the nursery) and went around and collected various articles and placed them in two sets of scrapbooks original and one copy. I planted the pansies that I would not water on the next Saturday. We left on 10 September 1983 ... READ MORE
