Freedom Day: Unearthing '94 moment through shared roots

'The truth must be told. They betrayed the struggle'

- By Setumo Stone

At 02:15 on Wednesday, my China-made phone buzzed. A WhatsApp notification lit the screen: “Good evening...” Timothy Phiri, the reclusive legend behind the 1988 coup attempt against apartheid’s Bophuthatswana regime, had replied from the US after a couple of days of silence.

Six years later, a large part of which Timothy spent on death row following the failed power grab, Lucas Mangope’s regime collapsed, and South Africa prepared for the democratic transition on April 27, 1994.

Colleagues had warned about Violet, Timothy’s wife, whose distrust of journalists mirrored a broader scepticism among liberation struggle veterans. “She's suspicious of pressmen,” one cautioned, voice tinged with the urgency of a spy trading secrets.

But the mention of a shared lineage - “Timmy’s” roots in Magokgwane village, where his brother Nagi still lives as our neighbour - softened the air. “Are you cooking something?” he'd probed, half-joking.

The deflection was polite: “Just a Freedom Day assignment.” Yet beneath the exchange lingered the unspoken weight of a deeper pilgrimage - to a man who‘ once dared to challenge a dictator.

Days after making contact, an innocuous change of a WhatsApp profile picture - a grainy family photo featuring my siblings and my father, Lenny Stone - seemed to have shifted the dynamic at Timmy’s home in Philadelphia.

Hours later, his reply arrived, steeped in nostalgia: “Your grandparents raised me... Chungam and Lenny were smart and pleasant to be around.” Here was a man who had evaded Mangope’s prisons, now disarmed by a grainy snapshot of home boys?