Lekota: political icon who refused to play the game

SOME politicians play the game.

- NYANISO QWESHA

MOSIUOA Lekota earned the nickname "Terror" not in politics but on the soccer field. I ITUMELENG ENGLISH Independent Newspapers

Others rewrite the rules. Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota refused the game altogether, insisting through every storm on his own uncompromising terms. Regrets? Few. He did it his way.You can almost hear Frank Sinatra's My Way rising over South Africa's turbulent political history: Robben Island’s limestone quarry, the exhilaration of 1994, the fracture of 2008, and the lonely benches of a shrinking opposition.

Lekota’s life was not quiet. It was defiant. Born on August 13, 1948, in Kroonstad in the Free State, the eldest of seven children in a working-class family, Lekota earned the nickname “Terror” not in politics but on the soccer field.

He played with fierceness. He tackled without hesitation. The name stuck because the temperament did. At the University of the North in 1971, he joined the South African Students’ Organisation, absorbing Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness philosophy.