A former truck driver, he rose to become ANC military commander and then South Africa's first minister of defence under majority rule
Thursday November 29, 2001
The Guardian
Joe (Johannes) Modise, who has died from cancer at his home in Pretoria, aged 72, trod a familiar career path in the African National Congress: from low-paid truck driver to liberation activist to high-ranking leader. On his deathbed, President Thabo Mbeki conferred on him the country's highest civilian honour, the Grand Cross (Gold) of the Order of the Star of South Africa. The honour was received on his behalf by his widow, Jackie, flanked by their two daughters.
Some in the ANC view the award with scepticism. As the ANC's military commander in exile, Modise presided over the setting up of detention camps (in Tanzania, and the infamous Quattro camp in Angola) where suspected informers and dissidents were incarcerated. The ANC's own inquiry into these camps admitted there was "staggering brutality, extraordinary abuse of power". Modise was involved, too, in an attempt to execute Chris Hani, the charis matic South African Communist party leader (in the event he was assassinated in 1993 by two white rightwingers, who are still in prison). The plotters suspected Hani of planning a mutiny. ANC president Oliver Tambo stopped the intended execution.
As a young man, the burly Modise was a streetwise activist in his native Johannesburg: a quick thinker, shrewd, boisterous and (they said) ruthless. When the ANC acceded to office in 1994, President Nelson Mandela appointed him minister of defence.
Modise displayed his pragmatism: he called for a two-thirds majority to enable the ANC to change the constitution unilaterally, because the "new South Africa" was "giving too many rights to criminals". He also appointed his wife as a major-general, and fraternised easily with the apartheid generals, several of whom found him charming and affable, with a taste for expensive clothes, large houses and fast cars.
A pact between the ANC and the South African defence force (SADF) high command had guaranteed the generals their jobs, so ambitious black soldiers, some of them senior members of the dismantled homeland armies, could find few openings. Modise could plead, though, that if he was drinking brandy with the generals, it was in the spirit of the pact, because the ANC was genuinely afraid of an Afrikaner revolt.
Modise even threatened the courageous Mail & Guardian with a court interdict to prevent it exposing the SADF's directorate of covert operations. The very dirty tricks of this department were also covered by the pact, although later it all came out in the wash.
Then, in the second half of the 1990s, came the huge £5bn arms purchases - money, radicals in the ANC protested, that could have been better spent on houses, education and healthcare. Soon the country was (and still is) humming with talk of shady deals and widespread corruption. Rumours that Modise (and the ANC itself) received large kickbacks have never been substantiated, but an official report, just released, says Modise's "significant stake" in a company involved in the arms package was "extremely undesirable", and the inquiry would be further pursued.
It was reported that Modise bought shares with £5.6m borrowed from a German friend. The money came in on a tortuous route through Mozambique and a clothing company run by the wife of the head of South Africa's arms procurement programme, Shamin "Chippy" Shaik, who has now been suspended.
Turning a blind eye to misbehaviour is one of the perennial problems of liberation movements: its stalwarts have to be rewarded. Modise committed himself wholly to the ANC, graduating from truck driver to ANC membership even before the apartheid gov ernment came to power in 1948; agitating against the forced removal of blacks from the ethnically colourful Sophiatown to what is now the sprawling black township of Soweto; and then targeting Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's notorious Bantu education programme, which sought to "educate" blacks to accept that they could never rise above their lowly station. By 1956, Modise found himself in the dock, next to 155 others from the Congress movement, charged with treason.
The trial collapsed before the end of the decade, but in 1960 the Sharpeville shootings rocked the country, the ANC was banned and, with no other options, turned to armed struggle, creating Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, or MK), as its armed wing. Modise served in MK's high command, involving himself particularly in recruiting large numbers of young blacks who were sent out of the country for military training, mostly in the eastern bloc. Modise him self was trained in Czechoslovakia (1963) and the Soviet Union (1964).
By 1962, he was a national fulltime MK organiser, but the next year the high command sent him out of the country to take command of its external armed wing.
At the end of 1964, Modise returned to Tanzania, and then located himself in Zambia and Botswana, engaged in reconnaissance of entry routes for MK cadres into South Africa. Meanwhile, Mandela, MK's first commander, had been imprisoned (for 27 years), two others had held the position, and then Modise was asked to take over. He was also elected to the ANC's national executive committee.
Working with Joshua Nkomo's Zapu (Zimbabwe African People's Union) in Ian Smith's Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and then attempting a thrust into eastern Rhodesia, Modise's men found the going tough - the initiative collapsed. From 1970-76, Modise was occupied creating underground MK struc tures in South Africa. He became chairman of the ANC's military committee.
Back in South Africa, in 1990, when President FW de Klerk unbanned the ANC and opened South Africa's border to its exiles, Modise moved rapidly upward politically, securing election to both the party's NEC and national working committee, and becoming an MP. As minister of defence, he presided over the initially bumpy, but eventually successful, integration of MK with the apartheid army, along with various black ex-homeland armies and two other black guerrilla formations. It was a critically important exercise. Modise also presented himself to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to ask for amnesty.
So, his friends say, for all his sins, Joe Modise served the "new South Africa" well.
· Johannes (Joe) Modise, black liberation fighter, born May 25 1929; died November 26 2001