At 2:15 am 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, 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’d 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 Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia city.
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 homeboys?
His message crackled with pride and fatigue. “I’m inundated with work,” he confessed, yet vowed to “share what I can.” The words carried the burden of a hero wary of mythmaking. For years, Violet had shielded him from sensationalism, but Magokgwane’s dusty roads—and the ghosts of a shared defiance—unlocked a fragile trust.
When he pressed for a deadline, “Tomorrow would be ideal” was the hopeful reply. As dawn broke, the awaited answers held weight beyond journalism. His story, like our village’s dusty roads, was etched with defiance and dignity. In the silence before his reply, I sensed the weight of history: sometimes, to resurrect the past, you must first awaken its ghosts.
When Violet’s message arrived later that Wednesday afternoon, her tone was firm that Timmy needed sufficient time to thoughtfully answer interview questions. “He has to put thought into it. Whether it is two or three questions, it is the same.”
Her words, clipped yet protective, framed Timmy’s silence not as evasion but as reverence—a man unwilling to reduce his life’s work to soundbites. Moments later, her voice crackled through the phone, pragmatic yet weary: “He has to go to work… it’s the end of the financial year in the US.”
The mundanity of audits and renovations juxtaposed sharply with the gravity of their history. But when she called the interview “about a legacy,” her voice softened. “He has to respond from the soul.” Here lay the crux: Timmy’s story was not just a chronicle but an elegy, a reckoning with what had been sacrificed and what had been squandered.
When Violet passed the phone to Timmy, his greeting was warm. Yet his first words carried a grief decades deep: “My heart is broken… our people still do not have their land back.”
The admission hung like a requiem. For a man who’d stared down death row for freedom, the betrayal cut deeper than politics. “Only spiritual intervention would save South Africa,” he murmured, his voice fraying at the edges.
The pragmatist in him listed failures – electricity and water cuts in Magokgwane – but the revolutionary trembled as he recalled the “open GG trucks” of 1978: apartheid’s steel jaws wrenching families from Koster to Mafikeng, elders sick and livestock crammed beside furniture under an indifferent sky. “They uprooted us without care.” That memory, raw as an open wound, had forged his defiance. It now fuels his disillusionment.
Violet’s interjections, meanwhile, crackled with bitterness. Speaking of their 2022 visit to Mafikeng, her voice tightened: “Service delivery was so much better during the Bophuthatswana regime.”
The irony was a dagger twist. Here was a woman whose husband had risked everything to dismantle Mangope’s tyranny, yet she could not unsee the decay—the cracked roads and hollow promises. “The truth must be told,” she insisted, her words sharp as shrapnel. “They betrayed the liberation struggle.”
Her resolve hardened into a vow: “If I pass away, never take me back… bury me here [in the US].” To her, South Africa was no longer home.
The couple’s friction with ANC leaders like Popo Molefe, North West’s first post-Mangope premier, revealed deeper fractures. “Our relationship was always volatile,” Violet said, framing their clashes not as personal but ideological—a refusal to let “the truth” be buried under party loyalties.
In the unpublished excerpts of the interview with author Oupa Segalwe for the book “Lucas Mangope: A Life”, Timmy’s account of his trial and imprisonment is raw, stripped of romanticism.
On February 10, 1988, he led disaffected Bophuthatswana Defence Force members, taking Mangope and his cabinet hostage at Mmabatho’s Independence Stadium. The coup lasted only 15 hours after the apartheid government stormed the stadium and crushed the rebellion. Five people died, including a BDF soldier. Timmy was placed on death row.
“Every day in that place under that cloud… it’s enough psychological warfare.”
His hunger strike, spanning “little over seventy days”, was not just a protest but performance art in resistance.
Post-1994, Timmy’s disillusionment with the ANC is visceral. As director of traditional affairs, he uncovered the rot. Confronting corruption, he faced hostility from comrades, who dismissed his concerns with a chilling pragmatism: “This is the ANC. We’re going to take the money.”
Violet’s interjections sharpen the betrayal: “The truth must be told… they betrayed the liberation struggle.” Her vow—“Bury me here [in the U.S.]”—is a dirge for a homeland she no longer recognises.
The Phiris’ migration to America “without a plan” mirrors South Africa’s fractured promise. Timmy’s labour now contrasts starkly with his revolutionary pedigree. Yet his critique remains unflinching.
Yet within their anguish lies an unyielding thread of legacy. Timmy’s insistence on responding “from the soul” and Violet’s demand to “tell the truth” are acts of resistance in themselves—a refusal to let history be sanitised. Their words, steeped in the grit of Magokgwane’s soil, remind us that Freedom Day is not a static celebration but a living reckoning.
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