TELEX BELLS AT MIDNIGHT: “HOW WE CHASED MACHEL’S LAST NIGHT”

Rapitse Montsho writes independently

The telex bells rang incessantly, warning of a major breaking story. It had been toiling overnight with the heading Samora Machel plane crash, Tambo may be dead”. The continuous ringing of the
Telex gave no exact location, but common sense told us to head toward the border with Mozambique.
Ian Herman and I rushed for the equipment; enough tapes, batteries and most a communicating tool, guts and oomph for the moments of regional history. We drove as the racing car does in a competition towards Lensaria Airport. An urgent call was made to our boss, Miranda Harris, to book us a helicopter. We had it as our guess that the terrain was not a landing strip. Mirarada confirmed the airline company to use, and that is all that mattered.

Ian and I became the first early crew to arrive on site and equally received the baptism of fire. We simply instructed the pilot to face the eastern part of the country. The pilot knew more than us of the story and had ground contact with the police in the Naboomstruit. On arrival, as the helicopter was landing, I filmed the establishing shot of the site, but as I hopped out of the helicopter, a policeman demanded the footage I had been filming. It was not worth arguing over. I had only filmed 1 minute of the plane crash.

The chopper landed about 150 m away from the lifeless body of Samora Machel. Curiosity and the urgency to film the President of Mozambique coverage with a black umbrella took their toll on me. We were stopped from filming by a security official. I mounted the camera on the tripod and switched the camera on the two-time extender to record the many bodies protruding through the windows. We witnessed a survivor who was wearing hospital clothing who approached the body covered with a black umbrella on a hot day. Fernando Antonio Joao, the well-built and trusted security of the President, is said to have been in the hind toilet at the moment of the crash. He survived to tell the story of Mbuzini and died from natural causes in 2024. His President was not killed in combat on the front line, but by a decoy beam to a Tupolev Tu-134 Russian plane. His role was to confirm the identity of the President, which amounted to the worst nightmare of a security guard at the worst time.

As we patiently awaited permission to draw closer to the body of the late President Machel, the billowing sound of a helicopter came from Mozambique. It was the delegation of the people of Mozambique, led by then Minister of Security Sérgio Vieira and leader of the Frelimo Party, Marcelino do Santos, who mounted a screaming match against Pik Botha in Portuguese without translation. It was reported that the long and short of the message was, “Why did you interfere with the body of my President…Why did you search his packets?” Pik Botha was as sheepish as you could have him. The act was reported to have been well choreographed on behalf of Le Grange and the entire apartheid machinery.

We were allowed to cover the body of the President in a coffin, the salute, and the carrying of the coffin into a helicopter, whose tears and lamenting were the beginnings of a nation in mourning. All the journalists on site were taken to the Naboomstruit Police station and were greeted by the clothes of the deceased lying outside the police station. A gun-toting policeman grabbed a pickaxe from the floor and crashed it to the ground with some profane words loudly uttered in Afrikaans for all to hear. This act of aggression pierced through me like a sharp knife, but also confirmed to me there and then that this was not an accident, but rather an act that made apartheid’s operatives overjoyed.

Journalists are taught to detach their emotions from a story, however tragic it is, but as for me, emotions took a huge toll. Firstly, the untimely death of Samora Machel, a founding member of Frelimo and a revolutionary who survived the Frontline. Other journalists kept asking me if Oliver Tambo was amongst the dead, but I had no idea and had wished that this was a bad rumor.

SUPPLIED: Rapitse Montsho writes in his full capacity.