The cortege will leave for Boksburg Cemetery, where the burial is scheduled for 1 p.m.

‘These funeral service and rallies must be conducted with dignity. We will give disciplined expression to our emotions at our pickets, prayer meetings and gatherings, in our homes, our churches and our schools. We will not be provoked into any rash actions.

‘We are a nation in mourning. To the youth of South Africa we have a special message: you have lost a great hero. You have repeatedly shown that your love of freedom is greater than that most precious gift, life itself. But you are the leaders of tomorrow. Your country, your people, your organisation need you to act with wisdom. A particular responsibility rests on your shoulders.

‘We pay tribute to all our people for the courage and restraint they have shown in the face of such extreme provocation. We are sure this same indomitable spirit will carry us through the difficult days ahead.

‘Chris Hani has made the supreme sacrifice. The greatest tribute we can pay to his life’s work is to ensure we win that freedom for all our people.’19

Hani’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Nomakhwezi, had witnessed the incident. The full horror of Hani’s murder, which could easily have changed the history of South Africa, was counterpoised by the quick action of Retha Harmse, Hani’s Afrikaans neighbour, who rang the police with Waluś’s licence plate number, helping the police capture Waluś with the weapon still in his possession.

Mandela had a special regard for Chris Hani. Some will say it was due to the younger man’s exemplary leadership, which endeared him to the membership, especially of MK, who sought to emulate him as much as possible. He was brave and charismatic, and leading from the front he was as unafraid to lead MK cadres infiltrating inside South Africa as he was of ANC authority when he penned his famous memorandum to the ANC leadership.

Impatiently cooling his heels while based in the Tanzanian camps of the ANC, Hani had excoriated its leadership in exile, accusing it of relinquishing its mission towards liberation and wallowing in corruption, which weakened the prospect of MK returning to fight inside South Africa. He and his co-signatories to the memorandum were charged with treason and sentenced to death. It was only through Oliver Tambo’s intervention that they were reprieved. Hani’s action contributed to the ANC’s Luthuli Detachment’s campaign in Wankie and Sipolilo.

Similarly, more than two decades earlier in 1944, Mandela was among the pioneers of the ANC’s Youth League – the erstwhile Young Lions – who challenged orthodox views in order to re-energise the ANC. One of the veterans of Wankie, Major General Wilson Ngqose (Ret.), remembers Hani at a camp called Kongwa in Tanzania in the late sixties, which the ANC shared with the MPLA, Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO)) and the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). The MPLA already enjoyed liberated zones in Portuguese-occupied Angola. It was in Kongwa, he says, that MPLA leader Dr Agostinho Neto invited Oliver Tambo to send trainees to the camps, seeing that the ANC was facing problems in Tanzania.20 Already a celebrated poet, Neto’s ringing call to arms in a poem titled ‘Haste’ could have informed Hani’s impatience with the slothful leadership of the time. It also speaks to the fighting spirit that imbued Mandela and his colleagues in the Youth League to challenge the ANC leadership, which believed in petitions and appeals to the consciences of a heartless regime.

I am impatient in this historical tepidness

of delays and lentitude

when with haste the just are murdered

when the prisons are bursting with youths

crushed to death against the wall of violence

Let us end this tepidness of words and gestures

and smiles hidden behind book covers

and the resigned biblical gesture

of turning the other cheek

Start action vigorous male intelligent

which answers tooth for tooth eye for eye

man for man

come vigorous action

of the people’s army for the liberation of men

come whirlwinds to shatter this passiveness.21

Much later, Mandela would acknowledge the debt of gratitude that democratic South Africa owed to the people of Angola. In his 1998 address to the Angolan National Assembly in Luanda, he said that Angola’s solidarity with South Africans ‘struggling for their liberation was of heroic proportions’.

‘Before your own freedom was secure,’ he said, ‘and within the reach of our ruthless enemy, you dared to act upon the principle that freedom in southern Africa was indivisible. Led by the founder of liberated Angola, that great African patriot and internationalist, Agostinho Neto, you insisted that all of Africa’s children must be freed from bondage.’22

Of the young hero, Chris Hani, Mandela continues writing: ‘In 1959 Hani enrolled at Fort Hare University [Mandela’s own alma mater] and attracted the attention of Govan Mbeki, the father of Thabo Mbeki. Govan played a formative role in Hani’s development. It was here that Hani encountered Marxist ideas and joined the already illegal Communist Party of South Africa. He always emphasised that his conversion to Marxism also deepened his non-racial perspective.

‘Hani was a bold and forthright young man and did not hesitate to criticise even his own organisation when he felt it was failing to give correct leadership. He recalled that: “Those of us in the camps in the sixties did not have a profound understanding of the problems. Most of us were very young – in our twenties. We were impatient to get into action. ‘Don’t tell us there are no routes,’ we used to say. We must be deployed to find routes.